I had to stop reading that. Miriam Toews is one of my favourite authors but that and All My Puny Sorrows were just so intense and full of trauma. I had to look away.
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One of my most favorite books. But definitely NOT an easy read 
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Sharron Gless, Apparently There Were Complaints. A memoir by the actress who played Christine Cagney in Cagney & Lacy, and Debbie Novatny in Queer as Folk. I listened to the audio book, read by the author in her distinctive voice. Content and voice were both very enjoyable.
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I’m giggling so hard at this, thank you for this gift.
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David retired from being a full-time writer earlier this year due to health issues.
He’s a nice guy and he was great to me when we met years ago.
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Just popped on to recommend Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is about a teenage girl from San Francisco’s Chinatown sneaking out to join in lesbian night life. Very compelling characters and I thought the ending worked- there were consequences, but not too many for a YA romance.
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I devoured this book in 2 days. Strongly recommend!
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It was VERY GOOD. TW for traumatic experiences for trans woman-
Summary
Misgendering, violence, gaslighting, hate speech
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I need an easy but engaging read to help my brain learn to focus for more than 10 pages again. I dunno why but my ADHD is like wheeeee
scalzi’s latest - Kaiju Preservation Society? that is kinda his brand
I haven’t read that! Will check it out.
Fraziska Thomas, Fits and Starts: A Memoir of Living with Epilepsy. I really enjoyed this memoir. Thomas did a great job of capturing society’s push to ‘try, try again,’ and the alienation and beauty of being outside society.
Gabby Dunn & Allison Ruskin, Please Send Help. A quick little read, about two women experiences the slings and arrows of being in one’s early 20’s, and newly graduated from college.
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Finally finished Ransom Riggs’ Peculiar Children series with The Desolation of Devil’s Acre. I don’t read a lot of young adult works, but I’ve enjoyed this one and thought the series wrapped up pretty well. Some of the newer characters in the last couple kind of annoyed me but this was back to the main set (with a couple additions that made sense and weren’t just a sea of names) and the story flowed well.
Also finished a couple more anthologies with Seanan McGuire short stories–
Stingers and Strangers with Frances and Johnny was included in Dead Man’s Hand an old west/steampunk type anthology like a lot of the ones that include those two characters seem to be. Bringing back the Apraxis wasps (or introducing them? I could be off in the ordering) was interesting, but none of the other stories really jumped out except for a reminder that Card’s Alvin Maker stories are weird.
Urban Enemies had Balance with Eliza the unconnected-to-anything-else in-the-Incryptid-series cuckoo…the story wasn’t bad but nothing really earth shattering as far as how cuckoos operate, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t tie into anything else (yet). Jim Butcher had a story from the POV of one of his crime lords that made fun of some stuff in the Dresden Files that was funnier, though.
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And updating with the final book for the InCryptid short stories, Fiction River anthology Hex and the City that had Seanan McGuire’s Red as Snow. It’s the first story for Istas and Ryan, and I really like those two and hope she writes more (I always like it when aliens or nonhumans are written as not human and with motivations that don’t completely parallel humanity). Although the anthology as a whole was focused mostly on witches/wizards/magic users and there really isn’t any of that in Red as Snow, they’re just not human. The other stories were good, though, if not my usual, and I’ll probably dig around more in the Poker Boy series because it’s nice to see actual practical logic solve a mystery even if the people involved are superheros.
(ETA–the librarians will probably be glad to see the last of me for a bit given the number of libraries I’ve requested the various anthologies from to cover all of the short stories 
)
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Ling Ma, Severance. A novel about the end of civilization. I listened to the audio version, and enjoyed the wry humor of the narrator. Though, I’m not sure if I missed some of the subtext, or if it actually wasn’t that deep and I was being an insufferable pounce. Still, worth the read.
Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City. I really, really liked this book. It’s the golden unicorn of books with gay and enby characters who’s gender and attractions aren’t plot points. Plus some social commentary about how cities work, and what morality is.
Marlo Mack, How to be a Girl: A Mother’s Memoir of Raising Her Transgender Daughter. A quick read, and despite Mack’s remembered fear and confusion of the early years, very hopeful and sweet.
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I read Severance in December 2019 lol. Weird timing.
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I had to go look at the publication date, to see if it was pre or post. I was surprised that it was pre. That author had some accurate imagination.
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Also a very good rendering of some quirks of working in the publishing industry! I loved the bit about her photo blog.
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Not reading too many new books right now since I’m using the reading month to go through stuff I already own with an eye towards paring down, but there have been a couple new ones:
Infected by Scott Sigler–Very different take on the cause of a series of random infections across the US (warning for violence here) and what the endgame of the ‘zombies’ is. A little light on the non-biological science part, but only one of the main characters is supposed to be a scientist, and she’s specifically a biologist so that’s fair. It was apparently originally written to be a series of podcasts which makes some of the things that bothered me in reading make a lot more sense–a lot of short sections with what seemed like unnecessarily rapid POV changes, large amounts of backstory repetition when cutting between main characters–but still not a bad read, and I picked up both Contagion and Pandemic to read when I get a chance.
Into the Real (John Ringo and Lydia Sherrer): A girl who has a talent for gaming strategy finds it relevant elsewhere, set a near-future universe where things aren’t going great. More YA-targeted than I’ve seen from Ringo before, but generally the setup is solid and characters are reasonable. The exceptions are, unfortunately, the two human antagonists: a teenage boy who still seems to think that girls have cooties (there are some loose hints at a Tragic Backstory for him, but mostly he just comes across as an idiot), and a teenage girl who keeps attempting to fat shame. And yes, I mean ‘attempting’–everyone tells her to can it in the first 100 pages and I have no idea what her presence was supposed to accomplish after that. Or, really, before that. Pretty sure she was Sherrer’s brainchild since Ringo’s villains generally accomplish something, but then again there were also a couple random right wing political screeds thrown in with no plot relevance whatsoever that I’m 95% sure came from him given what’s shown up in some of his other books recently (suspect his editors have less power to say ‘stop being an ass’ these days since I don’t remember those from his earlier works). When/if another book in the series shows up at the library I might pick it up as a quick read, but it’s nothing I’ll go looking for.