I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Speculative fiction, I guess, about what might have happened if the Soviets had given economic planners more authority to try to replace decentralized price signals with mathematically driven attempts to organize the economy from above. Since the characters were basically means by which to explore ideas, and since the core conclusion was that human foibles would still have gotten in the way, I didn’t find it particularly illuminating.

Dean Koontz, The Husband: I listen to a lot of audiobooks these days, and they reveal different things to me about a book than reading does. With nonfiction, they reveal whether the book is well organized; with fiction, they reveal when someone’s characters don’t sound like people, which is unfortunately the case here. The hook is certainly engaging enough—a gardener gets a call from kidnappers who have his wife and will kill her if he doesn’t get $2 million, and no, they don’t want him to rob a bank. Further twists follow. Koontz has that 90s thing of elaborate killer motivations down pat (though this is a book set in the present, so cellphones matter) and it could be fun, but listening was the wrong choice here.

Rosie Danan, Fan Service: An actor who looks like Jensen Ackles starred in a CW show about a werewolf (Colby) who worked for the FBI; it is Supernatural in an X-Files hat, as demonstrated by the episode “told through the POV of Colby’s beloved motorcycle.” But the important thing is that it’s fifteen years later and he’s struggling to find work when he goes viral for the stunt he pulled of somehow doing his werewolf transformation in public, tearing off his clothes as his body changed. Only problem: he didn’t actually attempt any stunt. In search of an explanation, he contacts the moderator of the main fansite for the show, who collected all sorts of werewolf info. (Look, he’s an actor, you can’t expect him to know how to research.) Years ago, she was a pathetic teen fangirl and she overheard him say something cruel about her at a con; nonetheless, when they meet (she doesn’t believe it’s really him but he comes to meet her in her small Florida town) the sparks fly. This didn’t hit the fandom uncanny valley for me, and it even honored her relationships with her fannish friends. But it’s mostly a romance, and it does a good job of showing the characters growing up and actually dealing with their past bullshit.

Rosie Danan, The Roommate: A buttoned-up socialite from Connecticut impulsively moves to California to live with her childhood/adolescent crush, only to find that he’s leaving on a tour and has rented his room to a porn star. If you buy that they are instantly horny for each other, it’s a good read for those who like heterosexual porn; they have sexual contact relatively quickly and all the drama is whether they will admit that they are actually falling in love and figure out what to do about their very different worlds.

Rosie Danan, The Intimacy Experiment: Sequel to The Roommate in which the porn star’s ex-girlfriend, also a former porn star, whose hard-as-nails exterior conceals a deep well of care for others, falls in love with a Reform rabbi when she agrees to give lectures on intimacy to help boost attendance at his synagogue. It’s nice to see Reform Judaism represented, and the love interest is basically a Woody Allen character minus the toxicity given all the worrying he does about whether he’s properly supportive and respectful. It’s clear that while I like Danan’s work I can’t read too much non-fsf romance in sequence because I run out of tolerance for it, though.

Django Wexler, Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me: In this sequel, the accidental Dark Lord tries to lead her new people to peace with the humans, against strenuous opposition from parties on both sides. Flippancy and lesbian lust guide her way. If you liked the first book, the second continues perfectly well in that vein.