Uhhh…hi. It’s Thursday, again. We’re here, again. This is the end of my weekly newsletters, the end of summer, end of those few empty days we’re able to grab. I hope to still write something up every now and again, and I’ve had such a great time rambling to all of you. You’re always welcome to send me books or ideas you might want me to chat about, whether here or just in a message.

With all that said, I believe I promised my near-annual queer SF reclist…ages ago. That seemed like a good note for me to go out on. Hope you enjoy. You’ve all heard about some of these books from earlier newsletters, but hopefully some of them will be new. Go forth and read.

And now, in no particular order, 10 books that I’ve read and loved in the past year.

1. The Archive Undying - Emma Mieko Candon

Well, we all know you’ve heard about this one, if not from here then from me rambling about it online or in person. The Archive Undying is about a world full of cities that are both the bodies of and governed by vast AIs, and about the fallout when one of those AIs corrupts. It follows a wonderful cast of characters, some who made me want to strangle them, some who made me want to cry for them. Full of complex relationships, humour, and grief, I have perhaps listened to the audiobook version three times in the past twelve months.

2. Saint Death’s Daughter - C.S.E Cooney

I recently saw a post saying how much they loved stories where Death is presented as kind and loving, and thought immediately of this book. Saint Death’s Daughter is a brilliant funny and joyful book, full of colour, horrendous puns, and footnotes that made me laugh out loud. This book follows a young necromancer who is—literally—allergic to violence and her extended family of murderers, assassins, and executioners. More than that, it’s a lyrical and bizarre book that isn’t afraid of playing with your expectations set in a lush world that utterly pulled me in (and made me read the sequel).

3. Where Echoes Die - Courtney Gould

Two sisters grieving their mother, an illicit trip, a town with a secret. After their mother’s death, Beck and Riley find themselves in a decaying town she visited regularly. Slipping through memories, their exploration circles around the mysterious treatment centre set in the hills high above the town. As they dig up truths about the town and the people who live there, Beck must face the things she has kept buried. I grabbed this book from the library on a whim, and was swept along in the story of these two girls and their strange town.

4. The West Passage - Jared Pechaček

This is one of those books that I finished and then immediately had to run to a friend to recommend. Two young people raised in the crumbling remains of the grey tower must take on ancient responsibilities to save their world from an ancient evil, meeting beekeepers, librarians and strange and powerful Ladies. Additionally, the author is also an excellent illustrator, and this book is done nearly in the fashion of an illuminated manuscript. Both the story and illustrations are full of charm and a bizarre fairy tale logic that swept me through the pages. If you’ve enjoyed books like Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin or Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, I’d highly recommend The West Passage. This is a book that creates a world unlike any I’ve seen and explores it with child-like wonder and horror.

5. Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera

You’re trapped inside a story, someone else’s story, one you didn’t get to write for yourself. The only way out is to peel yourself, bloody and screaming, from your world and into a new one. Rakesfall is a story that breaks past the fourth wall and crumbles away everything you thought you knew about the book. hopping between universes, time twists on itself and unravels as two people tear their way through each other, as siblings, as enemies, as something else. How do you tell your own story when you’re wearing someone else’s skin? Racing between Sri Lanka during political disruption, the world we remember from The Saint of Bright Doors and the far future, Rakesfall is a book that tears its way through the world.

6. Catherine House - Elizabeth Thomas

Another book I keep recommending to people, sometimes for dark academia, sometimes for the kind of dreamlike literary fiction I’m always chasing after. Students are offered places at the prestigious Catherine House college, on the condition that they spend the next three years completely isolated from the outside world, existing only within the gates and walls of the house. This is one of those books that you need to have the correct expectations going in to truly enjoy. This is a book that doesn’t answer questions, that locks you away in Catherine House with our narrator, and pulls you through all of its dusty rooms in a dream-like haze.

7. The Tiger Flu - Larissa Lai

The Tiger Flu ranks right up there with books that make me go ‘well then’. Parthenogenic women, a vast pandemic that largely affects men, psychedelics and artificial satellites filled with the memories of the dead. a narrative that weaves in and out of itself, looping back and regenerating itself. The prose veers between poetic and crass, and the characters are visceral and unsettling. This book definitely falls on the more bizarre end of the spectrum of these recommendations. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

8. Pluralities - Avi Silver

Pluralities is a novella following two separate but intersecting stories—one of a person slowly slipping out of the gender roles they’ve always held themself inside, one of an alien prince and his spaceship on a journey across the stars. If those sound like a bizarre combination, believe me when I say it works masterfully. This is a book that made me feel incredibly seen, and explored gender, gender expectations and coming to terms with being non-binary in ways that might not fit other’s expectations. Also, fun spaceship character.

9. Frontier - Grace Curtis

Lesbian space western!!! LESBIAN SPACE WESTERN!!! A woman crash-lands on a devastated earth and travels among the people still living there, passing through and touching the lives of all those she meets. The books is set up as a series of vignettes, each from a new perspective, each showing us another scrap of these people's lives, each showing us a lonely woman desperately searching for something—or someone. The official description lists ‘love, loss, and gunslinging’, and if that doesn’t pull you in, i don’t know what could.

10. Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo

A young empress caught up in court politics, her handmaiden who tells the story to the cleric who has come to view the empty palace the empress’ death has left behind. For so long I’d been seeing Nghi Vo’s work floating around, and Empress of Salt and Fortune did not disappoint. As this is a novella, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoiling the story, but it was, as is the case with all of these books, truly excellent.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. Today, I will only leave you with an album to listen to:

I feel like I should have some album that fully encapsulates everything I’ve written for this newsletter, but that’s impossible. Still, please give Among Horses III (Fifth Anniversary Edition), by Haley Heynderickx and Max Garcia Conover a listen.