Rackham Vale by Brian Saliba & Craig Schaffer - This is a fun little RPG sandbox based on the art of Arthur Rackham. Now I love me a fiction built on reinterpreting a small body of work over and over again so this tickled an itch I once tried to scratch myself by running a whole D&D campaign based on Blood Mountain. The layout and editing are impressive (but not perfect) for a small project and the quality is nice for print-on-demand. I only wish there was a map included for the Alchemist's Tower - it's described as a "general adventure site" the DM can drop anything into, but many actors and factions have specific bits mentioned as being tied back to it, and it also describes some specific contents. The map of faction relationships is a useful tool I'm hoping to see more sandboxes take advantage of.
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey - "Are you a coward or are you a Librarian?" asks the cover of this novelette. It's a sometime-in-the-future believable US of America situation where an approved job for single, upstanding women is to travel the land distributing Approved Materials. Of course there's more going on and I... think I read a romance novel? It was fun, and Gailey's debut.
The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jakob Walter - Pulled this one off my wife's shelf of college history books. Anytime anyone starts talking about war in a glorious fashion you should be allowed to slap them with a copy of this book. The suffering described in here in such straightforward, work-a-day terms is horrifying. I cried a bit for a man one-hundred-fifty-years dead when he described finding some peas in a kettle, then having them ruined when a fellow soldier's added fat turns out to be soap. There's a weird passage where they're cured of "the fever" by a travelling stranger who writes a spell on scrolls for them to eat. This edition has a collection of six letters sent from the frontlines that never made it home: Soldiers begging their families to gather up some money so they can buy shirts or some bread, mostly. Reading this made me appreciate the third amendment in a new way.
How to Take Over the World by Ryan North - The spiritual successor to How to Invent Everything, this is another broad popular science book that explores some of the boundaries of what science is capable of right now. The lens it uses is teaching you to become a supervillain, something North can claim expertise in as an established comics writer. My favorite takeaway was that there's a possibility in the far future that our then red giant sun could be close enough to Titan to turn it into an Earth-like environment, which could allow for a second run of evolution within our own solar system. The comic illustrations by Carly Monardo really help carry the points home.
Finna by Nino Cipri - A wild novelette about the (interdimensional) horrors of capitalism. "Oh yeah we used to have a team that would go into the planar rifts to retrieve lost shoppers, but we downsized them in the 90's. Now it's up to the least-senior team members. You get some gift cards!" And of course the two that have to go on this journey recently broke up a stormy relationship. On the way the author has a solid exploration of dealing with depression and anxiety and gender identity. Plus swordfights and retail zombies and carnivorous chairs.
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White - Grabbed this out of a little free library while walking the dog. E. B. White liked to make lists apparently. He made a list of the things Wilbur the pig ate, things at the farm's dump, types of cars parked at the county fair, things a rat might eat at said fair... there were others. It's caused me to make a list of lists. What a weird and melancholy book though. Reading it now, the part at the fair where they announce a special prize for Wilbur the pig and everyone's just like "Guess he's magic, huh?" and everyone claps and the dad gets $25 stands out as how I sort of imagining the adult world would work when I was a little kid.
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - It takes a special kind of cheek to use "Well, jail for mother" as dialog in your novel but Muir pulls it off. I admit I did have to check online a bit to see what was going on here. This novel is intentionally confusing but that can be hard to make sure of if you haven't read the first one in a few years. Describing events contrary to what happened in the first of the series, and doing it all in second person, is a gamble to convey Harrow's fractured mental and emotional state to the reader, but sticking through it I do think it all (mostly) comes together in the third act and pays off. There was a lot of setup in here for the next couple books and now I feel like I'm beholden to them. (Also, "none pizza, left beef" and Homestar references sprinkled in.)
Blueberry Hill Cookbook by Elsie Masterson - I didn't read this cover-to-cover, but I did read the preface, each section introduction, and skimmed all the recipes. What was mostly interesting here was this physical copy was my grandmother's, so it's got little annotations throughout, mostly "good!" or "very good!". Also it's full of pressed four-leaf clovers - I'm not sure if those were hers or my mom's. The book itself has an assertive tone, with a repeated sentiment of "if you can't get these ingredients exactly, don't bother." For 1959 the curry recipe is downright assertive with two whole tablespoons of curry powder (preferably imported).
