Little is known about William Shakespeare and every theater major I’ve known has had some opinion about what truth is known. Even saying “who cares?” implies that someone else does. Hamnet is a beautiful book whether you’re approaching it as one of the preeminent Shakespearean scholars, who knows exactly what his second best bed is, or that he was just some guy that wrote the play your kid was in, about the Danish prince. Maggie O’Farrell could have written about an entirely fictional family who happened to live through the plague; it would still trace lyrical pathways through the lives of her story…

The Tres Horny Boys are back with one of my favorite story arcs of the Balance Campaign. Time traveling inside a looping hour, doomed to die every sixty minutes unless they can lift the curse plaguing the town of Refuge, and claim the Temporal Chalice for destruction. You know, classic D&D shit. This arc had some of the most interesting game mechanics, allowing the story to unfold in a complex and unique way, within a setting that changed the way my baby roleplaying brain saw storytelling potential. Ever since these episodes first aired, I’ve wanted to recreate the feeling I got while listening to them…

The writing in The Other Americans is consistently really good. It’s clear that Laila Lalami is very talented at what she does, and I was never bored reading the individual sections of the book. The problem I kept running into was figuring out why I needed to care about a plotline assigned to a character, when there was something bigger going on, or there was a competing story from another character that had just been introduced. Efraín is an immigrant who witnesses the inciting incident of the novel. He has a few more chapters after that, some no longer than two pages. His stakes are raised so high that every time he interacts with a character, there is another opportunity for his deportation…

In a world without the internet, where privacy is prized above all, journalists are law enforcement and paparazzi are the most vile criminals in the all-seeing eye of their law. Created by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin, with coloring by Muntsa Vicente, The Private Eye is a once only-digital, now hardcover-bound, horizontal masterpiece that examines the questionable ethics of our constant voyeuristic culture from a post-internet perspective. The average citizen’s use of masking and superhero-like costumes both mocks and celebrates the comics Martin copies for the characters of this graphic novel…

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost has a surreal Eiphel tower on the cover, that looks as if it’s more drug-fueled mirage than actual sight. The dust jacket pitch would have me believe that David Hoon Kim’s debut novel is about a translation student whose girlfriend spends a month inside of her dorm room before emerging dead. Herself, or her doppelgängers, are then found all over Paris and through his life. I was imagining a mind-bending ghost story that dealt with personhood and gave equal page time to both male and female protagonists. Maybe it’s my fault that I was expecting the book to be more of a party, or that there would be a literal ghost…

In the year of 2023, in the city of Seattle, I rarely reach for a plastic water bottle at the convenience store. I’ve got about ten Nalgene bottles scattered about my apartment, in my car, at work, and any time I run out of water I just go to the tap for a refill. I always have to remind myself in other states that their water may be… harder than what I am used to, and without a filter on hand, the plastic water bottles destroying our planet may actually be the best thing for me personally. In Alexandra Kleeman’s new novel, Something New Under the Sun, it doesn’t matter whether the plastic water bottles are better for you or not, they’re all you have to drink…

‘I feel stupid when I pray -“Anyone” by Demi Lovato’ is the epigraph that begins Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Lapvona. Set in the fictional dark-ages country of Lapvona, Lapvona the novel is populated by the terrible sorts of characters Moshfegh fills her stories with. I am ever impressed by her ability to describe some of the worst people you’ve ever met and make them redeemable eccentrics by the end of the book. Perhaps redemption isn’t right, but there’s some sort of satisfaction they manage to achieve over the course of their sinning and selfishness that the reader is invited to share in. You are given the insight to see them through the lens of their own circumstance, rather than how they really are. In a novel of hideous people, no one comes away pretty, all of them playing dress-up in the eyes of an uncaring god…

What Black Sun was missing, Fevered Star delivered on without hesitation. Rebecca Roanhorse succeeds in strengthening an already interesting fantasy world and forcing her characters to scrap for their lives. There is a weight to the “Year of the Crow” that comes with knowing the setting and not needing crafted explanations to understand the hysteria thrumming through the city of Tova. Whether from the perspective of a main character, or one of the citizens overheard throughout, you can feel the end of the tower’s peace with the death of the sun god…

Tumblr in the mid-2000’s was a unique place to grow up and discover who you were as a person. If you were as online as my friends and I, there’s a fairly good chance you’ve read at least one, if not many, of Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant webcomics. When she published physical volumes of her comics under the same name, it was like seeing a classmate get a publishing deal. It felt good. Ducks is a very different book from her other work…

My experience with thrillers is limited, I think due to the fact that those I have read start too slow for the genre to grab me. It’s all the important table setting, putting the pieces on the board so they can be captured later in the game. When the slow burn pays off, it’s like a good mystery, but with more ongoing tension. Like Gone Girl and thrillers I’ve read before, The Happiest People in the World began so slowly, I had to put the book down twice before starting my third and final read. It’s not that it was boring. The characters of Brock Clarke’s novel were the charming glue that kept me coming back so many times. Their tangle of lives would have been enough momentum to keep me going in a straightforward lit book…

Sometimes a book is worth the hype, and sometimes the hype itself destroys any possibility of a book being enjoyable. (Un)Fortunately for I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, all copies of the American printing come with “The South Korean hit therapy memoir recommended by BTS’s RM” written at the top. I’m sure this helped sell plenty of copies, but it also set the expectation that this would be a memoir. Coupled with the title, I anticipated it with the excitement I had after reading books like Crying in H Mart or I’m Glad My Mom Died. Instead, I don’t think Baek Sehee even intended to write a memoir and instead was providing one person’s first experience with therapy in more of a self-help book sort of way…

The Last White Man is about change. Sure, the inciting incident is the literal shifting of white bodies to dark, but there are so many other mental, spiritual, and emotional changes that take place through Anders’ and Oona’s journeys. I went into this thinking that the most important takeaway would be some societal message. Instead, the titular last white man and interpersonal relationships within “the town” are what continue to stick with me. The white people of the novel can’t grasp what being non-white would mean until it happens to them, and Mohsin Hamid spends no time pretending they would immediately find that understanding when their bodies change…

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of the most endearing books a young reader could hope to find. Anne lives with the conviction and imagination that so many of us let rule our lives, before a world of adult concerns take hold; when the most important things are the puffiness of your sleeves and the names given to plants in your backyard. My first experience with the series was when my local community theater put on the musical and I read the first couple books while unused in rehearsals. The urge to launch into “Ice Cream” still comes over me whenever I pick out my flavors…

There is something wonderful about creating a new mythology. The author can pull from what already exists, combining it with other forms and their own imagination to create something both original and familiar. At its best, Stevan Allread’s The Alehouse at the End of the World creatively enchants the reader with a world reminiscent of native origin myth, The Odyssey, and biblical folk tales. At its worst it reads like a horny old man who’s a little too into birds…

Over the course of a poetry book, you can glean the personality of a poet, see their soul spill out through their words. Reading a collection where no poet has more than one poem, you see instead the editor’s intent behind compiling. In Border Lines: Poems of Migration Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters divide poems gathered across decades into Crossings, Promised Land, Motherland, Labor, Language, and Community. These sections create the story, not of any one group or person, but of the sense all migrants can see themselves in. Maybe not every poem, maybe not every section, but keep an open heart and there will be words that strike a chord no matter your background…

Certain settings are red flags and should steer me clear of their reading. There’s nothing wrong with something like Kentucky in the 1930’s, but you could make a list of books with that exact setting titled “Books For Dylan to Avoid”. For that reason it’s hard for me to say Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars is a bad book, but I couldn’t say it’s a good book either. The setting may not have been my favorite flavor, but there were issues with pacing and resolution that left me dissatisfied on top of whatever feelings I had going in…

Picking up an Isabel Allende novel is not a light task to undertake. In the expanse of just one of her books, she writes decades, and several generations of complicated, diverse characters. The House of the Spirits is a feat to be upheld for the sheer amount of story she covers, and that’s saying nothing of the actual quality of her writing. She creates interest in the most insignificant detail a distant cousin mentions in passing, bringing back something like their favorite type of food hundreds of pages later as they bleed to death in the same shirt they were wearing in that first scene…

Epigraphs can be deceiving. Some are so unimportant that they act as a red herring. Some are jokes; occasionally between the author and only one other person. Denis Johnson begins his short story cycle, Jesus’ Son, with the lyrics, “When I’m rushing on my run/ And I feel like Jesus’ Son…”, quoting Lou Reed from The Velvet Underground’s song “Heroin”. It was my mistake to disregard the lyrics as nothing more than a source for the cycle’s name. Paying attention to the song’s title would have clued me in to the drug coursing through each of these stories. Instead, I realized a few sections in that this wasn’t a collection of varied characters bumping up against the edges of a society they live outside of, but one long bender following a singular character as he pinballs off everything in his path…

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville puts you through hundreds of pages of pretending to know everything about whales while being no more informed than I would be with wikipedia open in front of me. You read about sperm, opium, and some really colorful relationships before he delivers one of the funniest jokes in the English canon. Another Roadside Attraction is a lot like that, only Tom Robbins does so in a shorter length, including more sex and drugs, without delivering quite the same ending. For his first book, you already see a lot of the writing style to appreciate in Robbins’ later work…

I don’t normally gravitate to books that contain scientific classifications or cover the defense of a thesis on the biology of plants, but the only reason I’ll turn down a Book Club pick is already having read it, so here we were. I’m so grateful Braiding Sweetgrass was picked because it is so much more than technical jargon and the latin names of plants. Robin Wall Kimmerer is in conversation with how the nature of scientific language can be isolating, walking the reader through her own experience as an Indigenous woman who had her own history questioned by the institutions she sought to expand her knowledge of the natural world…