Currently reading
Here’s what I’m reading right now.
This page lists books I’ve read this year, with previous years via link at the bottom.
If “Date Finished” is empty, I’m still working on it. The rating is out of five, with 1 being “I can’t believe I finished this thing!” and 5 being a book that I really loved or got a lot out of reading.
Comments are my short thoughts on the book, or a link to longer notes.
| Title | Author | Date Finished | Rating | Publisher | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ramona Quimby, Age 8 | Beverly Cleary | HarperCollins | |||
| World of Warcraft: Traveller | Greg Weisman | Scholastic Inc. | |||
| Africaville | Jeffrey Colvin | HarpcerCollins | |||
| The Desperate Adventures of Zeno and Alya | Jane Kelley | 4/9/25 | 4 | Feiwel & Friends | A funny, emotionally rich YA book about a wisacre parrot who leaves home in search of banana nut muffins and a convalescing young girl who he crosses paths with. It thoughtfully tackles some significant and resonant issues including long-term sickness, depression, and death. My 11 year-old and I enjoyed reading it together. |
| Pacific Edge | Kim Stanley Robinson | 4/6/25 | 3 | Orb Books | Read My Notes |
| Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States | Audra Simpson | 3/11/2025 | 5 | Duke University Press | Read My Notes |
| Locke and Key: Golden Age | Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez | 2/19/25 | 4 | IDW Publishing | A prologue for the main series, maintaining the rich characters, storytelling, and art I’ve come to expect. |
| The Bletchley Riddle | Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin | 03/19/25 | 4 | Viking Books for Young Readers | Fun, entertaining historical YA set at Bletchley Park during WWII. Read it with my 11 yo and we enjoyed the fun characters and puzzles. |
| Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) | Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò | 02/20/25 | 4 | Haymarket Books | Read My Notes |
| Not a Speck of Light | Laird Barron | 2/9/25 | 5 | Bad Hand Books | Maybe my favorite Barron short story collection since “Occultation”. It manages to combine his precise, economical cosmic horror with genuine introspection about families and relationships, what we give and what we get. Also, lots of the stories are about dogs, and how good they are. |
| Your shadow Half Remains | Sunny Moraine | 1/24/25 | 4 | Nightfire | A taut, sharply written zombie-ish thriller that’s really about the perils of lonliness and regret. Propulsively written with a really fascinating (and unreliable) main character. I read it quickly in one sitting and loved it. |
| Superman Smashes the Klan | Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru | 1/20/25 | 5 | DC Comics | Based on a 1940s Superman radio serial, Yang’s retelling enriches the story of a Chinese family menaced by racists in Metropolis. The b-story takes up the question of how Superman learned to fly, and nicely rounds out the themes of immigration and belonging. Great, rich art. Masterful! |
| The Black Tides of Heaven | Neon Yang | 1/24/25 | 3 | Tor books | A fanastical book, filled with a fascinating world, drawing on a pastiche of Chinese historical and cultural imagery in a way similar to fantasy’s imagistic debt to medieval Europe. Touches on issues of fate, wealth inequality, and gender fluidity. A fun read, and interesting, but didn’t grab me. |
| We3 | Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely | 1/19/25 | 4 | Vertigo | A love-letter to pets and the friendship they bring. Also, a real tear-jerker. Fair warning. |
| The Martian Sands | Lavie Tidhar | 01/20/25 | 3 | PS Publishing | Read My Notes |
| Beyond the Bright Sea | Lauren Wolk | 2/10/25 | 4 | Dutton Books for Young Readers | A really wonderful kids/YA book, set in coastal Massachusetts in the 1920s, about what it means to have a family, whether by blood or by choice. There are also a number of great, interlocking mysteries that keep the plot propsulsive and the pages turning, involving treasure, an abandoned leper colony, sailing ships, and more. Me and my 11 YO both really enjoyed it. |
| The Three-Body Problem | Cixin Liu | 01/13/25 | 4 | Tor Books | An interesting book that felt tonally a little too wild to be great. The cultural revolution history was fascinating and horrifying. The hard-science was dense but narrated fairly well. But the embattled Trisolarian aliens felt almost cartoonishly written. In essence, I liked the stuff on Earth reasonably well as a kind of historical techno-thriller, while the extraterrestrial element was jarring and silly. A similar but better executed example (for my money) is Sylvain Neuvell’s “Take them to the stars” trilogy, which deals with some of the same issues in a richer and more coherent way. |
| Ulysses Moore: The Long-Lost Map | Pierdomenico Baccalario | 1/8/24 | 3 | Scholastic | Still reasonably entertaining for my 11 year old, but the time-travel element and the hand-waving of some historical inaccuracies and language differences made this one less appealing to me than the first book. |
| The Damned Highway | Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas | 1/4/2025 | 4 | Dark Horse | What if the nightmare that Hunter S. Thompson was chasing through his gonzo journalism was Lovecraft’s cosmic horror? This book gets Thompson’s prose and tone down to a t, and is both fun and thoughtful about American culture and politics to boot. |
Previous years' lists:
2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2000s, 1990s
