Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (by Roz Chast)

A graphic memoir by a New Yorker cartoonist about the final years of her aging parents. This was for the Read Harder Challenge category of "nonfiction comic" so I bought it on paper, which I prefer to trying to read a graphic novel on my phone. 

As a person with aging parents (who are getting increasingly frail) this was so relatable and honestly probably arrived at the right time in my life. It handles the topic with sensitivity and humor, and painted such a vivid picture of her parents, and that mix of frustration, guilt, avoidance, more guilt, and everything else that comes up towards the end of life. But again, it's not a depressing read either, it's just very real.

I know this is one I'll continue to think about in the coming years.  

The Baby-sitters Club Fan Edition: Baby-Sitter Summer (by Ann M. Martin et. al.)

Well, my nostalgia would not allow me to pass this one by - a new Baby-sitters Club book, formatted like a Super Special, with authors like Becky Albertalli and Emma Straub each writing a different BSC character. And I have thoughts.

My hope was, of course, that this would finally cover the summer after eighth grade. But no, they are still in the same time warp they have always been, and this takes place during the original series (although no actual timeline makes sense if you think about events that are referenced, but I got mostly used to that when reading the original series.  I did think mentioning Hamilton was pretty egregious, though, if you're still not going to let cell phones exist.  Like either Hamilton exists and so does texting, or it's still the 90s. You can't have it both ways.)

Speaking of Hamilton, Dawn's storyline is the worst - for once, not because I hate Dawn, but because it makes absolutely no sense. Dawn is at a theater camp directing a musical featuring songs she has apparently written? If anyone is going to be a secret random Broadway fan shouldn't it be Stacey? But it turns out there is a character who is a songwriter, from the California Diaries series... but it's not Dawn. So the going theory is the author of this section (a longtime BSC ghostwriter) just got Dawn confused with Maggie. And then somehow nobody pointed out that Dawn being into musicals and songwriting makes no sense. 

The absolute best storyline is Kristy's because they let her be gay and kiss a girl. Like yes, finally queerness exists in the BSC world! This is why it needs to be the summer after eighth grade, because we can actually explore this and they can just be in a time warp at age 15 and they can do a new series of specials and the characters can actually evolve and it will be totally fine!  

As for the other stories.... Mary Anne's and Stacey's were basically retreads of half of their books. Mary Anne is shy and Stacey ditches her friends for a boy (although the story was a retread, the writing on this one was particularly well-executed).  I loved that they had a Japanese-American author write Claudia and a Black author write Jessi - and have Jessi visiting an HCBU with her mom.  Their racial identities felt a lot more authentic and it was handled more naturally.  Again, I'd love for this to continue. 

(Total sidebar that the title of this sucks. Try to find it by googling "Baby-Sitter Summer" and you'll see what I mean.  I love to go find reviews on Goodreads and it took me forever to find a Goodreads link.  Like, sloppy work from the team there.) 

I just realized I forgot Mallory. She's very in character, she goes to Ireland and rides horses, it's fine. I never really loved the Super Specials even though I read every other book in the series.  I never enjoyed the format of all the club members being split up and it felt disjointed because you only get short snippets from each of them. This book has the same issue.  But a series reboot set after graduation but not told in depressing Friends Forever style and keeping this writing team would be awesome.  Oh sorry, I mean, it would be totally dibble. 

Constituent Service (by John Scalzi)

I bought this (fancy signed edition) as a Christmas gift for my child, who loved Agent to the Stars so much that I felt confident she would also enjoy this novella, about a human who goes to work in city services for a cosmopolitan district where she is pretty much the only human around.

Mina adored this. "I love this so much, tell John Scalzi to write more, I need more, I just want to live in this world, I love it, I love it, I love it."  So please turn this into a series, John.  

It's very fun, light, fluffy, and unfortunately quite alien-poop-centric which is not my favorite type of humor but obviously it did not bother my child. So I'll have to decide which to try next - Starter Villain? Redshirts? Old Man's War? We shall see!

Texas Books and ToB 2026

Time to catch up on some recent reading! I think I either started or finished all of these during my recent work trip to Texas.  

For the first time I can remember, I'm slightly nervous about my reading goal for the year - I need to finish 10 more books before the end of the year.  I still think I'll do it but normally I'm done well before December. Anyway, adding eight more books to the list today, and introducing the tag for the 2026 Tournament of Books, since the longlist is out. 

The Complex Art of Being Maisie Clark (by Sabrina Kleckner)

The only YA book on the list, actually! I liked this messy main character, and thought her coming of age story felt realistic and cute. There is some excellent trans rep that was handled subtly but realistically.  I loved that finding her artistic voice was part of her story. Her brother was kind of an asshole to her throughout, though. Overall cute and fine.

The Killer Question (by Janice Hallett) and The Last Devil to Die (by Richard Osman) 

I read these two cozy mysteries back to back and they made an interesting counterpoint to each other.  Killer Question is an epistolary novel set in the world of competitive trivia contests, which I absolutely loved. The twists here are great and genuinely surprising.   The Last Devil to Die is part of the Thursday Murder Club series and has more real emotion and deeper characters, but the mystery wasn't particularly surprising or satisfying. Really, the relationships and emotion carry this one. I enjoyed them both for different reasons. 

In a Glass Grimmly (by Adam Gidwitz) 

Part of a middle grade series that Mina enjoys so this was a read-aloud for us.  Very clever and great dark humor. Kind of what I expected and did not get from Gordon Korman, e.g. a truly funny middle grade book.  I have the third book on our shelf to start on next (and I bought her a new signed Scalzi book for Christmas, since she also enjoyed Agent to the Stars this year.) 

The Shattering Peace (by John Scalzi) 

Did someone say Scalzi?  It's been a minute since I read the Old Man's War series so I was glad of his usual formula, where there's enough context-setting to let the reader catch up.  A solid installment, cleverly written and a fun romp. As usual, my only criticism is that all of his snarky-voiced characters and their banter are interchangeable, but this is easy to look past when all the characters are so fun anyway. 

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (by Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband) and The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter (by John Douglas)

And now for something completely different: nonfiction about dark topics with long subtitles. I'll dispense with the second one first - Douglas is smart but also full of himself, and clearly thrilled to bits there's a TV show about him as he brings it up a lot and even put it in the title. (I still would love a third season though.) Still, he presents some fascinating case studies about interviews with killers and if that's your thing, you'll enjoy it.

What We Knew on the other hand is a scholarly book, an oral history of Germany from 1933-1945, and explores what German Jews and non-Jews knew about the mass murder that started in earnest in 1942.  First there are 40 oral histories and then the authors take a look at large-scale survey data. Absolutely worth a read if this chapter of history is interesting to you. 

Sky Daddy (by Kate Folk) 

My first ToB read, about a woman who is sexually attracted to airplanes and believes her destiny is to marry one by dying in a plane crash.  Audacious and un-put-downable, I hope it makes the shortlist because I'd love to talk about it. (Is the ending a cop out or is it genius? I truly can't decide.)  I haven't read any of the other books on the longlist (although I had a couple on hold already) so I'd better pick the next one fast.  

Rusty Brown (by Chris Ware)

This was part of my challenge to read 10 physical books this year - this one is a 700-page comic and quite unwieldy so it was taking up a lot of shelf space! 

Ware's comics are beautiful depictions of depressed, toxic masculinity and sad people with circumscribed lives, this time set in small-town Nebraska. Mostly reading this was tiresome and unlike with Building Stories, which I loved, it wore out is welcome with me.  I think my favorite part was the novel-within-a-novel called Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars which, yes, is depressing and about toxic masculinity (and you don't want to know what happens to the dogs) but was inventive.

Sounds like damning with faint praise, doesn't it? I appreciate the achievement of Rusty Brown but it's definitely one that I'm passing along to the next reader, and don't need to keep on my shelf.  (Also this was my 10th physical book of the year! Although only 6 have left my house, so I'll try to read a couple more before the year is out.)  

Ungifted (by Gordon Korman)

I love Gordon Korman's YA novels, have read them all a dozen times or more, and recently read them out loud to my teenager. She also loves Gordon Korman's new work, and I had the RHC category of "the first book in a completed young adult or middle grade duology" so I figured we'd both enjoy this!

It was... fine. I expected more Gordon Korman magic, I'm so used to being delighted by the ineffable vibe of his books, and that was missing for me.  I didn't like our protagonist very much - he was an obnoxious troublemaker who stayed that way, except suddenly at the end nobody minds anymore? I'm sure it's me - I'm not a middle grade reader, and I've avoided all of Korman's middle grade books for this reason.  

I bought the second book in the duology but I'm hoping we can pick something else for our next readaloud. I think she might be ready for some Scalzi except she doesn't love bad language and John doesn't hesitate to include it.  I think she'd love the humor though, so maybe I'll go dig up my copy of Agent to the Stars and see what she thinks. 

Glaciers (by Alexis Smith)

I have another goal this year, to get through some of my unread books on paper, and probably Glaciers is the book I was thinking of when I made this resolution.  I bought this novella a dozen years ago from a display at Powell's Books - deckled edges, matte blue color, lovely cover,  pleasing form factor, and published by Powell's imprint - who could resist?  And yet somehow, I never managed to actually read it.

Once I did determine to read it, it went  fast! It's a novella about a day in the life of our main character, Isabel. Very Mrs Dalloway in its interiority, and how Isabel's reminiscences of childhood flesh out the narrative. It reads very "this is my MFA thesis" in that it's consciously poetic, very writerly, as opposed to organic, and is more about mood than any major plot happenings. 

I truly don't know what took me so long to read this - I hope whoever discovers it in our Little Free Library enjoys this poetic little novella.  

Shubeik Lubeik (by Deena Mohamed)

Read for the RHC category "a comic in translation." This was originally written in Arabic and is presented back to front, right to left. It was nominated for a Hugo, among other awards, and takes place in Egypt, in a world where wishes are real and can be bought and sold.

The book follows three "first-class" wishes and the stories of who uses each one.  A woman who has lost her husband, a college student (majoring in wishes) who is dealing with depression, and the man who sells wishes and, for religious purposes, doesn't believe in using them. 

Fascinating glimpse into a culture I know very little about and a unique premise. I didn't think the stories were all super successful - the second one, about Nour, resonated with me the most. I hoped the final story would end a bit more satisfyingly, but maybe the point is - life is life, and there is no perfect way to use a wish.   

The Best American Poetry 2024 (edited by David Lehman and Mary Jo Salter)

Back when I was in grad school, I have fond memories of going to Borders or Barnes & Noble in early September, hoping that year's Best American Poetry would be on the shelf.  So it was nice to have an excuse to buy this again! 

The RHC category was "pick a 2015 Read Harder Challenge task to complete." As you may recall, I started doing the challenge in 2016, and I've been slowly crossing off the 2015 challenges after the fact. I was down to four, and one was "a collection of poetry" so I figured I'd feed two birds with one grape, as we say on my team at work, in lieu of the more violent metaphor.  There's just something about reading each poem on paper, and flipping back to the notes to see what the author has to say about the poem, and then going back and re-reading it, and dog-earing my favorites... on Kindle it's just not the same.

Unfortunately I don't think Mary Jo Salter and I share the same taste. A lot of exact rhyme. A lot of long poems about nature. A lot of "big names." Very little contemporaneity or silliness, no prose poetry at all.  A lot of poems I thought were actively bad. There will always be hits and misses in any anthology, but as a whole, the collection didn't do it for me.

Still, there are some gems in here as far as I'm concerned. My favorite poem was probably Cleptopolitan by Brendan Constantine, which is exactly the type of James Tate-esque surrealism I enjoy. I also liked Domestic Retrograde by John Hennessey, Sentimental Evening by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and The Days by Adrienne Su.  And I did dog-ear a handful of other poems that I enjoyed or found moving.

Looking up the 2025 version, it looks like it will be David Lehman's last. I might have to visit Barnes & Noble in September, one more time, just for old time's sake.

Swimming Studies (by Leanne Shapton)

It's been a minute! This is another one of the paper books sitting on my shelf - where it had been for probably 10 years - that I always meant to read but never got around to reading because I ignore paper books. Not in 2025, baby! 

This is a very loose, impressionistic memoir that combines stories of Shapton's childhood as a competitive swimmer with her adult life in various pools around the world. It includes amazing artwork and photography, including pages of bathing suits and information about where they are from, and abstract renderings of pools.  And the writing is just, so lovely.  Like this description of a sunset:  “I’m serenaded by sky blue and pink, an intense Tahitian Treat pink. Popsicle, Care Bear, little-girl colours. I’ve never seen sky like this. It’s optical glucose."

Optical glucose - I will never forget this metaphor, it hit me like an incredible line of poetry.  This book is from 2013 so not exactly breaking news, but it's really lovely and I recommend it! 

I reshelved it to keep (especially due to the artwork) but for my next paper book decluttering, I just gave away The Tale of Genji. I have no plans to read it, and if I do change my mind and read it, it can be on my Kindle.  

Park Bench (by Christophe Chabouté)

For the RHC category "read a wordless comic." This is a graphic novel about a park bench and the lives that intersect with it. The author is French and you do see a word or two of graffiti, for example, which has been translated.  But this is largely wordless. 

 It's fun to follow all the small stories along the way.   From the old couple who shares a pastry on the bench every day to the unhoused man who sleeps on the bench to the skateboarder who rides his board along the bench.  But the ending is pretty sentimental (the ending of not just one of the vignettes, but all of the vignettes). If you don't mind that, it's sweet.  

Birthday Retreat Books

I spent a week taking the sea air on the Mendocino coast, and while there, finished four books!

The Making of Pride & Prejudice (by Sue Birtwistle & Susie Conklin)  

This was a gift from a few years ago and part of my quest to read through some of my physical books this year. The photos are a bit blurry and I would have enjoyed clearer photos, more interviews with the cast, basically a book ten times the size of this relatively slim volume. It definitely made me appreciate a lot of nuances that went into making the miniseries (this is about the BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth), from custom-printing fabrics on muslin to hiding lighting equipment with foliage in a ballroom. A must-read for 1995 devotees, but you'll definitely wish it were longer!

Headshot (by Rita Bullwinkel)  

Tournament of Books selection and I'm gonna be honest, I hated it. The repetitive style (which is I'm sure deliberate, because this is about boxing and it makes you feel like being punched with names repeated over and over and over again...) drove me mad. I enjoyed the flash forwards but they added up to nothing I was wholly uninterested in the winner, as the only characters I really enjoyed weren't in the final. I also hate boxing. I also found it implausible that none of the 8 girls were explicitly non-white, and race wasn't even mentioned. So either they were all white, or race never impacted their lives. Did not work for me. 

The Wedding People (by Alison Espach) 

Also in the ToB, but it was very "beach read" with romcom vibes and a predictable plot. That said, I immediately loved our main character Phoebe (who shows up at a hotel that has been rented out for a wedding, and gets drawn into the lives of the wedding people) and the fun cast of characters. I could see where this was going a mile off but I stayed up late to finish it anyway because it was delightful. Will make a perfect movie.  

Mansfield Park (by Jane Austen) 

I can't remember the last time I read Mansfield Park from cover to cover, so I'll include it here! It's been decades, probably. I enjoyed it so much this time around - I'm very familiar with the 1999 film and it actually takes fewer liberties than I thought it did! (The scene of Mary undressing Fanny in the rain, for one.) Jane Austen is always a joy.

Number One Is Walking: My Life in Movies and Other Diversions (by Steve Martin)

I love Born Standing Up and Steve Martin's novellas, and of course his films, so I was excited to read this. It's charming but it's also very slight - the most any movie gets is a few panels of a comic, and some only get a sentence. (His sentence about Bowfinger, that Eddie Murphy deserved an Oscar nod, is correct though.)  

I'll be very sad if we never get a complete memoir of all his films. Instead this one just skimmed the surface with cute anecdotes and then is padded out with dozens of one-panel comics (the comics, and book, illustrated by Harry Bliss) that are mildly amusing at best. 

It's not bad, it's just very surface-level, and not exactly what I want from Steve Martin. I could read an entire book about Three Amigos or L.A. Story alone.  Give me more, Steve!

Sense & Sensibility (by Jane Austen)

Pride & Prejudice is a book I read many times before ever seeing an adaptation of it. Because of that, although I've seen the miniseries a gajillion times, I still have a very strong "book version" of the characters in my head. (Particularly Jane, who I always picture as a brunette even though in adaptations, she tends to be blonde.)  

The opposite is true of Sense & Sensibility: I've seen the Ang Lee film a gajillion times but I think this is my first time reading the book cover to cover. Seems impossible but I think it's true! I've read all the others, including Lady Susan and Sanditon, but I loved the movie so much that I think I only read it in bits and pieces.  It was fun to finally read it from cover to cover and get some book versions of the characters in my head!

I bought this at the Jane Austen museum, along with Northanger Abbey. I read it as part of my resolution to read and/or donate 10 physical books this year but I definitely will be putting this one back on my shelf along with the other Austens. I mean, she's just great, Jane Austen. Every page was great.

Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts (by Evan Ross Katz)

One of my reading resolutions this year is to read or pass along 10 physical books, since I have a backlog of books on paper now that I do most of my reading on Kindle via the Libby app.  This was the first one I chose, as it also fits a RHC category: "a book about a piece of media you love."

I wanted a bit more oral history and a bit less of Katz inserting himself into the narrative as a fanboy of Sarah Michelle Gellar who clearly has his biases (Buffy and Angel yes, Buffy and Spike no) and doesn't manage to interview many of the people involved in the show, most notably David Boreanaz, Alyson Hannigan, and Joss Whedon.  Instead he spends a lot of time quoting Cynthia Erivo at length.  (I enjoyed her thoughts but, the choices were a bit strange.) 

My understanding is many interviews were cancelled after the allegations came out about Joss Whedon in 2020, and to Katz's credit, he fully engages with them.  But Live from New York did it well, incorporating material from previous interviews by people who declined to be interviwed into a coherent oral history.  And Katz sort of does this, pulling quotes from DVD commentaries for example, but then spends a lot of time editorializing them.

My favorite tidbit in this book is that Clare Kramer's audition for Glory was inspired by Jack Nicholson in The Shining. There are lots of fun tidbits, I just wanted it to be a little tighter and a little less memoir-y overall.

Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (by Tess Taylor)

Last year, I read the wonderful Rift Zone, a book of poems by Tess Taylor that met the "an author local to you" requirement. This year, Ian alerted me that Tess was doing a reading at our local library, and I'd enjoyed her book so much I bought another one, Last West, and then we went to see her read it.  So this qualified as "Read a book by an author with an upcoming event (virtual or in person) and then attend the event."

Last West is a book of poems written to accompany a Dorothea Lange exhibit at the Met.  Tess Taylor talked about how she read Lange's notebooks when she was documenting the lives of migrants in the American West, and did a road trip herself, following the same path. The poems are a collage of Tess's words and Dorothea's.

I loved the reading but as a standalone, the book of poetry is mixed (as books of poetry so often are). Some parts of it worked better for me than others - the choppiness of the pastiche/found poetry approach didn't always give me enough to grab onto - and on the whole I'd recommend Rift Zone more. Still, I'm excited that I have a signed copy now and definitely will be excited to read whatever she releases next.

Books Make Great Friends (by Jane Mount)

This seemed like a silly category, "a picture book published in the last five years." I can go to Barnes and Noble and leaf through a picture book in 5 minutes. But dutifully I did my research, and found out about this book, about a girl who loves to read.

It's beautifully and meticulously illustrated, with so many amazing books represented. I originally checked this out from the library and when I Couldn't zoom in to read all the titles, I ordered the hardcover so I could pore over every book. It had so many of my childhood favorites (Anne of Green Gables! Anastasia Krupnik!) and modern ones I love (Melissa! Planet Earth Is Blue!) And here's a picture of the adult bookshelf. It has some of my all-time favorites, most notably Cloud Atlas, Americanah, Crying in H Mart, and Circe. Jane Mount clearly has great taste, so I want to try and make out all the titles if I can and add them to my library list.

 

 

The story itself - about making friends when you are awkward and shy - is very sweet, and I think will resonate a lot with my child, even though she's "too old" (theoretically) for picture books.   I loved the experience of reading this, and thank you Read Harder Challenge for this lovely gift!

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up (by Naoko Kodama)

Read for the "manga" category in the RHC.  It's a short manga about a girl who marries her best friend "to shut her parents up" and then ends up developing romantic feelings for her.

There are a lot of flashbacks, which made this choppy and confusing to read. (This may partly be because I'm not used to reading manga, but I had no issues with My Brother's Husband.)  There is some weird sexual harassment going on, flashbacks that don't pay off, a weird focus on the main character's giant boobs?

I mean, it's cute - the grumpy/sunshine dynamic is there and this could have been adorable. But it lacked pacing and depth, for me.

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World (by Pénélope Bagieu)

For the RHC category "a comic that has been banned."  I'm so glad I got this on paper because the illustrations are absolutely stunning. This is an anthology of stories about brazen women around the world, from little known figures (like the woman who saved the Montuak lighthouse) to world-famous figures like Josephine Baker.

I'm guessing it's banned because it features at least one transgender woman and mentions sexual assault, murder, and other difficult topics in some of the (true) stories of these women's lives. But it's wonderful. Bagieu includes a list of more Brazen women at the end and it just made me long for another volume of this amazing book!

Get it for the Brazen women (and girls; my 12-year-old loved it) in your life.

Dayswork (by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel)

Another Tournament of Books entry. (I have about a week and five books left, can I do it?!?) (Probably not; I'm saving the three play-ins for last and if I run out of time, I will just read the winner.) 

This is a unique novel that revolves around a married woman researching Herman Melville during the early months of the pandemic.  It has almost no plot, and I would have enjoyed a smidge more, but it's a delightful read with a lot of great tidbits about Melville.   (My favorite is this quote from Philip Hoare: "Melville would never have finished his book today - he'd be constantly Googling 'whale.'") 

Tournament-wise, it should win the first round (it's up against Cold People, which has no ending) but should lose the second round to either Blackouts or Boys Weekend.  Then again, my predictions are almost always wrong, so we shall see...