Author: Marissa Lingen

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.

Once again, this is a work by a close friend, who provided me with the review copy.

I like middle books best, and one of the things I like best in middle books is ramifications. You’ve had the chance to set up both world and characters, you have some idea what parameters the particular series is working under: how does Corin Oshima react to aliens? What is her idea of honor? What kind of goals does she find satisfying? We know all that now, we’ve had it established, so now’s the time to double down on matter anomalies, first contacts, and oh yes, solving a murder.

The Ralkhuri are here, Corin still has a fraught but duty-laden working relationship with the person who betrayed her most deeply before the series ever started, and we’re definitely poking into the deeper layers of meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And this time the answer is much more complicated than 42. Don’t start here, start with the first book, it’s very much in print–but definitely keep going, there’s a lot here to love.

Natalie Adler, Waiting on a Friend. You find this out in chapter one, it is not a spoiler: this is the story of a young lesbian in NYC in the 1980s who can see ghosts, who can see all her friends who have died of AIDS except for her best friend. When I told the young people in my life this premise they literally gasped, and they were correct to do so. It’s beautifully done, but if you think “that sounds like it would rip my heart out and repeatedly smash it with a hammer,” well, yes, you’re not wrong about that. I was up for that, and I recommend it, but no shade if you need to wait for a better day for it.

Danielle Allen, Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat–and the American Revolution–Transformed Britain. Not a particularly well-written book, but with material I wanted to know, which is in some ways the worst kind of nonfiction. Still, if you want to know about the radical politics of the Duke of Richmond and his political relationship with Thomas Paine, here’s where you can find that.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Trade of Blood. The most recent of the Ana and Din books. I think my favorite of them so far. I like where this went and where it seems to be going. Hooray.

Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs, Lord Edgware Dies, Sad Cypress, Sparkling Cyanide, The Hollow, The Labors of Hercules, and The Sittaford Mystery. Kindle. Look what the library’s digital collection got in from my holds list in time for me to travel. Yep, these sure are by Agatha Christie. The Labors of Hercules is a short story collection, and I continue to find mystery shorts unsatisfying; ah well.

Madelaine Drohan, He Did Not Conquer: Ben Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada. Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby. Ope, sorry, that is: too much Ben Franklin, not enough Canada. You can read about Ben Franklin all sorts of other places and not nearly enough about the inter-British-colony politics of the 1770s. Ah well, it’s a start at least.

Safia Elhillo, The January Children. For me this is an example of it being a good idea to read poets who don’t immediately resonate, who are coming from a different place than oneself completely. Interesting poems rather than ones that speak directly to my heart, but that’s good, I shouldn’t be the target audience for everything, and I’m not.

Barbara Hambly, Death in the Palace. Latest in her 1920s Hollywood series. If you like these, this sure is another one, and I do, so here we are.

Heide Island, Romp! A Journey Through the Natural History of Otters and Why They Matter. Delightful natural history of otters, with lots of detail about field study of them. This kind of natural history is good for my spirits, might be good for yours too.

Michael Karns, Dennis Becker, and Lisa Golden Schroeder, Untamed Mushrooms: From Field to Table (A Midwestern Guide). Things you can do with foraged mushrooms. I like foraged mushrooms. I’d thought of several of these things more or less, but not all.

T. Kingfisher, Nine Goblins and The Raven and the Reindeer. Both very short older works, very different tonally. The latter is a Snow Queen retelling, which I often like and did like in this case; the former is goblin-perspective, which I often don’t like but did this time. Like Ursula (that is, Kingfisher), I read and watched a great deal of All Creatures Great and Small as a tiny kid, so the fantasy vet helping the unicorn give birth and so on was exactly up my alley.

Just Knut Qvigstad and Isak Saba, Sámi Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds. An old compendium of folk tales, most of them with magical content, in a new translation. Beautiful, easy to read, fascinating perspective, especially because these are not retellings that are polished to fit particular molds or have palatable contemporary morals. Really good resource.

David Woodman, The First King of England: Aethelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. When you read a lot of books about a particular topic, you start to pick out which one is for which strengths, and the major strength of this one over other books about Aethelstan is that it spends time on the Welsh and how they fit into the whole picture.

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.