The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin My rating: 4 of 5 stars A love letter to New York meets Lovecraftian Horror and you get this book. I believe this is probably one of those love or hate books with very little room in between. As someone who married into a NYC family, I was…

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher My rating: 5 of 5 stars Well, that was incredible and deserving of all the praise it got. I was already a fan of T. Kingfisher from when my eldest daughter convinced me to read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, but this was just so perfect to me.…

The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett My rating: 1 of 5 stars This is my second time reading. I dropped the rating from 2 to 1 star The first time I read this book, I thought, “I’m done with Rincewind stories”. And this second time around cemented that. The book is essentially Pratchett riffing on…

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by Tara Moore My rating: 3 of 5 stars Thoughts as I first read through this collection:Boy, modern English is so dumbed down. I love to read and read voraciously and still found it so laborious to read some of these short stories. Everyone speaks in purple…

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars As a Kickstarter backer on this campaign, I was able to read this book immediately on the first day of the year and I bet it will be tough to find another book that I will love more this year. As…

Dead Man’s Hand by James J. Butcher My rating: 4 of 5 stars This first book by Jim Butcher’s son has prose that reads like a combination of his father’s prose and John Scalzi’s prose. It’s fun and sarcastic, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious stakes. I was actually quite happy that Butcher tends…

A Very Scalzi Christmas by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars A great collection of Scalzi short stories and flash fiction about Christmas. If you like his sense of humor, you’ll enjoy the book. Depending on your reading speed, probably a little over an hour to complete. View all my reviews

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang My rating: 4 of 5 stars It will be very interesting to compare this book to Seize the Stars when I get to it next year. Both involve the seeming impossibility of pushing for justice against a society…

Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith My rating: 2 of 5 stars I was more of a fan of the abridged Bible, but that’s probably because I have more familiarity with the Bible than Shakespeare. Still, it’s interesting to see how old negging is. View all my reviews

Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m not an incredible baker, I’m an average baker. When I bake breads – my family is often happy with the taste, but my wife always says – “All that work and we could have…

The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn…

Nightmare magazine 122: November 2022 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 1 of 5 stars I really was not feeling it with this issue. The editor mentions that these are all stories in Weird Horror. I’m not a big fan of Weird Science Fiction either, so I’m not surprised these stories all bounced off of…

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom) If you’ve been reading the books from…

The Sacred Land by H.N. Turteltaub My rating: 4 of 5 stars Once again we join Menedemos and Sostratos as they sail around the Med. This time they head to Phoenicia and Israel. I was very curious what a pre-Hellenized Isreal would be like and what our Sostratos would think about the Isrealites. As usual…

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein My rating: 5 of 5 stars I know a lot about money and its history and I still learned a bunch in this book. Jacob Goldstein, who also narrates, uses his podcast-acquired skills to make the stories he uses to illustrate the history of…