Novel Gazing Redux

Clara Benson, The Trouble at Wakeley Court. Kindle. She really does better with straight-up mysteries, so the part of this that is spy story is…kind of purple, not better than it had to be. But the part that’s mystery is fine, and the story moves along and arc plots arc.

Sophie Burnham, Sargassa. Even saying what specific subgenre this Roman speculative fiction is would be a spoiler, but you can gradually learn where this new part of the Roman Empire is and why, and it acknowledges that not everybody loves an empire, go figure. I will probably read the next one, though I was hoping for a different subgenre.

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter. This was not even a very functional short story. It was an absolutely beautifully illustrated vignette with no momentum. I hate to be a crank here, but if this had not been written by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell who has not given the publishing industry loads of other things to sell, I’m not sure it would have sold at all, much less in an edition dedicated to itself.

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Spanish and Italian attitudes toward animal breeding and how they affected (and were affected by) attitudes about differences in humans, including both of what we would now call race and disability. Some of the worst applications of Plato’s Republic ever, with some terrible applications of Aristotle for a little treat. Gosh these people were confused by New World camelids.

Rosaleen Duffy, Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Securitization and militarization of conservation are unfortunately somewhat taken for granted in a lot of writing–of course if there’s bad outcome A, we must respond with militarization B, and so on. Duffy takes a moment to look at that and its drawbacks and alternatives.

Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. I like Eco, I like books on translation, this one is not long, there you are.

Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told: Poems. This is a great example of how poetry from a very different point of view than mine can still have spots of absolute resonance for me.

Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier. Gosh I liked this, what a nice book. It’s a gay Sleeping Beauty story about a Union soldier from the American Civil War waking to figure out his life with an earnest, sweet 1960s college student. Gray choosing to make this historical in both streams rather than waking into the present was a stroke of genius. I was a bit worried that some deeply unpleasant things would happen, so I will tell you: don’t worry, it is not that kind of book, it has people figuring out friendship and love, not people going to the hospital or jail because of the horrors of the time they’re living in. There is still plenty of tension about how they’ll do that.

Kerstin Hall, Asunder. An entirely cromulent fantasy novel in which the protagonists keep doing their best in hard (unplanned body-sharing!!!) circumstances and sometimes people are mad at each other for understandable reasons that still make their lives harder and do not make one of them the villain. How I feel about this will depend partly on whether she comes out with a sequel; any sequel at all would make the ending feel lesser to me. But we’ll see. People do like sequels (not even necessarily author people).

Ilkka Hanski, Messages from Islands: A Global Biodiversity Tour. Do you want to learn a lot about dung beetles? because this has a lot about dung beetles. Also several other island creatures, but: dung beetles, get your fresh hot dung beetles here.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Inheritance. This is my last favorite of Jaswal’s books. You can see that she’s not quite hit her stride yet, and there are lots of Issues she tries to handle in fairly small word count, with mixed success. I recommend everything else of hers I’ve read first, and only this if you’re a completist (as it turns out I am).

Rich Larson, Tomorrow Factory. Something for everyone in this collection, quite varied science fiction, all of it well done, probably not all of it to any one person’s tastes, but that’s the nature of variety of this type. One of the best collections of the last decade I think, in terms of sheer scope of science fiction from one person.

Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers. What it says on the tin. This is a book from 1892, a British woman going to Siberia to nurse lepers and talking about the voyage the whole time. This edition has not been edited and doesn’t really have commentary on it, so if you don’t want unfiltered late 19th century, this is not for you. If you want pre-contemporary travel in the north in several seasons, well, here we are.

Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter. How much can I be pushed to horror because of plants and fungus? The answer is that I read this straight through but could not be induced to love it, it’s definitely on the horror end of things in ways that don’t resonate with me, but it’s quite well done and very full of the non-animalia kingdoms.

Premee Mohamed, And What Can We Offer You Tonight. Dark and deathy and atmospheric and revolutionary and brief.

Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?. I think this is the most offensive book I’ve read in ages. It’s supposedly about a woman, a therapist, mourning the death of a friend she’s had for decades. Instead it’s about being secretly in love, and the resolution to losing someone you’ve been in love with for decades is oh yay falling in love again. And her colleagues, also therapists, are like, seeee, we THOUGHT you wouldn’t be so upset if you just lost a FRIEND. Friends are crucial, friends lift us up for our entire lives, friends are how we connect to the vast tapestry that is most of the human experience, what the actual hell, Anna Montague.

Roy Morris, Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. This was published shortly after the 2000 election, so there are bits of it that feel very certain about what parts of the present (recent past) are going to resonate with election fraud, and…welp. Huh. But anyway it’s an interesting book in which Morris is very clear that trying to identify with one side as heroic is…probably a really bad idea.

Jake M. Robinson, Treewilding: Our Past, Present, and Future Relationship With Forests. A Nice Book About Trees. Do you need one of those now? You might. I did.

Alanna Schubach, The Nobodies. This is a body swap story in which the people swapping bodies do not seem to gain much insight into each other’s (extremely ordinary) lives. Not so much Freaky Friday as Aggressively Mundane Friday Actually.

Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. My book club’s latest read, some really lovely pieces but mostly from the expected people. Makes for interesting discussion.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories. What a difference Lucifer makes. Stories of people who dislike each other making each other unhappy just aren’t the same without him.

Amy Wilson, A Girl Called Owl. This title is less spoilery than the UK one, although I really prefer unified titles. Owl finds out about her father and her own powers and deals very realistically with friend issues in this fantastical book.

P. G. Wodehouse, Mike. Kindle. I have said before that I hate when one book has two titles depending on what country you’re in, and I ran into one of those this fortnight with a Wodehouse novel I liked but did not want to reread just now (Jill the Reckless/The Little Warrior). Undeterred, I plunged into Mike, and felt utterly confident that it was not one I’d read before, because it was the cricketiest cricket school story you ever did see, in ways that were utterly unfamiliar. However, the second half of this book bears almost no relation to the first except that it’s (hypothetically) the same person in it, and the second half was published separately as Mike and Psmith. Ah well. The lot of a commercial author etc. I don’t know a darn thing about cricket and was still amused, that’s what.

Su Bristow, The Fair Folk. Entirely readable British modern fairy tradition novel, not as transformatively creative as some others out there. I can’t really complain about “this person has clearly read a lot of AS Byatt and also a lot of folklore,” that’s my own demographic and the demographic of other people I like, but also it was a fine rather than outstanding read within that group.

C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, Alliance Unbound. Second in its series and don’t start here, absolutely chock full of galactic economic politics. If you ever think that Cherryh (now with Fancher) is not doing enough plot in the atevi books, this may be where it’s all going. SO MUCH PLOT. Eager for the next bit.

Agatha Christie, The Plymouth Express Affair. Kindle. A short Poirot piece, the kind of mystery short story that’s just a little puzzle that gets solved rather than anything more, but basically okay if you have a few spare minutes and want to entertain yourself.

Mariana Costa, Shoestring Theory. Romantic queer time travel shenanigans, meditation on the nature of making the world better in cat-endowed fantasy novel form.

Stacey D’Erasmo, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. This author interviewed a bunch of artists with long careers, trying to think about doing art over a long period of time. I didn’t end up feeling like she had a particularly deep set of conclusions and there were some points about which she seemed fairly obtuse to me, but it was a comfortable enough read with bits and pieces of interesting artists along the way.

Margaret Frazer, Winter Heart. Kindle. A shorter Dame Frevisse story that comes at the end of the series, so there are plot developments from the novels that will be spoilers if you haven’t finished the novels. Not as rich as a novel-length thing with the same characters but reasonably fun to read all the same.

David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Thought-provoking essays about this, that, and the other.

Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon. Discussed elsewhere.

Laurie R. King, Beginnings. Kindle. Sort of what it says on the tin: a novella that delves into detective Kate Martinelli’s past to have her solve a cold case that influenced her early life. Not the strongest Martinelli mystery but still fun if you’ve enjoyed the series, don’t start here–it’s not a flashback, it’s “and here’s how the character you like got here, from the perspective of the present,” and if you don’t already like the character in question, it’ll be less effective.

Jane Pek, The Rivals. Second in its series of dating/social app tech thriller mystery things, good fun and dealing with the consequences of the first book. Start with the first one, but I’m glad this exists too.

Veronica Roth, When Among Crows. Fantasy novella that draws heavily on Polish mythology for its framework while still acknowledging the larger world at the edges of its legends’ lives.

Melissa Scott, Burning Bright. Reread. This was written in the same era as John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless: specifically, the time when some smart authors had had the chance to play a bunch of D&D and think about social dynamics in and around games. The setting is very space opera, not at all similar to GUW, but you can see that they were written in the same social moment, by people who did not have the same thoughts but were having something of a productive conversation in fiction about the same general topic.

Catherine Shaw, Flowers Stained By Moonlight. Kindle. Second in its Victorian murder mystery series, and the mathematics was far less well-integrated this time, unfortunately. Still thematically present, just not as strongly. Ah well, a cromulent enough mystery novel.

Christine Shearer, Kivalina. Kindle. This book is mostly background information, so if you had no idea how anti-environmentalism has been marketed to the public, how tort law works, etc., this is a good book for you. If you were more interested in the specifics of an Alaska town’s reaction to the threat climate change poses to its existence, it really doesn’t go very much into that, to my disappointment.

Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind and Secrets Typed in Blood. Pentecost and Parker mystery series, volumes three and four, and I remembered I had not stayed caught up just in time to read these before the fifth one comes out soon. Mid-century women who do not meet basically any of the stereotypes of what women were supposed to be, to their benefit, and the mystery part works for me as well.

Amy Stewart, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Thumbnail bios of tree collectors, lavishly illustrated, highly diverse group of people on a number of axes (race, nationality, gender, ability, age, sexuality…people just like trees, all kinds of people just like trees).

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). Kindle. An exploration of who gains power in marginalized groups and why, interesting stuff. Also refers to the group below, which was nice synchronicity.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Kindle. Interviews with older Black ladies who were part of the core of this influential group, talking about what they did with the collective and also what they think about the world since. Really heartening stuff if you need a boost to your sense that activism matters even (especially!) when it’s hard.

Emily Tesh, The Incandescent. Discussed elsewhere.

Greg van Eekhout, Happy Town. This is a very broad satire of modern corporate culture and advertising. I hope it succeeds in inoculating some of the grade school kids of today against the cult of the tech genius who actually does none of the work himself. Friendships and artificially created zombies.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Prince and Betty. Kindle. One of the more charming Wodehouses–this is from early in his career but not so early he hadn’t gotten into the swing of things. The plot will not surprise you. The characters will not surprise you. But the whole thing is entertaining, and he could turn a phrase with the best of them.

Francis Young, Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King. Thoughts about nationality and saint cults, including a bit of the life of Saint Edmund but mostly his death. Not so transcendent enough that you should seek it out if you’re not particularly interested in the era/subject matter but reasonable enough if you are.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The most common reason I bounce off a book is the prose voice. That means that the most common reason I read a book all the way through that I don’t end up liking much is also the prose voice. This was a very readable book on the sentence level. I have no complaints about its prose.

On a larger scale, though…this book just didn’t go anywhere deep or interesting with its premise. It’s about a young American woman who is hit by a car in Shanghai when her parents think she’s living and working in Beijing, and about that whole family trying to figure out what’s been going on. Which they mostly don’t do. Mostly they just flail around being a mess. Friendships and relationships are severed more or less by bad luck. 

On the up side, the sex workers in the book are treated with respect as people. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of depth in that part either–and it’s a pretty large theme to tackle without having anything in particular to say about it. I can’t say this motivated me to seek out Haigh’s other books. Oh well, they can’t all etc.

Review copy provided by the publisher. The author is also a friend, which started because we share an agent.

This is a grown-up book.

There’s a lot of dark academia going around these days, but most of it is focused either on institutions of higher learning or on the student level, often both. This one is teacher-focused. The students are brilliantly done, but they are realistic about being 17 in ways that are not always flattering, that are adult-perspective rather than own-perspective. And the protagonist is not just a teacher but a teacher who has moved into administration–what we’d probably call a Vice Principal in the US, where this book is not set. A Deputy Head.

Deputy Head in charge of the magic department. In the magic department of her own former boarding school. So there’s that.

The inter-teacher relationships are also beautifully done–co-workers with history and texture–and then there’s the magic, which is revealed with the most amazing pacing, every turn a revelation, the small details so important and so well-highlighted that the moments of “ohhhh it’s THAT thing” keep coming.

This is a weird thing to praise in a public review rather than a private note, but–the chapters are so well-constructed. If you’re having a normal adult life–like our protag Saffy Walden is having!–you will be able to put this book down at the chapter breaks, more curious about what’s coming but also satisfied with how the chapter ending went. It’s just so well done in so many structural ways, and then the heart is a genuine heart. Highly recommended, pick it up as soon as you can.

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.