Celebrate the Dreams of Others

What I Just Finished Reading: A novella and two novels since the last time I posted about books, I think: Automatic Noodle (Annalee Newitz), about sentient robots winding up running their own restaurant; Stone Yard Devotional (Charlotte Wood), a very-much-~literary~ book about a woman who winds up living with a group of nuns, although not a nun herself; and The Lovely and the Lost (Jennifer Lynn Barnes), about a search-and-rescue case from the POV of one of a trio of teenagers who're involved with the rescue effort, who was herself rescued from the woods as a child after she'd been there long enough to go feral and was (largely) resocialized and adopted by her rescuer. Many layers of family history and secrets in that last one, which was my favorite of the three.

(And since I've mentioned a couple of YA books recently where their flavor of YA really didn't work for me, I should say that The Lovely and the Lost is also very clearly YA but in a way I could work with just fine as a reader, despite being very much not the target audience.)

On the nonfiction side, I read The Crone Zone: How to Get Older with Style, Nerve, and a Little Bit of Magic (Nina Bargiel), which was...mostly odd, honestly. It's from the same publisher (and I guess the same...product line?) as Goblin Mode: How to Get Cozy, Embrace Imperfection, and Thrive in the Muck, which I read last year, and the presentation and vibe were really (I mean really) similar in a way that might've made more sense to me if they were also by the same author, but they're not. The Crone Zone's subtitle does accurately reflect its contents, so I feel weird saying "it's such a weird blend of exactly what it says it is", but...yeah. Not my thing.

What I'm Currently Reading: Chuck Wendig's Wanderers, which I chose at random from my ebooks and probably would not have started had I actually known anything about it. It's a 2019 novel that starts with a mysterious phenomenon where people just start...walking...somewhere, but also spotlights (*checks notes*) a world-changing disease, AI, and right-wing violence tearing at the seams of the US, all of which are being amply provided by reality. It's also pretty hefty, length-wise. And yet I keep reading.

I've also begun reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer), as the starting point for my 2026 goal* of "aim to read at least one chapter of nonfiction each week" (swiped from a friend else-net). (Another goal is to aim to read a volume of manga each week, and that one hasn't been started in on yet, but we'll see how strict I feel like being about "each week".)

*I have a full bingo card of goals! I will probably share it at some point! But not this minute.

What I Plan to Read Next: K.B. Spangler's newest Rachel Peng novel, Inside Threat is out/about to come out! (It was supposed to come out this week, but Amazon dropped it early, so she's also released it on her website.)

Plus: What I've Been Watching: scruloose and I are two episodes into Pluribus! I also recently watched Challengers. (A movie? So soon in the year?) Hopefully we'll get the premiere of The Pitt season 2 watched today.