New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.<\/em><\/p>\n Anyone who lives with a difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness and has endured the demoralizing process of trying to get proper treatment can tell you it is, at times, a living nightmare. Advocating for yourself, fighting to be taken seriously; it\u2019s something I\u2019ve dealt with most of my life as a person with autoimmune diseases. So when I read the description of Hildur Kn\u00fatsd\u00f3ttir\u2019s psychological horror novel, The Night Guest<\/em><\/a>, it resonated with me immediately:<\/p>\n I\u00f0unn is in yet another doctor’s office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something’s not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven’t revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same \u2015 have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps. Until one night I\u00f0unn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she\u2019s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . . What is happening when she\u2019s asleep?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n The Night Guest <\/em>is a short, compelling read that puts an unsettling spin on an issue a lot of people can relate to. I pretty much inhaled it.<\/p>\n The origin of life and the question of whether it exists elsewhere is a topic I find to be endlessly interesting (as evidenced by how regularly books about it land among these recommendations). In their new book Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life<\/em><\/a>, astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible \u2014 the building blocks of life \u2014 and explore how they could have emerged on Earth and, hypothetically, elsewhere. At the heart of the mystery is the as yet unanswered question of whether or not life came to be as the result of a freak accident.<\/p>\n As the authors write in their introduction, \u201cEven with the enormous scientific progress we have witnessed in the past few decades, we still don\u2019t know whether life is an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we may be alone in our galaxy, or a chemical inevitability, which would potentially make us part of a huge galactic ensemble.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Night Guest<\/em> by Hildur Kn\u00fatsd\u00f3ttir<\/h2>\n
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Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life<\/em> by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak<\/h2>\n
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Into the Unbeing<\/em> by Zac Thompson, Hayden Sherman<\/h2>\n