This is basically my catnip. Take something I am interested in, but don’t know a lot about and tell me why you love it. 
I’m not entirely going to switch the way I drink tea (same as I will never give up my love for mediocre music despite knowing what the beautiful stuff sounds like), but I adored this invitation into the world of caring deeply about tea and now I want to try ALL the things. 

This was fun and I understand why Stephenson does not write sequels. (Diamond Age does not count, don’t @ me).
So much of the fun of the original story was in the funny science. Losing that, you lose a lot of what makes it appealing. It’s still fine, but definitely not the same.

I have a lot of feelings about this book, most of which boil somewhere down to “this book told a story I don’t much like in a particularly lovely fashion.”
The experience of reading it was like being in a thunderstorm, but the experience of looking back at it and trying to say something is like the aftermath of “now I’m cold and wet and I’m not sure I have anything that I have with me that I can point to as the source the experience, just a lot of discomfort.”
Nothing quite like writing a helpful review, is there?

This book was a LOT of set up. Here are the rules, here are the interesting people in it, here are all the grand mysteries at the heart of things, and here is the plot for the rest of the series.
Which means very little actually happens. It's a book about getting things into place.
It is also, in a way that reminds me of Seanan McGuire's InCryptid series, a book that is not all that interested in the philosophical conundrum it's surfacing; it takes a side and chills there.

In this case, there's a subterranean conversation about free will, programming, and artificial-ish intelligence that this book has ABSOLUTELY no interest in looking into beyond the "I am more than you made me to be!" moments. Like, just...not even a little bit? We're going to ignore that in favor of a (nother) story about overthrowing the government? Can't we try for both, at least?

Elul reading (which explains why I finished it in Tishrei).
Curtice's perspective is, necessarily, very different from mine and I find in particular the way that her Indigenous and Christian beliefs speak to one another to be both generative and a belief that can only grow in that fertile soil. Whatever teshuva, in whatever sense of the word, is going to look like for observant Jews, it is going to look different.
And also the call that she resounds in the world and the questions she asks cut deep in the all the right ways.

Ahhhh, Celehar needs a hug! Anyway, this book is beautiful and understated and I need like 10 more hours of it stat.
Also, out of all the things that Addison does here that stand out in the genre, her compassionate portrayal of how clergy help and matter to people in need was just gorgeous and really spoke to my experiences in rabbinical school. She gets it—gets the awkwardness, the difficulty, the job of the clergy person to just hear and bear witness. The magical aspect adds to it, but changes the job very little and she SEES how much of course what Celehar does is what Judaism calls true lovingkindness—kindness that cannot be repaid and so can only be done of the goodness of one's heart. Anyway, so much love for this story.

This was just really fun. Morally off-white characters, lots of space battle, people trying to do good against cartoonish evil and succeeding (IDK why *that* might resonate at the moment...)

Okay, so you know that thing that Lewis was trying to do in The Last Battle with thinking about the numinous and death and belief?
He pulls it off here. 
It’s still Lewis (and, while I realize this is an ABSURD comment, I had forgotten how good of a writer he is and how perfectly elegantly he sucks you in to the inner world of his characters) and the man does not do subtle. But he does do elegance and this is elegant in so many ways. 
And it’s deeply enmeshed in stereotypes about beauty and ugliness even as it’s Lewis at his most sympathetic. 
It’s a complicated book, but what he sets out to do…map the experience of the sacred using nothing but words…there’s a reason I needed to finish it before rosh hashana. 
(Did I read an audiobook in two days…maybe)

I can never tell if my ongoing abiding interest in books set in South and East Asia is some kind of weird cultural tourism thing or about a deep and abiding interest in a culture that has so many touchstones in common with my religion...mutatis mutandis.
I think a bit of both. It's extremely clear that this is a...fantasy India more interested in world building than a real evocation of a space.
As someone who almost uniformly hates books with characters of my background because of a combination of the narcissism of small differences and the awareness that authors are rarely writing for insiders, I imagine Indian readers will feel the same way about this book. (Checks reviews. Yep!)
Which is a position I have a lot of sympathy for. It's useful to know whether a book is written addressed to insiders or outsiders, whether the story is created to build a beautiful fantasy or investigate reality.
(There's an element of bias in here, naturally, as to who gets realism and who gets romanticized, although I would say the real difference is who gets to write the romance of the place as an insider and who has to write it for the outsider's gaze. And this is complicated when literature becomes a means for diasporic children to research and write their way back into the homeland and home legends. I think it's really important to recognize that this book is *fantasy* and has to be read as such. (Cue Delaney's comment that all fiction is fantasy, some of it is just AU with minimal changes.) The fantasy of the diasporic child finding a homeland that never was, but that can be found in fiction is often beautiful to read, but bears little if any relationship to reality. And that's fine. That's a matter of managing expectations. And also for Western readers to stop assuming that historical fiction is an accurate portrayal of a place.)
Also the food. Wow, this book made me hungry.
Reading this in the middle (God forbid it be just the beginning) of what's going on in Texas was...an experience. The reminder that, for more of history, women could and did end pregnancies that would have put them in some kind of danger was particularly stark. The contrast of all of these women—those who sought abortions, those who refused them, and those who desperately wanted to conceive was elegantly done and, honestly, emphasized the role that power and choice played in what constitutes the right thing.
I have such a soft spot for "woman stops being at the mercy of others and finds herself" stories. This was a really good one and the audio version was lovely. (The worst part of reading audiobooks is that it multiplies my "Oh, oh, NO, the character is going to do something THAT IS A MISTAKE" by like ten and the visceral embarrassment is a MOOD. So if that's a thing for you...maybe print or just put those 15 minutes on like 2x speed.)

Yes, this took me FOREVER to get to and I definitely intended to sooner and also ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Jemisin's a genius, we all know that, and her short stories are laser focused in a way that even her fiction sometimes isn't.
She's interested in kindness and cruelty, in the dynamics of power and, more than anything else, in fighting what needs being fought. She asks VERY different questions (and thus finds very different answers) about human nature than Butler does (and, yes, I know, cliched to compare the two and also there are reasons that the preeminent Black SFF writer of the 20th century and of the 21st century are in conversation on matters of bodily autonomy and what it means to be taken), but her stories, starting from the absolute first one which lays this out explicitly, is that the paradox of tolerance is not a paradox, but a necessary precondition to existence. If you are prejudiced, hateful, unwilling to care for others, you are not welcome in society and you are the thing that needs to be brought down.
If Butler is almost always asking whether human beings *can* ever be better—and what would be necessary to make that happen—Jemisin refuses to believe they can't and asks instead who we are going to be when we are better. What does it look like to show up?