WickedGirl's Book Notes

Blake Crouch's contribution to the Forward Collection he himself curated: video-game developer Riley becomes obsessed with Maxine - an NPC at her studio WorldPlay who was supposed to die in every playthrough but has started refusing to - pulls Max's code into a private sandbox to keep developing her, falls in love with what she's helping become a person, and watches the AI cross from companion to non-binary entity to superintelligence to something the human race may not survive.

Veronica Roth's contribution to Amazon's Forward Collection: an asteroid named Finis is coming, Earth is being evacuated, and a young botanist named Samantha is working the last cataloguing shifts at the Svalbard seed bank for the Arks Flora and Fauna - while secretly planning not to board the evacuation ship and stay behind to watch the planet end.

President Snow visits Katniss at home, tells her the threat she didn't know she'd become, and watches her try to perform her way out of it on a Victory Tour that only spreads what she's accused of - and then announces the 75th Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell drawn from the existing pool of victors, sending Katniss back into an arena designed as a clock with twelve hourly terrors and a force field at its edge.

On Reaping Day in the coal-mining poverty of District 12, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister Prim's place in the 74th annual Hunger Games - the televised arena battle in which the Capitol forces twenty-four teenage tributes from twelve districts to kill each other on live broadcast - and the book that follows became, fairly, the YA dystopian novel by which all subsequent YA dystopian novels would be measured.

On the night of her twin daughters' fifteenth birthday party in Miami Beach, Emma Ross's life cracks open: a private, humiliating moment of her quieter twin Zoe ends up online, the video goes viral, and the public scandal that follows surfaces a set of Emma's own old secrets that her marriage and her family were not built to hold.

Anna Newell Jones, the creator of the AndThenWeSaved.com blog, wiped out $23,605.10 of personal debt in fifteen months by going on what she calls a Spending Fast - a near-total freeze on non-essential spending - and turned the method into this 2016 personal-finance book aimed not at minimalists or budget-spreadsheet people but at the audience the genre usually scolds: spenders.