books

Cozy Reading Recs from the Women in Tech chat

Cassey Lottman

— 2 min read

Light & cozy reading suggestions are a frequent request in the Women in Tech slack I'm in.

Here are a few that have come up a lot, so we can link this post when someone asks again!

  • Legends & Lattes, and it's sequel, Bookshops and Bonedust
  • House on the Cerulean Sea
  • Psalm for the Wild-Built and its sequel, Prayer for the Crown Shy.
    • These are novellas featuring a nonbinary monk in a utopian future, looking for meaning and finding friendship
    • Anything by Becky Chambers really goes on this list, too. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is about a lovable alien space ship crew having decently low stakes adventures. The whole series is great, though note the second is a little sadder (themes of grief and self-identity, and child slave labor). They are all in the same universe but standalone, so you could easily skip #2.
  • The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
  • The Ex Hex and its sequel, The Kiss Curse
  • Jasmine Guillory - easy romances
  • Murderbot series by Martha Wells.
    • A series about a genderless AI robot built to be a security guard, who gains self-control and mostly wants to use it to watch soap operas in their head, but keeps discovering the power of real life friendship anyways
  • Killers of a Certain Age, a super fun spy novel about these 4 best friends who became contract killers ("bad guys" only, ofc) together as young women, who have just reached retirement but get pulled into one last big job. Very funny.
  • Little Paris Bookshop
  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake "was weird but you might like it"
  • Anything by Alexander McCall Smith
  • Shady Hollow by Juneau Black - cosy murder mystery but everyone's an animal
  • The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa
  • "If you're ok with the initial murder premise, I really like the cozies by Abby Collette, Valerie Burns, and Jesse Q. Sutanto. All three have some found family themes, which I love."
    • "(Especially Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers - it was so so great.)"
  • Alexis Hall: Boyfriend Material and Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake
  • Battle Royal by Lucy Parker
  • The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedra Patrick

Nonfiction

  • books by James Herriot, a British vet who tells British countryside vet stories
  • Other Minds, a bit more cerebral, about how cephalopod (think squid) brains work and how smart they are in a physiologically entirely different way than humans
  • The Genius of Birds, continuing on the smart animal theme, on the different ways that birds are actually super smart
  • Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
  • The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, on considerations and approaches to having really meaningful and fun get togethers from work retreats to dinner parties to whatever

Contributing

Have additions or corrections for this list? Tell Cassey!

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