N. K. Jemisin  - only author to have won the hugo for best novel three years in a row, only author to have won it for every book in a series and, to top that, the only author who has ever set out to write a trilogy and instead managed to wrap it up as a duology instead.
Truly, there is nothing she cannot do.

This book was a delight. It was aware that it was incredibly weird and eldritch and does so many fun things all at once while knowing, in its heart, in the best traditions of Terry Pratchett, that squamous tentacles and beings from the horrific depths of reality are only as good as the characters fighting them. And it delivered.

This book is, in theory, my jam in the sense that it's creepy schools and hauntings and overeducated and deeply pretentious students (for whom I have a soft spot...for what may be obvious reasons). Dark academia is a vibe and I am here for it.

It's also not entirely my jam in the sense that I prefer my horror

to be real rather than the real horror was the friends we made along the way

.

It was one of those where the atmosphere was a good match and the story that the author was interested in telling...not so much.

I somehow missed this when it first came out - in part because Sharing Knife is so contained as a series that I wasn't expecting it and in part because it took me longer to appreciate it (it has that in common with The Hallowed Hunt).

It's nice seeing Barr grow up and this just confirms that every single book that Bujold has ever written is a riff on Aral's "All true wealth is biological".
The rest is commentary.

This is one of those times when the back copy covers all the important points. Space opera! Mind meld! Fake mind-meld a la fake dating! The impossibility of ethics in a military system! Romance! 
Honestly, I'm amazed there were two beds.

It was delightful and I was very glad to read it.

I knew when I was reading it that it was going to hurt and that I was going to be recommending it with "okay, but like read this when you're feeling stable because otherwise it will rend your apart" kind of rec.

Sometimes it's nice to be right.

I could talk about and analyze every part of this book - the translation theory, the way it thinks about colonialism and empire, the beautiful and brutal indictment of the academy, friendship - or I could throw my hands up and say "it hurt and it was worth it".

Come for the homage to the locked room mystery, stay for the descriptions of food. 
It was very cute and fun to puzzle through and Pandian very clearly enjoys tricking her readers (even if that lets things get a little out of hand) and also - and I cannot stress this enough - the food. 

I don't even know where to begin with this book. I had to restrain myself from highlighting like every other sentence, which is not a useful practice (in case you were wondering).
Srinivasan's essays are all gifts, but the thing that stood out to me was her absolute unwillingness to compromise on the complexity of the topics she took on. At no point does she ignore, demean, or misrepresent the positions she addresses in her work. She not only clearly sees, but clearly writes against reductive thinking and persists in believing that it's possible to talk about complex things clearly and advocate for change without ignoring the stakes. 
She's so good. I hesitate to pick a favorite, but "On Not Sleeping with your Students" was so good and the perfect combination of thoughtful and adamant and I just...I wish more people could write with that level of clarity and consciousness. I wish *I* could.

One day, someone is going to challenge Hall to write a book with two main characters who BOTH have reasonably healthy families and I think it might break him.
In the meantime, though, his ongoing exploration of the overeducated and underselfesteemed will never cease to hit the spot.

Hall is very good and part of the reason he is so delightful is just how he writes. From the absurd referential conversations (I'm thinking of the "which character are you from Aladdin" conversation) to his neologisms, to his exuberance. If Terry Pratchett has been about thirty years younger and writing introspective romances, he might sound a bit like Alexis Hall.
The other thing is that Hall knows what's funny. What is funny in the story of a deeply stressed and anxious person is not that they say the wrong thing, but that the wrong thing itself is absurd and wandering around being human is absurd and if you don't laugh at it, you'll cry. (His characters do that too.) So while you feel like you're being invited to laugh, you're not being invited to laugh AT people who are struggling.

And he gets the Inigo Montoya principle. (I'm straight-up stealing this from Mandy Patinkin.) The first time Inigo says "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." it's part of the bit. It's...not precisely funny, but it's a part. But as it repeats and crescendos, it stops being funny and captures the character arc. And the payoff for Inigo at the end - it's perfect and it's perfect because the joke becomes the story becomes the resolution.
Hall does that with Paris, with his mental health struggles. It's told with less humor each time until it becomes the moment you are waiting for and crescendos and it works because Hall took you through the experience. 
Not that I would expect anything less from Hall, but A+ realistic portrayal of mental illness in relationships.

Reading this book was complicated, given that I am, well, an overeducated and underselfesteemed person myself. Paris's spirals and self-sabotaging behavior were hard to read because they were achingly familiar. (It's super fun when your empathy for other people is off but by god do you feel things that happen to fictional characters.) I loved it and I loved it because it felt simultaneously absurd and too real and I had to put it down multiple times and cover my eyes and then pick it right up again because I had to know, damn it.

And I made it this far through without talking about Tariq and how much his portrayal as someone adamant about being both queer and religious and not fitting in in either space felt incredibly real and a gift to see the people I know who walk that walk daily so accurately depicted in media. 
Ugh, everything about this book.

I held off on reading this book for the longest time because, well, it looked like failures of communication galore and, like, that is stressful.
And it is. But Alistair as disaster bi (Cat Sebastian has a type) and Robin as a nonbinary ball of sunshine made it a lot better, if only because it makes the secret keeping make way more sense and gives the whole thing a slightly gothic thrill.
Also, Joel Leslie, excellent narration.

My previous review, which was on the printed edition of the book, was from 2009. That was a while and I’ve been meaning to reread this forever because I could not remember what happened. 
I’m beginning to understand why. It’s not exactly a story about things happening (Shevek would be rolling his eyes right now) but a story about what it is to have things happen. 
I don’t know. It’s gorgeous in Le Guin’s inimitable fashion and I am not the same person I was at 22–though I am contiguous with her—and the same is true of the world. And Le Guin is gone. And I wonder which of those changes is shaping my response most.