Manga editor Shiozawa decides to quit his job after a magazine he founded folds. He plans to find some hobbies and start a new life. But manga won't let go of him so easily. Editor colleagues continue to ask him for help, especially with their more difficult artist clients. He has to pay last visits to artists he worked with in the past, which often turn into emotional conversations. He tries to sell his entire manga collection to a used bookstore, but at the last minute has a change of heart and keeps it. Then he decides he wants to work on one more story. But who to ask to write and draw it? This is an elegant, understated book about how deep the comics industry gets under your skin, and the very wide variety of people who fall for manga and can't let it go, even after it's broken their hearts. 

Set in South Korea in the early 1980s, this comic follows up Banned Book Club in which college student Hyun Sook discovered a friend group of students reading books deemed illegal and dangerous by the government. During South Korea's Fifth Republic, a military regime, students could be beaten or jailed for owning banned books. But even under an authoritarian government, college students are still college students: learning, growing, questioning their identities, looking for trouble, romance, and ways to subvert the rules. Set on a camping trip during winter break, this book follows a group of students, including Hyun Sook, with conflicting motivations and interests as they decide who to trust and who they want to become. A timely story about the power of art, literature, theater, and community to resist fascism. Despite the real danger, it's full of humor and deeply human moments. I had the chance to read this book ahead of its release- look for it on shelves in early October! 

Dex, the traveling tea-monk who befriended a robot in the wilds, now brings their friend Mosscap back down to the human-inhabited parts of the world. Like the first book, this is a gentle story, told more in a series of linked vignettes than an over-arching plot. I enjoyed the exploration whether essence of self is rooted in the body, and to what extent consciousness and personality transcend the body while still being undeniable linked. However, like the first book in this series, there just isn't quite enough plot to satisfy me. I read this because I've decided I'm a Becky Chambers completest, but I don't personally recommend this series as the best place to start with her work- I point readers instead towards the standalone To Be Taught If Fortunate.

I picked this up after watching the film of the same name. It's a very well researched history of the University of Washington men's eight rowing team, a bunch of boys raised during the worst of the Great Depression, working their assess off to represent the US at the 1936 Olympics. The book follows Joe Rantz most closely, in huge part because he was one of the few members of the team still alive and available to interview when the author began the book. However, several of the others kept diaries or wrote letters which the author also had access to. There's a lot of background on the era, both the economic hardships of the Depression and Dust Bowl in the US, and also the way Joseph Goebbels planned the entire Berlin Olympics as a massive propaganda project to fool the West into thinking that Germany wasn't planning war. I thought the book was a little longer than it needed to be, but overall enjoyed it as a good audiobook to keep me company during work hours. As always, the truth of the story is even stranger and more dramatic than the version of this story that made it to film! 

A short but sweet glimpse into the period of Frida Kahlo's life when she was beginning to mount solo shows of her paintings in New York and Paris. I loved the bright colors, tender character designs, and the reconstructions of conversations she may have overheard at her gallery openings. In no way a complete biography, but instead a little window into the life of a passionate artist. 

In the autumn of 1963, Tove Jansson, her partner Tuulikki 'Tooti' Pietilä, and their taciturn friend Brunström set about trying to finish a small cabin on a tiny Finnish island before the onset of winter (and possible legal delays of building permits). Tove and Tooti spent their summers on the island for the next 3o years. This book contains excerpts of journal and introspective writing on the nature of the island, the sea, the changeable weather, the futility of human efforts to shift the natural environment. These writings are paired with delicate prints Tooti made of water, stones, and ocean views. I read this directly after The Summer Book and after listening to a short biography of Jansson- this made a good companion to those other texts, but might have been a bit spare on it's own. 

As the smoke clears after the explosive ending of the previous penultimate volume, our heroes gather themselves, check on the survivors, and set out on the most collaborative challenge: cooking and eating an entire chimera body. This is a satisfying and in some ways gentler ending than I expected from this series, but I really enjoyed it! 

What can I even say about this, the final novel of a 16 book fantasy series, which I have been reading and re-reading now for twenty years, other than holy shit??? I can't believe I've reached the end of Fitz's journey at last. This book is SO long (nearly 1000 pages) and much of it is brutal to read; characters we love are beaten, abused, tortured, and left in pretty hopeless situations for much of the novel. I think Hobb's insistence on revisiting almost every single character from the Rain Wilds and Live Ship sub-series expanded the first third of the book more than needed; had I been editing it, it would have been shorter. And yet! And yet! I was riveted by this too-long book, devouring it in big gulps, scream-texting about it to several friends who were reading the series along with me. The ending hit SO HARD. Its PERFECT, TERRIBLE, WRETCHED, one of the cruelest endings for several beloved characters and while also giving them a kind of grace and eternity I did not see coming, but should have. This book fulfills the themes of the entire series so well, completing repeated patterns, showing cycles that ripple through three generations, while also leaving a door open for the future that I'm already daydreaming about. Literally how did Robin Hobb come up with all of this. Its flawed but its perfect. I am in awe. 

This book follows multiple different story lines, some of which captured me much more than others. In Kentucky in 1850, an enslaved black boy watches a new thoroughbred racing colt's birth and begins a lifelong relationship with the horse, who will go on to be one of the most well-known champions in the history of American horse racing. In New York City in the 1950s, a gallery owner known for her modern tastes falls for an equestrian portrait of the great Kentucky race horse, Lexington. And in 2019, in Washington DC, a Nigerian-American art history student and a Smithsonian scientist dig into the mystery of an unlabelled horse skeleton in the museum's collection- and its possible connection with several paintings by a Civil War era equestrian artist. I admired the amount of research that went into this novel, and the way the paintings of Lexington tied the different timelines together. However, I really struggled with how the interior emotional lives of several of the Black male characters in this book were portrayed by this author. When Jarret, the enslaved Black groom, is separated from Lexington and forced into plantation labor temporarily, Brooks writes of him gaining a depth of spirit and understanding for the human condition from this experience. This felt deeply weird to read from a white author! I'm not really the right reader to say whether Brooks did a good job or not, but it put me on edge. When the final climatic moment of the novel read like a heavy-handed lesson in how Black men are still at risk of police violence even in 2019, I wondered who exactly that point was supposed to be for, and if Brooks is the one who needed to make it. So, I felt very mixed as I finished this book. There's a lot to admire craft-wise, and I can understand why so many readers were impressed by it. But I honestly I don't recommend it, unless you want to read it in a book club setting and have a nuanced discussion about what works and what doesn't in this novel. 

This complex fantasy novel weaves together a multi-strand narrative of violence, love, and the end of empire in an original world of old gods and talking animals. In the main thread, two warriors carry the corpse of an almost-dead goddess across the country in a five day dash from the mountains to the sea. The goddess was once the Moon, torn out of the sky by her own desire for immortality. Her children became the despotic Moon Throne, a cruel dynasty which has repressed and punished the people and elements. The Moon Thrones' heirs, three brothers with extraordinary powers, chase the warriors and hunger for the last dregs of the fallen Moon's power. In another thread, an unnamed protagonist watches this drama unfold as a play being performed in a dreamy underwater sleep realm, while recalling the stories their lola told of the old country before the war. This novel is often compared with NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season in terms of scope, literary prose, and ambition and I can see why. This novel employs some very creative and unusual writing choices that make it more rewarding to read in print than to experience in audio. I had a content warning for gore and cannibalism going in, so I was prepared for the violence of the middle section. I really enjoyed this novel and I can tell I'll be thinking about it for a long time.