This might be the first funny book I've ever enjoyed. (Excluding dark satire, of course. I'm looking at you, Bunny). I picked this up because I wanted something quick to boost my reading goal, but I actually really enjoyed this comic. Typically, I feel a sense of disconnect from comics/graphic novels/manga, but I found that the genre of humorous fantasy perfectly compliments the medium. This charmed me in similar ways that Terry Pratchett's Going Postal did. It's the perfect

People call Shiva Baby a horror movie, but this book is Shiva Baby if it really were a horror movie. Not to reduce this purely to comparisons, but it also bleeds with traces of I Saw the TV Glow (really any Jane Schoenbrun) and Carmen Maria Machado. You may recall that I love I Saw the TV Glow, highly enjoy Shiva Baby, and am a bit lukewarm on Carmen Maria Machado. Most of that rub comes from our misalignment on how sex/desire is portrayed, and it's very similar in Black Flam

But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will. This is a very interesting read that does a good job at capturing how tuberculosis affected major aspects of history and how it continues to pervade many countries in the present, purely because we've denied them access to the cure. I don't have a ton to say about the content because I think it truly speaks for itself, but I do have something to say about this book's structure:

I picked this up at BookCon because I attended Kylie Lee Baker's panel, and I'm always convinced to read an author's book once I've heard them speak about the process of writing it. I was further convinced it should be my next read when I discovered it is set in New York. The city is a great backdrop for this pandemic novel; the ooze of the subway and the eerie silence of what should be packed streets are perfect in capturing the inherent wrongness of how the world felt as CO