From the first few chapters of I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy illustrates the terror of life under her mother. She doesn’t do so with the hatred or bitterness that I expected of someone who experienced that kind of a traumatic relationship. She puts the reader in the headspace of her younger self. Though we understand what we’re seeing, it’s clear that all she sees is a loving mother whose best friend is her darling child who will go on to live the dreams she saw unfulfilled and lose the weight she struggled to maintain her entire life. It’s horrifying. Like watching a film where you’re constantly yelling “Don’t go in the basement!”, only behind every creaky door is her mother with a new trauma…

The intimidation of a multi-book spanning fantasy series will often stop me in my tracks, there’s just too many other books to read. I’d love to pick up The Wheel of Time, perhaps I’ll do it after I retire. The beauty of V. E. Schwab’s writing is that even after years between reading A Gathering of Shadows and A Conjuring of Light, everything from the first two books is still right there for me. You could pin it on her memorable characters or endlessly fascinating magic system…

Ballad For Sophie is one of the most visually impressive graphic novels I’ve ever seen. Juan Cavia’s illustrations give the book an artistic style, echoing its writing and bleeding color into the musician’s already colorful life. Filipe Melo’s story flies through the pages like a concerto, filling the already beautiful book with a nuanced life that never feels overly saccharine or unearned…

How immortal could you be before it turned from evading death into your own personal hell? Beyond the usual “everyone dies before you and civilization crumbles at your feet”, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue introduces a slight wrinkle, cursing the main heroine with the inability to leave a trace, either in people’s minds, or in the dust on the ground. I like immortality stories. They are similar to time travel in the sense that time travels around the subject. V. E. Schwab’s creation of Addie’s curse is a compelling enough reason to set this novel apart from others like it. Addie doesn’t accrue wealth and influence the world around her, she can’t hold onto it, time moves without her while she moves with it…

Lesbian time traveler stuck on the Q Line meets neurotic gayby, new to New York and relationships of any kind. Casey McQuiston is the name to know in queer romance fiction, and though One Last Stop was the first I’ve read of her, I knew I was in good hands before I cracked open the book…

Black Sun’s story unfurls from a ritual to awaken the sky god into a messy hive of politics and manipulation. Throughout the fantasy novel, characters discover powers they didn’t think themselves possible of inside of mythos they believed to be folk tales. When it’s working, the story is fascinating and full of color. When it’s not, political power-struggling plays out like an episode of gossip girl. While I started reading the physical book, the audiobook became available when I was around halfway through, and I can’t recommend it enough…

Rarely will a book encapsulate so many concepts while ultimately being about nothing. In The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada conjures a supernatural community that couldn’t be more mundane, while making the mundanity of everyday life feel dramatically necessary to her character’s well being. I was fascinated by how much I still do not know throughout the book, and now that it’s over I feel like I have a better understanding without any resolution to those mysteries…

“A java sparrow lives inside of Owen’s chest.” This is the opening line to Emme Lund’s debut novel, The Boy With a Bird in his Chest. There is a clarity to these first words. An immediate understanding without knowing any of the other things that make Owen a complex and fascinating character. You can visualize some, fairly accurate, version of him without any other physical description. The vivid portrait of the title itself is immediately satisfying, setting up the novel’s characters to glow like psychedelic flowers on the side of a cliff…

If you’re picking up a 33 ⅓ book, you’re probably a fan of the album or band it features, the author themselves, or you like the series in general and want to expand your musical knowledge. Very rarely would you be looking for a fictional novella, but John Darnielle is not one to do things the way you’re supposed to. If you’re thinking “John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats?” you’d be right, but also John Darnielle of Wolf in White Van, Universal Harvester, and Devil House. Master of Reality was the first book Darnielle had ever written, and whether it influenced him to write his other books, or was simply the beginning of his authorial journey, is up to the man himself…

Lucy Grealy’s story of growing up and living through unending medical treatment is told beautifully by the audiobook narrator Coleen Marlo. Marlo breathes reality into Grealy’s words, words that already feel so real on the page without the assistance of the voice bringing them to life. I had to stop midway through to make sure it wasn’t the author herself reading her own story. Whether audio or physical, Autobiography of a Face conjures the experience of a not-quite teen girl going through the graphic, physical reconstruction of her very face, at a time when most are trying to change the way they’re perceived through private, slight modifications for the microscope of their peers…

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird does what every good book about writing does. It informs the reader in the beginning that the only way they will ever write anything is by writing it, and then spends the rest of the book trying to show how they might go about doing that. Evergreen as the advice is, there is a personalized touch to it; pushing it forward in front of other similar books with stories from Lamott’s life and time teaching. Her personal stories shape the way she appears as a character in her own advice, giving form to her lessons, shaping them into story within curriculum…

Anthony Veasna So’s posthumous, debut novel Afterparties examines what it was like for the generations following the survivors of the Cambodian Genocide. Sometimes he does so through a queer lens, sometimes through the eyes of characters who have long since left their hometown, but there is always a connection to family and a question of where a person sits within a culture they couldn’t understand without experiencing. It’s heartfelt in one moment, cynical in the next, each short story unraveling some new way in which the surviving families are stronger as a unit than they are as diasporic strangers floating farther from their home.

I heard that Anthony Doerr had written something else, that at least some people were talking about, a bright blue and gold cover that when you looked at it just right, showed a book framing the title. Cloud Cuckoo Land is six hundred and twenty pages of perfectly fine story by an author who won one of the most prestigious awards there is. I do wish I had read All the Light We Cannot See so I could speak to it in response to this, but I can’t and I’m sure there’s someone out there who has…

The living influence of all things, animate or otherwise, drives the core of this novel. Beginning with a ferry to Bainbridge and ending in a community auditorium, the settings of Subduction are as important to the plot as its characters. Kristen Millares Young uses every inch of the page to tell this story. I was constantly falling into the descriptions of rooms in trailers and houses, while fascination took me in the very real conversations happening between characters the characters living in Neah Bay. From the first moments on the Puget Sound, this book became cement in my mind, creating a base that I will compare other stories to…

This book got stuck in my head when I first heard about it and it’s been threatening to undo my curated to-read list for years. It’s not a book people talk about very often and I’ve been able to avoid hearing about it for the most part. That was until I went down to do my laundry and found it on a “free book and puzzle” shelf in the basement. Unfortunate for the other book I had been reading, A Canticle For Leibowitz fit perfectly into my pocket and I had just finished On Writing, my previous “carry anywhere” book of that same size. The conditions had been set and at long last, I began my journey with Saint Leibowitz…

Someone asked me what I was reading. Instinctively I led with, “I know it’s cheesy, but On Writing by Stephen King” and I don’t know why, but I’d probably do it again. There’s something about success that makes taking advice from that person seem played out or basic. Which is bad somehow? I literally started reading On Writing because I was listening to an author talk about their debut novel, how even though it was cliche, On Writing was what made them decide to sit down and put words to paper. So what is that? I guess taking advice from an author may come across as wanting to write like them, but I think King is arguing for the opposite to be true…

Leonard Cohen’s music isn’t for everyone. I know Hallelujah, but my favorite version is Buckley and when I first heard that version I thought it was a really good cover of Rufus Wainwright’s song. I can’t say I’m a huge Cohead, but I’ve certainly enjoyed his music when someone points out I’m listening to it. This casual interest in the musician-poet caused me to stop and grab Leonard Cohen: On a Wire off a library display. Reading it, I find myself no better or worse due to that passing glance…

The presence of an illustrated family tree in multi-generational storytelling is an interesting dilemma at the beginning of a novel. Do you read through to try and understand names you haven’t met? Do you refer back to it as the threads begin to weave together and ruin plot-lines that depend on marriages? Do you ignore it completely and only look when you’ve reached the end? The beauty of reading an audiobook is that all these questions are answered for you…

It feels cliché to associate wisdom with children asking questions we’ve long since settled for assumptions to. Unfortunately, you can’t just write your own kid off as cliché and move on, you actually have to answer their questions. Mira Jacob answered her child with thoughtful hope, that maybe she could protect him from the real world in some way that she was not. Maybe he would have the opportunity of a kinder America not given to her. From a question about the racial identity of Michael Jackson spills her memoir Good Talk that spans childhood as an East Indian child growing up in New Mexico to a mother raising a Brown child in the age of Trump. Everything comes easy to the page, but leaves tricky questions in your brain, many without answers both for her life and your own…

I read this book in an audio format, by Recorded Books, Inc. James Yaegashi was an excellent Charles Yu, playing up the handyman living through science fiction who was raised on stories of Star Wars. There were a few times when reading the physical book would have been better. Certain chapters have diagrams and there is a moment with footnotes that fell flat both when the footnote was inserted and later when it was read. On the other hand, some of the book was divided up by Greek letters and hearing them pronounced was much easier than if I had come across them on my own. I’d probably still be calling them “section squiggle”. In the end, I recommend the audio book, but if you happen to have a physical copy on hand, it may benefit you to leaf through every couple of chapters…