"Culpability" by Bruce Holsinger. For Data ethics book club. It kind of did the opposite of grabbing me immediately. I found it annoying. The first person present tense narrator knows more than he shares, and not for any good reason except to enhance the narrative as far as I can tell. I found myself googling things, like who is Alice texting with (chatbot, like I figured), and what's wrong with Alice, etc. It's very near future, and as such it got some things wrong. Like no tech overlord is donating to the democrats these days. One of my coworkers said, of the whole Alice chat thing, that's not how teenagers chat. Then, because I was annoyed, I read all the Alice chat sections to the end when I was about halfway through the book. And you know what? They don't completely make sense if you read them that way. Like, you could make them make sense with a little bit of editing. Like, she had a concussion, maybe she didn't remember what she did? You could make it work. But the author didn't even try. Very annoying.
LHC #339: "Immortal Longings" by Chloe Gong. eBook. It was sort of amazing how all the bodies Anton jumped into were always male and attractive. I still put the sequel on my list though. Great ending.
LHC #340: "Blood of the Old Kings" by song-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. Hard copy. There wasn't quite enough of the worldbuilding on the page for me, though I think a lot was in the author's head. Reading along, it seemed like it was written in a shared universe I don't know about. And then I read the acknowledgements and learned it all started with the author's TTRPG, so there you go. I found the sentences and paragraphs functional but not artful.
LHC #341: "Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Matt Dinniman. Office book club. Kind of reminded me of The Library at Mount Char, but younger, like Percy Jackson. All the fun of playing a video game without having to figure out how to navigate! It's about the importance of community, really.
LHC #342: "Goodbye Eastern Europe" by Jakob Mikanowski. Hard copy. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, very well-written, even if it went down some rabbitholes I didn't care that much about. I loved this book.