So much life in the last few months…new job/hours/commute, a move/new home…kept me away from the blog and, by and large, books. As of the end of July, I’m up to 94 books for the year (57 in March-July, of those 25 were fiction/32 were non-fiction). 25 were from my TBR pile bringing me up to 52 TBR for the year, not bad at 55% of total. The books that spent the longest on my TBR before reading were Indexing, The View from the Cheap Seats and Algorithms to Live by (all since January 15, 2017). There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so I’m going to group them and only comment on the ones really worth noting.

Fiction – Contemporary

• An American Marriage (ebook) [TBR]
• Dunbar (audiobook). A retelling of King Lear, and hands down the best Shakespeare retelling I’ve ever read. The audiobook was particularly spectacular, and really gave the ‘madness’ a life of its own. [TBR]

Fiction – Historical

• The Man in the Iron Mask (paperback and audiobook). Given that I hadn’t read the first two books in the series, or the first two parts of the book that this is the third part of, I found this a bit like picking up in the middle of a long-running telenovela – I understand the words, but I have no context for anything that’s happening. (This was a book group pick.)
• The Nickel Boys (hardcover). Hard and beautiful. Colson Whitehead is a treasure.

Fiction –  Mystery/Suspense/Horror

• Body on Baker Street (ebook/hardcover). My husband brought this home from a book swap, and I thought it would be a fun but meh cozy mystery, but it was a fun and highly entertaining cozy mystery. I’ll read more in this series.
• The Couple Next Door (paperback). WHAT. THE. FUCK. A horrible book about horrible people.
• The Girl from Rawblood (ebook). Not as fucked up as I’d hoped, but a solid gothic/paranormal/horror. [TBR]
• Magic and Macaroons (ebook). [TBR]
• A Question of Holmes (hardcover). I went into this not knowing that this was the last book in the series, and I was not ready for that. I wanted their adventures to go on forever. A lovely end to the series, though. [TBR]
• You May Now Kill the Bride (ebook). 50% bad writing, 50% THIS IS WHY I LOVED FEAR STREET BOOKS. [TBR]

Fiction – Romance

• Any Old Diamonds (ebook). This was described to me as “queer kinky Leverage”, by someone on Amazon as “Hot D/s dynamic meets heist movie”, and by someone on Goodreads as the below gif; it is exactly that on all fronts. Heisty hijinks, driven by a D/s dynamic, with a romantic twist. I want to read this again and again. FIVE SMOKING HOT STARS.
  
• The Bollywood Bride (ebook). [TBR]
• The Countess Conspiracy (ebook).
• The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky (ebook) [TBR]
• Romancing the Duke (ebook). [TBR]
• The Suffragette Scandal (ebook). [TBR]
• Talk Sweetly to Me (ebook).
• The Wedding Date (ebook).  [TBR]

Fiction – Science Fiction/Fantasy/Magical Realism

• Any Way the Wind Blows (web).
• In Calabria (audiobook)
• Indexing (ebook). [TBR]
• The Land of Love and Drowning (hardcover). Beautiful, but I found the switches in perspective jarring. [TBR]
• Middlegame (hardcover). Kind of sci-fi, kind of horror, one hell of a ride. Not my favorite McGuire/Grant, but WOW, what a ride. [TBR]
• The Night Circus (paperback). I went into this thinking I’d read it years prior, but I wasn’t sure…now that I’ve read it (again?), I’m still not sure. [TBR]
• Who Fears Death (ebook). I continue to love everything I read by Nnedi Okorafor. [TBR]

Non-Fiction – Agile/Software/Tech

• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (ebook). [TBR]
• The Art of Agile Development (paperback). Good enough that I bought a copy to keep for reference.
• Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions (paperback). I was interviewing for a hybrid Project Manager/Systems Architect position earlier this year, and picked this up to brush up my skills – I ended up getting a lot out of it that I will reference down the line. Honestly, every book I’ve picked up from this series has been amazing – I’d have the entire catalog in my home office if I could.
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (paperback).
• Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Practice (paperback). [TBR]
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (paperback). [TBR]
• Objects First with Java: A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ (paperback). BlueJ is a terrible IDE, but the exercises were sort of game-ified, and I enjoyed working through the book.
• Oracle SQL by Example (paperback).
• Systems Analysis and Design (hardcover). This book felt like I was having my job mansplained to me.
• I wrote a paper on Extreme Programming for the spring term; in addition to my own Agile library, I read and referenced:
  • Extreme Programming in Practice (paperback).
  • Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban (paperback).
  • Questioning Extreme Programming (paperback).
  • Scrum and XP From the Trenches (paperback).
  • XP Refactored: The Case Against Extreme Programming (paperback).

Non-Fiction – Biography/Memoir

• Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected (ebook). [TBR]
• The Complete Book of Running (hardcover).
• The Hidden Power of Fucking Up (audio).
• My Girls: A Lifetime with Carrie and Debbie (ebook). As a kid, I wanted to be Leia. As an adult with bipolar disorder, I admired the hell out of Carrie. I cried ugly tears watching her in The Last Jedi. This book was a balm. [TBR]
• No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (hardcover). An interesting take on what is effectively a band biography – a study of the ways that the Grateful Dead have impacted (mostly US) culture – like the connection between the Dead and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Deadheads’ early internet use. (Disclaimer: my first tattoo was a Dead bear. I’m a bit biased.
• The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (ebook). [TBR]

Non-Fiction – Business/Ethics

• Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (ebook). I don’t remember how I found review of international corporate ethical issues re: human rights, but I’m glad I did.
• Practical Management Science (looseleaf).
• Screw Business as Usual (ebook).

Non-Fiction – History/Politics/Culture

• Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (paperback). HOLY FUCK. READ THIS.
• Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You (hardcover). [TBR]
• Leadership: In Turbulent Times (ebook). I may need to get my own copy of this and do an annotated re-read. An in-depth look at four presidents (Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Johnson), and how they dealt with personal, political, and global adversity. [TBR]
• Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (hardcover). I’m horrified that I knew absolutely nothing of Partition until it came up in an episode of Doctor Who. After that episode, I went looking for some books on the subject, and found this. It took me over six months to get through it; I can’t say I’m glad I read it – the subject matter precludes any gladness – but it’s worth reading. (Some of Partition is covered in Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, which I read in January, and also recommend.)  [TBR]
• The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics (paperback).
• We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation (hardcover). Such important history, gloriously documented. If we had a coffee table, this would be on it.

Non-Fiction – Medicine/Science

• No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming of Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine (paperback).
• The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (hardcover). What a gorgeous book. I want a copy of this (and the others in the series) for my home library. If you enjoy the Mütter Museum, medical history, and beautiful illustrations, I highly recommend this.