Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

 

Of course I hope you've enjoyed my short fiction and poetry (and nonfiction!) this year. But other people have been absolutely lighting the place up as well, and here are my recommendations for speculative short fiction and poetry for 2025. Even I can't read everything, so please do not take this as a comprehensive list! I'm sure there's great stuff out there I've missed, and if you want to comment with it, that's great. Spread the joy.

Heritage/Speaker | Hablante/Herencia, Angela Acosta (Samovar)

The Witch and the Wyrm, Elizabeth Bear (Reactor)

Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)

Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)

Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)

Bestla, James Joseph Brown (Kaleidotrope)

Mail Order Magic, Stephanie Burgis (Sunday Morning Transport)

With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)

As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)

And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)

“To Reap, to Sow,” Lyndsey Croal (Analog Mar/Apr 25)

Atomic, Jennifer Crow (Kaleidotrope)

Flower and Root, J. R. Dawson (Sunday Morning Transport)

Six People to Revise You, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)

The Place I Came To, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Lightspeed)

Understudies, Greg Egan (Clarkesworld)

All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys (Reactor)

Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth, Kate Francia (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Jacarandas Are Unimpressed By Your Show of Force, Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gorgon, Gwynne Garfinkle (Penumbric)

The Otter Woman’s Daughter, Eleanor Glewwe (Cast of Wonders)

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)

In Connorville, Kathleen Jennings (Reactor)

Michelle C. Jin, Imperfect Simulations (Clarkesworld)

What I Saw Before the War, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Reactor)

The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)

Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)

Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch (Uncanny)

The Loaf in the Woods, David Marino (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

One by One, Lindz McLeod (Apex)

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills (Uncanny)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)

Liecraft, Anita Moskát (trans. Austin Wagner) (Apex)

The Orchard Village Catalog, Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)

Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Last Tuesday, for Eternity, Vinny Rose Pinto (Imagine 2200)

The Horrible Conceit of Night and Death, J. A. Prentice (Apex)

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)

Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off, Margaret Ronald (Sunday Morning Transport)

Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Reactor)

No One Dies of Longing, Anjali Sachdeva (Strange Horizons)

Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)

Orders, Grace Seybold (Augur)

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens, Rachel Swirsky (Reactor)

“Holy Fools,” Adrian Tchaikovsky (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)

A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Willrich (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

“An Asexual Succubus,” John Wiswell (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)

Phantom View, John Wiswell (Reactor)

Brooklyn Beijing, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)

Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)

 

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Material goods/archaeological evidence in the study of this period. It's slightly awkwardly balanced in terms of who the audience is--I have a hard time that people who need this much exposition about the era will pick up a book this specifically materially detailed--but not upsetting in that regard.

Elizabeth Bear, Hell and Earth. Reread. Returning to my reread of this series in time to still have all the memories of what's been going on with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and their connections to faerie realms; as the second half of a larger story, it goes hard toward consequence and ramification from the very start of the volume.

Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age: Europe in the 1840s. I feel like this is trying for more than it achieves. It goes into chapters about Romanticism and the advent of science and some other things, and then there's a second section with chapters about major empires. But what it doesn't do is actually talk about Europe in this period--it's fairly easy to find material about England, about France, even about Russia, but there's nothing here about Portugal or Greece or Sweden. It's not a volume I'm going to keep on the shelves for the delightful tidbits, because it's not a tidbit-rich book. Also some of the language is '90s standard rather than contemporary. So: fine if this is what you have but I think you can do better.

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism From Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. Good ground-up Third World environmentalism thoughts.

Victoria Dickenson, Berries. One of my friends said, "a book about berries, Marissa would love that!" and she was absolutely right. It is lushly illustrated, it is random facts about berries, I am here for it.

Emily Falk, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Interesting thoughts on working around one's particular brain processes--the third "c" that did not make the title is "connection," and there's a lot about how that can be used to live lives closer to our own values.

Margaret Frazer, Heretical Murder. Kindle. One of the short stories, and possibly the least satisfying one of hers I've read so far: there's just not room for questions, uncertainty, or even a very human take on the life experiences of heretics in this milieu. Oh well, can't win them all.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. If you're an English Civil War nerd, this book on the lead-up to it will be useful to you. I am. It is.

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater. A near-future desert fantasy that was creepy and exciting and warm in all the right spots. This is one of Kingfisher's really good ones. Also Copper dog is a really good dog--I mean of course a good dog but also a well-written dog, a dog written by someone who has observed dogs acutely.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Lyrical writing about gardening in the face of more than one apocalypse at the same time. Laing loves many of the same reference points as I do, in life, in literature, and in botany, so I found this a warmly congenial book.

L.R. Lam, Pantomime. This is very much the first volume in a series; its ending is a midpoint rather than an ending per se. It's a circus fantasy with an intersex and nonbinary protagonist, and it was written just over a decade ago--this is one of the books that had to exist for people to be doing the things with intersex and/or nonbinary characters that they're able to not only write but get published now.

Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Glorious. Some favorites from past collections and some searing new work, absolutely a good combination, would make a good present especially for someone who doesn't have the prior collections.

Daniel Little, Confronting Evil in History. Kindle. This is a short monograph about philosophy of history/historiography, and why history/historians have to grapple with the problem of evil. I feel like if you're really interested in this topic there are longer, more thorough handlings of it, but it was fine.

Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? Really good analysis of how we parse things as alive and having rights, and also how riverine biology, ecology, social issues are being handled. Personal to the right degree, balanced with broader information, highly recommended.

Lars Mytting, The Bell in the Lake and The Reindeer Hunters. The first two in a series of Norwegian historical fiction, not more cheerful than that genre generally is but more...active? relentless? I really like this, they're gorgeous, but people will die sad deaths, that's how this stuff does, it's just as well that I'm taking a break before reading the next one because too much of it can make me gloomy but just the right amount is delightful. The symbolism of the stave church and its bells and weaving and all the weight of rural Norway hits in all the right ways for me.

A.E. Osworth, Awakened. This queer millennial contemporary fantasy is not rep of me, it's rep of the people I'm standing next to a lot of the time, and that's powerful in its own way. Many of you are that person. This does things with magic/witch community that feel very true and solid, and it's a fun read.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Mirage City. The latest in the Evander Mills mysteries. This one takes Andy to Los Angeles and his childhood home, in pursuit of missing (queer) persons. Some of them turn out to be perfectly well, some of them...a great deal less so...but the B-plot was focused on Andy's relationship with his mother, whose job turns out to be something he didn't know about--and will have trouble living with. The last line of the book made me burst into tears in a good way, but in general this is a series that has a lot of historical queer peril, and if that's something that's going to make you more unhappy than otherwise, maybe wait until you're in a different place to try them. I think they continue to stand reasonably well alone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear. Reread. Okay, so at some point in early October I earnestly wrote "reread King Lear" on my to-do list for reasons that seemed tolerably clear to me at the time. Things on the list tend to get done. Somewhere in the last two months I forgot why this was supposed to get done. If there's a project it's supposed to inform, reading it has not helped me figure out which project that is. I'm not mad that I reread it, it still has the bits that are appalling in the most interesting ways, but...well. A mystery forever I suppose.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Discussed elsewhere.

 

We've all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.

This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can't control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you'd never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true......how would we ever get new baked goods?

I think this is a mistake we make too often when we're thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we're not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can't come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we'll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.

So yeah, the lussekatter--you know what day it is--rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze--I told you last year that I shouldn't mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not--what they don't have to be--is perfect.

Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she'd made calzones but they'd turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, "Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!" And not in the "I'd do it better than that loser" way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or--let's be real, perfect isn't available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that's what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.

2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078

2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875

2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654

2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366

2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953

2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654

2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376

2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995

2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566

2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141

2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659

2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260

2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html

2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html

2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html

2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html

2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html

2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html

2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!...oh hey, this is the twentieth year I've posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn't that a thing.

 New essay out today in Uncanny Magazine! The Stranger Next Door: The Domestic Fantastic in Classic Nordic Children's Fantasy. Want to read me geeking out about Pippi, Nils, and the Moomins? Here we are, it's a different kind of cozy!

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Like Pueyo's debut, this is an extremely well-done example of something that is very, very much not my thing. This is another monsterfucking book! I am using that term as a genre term of art rather than a pejorative: there are guls, they eat human flesh, the main character ends up romantically/personally entangled with one despite or perhaps because of her complicated history.

There's vivid writing here--which if you are not interested in stories of human flesh being eaten is not necessarily going to appeal to you--and there are cultural touchstones I wish we saw more of in things published in the US. It's great to see a really Brazilian speculative novella--and the politics of contemporary Brazil give this speculative story weight and deep roots. It's done so well. It's just so beautifully written. But also, and crucially for me, it is body horror basically start to finish, so: approach with care, depending on your tastes.

 

William Alexander, Sunward. A charming planetary SF piece with very carefully done robots. Loved this, put it on my list to get several people for Christmas.

Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance. I picked this up from a library display table, and I was disappointed in it. It isn't actually very much theory of the use of expert witnesses in the American legal system. Mostly it's about Burgess's personal experiences of being an expert witness in famous trials. She sure was involved in a lot of the famous trials of my lifetime! Each of which you can get a very distant recap of! So if that's your thing, go to; I know a lot of people like "true crime" and this seems adjacent.

Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns. I wanted to fall in love with this series of murders featuring a birder detective. Alas, it was way more sexist than its fairly recent publication date could support--nothing jaw-dropping, lots of small things, enough that I won't be continuing to read the series.

Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays. Mostly interesting, and wow does she have an authoritative voice without having an authoritarian one, which is sometimes my complaint about books that are mostly literary criticism.

David Downing, Zoo Station. A spy novel set in Berlin (and other places) just before the outbreak of WWII. I liked but didn't love it--it was reasonably rather than brilliantly written/characterized, though the setting details were great--so I will probably read a few more from the library rather than buying more.

Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land. Discussed elsewhere.

Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai. Analysis of Japanese supernatural creatures in historical context, plus a large illustrated compendium of examples. A reference work rather than one to sit and read at length.

Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War. Extensive and quite good; when the maps for a book go back to the 400s and he takes a moment to say that we're not thinking enough of the effects of the Welsh, I will settle in and feel like I'm in good hands. Livingston's general idea is that the conflict in question meaningfully lasted longer than a hundred years, and he makes a quite strong argument on the earlier side and...not quite as strong on the later side, let's say. But still glad to have it around, yay.

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Also a disappointment. If you've been listening to science news in this decade, you'll know most of this stuff. Osterholm and Olshaker are also miss a couple of key points that shocked me and blur their own political priorities with scientific fact in a fairly careless way. I'd give this one a miss.

Valencia Robin, Lost Cities. Poems, gorgeous and poignant and wow am I glad that I found these, thanks to whichever bookseller at Next Chapter wrote that shelf-talker.

Dana Simpson, Galactic Unicorn. These collections of Phoebe & Her Unicorn strips are very much themselves. This is one to the better end of how they are themselves, or maybe I was very much in the mood for it when I read it. Satisfyingly what it is.

Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. If you were hoping for a lot of detail on And Peggy!, your hope is in vain here, the sisters of the title are very clearly Angelica and Eliza only. Vaill does a really good job with their lives and contexts, though, and is one of the historians who manages to convey the importance of Gouverneur Morris clearly without having to make a whole production of it. (I mean, if Hamilton gets a whole production, why not Gouverneur Morris, but no one asked me.)

Amy Wilson, Snowglobe. MG fantasy with complicated friend relationships for grade school plus evil snowglobes. Sure yes absolutely, will keep reading Wilson as I can get her stuff.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This went interestingly into the details of what people were eating and what other people thought they should be eating, in ways that ground a lot of culinary history for the rest of the century to follow. Ziegelman and Coe either are a bit too ready to believe that giving people enough to eat makes them less motivated to work or were not very careful with their phrasing, so take those bits with a grain of salt, but in general if you want to know what people were eating (and with how many grains of salt!) in the US at the time, this is interesting and worth the time.

 

My crow story is out today in Beneath Ceaseless Skies! The Crow's Second Tale is what happens when you mull over crow-related song and story a bit too long, or maybe just long enough. If you need or prefer a podcast version, that's available too, narrated by the amazing Tina Connolly. Hope you enjoy either way.

(I had originally written "a murder for" a particular abstract noun, but you know what, I don't want to spoil what abstract noun it was, go read if you want to know!)

 

Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. A history of China through its rivers. And other water, but really mostly rivers. Gosh they're important rivers. Some of it was more basic than I hoped, but the part where he talked about the millennia-long conflict between the Confucian and the Daoist views of flood management--that's the good stuff right there. That's what I need to think over.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Testimony of Mute Things. Kindle. A neat little murder mystery fantasy novella, earlier in the Penric and Desdemona timeline than most of the others in the series. I really like that Lois is feeling free to move back and forth in the timeline as fits the story she wants to tell.

Traci Chee, A Thousand Steps Into Night. Demons and time loops and complicated teenage relationships with oneself and others, this was a lot of fun.

Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule. The latest in the Craft sequence, and hoo boy should you not start with this one, this is ramifying its head off, this is a lot of implication from your previous faves bearing fruit. I love middle books, and this is the king--duly appointed CEO?--of middle books, this is exactly what I like in both middle books generally and the Craft sequence specifically. But for heaven's sake go back farther, the earlier Craft novels are better suited to read in whatever order, this has weight and momentum you don't want to miss out on.

Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, I Killed the King. A fun YA fantasy murder mystery, better as a fantasy than as a murder mystery structurally but still a good time with the locked room and the suspects and their highly varied motivations. Are we seeing more speculative mysteries? I kind of hope so, I really like them.

Lauren Morrow, Little Movements. This is a novel about a choreographer who gets a chance to work slightly later in life than would be traditional, of a group of Black artists who deal with insidious racism, of a woman who has miscarried and is trying to put her life and identity and romantic relationship back together. In some ways it's a very straightforward book, but also it's a shape of story I don't think we get a lot of, the impact of being all of the people in my first sentence at once. It's a very intimate POV and nicely done.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. The authors were journalists in Russia early in the Putin era and had a front row seat to watching people they respected and trusted become mouthpieces for Putin, and this is that book. Unfortunately I think some of the answer to "how could they do this" was that many of them--as described by Soldatov and Borogan!--were already those people, and Putin gave them the opportunity to be those people out loud. I was hoping, and I think they were hoping, for more insight on how someone could become that person; what we got instead was insight into how some people already are and you don't necessarily know it clearly. Which is not unuseful, but it's not the same kind of useful. Anyway this was grim and awful but mostly in a very grindingly mundane way.

Serra Swift, Kill the Beast. Discussed elsewhere.

Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill does not like Ernest Hemingway any better than I do, bless her, but when she picked her other subjects in writing about a group of journalists and photographers in the Spanish Civil War, she was apparently kind of stuck with him. Did that mean she learned to love him? She sure did not, high fives Amanda Vaill. Anyway some of the other people were a lot more interesting, and the Spanish Civil War is.

Jo Walton, Everybody's Perfect. Discussed elsewhere.

 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a dear friend since the mastodons roamed the plains.

It seems like half of the reviews out there claim that the book they're reviewing is something really different, but this, in fact, is something really different. It's like Marguerite Yourcenar's A Coin in Nine Hands, where the story passes from person to person as they encounter each other, showing different facets of life. But it's also very much not like that, because the story is a fantasy story with crucial worldbuilding, and the quiet nature of its plot makes it easy to miss that it's about massive social change.

Serenissima is not Venice, though they are connected. Serenissima, city of the mists, is the point that joins nine worlds, each filled with a sentient humanoid species, living and trading and growing and learning across worlds. No matter how long anyone has lived in Serenissima, no one person knows all of its secrets--so they need to work together to cure the blight that has stranded some of them there.

Because yes, this is a Venice Carnival mask book--but it's also a book that couldn't have been written in 2019. It is a book with strong awareness of the pandemic we've been going through, and all the ways in which it's only one possible way that we could suffer--and need to help each other. It's a book with a strong sense of forming community with others, even when those others don't fit our preconceptions of what a friend, an ally, a lover might look like. I really like the gentleness and the hope in this one. I think you might like it too.

 

K.J. Charles, All of Us Murderers. In a lot of ways more a Gothic thriller than a murder mystery, I found this gripping and fun. I hope Charles keeps writing in the thriller and mystery genres. The characters are vividly awful except for a few, and that's just what this sort of thing calls for.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho. And speaking of vividly awful, I'm not sure I would have finished this one if it hadn't been both extremely short and part of a conversation I was having. There is not a piece of vice or unpleasantness not wallowed in here. It's certainly affecting, just not in a direction I usually want.

Frances Hardinge, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. I'm a little disappointed that Hardinge's work seems to have gone in the direction of illustrated middle grade, more or less, because I find the amount of story not quite as much as I'd like from her previous works, and I'm just not the main audience for lavish illustration. If you are, though, it's a perfectly cromulent fantasy story. I'm just greedy I guess.

David Hinton, trans., Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. An interesting subgenre I hadn't had much exposure to. Translating poetry is hard, and no particular poem was gripping to me in English, but knowing what was being written in that place and time was interesting.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Kindle. If you've been reading anything about American Black history this will be less new information and more a new lens/synthesis of information you're likely to already have, but it's well put together and cogently argued, and sometimes a new lens is useful.

Im Bang and Yi Ryuk, Tales of Korea: 53 Enchanting Stories of Ghosts, Goblins, Princes, Fairies, and More! So this is a new and shiny edition, with a 2022 copyright date, but that applies only to the introduction and similar supplemental materials. It's actually a 1912 translation, with all the cultural yikes that implies. Even with the rise in interest in Kpop and Kdramas information about Korean history and culture is not as readily available as I'd like, so I'm keeping this edition until a better translation is available.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. This is a novel, and I knew it was a novel going in. It's a novel I mostly enjoyed reading, except...I kept waiting for the octopus. Even a metaphorical octopus. And when it did come, it was the most clunkily introduced "HERE IS MY METAPHOR" metaphor I recall reading in professionally published fiction. Further, using it as the title highlighted the ways that most threads of this book did not contribute to this thematic metaphor. I feel like with two more revision passes it could have been a book I'd return to and reread over and over, and without them it was...fine while I was reading it, not really giving me enough to chew on afterwards. Sigh. (It was set on a university campus! It would have been trivially easy for someone to be studying octopus! or, alternately, to be studying something else that was actually relevant and a source of a title and central metaphor.)

Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle, Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates. Does what it says on the tin. The last chapter has a lot of very good graphs about differences in restored vs. natural streams. Do you like stream restoration ecology enough to read a whole book about it? You will know going in, this is not a "surprisingly interesting read for the general audience" sort of book, this is "I sure did want to know this stuff, and here it is."

Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island. Surprisingly not a reread--not everything was available to me when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I had hoped it would be Swedish Swallows and Amazons, and it was not, it was a lot more like a Swedish version of something like Noel Streatfeild's The Magic Summer, but that was all right, it was still delightful and a pleasant read. I will tell you right up front that Bosun the dog is fine, nothing terrible happens to Bosun the dog in the course of this book, there, now you will have an even better reading experience than I did.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen. Reread. Probably my least favorite of her collections despite some strong work--least favorite of a bunch of good collections is not actually a terrible place to be, nor is improving over one's career.

Freya Marske, Cinder House. A reverse Gothic where a nice house triumphs over a terrible human. Short and delightful.

Lio Min, The L.O.V.E. Club. I really hope this gets its actual audience's attention, because it is not about romantic love or even about people seeking but comically failing to find romantic love. It's about a teenage friend group trapped in a video game and dealing with their own friend group's past plus the history that led to their lives. It was about as good as a "trapped in a video game" narration was going to be for me, sweet and melancholy.

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. Two hundred years of Mongols, and this is a really good perspective on how Europe is a weird peninsula off the side of Asia. Which we knew, but wow is it clear here. Also it's nice to read books where people remember the Armenians exist, and related groups as well. My one complaint here is not really a fault in the book so much as a mismatch in it and me: I'm willing to read kings-and-battles kinds of history, and this is a khans-and-horse-troops kind of history, which is basically the same thing. I prefer histories that give a stronger sense of how actual people were actually living and what changed over the period that wasn't the name of the person receiving tribute. But that's not a problem with this book, it was clear what kind of book it was going to be going in.

Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea. This debut fantasy (science fiction? science fantasy?) novel is definitely not generic: it's a strongly Tlingit story written by a Tlingit person, and it leans hard into that. Raven is one of the major characters; another character is a bear cousin and another straight-up a wolf. It's a quest fantasy, but with a different shape to harmonize with its setting. I really liked it, but let me warn/promise you: this is not a stand-alone, the ending is not the story's end.

Vikram Seth, Beastly Tales (From Here and There). Very short, very straightforward animal poems. If you read something like this as a child, here's more of it.

Fran Wilde, A Philosophy of Thieves. A very class-aware science fiction heist novel that looks at loyalties and opportunities at every turn. Who's using whom and why--if that's your kind of heist, come on in, the water's fine.