Multifandom vid recs. Yay!

And with this installment, I have finally caught up on my library overdues -- things got a little hairy there, while I was trying to bull my way through our final Hum 110 book of the year. Happily, we don't get charged overdue fines, just a replacement fee when the library decides getting their book back has become a lost cause. Which hasn't happened yet, knock wood. *juggles books faster*


Kelley Armstrong, An Ordinary Sort of Evil (2026)

Fifth novel in the Rip Through Time series (not counting another four novellas under the author's private imprint), in which a police detective from 2016 Vancouver BC becomes displaced in time and solves crimes in 1860s Edinburgh, Scotland.

This was a particularly fun installment, but the big question I had going in was: do Duncan and Mallory finally kiss? The novel came out a month ago, and this is the first time in years when a Rip Through Time novel has come out and I haven't gotten a rash of comments on my Duncan/Mallory story (the only one on AO3!) from readers frustrated that they STILL weren't kissing in the novels. So I had my suspicions.

Spoiler:

They kiss. And a decent kiss it was, too! Although I flatter myself that I did it better. ;-)

I need to go back and pick up the most recent novella, which is sitting unread on my ereader, but all in all, I'm very pleased with this installment.


Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016)

Read-aloud with grrlpup; first read for her and second read for me. Unlike nearly every other book in the Vorkosigan Saga, this one is neither mystery nor MilSF, instead being very domestic. (It is hilarious to me that every time I prepared to read the next section and asked Grrlpup for a "last time in Gentleman Jole" recap, she nailed it. She does not nail it with mysteries or MilSF, at least not without a ton of scaffolding on my part.) I still very much like this one for all the things it made canon, although as noted before, it is rather babies-forward. I've been holding off on finishing writing a couple of fic until I finished my re-read of this; I suppose it's time now to push those higher in the queue.

Btw, this finishes our planned reading of the Vorkosigan Saga (although we may go back and pick up Ethan of Athos at some point). Next up for cooking-and-picnics read-aloud time: the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.


Grace Lin, The Year of the Dog, (2006 / 2018)

Middle-grade semi-autobiographical novel about a fifth grader deciding what she wants to be when she grows up, all while learning to navigate her second-generation Taiwanese-American identity. (Spoiler: she wants to grow up to be an author who writes books with Chinese people in them! Congratulations, Grace, on achieving your childhood dreams! So few of us do!)

Published for the 2006 Year of the Dog, then reiussued for the 2018 Year of the Dog, this new edition has more family stories at the end, as well as an interview between Grace Lin and Alvina Ling, Grace's childhood friend, present-day editor, and a character in the book, reminiscing on the development of the book and how Grace altered events from their childhood and for what narrative purpose.

(btw, Grace and Alvina host a children's lit podcast together: Book Friends Forever. Grrlpup is a regular listener -- I honestly thought the podcast was called "Grace and Alvina" until two minutes ago.)

Loved this book when I first read it, and I'm delighted to say it holds up on re-read. And the new bonus material at the back is a real treat!


Meredith Broussard, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (2023)

Exceptionally clear overview of technochauvanism (tech bros thinking they're smarter and better than anyone who has ever tried to solve a particular problem before) and algorithmic bias (when technology reproduces the same racist, sexist, cissexist, and ableist biases of society at large). Each chapter discusses specific algorithmic failures in a different domain: facial recognition, policing and courts, testing and academics, digital accessibility, gender, and medical diagnosis. She also has a chapter devoted to algorithmic auditing and a concluding chapter that highlights various efforts to check, correct, or regulate biased algorithms. (Alas, a lot of the U.S. efforts have since been set back, if not gutted, by the Trump Administration. Stay strong, E.U. -- we're counting on you!)

This book played havoc with my library holds list. It also wasn't great for my browser tabs. Let me share two:

• Heat Listed. Chicago's predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting. But it couldn't determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime -- twice. (Person of Interest was ripped from the headlines -- this story even happened during 2013! But instead of "the Machine" saving Robert McDaniel's life, it got him shot instead. Twice.)
  
  
• How Eugenics Shaped Statistics. Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers. (Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, damned eugenicists, all, and one of them was in bed with Nazis. Basically, how the p-test was invented to give eugenics the veneer of objective truth. I am pissed that NOT A SINGLE ONE of my years of statistics classes mentioned any of this. Article has some good conclusions that statistics needs to relax its death grip on "objectivity" for ethics reasons, which my statistics classes have done, but it'd have been nice to have the ethics object lesson actually in class.)

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates (2023)

Book four in the Singing Hills Cycle, an Asian-inspired fantasy series about an abbey of archivist clerics, who have dedicated themselves to collecting and preserving histories/stories. (They apparently do archaeology, too, according to a throwaway comment in this volume!)

This particular volume is a meditation on death and memory: how to best honor the fullness of a life, and too the fullness of the grief of the mourners. A quiet and meditative story, despite the threat of open violence over who has best claim to a recently deceased cleric's body: the abbey, or the granddaughters from the cleric's prior life. The granddaughters never knew him in life, but did know and do honor their grandmother's grief for the husband who left her. This installment also adds quite a bit to the lore of the neixin, the talking hoopoes/memory-spirits who serve as companions and advisors to the clerics.

I forgot how much I enjoyed this series, and am looking forward to catching up on the latest few installments.


Sarah Levine, Treasure Island!!! (2012)

Goddamn, but that was a wild ride. All three of those exclamation points are justified. Great swathes of this I read in sheer incredulity, then immediately turned around to read them aloud to grrlpup, sometimes entire chapters at a time. (She giggled through each, and demanded regular updates between.)

I have no idea what to say about the plot, beyond: a twenty-something washed-up English major reads Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and promptly loses her mind. She decides to model her life on Jim Hawkins (whom she feels emulates the Core Values of BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING), but honestly, she's closer to that dagnab fool Squire Trelawney. Squire Trelawney, if he was viciously self-centered and felt himself compelled to bring everything around him to ruin in the name of boldness, etc.

Needless to say, this will be a more rewarding experience if you're familiar with Treasure Island, if only so you can fully appreciate her misreading of it.

Content warning for animal death.


Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga (2019)

Prequel to Red, giving the backstory of "how the Carpenter was found alive on a rock in the middle of the ocean."

Twisty half-world story wherein Carpe, on returning to his home village in the present-day, finds all the local extractive businesses failing, the seashore poisoned by an oil spill, and his people hungry. He and his friends go hunting for sea lion on a mid-ocean rock where they are wintering, and through a twist of chance and weather, Carpe is left behind. What follows is a half-world story where Carpe is taken down to the bottom of the sea, is returned to his village as a spirit, and eventually comes to settle on the original sea-lion rock, unrooted from time.

I loved the art and humor and twistiness of this, with the shifting between the concrete present-day and the undersea world of the Lord of the Rock. As with Red, if you buy two copies of the book, unbind them, and reassemble the pages, they combine to make one giant black-line mural. Unlike in Red, this edition doesn't include an illustration of the all-in-one whole.


Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Red: A Haida Manga (2009)

And because I'd just read the prequel, I came back to re-read the original...

Ancient-times story of an orphaned boy whose sister is stolen and enslaved by another people. As an adult, he goes on a quest for revenge, which has tragic outcomes across the board: as his people militarize, they becomes less trusted and more targeted by their neighbors; meanwhile, his quest to rescue his sister becomes the murder of her beloved husband, thereby orphaning his nephew. In his remorse, Red commits suicide, leaving the village elders to clean up the mess.

This one doesn't appeal as strongly to me as the prequel, but the inside jacket does unfold into the assembled mural.


Nora Nickum (illus. Elly McKay). Twelve Daring Grays: A While Migration Adventure (2026)

Children's picture book about a group of twelve gray whales that sometimes make a detour into the Puget Sound on their annual journey from Baja California to the Arctic. With an eye to the tides, these twelve specific whales come into shallow water at high tide and filter mouthfuls of mud for ghost shrimp. At low tide, when the feeding area becomes exposed mudflat, you can see the gouges in the mud left behind. Obviously they risk stranding in doing this! But there isn't always enough food in the open ocean on the migration from Mexico to the Arctic, and so this can be a life-saving strategy. (But obviously not one widely adopted! Some twenty-thousand whales don't make this detour into the Puget Sound.)

For more info about these whales, see Cascadia Research's page about the Puget Sound gray whales.