It’s that time of the year again where I talk about how my overall reading year went and decide if it was a success. On paper it was a success, but as I looked at a lot of these categories it was really hard for me to pick out some of the books to highlight….
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
“A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.” On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious….
The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer
“You had your bender. You had your wallow. Now you fix this thing that’s been done in your name.” Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home….
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
“The problem is not the packing, I admit; I simply dislike travelling. Why people wish to wander to and fro when they could simply remain at home is something I will never understand. Everything is the way I like it here.” Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore who just wrote the world’s…
The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch
“Every single one of those instances when I thought I was hypnotized by seeing joy on other people, I’d been searching, searching specifically for his joy. Because now that I’ve experienced it, it renders all past joy obsolete.” Nicholas “Coal” Claus used to love Christmas. Until his father, the reigning Santa, turned the holiday into…
The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao translated by Wendy Chen
“The pear blossoms are dipped in the moon’s first slanting light.” The Magpie at Night is a lyrical and searching portrait of the inner life of Li Qingzhao, one of the greatest poets in Chinese literary history. These spare and arresting poems evoke with rare immediacy the quiet and haunting beauty of country life during…
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
“Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.” Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a…
Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross
“Their souls weren’t mirrors but complements, constellations that burned side by side.” Two weeks have passed since Iris returned home bruised and heartbroken from the front, but the war is far from over. Roman is missing, lost behind enemy lines, with no memory of his past, or Iris. Hoping his memories return, he begins to…
The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang
“Rainbows are funny things, aren’t they? The harder it rains, the more beautiful they shine. Who knows? Maybe it’s a gift from God, for those who’ve endured the storms.” On the outskirts of Rainbow Town, there is an old, abandoned house. They say that if you send a letter detailing your misfortunes there, you could…
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
“How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?” Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s and…
The Great Book Wyrm 