Sci-fi contemporary novella. Sequel to Finna, featuring low-wage precarious retail employees of the same Ikea-esque big-box chain whose stores, because of the bizarre physics of their layout, sometimes connect with parallel worlds. This one begins, according to the author in the Acknowledgments section, from that one “otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn …
Science fiction, of the political-intrigue-in-an-interplanetary-empire variety, with a quite sweet and well-done romance at the centre of it. The worldbuilding is nothing special (though I appreciate how gender and sexuality work in this universe) and I suspect a certain kind of genre snob (thank goodness I am not such a person!) might be inclined to …
Weird fantasy. The best thing that I can say about this book is that I’ve never read anything like it before. Unfortunately, when I was about a hundred pages in, I was on the verge of abandoning it. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it grew on me somewhat, but it never managed to …
Theoretical physics for the lay reader, critique of the institutional and social doing of science, and radical analysis, mixed with memoir. The author is a prof of physics and astronomy who grew up immersed in radical grassroots politics in a Black working-class family in Los Angeles. The book starts with a focus on explaining some …
YA contemporary with a sprinkling of the fantastical. Follows a teenage girl – Mexican-American, queer, a high school student, works in her family’s pastry shop and has a knack for knowing the perfect baked good to meet the needs or fulfill the desires of anyone who comes in. At a party at the home of …
Literary fiction. Short stories, mostly centred on characters who are Black girls and young women living in Florida. Relationships, loss, embodied messiness in everyday life and in those few-in-a-lifetime moments when everything changes. The stories were more distinct from each other than you often find in an early-career collection like this, while still having a …
Sci fi. Centuries ago, humanity fled Earth on generation ships. The ship at the centre of this book has survived because it came upon a herd of massive, vacuum-living space beasts. Originally, the beasts were just a source of resources, killed and harvested, but for many generations now the humans on this ship invade a …
Science fiction, I suppose, or maybe fantasy – anyway, kind of comic book-y in feel, and a world different from our own in that a small number of people have super powers, though this seems to be relatively new and not yet commonly known. Follows a not-very-good small-time super villain who robs banks, and a …
Literary fiction. Two interspersed narratives set in London, England, one in the Victorian era and one in the present day, each following an employee of the same encyclopedic dictionary. In the older time period, it is a bustling concern, with dozens of lexicographers filling a massive building, working slowly towards the hoped-for publication. That blessed …
Scholarly. About habit – what it is, the role it plays in lives and worlds, and how it relates to struggles for social transformation. (Not, btw, the philosophy book I alluded to feeling resistant to reading in a post last week…I had already finished this by that point!) Draws on US pragmatist philosophers, more recent …