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when i picked this up i thought it was new writing. it's actually old columns of his. they were great when i read them the first time. not really interested in re-reading them, particularly the ones from the Bush era.

Never Go Back has a simpler conspiracy than the previous book, A Wanted Man, and it meant I could actually enjoy this one. The bad guys mess with Reacher, setting him up to take a fall for a murder he did not commit. This sets up a cat-and-mouse between Reacher and the baddies, as he escapes, dodges the fuzz & the henchmen, tries to rescue the girl, and gets down & dirty with the woman he decided he wanted to meet something like 4 books ago.

new vocabulary: parturition

(formal) or (technical) the action of giving birth to young; childbirth

had a few other new vocabulary words, which is weird for a Reacher nook, but i didn't have my phone handy to post.

Nope, sorry, we're just whipsawing between banal generalities and pernicious nonsense too fast for me. If there's a point or lesson in this book it'll either be from the other real knowledge that it builds on, or absolute incoherence from the dross with which those firm facts are mortared. I don't care to find out.

This is October's choice for the Queer Romance Club read on Mastodon.

Now I know where Verso Books took its name, from the left side of an open book.

People with wombs are selected to colonize a new planet (yuck) because people on earth are too busy destroying themselves & climate change has become too violent at scale. They travel with thousands of specimens to be used for artificial insemination.

I really liked this plot twist on how people get chosen. It's a murder mystery that is sorta melancholic that ends on a more hopeful note. I felt really sad reading about the climate change and how the last hummingbird was caged in a zoo that was then hit by a missile. It really gutted me because thats what is happening now in Lebanon & Palestine.

Otherwise, my only criticism is that this book is too kind to fascists.

The woman sitting at the counter next to me at The Pork Store this morning was reading White Sky, Black Ice. I mentioned reading and liking it. Because it's not a well known book, it sparked a long discussion of our favorite authors.

Also, he's in high school but so cool he picks up college girls.

As before, young Reacher is even less believable than adult Reacher. Very meh on this story.

I bought the latest edition of the CMOS and put it on a newly created "Reference" shelf here.

Kress likes to do "what if human bodies were changed..." stories. This one is: what if a symbiotic species inhabited a human such that it could make changes to the host but the person and symbiote could only communicate in a general sense. So the symbiote can make its host able to spit toxic saliva when threatened, or change the host's pigment and apparent age, etc. Set in an era where there's a breakdown in civil society because large numbers of US residents believe in witches (and want to burn them at the stake).

The Pieczynski piece features a woman in 1980s Sandinista Nicaragua who focuses the energy of the fighting between Contras and Sandinistas and turns it into sentient whirlwinds and golems.