Remember last time when I thought I had been working on a book review post for awhile but it turned out I had posted one over a year ago? Well, the same thing happened again, but to a less extreme extent. I do have a reason besides forgetting–approaching burnout! Of the work variety, not (just) the existential kind that being a person in America is leading to right now. More on that in a future post.
Like last time, I’m including only the best/most memorable books in order to avoid scope creep, so these books are roughly from October 2024 to February 2025. I’m also starting the next round of book reviews now in the hopes of getting the next round up sooner and maybe even writing them sooner and not six months later? A girl can dream.
Fiction
I’ll Have What He’s Having by Adib Khorram: This romance really hit the spot for me. M/M written by a queer author, mistaken identity, protagonists in their late 30s who still don’t have all their shit together yet find love anyway, and doesn’t take place in one of the big glamorous cities. Oh and they have lives (and close families!) outside of the love interest. You love to see it. Also, they bang it out a lot, just so you know. I got so hungry (for food, to be clear) while reading this book because both protagonists work in the food business and there are so many food scenes, and now I want some Iranian food. And wine.
Forever by Judy Blume: Somehow I never read this book as a kid! This book was written in the 70s and it was pivotal for the time. I really liked the way that the decision to have sex came as 1) a decision from both people, 2) not a reason to feel shame, and 3) not a commitment for a future marriage, and 4) a promotion of safe sex. There’s a scene where the girl goes to Planned Parenthood in the city to get birth control. And (spoilers, but is it really a spoiler for a book this old?) while the two are determined to stay together forever (or at least through the summer before college), they don’t, and this is treated as a perfectly normal thing where no one’s life is ruined. The book and the characters aren’t perfect, but they’re teenagers and being imperfect and thinking you know everything about your lover at seventeen is exactly what teenagers do. Honestly, that part felt so realistic.
About a Boy by Nick Hornby: I read this for my book club. Will is the youngest 36-year-old in the world, and Marcus is the oldest 12-year-old in the world. You’d think that a guy hitting up single parent clubs to score with the ladies sounds like such a bro thing to do, and you’re not wrong. But Will isn’t written like a bro, just a shallow dude who doesn’t have to worry about anything in his life and doesn’t really do any of these things out of malice. Which somehow makes him the perfect adult pal to Marcus because his mother is so depressed she can barely function, stuck in the past and determined to keep Marcus there too without giving him a chance to develop his own personality. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for fans of Kirk O’Bain.
Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin: I am here for fucked up queer characters. I like Emily Austin’s previous book better (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead), but this one is pretty good too. Enid is a human disaster who makes me feel better about myself. Is that horrible to say about fictional characters? She’s just dating random women on apps, listening to true crime podcasts, and worrying about being stalked by her bald neighbor (which isn’t helped by her phobia of bald men). Oh and she knows lots of interesting facts about space. Lots and lots of facts. This book relies more on slice-of-life than a plot to drive the story, but the characters are interesting enough that I don’t mind.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick: I love futuristic science fiction, and somehow I had never read PKD before. Someone take away my nerd card. Anyway, the main character is an android bounty hunter in a world where owning real animals is a status symbol. This book touches on a lot of topics, like how damn isolated people are. Deckard’s wife spends all her time in the empathy box instead of in the real world because their real world is terrible. Yet during Deckard’s android “retiring” adventures, he discovers that empathy isn’t limited to humans, and humans can also lose their sense of empathy.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett: I read this for book club, and I’m not even sure how to describe it. This book is about race and labels and what happens when you don’t fit any of those labels that people or society put on you. Some of the storyline feels like multiple storylines or not told fully in order at some points, but that’s part of the charm of wondering whether the story is actually about Not Sidney or a story about a story. There are some references to Everett’s past books but I didn’t feel like I was missing out by not understanding those references.
When the World Tips Over by Jandy Nelson: I’ve waited for years for a new Jandy Nelson book and this book doesn’t disappoint. It has so many things I love: messed up family dynamics, magical realism, family discoveries, stories within stories, a curse, a mysterious rainbow-haired girl who somehow touches all the kids’ lives. It took me a long time to feel for Wyndon, but I fell for Dizzy and Miles immediately, and I adored Cassidy’s backstory and the story within the story, the search for The Town and Perfect Miles getting comfortable with his sexuality, and the entire world in this book where I don’t even question the talking dog.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: The prose is absolutely beautiful, and the book itself a snapshot of the conflict that Red and Blue, two time travel agents, find themselves part of. It’s almost impossible to describe without making you read the entire book, and this is one of those books where the less you know about it going in, the better. Yes, you’ll be confused. Yes, I was. But here, unraveling the story and the prose is the experience. I just wish we learned more about the conflict that Red and Blue are involved in as well as the wider world. I want to knoooow.
Nonfiction
As usual, I listened to all these audiobooks.
Leslie Fucking Jones by Leslie Jones: This book was so damn funny. I might have been annoyed by the writing style if I had read it with my eyes, but listening to the audiobook felt like Leslie was talking to me instead of reading the book. She even says in the audiobook edition at least once that she’s read the book a zillion times so let’s just tell the story as it happened. I wonder how much of the actual book she read. Okay, I checked: the tree book is around 300 pages long but the audiobook is 16 hours long. That math isn’t mathing. But whatever, go listen to it and prepare to laugh your ass off.
Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America by Shefali Luthra: Well this book hit way too hard. I appreciate the inclusion of trans and nonbinary people in the book, since they’re often left out of the reproductive choice discourse. This book gets personal and scary; if you haven’t been living under a rock in the United States for the last couple of years, you’ve probably heard a couple of stories like the ones in this book. I knew about how abortion bans affected care in surrounding states, but not about how care in “safe” states further away would be affected with people driving or even flying in to access care.
The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America by Carrie Schuettpelz: You know those surveys on the census or when you apply to jobs that ask you your race? Now imagine having to prove it. That’s what Native people have to do in order to be a card-carrying member of their tribe, and every tribe does it differently. Some trace lineage, some calculate blood quantum, and some use both. The fun part: different tribes have a different qualifying blood quantum, ranging from 1/32 to 5/8 from the table on the Wikipedia article. So… what happens if you have an estranged relationship with your Native parent or grandparent, but need their support to help you get registered? Or your family records are inaccurate because of America’s racist history? Or your and your spouse’s (different) tribes have blood quantum rules so your children can’t be enrolled in either tribe? Great questions, welcome to this book! The author is Native American herself, so there are some personal stories, along with a lot of interviews with other Native people in varying steps of getting officially registered, including some who choose to self-identify for their own reasons. This book is an excellent look at who gets to be Native and what that means.
The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor: Holy shit. Have you heard about the New Apostolic Reformation? I hadn’t until reading this book, and I’m an ex-Christian. This is a fringe movement, the people who want to engage in spiritual warfare and make America a Christian country because God told them to, and this book is the story of how they’ve succeeded so far. I didn’t know about any of the people or items in this book, and I spent hours on Wikipedia afterward (and still do occasionally for this topic). Remember the Appeal to Heaven flag with the pine tree? That’s these people. This rabbit hole goes deep, and sometimes the big names behind this movement are stupid enough to meet with the orange one at the White House and then post about it on social media, when the visitors logs are secret until at least next year. This book goes deep and I’m sure the movement has entrenched itself even deeper since the book was published in October 2024. (I listened to it in December.)
How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books by Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer: This book feels like the tl;dr of every self-help book, but it’s not a bad thing. The authors (and podcast hosts, apparently, but I didn’t know that going in) read fifty self-help books of all types and tried living by the rules of each book for two weeks. This book summarizes what works, what doesn’t, and what they wish more books recommend. The authors have two very different approaches to life; one is a self-help enthusiast, while the other is a skeptic. Having both of those perspectives in this book plus an intersectional feminist viewpoint to call out all the books written by white dudes made this much more interesting than just reading a random self-help book. But if you don’t like it when authors talk about themselves, steer clear of this book. I didn’t mind because they were trying to apply the rules of the books to their lives, which involves… discussing their lives. But some people really hate this for some reason.
Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination by Sadie Dingfelder: This book was fascinating. It’s part memoir, part science about a journalist who is severely faceblind. I’m not diagnosably faceblind, but if I don’t see you regularly, it’ll take me awhile to put a face to your name. The author of this book has mistaken strangers at the store for her husband. I’m not that bad. But this book takes you on the author’s adventures in learning about faceblindness during her nerdy midlife crisis (her words, not mine), from her very practical father’s denial to becoming a professional test subject in assorted faceblindness labs and asking a lot of questions. But it goes deeper than faceblindness. She also learns about the things about her that she assumed were just quirks her entire life, like how she can’t mentally time travel (I’m bad at this too) or create mental imagery. It’s a really interesting read, helped by the fact that the author is really funny. Oh and here’s the test I took online to test my ability to recognize faces. I scored lower than most adults but not interestingly so. (I found my Bluesky post. The average score was around 80% correct responses for adults. I scored 71%.)
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: This book hit me in my soul to the point where I bought a dead tree copy from a local indie bookstore before even finishing the audiobook because I knew I’d want to refer to it over and over again. I have a whole essay on this coming separately later, so I won’t cover everything here, but this book is not a book about productivity like I thought it would be for some reason. If anything, it pokes at the idea of traditional productivity, that we must be striving for some higher goal at all times in order to make something of our lives, and forces the reader to ask what actually matters and strive toward that instead. Does your job matter? In the grand scheme of things, probably not, but if you want it to matter, choose to make it matter. Don’t let random things control you.