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The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky. This was really good! The ending in particular was particularly well done -- without spoilers, it's doing a sort of thing that usually doesn't work for, but worked here. (The endgame of the book feels slightly LARPy to me, but not in a bad way.) It does at one point dwell a bit on "creepy fascists are creepy", though I understand the point. Also without spoilers, Tchaikovsky is really good at writing non-human intelligences, and doing interesting evolutionary worldbuilding! My one complaint from last time about too much time with the white male POV characters mostly got better over the course of the book, both as the viewpoints diversified, and as it became clear that the story wasn't actually about those guys, they were mostly just along for the ride. (Also it becomes clear that there are reasons why these characters need to be white male Brits, and the rest of the human cast is intentionally full of people with marginalized identities in one way or another. Would have been nice to have some male humans who weren't cis straight white dudes, but then the non-human cast is more interesting anyway.)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anonymous. Read-aloud alternating stanzas, mostly we were reading from this public domain translation but a couple people brought their own translations. I'd read this before (in the Tolkien translation I think?), but it had been a while. I really like the Green Knight as a space alien, but the ending undermines this.
The Face in the Mirror, Stephanie S. Tolan -- this is actually from a couple weeks ago, but I forgot to post last week. Book that I had and read as a kid, and will be donated now that I've reread it. The setting of the book -- a Shakespeare festival putting on a Star Wars-flavored Richard III -- is great, and I'd be happy to have the whole thing just be slice-of-life with the actors, but the book also has a plot with a ghost which is less interesting, and the whole thing has too much immature teens (and immature ghost) being immature. When I read it I didn't know Richard III, and now I do, so I was able to appreciate the Shakespeare bits a bit better, but not much. On the topic of '90s Shakespearean YA, I should possibly reread Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, which I absolutely adored the one time I read it when I was 13.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anonymous. Read-aloud alternating stanzas, mostly we were reading from this public domain translation but a couple people brought their own translations. I'd read this before (in the Tolkien translation I think?), but it had been a while. I really like the Green Knight as a space alien, but the ending undermines this.
The Face in the Mirror, Stephanie S. Tolan -- this is actually from a couple weeks ago, but I forgot to post last week. Book that I had and read as a kid, and will be donated now that I've reread it. The setting of the book -- a Shakespeare festival putting on a Star Wars-flavored Richard III -- is great, and I'd be happy to have the whole thing just be slice-of-life with the actors, but the book also has a plot with a ghost which is less interesting, and the whole thing has too much immature teens (and immature ghost) being immature. When I read it I didn't know Richard III, and now I do, so I was able to appreciate the Shakespeare bits a bit better, but not much. On the topic of '90s Shakespearean YA, I should possibly reread Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, which I absolutely adored the one time I read it when I was 13.