This is definitely "a book for people who like books" - in the same way as Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore except with less fantasy and action. It is rather quiet tale but a goodhearted and satisfying one.

Jeffrey Eugenides's narrator, Cal, informs the reader on page one that he is intersex- born as a girl, but transitioned to living as a boy at age 14. Then he winds back the tale of his family, immigrants who fled the war between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s to settle in Detroit. Cal's grandfather worked in the auto plants, smuggled bootleg liqueur and ran an underground bar during Prohibition. His grandmother struggled in the new land, living half in the present world and half in an increasingly fictional Greece in her mind. Cal weaves the tale of his parent's births, their courtship, and of his own birth and childhood. This book leans heavily on consensual sibling incest as a plot point: Eugenides suggests that Cal has only been born intersex because his grandparents were brother and sister, and his parents first cousins. Intersex readers of this novel have given it very mixed reviews, from luke-warm to BURN IT, and for anyone wanting a specific intersex perspective on the book I'd recommend this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmyKRGpZclc

I have a complicated relationship with this book because I read it very early on when I was coming out as nonbinary, and I liked the story when I read it with the lens that Cal was in fact nonbinary and masculine of center as well intersex. However, I'm pretty sure most of the richness that I found on my first reading of this book was me projecting my own feelings onto the character. In learning more about Eugenides' process of writing it (he not only lifted heavily from the actual memoir of an intersex woman whom he didn't fully credit, he also didn't interview any intersex people for accuracy or sensitivity reading) I've lost my respect for this book and would no longer recommend it.

This was my first Margaret Atwood book and it was excellent! It's a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Toronto or in the wildness of the Canadian woods. There are themes running through these stories: two contain men who have been buried long ago and preserved, one is a Scottish bog and one in the tundra ice; two stories contain haunting events at children's summer camps; two contain women who write for newspapers; at least four contain adulterous affairs; and nearly all of them contain women who cannot be contained. Wild, witty, bold women who take what they want without asking and are well equipped to survive in any wilderness.

A collection of firey essays, some of which verge on rants, about feminist, science-fiction, representation in popular media, race and writing. This was my first introduction to Hurley's work and I'd definitely read more.

I picked this short story collection up at a used bookstore because I loved Wilderness Tips so much. It was good, but not quite as good as the other collection, at least to me. Nearly all of the protagonists of this book are adults, whereas two of my favorites in Wilderness Tips were narrated by teens, which made for more variety. More of the Bluebeard's Egg stories focused on relationships, often troubled or recently ended or in uncertain status. The standout was definitely the title story, in which a woman contemplates both the stupidity of her own husband (whom she loves very much) and also how to re-tell the fairy tale of Bluebeard from a unique and unexpected point of view.

Kiera is one of very few Black students at her private high school in Bellevue, Washington, and on top of the normal pressures of keeping up in her honors classes and applying to colleges she is also the secret developer of a multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. She has poured her heart and soul into building SLAY as a fantasy world exclusively for Black gamers to play free of harassment, but she's never told her younger sister, her parents, her boyfriend Malcolm or her white best friend Harper about her creation. When a SLAY player in Kansas City is murdered over trying to sell in-game items for actual money, SLAY is suddenly a hot media topic and Kiera and her co-moderator Cicada (a Black college student in Paris whom Kiera has never met IRL) must figure out how to handle the new and scary outside pressures on their previously safe and hidden world. This book is a fast and fun read, and I liked how the story unfolded over a very short period of time. The chapters that briefly showed various diverse SLAY player's POVs added a lot. Some of the high school friend/boyfriend drama felt a little clunky, mainly because it was often a distraction from the main narrative of game situation. But I really liked the relationships Kiera had with Cicada and with her sister, and I was very pleased with the book's ending.

Short and fast paced, this story centers on Mouse, an orphan who hangs on to the edges of a traveling circus, who revels in fairy tales and wants to be a monster-tamer. She gets caught up in her very own fable, tangling with a shape-shifter, an imp and monster with a tender heart. Clearly the set up of the beginning of a longer tale.

This is a book I want to own, so I can underline passages. It's so good I ended up giving up on another book I was also reading, because it paled in comparison. Kiese Laymon writes about growing up Black and poor in Mississippi, raised by his Grandma and his single mom, to whom the book is addressed in the second person. He includes experiences of physical and sexual abuse, as well other body-related traumas such as eating disorders. He writes of a gambling addiction and other self-sabotage. It feels trite to call these introspections honest or raw or hard-won, though they are those things. As Laymon asks near the end of the book, "Can we just not lie?"

This book is also about Laymon's education as a writer, reader, and thinker. His mother (a professor at Jackson State University working towards her PhD through most of childhood) assigned him reading and essays on top of his normal school work, edited his pieces, and impressed on him the importance of writing, re-writing, re-reading, revising. Laymon highlights moments in which certain concepts or words entered his vocabulary, the phases in which he became proficient at writing about various parts of his experience.

This is also a book about racism, and the unconscionable levels of racist violence and oppression in this country, on which this country was founded, and which is woven into every single system of power, including the education system. Laymon was impacted by this as elementary school student, as a high school student, as a college student, and as a tenure track professor trying to meet the needs of students just as marginalized as he was.

For anyone who loves memoir, or who writes memoir, this is a masterful example. I'm definitely planning to check out Laymon's other books as well.

This is a wonderful graphic novel, an engaging look at the student-lead activism in South Korean in the early 1980s. Kim Hyun Sook is a first year University student studying literature. She is shocked to discover that campus is regularly overtaken by riots in which police beat and tear-gas students who protest President Chun, an unelected military general who controlled the country from 1981-1987. At first, she doesn't understand what motivates the protests. Then she joins a book club which reads exclusively book which have been banned by the government- The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara, Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda by Noam Chomsky, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, A Song That Cannot Be Erased by Kim Jeong-Hwan, For the Independent Peaceful Reunification of the County by Kim Il Sung. Hyun Sook's eyes are opened, and she begins working with a group of students who organize via the school newspaper and the masked dance troupe. It's very dangerous and multiple members are arrested and tortured by the police but the book doesn't lose it's hopeful tone that protest is effective and change is possible. It's a needed message for our current times. The book is based on one of the co-author's real life experiences, though the story has been condensed down from reality.

I loved the world of this book: January, a planet tidally locked to its sun with one side frozen in perpetual night, the other burning and bright. The humans who colonized this planet many generations ago established several cities in the narrow band of dusk between the two extremes. They were aware of the native species, but they didn't understand the intelligence or careful climate control programs the indigenous beings had crafted to keep the world livable- until those systems started to break down under human intervention. I struggled to like the characters who fill this intriguing setting. I think for me the book was a little too long, and some of the emotional beats didn't land. I would have liked more of the January beings, more explicit queerness, and less of the painfully disintegrating friendship. I believe this book has been optioned for TV- I'm curious to see what changes might be made in an adaptation.