Author: Marissa Lingen

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.

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.