Book #30 of 2026: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine An entertaining blend of Taylor Jenkins Reid with Ruth Ware, in which a down-on-her-luck publishing editor, expecting to soon be fired, is instead tasked with handling the upcoming tell-all memoir from a beloved but secretive celebrity chef. In this novel Maria Capello is a …
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Book #29 of 2026: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and …
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Book #28 of 2026: Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #1) This 1934 novel introduces the character of Nero Wolfe, as well as his assistant Archie Goodwin and a few other members of their inner circle. The former is a genius consulting detective in the style of Hercule Poirot (who had debuted in 1920) or …
Book #27 of 2026: Empire Builders by Ben Bova I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed …
Book #26 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell As usual, a strong episode of Doctor Who leads to one of the better novelizations, helped along in this case by a few neat additions that author Gareth L. Powell has sprinkled in throughout. (In an afterword, he mentions that he grew up …
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Book #25 of 2026: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10) This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find …
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Book #24 of 2026: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang I’m not familiar with the 14th-century Chinese novel Water Margin / Outlaws of the Marsh / All Men Are Brothers, but I’ve still really enjoyed this modern genderbent retelling, in which the central bandits are now predominantly female and/or queer. Even approached as a …
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Book #23 of 2026: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz This 2025 novella imagines a future in which robots are free but second-class citizens, their status a contested compromise between those humans who see them as worthy of full equal rights and those who would deny their sentience and return them to a state of legal …
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Book #20 of 2026: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones This 1984 fantasy novel offers a weird and problematic little bildungsroman. Author Diana Wynne Jones excels as usual at the quotidian slice-of-life business and the unexpected intrusion of magic into the ordinary, but there are a few major hurdles that readers will need to …
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Book #19 of 2026: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This short novella was written in the early 2000s and included as an extra gift to backers of author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Kickstarter campaign in 2023 (now subtitled as A Sanderson Curiosity, …
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