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[I wrote this on Facebook and Instagram. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I publish it here in slightly edited form]. Book # 20 of 2026 is a wrap:  Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler. First off, this has been the most fruitful reading year I have had in an extremely long time. I don't have a great explanation for it, other than I've tried to be more open and adventurous in my book choices, and this strategy has paid off. Waiting on a Friend is another book that crossed my desk at work and it looked intriguing enough to   take a chance on it and place a hold. However, as it sometimes goes with this, when it was my turn, I was already knee-deep in another book. I didn't get to Waiting on a Friend until three days before the due date. Thanfully, the novel grabbed me right away and I returned it "only" three days late. The book takes place in NYC in 1984. Our narrator is Renata, a (self-described) queer 29-year-old vintage clothing store employee who,...

Superstars is yet another, "Hey, that looks interesting--let me put a hold on it!" book. It came across my desk at work and I can only assume the description on the back grabbed me right away: "First published in 2000, Superstars is a cult classic: a blistering but tender, sexed-up, drugged-out fictionalization of lesbian life in the '90s Paris techno scene." I mean, how is that NOT gonna pique my curiosity? Superstars , as the blurb indicates, was originally published in French back in the year 2000. It was not translated into English until this year. I had never heard of it until it hit my desk waiting to be catalogued. The author, Ann Scott (a pen name) has had quite an interesting life. Born in 1965,  her father was Russian and her mother was French. As a young teenager, she lived for a while in England, where she became interested in the burgeoning punk scene. She played drums in a band, and she also modeled for a spell. Then she became a write...

After reading Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House and finishing it on May 6, I returned to Riley in the final week of last month and finished her book My Phantoms on June 30. As much as I enjoyed The Palm House , I liked My Phantoms even more. It's hard to neatly describe why I find Riley's books so enjoyable and compulsively readable. There is very little action or plot twists--not that any of that matters much to me. It comes down to the sharply drawn characters and Riley's ability to notice and artfully describe the small details of ordinary life. My Phantoms is narrated by Bridget "Bridge" Grant, a 40-something academic living in London with her partner, John. Bridget's parents, Lee and Helen (aka "Hen") divorced when Bridget was two years old. Bridget has an older sister, Michelle. Early in the book, Bridget describes her and Michelle's awkward court-mandated visits with her father. Lee frequently picks on and bullies the gir...