Science fiction. Short stories. I’ve known Delany’s name since I was a sci-fi-devouring teen, and I read and loved a memoir by him almost a decade ago, but this was my first time picking up any of his fiction. It certainly wasn’t the case in his writing about his own life, but I’d always had …
Literary fiction. Australian. The novel takes place over one evening – a woman getting ready for a party, at the party, and then back home afterwards with a man she met at the party. The main character is autistic (as is the author). The book is a detailed portrayal of her incredibly rich inner life …
Weird sci-fi. An invasion, of sorts, or an infection, or an infestation. An alien life form comes to earth, joins with humanity, and brings about a new world, a utopic world, a vaguely unsettling world, a world without the great harms that define ours, a world of community and met needs and amazing new tech …
YA historical fiction. I don’t read much historical fiction, but I’ve been a fan of this author since her first novel, the Cinderella retelling *Ash*, and I’ve followed her as she has worked her way across a range of genres. This book traces the story of a teen Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco as …
Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the …
Fantastical absurdity and wry amusement at human (and nonhuman) foolishness. I read a scant handful of books from Pratchett’s famous Discworld series when I was a teen and enjoyed them, but they didn’t captivate me sufficiently for me to go out of my way to find more of them at the time. But recently, on …
Middle grade. Translated from Japanese. A classic that has also been made into an animated film, though I’m not familiar with it. Kiki is a witch. When a witch turns 13, she and her cat must fly on her broom from the town where she grew up to find a new town to be her …
There’s a genre of scholarly left nonfiction which I think of as “capitalism and ____” which is organized around talking about capitalism as understood through some novel lens, with a specific focus, or highlighting some feature with hitherto underappreciated significance. I’ve read my share of these books, and I’m sure I’ll read more in the …
Memoir – I’d even say lyric memoir, a la Maggie Nelson. Not sure I’m using that category quite correctly, but it seems to me that there are two broad areas of writing that distinguish lyric memoir from more conventional life-writing: the artfully (if intermittently) nonlinear flow of ideas, images, events, and reflections, and the play …
Scholarly. Listed as “Indigenous studies” and “health studies”, but also contains lots of important history and at least a little attention to social struggle. Focused on the role that the medical establishment has played in genocide and colonization in Canada – that is, medical colonialism. Written by a pediatric emergency physician who practices in Montreal. …