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I appreciated the writing advice, but more than that, the personal insights from Charlie Jane. This is a book about writing, but it’s also kind of a memoir about being a writer; she expertly uses her own experiences, and most importantly, mistakes, to make points that always land on the affirming and inspirational side of the rhetorical garden. It’s a warm book, written by someone who very obviously cares, and very obviously wants to help. That counts for a lot.

This is a spy novel, sure, but also an exploration of the nature of our relationship with our history at every level - from the personal to that of our species. As such, it’s more introspective than tense; a reflective journey more than a pulse-pounding one, but a worthy journey nonetheless. It’s one of those novels where the protagonist is just on the edge of unlikable, and knowingly so, but in a way that is more relatable than we might care to admit. It took me a little while to get into it, but I soon found its untethered rhythm. It’s one that will stick.

I really enjoyed this story about time travelers racing to prevent the timeline from being edited to eradicate women’s rights. It felt relevant somehow. Can’t put my finger on it.

Aside from the obvious analogy for where we are, I had a hard time putting this down. It was so much fun. I want more.

A powerful set of first person essays on injustice that serve to emphasize the parallels - and hard links of funding and culture - between systemic racism in America and in Israel. Its point is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the problem, but to shine a light through a particular lens into it. The result is compelling and tragic. A portrait of occupation and oppression which is easier to overlook than face.

A deeply thought out exploration of different kinds of societies, that also happens to come with well-rounded, deeply-flawed characters and genuine tension. It is, as advertised, a thought-provoking masterpiece: a piece about politics and human nature, albeit in space opera clothes.

This works best as a chronology of how social media influence has undermined democracy and truth. In that sense it'll be a really useful resource for generations to come: these things really are what this era was about, and DiResta really doesn't hold anything back. The book is at its weakest when her own life intersects with these trends, forcing her to act as defense against accusations that were levied at her - not because those arguments had any validity (they didn't), but because it sometimes serves as a sidebar to the rest of the narrative.

This was a challenging one. On one level, it’s of the Twilight era, almost in response to those novels: genuinely repellant and intentionally alien in opposition to vampire romance. But this is a book about power dynamics; interconnectedness and free will. It’s a hard book to like, but I see what Butler was doing here, I think, and there’s a lot to think about.

It’s about loneliness, and transience, for sure, but it’s also about the masks and patterns we use to sanitize ourselves for the world, and how they battle with our real human nature and what it means to be alive and to yearn and dream and feel. I fucking loved it.

A book about what happens when the Internet goes away, yes, but there’s something much more than that: the exploration of humanity as content between advertising, the questions about what happens next post-revolution, the overlapping mysticism and open-source pragmatism, the breathing, beating characters, the class politics woven throughout. I loved every glowing, gripping word.