Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

Three stars, read in June 2018. Good, but not as compelling as the first book was. I’d been thinking I might not read the third, but it turns out that this trilogy is more like one book split into three; since there was no conclusion here, I may end up finishing after all. Maybe. The world…

New Volumes of My Favorite Comics

Saga, Vol. 8, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Four stars. Excellent as always, less robot penis than usual, so plenty of good news. For the bad news, in chapter 47: oh my god, Brian K. Vaughan, no, absolutely fucking not. That is too far. Such excruciatingly graphic sexual violence against women is fetishistic, and…

We Need—I Needed—N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy Right Now

Five stars each and for the series as a whole; read mostly in December 2017. I read this series for the past two weeks of 2017, and it is so annoyingly perfect that The Stone Sky was the first book I finished in 2018. My stony, cynical heart doesn’t want to feel as hopeful as this…

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Three, maybe three and a half stars, read in March 2016. It’s taken me forever to write this review, mostly because I keep questioning whether there’s even a point in writing it. I feel like I didn’t have the experience I should have had with the book, but I’m glad I read it. My husband has been…

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Three stars, read in February 2016. Intriguing from the first pages, this is science fiction that you don’t have to be an avid science fiction fan to appreciate. Breq, the protagonist, is an ancillary—an AI in a human body. At the beginning of the book, she is only that one body, but twenty years ago…

Exegesis, by Astro Teller

Three stars, read in January 2016. It’s surprisingly difficult to pin down what I think of this book, which I found as part of the Reader’s Room Winter Scavenger Hunt (for the library excursion, item 12). I read it in about two hours, which sort of gave me the impression of loving it, but it’s really just…

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne

Four stars, I guess! It’s honestly taken me almost a year to be able to even tentatively give this book a star rating. Read in May 2015. I took a month and a half to think about it before I could write a review, too, and even now I’m not sure what I want to say. In…

For the Win, by Cory Doctorow

Four stars, read in September 2011. There’s an emotional cycle I go through every time I read one of Cory Doctorow’s books, similar to the cycle I go through when I think about politics, or human rights, or the corporatizing of the world. First is shock, as I start learning about whatever new despicable thing…

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood and 1984, by George Orwell

Both four stars, read in 2010. I knew very little about The Handmaid’s Tale when I started it, so I had no idea how similar it would be to 1984. The fact that I read them back to back was a coincidence, but the fact that I am writing about them in the same post…

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Two and a half stars, maybe, read in 2010. I did not like this as much as I did the first two books. I still enjoyed reading it and was reluctant to put it down for things like work, food, and sleep. But I was supremely disappointed in the ending. Massive spoiler alert for everything…