Book #252 of 2018: The Library Book by Susan Orlean This is a weird, messy book, but it has definitely lodged itself into my head and my heart. One part true crime investigation into the devastating 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, one part oral history of that library and the broader library …
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Book #251 of 2018: Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Princess Academy #1) Situated right on the boundary between middle-grade and young adult fiction, this little book is pretty delightful. It’s more grounded — and more feminist — than the fairy tale it at first resembles, and is filled with strong female friendships and the struggles …
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Book #250 of 2018: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers #3) I adore every book in this warmhearted series about humanity’s future amid a coalition of other intelligent space-travelers, but this latest volume feels like a minor step down on a technical level. The five new viewpoint characters, all human residents of …
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Book #249 of 2018: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #7) And so my Harry Potter reread comes to an end with what I consider the weakest volume of the series (not counting oddities like the Cursed Child screenplay or the flimsy textbook tie-ins). The major problem in this …
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Book #248 of 2018: The Book of Magic edited by Gardner Dozois Gardner Dozois was a prolific editor of speculative fiction, and this is most likely his final project, having come to publication soon after his death in 2018. It’s a series of stories about sorcery — the companion to last year’s Dozois fantasy collection …
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Book #247 of 2018: The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal This short fitness memoir — titled after Jim Fixx’s 1977 classic The Complete Book of Running — is a lot of fun, especially for readers who run themselves. I don’t always agree with author Peter Sagal’s advice, like that runners should do without …
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Book #246 of 2018: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Roxane Gay is a talented writer, but I must confess that I don’t find this 2014 essay collection as engaging as her later work Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. There’s little thematic cohesion across the pieces in this volume, most of which were independently published …
Book #245 of 2018: Elevation by Stephen King A lackluster novella from a writer who should know (and can obviously do) much better. Part of the problem is the warmed-over premise of a man gradually losing his body weight, which can’t help but recall the author’s earlier novel Thinner — which if not quite a …
Book #244 of 2018: How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin A few of these short stories miss the mark for me, and the ones I like best seem front-loaded in the first half of the collection, giving the book at large an uneven feel. Still, author N. K. Jemisin’s imagination is …
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Book #243 of 2018: 41: A Portrait of My Father by George W. Bush My political views are very different from both the author and the subject of this presidential retrospective, but thankfully the former steers largely clear of politics to talk about the latter’s character. (The author’s brother Jeb, for example, barely features in …
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