Book #41 of 2026: Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja Although I’ve generally enjoyed the short stories in this collection, I have to admit that I don’t quite get the point of it as a project. Lilja’s Library is a website dedicated to the writing of Stephen …
Tag Archives: fiction
Book Review: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu
Book #40 of 2026: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a …
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Book Review: The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout
Book #39 of 2026: The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #2) I’m enjoying this old mystery series enough to keep reading, but I have yet to be blown away by the execution. The most enjoyable aspect remains the narrator’s banter and overall relationship with his boss the reclusive detective, which means …
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Book Review: Mars by Ben Bova
Book #38 of 2026: Mars by Ben Bova This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it …
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick
Book #37 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick (Virgin New Adventures #12) This Doctor Who novel is so bad that it had me looking back over previous stories I’ve rated as three-out-of-five stars, wondering if I’d been too harsh on them. It’s both overstuffed and incredibly disjointed, offering not so much a …
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Book Review: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire
Book #36 of 2026: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #11) At this point, the Wayward Children fantasy series has established a clear alternating pattern: the even-numbered novellas contain prequel stories about troubled young characters stumbling into other worlds that offer a respite from their ordinary lives alongside unexpected new …
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Book Review: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth
Book #35 of 2026: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth I like the glimpses we get throughout this novel of its story-within-a-story, a fantasy series called The Fallen Children that’s supposedly bigger than Harry Potter. (Perhaps, like Simon Snow, it will someday be spun off on its own.) The further wrinkle that its pseudonymous …
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Book Review: UnWorld by Jayson Greene
Book #34 of 2026: UnWorld by Jayson Greene In the not-too-distant future of this novella, people can create digital copies of themselves to serve as a backstop for their fallible physical memories. Generally the uploaded consciousness stays close to the human original, but Ana’s has asked to be set free following the death by apparent …
Book Review: Behooved by M. Stevenson
Book #33 of 2026: Behooved by M. Stevenson The punny premise that lends this romantasy novel its title doesn’t technically spring until almost a quarter of the way through the text, which is late enough that I normally wouldn’t mention it in a review. But since the publisher’s description gives it away anyway, and it …
Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen
Book #32 of 2026: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7) I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 