Bookmaaaaiiiiill!! So excited and happy to have the debut collection from this unbelievably talented author. Sofia Samatar is one of my favorites. Also pictured: three books from the equally fantastic Saga Press!

For #AllHallowsRead, my current favorite #ScaryRead is the short story "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" by Alyssa Wong which, as a matter of fact, just won the World Fantasy Award this weekend! Making Alyssa the first ever Filipina to win a WFA!! This story has great prose and plenty of creep. I hear that @Kat_Howard is kinda into #shortfiction as well...
(This story actually appears in Issue 37 but that wasn't @Litsy -ed...)

I LOVED the first half of this book and enjoyed the second half, mostly (just felt a little like I was waiting on the protagonist to catch up with revelations the reader already had). Most of the book had a thoroughgoing Agatha Christieness to it (which I'm excited to hear is even more true in Ware's newest release) which I always love when done well. A lot of my time away from the book was spent eager to return to it. Enjoyed!

The #booknerd in me smiled at this bookish interchange in the middle of a secret agent action book. Hoping this book satisfies my strong desire for a Jason Bourne-esque story...I've tried Ludlum's Identity three times and just can't do it! Looking for a story that cares about its prose & understands subtlety when it is called for. So far, so good here!

I'm a little baffled here I guess...Laura Lippman and Megan Abbot both gave this one positive blurbs and it was just...meh, to me. Nothing was WRONG with this book, per se; I just realized I was pushing forward because I felt like I *should* be liking it, not really that I actually was. I made it 56% through (much longer than I normally give the "assessment phase") and just plain wasn't gripped by the characters or narrative. I tried.

A book in which Lewis, Tolkien, & other Inklings are tangentially involved because the protagonist stands in their professorial legacy at Oxford. Also the book has an app, with which author Iain Pears said he's seeking "not to supplant books, but to do what print & ebooks cannot." Oh Iain, you had me at "Lewis & Tolkien."

Not my favorite cover art, but certainly a favorite author & collection. Pick this up...she for sure belongs in the Ted Chiang & Ken Liu short fiction echelon of excellence. A real genre assortment pictured here, which I'm just now noticing & is totally congruent with my reading preferences. (Also featured: I Remember You, the "most frightening book @Liberty has ever read," which I have not yet worked up to...)

In which FSG is perfectly fine with us judging books by their covers...

Here, we get the Abbott-brand story (teen girl caught up in something big & dangerous) WITHOUT the POV in that girl's head as we (I?) have come to expect from her. This absence was stifling and claustrophobic. Typical yet new Abbott-brilliance (I hereby coin that literary descriptor)! I'll be watching the Olympics w/ much more trepidation than usual this year. (Also, I used the Noir frame here because, obviously. I think she'd appreciate that.)