The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

by Rebecca

The City of Falling Angels
written by John Berendt
read by Holter Graham
2005

This is a wild ride and a fabulous introduction to a city and a culture that is misleadingly inviting. This is an introduction to Venice, not as a tourist destination or a place of history, but as a location where a number of truly nutty people live and are deeply impacted by the tourists and the history.

The author does an amazing job of writing people who I expect would be extremely annoying in real life as being delightful, and of showing interpersonal conflicts as being multi-sided. He likes people and they open up to him, and thus to the reader, and we get to see an incredibly rich world filled with complicated people and situations.

With a topic as vast as “life in Venice”, Berendt provides a structure around the burning and then rebuilding of La Fenice Opera House. His original planned visit to Venice happened to have him arrive just three days after the famous opera house burnt down, and everyone is talking about it, so it’s a natural discussion point that ties into the justice system and construction and history and art and everyone who happened to live nearby, which meant everyone in Venice, because they’re all interconnected. The book also covers a significant amount of history because in a city like this, every current resident has connections going back generations, from the glass artist who is the twenty-first generation of glass blowers in his family, to the American ex-pats who are referred to that way despite having moved to Venice in the 1890s after a social kerfuffle in Boston high society.

This book is fascinating and delightful. While it feels timely in the way it discusses governmental corruption and personal self-aggrandizement, it also feels remarkably low stakes. It was both interesting and soothing. I highly recommend it.

A special call out to the reader Holter Graham, who did a fabulous job, to the point where I had to double check that it wasn’t the author reading his own story, because he really embodied the first person account. He has an excellent voice for listening to for hours on end, especially after I’d quit a different audio book after just half an hour because I could not listen to the reader.

Honey

by Anna

By Imani Thompson

I checked out this book based on the recommendation from Samantha Irby’s newsletter and the gorgeous, gorgeous cover, and was absolutely enthralled! I wasn’t quite sure how to review it without spoilers, but Kinsey sent me a substack dialogue on the book which manages to avoid all major spoilers and which I have a lot of responses to.

Honey is inevitably compared to My Sister, The Serial Killer, which I also loved (and which Rebecca and I dialogue about in the comments), and is considered another entry in the “female rage fiction” genre, while I would argue that Honey is a direct commentary on that genre.

For me, a closer comparison would be to American Psycho (which, granted, I watched but didn’t read), in which the author is trying to show the ultimately banal shallowness of evil and violence that is too often elevated in our society. Protagonist Yrsa is working on her dissertation on the cultural victimization of Black women, and attempts to frame her own violent impulses in an academic context, theorizing that the only way to escape victimhood is to become the violence instead.

I found Yrsa to be deeply unlikeable, though a fascinating narrative voice, which I assume was intentional. It is clear that she has a whole slew of issues stemming from a family history that I wish had gotten a little more page space and which play out across her relationships with just about everyone. The novel felt to me like it was more about how Yrsa uses academic framework as an excuse to lash out and avoid any sort of clear look at herself or the world around her. And to my mind, Yrsa herself begins to recognize this over the course of novel. I read Honey as more of a critique on female rage fiction, that elevating stories of female violence does not in fact lead to equality but only more violence.

As a slight cynical aside, I saw this described as “dark academia,” and coming from a family chockfull of professors, murders aside this seemed to be just regular academia, though not particularly complimentary.

Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary

by Rebecca

Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan
written by Tamim Ansary
read by Tamim Ansary
2012

This was another excellent audio book that I knew I needed to listen to after I’d finished Destiny Disrupted, but also needed to gird myself to listen to, because it’s about the last two centuries of Afghanistan’s history, which covers the British invasion(s), the Russian invasion(s), and the American invasion(s), all interspersed with the locals and more-near-neighbors all having their own factions trying to come to power. Pretty much every faction is getting in the way of every other faction, including those who’s policies would make them natural allies if not for a disagreement on who would actually lead. If it were fiction, it would be somewhere between a tragedy and an extremely dark comedy. As non-fiction, it’s somewhere between heart-breaking and enraging, while also being completely fascinating. Ansary does an excellent job of laying out the various players and how the various events lead from one to another.

This book gave me context for people and events that I had previously found largely incomprehensible without that context. I wish I’d been able to read this thirty-five years ago when “Desert Storm” was the military action discussed in my school, and I really should have read it fourteen years ago when it actually came out, but I’m glad that I finally got around to reading it now.

The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

by Rebecca

The Enchanted Greenhouse
Book 2 of The Spellshop
by Sarah Beth Durst
2025

This is a cute book with a lot of interesting, fun world-building and I get why it’s recommended a lot, but it’s a few degrees off from my personal preferences.

I enjoyed the book but I also put it down at one point and read a few other books in the meantime before picking it up again to complete. I realized that I had two issues with it, neither of which are an intrinsic problem. First it was just a little bit overly cutesy to my taste: the various characters are described as being pastel colors but it has no effect on the plot or character interactions, and many of them talk in a way that it seems clear the author has spent years in therapy and knows that emotional issues can be worked through in a kind but determined fashion. These are good people who are doing good, which is, you know, good, but it felt less like an optimistic world view and more like a morality tale.

Second, while it had been recommended to me as cottage-core and had a lot of the aesthetic of the cottage-core genre, it had a much more standard fantasy plot: there was a grave danger and it needed to be fixed before something terrible happened. The point of cottage core is that the stakes are extremely low: the main character needs to bake a cake and then they do, they need to plant that garden and then they do. This had the cute cottage and the garden and the cakes, but it also had the greenhouses catastrophically failing and the threat of political violence and a lot more embedded anxiety and fear of consequences than I was hoping for.

In theory, this book is also the second book in a series, which I hadn’t realized when I put a hold on it at my local library, but it works just fine as a standalone book. I could vaguely guess which characters I would recognize if I’d read the first book but it seems clear that it is a shared world rather than continuing to follow any main characters.

Overall, this book is fine and I get why a lot of people would love it, but much to my own disappointment, it was not really for me.


Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

by Rebecca

Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
2021

This book was a lot of fun and I read all 476 pages in three days. I do love a good science montage scene and and this was full of them. It was also extremely similar to Weir’s breakout novel, The Martian, which I had enjoyed very much. This one is obviously less bound by actual science — introducing both aliens and alien technology — but it’s clear that Weir is trying to at least keep some of the math accurate.

The book tells parallel stories of Dr. Ryland Grace waking up alone on a spaceship with no memories and figuring how what he needs to do and then doing it, interspersed with the flashbacks that tell the history that got him to that point as his memories return to him. I would sometimes wince at the choices the main character was making but I appreciated the in-story acknowledgements that his decision making skills were compromised because he’s working under a lot of stress with imperfect knowledge. I did have to suspend disbelief that it worked out for him (and humanity) as well as it did.

There were some points when I had to pretty actively suspend disbelief, less about the science technology and more about the social decisions. Having all the world governments come together to send an incredibly expensive space mission that *might* have results in 26 years seems a lot less likely than most of them deciding that it would be cheaper and quicker to come up with a local solution, but that’s not actually addressed at all: the premise is all the world unites to do this one mission. Talking around spoilers: At another point, there was an argument between two characters where it was pretty obvious that Weir was writing it purely for the drama of a conflict but didn’t actually know what the real counter argument was, so put a pretty dumb strawman argument into our protagonist’s voice. Events could easily have played out the exact same way just more interesting if it had been a real argument between two valid sides.

I enjoyed this book. It was fun and kept my attention. However, the more I think about it, the more the flaws stand out. In some ways it reminds me of Tom Godwin’s short story, The Cold Equations (1954). Both are science fiction stories that deal with the trolley problem and making hard decisions while ignoring how much their premises focuses on physics while ignoring engineering: the math works out, but it’s really bad engineering to create systems that are so inflexible. This particular book also has a meta-layer of unintentional satire provided by the interview in which Weir stated that his writing isn’t political at all, which is so fractally wrong that it’s more mind boggling than any part of the actual book.

So in summary: I enjoyed it, but it feels a lot like some of the classic science fiction stories of generations past with both the pluses and minuses that entails.

How to Love in Sanskrit by Rao & Mahesh

by Rebecca

How to Love in Sanskrit: Poems
edited and translated by Anusha Rao & Suhas Mahesh
2024

This is a delightful little book of poetry, with 218 poems from a variety of authors across millennia, originally written in Sanskrit (more or less), and selected as representations for how love was and is conceived of in that language. An innate part of poetry is that it involves evocative language of metaphors and references and it’s fascinating to see what comparisons are impactful in other cultures. For example: a lot of British poetry will refer to the coldness of a scornful lover or the warmth of a loving relationship; in contrast, a lot of this poetry from India talks about the burning heat of abandonment or the cool soothing presence of a lover.

I’m not much of a poetry reader, but I bought this book specifically for the introduction which discussed the process of translating the poems, and I wish that had been more extensive, or even (oh how I wish!) a matching description of the process for each individual poem. Part of the introduction used a single poem as an example and went through the stages of: 1. what it was in the original (which I couldn’t read at all), 2. what it was in the direct literal translation (which was oddly disjointed as such types of translations always are), 3. what it meant in the conceptual translation (which made more sense), and 4. finally what these translators created as the end result (which was delightful!)

These poems are mostly quite short and often quite funny, and the translators have made them very accessible.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Anna

By Omar El Akkad

I’ve been checking out so many cozy mysteries and fluffy romances in a desperate attempt to drown out the news, but can’t seem to stick with any of them. I finally decided that the cognitive dissonance wasn’t doing me any good, and I should just face reality directly.

This was a painful read, of course, but I felt relief as well to finally read a direct encapsulation of my growing general discomfort and discontent: “One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of politics, opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election cycle, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something great. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow.”

This. This is what I’d been feeling, and then feeling guilty about it, like I was just being fatalistic and giving up, which El Akkad also addresses as a way the status quo tries to harangue people into continuing to toe the general line. This is what I felt working the polls during the 2024 primary, with the justifiably furious voters participating in the uncommitted protest (which is still being ignored and minimalized by the Democratic Party). I tried to explain my sympathy for these voters (and own participation) to more centrist liberal relatives who couldn’t understand why people couldn’t take a ‘rational’ approach of voting for the lesser of two evils, when both parties were literally killing their family members. I only wish I had El Akkad’s eloquence: “What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.”

Though I would hesitate to try to categorize this book, I would guess it falls primarily in a cross-section of politics and ethics. However, El Akkad weaves in his family and his own personal experience with displacement and immigration, providing small, individual snapshots that create a necessary balance and foil for when the sheer scale and scope of the genocide becomes too much to take in cognitively. This blend reminded me strongly of Why Are They Angry With Us?, which also bares some stark similarities between how Israel is treating Palestinians and how the USA treats Black Americans.

Mid-book, I had tickets to see Hamilton (which absolutely lived up to the hype 10 years later!), though I wasn’t at all sure I’d be in the right frame of mind for a rah-rah-founding-fathers show. Luckily, it was way more about how messy and deeply flawed the start of this nation was, with unacceptable compromising being made around slavery by people who should have and did know better, or at least that was my takeaway at this point.

Hamlet

by Anna

by The Royal Exchange Theater (on Kanopy)

I want to expand the scope of reviews on this site for a few reasons: 1) I have cut all my paid streaming subscriptions because fuck them; 2) I currently only stream on Kanopy through my library, which seems relevant to this site; and 3) I just watched the Royal Exchange Theater production of Hamlet starring Maxine Peake, and it is intense!

First of all, it is over three hours long, so I watched it over a couple of nights. It has a super pared down set, which I imagine was really intimate in person, but I worried the effectiveness was getting a little lost on the small screen. In the end, though, the acting, Peake in particular, is so combustive that it all hits stronger than any I’ve seen before.

Peake’s performance feels like the dark side of Mary Martin’s famous Peter Pan. With her blonde pageboy cut, Peake captures true teenage dirtbag, making her Hamlet an absolute disaster of a person. Most performances of Hamlet elevate it to an artistic but fairly straight-forward tragedy. Peake’s Hamlet is a very young man in a horrifying situation making everything much worse by his poor judgment and resulting terrible behavior.

I really love Shakespeare performances, but it has been too long since I’d seen one that felt like it brought a fresh approach to the text (shout out to Scotland, PA, one of my favorites, Rotten Tomatoes be damned). This one blew my hair back in a way that I expect was similar to the audiences at the Globe seeing Hamlet for the first time. It wasn’t always a fun experience (Hamlet really can be such a brat), but I was enthralled!

Wine for Roses

by Anna

By Emily O’Malley Liu

Our weather in the Midwest has been real wonky the last month – a couple of weeks ago, we had temperatures in the 80s, which made everyone itchy to start planting their (our) gardens. Every professional was warning us to hold our horses, that we are not frost-free until Memorial Day, and sure enough this week we’ve gone down to a freeze, which has made me very cranky.

All this to say, Wine for Roses, a gentle, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast, was not only soothing for my general nerves but for my gardener nerves, too. I can’t plant any of my own seeds yet, but I can read all about Ethan, a gardener hired to restore the rose garden at an estate overseen by a reclusive trustee. Bless Liu, who even filed down some of the rougher edges of the original story. When I told Rebecca about this book, she asked how it deals with the whole kidnapping, and I was like, oh, there is no kidnapping, it’s just straight employment! My poor frayed nerves were starting to twang a bit towards the end, as well, but Liu managed to capture the general feeling of the original without the guilt and dying.

Liu has created a marvelous world of hedge witches and casual magic set in an otherwise very prosaic rural Indiana. This is her first published novel, which shows in some loose details, but I’m very much looking forward to reading more from her, and I hope she continues to play around with this world, as well.

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me
by Ilona Andrews
May 31, 2026

I am obsessed with this book; it scratches right at my id and I adore it! The main character Maggie is a modern woman in our real world who has been obsessed for years with a fantasy novel series that was never completed, something along the lines of Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time, except only two books, but she has read them multiple times, has all the details memorized and cares deeply for the characters who all have complex and often devastating lives. In this book, Maggie wakes up one day in the world of that book series, in the opening chapter with absolutely nothing except for her knowledge of how dangerous this society is and what the future holds. What she learns relatively quickly is that if she is killed, she will return to life. Which is a decidedly mixed blessing in a world where torture is just not that uncommon.

But over the course of this book, Maggie uses her knowledge of the world to A) improve her own situation, going from naked and alone in a ditch, to having many allies and socializing at the highest level, B) saving her favorite characters from their tragic fates and giving the villains their just rewards, while C) stumbling over the fact that knowledge from a book does not always perfectly translate into easily recognized personal experiences.

In a time when anxiety in the real world is high, it was great to read a book where the main character knows what’s happening and works to fix it, innocent people get saved and guilty people face consequences. It’s a hefty 470 pages but reads very quickly. I have, in fact, already read it twice now and I am desperate for the sequel to come out despite this first book having been published only 20 days ago. I am ready to read more!

That said, I do have some caveats: First, sometimes events do tend to work out for Maggie in a variety of ways that just fall nicely into place via authorial intent rather than because it makes sense plot ways. I’m giving that a pass because it’s that kind of book: everything is going to work out, the world is on her side, it’s fine. Second, and more seriously, the narration is somewhat casually pro-war crimes. Like, the bad guys commit atrocities and need to be stopped because of that but the good guys also commit atrocities and get reassured that they only did what was necessary to achieve their goals, so it’s all good. I’m fine with giving that a pass too because this is escapist fiction, but in today’s real world climate it does make me nervous to actually recommend anything promoting that moral stance.

But over all, this book just hits so many right notes, has so many great scenes, and keeps me delighted all the way through.