my circle

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.