Sara C. Bronin, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World. If you haven’t thought much about zoning, this is a good introductory book. I was hoping that it would be a little deeper than it was; ah well.
Agatha Christie, Third Girl and Towards Zero. Gosh, Christie did not much enjoy the Sixties! But other than the usual caveats about that crankiness and some attitudes I’d call “dated” if some people didn’t still have them alas, these were fine enough, fast reads, not outstanding, there’s a reason they’re not the famous ones.
Davinia Evans, Rebel Blade. Regular readers know how I love to say “the triumphant conclusion,” and here we are! The triumphant conclusion to this trilogy, with the magic of the mundane plane making its mess all over everyone’s life and getting mopped up as best they can! Don’t start here, you want to start with the first one, but gosh I enjoyed this series.
Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide. Discussed elsewhere.
Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. This was also not a deep analysis but a fun wander through the history of everyone’s favorite kind of shop.
Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. I have read a lot of books about the Carolingians, and this was the absolute best of any of them at keeping straight which Charles, which Pepin, etc. we were talking about at any given moment. The analysis is clear and cogent and it never devolves into “and then a series of events, God knows why we’re telling you this except that it appears to have happened,” which is frankly a Carolingian pitfall. This is my jam, and I think it will be the jam of many of you here as well.
Ariel Kaplan, The Republic of Salt. A sequel to The Pomegranate Gate, and you really don’t want to start with the second one, you really need the character and plot context of the first one. Very much a middle book, looking forward to where it’s going, lots of mythological ramifications here.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Lavishly illustrated, extremely short, more life philosophy and less botany but still interesting.
Julie Leong, The Teller of Small Fortunes. A sweet and cozy adventure fantasy, featuring a cat and a baker as well as some more traditional adventuring party members.
L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle. Reread. It had been longer than I thought since I reread this, but it remains as funny and sharp and loving as always.
Garth Nix, Frogkisser!. A MG fairy tale-inspired quest fantasy that sometimes goes hard in the silly direction, but really who hasn’t had a day when we need a bit of that.
Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning. Rereads. Wars and alliances and kingdoms oh my! I had basically forgotten all of these last two books and remembered the trilogy as the first book alone, so this was a lovely rediscovery of “oh right, THIS guy again.” Everybody boo for Edward Longshanks.
Lev A. C. Rosen, Rough Pages. The third in its series of mid-century queer San Francisco mysteries, and this is a perfectly reasonable place to start (although the second one is still my favorite). Its detective has to deal with the murder of the owner of a bookstore that mails queer literature not entirely legally–and has a mailing list that would name names of a lot of his community. This is not a feel-good mystery, this is a very tense mystery, which is also sometimes just what you need, but not the same times.
Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination. Kindle. A collection of Roy’s political essays from the early 90s to the mid ’00s. This is a period in which I was definitely already politically engaged–for part of it I was reading three to four major news magazines every week as part of handling the “extemp box” for my high school speech team–and a lot of the elements of what was going on in Indian politics were completely new to me. Thanks, US media! The stuff that I already knew about was interesting to see from a different angle–and unfortunately there’s a lot of ominous foreshadowing in this collection.
Iona Datt Sharma, You Are Here: Nine More Stories. Discussed elsewhere.