This book is...not exactly a warm hug because it also burns with deep fury and also it's a hug. An unflinching look at colonialism and power imbalance and what it means to be loved and what love is. de Bodard is SO DARNED GOOD at wrapping the world into the novella form.

Let the Hugos reading begin. (This one is only kind of Hugos reading since I started it and the checked the Hugos nominees in the middle and realized it was on it.)
Onyebuchi has written a story about the relationship between rage and justice that plays out within relationships, within individuals, and within the world. It's raw and, reading it from a culture deeply in the Old Testament (meaning, you know, Tanach), it's deeply validating and complicating to revisit the question of "old testament vengeance" as the space for justice.

I've been listening to this book for so long that I've kind of lost track of the beginning stories. I remember really appreciating them and, in general, being moved by Liu's ongoing meditations on the transformation of the human in the face of technology and also parenthood.
Those two themes sweep through the book and, while he's manifestly not attempting to make specific claims, the intertwined questions of who are we and who are we becoming are threaded through every story in the book.

A tour of history through the lens of aliens. Its a fascinating conceit and it works, overall, although it feels very much like a long prequel to whatever the next book is...as perhaps the title suggests.

This book was, in some ways, a reverse of the first. The first 1/2 - 2/3s grabbed me and then it faded out and had…less to do other than get to the end. It feels like Anton has parts of her heroine’s life that just are easier to write and struggles with both youth and age. 
It’s complicated to write characters whose stories are already written in very ancient texts and I love that she stuck so close to the texts and wish sometimes she’d let her characters drive. 

So many complicated feelings about this book. I love the idea, the evocation of the world was beautiful, especially in the blending of halacha, magic, and general antiquity. 
And it took Hisdadukh at least 2/3s of the book to come into her own as a character rather than as a pair of binoculars into rabbinic life and it was mostly her relationship with Rava (aka Rav Darcy) who made that happen. 
Some of that is the difficulty of writing children as characters contiguous with their adult selves. And some of that is in the way that the world overwhelms the characters. 
I’m so glad this book exists and also I am not entirely sure how I feel about it.

I love histories of interesting scientific things.
Also, we've reached the point where I pick up books because the author said interesting but completely unrelated things on Twitter and I kind of love that.
Also, WOW, I has forgotten that the era right before I was born was extremely into nuclear energy as the future and not as the horrifying thing that will kill us all and there's an oddness that comes from reading people who are very much NOT in that mainframe.

More Penric!
I am attempting not to create a list of words that Bujold relies on quite a bit in her writing, much as I am tempted to call out the twitching of lips.
It's also fascinating to see recurring character themes in her work. Women getting second chances after their first marriages is a really interesting one. (Well, women and Aral.) And the question of what does it look like to rise the occasion that life demands of you.
I'm wondering what other dangling plot points still exist in this narrative to wrap up. I think this is everything we've started with Adelis and Nykis...
What do you do with your agents of chaos when they've run out of chaos to cause?

Do I have to make cake jokes in the review? Can we just skip that part?
If you’re looking for the Gilmore Girls/GBBO mashup you never knew you wanted, might I recommend this one?
Combined with Hall’s trademark deep investment in the class politics of Great Britain. Who gets to be smart, polished, respected, respectable? What is success? You know, the usual.
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, you will WANT to make cakes after reading this book. It 100% pulls off the bake-off makes me want to bake effect. 

Django Wexler is just so much fun.
And he's such a thoughtful writer of politics, which is extremely fun to read. He knows how to balance the edge of "the revolution has to be believable" with "no one wants to read about the protagonists getting crushed like bugs".
Also, I had somehow forgotten that the b-plot in the last book existed and so they got to the city and I was like "Oh, right, Tori has been busy".
But the nice thing about these books is they are self contained and catch you up quickly on what you missed in the last book and also stand pretty well on their own. And Wexler definitely sticks the landing.