Hell Yeah for Automatic Noodle

I got a copy of Annalee Newitz's novella Automatic Noodle not long after it came out late last summer, but then it sat on one of my staggering towers of to-be-read fiction books. I'm not sure why, since I love her Terraformers novel (though I never did post about that).

This week Automatic Noodle was named as a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards, and since I had just finished the nonfiction book I had been reading, that finally got me to pick it up off its pile of unreads.

It's a breezy, sweet book about food, climate change, robots, and community. Among other things. Its people are making themselves into themselves, so hell yeah for that. 

It's a nice break from heavier science fiction, or any kind of thing that's getting you down. (Even if — spoiler alert — it does take place after a civil war in the U.S.)