Reading roundup

[white_hart]

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers: the last in the Wayfarers series is a gentle novel about a group of sentient beings of different species who find themselves stuck at an interstellar service station when a communications failure stops travel for a few days, and how they get to know each other better, despite their many differences. A lovely relaxing read.

Bitch Planet (vols 1 and 2) - Kelly Sue Deconnick and Valentine De Landro: a graphic series set in a dystopian future where women who don't comply with patriarchal expectations are sent to an offworld prison. Not entirely cheerful but plenty of feminist black humour, and I rather enjoyed it.

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine: the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, wonderfully thoughtful and chewy space opera, asking questions about language, identity, colonialism and who gets to count as civilised, while also featuring a charming queer romance and a host of wonderfully likeable and engaging characters. I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in the universe Martine has created again and quite sorry to leave it.

Something Fabulous - Alexis Hall: an entirely ridiculous and incredibly fun queer Regency romp.

 

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson: set in a world where travel between parallel universes is possible, but only when the traveller doesn't have a living counterpart in the destination world, this is a fantastic novel which has a lot to say about capitalism, privilege, race and class, as well as life on a post-environmental-collapse Earth. It's not always easy reading, but it's really, really good, and not as downbeat overall as I feared it might be.

Thirsty Mermaids - Kat Leyh: graphic novel about three mermaids who magic themselves human to go to a bar, and then find themselves stuck on land in a world they don't understand. Fun and very queer, although the kindle edition is not fantastically formatted and I'd advise anyone who's interested to get the print copy instead. (The pages are formatted as a double-page spread, and won't rotate to landscape, so it's only really readable in frame-by-frame mode which I'm not a fan of.)