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two decades ago i read a graphic novelization of the 9/11 report, an unexpectedly compelling synthesis. a similar treatment of giec is working well, with the narrators (one eager, one a bit skeptical) talking to various giec members. at this moment, valérie masson-delmotte recommends the best summary to read from the 4,000-page report, and recounts an initial analogy to pottery that got her laughed out of the room, as everyone at once saw the Hot Pottery scene from ghost

this was a book club selection a decade ago… how did i miss it

I walked into a sapphic schoolgirl princess romance — the cover is very accurate — but partway through, a mystery broke out.

The story is that a middle-class American gets into a fancy boarding school on a music scholarship and then falls into the arms of a princess, who as heir to the throne, is very much not out as lesbian. She already had a sullied name because of a party gone very wrong the year before. The last thing she or the royal family needs is another scandal. So of course they get one.

The stakes were high enough to drive the plot, but never so high that I pushed the book aside, as I'm prone to doing. While I admit to being overly fond of sapphic schoolgirl princess romances, I promise you this is very well done.

If you're a fan of public art, or mosaics, or New York City, or transit, this could be your book. Contemporary Art Underground is a beautiful, weighty coffee-table book with photos from across the MTA universe, encompassing all boroughs (yes, and Staten Island too) and all of MTA's transit systems. The subway is front and center, but LIRR, Metro-North, and the buses are represented.

William Wegman's dogs lord over the 23 St F/M station; Yayoi Kusama has an impossibly long mosaic work running the length of the new LIRR station at Grand Central; Nick Cave's Soundsuits lines a new, narrow connector that links Times Square station to 42 St-Bryant Park.

Definitely worth a look, the book and the stations both.