Book Recommendations

Total books for the year: 83.

• Wild Rain, Beverly Jenkins
• Imposter Syndrome, Kathy Wang
• Jade Fire Gold, June CL Tan
• Cemetery Boys, Aiden Thomas
• Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
• My Fair Concubine, Jeannie Lin
• The Care and Feeing of Waspish Widows, Olivia Waite
• When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Nghi Vo
• Tommy Cabot Was Here, Cat Sebastian

Total books for the year: 75. Between a pandemic and uprising and general sense of anxiety, it was a hard year for reading, but what I did manage to read was nearly all stuff I loved, making this a very tricky top ten!

• You Should See Me in a Crown, Leah Johnson
• Nothing To See Here, Kevin Wilson
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe
• Thornfruit (& sequels), Felicia Davin
• Wonders of the Invisible World, Christopher Barzak
• All Systems Red (& sequels), Martha Wells
• When We Were Magic, Sarah Gailey
• The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner
• The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin
• Today Will Be Different, Maria Semple

Total books for the year: 148, including, on a reflection, not a whole lot I loved in a lasting way. This top ten was not hard to narrow down.

• Life Among The Savages, Shirley Jackson
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
• The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum
• The Jade Temptress, Jeannie Lin
• Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall
• Hither, Page, Cat Sebastian
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo
• A Gentleman Never Keeps Score, Cat Sebastian
• The Frog and Toad books, collectively, Arnold Lobel

Total books for the year: 194, a number I will probably never hit again! I made this list in January 2019 and accidentally picked 11.

• Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantaro
• Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine
• Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple
• The Parker Inheritance, Varian Johnson
• The Ruin of a Rake, Cat Sebastian
• Vernon Is On His Way, Philip C. Stead
• The Year of Ice, Brian Malloy
• Wolf In White Van, John Darnielle
• Peter Darling, Austin Chant
• Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, JE Smyth
• Spectred Isle, KJ Charles

When the weather turns cooler and the daylight shortens, Spooktober has begun! Here are some fun reads for those eerie days, without being too scary because I can not handle that.

• The Family Plot, Cherie Priest
• The End of Temperance Dare, Wendy Webb
• The Turning, Francine Prose
• The Wicker King, K Ancrum
• People Like Us, Dana Mele
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Kiersten White
• Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand
• Dreaming Darkly, Caitlin Kittredge
• The Rules for Vanishing , Kate Alice Marshall

I have a hard time getting hooked by non-fiction that's too academic, but get frustrated with how much of pop history is obviously sketchily sourced/making major leaps without support. These are some of my favorite non-fiction books that at least mostly felt well done.

• Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y Davis.
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe
• Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, JE Smyth
• Shoot the Women First, Eileen MacDonald
• MacDonald has a certain idea she wants to prove, and it's not very well supported, and she's also very trusting of her interviewees. But! I include this for how interesting the interview portions are, which contain a perspective that's hard to find elsewhere.
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
• The Family that Couldn't Sleep, D.T. Max
• Okay, this one is extremely pop science and there are a lot of places Max needed to dig a bit deeper, but it's the biggest book out there about prion diseases and it is really fascinating to read with a grain of salt
• Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, Anna Zeide
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, Mallory O'Meara
• Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey, Michael Collins
• Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People, Kekla Magoon