Upcoming talk: Dinosaurs, Kids, and the Future in the Jurassic Park Franchise

I’m giving a talk on my campus soon, the next in what is becoming a series of talks on the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies. All of these presentations are part of a larger book project I am slowly but surely developing. I always enjoy giving these Brown Bag presentations, and I’m looking forward to this one, which basically grew out of my initial response to the short film “Battle at Big Rock.” Plus, preparing for this talk gave me an excuse to watch all the movies again over break!

Books of 2019

As I do every year, I’ve kept a list of the books I read, their dates of publication, and my ratings of them. Below are two lists of favorites (best nonfiction and best fiction), plus the entire list of books I read in 2019. I read a total of 219 books this year, which seems fitting for 2019. I did include individual issues of comics and some children’s books here, which might seem like a cheat, but I also didn’t count many, many, many of the kids books I read this year with my kids. I only included a small handful of the most memorable ones.

First, favorites! I’m listing them in alphabetical order in each category. I couldn’t possibly rank the lists; narrowing it this far was hard enough!

Best Nonfiction:

1. Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America (2018)
   • This might be only for the reader who loves Angels in America, but that’s me, so I loved it!
2. Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019)
   • Fascinating true crime, literary history, and regional history all at once.
3. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015)
   • A rare academic book that is not only intellectually fascinating and relevant to my research but also moving.
4. Ariel Gore, Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance (2019)
   • Fun, feminist witchery!
5. Taisia Kitaiskaia, Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles (2017)
   • Advice in the form of prose poems, from the perspective of a powerful, self-possessed witch.
6. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)
   • The title says it all. I’m teaching it this semester!
7. Rax King, The People’s Elbow (2018)
   • A short memoir that somehow effectively combines a narrative about rape and trauma with an obsession with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The best accidental find of the year!
8. Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2019)
   • A brilliant memoir of an abusive relationship. Machado is a beautiful writer, and this was really hard to read but worth it.
9. Mallory O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (2019)
   • If I were ranking my Top Ten, this might be #1. O’Meara’s book is hilarious and filled with fascinating film history. Plus, I had several feminist “fuck yeah!” reactions, even in just the first few pages. Everyone should read this book.
10. Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (2018)
    • Another academic book that I truly enjoyed reading!

Best Fiction:

1. Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night (2019)
   • Cool worldbuilding and aliens! Queer characters! Beautiful writing! I read this with a student reading group in the spring, and they all loved it, too.
2. Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (2018)
   • A retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women in the background of those tales of war and conquest.
3. Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside (2018)
   • Bennett remains one of my favorite fantasy writers. This is a fun adventure story that ultimately has something powerful to say about self-determination.
4. Chelsea Cain (ill. Kate Niemczyk and Lia Miternique), Man-Eaters, Vol. 1 (2019)
   • It’s a comic book about periods, cats, toxoplasmosis, and violence! It’s fun!
5. Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (2017)
   • YA science fiction about North American indigenous people, loss of culture, and resilience.
6. Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014)
   • Another dystopia, this one focused on dangers to women. Deadly childbirth and masculinist enclaves. Terrifying. Also, I met Meg at an event earlier this year, and she is super cool.
7. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019)
   • I’m sometimes iffy about time travel narratives, but I loved this one. It’s a love story that gives it a real emotional core beyond the thinky bits. I loved this book so much that on my one full day in Chicago on my own, I opted to sit in a coffee shop and read this until I devoured the whole thing instead of going to more places.
8. Ariel Gore, We Were Witches (2017)
   • It’s not as much about witchcraft as the title might indicate, but I loved it anyway.
9. Peter Heller, The River (2019)
   • Men bonding out in nature. This book reminds me of both Deliverance and Brokeback Mountain in various ways. The end made me cry in public. No regrets.
10. N. K. Jemisin, Broken Earth series: The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), The Stone Sky (2017)
    • Yes, I’m cheating here. I don’t care. I loved this series so much. I read this whole series with another student reading group in the spring, and they loved it, too! I just can’t believe I waited so long before reading it. This series more than deserves all the hype it has gotten and all the awards it has won.
11. Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (2019)
    • Kay is a beautiful fantasy writer (I’ve long loved his Fionavar Tapestry series), and this is a really lovely, reflective story that’s actually mostly about aging and memory.
12. Stephen King, Pet Sematary
    • This is another one that made me cry while reading it in public. I honestly can’t decide if I love or hate this book because I found it so intensely upsetting.
13. Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower (2019)
    • I know Leckie primarily as a science fiction writer (space opera, cool AI, etc.), so I was both excited and hesitant with her shift to fantasy, but this book is so great. Honestly, I read it a while ago, so I don’t remember many details, but I remember I loved it.
14. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019)
    • Science fiction with a complex world, an interesting protagonist, and very neat technology! Its best feature is its attention to power and politics, though.
15. Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019)
    • Lesbian necromancers! A snarky heroine! Adventures! This was a wonderfully fun book.
16. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (2019)
    • This book gives me hope. It’s another time travel book, featuring alternate histories, with an eye to the possibility of creating a better future. Central settings include an alternate SoCal feminist punk scene and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which means I am inherently into this! It also addresses reproductive rights and feminist history in both direct and complicated ways. It’s almost like she wrote it just for me!
17. Helen Phillips, The Need (2019)
    • A dark story about motherhood, one that I found quite upsetting at times. It reminds me in some ways of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream – just as with that book, I didn’t always like reading it, but I also couldn’t stop.
18. Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
    • I bought this book ages ago, simply because I’ve always loved Powers’ writing, and I finally (just within the last week) found enough time and mental bandwidth to read it. It was so worth waiting for! It’s a book about trees that has me excited about learning more botany. It’s a book about activism that inspires. It’s long, but I plan to teach it in my environmental lit & culture class next fall (and I really hope the students like it!).
19. Lina Rather, Sisters of the Vast Black (2019)
    • Nuns in space! That makes it sound silly, but it’s a thoughtful novella about politics and religion in a society expanding across space.
20. Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers (2019)
    • A pandemic causes the people of a small town to fall asleep. It’s quietly frightening.

And here is the entire list of books I read this year, complete with ratings. Five-star books are in bold; there are more five-star books than made my lists above.

January

1. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) – 4 stars
2. Alexis Turner, Taxidermy (2013) – 4 stars
3. Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel (2018) – 3 stars
4. James Tynion IV (ill. Eryk Donovan and Dee Cunniffe), Eugenic (2018) – 4 stars
5. Mira Grant, Kingdom of Needle and Bone (2018) – 4 stars
6. Phil Kaye, Date & Time (2018) – 4 stars
7. Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema (2018) – 3 stars
8. Samanta Schweblin, Mouthful of Birds (2019) – 4 stars
9. Starr Stackstein, Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (2015) – 3 stars
10. Craig Jones, Blood Secrets (1978) – 4 stars
11. Sam J. Miller, The Art of Starving (2017) – 5 stars
12. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, E. B. DuBois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (2018) – 4 stars
13. K. Reed (ill. Joe Flood), Science Comics: Dinosaurs: Fossils and Feathers (2016) – 4 stars
14. Jeff Moss (ill. Tom Leigh), Bone Poems (1997) – 3 stars
15. K. Jemisin, How Long ‘til Black History Month? (2018) – 4 stars

February

1. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (2018) – 4 stars
2. Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow (2019) – 5 stars
3. Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon (2018) – 4 stars
4. John Warner, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (2018) – 4 stars
5. Eli Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (2018) – 3 stars
6. Wesley Chu, Time Salvager (2015) – 4 stars
7. Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937) – 3 stars
8. Robert Jackson Bennett, Vigilance (2019) – 4 stars
9. Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America (2018) – 5 stars
10. Joanna Wolfe, Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups (2009) – 4 stars

March

1. Wesley Chu, Time Siege (2016) – 4 stars
2. Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (2019) – 3 stars
3. Dane Huckelbridge, No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History (2019) – 3 stars
4. Axel Young, Blood Rubies (1982) – 3 stars
5. Nick Pyenson, Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures (2018) – 3 stars
6. Mallory O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (2019) – 5 stars
7. Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish (2015) – 5 stars
8. N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015) – 5 stars
9. Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night (2019) – 5 stars
10. Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread (2019) – 3 stars
11. Eoin Colfer, Illegal (2017) – 4 stars
12. Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (2018) – 3 stars
13. Judith Viorst, Lulu and the Brontosaurus (2010) – 4 stars
14. Robin Williams, The Non-Designer’s Design Book (4^th edition) (2014) – 3 stars
15. Osamu Tezuka, A Tale of the Twentieth Century (1983; 1996) – 3 stars
16. Debbie Tung, Book Love (2019) – 3 stars
17. N. K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate (2016) – 5 stars
18. Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (2016) – 4 stars
19. Rose Macaulay, What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918) – 4 stars
20. Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019) – 4 stars
21. Peter Heller, The River (2019) – 5 stars
22. Renée Nault (and Margaret Atwood), The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel (2019) – 5 stars

April

1. Stephen King, Pet Sematary (1983) – 5 stars
2. Victor LaValle and John Jacob Adams (eds.), A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers (2019) – 5 stars
3. Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (2018) – 5 stars
4. Kyle Baker, Nat Turner (2006) – 4 stars
5. James Howe (ill. Randy Cecil), Brontorina (2010) – 5 stars
6. Ted Rechlin, Sharks: A 400 Million Year Journey (2018) – 4 stars
7. N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky (2017) – 5 stars
8. Jennie Orr and David Orr, Mammoth is Mopey (2015) – 4 stars
9. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) – 4 stars
10. Josh Malerman, Inspection (2019) – 2 stars
11. Miriam Toews, Women Talking (2018) – 3 stars
12. Darcy Van Poelgeest, Little Bird #1 (2019) – 4 stars
13. U. Nicholson, Fingers of Fear (1937) – 3 stars
14. Adam Glass and Olivia Cuartero-Briggs (ill. Hayden Sherman), Mary Shelley Monster Hunter #1 (2019) – 4 stars
15. Darcy Van Poelgeest, Little Bird #2 (2019) – 5 stars
16. Jeff Lemire (ill. Dustin Nguyen), Ascender #1 (2019) – 4 stars
17. Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream (2019) – 4 stars
18. David Streitfeld (ed.), Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2019) – 4 stars
19. Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) – 3 stars
20. Chelsea Cain (ill. Kate Niemczyk and Lia Miternique), Man-Eaters, Vol. 1 (2019) – 5 stars

May

1. Ulises Farinas, Godzilla: Rage Across Time (2016) – 3 stars
2. Emily Tetri, Tiger vs. Nightmare (2018) – 5 stars
3. Jon Agee, Life on Mars (2017) – 4 stars
4. Ken Greenhall, Childgrave (1981) – 4 stars
5. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) – 5 stars
6. Ira Levin, Sliver (1991) – 3 stars
7. Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower (2019) – 5 stars
8. Seanan McGuire, Middlegame (2019) – 4 stars
9. Sarah Perry, Melmoth (2018) – 4 stars
10. Saladin Ahmed (ill. Sami Kivelä), Abbott (2018) – 4 stars
11. Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (2019) – 4 stars
12. Jeff VanderMeer, This World Is Full of Monsters (2017) – 3 stars
13. Nnedi Okorafor (ill. Leonardo Romero), Shuri, Vol. 1: The Search for Black Panther (2019) – 3 stars
14. Darcy Van Poelgeest, Little Bird #3 (2019) – 5 stars
15. Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (2019) – 5 stars
16. Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange (2014) – 4 stars
17. Helen Marshall, The Migration (2019) – 4 stars
18. Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018) – 4 stars
19. Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide (2013; 2019) – 4 stars

June

1. Chess, Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) – 4 stars
2. Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014) – 5 stars
3. Adam Glass and Olivia Cuartero-Briggs, Mary Shelley Monster Hunter #2 (2019) – 4 stars
4. Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980) – 3 stars
5. Farah Mendlesohn, A Short History of Fantasy (2009) – 3 stars
6. Tim Johnston, The Current (2019) – 5 stars
7. George O. Smith, Hellflower (1953) – 2 stars
8. Gwyneth Jones, Joanna Russ (2019) – 3 stars
9. Tobias Meneley and Jesse Oak Taylor (eds.), Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017) – 4 stars
10. Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012) – 3 stars
11. Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice (1995) – 4 stars
12. Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin (1996) – 4 stars
13. Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in retain, 1660-1815 (2008) – 3 stars
14. Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (2013) – 4 stars
15. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (2007) – 4 stars
16. Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Quest (1997) – 4 stars
17. J. Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (2019) – 4 stars

July

1. Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World (2003) – 3 stars
2. Brian Attebery, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2013) – 4 stars
3. Chuck Wendig, Wanderers (2019) – 4 stars
4. Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell, The Tangled Lands (2018) – 5 stars
5. Helen Phillips, The Need (2019) – 5 stars
6. Sam J. Miller, Destroy All Monsters (2019) – 5 stars
7. Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars (2019) – 4 stars
8. Allen A. Debus, Prehistoric Monsters: The Real and Imagined Creatures of the Past That We Love to Fear (2009) – 3 stars
9. Jenn Lyons, The Ruin of Kings (2019) – 3 stars
10. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) – 5 stars
11. Grégoire Courtois (trans. Mullins Rhonda), The Laws of the Skies (2016; 2019) – 2 stars
12. Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography (2018) – 4 stars
13. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (2018) – 4 stars
14. Claire McGowan, What You Did (2019) – 3 stars
15. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) – 5 stars
16. Rax King, The People’s Elbow (2018) – 5 stars

August

1. Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X (2019) – 4 stars
2. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (2018) – 4 stars
3. George Gaylord Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder (1996) – 3 stars
4. Eugene Linden, Deep Past (2019) – 3 stars
5. Gary Grossman, Old Earth (2015) – 2 stars
6. Markisan Naso (ill. Jason Muhr), Voracious: Diners, Dinosaurs & Dives (2016) – 4 stars
7. Markisan Naso (ill. Jason Muhr), Voracious: Feeding Time (2017) – 4 stars
8. Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (eds.), Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018) – 4 stars
9. Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare (ill. Natacha Bustos), Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF (2015) – 3 stars
10. Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare (ill. Marco Failla and Natacha Bustos), Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 2: Cosmic Cooties (2016) – 4 stars
11. Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore, BTTM FDRS (2019) – 4 stars
12. Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (2017) – 4 stars
13. Jeanette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun (2017) – 3 stars
14. Naomi Morgenstern, Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics (2018) – 4 stars
15. Mira Grant, In the Shadow of Spindrift House (2019) – 4 stars

September

1. Blake Crouch, Recursion (2019) – 3 stars
2. Nicholas Aflleje, Sarah Delaine, Ashley Lanni, and Adam Wollet, Little Girls (2019) – 4 stars
3. Benjanun Sriduangkaew, And Shall Machines Surrender (2019) – 4 stars
4. Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power (2019) – 4 stars
5. Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (2018) – 5 stars
6. Santiago Garcia (ill. David Rubin), Beowulf (2013) – 4 stars
7. Michael Alexander (trans.), Beowulf (975; 2003) – 3 stars
8. Burton Raffel (trans.), Beowulf (975; 1963) – 4 stars
9. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (2018) – 4 stars
10. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011) – 4 stars
11. Kieron Gillen (ill. Jamie McKelvie), The Wicked + the Divine, Vol. 1: The Faust Act (2014) – 4 stars
12. Kieron Gillen (ill. Jamie McKelvie), The Wicked + the Divine, Vol. 2 (2015) – 5 stars
13. Frederick Rebsamen (trans.), Beowulf: An Updated Verse Translation (1000; 2013) – 5 stars
14. Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (2017) – 4 stars
15. Seamus Heaney (trans.), Beowulf: A Verse Translation (1000; 2007) – 4 stars
16. Kieron Gillen (ill. Jamie McKelvie), The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 3: Commercial Suicide (2016) – 3 stars
17. Kieron Gillen (ill. Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson), The Wicked + The Divine, Vol.4: Rising Action (2016) – 4 stars
18. Eve L. Ewing, 1919 (2019) – 4 stars
19. Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019) – 5 stars
20. Sophocles (trans. Anne Carson), Antigone (441 BCE; 2015) – 5 stars
21. Euripides (trans. Sheila Murnaghan), Medea (431 BCE; 2018) – 4 stars
22. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Black Medea: Adaptations for Modern Plays (2013) – 3 stars
23. Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks, Medea: A Radical New Version from the Perspective of the Children (2015) – 5 stars
24. Euripides (trans. Anne Carson), Bakkhai (405 BCE; 2015) – 4 stars
25. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019) – 5 stars
26. Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) – 5 stars
27. L. Stine (ill. German Peralta, Daniel Warren Johnson, Christopher Mitten, and Kate Niemczyk), Man-Thing (2017) – 3 stars
28. Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019)- 4 stars
29. Michael Patrick Hicks, The Resurrectionists (2019) – 3 stars

October

1. Kit Whitfield, Benighted (2006) – 4 stars
2. Marcus Sedgwick, Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black (2019) – 3 stars
3. Kim Q. Hall (ed.), Feminist Disability Studies (2011) – 4 stars
4. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019) – 4 stars
5. Jennifer Giesbrecht, The Monster of Elendhaven (2019) – 4 stars
6. Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (2019) – 4 stars
7. Carolyn Johnsen (ed.), Taking Science to the People: A Communication Primer for Scientists and Engineers (2010) – 4 stars
8. X. Beckett, Gamechanger (2019) – 4 stars
9. Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods (2018) – 3 stars
10. Mica Pollock, Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School (2008) – 3 stars
11. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) – 2 stars
12. Naomi Booth, Sealed (2017) – 4 stars
13. Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) – 4 stars
14. Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) – 4 stars
15. Ariel Gore, Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance (2019) – 5 stars
16. Jamila Lyiscott, Black Appetite. White Food.: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom (2019) – 3 stars
17. Sabrina Scott, witchbody (2015) – 4 stars

November

1. Kristen J. Sollee, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (2017) – 3 stars
2. Dan Watters (ill. Val Rodrigues), Deep Roots (2019) – 4 stars
3. Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic (1995) – 4 stars
4. Ariel Gore, We Were Witches (2017) – 5 stars
5. Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers (2019) – 5 stars
6. Cixin Liu, Supernova Era (2019) – 3 stars
7. Adam Nevill, The Reddening (2019) – 3 stars
8. Taisia Kitaiskaia, Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles (2017) – 5 stars
9. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (2019) – 5 stars
10. Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (1974) – 4 stars
11. Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (2017) – 5 stars
12. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (eds.), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (2018) – 4 stars
13. Maryse Condé (trans. Richard Philcox), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986; 2009) – 4 stars
14. Pam Grossman, Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power (2019) – 4 stars
15. Pam Grossman, What Is a Witch (2016) – 4 stars
16. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (eds.), Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (2018) – 4 stars
17. Nnedi Okorafor, Akada Witch (2011) – 3 stars
18. Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre (2019) – 4 stars
19. Jeanette Winterson, Frankisstein: A Love Story (2019) – 4 stars
20. Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart (1947; 2019) – 3 stars
21. Leila Taylor, Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul (2019) – 4 stars
22. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer (2019) – 4 stars

December

1. Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019) – 3 stars
2. Leonora Carrington, Down Below (1945) – 3 stars
3. Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019) – 4 stars
4. Emily Carroll, When I Arrived at the Castle (2019) – 4 stars
5. Lina Rather, Sisters of the Vast Black (2019) – 5 stars
6. Jillian Weise, Cyborg Detective (2019) – 3 stars
7. Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (2011; 2019) – 5 stars
8. Nona Fernández (trans. Natasha Wimmer), Space Invaders (2013; 2019) – 4 stars
9. Claire Kann, Let’s Talk About Love (2018) – 3 stars
10. J. Tudor, The Hiding Place (2019) – 4 stars
11. Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2019) – 5 stars
12. Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered (2018) – 4 stars
13. Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside (2018) – 5 stars
14. Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) – 5 stars
15. Paul Tremblay, Growing Things and Other Stories (2019) – 4 stars
16. Inés Estrada, Alienation (2019) – 3 stars
17. Elizabeth Bram (ill. Chuck Groenink), Rufus the Writer (2015) – 4 stars

Decade Totals (as usual, skewed very much toward the last decade):

2010s – 183
2000s – 12
1990s – 7
1980s – 6
1970s – 2
1960s – 2
1950s – 2
1940s – 2
1930s – 2
1910s – 1
1-1000 AD – 4
500-1 BCE – 3

Star Ratings:

5 – 49
4 – 110
3 – 55
2 – 5
1 – 0

This might the first year I’ve ever had ZERO 1-star books in the year. I guess I’m getting better at choosing books I’ll actually like.