Book #48 of 2025: Vallista by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #15) In this installment, Vlad Taltos goes full Gormenghast, and the results are somewhat underwhelming. I do appreciate how author Steven Brust continues to periodically shake up his usual storytelling rhythms for this series, and it’s hard to name a bigger change than this adventure, …
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Book Review: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros
Book #47 of 2025: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (Ring of Solomon #1) [Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.] Overall a solid entry in the Percy Jackson genre of middle-grade fiction, where tweens battle fantastical monsters drawn from some culture’s traditional mythology (increasingly #ownvoices for the writer’s particular background, as here). In …
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Book Review: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard
Book #46 of 2025: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard This Discord-exclusive story is a lightweight snippet, depicting Kip Mdang from The Hands of the Emperor as a young person at university. It’s fun to glimpse him at that age with friends and family we’ve previously seen when they’re substantially older — namely …
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Book Review: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi
Book #45 of 2025: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi An interesting overview of the author’s time in politics, though this is mostly a matter of emphasizing what had been obfuscated or ignored in the public record, rather than providing any revelatory new insights. …
Book Review: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden
Book #44 of 2025: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden I was initially worried that this satire would be a two-star read for me, but it’s significantly funnier in the back half as it leans more into the absurd tropes that riddle this suburban crime thriller genre. Secret identical twins! Characters who might …
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Book Review: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider
Book #43 of 2025: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider Mark Twain (1835-1910) didn’t actually write an autobiography. That is to say, he wrote — and dictated — many things over the last forty years of his life that he characterized as part of that great undertaking, but they were disjointed, incomplete, …
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Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks
Book #42 of 2025: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks (Virgin New Adventures #2) Categorically an improvement over the John Peel title that launched this series, thank goodness. We’re still traveling with final Classic Who TV heroes the Seventh Doctor and Ace, but the writing this time feels more sure of itself, with less …
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Book Review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Book #41 of 2025: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow An atmospheric modern gothic / romantasy, in which a feisty heroine from the wrong side of the tracks is drawn to the creepy haunted house in her community and its reclusive and volatile caretaker. My favorite part of this story is its rural Kentucky setting, …
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Book Review: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Book #40 of 2025: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura This is an odd little story. It’s a translated version of a Japanese bestseller, and I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that I’m missing, as I’ve had a particularly hard time swallowing the basic premise here. Not the mirror that magically transports …
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Book Review: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Book #39 of 2025: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (The Wild Robot #1) A cute but aimless little story about an industrial robot who washes ashore on an island after a shipwreck and begins to make a home for itself. She’s fresh from her factory and there are no humans around to give her …
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