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 Prayer for the Crown Shy
By Becky Chambers

This is the second Monk & Robot book, after A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It picks up with Sibling Dex and Mosscap returning to human civilization and introducing Mosscap to the human world. We got to explore more of how Mosscap views its task, which was interesting. I enjoyed this one, but I think the first book was better.

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.

Avery Lawson: The Last Pureblood
By DJ Small

I picked this up when the author made it free as part of a FediBookFair event a couple years ago. I don’t normally do books with werewolves, vampires, and the like but it seemed worth a try. The premise was interesting, a park ranger who doesn’t know she’s a werewolf is on the verge of her first change into a wolf, but the execution was not great. I enjoyed the romance for the most part, but there are too many different plotlines that are opened up and never resolved. There were a lot of typos and it honestly felt more like a first draft than a completed novel.

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.

Fugitive Telemetry
By Martha Wells

Fugitive Telemetry takes place between Exit Strategy and Network Effect, although it is a standalone story not directly connected to either one. It was a murder mystery, with Murderbot serving as the investigator. I enjoyed it and think the novella format is better for these stories, but I didn’t like it as much as the others in the series.

God Didn't Make Us to Hate Us
By Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail

I have a complicated relationship with faith and religion where I’m never sure what I believe. It’s difficult to separate Christain faith from the Church as an institution and many societal issues that come from it. This book presents a view of Christianity that attempts to separate the life and teaching of Jesus from the white-nationalist, LGBTQ-hating version of American Christianity. Rev. Lizzie wants people who turned away from faith because of these things to discover there can be another way. Overall I liked the book and think it was good to read, especially during Lent. I think it’d be good for others who are similarly questioning thier relationship with Christianity.

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.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
By Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing offers an alternative to the modern world’s ideas of productivity and attention. Instead of focusing on growth and the next big thing, Odell suggests we find joy in maintenance work and rest. Instead of the context collapse of corporate social media, we should be more intentional with where we put our attention. I think this book is masterfully structured because she starts with describing some of the ills of capitalist productivity and the obvious desire to opt out by moving off to the woods somewhere, but she follows that up with examples of people attempting exactly that and failing. Communes, corporate detox retreats, and attempts at techno-utopia outside of the rules of general society haven’t worked. Instead she gives some ideas on how to direct our attention for good within the existing system. I liked this, but at times it was difficult to tell what point the author was making.

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 particularly 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.

Remarkably Bright Creatures
By Shelby Van Pelt

I had heard this was good and then it was picked for the book club I’m in. Overall I enjoyed it. The narrator is an octopus, which was entertaining but at times suspension of disbelief was difficult because he was too smart to be reasonable. The other characters are pretty good and I liked seeing how their arcs intersected.

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 Spare Man
By Mary Robinette Kowal

The Spare Man is a murder mystery set on an interplanetary cruise ship. One of the richest and most powerful women in the solar system and her new husband are on the ship for their honeymoon and are the first on scene when a fellow passenger is murdered. They’re caught up in the mess and spend the rest of their cruise trying to find the killer and avoid being killed themselves. This book is just fun and I enjoyed it a lot. Each chapter has a cocktail recipe at the start and there’s a cute service dog. The characters were interesting and it was fun trying to figure out what was really going on.

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.

Tress of the Emerald Sea
By Brandon Sanderson

I’ve been hearing for a while how good this book is so I went into it with high expectations. It is very good, but I don’t think I would rate it as high as others. The setting is good and the seas of spores were fun. I really enjoyed having the entire story from Hoid’s narration. I didn’t love the setup of why Tress left the Rock, but her relationship with the crew and personal development was great. I got the print version of this with full color illustrations, which was a nice touch. This would be a good entry into Sanderson’s work, although it does have some references to other Cosmere works.

wordslut: a feminist guide to taking back the english language
By Amanda Montell

Wordslut is a feminist look at the English language. Montell digs into common myths about how women speak (and how traits that are often maligned are not in any way unique to women’s speech), some of the language around what it means to be a woman or female, and how insults are oftened gendered, but only toward women. This book is great and the linguistic concepts brought up are fascinating. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in language and learning about how people use it.