Novel Gazing Redux

Melissa Albert, The Children. I found this very readable at the sentence, paragraph, and chapter level. When I put it down, I very much wanted to go pick it up again; it was the sort of book I wanted to be reading. Part of this is that Albert is good at the mechanics of writing, and part of it is “something mysterious and probably magical [but not necessarily] is going on with the family of a children’s book writer” is really my jam. As I got further into the book and the protagonist processed more about her childhood, I started thinking that what I would say about this is that it’s an interesting example of a book that works despite the protagonist being very reactive and having almost no agency for most of the book, at times seeming to flee from agency. Then I got to the ending, and that’s not what I’m saying here after all, because I don’t think it works after all, and I think the protagonist’s avoidance is a large part of why, all the way through to the end. I didn’t even feel like her agency had been taken, so I couldn’t make it work in that direction, just: welp. No thank you. Sigh.

Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. Kindle. On the quirky end of Christie’s mysteries, which for me is nice.

Jennifer Graham, The Fall of Iris Henley. A teen thriller about a girl who’s anonymously accused of murder and finds very little support from the people she once trusted. A very tense read, unfortunately all too real in its social dynamics.

Christopher Gravett, Towton 1461: England’s Bloodiest Battle. A friend picked this up, I don’t know whether it was at Towton or somewhere related, but this is definitely the kind of lots-of-pictures battlefield history they sell at battlefields and related museums. Lots of detailed maps from different points in the day. Useful if you’re interested in this specific topic, which I am, it’s adjacent to my Ricardian needs.

Scott S. Greenberger, The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. I would love to say that Chester A. Arthur was more interesting than you’d think, but truly, he’s not. Now we know, I guess. I don’t even blame Greenberger. Just: yah, nobody wanted this guy to be president including himself, and he was, and then he died.

Inhabit Education Books, The Life & Art of Germaine Arnattaujuq. This title came up when I was searching (fruitlessly) for some other Arctic art topic in my library’s card catalog. It is very much a children’s book, the sort of simple summary of a complex career that I didn’t really like even when I was its target age. But the bits of her work visible in it were cool.

Kim Choyeop, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light. I feel like we’re getting a wider range of East Asian SFF translated into English than we were a decade ago, and I feel like particularly Korean SFF is now allowed to be human-focused and “soft” in ways that 1) I love and 2) were not considered translation-worthy in the not-too-distant past. So when there’s a very human-focused short story collection like this one, I feel very lucky indeed. Recommended.

E.C.R. Lorac, Crock o’Lune. Kindle. A not particularly quirky regional mystery, reasonably well done as the other Loracs generally have been.

Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution. Lots of books about the American Revolution this year for obvious reasons, and I appreciate that this one treated both the lead-up and the fallout as parts of global phenomena contributed to by many people and many types of people. Interesting stuff, in some ways wish it had been longer (but it’s not a super-short book already!).

Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age. So much about printing and selling books! So much! So much attention to printing ephemera! This is for the dedicated nerd, but if you are one, here it is.

Maya C. Popa, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. The kind of poetry collection that takes language musings and runs with them at poetic length, which is nearly always of interest to me. The titular poem and related ones thread through in a very good way.

Mykaela Saunders, ed., This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction. This is a book club book, and the “First Nations” in the title refers to Australian First Nations only. I can’t say it’s one of our more successful selections, I think partly because it has several excerpts and we, on average as a group, really don’t like excerpts. (I personally do not like excerpts! I am part of bringing the average well into the negative on this point!) I think the other thing that was difficult about this anthology is that none of us had the experience to be able to sort out editorial bias from general cultural viewpoint. So…now we’ll all have this when we read more Australian First Nations SFF, and that’s a good thing? But it didn’t make the experience of reading and discussing this volume as satisfying as some others.

Nghi Vo, The Scarlet Ball. Discussed elsewhere.

Jesse Wegman, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution. Wilson was an absolute personal disaster, and Wegman never gets so entranced with his subject that he loses sight of that. (To be fair, Wilson would make it very hard to lose sight of that.) He pointed out a lot of the things many of us see as problems now in the US Constitution! He fought for it to be better than it eventually was! Also he had absolutely no financial skills and considered running and hiding to be a great approach to problems, so. Yeah.

G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register. This is the sort of graphic novel that I can see would better suit people who are far more visual than I am. Its art is lovely, its text goes beautifully with the art, and there just isn’t enough story there for me to find it particularly satisfying.

John Wiswell, The Dragon Has Some Complaints. I really really hope this book finds its audience, because it’s warm and funny and also extremely honest about physical and emotional trauma recovery, and frankly when I’ve had physical and emotional trauma recovery, things that were both honest and funny were extremely hard to come by. Especially things with dragons! Especially things with dragons and political machinations! I love those things! I love this book! Read this book.

Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. I really like that this book is primarily organized temporally but also has geographic sub-organization after that, because it reflects how much Young is not assuming that the beliefs of, say, the Saami and the Estonians had to be at all similar to be dealt with in a similar analysis and time frame. He’s very careful about the places where he can talk about the people but not about the details of their beliefs, and that’s fascinating too. I’m very interested in this topic, but I think that even people who are less keen on it might find a lot that would be of interest here.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I knew this was not my sort of thing, and I was correct, but Nghi Vo writes so well that I thought it was worth giving this specific instance of not-my-sort-of-thing a try, and that was also correct. This is in some ways like a billionaire romance if the author was really honest about the morality of billionaires. And also if the billionaires were literally natural disasters taken on (occasional, voluntary) human form.

So yeah, not a lot like most billionaire romances…but it does have the attention to luxury detail, tuned to a dark fantasy precision. Give our heroine a makeover? why not lend her entirely new faces? What happened to the previous owners of those faces? Don’t ask that, smile, look how beautiful you are as someone else! So beautiful you could charm a hurricane. Literally. There are dances galore leading up to the titular ball, there is backstabbing and politicking and exquisite clothing, and there are forest fires masquerading as people for fun and profit. And getting boatloads of both.

If you’re hoping for a moral ending where the wicked suffer and the good are rewarded, this is not that book. If you can be satisfied with something a bit more visceral, well…this might be the thing for you. Especially if you like either the trope of “dangerous rich man, I can change him” or that trope’s subversion.

Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, eds., Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation. This is a collection of essays by translators who are either working in global minority languages or global minority situations, with a wide range of thoughts and attitudes. Very cool stuff, very interesting if you’re interested in translation generally, which I am.

Joe Boyd, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. This could fruitfully have been much shorter. Boyd did a lot of work in the music industry and is sometimes speaking of his personal experience of different parts of world music (separated by chapter geographically except when not). When he leaves his personal experience, he gets both less interesting and less reliable–I believe, for example, that the events he discusses being privy to in Jamaican music are real and even interesting, but his brief comparisons with Trinidad and Tobago, from my own knowledge of those musical subgenres and their cultural context, are far more suspect. Anyway it’s a giant weird book, and I’m glad I read much of it, but also gosh was it a relief to be done.

Hayan Charara, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. Intense and varied, personal, political, natural, all the things. Sometimes bookstore shelf-talkers are the greatest.

Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery. Kindle. I’ve seen the recent filmed version of this, and uh. “Version” may be too strong. This was fun but not one of her more outstanding efforts IMO (the secret society plot that this era tends to do is a hard sell for me whether it’s in book version or movie version), but the transformation of it was…well. I guess they could put “Agatha Christie” on it to draw people in. Meanwhile I do like how exasperated the young women were with how they were perpetually underestimated.

Dorothy Dunnett, King Hereafter. Reread. There sure is a lot of this, and all of it Dunnett, start to finish. Patterns of melodrama and withholding of information: check. Characters who make vividly self-destructive choices: check. Oh Dorothy. I continue to maintain that if you try this one and don’t like it, there’s no need to go on to the two longer historical series. But I will love her forever for noticing that Macbeth’s world was the North Sea world and for going all-in on that, and this is one of my favorites. And despite its size it’s far less of a commitment than either series.

Alix E. Harrow, The Slantwise Histories. Discussed elsewhere.

Rochelle Hassan, The Spell for Unraveling. The last in its series, and I don’t recommend starting here, start with the first one like a sensible person. One of my major questions was how Hassan was going to treat the plot where a person’s One True Love was treated like a metaphysically real thing rather than a personal choice influenced by circumstances, and uh…almost well? but not really well? I’m not sure there was an ending with that plot that would have satisfied me, but otherwise this was a reasonably nice YA contemporary fantasy trilogy, sort of like YA contemporary fantasy used to be but with more varied characters, and I’m glad I read it.

Oliver K. Langmead, The Killing of a Chestnut Tree. Discussed elsewhere.

E. C. R. Lorac, Murder By Matchlight and Two-Way Murder. Kindle. These sure were Lorac mysteries. The first one was both written and set during WWII, which I always find interesting. I am just continuing to get these as the library makes it possible.

Tessa McWatt, ed., Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Some of these essays were about WRITING (in Canada), some were about writing IN CANADA, some were about indigeneity, some where about immigrant experience, there was a really good breadth and also some very specific good depth. This could have been a much more mediocre/standard-issue book, and I’m thrilled that it was as specifically good as it was.

M.E. O’Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. What a weird lovely thing this is. I think if you don’t read leftist oral history at all it might not hit as hard how very good they are at what they’re doing. It’s not a novel, per se, there’s not a linear plot that’s going somewhere, it’s a vision of a multifaceted future. I wouldn’t want everything to be like this, but I’m delighted that this particular thing is like this.

C.L. Polk, The Feywild Job. I haven’t read a D&D novel in over 30 years, but I read everything Cee puts out, so I read this. I had some “wow I have been out of the loop moments,” such as when I learned that Baldur’s Gate is a D&D thing (I really felt like Roger De Bris in The Producers saying, “I for one did not know that the Third Reich meant Germany,” and boy was my godson happy to explain more to me on this topic), but on the whole it was a fantastic-romantic romp that was very Cee. I think it will also be satisfying to those who have been up on the D&D developments of, uh. This millennium, but I’m the wrong person to ask.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Reread. Definitely there’s a reason I am rereading Macbeth stuff, but not an immediate reason. In any case I thought a lot about the witches. It looks to me pretty transparent that they displayed their evil spirits to Macbeth later in the play for Doylean reasons (specifically to make the scenes more varied and do some impressive stage effects but not do them enough to run out of budget/ability to accomplish them). Also thinking about dynasties is wild, that’s what I have to say about that.

Kristen Stapelton, The Modern City in Asia. Kindle. Really interesting stuff about how colonized and non-colonized cities modernized, how war affected these questions, very short and pithy, good stuff.

Jane Yolen, Briar Rose. Reread. I was not done mourning Jane (nor yet), so this is what came to hand. It’s warmly and sweetly done, which sounds like a strange thing for a Holocaust novel, but…it’s also a granddaughter/grandmother novel. And I need more of that in my life. Recommended if you come into it braced.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I’m kind of delighted by this title, which signals its short story collection nature even more clearly than a semicolon and “stories” would do. And it fits, these do very much come at their source material at an angle–not always the same kind of source material, not always the same angle. There are fairy tales and tall tales and histories and love stories and tales of death. I think one of the things I particularly appreciate is how much there’s a pervasive awareness of class in this collection, a sense that these are not characters who will have their way smoothed seamlessly by wealth and power. Not all of them are what I’d call mid-Southern US in their setting and influences, but a lot of them are, in a way that is grounded and textured, and I really appreciate it.

I’d read most of these in their original publications, but not all, and having them collected gives a sort of rhythm to the enterprise that I appreciate being able to see. I feel like the variety of this kind of collection is one of its strengths, but that means that there may be a few stories you like less than others, and that’s okay too–the joy of a collection is that you can just skip to the next one and know it’ll be different.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Okay, look. I am pretty sure this novella was not written specifically to be the pilot for a filmed TV series. It could have been, though. I am the world’s least visual person, and there was not one part of this fantasy mystery that I could not clearly imagine as it would be handled by specifically a British mystery producer. This was a very odd experience for me–not a bad one, but very odd.

This is very much an overtly gay Holmes and Watson analog–they’ve been around the world together, they are clearly a couple, they are so much clearly a couple that they–well, there’s a frame story, let’s put it that way, and the frame story is described as a mystery but really is not. The central mystery deals with fantastical relationship with trees in an isolated community, and also there’s a B-plot about their relationship, but it’s a long-established relationship, not a new one. It’s very sweet. It’s not very much about whodunnit. But if you like trees and procedurals–yes, hello, hi, it’s me–then this is a charming little bite of a novella that will be a good way to spend your time.

Jorge Aguirre and Andres Vera Martinez, Monster Locker. A cute, fun middle-grade graphic novel in the same sort of shape of “young person deals with the legends of his personal ancestors as well as his individual self and contemporary aspects of culture” that the Rick Riordan Presents line of (prose) novels have done so well. If the library gets the sequel I will probably keep reading this series–it’s very charming.

E.K. Johnston, Pretty Furious. Oh geez can Johnston write small towns. Can she ever. The eye for detail and social dynamics just blew me away. This is not the kind of small town fantastika that she started with, it’s mimetic fiction, but that’s okay, I did not need dragons, a group of teenage girls supporting each other and hell-bent on justice was entirely enough.

Isabel J. Kim, Sublimation. I really liked this science fiction novel about doubling of selfhood and immigration, and I felt like she walked a very difficult line very successfully, of being aware of some of the really worse outcomes for immigrants right now without making them the focus of a book where she clearly wanted to talk about a different but also at times difficult shape of immigrant experience. It’s vividly written, and I recommend it.

Fonda Lee, The Last Contract of Isako. Fonda Lee thinks about the applications and consequences of violence so well. The action scenes in her books are never tacked on, they’re always very much to the point and illuminating the thoughts she’s having about violence in systems and individuals, and I think it’s just so beautifully done. This is a science fiction hired goon book, more or less, and I had a lot of fun with it but it was not the “oh you rogue with your clever quip” trope that the speculative genres sometimes see with hired violence, and that was all to the good too.

E.C.R. Lorac, Bats in the Belfry. Kindle. This sure is another Golden Age mystery that I enjoyed for what it is.

Yotam Marom, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness. This book walks the line between activist call to arms and personal memoir. I think Marom’s personal experience in activism and organizing can be extremely useful, but there are times when the type of personal discussion involved muddies the waters a bit and makes it harder for me to recommend this to as many people as might have benefitted from the other side of it. Ah well, still interesting.

Freya Marske, Bodies of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. David (who is a friend) is not kidding with this subtitle. If you’re an academic looking for straightforward, concrete advice about writing for the broader public, he’s got your back, clearly from experience.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters. Reread. Gosh this is simultaneously not-Shakespeare and all-Shakespeare-in-a-blender. He got better with time but I still enjoyed rereading this, even though it turned out not to apply to a potential project at all.

Anthony Price, A Prospect of Vengeance and The Memory Trap. Rereads. Finishing up the series reread, I feel like these last two sort of…illuminate the line between “ramifications and consequences” (one of my favorite series elements ever) and “rehash of previous events,” which I sort of felt like these were. Poor Price, the world he was writing about had fallen apart while he was writing it. I still like the early part of the series, but I think the later ones are unlikely to draw me on a reread, which is fine, knowing where to stop is good.

Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon. A linked-story novel about settling a planet and its environmental-social relations for the humans doing it. Really liked this, even though I wanted it to be a bit more of a unit than it turned out to be. I’ll enjoy the reread more knowing to expect what it actually is.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs. Kindle. Light-hearted and humorous stories doing the thing his plots do basically all the time. If you’re in the mood for the thing he does, he sure is doing it here. (For me this made it a great thing to read in my hotel room during Fourth Street, a break from the intense kind of thinking that convention produces.)

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I absolutely tore through this and was so glad to have it. Highly recommended. I’m saying that first up, because I don’t want you to mistake one of the other major things I’m saying as a criticism: it is one of the most clearly about the aftereffects of the Covid pandemic on medical staff of any novel I’ve read in any genre; certainly the most in the secondary world fantasy genre.

Okay, so the plot is: five students about to take their final exams to become healers in the city that produces the most magically gifted healers of anywhere in the world (distinguished from non-magical medics and nurses), and there’s a murder mystery they have to solve that turns out to have a direct connection to all of them. In the middle of finals. While they sort out their complicated personal lives as people at the cusp of their professional careers often have to do. Backwards, in high heels.

Marske isn’t trying to obscure some of the strongest sources of inspiration to her book. This is a matter of “let’s make a Covid-like situation in a number of dimensions but not pretend that Covid itself is universal,” not “let’s make it a point of dispute about whether we’re even talking about that.” We are. But we’re talking about it thematically, in the same way that the system of educating healers in this universe does not directly replicate our current med schools but invites thought and discussion about some of the same issues that ours have. This is one of the things fantasy can do well, and Marske is doing it really well specifically here. While also juggling a murder mystery plot and several flavors of human interactions, from grudging colleagues through dearest friends into complicated family ties and unsettled romantic/sexual relationships. It’s a longish book, but not because she’s taking her time–there is a lot packed into this one. And I love it that way, I really really do, I love all the chewy thoughts about bodies and healing and relating that go into this with shiny magic systems along the way.