A Closed and Common Orbit
By Becky Chambers

A Closed and Common Orbit picks up right at the end of the first book but follows a different set of characters. The style is very different from the first book but I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are two timelines, one in present day and the other from when one of the characters was a child and they worked very well together. Overall I think I liked the first book better, but this still very good. Chambers' characters are excellent and I’m looking forward to the next book.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built
By Becky Chambers

Rather than taking over the world, the robots in this world decided they’d had enough of humanity and went off to live in the woods. This book follows a monk named Sibling Dex, who goes into the woods to find some meaning missing in their life and meets a robot instead. They travel together an discuss their lives and the search for meaning. I enjoyed this a lot, especially after reading a Murderbot book, which shows a very different relationship between humans and sentient robots. This was thought-provoking and I’m looking forward to reading the next in the series.

A Short Stay in Hell
By Steven L. Peck

A Mormon man dies and wakes up to discover he is in the intake office of a Hell from a religion he’s never heard of. He is placed in a Hell made up of a library that contains every possible book of a particular length and its occupants must find the book that exactly tells the story of their life to be granted passage to heaven. The book shows the man’s daily life in the search of his book and relationships and communities that formed in Hell. This was an interesting view of a Hell based on something other than physical pain. I didn’t find it as profound or moving as some of the reviews I read, but I enjoyed it. It’s very short, so it’s not a big commitment to read.

Camp Damascus
By Chuck Tingle

Camp Damascus is a horror novel about a small town controlled by a church that runs a conversion camp that boasts a 100% success rate. It is excellent. I figured out what was going on reasonably quickly and was still completely engaged in seeing how it played out. The characters were great and the situations presented felt so depressingly real, but the strong examples of both romantic and playtonic love were reassuring. I’d recommend this to anyone. Plus, after finished I looked up the author and he’s an interesting guy.

Halfway to Better
By Susan Kaye Quinn

Halfway to Better is a collection of hopeful climate short stories that showed a few different perspectives of what the near future could look like. We see ecologists on the bottom of the ocean, scavangers in a wealth-controlled city, and a sci-fi Rapunzel retelling. I enjoyed them all, and the author sold her leftover stock of signed copies at-cost, which was extremely kind of her.

Network Effect
By Martha Wells

More Murderbot is always a good thing. I loved Network Effect as much as the first four books. It was great to see some characters again and the problem of this story was interesting. I love reading Murderbot process new emotions and particulalry enjoyed it not understanding human adolescents. I read this one on paper, where I had listened to the first four. I think I like the audiobooks better, just because Kevin R Free’s performances are incredible.

System Collapse
By Martha Wells

System Collapse picks up right after Network Effect and completes that story arc. I enjoyed this but I don’t think it was as good as the rest of the series. I went back to audio for this one which I think was the right choice.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
By Becky Chambers

I’ve never read anything considered cozy sci-fi before, but this book might get me to add some more to the list. I needed an audiobook while painting and I had just read A Psalm for the Wild-Built and was excited to try something else by Bekcy Chambers. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows the interspecies crew of a tunneling spacecraft on a yearlong journey. There’s a lot of really interesting race and gender stuff and some talk about personhood. What got to me the most about this book is how deeply kind the characters are. The journey is the good part with this book, which may be offputting for people who are looking for action, but I loved it. I’ve already put in an inter-library loan request for the second one because my library doesn’t have the audiobook.

The Serviceberry
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

After reading Braiding Sweetgrass I was so excited to see something else by Dr. Kimmmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass changed my view of the world and The Serviceberry zooms in on the idea of reciprocity. It’s a call to action to recognize places where reciprocity exists in the natural world and push for incorporating it into human society. It’s short and approachable and a nice reminder to look for ways to improve the world.

The Sunlit Man
By Brandon Sanderson

My brother suggested I read the Sunlit Man before starting Wind and Truth and I enjoyed it. It was interesting reading more direct discussions of the Cosmere and Investiture since most of the other books I’ve read so far are more vague about it. It was fun trying to figure out which Stormlight character Nomad is. The standalone Cosmere books are always fun and this was no exception.