Novel Gazing Redux

Sara C. Bronin, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World. If you haven’t thought much about zoning, this is a good introductory book. I was hoping that it would be a little deeper than it was; ah well.

Agatha Christie, Third Girl and Towards Zero. Gosh, Christie did not much enjoy the Sixties! But other than the usual caveats about that crankiness and some attitudes I’d call “dated” if some people didn’t still have them alas, these were fine enough, fast reads, not outstanding, there’s a reason they’re not the famous ones.

Davinia Evans, Rebel Blade. Regular readers know how I love to say “the triumphant conclusion,” and here we are! The triumphant conclusion to this trilogy, with the magic of the mundane plane making its mess all over everyone’s life and getting mopped up as best they can! Don’t start here, you want to start with the first one, but gosh I enjoyed this series.

Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide. Discussed elsewhere.

Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. This was also not a deep analysis but a fun wander through the history of everyone’s favorite kind of shop.

Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. I have read a lot of books about the Carolingians, and this was the absolute best of any of them at keeping straight which Charles, which Pepin, etc. we were talking about at any given moment. The analysis is clear and cogent and it never devolves into “and then a series of events, God knows why we’re telling you this except that it appears to have happened,” which is frankly a Carolingian pitfall. This is my jam, and I think it will be the jam of many of you here as well.

Ariel Kaplan, The Republic of Salt. A sequel to The Pomegranate Gate, and you really don’t want to start with the second one, you really need the character and plot context of the first one. Very much a middle book, looking forward to where it’s going, lots of mythological ramifications here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Lavishly illustrated, extremely short, more life philosophy and less botany but still interesting.

Julie Leong, The Teller of Small Fortunes. A sweet and cozy adventure fantasy, featuring a cat and a baker as well as some more traditional adventuring party members.

L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle. Reread. It had been longer than I thought since I reread this, but it remains as funny and sharp and loving as always.

Garth Nix, Frogkisser!. A MG fairy tale-inspired quest fantasy that sometimes goes hard in the silly direction, but really who hasn’t had a day when we need a bit of that.

Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning. Rereads. Wars and alliances and kingdoms oh my! I had basically forgotten all of these last two books and remembered the trilogy as the first book alone, so this was a lovely rediscovery of “oh right, THIS guy again.” Everybody boo for Edward Longshanks.

Lev A. C. Rosen, Rough Pages. The third in its series of mid-century queer San Francisco mysteries, and this is a perfectly reasonable place to start (although the second one is still my favorite). Its detective has to deal with the murder of the owner of a bookstore that mails queer literature not entirely legally–and has a mailing list that would name names of a lot of his community. This is not a feel-good mystery, this is a very tense mystery, which is also sometimes just what you need, but not the same times.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination. Kindle. A collection of Roy’s political essays from the early 90s to the mid ’00s. This is a period in which I was definitely already politically engaged–for part of it I was reading three to four major news magazines every week as part of handling the “extemp box” for my high school speech team–and a lot of the elements of what was going on in Indian politics were completely new to me. Thanks, US media! The stuff that I already knew about was interesting to see from a different angle–and unfortunately there’s a lot of ominous foreshadowing in this collection.

Iona Datt Sharma, You Are Here: Nine More Stories. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is an online pal and has the same agent as me.

This collection has all the stuff I like about Iona’s stories, and you should read it.

Oh, did you want more? Hmm, okay: the thing I love most about Iona’s stories is that heart and head are both fully engaged and connected to each other. This collection has fantasy and science fiction, comedy and pathos, it has different kinds and moods of each sub-genre all in nine stories. There is range here. The consistent thread is how human the concerns are and how well they are rooted in their speculative elements. Nobody is having a romance in a spaceship where the spaceship is incidental–it’s absolutely crucial to the romantic obstacle. Nobody’s relationship with their family is using portal fantasy as a backdrop, portal fantasy is illuminating the relationship with family and time. This is what short speculative fiction does best, and whether you’ve already read some of these or whether it’s all new to you, you have treats in store here. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Today I was on the periphery of a conversation of books “about” queerness and books that “just happen to feature” queerness, and I need to say: this one is about queerness, it sure is, it is as about it as anything ever has been. What it is not, however, is a 101-level work about queerness. In science fiction this division often points at science fiction novels where knowledge of, for example, trans people is assumed and the trans people are allowed to have space adventures (undersea exploration, dimensions of the human heart, whatever) just like cis people, vs. novels where the author is going to do a science fiction about What If Gender: Weird Stuff, Huh.

Not in Notes from a Regicide. This is a book where it matters deeply to the main characters’ experiences that they are all trans people. It matters to the action plot, and it matters dreadfully, intensely to the main plot arc that is “young man attempts to understand the outside world forces that have shaped his parents.” It matters that their trans experiences are not all the same, both in terms of what’s available/expected from the outside world and in terms of what they want/need internally. This is very much a book that knows that there is no unitary trans experience any more than there is a unitary artist experience or a unitary revolutionary experience, and it’s a much stronger book for that.

Because yeah, some of the people who manage the most revolutionary acts do not burn with a political fervor here. Some of the things that change the world were meant to change it in other ways, or in unknown ways. The breadth and depth of human variety is stunning here, as the pieces come together, as we find out who did what and how it has mattered, small scale and large.

Clara Benson, A Case of Robbery on the Riviera, The Imbroglio at the Villa Pozzi, and The Problem at Two Tithes. Kindle. So I’m still finding these light historical mysteries diverting in the way that I need right now. My only complaint is that there’s no clear indication of the timeline on which the two series interleave, so A Case of Robbery on the Riviera contains spoilers for several more of the Angela Marchmont books than I’ve gotten to. There’s a warning at the front that says you should have read both to get the full enjoyment, but how far in both is not made clear. Ah well. (Also I find Freddy Pilkington-Soames much more annoying from Angela Marchmont’s POV than from his own.)

Brenda J. Child, My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation. This book includes a lot of things under the category of labor that challenged my cultural preconceptions about what she would be talking about. Interesting personal-ethnographic study.

Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel. Who is where when and who was meant to be killed and who will take the blame for it, pretty classic Christie.

August Clarke, Metal From Heaven. Labor movement fantasy. Labor movement fantasy! Labor movement fantasy. Yes. Amaze. It has other facets–some people may be interested in the lesbians or the violence or all sorts of things, but you had me at labor movement fantasy, that’s all I needed, thank you and good night.

Eric H. Cline, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations. This is a follow-up to his book about collapse of civilizations around the Mediterranean around 1177, and it did not do what I wanted, but it did a fine job of what it did. What it did: a survey of who was left in the aftermath of that massive collapse, who ruled what and how much they rallied. What it did not do: talk in any detail about the lives of actual people in this period or very many social trends and traits that might help us understand why some cultures did better than others (and on which axes).

Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red. The title refers to the Red River, and this is about soil and relationships and feeling trapped and finding choices in a small town in its area. The people are…oh God, I know these people. They’re so real. It’s just so vividly real about the people and the land.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Lords and The Apostate’s Tale. Kindle. Oh look, more historical mystery series that are diverting in the way that I need right now.

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament. Speaking of vividly real people: this is dysfunctional Nordic family drama, and gosh are the rhythms of it familiar even if the details of it are not my family details. I would be interested to hear from people who didn’t grow up being told stories of family dysfunction by Nordic people, whether it was hard to follow at any point with the names given without relationships and relationships without names and…all this was in my idiom even though it’s in translation, and I don’t know who else’s idiom it’s in. Not a nice book, the dysfunction is horrible and deep, do not read this for a light diversion.

Noah Jodice, Beyond Courts: Community Justice Exchange, Interrupting Criminalization, and Critical Resistance. Kindle. This is another book that did well at what it was doing but was not doing what I wanted. It is a very 101-level primer or possibly sub-101-level about why the criminal justice system is not very just and why alternatives are called for. What I wanted was more detail on the alternatives, a lot more detail. Different book completely, ah well.

Dan Jones, Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King. Jones is pretty upset about people taking Shakespeare as a reliable source about Henry V’s early character, as there is no historical evidence whatsoever for the Prince-Hal-to-King-Henry transition. But that’s not most of the book, most of the book is just talking about his life and times, and it’s interesting and well-done. Just. Not a lot of Falstaff to be had here.

Anna-Marie McLemore, Flawless Girls. McLemore can write sisters. GOSH YES. This is about two sisters who are trying to use a fancy finishing school to make their way in society, only to find that it is not doing exactly what it promises–INSERT SINISTER MAGIC HERE. Fun times.

Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell By Shattered Shell, The Hummingbirds’ Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings, and What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird. These were my other random comfort read thing this month, besides the historical murder mysteries: they’re all quite short, and the first two are about rehabbing the animals in question back into the wild. There are occasionally random moments in the structure of these books, but it’s mostly okay, and in any case they’re worth it for the solid accounts of people taking concrete steps to make things better in the natural world. (The chicken one was just interesting despite not being in that same category.)

Jim Morris, The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers. This is a case study of some factories and their misdeeds, with clarity about how they stand for a much, much larger class of factories and companies doing the same thing. It is not a fun time, but also it’s better to know what tricks they’re pulling.

Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land. Very similar category of book to the above but a different topic: this is about the legal fight for jurisdiction and about who prosecutes crimes on Native lands (and which crimes go unprosecuted and why). Harrowing but solid.

H. G. Parry, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. An alternate-1920s fantasy, but in the “oh my God WW1 and influenza just happened” way more than the “whee parties” way. (Guess which one I like better, just guess.) Class and magic and friendship and academia, yes please.

Iona Datt Sharma, Blood Sweat Glitter. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend I met through being represented by the same agent.

Back in the day, one of my friends grumpily reviewed a book by saying, “too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby.” They would never have to have that reaction to Blood Sweat Glitter, which is absolutely full of roller derby, and also the romantic connection builds between two women, zero boyfriends involved.

Eleanor is a charge nurse who pours her heart and soul into her roller derby team. The stress of the job comes out in the rink. Her team isn’t one of the big ones–their league is pretty small-time–but she loves the game for itself, and she keeps hoping to build a team that will love it with her. When new girl Robin shows up–and shows off–Eleanor finds her abrasive and annoying. She’s constantly acting silly and ditzy, and why is she even in roller derby? She’s a good skater, though, Eleanor has to admit that….

As the team’s season progresses, Eleanor realizes that Robin is not the airhead she appears–and her candy-pink bubbly presentation is covering over some trauma. Nor is Eleanor entirely free of it herself. If she can get past some of her prickly habits, they might make a pretty good team, on the rink and off. Lovely fun read but–like the character of Robin–not an insubstantial piece of cotton candy after all.

Katherine Addison, The Tomb of Dragons. Discussed elsewhere.

Lisa Baril, The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and Future Without Ice. Gosh so many ice mummies. I think I learned more about the ice mummies than anything else here, but it really was nicely procedural.

Clara Benson, The Incident at Fives Castle and The Riddle at [slur]’s Mile. Kindle. Honestly why did she feel the need to use that slur in the title, there were literally no Roma people in the book. It gave me serious pause over reading it at all. And the unfortunate part is that it was the better book of the two; in terms of the entire rest of the text if I could advise you to skip one it would be Incident because the political conspiracy was not particularly well-drawn. I did not intend to become an expert on political conspiracy mysteries but they keep popping up, and also I don’t dodge in the least, if you have more in mind please do tell me.

Maurice Broaddus, The Breath of Oblivion. Discussed elsewhere.

David Brown, A Hell of a Storm: the Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War. Did not do what it said on the tin: specifically this was a book about the lead-up to the American Civil War more generally and not really about Bloody Kansas in any more detail than anything else. It’s a fine enough “lead-up to the American Civil War” book but not the best I’ve read. Oh well.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country. Very short and very quiet. This is a book about a recently demobbed soldier whose life has generally fallen apart, restoring the art in an old church in a small town. It’s an older book, but it was written as an historical, not contemporary to the 1920s, but I felt that it did a really good job of combining the feel of the books of that era with perspective from later–that is still the perspective of forty years ago now.

Cathy Coats, To Banish Forever: A Secret Society, the Ho-Chunk, and Ethnic Cleansing in Minnesota. A short book but not an emotionally easy one. Apparently there was an entire secret society–very well documented and in locally prominent positions–in the Mankato area in the second half of the 19th century, dedicated to the genocide of the Ho-Chunk people. I lived four years in that area and knew nothing about it, which is a flavor of horrifying in itself. Extremely useful for opening my eyes, but not a light read, of course.

Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop. This, by contrast, is a light read, a cozy fantasy with jam and books and talking plant friends and a romance. The obstacles to the protagonist’s happiness were so readily overcome that it felt frictionless, a bit insubstantial, but honestly that was just fine on the day I read it.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Knaves and The Squire’s Tale. Kindle. One each of the Player Joliffe and Sister Frevisse series, and I really continue to like how organically these characters are different in a similar setting. I am finding these to be quite reasonable comfort reads and will keep doing so until I run out.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome. Reread. Gosh, he can write a sentence, always could. There’s a lot of sexism here, and I haven’t found early cyberpunk particularly compelling over time, but on a sentence level this is some of the best science fiction writing of its time.

Holly Gramazio, The Husbands. Very small-scale science fiction: the protagonist, who starts the book unmarried, comes home to find a life and a husband she doesn’t remember having, and every time he goes up in the attic, he disappears and a different husband/timeline takes his place. This is the sort of story where prose voice is everything for me, and I enjoyed the prose voice here, it was warm and compelling. The different shapes of relationship possible to her, the different ways that would direct her life, and the way that she exercises agency among them, is thought-provoking and fun.

Jack Kelly, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America. Very much what it says on the tin, and I fear that the Gilded Age is all too relevant to our time, so I was glad to learn more about it.

Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest. Very short and creepy. I felt like the strength of this book was how Knútsdóttir wrote about chronic illness and the reactions people have to it. The plot twists were…not very twisty. The ending was unpleasant but unsurprising. But the writing about chronic illness early in the book was absolutely solid stuff.

Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous. Not a reread, this is my first exposure to this one, miraculously enough. The journalism spin on the Arthurian tale was charming–the commentary on perspective and legend. Very glad I read this and will want another go at it.

Lauren E. Oakes, In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World. Oakes puts a lot of herself in this book–possibly too much depending on how much you’re interested in her personal life while doing the research she describes here, but it’s still an interesting account of how this kind of botanical research works.

Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II. Other suggested titles: Not All Nonfiction Needs a Three-Item List In Its Subtitle: Now Conclusively Proven! Sorry, it’s just been a heck of a pattern lately. Anyway, this is an interesting take on how strategizing itself evolved and who got to be involved in it, in the UK dealing with the U-boat problem.

Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Science. A warm and charming account of the different young women who followed directly on the path she blazed–the lab assistants and fellow scientists who had opportunities in her lab. Good stuff.

Ashley Spencer, Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire. I don’t know much about this part of culture, and I don’t like ignorance, so I picked this up from a library display. I was disappointed in its depth and type of analysis–this was more a straightforward account of what there was than why it succeeded and failed–and I think the reason is that Spencer is a celebrity journalist of a type that has and needs access. She’s less likely to dive into problems with streaming or other networks’ competition in ways that might jeopardize future interviews, and this book is much shallower than I hoped as a result.

Jonathan Strahan, New Adventures in Space Opera. I will be so glad to have this book in another five years. Today, though, I was frustrated that it has this title while being entirely a reprint anthology. Adventures in Space Opera that you’ve already read in the last few years, and you liked some of them is a less-catchy title. It’s a solid volume, it’s just that I didn’t realize that it was reprints.

Nghi Vo, The City in Glass. I am a hard sell on demon perspective–also on angel perspective, when it comes to that–but Vo is engaging with this ages-long (but reasonably short) fantasy of a city.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. This short story collection had moments of racism and animal cruelty. There’s a sharpness to the fairy stories here that has its good sides but also its quite negative ones. Not the place to start with her work, I wouldn’t think.

Ovidia Yu, The Angsana Tree Mystery. And speaking of not the place to start, this series does such a satisfying job of unfolding its plots as the history of Singapore progresses that it would be a shame to miss what’s come before. We’re now in the post-WWII repercussion section of this series, and I continue to really enjoy it.