Novel Gazing Redux

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Reread. I’m running a bit short on TBR pile at the same time as I’m looking forward to a “Classic or Just Old?” panel at Can*Con in mid-October, so several of the things I’ve read in this fortnight have been with that panel in mind. The interesting thing about this one is that basically all the good bits are perpetuated and reproduced in nerd culture. Usually there are at least a few “oh I forgot about that”s, especially in a book I haven’t read since 1992 at the latest (probably more like 1990).

Louisa May Alcott, Under the Lilacs. Reread, Kindle. And speaking of books I haven’t read in a minute: this was the Alcott I didn’t own and the branch of the library I used most regularly also didn’t own. So while it was a reread, I didn’t retain nearly as much of it as I do of, um. Any of her other work. Which is too bad, because it has a poodle (although also the poodle has some official and substantial peril, which I wouldn’t have liked much even knowing how it would end). It also has a gratuitous section anti-Chinese racism–no Chinese characters, but room for racism all the same. Sigh.

Stephanie Burgis, A Waltz of Sinister Import. Discussed elsewhere.

Octavia Butler, Patternmaster. Reread. Violent and straightforward telepath-on-telepath violent adventure with plenty of violence. Did I say violence? Yes. Did I say nuance? Not really; this is one of my nominees for “author wrote some classic work but not all her work is classic.”

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. Reread. I let myself reread this favorite in honor of my own dubious book. We are doing very different things with doubt in them, but hardly anybody else is taking it head-on at all, so I went to go sit by Pamela for a bit, literarily speaking. Still love this so much.

Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, eds., We See a Different Frontier. Kindle. It’s always nice when one doesn’t get to an anthology anywhere near its publication date to find that it has held up. Several people in here are now much more broadly published, which is good to have the hindsight to see, but I really enjoyed most of the stories, and “most” is about all an anthology usually gets.

John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air. Reread. Always with your games and identity, Mike. Well.

Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gündoğdu, eds., Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State. Read this for book club, and it’s the sort of science fiction anthology you get when most of the authors don’t regularly write science fiction: there was a lot that felt like attempting to invent the concept of science fiction from scratch and ending up with similar sorts of clunky telling that we got early on. In service to this very underrepresented culture, still interesting to have.

Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England. This was about most of the 17th century rather than just the years of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Interregnum, and I think that was to its benefit. If you’re not very familiar with that placetime, this is a good place to start, and if you are, it’s still well done and interesting.

Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times. An autofiction by/about someone whose first year at Stanford was the fall of 2019. So yes, a pandemic novel, staggeringly and overwhelmingly a pandemic novel. One of the things that’s always a question with autofiction is whether it’s the auto- or the fiction part that has failed when there is a failure: if the characters of the former friends seem flat and insufficiently considered, is it because she didn’t do as good a job with that part of writing fiction as with some of the other elements of this novel? Or is it because she is accurately writing down real behavior she never fully understood? Both are possible–even, I suppose, simultaneously. It’s a very young novel and I sometimes lost patience for the protagonist and/or for the author, but the writing propelled me through all the same.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter. Kindle. This is a collection of minor Le Guin nonfiction: introductions to other people’s books, short reviews, a few speeches and essays. It’s nice. It’s not more than nice, mostly.

Rose Macaulay, What Not. Reread, Kindle. This, on the other hand, is not nice at all, and I love it. It’s darkly hilarious. It understands the science fiction technique of incluing when the official genre of science fiction mostly had no clue about it. It’s a dystopia whose people are very directly the people she knew, generally speaking; they read like the cast of any other 1918 English novel, but gone horribly wrong with eugenics. I think one of the great things about What Not is that her dystopian technologies are entirely social. Macaulay understands that it’s people, the problem is humanity, and the solution, to the extent that there is one, is also humanity.

Iain Pears, Stone’s Fall. I hate this book so much that I hope I remember how much I hate it and never read anything by this author again. The twist ending is so unmotivated and so stupid and so bad. The problem is that he can write sentences, so I kept reading, and it got thoroughly and abruptly worse.

Sophia Smith Galer, How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Smith Galer’s focus is entirely away from the circumpolar region that’s my particular interest here, but it’s still a compelling collection of essays that focuses more on how to save languages when we can than on how to kill them. The resistance is not in the subtitle just for marketing clicks. Good read.

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves. Kindle. This sure was itself. The non-Wooster-and-Jeeves stories were less good, but still fine. I knew what I was getting into.

Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing With Dragons and Searching for Dragons. Rereads. I didn’t find these at a young age like a lot of the fantasy writers my age–I was in my twenties and living in this house and had read other books by one Patricia C. Wrede. But these are definitely high on the list of Pat’s works considered classics, and they’re fun, fast reads; glad to have gotten to them again.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

I think I get to say “triumphant conclusion” again! I love to say “triumphant conclusion.” If you’re less fond of that phrase, okay, okay, this is the third book in the Lord and Lady Riven series, and I would not recommend starting here, because much of what makes the characters’ actions work, much of the interest and impact, is contextual from previous stories. It’s that it’s not a sitcom plot where the characters reset every time, they’re actually learning how to be with each other and with the rest of the world.

Which is a thing I really love about this series: it doesn’t stop at “these people are in love,” which is great because things don’t stop there. Not only fantasy plot things, but relationship things. We will keep running into different magical creatures and artefacts, sure, because that’s how this world is (and it’s a lovely fantastical reflection of how this world is, rich and diverse), but also we will keep developing as people, and figuring out how to have our marriage reflect that. I particularly loved that being concerned with and attentive to the needs of vampires did not magically make Margaret fully aware of the needs of the new person she meets. It’s an aspect of disability justice that I don’t see often enough in fantasy metaphor, and it was wonderful here.

Also I have a few friends I’d have wanted to huddle under an invisibility cloak with for shenanigans shortly after meeting them. Yes, absolutely. Some people immediately strike you that way.

Kenzie Allen, Cloud Missives. This was a birthday present that came with a content warning, and rightly so: some of the topics of these poems are harrowing, and the language is vivid enough to highlight rather than blunt them. Which is a good thing. But proceed with caution.

Attar, The Conference of the Birds. A twelfth century allegorical poem, featuring a great many conversations between symbolic birds and quite a lot of focus on what it means to be a good person living a good life, many of the conclusions of which are absolutely opposite my own, but still of interest to see how another time and culture developed them.

Rachel Carney, Octopus Mind. Mostly poems about dyspraxia, mostly the sort of poems that very much come right out and say what they’re about. There are some fairly high highs in this collection for me but also some fairly low lows.

Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge. Of the three poetry collections I read this fortnight, this was the one that was most “my thing,” most vividly natural with a confident personal voice.

Agatha Christie, The Clocks. Kindle. The cats in this book did not rise to the level of Bob the dog but were still very reasonable cats, it was clear she had met cats and made observation of them. Anyway it was a reasonably cromulent Christie mystery if you want one of those.

Deva Fagan, The Delta Codex. A middle grade science fiction novel with a young heroine trying to make sense of her own memories and milieu on a hostile planet whose hostility is at least in part its humans. I really liked this.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Home-Maker. Kindle. This is a fascinating novel from the mid-1920s, the premise of which is: what if people who are unhappy with their currently assigned gender roles got to swap and were much better suited for the opposite gender roles? And it’s very interesting to watch her construct that for her time, but I found the ending very unsatisfying (horrifying actually). Also, and crucially, I know someone who treated her family exactly like the mother in this book treated her family at the beginning…and had a major career the whole time. So I had a very hard time thinking that “just get her a job she finds engaging!” was going to be enough.

Dana Frank, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. Kindle. This was a personal account of the author’s involvement with activism on behalf of Honduran civil liberties, in the US and Honduras. She was very clear about it being her perspective, her experiences, not a universal account with any linguistic pretense of objectivity. I still–therefore? still?–learned a lot from it. It was about as much fun as you’d expect, but I can’t really imagine that Honduras 2008-2024 is going to be a “fun” topic no matter how you spin it.

Kate Heartfield, Mercutio. I felt like I am the person sitting next to the target audience for this book, with its Dante/Faerie/Romeo and Juliet hook. I still enjoyed it, but I think all I need to say is that combination of three things and several of my friends will make undignified noises in their haste to go get a copy. Some books sell themselves, accurately.

Vera Keller, The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge. Keller has a lot of interesting things to say about the pre-Civil War Stuart era of the formation of science and specifically about authority, access, who is able to investigate which topics and speak to them and how and with what support. Really good stuff about an aspect of this transformative era I hadn’t seen treated head-on before.

Premee Mohamed, Wickhills. A city fantasy (not urban fantasy, that means something else), a spy novel, a citywide Gothic, this balances so many genres so well. I was captivated, I definitely recommend it.

Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call. A 1930s murder mystery with a fairly large cast allowed their own perspective. The ending wasn’t quite as solid as the rest for me. Endings are hard. But I’m definitely interested in Quinn’s other novels.

Tore Skeie, The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire. I think if this book had had a different subtitle, I would have prioritized it less and been less disappointed in it. Because I am deeply interested in the North Sea milieu, I am deeply interested in that as a connected world, and this…was not particularly more about that than any other book about the Viking Age. It spent a lot of time on Europe, it even did the obligatory Vikings In Byzantium Oh My, it was not at all better at joining the dots about what was going on along different bits of the North Sea at any given time. It was fine. There are better books at what it’s doing, but it’s fine.

Francesca Tinti, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons. Kindle. This is a short monograph talking about how and where the Anglo-Saxons had cultural and religious impact on continental Europe, and it, by contrast, is doing something that isn’t done enough, doing it reasonably well, and then getting on with life.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Specifically I read the Rosamund Bartlett translation, which I would recommend, because she extensively researched and footnoted all the things that I think of as “texture,” all the metaphors about beekeeping and birds and things that are very specific to Tolstoy. That’s what I loved about this book. Plot and characters, not so much; portrait of a milieu, absolutely worth the price of admission.

Jorge Aguirre and Andrés Vera Martínez, Monster Locker: Nine-Tail Trouble. Another graphic novel with middle-school monster fighters and friendship/social dynamics, this time with a kitsune (it’s in the title, it’s not a spoiler) and a different character embracing their heritage. Very fast good fun.

Albrecht Berger, The Statues of Constantinople. Kindle. Short monograph about exactly what the title says. It was available in a give-away some time ago, and I picked it up on a whim; if you’re not interested in the topic it’s probably not worth seeking out, but it was interesting to put into the mental mix about worldbuilding.

María Luisa Bombal, New Islands. I don’t know if it was the translation style or if this was in the original, but these short stories had a very early-20th feel to me, a bit of Henry James, a bit of Amy Lowell. They were written much later than that, so I’m still mulling over why that would be. They were vividly dramatic if that’s the mood you’re in.

M.A. Carrick, The Eye of Leviathan. Carrick is two friends of mine, and they have not lost their touch: their prose is still immediately and vividly engaging and propelled me all the way through this one. The setting is not ever going to be my favorite of theirs, I think–the Spanish “Golden Age” puts me in very much of a mind to pick at setting choices when there’s an entire faerie realm that is verified and matters quite a lot to world developments, so I never settled into it as much as I wanted to, but I can’t think anything the authors could have done to change that once they had that setting and were not really focused on the groups that actually were oppressed by the Spanish Empire of the time. I’ll still read the next one for sure.

Rae Carson, Monster Monarch Maiden. This is what I mean when I talk about liking “stitial” fantasy as well as interstitial fantasy: it is absolutely genre-center, it is not the least bit interstitial, and it is really well done right smack in the middle of this genre I like. I also particularly thought the ending was well done, the denouement landed for me. Individual magical gifts and travels through highly varied landscapes and perils! Yes here I am.

Agatha Christie, Curtain, Dead Man’s Folly, Dumb Witness, and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Kindle. The reading project continues. I have now encountered my favorite character in all of Christie so far, Bob the dog in Dumb Witness, who is far more patient with Hastings than Hastings really deserves.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Sanna Valkonen, and Jarno Valkonen, eds., Knowing from the Indigenous North: Sámi Approaches to History, Politics, and Belonging. Interesting collection of essays situating a northernness that is very distinct from westernness in cool ways, very glad I found it (used! for about 5% of what it would cost me to order it!) in this summer when I was taking Sámi cultural classes.

T. Kingfisher, Daggerbound. Second in its series, and I think it would stand alone reasonably well. Good times with people who live in swords! Or mostly bad times for them. Good times for me though. A human likes a gnole so much. The gnoles just continue great. And there is a giant bug–okay, if you’re going to drop the book and freakout about a giant bug character, yeah, there sure is one, fundamental to the plot, too, but otherwise go have fun with this, it’s one of her better ones.

Yoon Ha Lee, Fox Snare. Kindle. Caught up on the end of this MG science fantasy series and had a lot of fun with it, but for heaven’s sake don’t start here.

Scott Lynch, Locke Lamora: The Bottled Serpent and The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious. Kindle. Two shorts, both entertaining. “Kaiju Agonistes” sets a high bar for “Scott Lynch’s best short work,” but I did have fun with these all the same.

Hilary McKay, Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, Permanent Rose, Caddy Ever After, and Forever Rose. Rereads. The only reason I didn’t reread Caddy’s World as well is that I don’t own it yet and the library has culled their copy. I love these books so much, and once I started reading one I just wanted to be reading them all the time. They’re like a crash course in subtext for the grade school set, an absolute masterpiece of perspective and of understanding different perspectives. I love them so much.

Emmet A. O’Brien, Here Be Dragons. Discussed elsewhere.

Aleksander Pluskowski, The Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades. I’m not sure why other people are willing to tell me more about the Baltic Crusades this year than in previous years, but I’m here for it, tell me more about what weird stuff people were up to around the Baltic, that is my jam. This one is substantially focused south of my main interest (Finland and Sápmi), but I’m still happy to learn interesting things about Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and all the smaller groups that went into them in various ways.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. This is a history of Classical music in the 20th. Did you know that the only woman who really mattered in 20th century Classical was Jiang Qing (Mme. Mao)? Yeah, it’s that kind of history. There were lots of other pieces of analysis that did not strike me as correct or well-grounded (you cannot! understand Sibelius! without understanding 20th century Finland at least a little! sir! sir!), and I frankly don’t recommend this; there were some interesting spots but a lot of ugh.

Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, eds., Nova Scotia 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland. This is a very well-constructed anthology. I kept enjoying stories and thinking, “I wonder if this is the one that’s why I knew I wanted this!” until I got to the one that is definitely why I knew I wanted this (it’s the one about Lise Meitner, you’ll know it a mile off), but the fact that there was any question is a very good sign.

Andrea Wulf, The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris. Andrea Wulf is very good at her job, so this is entirely readable. If you don’t have more than one Andrea Wulf book in you, don’t go with this one, it is a side quest. George Forster is moderately interesting and is a great example of how “a man of his time” can mean things much more progressive than we’re encouraged to think it can, but at the end of the day he is a footnote in the history of natural science, and even Wulf knows it. I like reading the footnotes. You may also like reading the footnotes. But that’s very much what this is.