• BLACKTAIL by Scott Hawkins. One of the books I think is probably the best and most influential of the 2010s SFF boom is THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, which was, for quite a long time—ten years, I think?—Scott Hawkins's only book. It falls under both sci-fi and horror, it's twisty and mind-blowing, a real contender for the best to ever do it, something I've said enough times that Scott Hawkins's editors have zeroed in on my devotion and taste. I was really excited to read BLACKTAIL, which is a strange book—when I was telling my husband about it, he said, "Oh, like WHITE FANG," which is probably true, but I read WHITE FANG in sixth grade and can't remember. So: Yes, there are talking animals. Yes, it's oddly fable-like, and in many ways an indictment of humankind on the whole. But it's also so funny and strange and violent. I was a little apprehensive for a second when there was recently a mountain lion on the loose in my neighborhood, but then I was like meh, Blacktail was right in the end. Do you, big cat. Do you. 

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• RENTAL HOUSE by Weike Wang. I picked up this relatively spare novel about marriage while I was on tour for CLARA & THE DEVIL and read it in pretty much one sitting on the plane. It's charming, very familiar—it's about the socioeconomics of being a first generation Asian woman married to a white man of a working class background, and my god, both sets of parents were shockingly familiar. I think I've had some of these exact conversations, up to a point. I found it to be very helpful for the novel I'm currently writing—also low-key about a mixed-class marriage, give or take some multiverse espionage—and also a welcome introduction to Weike Wang, whose recent story "The Dreamdrive" in the New Yorker was also very excellent. Funny, tender, periodically melancholy, all of that and more. Reminded me a bit of THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR for a different (more personally applicable) demographic in terms of its handling of middle age.​​

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• SPACE INVADERS by Nora Fernández. A very short novella, almost more like a short story in terms of reading experience. This one hops around from different perspectives during Pinochet's regime in Chile. It blurs the space between dream and reality very well, and the surreality was really an accomplishment. In the end, the story is quite simple, the misfortunes and attempted political activism of a bunch of school-aged friends during a time of military rule and corruption. It's strangely innocent—the reference to the game Space Invaders really does a lot of work conjuring nostalgia for a time that should have been simpler, and in some ways, was. 

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• THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is my husband's favorite book and he's been trying to get me to read it for ages, but there's a lot you need to understand about him in order to grasp the reasons for my delay. One, he's an optimist. Crazy, I know, but he really believes that people are more capable of good than evil and on the whole can be trusted to do the right thing. (Under some conditions I agree, others we argue.) Two, he's a physics teacher and prefers non-fiction or hard sci-fi (though I've gotten him really into the Selin books by Elif Batuman). So, I kind of understood off the bat that this book was probably climate fiction that was relatively utopian, and it is. It's very, very good; well-researched, informative, a perfect plan, which is probably why I'm so depressed. It could be so easy, actually! To fix the world. To assign real, meaningful value to future generations. To act in a way that implies a future at all. I keep dog-earing pages of his copy, which he hates, but I have a system, and there is so much here to absorb into the way we speak of not just climate policy, but economic futures as well. This book presents a plan for casting capitalism aside—and fuck, I hope we do it. But also, the depressing bit: I kind of doubt we will. Still, someone has to have a plan, so why not us? And why not this?