2020 reading!

Love this! My 2020 list:

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing by Mar Hicks (super interesting read with lots of good lessons for the industry, though it did jump through time in a way that was a bit jarring for me)

Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton McIlwain (loved the subject but struggled with the style because it didn't attribute quotes and I'm terrible at using context clues)

Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir by Thomas Pecore Weso (enjoyed this one loads and it has recipes!)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (I have to admit, she got me! I did not guess the killer before the reveal!)

Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron (cool premise and interesting side characters! the main character felt a little flat to me)

Mirage by Somaiya Daud (loved. beautiful world building, lovely prose)

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland (never thought I would have enjoyed this one based on the premise, but I did! great voice)

City Spies by James Ponti (eh.)

Jinxed by Amy McCulloch (the plot was a bit choppy but the world was so fun!)

Song For A Whale by Lynne Kelly (made my heart ache but in a good way???)

Instant Karma by Marissa Meyer (cute, wholesome, lighthearted)

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (solid mystery! the trailer for the new movie is way too dramatic lol)

You Should See Me In A Crown by Leah Johnson (soooooo cute and fun, I sped through this one!)

Truly Devious Trilogy by Maureen Johnson (it was okay, not my favorite. there were several things that I took issue with but the mystery was interesting)

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull (had some solid concepts and I enjoyed the insight into the creative process at Pixar. author was kind of arrogant, but as the guy who invented texture mapping for digital 3D models maybe he gets to be a little full of himself lol)

For 2021 one of my goals is to read 50 books. I very likely won't hit it, but it can't hurt to try! A few on my To Read list that I'm looking forward to:

The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History by Nathalia Holt

Elatsoe by Darien Little Badger

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

• The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan
• The One and Only Bob by Katherine Applegate
• Wishtree by Katherine Applegate
• The Hunger Games Tribute Guide by Emily Seife
• The Invasion by K.A. Applegate [reread]
• The Lightning Thief: The Graphic Novel by Rick Riordan
• The Invasion: The Graphic Novel by K.A. Applegate

• Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
• Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg
• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
• The Visitor by K.A. Applegate [reread]

• Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate
• Endling: The Last by Katherine Applegate
• -insert as many Animorphs books as possible here- by K.A. Applegate
• The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan
• The Eye of Minds by James Dashner
• Things in Jars by Jess Kidd
• Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
• Girl Crushed by Katie Heaney
• Return to the Castle by Rose Catherine Khan
• Jackaby by William Ritter

highlight reel, following as promised! top 15 of novels/novellas/collections, top 5 each of picture books, graphic novels, nonfiction, poetry, and short stories; again, ordered in chronological order rather than ordered by favorites because I'm way too indecisive for that.


Novels, Novellas, & Collections
Dead Astronauts (Jeff VanderMeer); Wayward Children (series) (Seanan McGuire); The Wicker King (K. Ancrum); With the Fire on High (Elizabeth Acevedo); After Zero (Christina Collins);
Conservation of Shadows (Yoon Ha Lee); The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia (eds. Jaymee Goh, Joyce Chng); Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color (eds. Ellyn Peña, Jamie Berrout); The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo); Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia);
The Real Boy (Anne Ursu); Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight (Aliette de Bodard); Sidekick Squad (series) (C. B. Lee); The Space Between Worlds (Micaiah Johnson); Elatsoe (Darcie Little Badger)

• Dead Astronauts (Jeff VanderMeer)
  
  Weird ecotragedy, set both pre-and-post-apocalypse, ft. astronauts of the usual and/or dimension-hopping sort, telepathic bioengineered foxes, and a trio of furious and determined and caring rebels. This is probably going to be the most divisive title on my list on account of being nonlinear, wildly bizarre, and really dark in places, but I loved it for the surreal ecology, for the triad who emotionally ground the main narrative part of the book (the entire first third of the book said m/f/nb polyam rights and I said thanks), and for the way that instead of leading readers to give up on hope and joy, it asks us to look ecological crisis in the eye, remember why we care, and refuse to back down.
  
• Wayward Children (series) (Seanan McGuire)
  
  A series of novellas, beginning with Every Heart a Doorway, about a boarding school for children who have returned from adventures in other worlds and no longer feel at home in the world where they grew up. Sometimes eerie, sometimes glittery, always adventurous and empathetic. Every time I pick up a new installment, I'm impressed by the way McGuire handles children's POVs, writing them with clear and consistent respect for children's intelligence and abilities without tripping into writing them as exactly like adults. If you've ever read a book with a teen protagonist and wanted to give them a damn break, wished portal fantasy spent more time dealing with emotional fallout of traumatic experiences, or been a kid who felt out of place in ways you couldn't explain to the adults in your life, this series is for you.
  
  
• The Wicker King (K. Ancrum)
  
  Feeling like they can't turn to any of the adults in their lives for support, August struggles to support his best friend, Jack, as the latter develops increasingly alarming hallucinations about a quest only the two of them can fulfill. I put this book down to take a break halfway through because I felt like I couldn't emotionally handle it anymore, and I lasted about ten minutes before I had to pick it back up and read through the rest in one sitting. This is a hard read—it's a deep dive into the mental health of teenagers with too much on their shoulders and nowhere near enough support—but an incredibly and compassionately written book (with a likewise deeply compassionate afterward that had me sobbing). The formatting is also unique in a way that I thought was a nice touch, with multimedia elements like playlists and hand-drawn maps.
  
  
• With the Fire on High (Elizabeth Acevedo)
  
  High school senior Emoni knows what she's doing; she's used to making tough decisions and putting in the hard work to balance caring for her daughter, supporting her abuela, and keeping up in school. But when her love of cooking brings her to a culinary arts class and she finds herself cautiously befriending the new boy at her school, it starts to look like her future might include dreams she hadn't yet considered. Emoni has one of the most vividly rendered character voices I've read in a while, and the book moves along at a brisk pace without sacrificing time for the emotional complexity of every character on the page.
  
  
• After Zero (Christina Collins)
  
  Not talking at school was intentional at first—a way to keep herself from saying something wrong—but months later, Elise isn't sure anymore if she could stop if she tried, even as her best friend drifts away and Elise stumbles into a family secret that shakes her world. I read this book in one sitting and cried my eyes out; I wish it had existed when I was eleven and I'm very, very glad it exists now.
  
  
• Conservation of Shadows (Yoon Ha Lee)
  
  Speculative fiction short story collection featuring beautiful prose and intricate, varied worldbuilding, with magic and technology from living ink to weapons tuned by music. Many of the stories draw on mathematical concepts in interesting ways (though you don't need to actually understand the math for the story), and the collection as a whole circles themes of the impact of war, the importance of art and language, and difficult choices. The standouts for me were "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" (about the guardian of a strange and storied gun that doesn't work) and "Iseul's Lexicon" (a novella-length piece about linguistic imperialism, magic, spies, sacrifice, and two women risking their lives to destroy a tool of occupation).
  
  
• The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia (eds. Jaymee Goh, Joyce Chng)
  
  By turns whimsical, serious, and both at once, this short story anthology winds through alternate histories where resistance fighters wield technology that borders on magic, Southeast Asia was never colonized at all, airships fight rampant volcanic eruptions, music powers flight, or wood comes to life. My favorites were Alessa Hinlo's "The Last Aswang" (about a diwata and her liaison in an uncolonized Philippines receiving a visiting ambassador and her entourage) and Pear Nuallak's "The Insects and Women Sing Together" (about two Thai Khorat girls coming of age in two generations, each balancing secrets, dreams, and ambitions in the shadow of war).
  
  
• Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color (eds. Ellyn Peña, Jamie Berrout)
  
  This is a difficult book to describe, because it's all over the board in terms of tone, genre, and style; there are apocalypses and slice of life, fantasy and scifi and realism, poetry and prose, happy endings and trauma and ambiguity. Which is part of why I love it, but know going in that this will almost definitely includes at least one piece any given reader is going to deeply love and at least one piece they're going to have a hard time with. On the whole, this is an incredibly powerful collection, sharp and beautiful and uplifting voices that are sorely underrepresented in publishing.
  
  
• The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo)
  
  The story of an empress in exile overthrowing the dynasty that wronged her, as related to a historian cleric by a former handmaiden who helped her. Each chapter opens with Chih, the cleric, chronicling descriptions of items at the Empress' former estate, before Rabbit, the now-elderly handmaiden, tells them the story behind those things. This is a quiet, evocatively written novella that reads like a puzzle box unfolding.
  
  
• Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
  
  Casiopea Tun, eighteen and dreaming of a brighter life but as yet unable to break free of her grandfather's household, stumbles across chest where said grandfather has been keeping Hun-Kamé, lord of the Maya underworld, captive. With their lives now magically tangled together, she has little choice but to travel with him on a cross-country trip to regain his throne. Set primarily in Jazz Age Mexico and occasionally stepping into Xilbalba, this is a lavishly written, well-paced adventure story, and seeing Casiopea come into her own was an absolute joy.
  
  
• The Real Boy (Anne Ursu)
  
  Oscar—assistant to his town's only magician, Caleb—just wants to do his job, read, look after his cats, and avoid getting harassed by Caleb's apprentice. But after a series of strange events leaves a panicked Oscar in charge of Caleb's shop, he turns to the town healer's apprentice, Callie, for help, and together they unravel the connections between patients with a strange new ailment, disappearing magic, and the unexplainable happenings outside of town. This book wormed its way into my heart on contact; while not explicitly named as such, Oscar is heavily coded (in! complex and relatable ways!!) as autistic, and his journey toward learning to be kinder to himself struck a major chord with me (this is another one I'm very glad is out there for today's kids). I could also wax poetic about how lovely his and Callie's friendship is but this is getting long enough so please just know that they are mutually supportive and I love them both with my whole heart.
  
  
• Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight (Aliette de Bodard)
  
  Speculative fiction short stories, largely set in de Bodard's Vietnam-indluenced far-future space opera series Xuya and largely centering on stories of survival under colonialism, the impact of war on everyday life, and intergenerational grief. Stunning prose, vivid worldbuilding, and compassionately crafted characters. My favorite was "The Waiting Stars," about cousins breaking into a derelict ship ward to restore a ship who is also their aunt while, elsewhere, a girl grows up in an institution designed to assimilate her into the culture that took her from home as a child.
  
  
• Sidekick Squad (series) (C. B. Lee)
  
  Jess Tran, daughter of Andover's resident superhero team, lands an internship with her parents' villainous rivals. As if that's not complicated enough, her longtime crush Abby greets her at her new workplace, her best friends Bells and Emma are acting strange, and her supervisor M begins to suggest that something much larger than hero-villain rivalries is going on. This series is a little heavier than it sounds, dealing with corruption and propaganda in a country that steadily reveals itself to be fairly dystopian, but the superhero antics and character dynamics generally keep it from feeling too dark; the romance (or lack thereof, as one character's arc involves settling into aromantic identity) is sweet without overwhelming the story, and the team that Jess and her friends wind up building is grounded in a friendship that feels very real.
  
  
• The Space Between Worlds (Micaiah Johnson)
  
  Cara is dead on 372 worlds, which makes her a valuable traverser; professional universe-hoppers can only collect information from worlds where their doubles have died, as a universe will reject duplicates. Once a child of the wastelands around the walled city she now calls home, she's a survivor who's built a life for herself on being good at dying—until the death of her 373rd alternate self opens up a world whose secrets have implications for her own home. An adventure story that's deeply conscious of race and class and asks questions about how circumstances affect us and what it means to be yourself, and a protagonist who absolutely doesn't want to deal with any of this bullshit but can't bring herself to turn away (a character archetype I have a soft spot for); also, Cara's relationship with her younger sister is entirely delightful.
  
  
• Elatsoe (Darcie Little Badger)
  
  Just before he dies, Elatsoe's cousin manages to warn her in a dream that whatever it looks like, his death was a murder. Expecting no help from police oh behalf of a young Lipan Apache man whose death has already been ruled accidental and whose murderer is a well-connected white doctor in insular small-town Texas, Ellie—with her parents, her best friend, and her beloved ghost dog Kirby—sets about the investigation herself. A solid mystery, a strong dash of adventure, and elegant worldbuilding, with magic (from Ellie's ability to raise animal ghosts to vampires to cross-country transit through fairy rings) woven neatly into a world otherwise much like our own; also features occasional lovely greyscale illustrations by Rovina Cai.
  

Picture Books
Sweetest Kulu (Celina Kalluk, Alexandria Neonakis); They Say Blue (Jillian Tamaki); Shi-shi-etko (Nicola I. Campbell, Kim LaFave); My Footprints (Bao Phi, Basia Tran); 'Ohana Means Family (Ilima Loomis, Kenard Pak)

• Sweetest Kulu (Celina Kalluk, Alexandria Neonakis)
  
  A new mother tells her baby, in the form of a bedtime poem, how the beings of the Arctic greeted them with blessings and well-wishes at their birth. The language is a little more sophisticated than you'd generally expected out of a board book so I'm not sure how it would actually go over with babies, but it's a sweet read, and the soft colors of the illustrations are lovely. (Example page.)
• They Say Blue (Jillian Tamaki)
  
  Exploration of colors across a year's seasons and through the young narrator's imagination. Playful, poetic, and evocative, with dynamic paintings. (Example page.)
  
  
• Shi-shi-etko (Nicola I. Campbell, Kim LaFave)
  
  In the days before she has to leave for her first year at residential school, Shi-shi-etko soaks in the last of her time with her family and does her best to fold every piece of home around her—songs and scenery, plants and animals, prayers and family meals—into her memory. On its own, this probably lacks the context to be an ideal introduction to the concept of residential schools (though it may work as one in combination with the sequel Shin-chi's Canoe, about Shi-shi-etko and her little brother at the residential school itself), but it's a beautiful story in its own right, balancing celebration of the things Shi-shi-etko loves with the heartbreak of their loss. (Example page.)
  
  
• My Footprints (Bao Phi, Basia Tran)
  
  Thuy, upset and frustrated after being bullied at school, spends her walk imagining herself as animals that could escape notice or scare her bullies away. When she gets home, her moms join in, helping Thuy open up about her feelings and find creatures that bring out the best of herself and their family. Poignant and loving, with charming art (Thuy's expressions are fantastically emotive). (Example page.)
  
  
• 'Ohana Means Family (Ilima Loomis, Kenard Pak)
  
  A cumulative rhyme about a family preparing for a luau, zooming out from a bowl of poi to the cooks to the harvest and ultimately to the Hawaiian landscape, then focusing back in on the luau. Pleasantly rhythmic, and the landscape images in particular are gorgeous. (Example page.)
  

Graphic Novels
Sleepless (Sarah Vaugh, Leila del Duca, Alissa Sallah, Deron Bennett); Mooncakes (Suzanne Walker, Wendy Xu); This Place: 150 Years Retold (Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm et al.); X-Men: Marvels Snapshot #1 (Jay Edidin, Tom Reilly, Chris O'Halloran); Nightlights (series) (Lorena Alvarez)

• Sleepless (Sarah Vaugh, Leila del Duca, Alissa Sallah, Deron Bennett) [reread]
  
  Two-volume fantasy romance about Poppy, technically-illegitimate but beloved daughter of the recently-late king, and Cyrenic, a knight under a spell to not need sleep, featuring assassins, court intrigue, and an adorable fox. I reread this as a pick-me-up sometime around April, and loved it just as much as the first time around; despite how compact the story is, Poppy's relationships with the people around her are compelling and the happy ending feels earned and fulfilling. The art is lovely and gently colored in a way that suits the light fantasy vibe (which is what originally convinced me to give the series a shot even though court romance is not even sort of my genre). (Example page.)
  
  
• Mooncakes (Suzanne Walker, Wendy Xu)
  
  Teen witch Nova Huang follows reports of a wolf in the woods near her New England town and finds Tam Ling, her childhood crush, battling a horse demon. Tam has been wandering for years and, short on both support and options, enlists Nova's and her grandmothers' help dealing with the horse and the forces behind it. A sweet, fast-paced, and just plain fun read. (Example page.)
  
  
• This Place: 150 Years Retold (Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm et al.)
  
  A graphic novel anthology exploring post-Contact Indigenous Canadian history, opening with a piece on Annie McDermot Bannatyne and ending on an image of the future; an ambitious collection, immensely varied in tone, style, and topic. Each entry includes an introduction with historical (and sometimes personal) context from the creator(s). (The publisher has a "View Inside" available here, though you'll likely need something like Newgrounds Player to view it until they get their website converted from using Flash.)
  
  
• X-Men: Marvels Snapshot #1 (Jay Edidin, Tom Reilly, Chris O'Halloran)
  
  Oneshot (the #1 indicates it's part of a collection, not an ongoing series) about Scott Summers as a teenager, struggling to figure out who he is while feeling lost and out of place and sorting through memories that dokn't fit together. This is less a story about how Scott becomes a superhero, and more a story about why—about deciding that helping people matters, and in a lot of ways about making sense of a confusing and overwhelming world through stories. (Example page.)
  
  
• Nightlights (series) (Lorena Alvarez)
  
  Stories about Sandy, a young artist who brings her dreams to life through drawings; in Nightlights, a new classmate who covets her ability starts to pressure her to draw what Morfie wants, and in Hicotea, she falls through a turtle's shell into a museum where wetland creatures recruit her help. Nightlights was a good read—lightly eerie but uplifting—and the art is stunning, with rich colors and incredible detail, but Hicotea was what really landed this series on this list. (Example page.)
  

Nonfiction
Palimpsest: Notes on a Korean Adoption (Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom; trans. Hanna Strömberg, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, and Richey Wyver); Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha); Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer); You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works
and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place (Janelle Shane); Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (ed. Alice Wong)

• Palimpsest: Notes on a Korean Adoption (Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom; trans. Hanna Strömberg, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, and Richey Wyver)
  
  A graphic-novel memoir about Sjöblom's experience as a transnational adoptee and her fight, through agencies with missing and changing answers, for information about her birth family and early childhood. Sjöblom is open and frank about the difficult emotional complexities of the entire experience, and her art style suits the book without overwhelming her story, drawn in muted sepia tones and incorporating actual records and correspondence from the agencies she spoke with. (Example page.)
  
  
• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)
  
  Essays on community, advocacy, intersectionality, survival skills, collective access, and building a world where none of us leave each other behind. I've thought about this book easily weekly since I read it, and if nothing else—and there is much, much else—I would recommend it specifically for the insights on how to integrate accessibility into planning and how sustaining community is an active practice, especially when communities built of marginalized people often struggle with the ways our conflicting needs and traumas can make it easy for us to hurt each other. And on the tension between the truths that care webs are necessary and wonderful things, but that no one should have to rely on their charisma for survival. And—look, I told you there was a lot, this book covers a lot of incredibly important ground.
  
  
• Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
  
  Essays examining plants, ecology, and humans' reciprocity with our environments through both Potawatomi teaching and Western scientific methodologies, with a dash of memoir and an eye toward unraveling the effects of colonialism in North America. Lyrically and emotively written; if you're worried this sounds like a dull botany textbook, don't be. This book fundamentally shifted the way I think about and interact with my environment, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
  
  
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place (Janelle Shane)
  
  Exactly what it says on the tin: an accessibly written introduction that breaks down how AI works, what it can and can't do, and some of the ways it can go wrong (or go right in unanticipated ways). Shane shows some of the ways that a troublesome AI can be hilarious, like physics-defying simulation glitches and robots that would rather spin around or fall over than learn to walk, but also how they can be incredibly dangerous, like when algorithms that handle hiring or parole decisions learn to replicate racist and sexist biases in their training data. Newcomers to the field will probably get more out of this than established AI enthusiasts, but either way it's a fun read.
  
  
• Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (ed. Alice Wong)
  
  Multi-author personal essay anthology, from a tremendous array of perspectives, on joy, connection, struggle, resilience, and other rich nuances of disabled life. Some of the topics covered here are painful and infuriating, like audism in prison and medical mistreatment of disabled indigenous people; some are celebratory and loving, like creative collaborations, reimagining dance, and the legacies of historical disabled icons; the book as a whole looks toward, in contributor A. H. Reaume's words, a world and a future where we can be loved and cared for and held not just despite but because of our disabilities. This is a beautiful and vital book.

Poetry
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (Joy Harjo); The Twenty-ninth Year (Hala Alyan); The Gospel of Breaking (Jillian Christmas); Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (ed. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke); Islanders (Teow Lim Goh)

• Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (Joy Harjo)
  
  Lyrical and incisive, the poems here are grounded at once in the past and in the present, grieving losses and reaching to passed ancestors while celebrating resilience and looking for collective ways forward.
  
  Favorite line, from "Charlie and the Baby": Every word that's ever said tries to find a way to live.
  
  
• The Twenty-ninth Year (Hala Alyan)
  
  Sharp poems full of both grief and everyday beauty, focusing on living through chaos and building a life and a home on the other side of it.
  
  If I had to pick one full poem to recommend it’d be "Aleppo"; my personal favorite lines were from "Dear Layal" (A girl unloves her house, but it is too late. The house is her eyes and her ears and the wind she pins her hair by.) and "Upstate I" (This is how the clouds convert you, replacing one future with another, and the whole car ride back is quiet and unheated, you are crying because you nearly forgot, because the car is good, the fog is good, the dream is good.)
  
  
• The Gospel of Breaking (Jillian Christmas)
  
  Reflective, simultaneously intimate and expansive, and gorgeously vivid, focusing particularly on family and diaspora, loss and love, and identity and experience as a queer Black woman. Christmas' voice as a slam poet comes through even on silent pages; her poems carry the reader forward from start to finish.
  
  Favorite lines come from "soft-bellied beast":
  
  even amidst the grinding heartbreak and
  the disappointing alarm clocks
  there were nights of unassuming magic
  
  and from "do not feed":
  
  this world thinks me sweeter with my jaw
  clenched shut […]
  
  I keep trying to finish poems about black joy
  
  
• Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (ed. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke)
  
  A multilingual anthology of work from more than eighty poets of indigenous nations across the Americas, including both established names and emerging voices. The scope of this book and the variety of perspectives is fantastic; as is often the case with multi-author anthologies, not every poem will land for every reader, but the ones that landed for me took my breath away. (Poems not originally in English include translations.)
  
  Favorite lines, from "Leaving Tulsa" by Jennifer Elise Foerster:
  
  and I imagine a land I come from still,
  a pocket under roots to return to,
  that I am not just another lost American
  smashing butterflies on her windshield,
  addicted to the open range and the highway
  that crosses it like a perfectly straight seam
  hemming up all the broken dreams
  we come from.
  
  
• Islanders (Teow Lim Goh)
  
  A tribute to Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay from 1910 to 1940, reimagining the voices of women on the island whose poems were lost when the women's quarters burned down (along with their families on shore, the staff at Angel Island, and a number of people at the San Francisco riot of 1877). Goh also has a few connected essays linked at the book's page on her site; I've only read "The Dehumanizing Politics of Likability," but it was well worth the read and I'm looking forward to the others.
  
  Favorite lines, from "The Walls Speak":
  
  Each time
  I pick up the knife,
  
  ready to etch my words
  into the wood,
  
  my hands tremble
  and I step back.
  
  *
  
  At night I lie awake.
  Will I always be a secret?

Short Stories
A Nest of Ghosts, a House of Birds (Kat Howard); The Homunculi’s Guide to Resurrecting Your Loved One From Their Electronic Ghosts (Kara Lee); Difference of Opinion (Meda Kahn); The Secret Life of Bots (Suzanne Palmer); How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls (Kai Minosh Pyle)

• A Nest of Ghosts, a House of Birds (Kat Howard)
  
  Luna moves into her late grandmother's home to find it full of strange birds that no one else seems to see, and in learning to care for them learns more about herself and her family. There's a melancholy to this story, but a gentle one.
• The Homunculi’s Guide to Resurrecting Your Loved One From Their Electronic Ghosts (Kara Lee)
  
  A step-by-step guide, by ghosts formed from the amalgam of people's digital traces, to rescuing one of their number from the wires, and what to do when you can't. A deft blending of magic and technology, and a beautiful exploration of grief that eviscerated me with love.
  
  
• Difference of Opinion (Meda Kahn)
  
  Keiya wants to do her job, be left alone, and listen to her favorite singer. Morit wants to know her perspective on eugenics. This is a story about autistic advocacy and community, abled co-optation of disability justice, and how ableism paints nonspeaking people as at once empty and dangerous (they see you big and looming like a monster and they take your keyboard, last kernel of defense you've got left); it is, most of all, about Keiya wanting to be who she is and the powers that be around her deciding that that's unacceptable.
  
  
• The Secret Life of Bots (Suzanne Palmer)
  
  A crew pulls an old ship from a junkyard for a last-ditch military maneuver. Meanwhile, Bot 9 pursues a rattish-buggish animal through the ship and makes friends. This story manages to be both high-stakes and a lighthearted, genuinely fun time that made me laugh out loud.
  
  
• How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls (Kai Minosh Pyle)
  
  (Collected in Love After the End, edited by Joshua Whitehead.) Nigig, a girl coming of age in Anishinaabewaki after border wars that reshaped the world, writes down observations and advice as she grapples with the meaning of Kinship and pushes for answers about her missing best friend, Migizi, who everyone else seems to believe is gone for good. This story mulls over its themes the way you might turn a stone around in your hands to see it at different angles, examining ideas of community and belonging and explicitly asking Nigig, and through her the readers, to always remember who is being excluded and what that exclusion means.