I've written about them before but I LOVE the Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney mysteries by Claudia Gray. I am reading the third one right now (The Perils of Lady Catherine De Bourgh) and it is so great! The young Mr. Darcy in these murder mystery novels is SO autistic and I feel like the representation is the best I have seen in awhile.
I am always looking for romance books with enby characters, so let me know if you have any good ones!
I’m waiting for the book to be at my local library and for the four other people who have it on hold before to read it. But I literally am so excited to read the continuation of their story and their sleuthing.
I am halfway through Soil: the Story of a Black Mother's Garden, and it is such a soothing insightful read. She's a professor--I think of creative writing, with a niche in environmental literature, and she writes such a profound critique of the core cannon of environmental literature in the USA--which basically is white men alone in the wilderness with no responsibilities toward anyone tying them down (or white women mimicking that freedom). She talks about how children and their caretakers have been erased from the environmental cannon, and her critique just intersects with my personal life in such profound ways. She also writes a critique of an artistic depiction of the Chain of Being, which depicts an isolated fully clothed Mary near the top, and the devil at the bottom in the form of a naked woman with sagging breasts (implying having fed babies), birthing babies. The way her writing braids nature writing together with all the ways our culture alienates motherhood and depicts mothering bodies as gross, bad, and undesirable has been so soothing to me. It feels like a social critique where I can see the story of my own body, which is a very rare experience.
I am looking for fiction that can be spoon-fed to a very tired brain, but also offers depth of insight and analysis. Octavia Butler fits this criteria perfectly. Her prose is direct, her narratives plot driven, and her plots riveting--but not at the expense of characters (who can feel very real without a lot of literary flourish), and her books offer social analysis that change the way I think about the world (also the most terrifying dystopia I've ever read--just as a warning...). I feel like I could enjoy a wide variety of genres or moods if it fits this criteria--of an easy read that also makes you think differntly about the world (Becky Chambers Psalm of the Wild Built fit this as well)
I just started “to be taught if fortunate” by Becky chambers but it’s not capturing me the same way the monk & robots books did. Do you like short stories? Good for a tired brain & can still pack a punch. I just finished a collection called “in machine we trust” by Tim Conrad. 👍🏽👍🏽
I've always had a hard time with short stories! it usually takes me a few chapters to really relax into a novel, so I think short stories are too short for me to get there. Although, most of my exposure to short stories were literary stories assigned in my creative writing program. there may be easier reads out there that would be interesting to try
I’ve only read Kindred, but agree with your analysis of her. You might enjoy The Change…it’s a suspenseful page turner with A LOT to say about our justice system and the “dead women industrial complex.” It centers around a group of women who received special powers when they went through menopause. I LOVED the magical realism and found it super thought provoking while still being easy to read. The audio is excellent.
The Change sounds amazing - love that the main characters are women in my age category - and perimenopause is where I’m at right now (ugh) - just added it to my list.
I LOVED The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - queer, incredible world-building and magic system, and I 100% read Ana Dolabra as autistic. I ate that book up.
Also loving A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon - it’s a standalone prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree and I’ve been avoiding it because it’s 800 pages long but now that I’m in it, it’s like being wrapped in a cozy blanket of great writing and vivid scenery and detailed characters and Older! Lesbians! Who still! Have sex! And are fully realized people!? And also they fight bad guys. Where have these been all my reading life??
And I wish I liked Anne of Green Gables more (I tried so hard to love her as a kid; read all the books) but her penchant for getting into trouble made/makes the part of me that was a frequently-punished kid want to crawl into a hole and die. I get so anxious reading about plucky heroines who break the rules! Just me?
The Anne of Green Gables books are one of my comfort series that I come back to again and again. Another is the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace.
Recently I'm on a bit of a self-discovery journey (not sure whether I have ADHD or autism or both) and I've read two memoirs that really resonated with me.
1. A Thousand Ways To Pay Attention by Rebecca Schiller (diagnosed as an adult with ADHD)
2. The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May (diagnosed as an adult with autism).
Self-help books about ADHD and autism have not been, uh, very helpful for me thus far, but the memoirs made me feel like "YES, this is what it's like inside my brain, and in my life."
Oh how funny, I just started reading Anne of Green Gables to my daughters right around the time I got your email! They're 6 and almost 8 and so far are super into it!
The most recent books I've read and loved are the Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Orman. They're fun murder mysteries, but I mainly love them for the characters. Each character is a complete delight and the way they interact makes them even better. It's a team of old people who live in a luxury retirement village in England.
I just started listening to Gay the Pray Away and I'm not very far in, but so far it seems very promising.
Gay the Pray away cracked me up with its references but not references to Bill Gothard/ATI. I found it to be a delightfully simple read and the ending made me cry.
For all the fellow Monk & Robot readers, The singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo has a similar kinda main character, but each book in the series can be read as a standalone and is a little more story-driven than M&R.
A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall is a wonderful historical M/F romance with a trans MC and queer side characters I read fairly recently and really enjoyed!
Also Good Mourning, Darling by Azalea Crowley is a cozy horror with a little romance with a bi and greysexual/greyromantic pairing and autism rep that I just found super delightful.
I recently read I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy which is a memoir of a child tv star discussing her life primarily through the lens of her relationship with her mother who eventually died of cancer. It’s good but very heavy in regards to dysfunctional families, parental abuse, ocd, and eating disorder stuff. A fiction thing that’s been good recently is All Systems Red by Martha Wells which is the first of the Murderbot series which is about a corporately owned cyborg who overrides its control chip but uses its freedom just to watch soap operas when it’s not working but when a job goes wrong the humans it’s been assigned to protect begin to suspect something is amiss.
If anyone has recommendations in this vein, I like mostly sci-fi and fantasy with enbies and/or robots like the Murderbot series or the Monk and Robot books.
Eeeee! I love this and resonate with so much of it. Two recent favs:
1. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. There is a M/F romance, but also a witch breaking rules because the rules seem wrong to her. And it hits in all the right places for this person who grew up in a place where many of the rules seemed wrong, so I broke them (gradually).
2. Everything by Rainbow Rowell, but a good place to start is Fan Girl, and then immediately jump into the Simon Snow trilogy (which I liked even more, but Fan Girl sets up the trilogy). Fan Girl is a M/F romance, it's YA, and it's got lots of queer love (the Simon Snow trilogy is queer fantasy).
I also love a good memoir, especially from a comedian and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate was absolutely delightful.
I love reading about reading! This month I finished Slewfoot by Brom and really liked it. Set in Puritan times. (F the Puritans!) it is folk horror. I love the pagan creatures Forest Creek and Sky which are combined human and opossum etc.
With #joyful #enthusiasm, I'm kinda deep into grief memoirs. I just finished "Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life", by David Giffels. Giffels is by turns smart, funny, poignant, and has superb taste in music ( included is his personal funeral playlist😀) Turning 50, he is slammed by grief as three loved ones in quick succession are diagnosed with cancer and he is left to deal with the untimely, unexpected deaths of two. Aching visceral honesty, a beautiful mediative examination of loss and what happens after the funeral: the incremental acceptance and acknowledgment of the spaces left.
Next up on the Grief Summer Tour 2024: " Grief is for Other People", Sloane Crosley". About 20% through it and highly recommend. Unprocessed grief slams Crosley when her home's robbed of sentimental objects and her best friend dies unexpectedly.
I have Joan Didion's " The Year of Magical Thinking", and Patrick Bringley's " All the Beauty in the World" in the queue.
Looking for Grief Memoirs by creatives who experience and process through their creative work. TIA!
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney is an incredible grief memoir. He’s a comedian/actor/writer who lost his son to a brain tumor at two years old. It is absolutely brutal and unflinching, but also funny and tender and life affirming. I wept/laughed my way through the whole thing.
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene is also incredible - also about losing his very young child. i could only read a few pages at a time (same w/ Rob Delaney's) because i was weeping so much, but it was lovely, too.
Reading is my special interest, so I could overwhelm you here :) but two books I've loved lately are A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, a mash-up of memoir and nature writing by a woman with CPTSD....a voice I've never heard before, so good....and Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, such a tender novel for anyone who likes beautiful characterization. I think we all have our sensitivities, though, and lately I've had to put aside some very good books because, sigh, America and the upcoming election and my nervous system. I generally love literary fiction and nonfiction (science, history, nature writing) ...but I've been dipping into genres like fantasy and romance. Happily the genres are getting better and better...all of them...so that's fun. I endorse books that offer resting places, self-soothing and pure fun. :)
Two of my favorite are books that are for older kids, both of which I found as an adult and love to re-read. The Ocean Within by V.M. Caldwell and Waiting for Normal by Leslie Connor. All my favorite books (and movies) deal with trauma and wanting desperately to belong. Hmmm.......
When I was a kid, I only read fiction. I thought non-fiction was boring.
As a younger adult, I then thought that fiction was a waste of time because it was talking about things that weren't true.
Now I have learned to love them both, but I still read a lot more non-fiction overall. I do enjoy fiction written for 8-12 year olds more than the fiction written for other age groups.
Ooh hand flap you could write about books all day and I would love it.
2 of my favorites. One I came across by accident, “the lost for words bookshop” by Stephanie Butland. Really about this habit we have of dissociating into books and needing them in order to become our full selves. It’s a little romance-y too: but really well done. The second is a super off beat choice for me: after years, I read “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk. I don’t have many masc interests and don’t identify as a fighter and I never saw the movie. But I found it a really interesting meditation on self-delusion, religion, psychology and mass psychology, and the death urge which opposes the creative urge. Made me THINK.
Like you DL I read for different reasons, but I recently identified them as for pleasure, learning, and growth. Learning and growth being slightly different ways to retain things for me. And if I stop I just shrivel up and die. Not a new baby, not a full time job and a grad program and 2 kids and 2 elders one of whom is starting to have dementia…nothing. It’s my one coping mechanism.
My kids pointed out that I flap when my son (our index patient) got his diagnosis. We have a whole family of autistics but I’m the big flapper. This and my hyperlexia were the unmistakable “tells” for me.
I'm currently reading The Stars Too Fondly and love it so far (queer friends accidently steal a space craft) and the last book I loved was The Housemates (literary fiction, queer artists traveling and making art)
I loved James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and I’m currently reading another novel of his, Deacon King Kong. As a teen, I relished Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (read it multiple times) for its vast cast of characters, many of which are endearing while others are so absurd and comedic, whose lives merge as a mystery unfolds. McBride’s novels have a similar vibe, have hilarious scenarios and exquisite writing, and emphasize the centrality of community and community organizing as the locus of resistance to white/christian supremacy.
I would actually love reading a enby/sapphic romance but I don’t want cheesy or predictable writing.
And Martha Wells’ murderbot diaries has the.best.enby character ever. Who even gets a romance in book 2 or 3. Great writing. But not fuzzy. “I’m not a sexbot” after all…
I think This is How you Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar would scratch a similar itch to murderbot and Gideon the Ninth. Witty, a little romantic sci-fi novella! I love it so much haha. Gender is definitely fluid for both main characters.
I’m loving Ray Kurzweil’s new book, The Singularity is Nearer. It’s really well written and putting into perspective the history of technology and the future of it.
Novel wise, I’m listening to Stephen King’s new short story collection— Some Like It Darker and loving the dark Florida vibes, and how it’s contextually very present-day. Kind of grandpaish in a cozy way.
I've written about them before but I LOVE the Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney mysteries by Claudia Gray. I am reading the third one right now (The Perils of Lady Catherine De Bourgh) and it is so great! The young Mr. Darcy in these murder mystery novels is SO autistic and I feel like the representation is the best I have seen in awhile.
I am always looking for romance books with enby characters, so let me know if you have any good ones!
I’m waiting for the book to be at my local library and for the four other people who have it on hold before to read it. But I literally am so excited to read the continuation of their story and their sleuthing.
I am halfway through Soil: the Story of a Black Mother's Garden, and it is such a soothing insightful read. She's a professor--I think of creative writing, with a niche in environmental literature, and she writes such a profound critique of the core cannon of environmental literature in the USA--which basically is white men alone in the wilderness with no responsibilities toward anyone tying them down (or white women mimicking that freedom). She talks about how children and their caretakers have been erased from the environmental cannon, and her critique just intersects with my personal life in such profound ways. She also writes a critique of an artistic depiction of the Chain of Being, which depicts an isolated fully clothed Mary near the top, and the devil at the bottom in the form of a naked woman with sagging breasts (implying having fed babies), birthing babies. The way her writing braids nature writing together with all the ways our culture alienates motherhood and depicts mothering bodies as gross, bad, and undesirable has been so soothing to me. It feels like a social critique where I can see the story of my own body, which is a very rare experience.
I am looking for fiction that can be spoon-fed to a very tired brain, but also offers depth of insight and analysis. Octavia Butler fits this criteria perfectly. Her prose is direct, her narratives plot driven, and her plots riveting--but not at the expense of characters (who can feel very real without a lot of literary flourish), and her books offer social analysis that change the way I think about the world (also the most terrifying dystopia I've ever read--just as a warning...). I feel like I could enjoy a wide variety of genres or moods if it fits this criteria--of an easy read that also makes you think differntly about the world (Becky Chambers Psalm of the Wild Built fit this as well)
I just started “to be taught if fortunate” by Becky chambers but it’s not capturing me the same way the monk & robots books did. Do you like short stories? Good for a tired brain & can still pack a punch. I just finished a collection called “in machine we trust” by Tim Conrad. 👍🏽👍🏽
I've always had a hard time with short stories! it usually takes me a few chapters to really relax into a novel, so I think short stories are too short for me to get there. Although, most of my exposure to short stories were literary stories assigned in my creative writing program. there may be easier reads out there that would be interesting to try
I thought his collection was accessible and some of them had really quirky characters and surprising twists.
(And just added the Becky Chambers book to my book list)
I’ve only read Kindred, but agree with your analysis of her. You might enjoy The Change…it’s a suspenseful page turner with A LOT to say about our justice system and the “dead women industrial complex.” It centers around a group of women who received special powers when they went through menopause. I LOVED the magical realism and found it super thought provoking while still being easy to read. The audio is excellent.
The Change sounds amazing - love that the main characters are women in my age category - and perimenopause is where I’m at right now (ugh) - just added it to my list.
It kind of makes going through menopause feel badass. 🤪😅
Thank you! I'll check it out.
I love both the Soil book and the few books by Octavia Butler that I have read as well!
I LOVED The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - queer, incredible world-building and magic system, and I 100% read Ana Dolabra as autistic. I ate that book up.
Also loving A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon - it’s a standalone prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree and I’ve been avoiding it because it’s 800 pages long but now that I’m in it, it’s like being wrapped in a cozy blanket of great writing and vivid scenery and detailed characters and Older! Lesbians! Who still! Have sex! And are fully realized people!? And also they fight bad guys. Where have these been all my reading life??
And I wish I liked Anne of Green Gables more (I tried so hard to love her as a kid; read all the books) but her penchant for getting into trouble made/makes the part of me that was a frequently-punished kid want to crawl into a hole and die. I get so anxious reading about plucky heroines who break the rules! Just me?
The Anne of Green Gables books are one of my comfort series that I come back to again and again. Another is the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace.
Recently I'm on a bit of a self-discovery journey (not sure whether I have ADHD or autism or both) and I've read two memoirs that really resonated with me.
1. A Thousand Ways To Pay Attention by Rebecca Schiller (diagnosed as an adult with ADHD)
2. The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May (diagnosed as an adult with autism).
Self-help books about ADHD and autism have not been, uh, very helpful for me thus far, but the memoirs made me feel like "YES, this is what it's like inside my brain, and in my life."
Katherine MAy's writing made me feel really seen too!
I just went to add both memoirs to my TBR list and it turns out the first one is already on it! I added the second though. Thanks for sharing!
Oh how funny, I just started reading Anne of Green Gables to my daughters right around the time I got your email! They're 6 and almost 8 and so far are super into it!
The most recent books I've read and loved are the Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Orman. They're fun murder mysteries, but I mainly love them for the characters. Each character is a complete delight and the way they interact makes them even better. It's a team of old people who live in a luxury retirement village in England.
I just started listening to Gay the Pray Away and I'm not very far in, but so far it seems very promising.
It's so funny because I have a sweatshirt I made for my teen that says gay the pray away :) I will have to look into this book!
Gay the Pray away cracked me up with its references but not references to Bill Gothard/ATI. I found it to be a delightfully simple read and the ending made me cry.
I just checked out a sample of this one and can’t wait till it comes off hold! So far, great
For all the fellow Monk & Robot readers, The singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo has a similar kinda main character, but each book in the series can be read as a standalone and is a little more story-driven than M&R.
A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall is a wonderful historical M/F romance with a trans MC and queer side characters I read fairly recently and really enjoyed!
Also Good Mourning, Darling by Azalea Crowley is a cozy horror with a little romance with a bi and greysexual/greyromantic pairing and autism rep that I just found super delightful.
Loved Singing Hills, the enby MC and the queerness of it all!
Thanks for the Nghi Vo rec! I find myself rereading Monk and Robot so often!
I recently read I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy which is a memoir of a child tv star discussing her life primarily through the lens of her relationship with her mother who eventually died of cancer. It’s good but very heavy in regards to dysfunctional families, parental abuse, ocd, and eating disorder stuff. A fiction thing that’s been good recently is All Systems Red by Martha Wells which is the first of the Murderbot series which is about a corporately owned cyborg who overrides its control chip but uses its freedom just to watch soap operas when it’s not working but when a job goes wrong the humans it’s been assigned to protect begin to suspect something is amiss.
If anyone has recommendations in this vein, I like mostly sci-fi and fantasy with enbies and/or robots like the Murderbot series or the Monk and Robot books.
Eeeee! I love this and resonate with so much of it. Two recent favs:
1. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. There is a M/F romance, but also a witch breaking rules because the rules seem wrong to her. And it hits in all the right places for this person who grew up in a place where many of the rules seemed wrong, so I broke them (gradually).
2. Everything by Rainbow Rowell, but a good place to start is Fan Girl, and then immediately jump into the Simon Snow trilogy (which I liked even more, but Fan Girl sets up the trilogy). Fan Girl is a M/F romance, it's YA, and it's got lots of queer love (the Simon Snow trilogy is queer fantasy).
I also love a good memoir, especially from a comedian and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate was absolutely delightful.
I love reading about reading! This month I finished Slewfoot by Brom and really liked it. Set in Puritan times. (F the Puritans!) it is folk horror. I love the pagan creatures Forest Creek and Sky which are combined human and opossum etc.
F the Puritans!
With #joyful #enthusiasm, I'm kinda deep into grief memoirs. I just finished "Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life", by David Giffels. Giffels is by turns smart, funny, poignant, and has superb taste in music ( included is his personal funeral playlist😀) Turning 50, he is slammed by grief as three loved ones in quick succession are diagnosed with cancer and he is left to deal with the untimely, unexpected deaths of two. Aching visceral honesty, a beautiful mediative examination of loss and what happens after the funeral: the incremental acceptance and acknowledgment of the spaces left.
Next up on the Grief Summer Tour 2024: " Grief is for Other People", Sloane Crosley". About 20% through it and highly recommend. Unprocessed grief slams Crosley when her home's robbed of sentimental objects and her best friend dies unexpectedly.
I have Joan Didion's " The Year of Magical Thinking", and Patrick Bringley's " All the Beauty in the World" in the queue.
Looking for Grief Memoirs by creatives who experience and process through their creative work. TIA!
I remember really loving the book About Alice by Calvin Trillium many moons ago . . . it is probably very old-fashioned but I loved it at the time.
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney is an incredible grief memoir. He’s a comedian/actor/writer who lost his son to a brain tumor at two years old. It is absolutely brutal and unflinching, but also funny and tender and life affirming. I wept/laughed my way through the whole thing.
Thank you! I am adding it to the queue! Down the rabbit hole, also found " Notes on Grief", by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene is also incredible - also about losing his very young child. i could only read a few pages at a time (same w/ Rob Delaney's) because i was weeping so much, but it was lovely, too.
Reading is my special interest, so I could overwhelm you here :) but two books I've loved lately are A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, a mash-up of memoir and nature writing by a woman with CPTSD....a voice I've never heard before, so good....and Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, such a tender novel for anyone who likes beautiful characterization. I think we all have our sensitivities, though, and lately I've had to put aside some very good books because, sigh, America and the upcoming election and my nervous system. I generally love literary fiction and nonfiction (science, history, nature writing) ...but I've been dipping into genres like fantasy and romance. Happily the genres are getting better and better...all of them...so that's fun. I endorse books that offer resting places, self-soothing and pure fun. :)
I totally agree that genre fiction continues to get better and better! It's an exciting time to start reading romance and fantasy more :)
Two of my favorite are books that are for older kids, both of which I found as an adult and love to re-read. The Ocean Within by V.M. Caldwell and Waiting for Normal by Leslie Connor. All my favorite books (and movies) deal with trauma and wanting desperately to belong. Hmmm.......
When I was a kid, I only read fiction. I thought non-fiction was boring.
As a younger adult, I then thought that fiction was a waste of time because it was talking about things that weren't true.
Now I have learned to love them both, but I still read a lot more non-fiction overall. I do enjoy fiction written for 8-12 year olds more than the fiction written for other age groups.
Ooh hand flap you could write about books all day and I would love it.
2 of my favorites. One I came across by accident, “the lost for words bookshop” by Stephanie Butland. Really about this habit we have of dissociating into books and needing them in order to become our full selves. It’s a little romance-y too: but really well done. The second is a super off beat choice for me: after years, I read “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk. I don’t have many masc interests and don’t identify as a fighter and I never saw the movie. But I found it a really interesting meditation on self-delusion, religion, psychology and mass psychology, and the death urge which opposes the creative urge. Made me THINK.
Like you DL I read for different reasons, but I recently identified them as for pleasure, learning, and growth. Learning and growth being slightly different ways to retain things for me. And if I stop I just shrivel up and die. Not a new baby, not a full time job and a grad program and 2 kids and 2 elders one of whom is starting to have dementia…nothing. It’s my one coping mechanism.
I love that you wrote out hand flap! That made me so happy. The lost for words bookshop is now on my library list, thank you so much!
My kids pointed out that I flap when my son (our index patient) got his diagnosis. We have a whole family of autistics but I’m the big flapper. This and my hyperlexia were the unmistakable “tells” for me.
I'm currently reading The Stars Too Fondly and love it so far (queer friends accidently steal a space craft) and the last book I loved was The Housemates (literary fiction, queer artists traveling and making art)
I loved James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and I’m currently reading another novel of his, Deacon King Kong. As a teen, I relished Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (read it multiple times) for its vast cast of characters, many of which are endearing while others are so absurd and comedic, whose lives merge as a mystery unfolds. McBride’s novels have a similar vibe, have hilarious scenarios and exquisite writing, and emphasize the centrality of community and community organizing as the locus of resistance to white/christian supremacy.
I would actually love reading a enby/sapphic romance but I don’t want cheesy or predictable writing.
It’s not exactly romance but Becky Chambers “monk & robot” series has a very lovable enby main character 💖
And Martha Wells’ murderbot diaries has the.best.enby character ever. Who even gets a romance in book 2 or 3. Great writing. But not fuzzy. “I’m not a sexbot” after all…
I enjoyed the series so much! It made me yearn for that world of such plenty and generosity.
I think This is How you Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar would scratch a similar itch to murderbot and Gideon the Ninth. Witty, a little romantic sci-fi novella! I love it so much haha. Gender is definitely fluid for both main characters.
I’m loving Ray Kurzweil’s new book, The Singularity is Nearer. It’s really well written and putting into perspective the history of technology and the future of it.
Novel wise, I’m listening to Stephen King’s new short story collection— Some Like It Darker and loving the dark Florida vibes, and how it’s contextually very present-day. Kind of grandpaish in a cozy way.