not what you look at, but what you see

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas – Rebecca Solnit
this has been on my list for a long time, and after reading a book about maps that are literally magic I got re-inspired to hunt it down and finally read it. it’s a series of maps-as-lenses, each a way of superimposing history or politics or cultural change or economics over the landscape of San Francisco. the real power, at least for me, was less in the maps themselves and more in the accompanying essays, but it’s a thoughtful book whose sections are perfectly sized to pick up and put down again at a whim.



97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement – Jane Ziegelman
July’s book club book, unexciting but well worth the time. the way it’s put together doesn’t totally bear out the impression given by the title, but it hardly feels like it matters. in all other ways it’s a fascinating wander through the intersecting immigrant food cultures of 19th century NYC. I will never get my head around oysters as a casual street food.



Ninefox Gambit – Yoon Ha Lee
I don’t read a lot of space opera, but this one hits a nice balance between density and flow—it’s a convincingly rich world anchored by convincing characters, and it runs and kicks but also gives the impression that the author could write in-universe textbooks if he wanted. I spent a lot of the book waffling about whether I liked the central character dynamic, and the back third wondering whether the climactic backstory reveal was buyable or simply a little bit too much in the tragedy department, but I’m absolutely reading the rest of the series.



The Outlaws Scarlett & Browne & The Notorious Scarlett and Browne – Jonathan Stroud
these are middle grade novels I gulped down in between worrying about bigger things, and I tell you, if I’d read these as a kid I would never have gotten over them. very very fun and very very Genre (the answer to the question “can you do Wild West pseudo-medieval post-apocalyptic Britain and make it run?” which no one asked). the worldbuilding has its thin spots but Stroud has way more facility with language - more sense of fun and inventiveness in prose - than a good chunk of adult popular fiction authors.



The House in the Cerulean Sea – TJ Klune
I’m pissier about this book than I need to be, because I was obligated to read the whole thing for book club instead of deleting it as soon as I started breaking out in hives from the superdense concentration of uwu. I read books with woodland animals in waistcoats, it’s not like I can’t take this stuff. and I don’t actually think it’s a sin for a book to be predictable. predictable is fine. but there are plenty of children’s authors writing books about queerness, prejudice, and unconventional families, for actual twelve-year-olds, that are less hamfisted and saccharine than this book inexplicably marketed for adults.



Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface – Robert Bringhurst
the dubious joy of Dewey is that sometimes you go to the library shelf for a how-to on bookbinding, and a little ways down the shelf is a book that promises to smother you under a loving infodumptruckload of information on a topic you’ve never given more than 90 seconds’ thought previously. Bringhurst wrote The Elements of Typographic Style, and is furthermore a linguist and a poet (dream multiclass holy shit), so he’s pretty uniquely qualified to write a book that’s part detailed catalog of every variation of the Palatino family ever and part general love letter to letterforms. complete with extravagant metaphor (is font selection like wine pairing? please tell me more) and the grand rhetorical gestures of romance. I like letters on paper, obviously. but I don’t know anywhere near enough to absorb the exhaustive amount of information in this book, so I mostly had a nice time letting it wash over me.


plus a reread of the full-length Murderbot novel Network Effect, a handful of kids’ comics that were cute but not much to talk about, and a couple of mystery novellas I’m still not sure why I read.