Books in lieu

Stress levels = not better. Combo of stuff I can't talk about and stuff I'm not ready to talk about and stuff I'm too tired to talk about. Have short book reviews instead.

72. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. 4. There are middle grade books that are equally appealing to adults, and middle grade books that are excellent for what they are, and this summer camp for Greek gods' kids leans towards the latter. But I hope my kid picks it up.

73. Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton. 3.5. So Wheaton wrote a lot of blog posts, and then annotated them into a book, and then re-annotated that. Honestly, a bunch of the earlier posts are not particularly well written and come off as whiny and kind of prejudiced. But he's cringing even more than you can, so it's forgivable. Also, damn, this dude's parents suck.

74. Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire. 3.5. Not as strong as the first in the series, which was heavily experimental and brilliantly conceived. I found the degree to which the info dumping was lampshaded and spread out irritating, and the pacing of the ending just didn't really work for me. I realize it was kind of horror pacing versus fantasy pacing, but it was pretty obvious things weren't resolved.

75. A Lowcountry Bride by Preslaysa Williams. 3.5. Sweet little love story, but the barriers she put in the way were kind of infuriating. (And I specifically mean the way the job and the daughter were handled.) On the other hand, I appreciated how (minor spoilers) chronic illness was handled as a whole - there's no impossible magical fix, but the protagonist is still worthy of (and gets) love even if she knows she's looking at a likely early death.

76. Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho. 4. On one hand, this is a pretty obvious imitation of Crazy Rich Asians with its status-obsessed, brand-name dropping, outrageously wealthy Singaporeans. On the other, it's still loads of fun.

77. Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. 5. One of the best cookbooks I've ever read, ever. Incredibly detailed and factual and yet still compulsively readable.

78. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. 4. This science fiction novel of a missionary on an alien world while our own collapses into apocalypse was fascinating in that I utterly could not predict the plot arc. I had NO idea where the author was going, in a good way.

79. I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider. 3. These mostly single-page comics about books and reading are entertaining as standalones, but were clearly meant to be read days apart on social media. They get pretty repetitive all in a row.

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80. Unnatural Creatures ed. by Neil Gaiman. 5. Really excellent anthology of short stories around cryptids of various types.

81. This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed. 3. A young Bangladeshi man comes out to his family. I kind of hope this is heavily autobiographical - there are a number of plot wanderings that are kind of self-indulgent and unfocused unless they're true. But charming.

82. You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo. 4.5. Madcap adventure when a band of ex-military turned chefs get accidentally kidnapped by space pirates. Part funny, part devastating, may be setting up for a sequel? I kind of hope so.

83. Book Lovers by Emily Henry. 5. Literary agent and editor enemies-to-lovers while trapped in a small town neither of them want to be in. The dialogue is just so sparky.

84. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. 4. The first chapter, about a forensics course for people trying to figure out which species of animal is responsible for various murders, maimings, and property destruction, is hilarious. The rest is still interesting if somewhat less witty.

85. The Roommate by Rosie Danan. 3.5. Prissy trust fund heiress falls for male porn star. Very hot, as is appropriate. But on the other hand, some of the threads of the plot are resolved in a kind of slapdash way I found unsatisfying.

86. Well Met by Jen DeLuca. 3.5. Well darn, now I want to go to the Renn Faire. I didn't love the male lead's being an asshole for most of the first half of the book, and the plot requires him to insert his head in his butt too frequently. But there were enough flashes of good humor to keep me going, and I love the trappings.

87. Musketeer Space by Tansy Rayner Roberts. 5. Ok, so I have a love/hate relationship with The Three Musketeers - love the swashbuckling plot, hate the unbelievably rampant macho sexism. (I read a lot of old fiction. This one is so bad, guys, even for the time.) Gender flipped version with cleverly done SF trappings? Yes, please.

88. A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean. 4. There are so many ways for the grumpy-guardian, fiery-ward trope to go bad, but this one pulls it off.

89. The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era by Gretchen Bakke. 5. Really fascinating exploration/explanation of how our electrical grid is set up and why it needs to change.

90. The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan. 5. Re-read. He's a scandalous geneticist, she's a proper lady...who secretly is the one who did all the research.

91. The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. 4.5. World-hopping where that's barely the point - the point is more the story-within-a-story, the bounds of love, and the dismantling of colonialism. And an awesome heroine.

92. Speed & Scale: A Global Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis by John E. Doerr. 5. Is this terrifying? Yes, it should be. Is it kind of weirdly self-congratulatory, and focused on the companies this dude's VC firm funds? Yes, that too. It's also...weirdly hopeful? Like, you know how bad things are. But this actually does lay out an extremely ambitious but actually pretty rational plan, and shows where we're making a lot of progress. Enough progress to get you fired up on the "oh crap we gotta get moving here" level, rather than "we're so screwed there's no point" level.

93. Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire. 4. Cora the ex-mermaid got captured by Lovecraftian elder gods in the last book, so in this one she signs herself up for a significantly shittier school than Eleanor West's to get free. I suspect this isn't the last we'll see of the Whitethorn Institute.