Much like Tenth of December, George Saunders’ Pastoralia is a collection of fascinating yet cynical character studies. Whether portraying a troubled kid, a self-absorbed barber, or a hack writer, he’s consistently focused on the flaws of his subjects. And here again, Saunders often provides characterization by fusing a subject’s tone with a third-person perspective. The narrative trick is fun on its own, but it also makes the stream-of-conscious writing feel surprisingly authentic.

What Remains of Edith Finch? is a walking simulator and a frame story. It’s tragic and beautiful and best experienced alongside a friend or two. If you haven’t played, and any of that sounds promising to you, then I suggest you stop here and go play it. The spoilers below are minor, but the less you know to start, the better. The environment is beautiful and detailed. Books, heirlooms, photographs, and other knick-knacks fill Edith’s childhood home.

Death by Design is a two-issue one-shot that has the Dark Knight solving a mystery in a 1940’s-era Gotham. I’m a sucker for a self-contained Batman book, so this has been on my list since it was published back in 2012. The first thing to note is the fantastic art direction. Dave Taylor sticks to pencils with limited color for highlights like the Joker’s hair, the glow of computer terminals, and (my favorite) the light pollution from street-level Gotham.

For the second game in my introduction to walking simulators, I chose Variable State’s Virginia. It’s easy to talk about gameplay. As a walking simulator, Virginia limits your interaction significantly. You move through environments and press a button to interact with people and objects. This design won’t satisfy players looking for a challenge, but it’s not intended to. On the other hand (and in concert with the distinctive editing direction, described below), it’s great for casual players who’d like to share the experience.

In Perhaps the Stars, things get weird. And for a series that OPENS with a sage being restrained by a serial killer after witnessing a boy resurrect a toy soldier, that’s saying something. New themes of identity and destiny join familiar ones like gender, violence, sex, and religion, and author Ada Palmer pushes them all to twist the plot in unnerving directions. Due to catastrophes in critical infrastructure, it plays out in a context that’s surprisingly distinct from the preceding three novels.

In The Road to Unfreedom, historian Timothy Snyder attempts to explain the state of Western democracy in 2018 with an analysis of Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and the US. Although he casts a wide net (reaching back 1,000 years to the Viking King Volodymyr/Valdemar), he gets a surprising amount of mileage by focusing on “just” the last decade or so. But it’s easy to fool a historically-challenged computer programmer like me.

On Tyranny is a short collection of lessons learned from the study of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. It was written in 2017 by Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history. In 2021, it was re-released as a graphic novel, and that’s the version I borrowed from the library. The illustrations and photos certainly fit the mood: uniformly creepy and occasionally disturbing. Unfortunately, they’re also over-emphasized at times, intruding on the text in pages with more inventive layouts.

Physician/anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer was remarkably committed to the idea of a preferential option for the poor. While his rock-solid conviction may be easy to summarize, its application is anything but. The context–the culture of those impacted–is historically obscure. The work is logistically ominous and tragically political. And the personal ramifications are a strange mix of awkward, disappointing, and inspiring. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, author Tracy Kidder adapts some conventions of the biography in an attempt to fit it all in.

There’s been a lots of finger-pointing about the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be tough for a layperson to sift through all the different takes on which experts let us down and how they failed. Everything I’ve read from Michael Lewis (one book on early Internet adoption, another about professional sports team management, and the third on Wall Street tomfoolery) is mostly lower-stakes than that. While their subjects aren’t matters of life-and-death, the books all demonstrate a clean style and an aptitude for critical thinking.

The Will to Battle is the third installment of author Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota tetralogy. After reading Too Like the Lightening and Seven Surrenders, I opened it expecting some answers and a bunch of new questions. I got both along with a few surprises. The narrator is maybe the most compelling challenge. Mycroft Canner’s writing style is by now familiar, which is not to say that it’s easy. It’s formal, emotionally unstable, laden with rich metaphor, and intentionally abstruse when it comes to gender.