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 or make a pull request directly.

Webmentions: None yet!

These are webmentions via the IndieWeb and webmention.io.