Author: Marissa Lingen

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Rereads. I had run out of TBR before Christmas, and it seemed like time. And oh gosh. If you’d asked me the plot of Eight Cousins when I was small–when it was my favorite LMA–I would have said that the plot was “girl has too many relatives, chaos ensues.” (This was a form of plot I found very relatable.) But upon rereading, oh my goodness. Oh MY goodness. So there is one aunt who has been giving Rose dozens of “patent medicines” and another aunt who says straight out to her face, “Oh, shut up, Myra, we all know you killed your kid with laudanum,” and all the nicer characters are like, “welp, harsh but fair.” (This is only barely a paraphrase.) (Also, rather than thinking this was a weird family conversation, I immediately identified which of my great-aunts I thought would be the one to deliver the “you killed your kid” line and went on reading. WELP.) The plot of Eight Cousins is actually “for the love of Pete will you people stop drugging your daughters into immobility.” So much wilder reading it that way. The plot of Rose in Bloom has always been “which of my cousins should I marry, obviously not someone unrelated to me, don’t be daft.” So I always found that one alarming for the same reasons as I found the first one very relatable. I have so many cousins, and I am so glad to be married to zero of them. So at least one of my sets of memories here was intact, but it was the wrong one.

Stephanie Balkwill, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. Interesting detail about which women had power, and how they had it, and who was opposed to it, and how it was recorded/discussed after. Filling in a bit of history I didn’t know much about.

K.J. Charles, Copper Script. A friend suggested that I might enjoy this one, since I have enjoyed Charles’s mysteries and there is a strong mystery/thriller component here as well as a strong historical romance component. Friend was correct, this worked very well for me because I found the romantic obstacles sympathetic and believable and because it stayed reasonably far on the action plot side of the line. Will be poking around to see what else might suit in Charles’s back catalog, as one can only expect her to write so many murder mysteries in a year.

Amanda Downum, The Poison Court. Kindle. Fantasy court politics and magical politics entwined, as they must do, with interpersonal politics, lush and engaging, not sure why I thought this was a shorter work than it is but I’m very glad I’ve gotten to it now.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Reread. I had, I repeat, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I noticed that 2019 was a minute ago, so I had not in fact “just read” this one. I reveled in the language and playfulness of it all over again.

Margaret Frazer, Lowly Death and The Death of Kings. Kindle. I’m not finding her short stories particularly transcendent, but they are compulsively and conveniently readable, and I’m out of novels, so. The first is a murder mystery, the second is a political mystery about the death of Richard II, who is the wrong Richard for me to really engage, ah well.

Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionaries: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists After 1848. Everybody knows I love me some ’48ers. This is a study that deliberately looks at different regions of America and genders and classes of German-speaking immigrants rather than treating them as a monolith, so it’s full of all sorts of interesting treats of information.

Alice Hunt, Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1648-1660. What I really like is that Hunt is really good about questions like “what was going on with the Caribbean colonization at the time” and “okay but what were they writing and doing scientific research about that was not politics.” It’s about Britain in this decade+, not just about its politics. Really solid stuff, makes me very happy to have.

Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley. Kindle. I’m pretty sure I read this as a child, but I have neither record nor memory of it. It is a delightful gentle fantastical collection, with many of the stories focused on the pleasures of quiet and solitude in a way I find entirely congenial.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel. This was 3/4 of an interesting novel about art restoration, chess, and murder, but then it veered off into mid-late 20th century attitudes about gender and sexuality in ways that I cannot recommend. Go in braced if you go.

Linda Proud, A Tabernacle for the Sun. Kindle. Historical novel in the milieu of Lorenzo de Medici, centering on him but not featuring him as protagonist. This is the first in a trilogy apparently, and if you want to sink into thumping big historical novels, this sure is one. I do sometimes.

Alice Roberts, Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History. The friend who gave this to me for Christmas opined that it was hard to get more in my wheelhouse than a book that discussed both dogs and apples, and he was correct, and this was fun and interesting and made me happy to read.

C.D. Rose, We Live Here Now. Surreal and sinister and sometimes quite funny, this is a book with a fairly niche audience, and that niche is: have you ever made snarky jokes about Anish Kapoor? To be clear, this book is not about Anish Kapoor. But it’s steeped in contemporary art, and that’s a pretty good synecdoche for its direction. We make a lot of Anish Kapoor jokes around here. I found this delightful. Installations and disappearances and different angles on similar happenings. (I find it so delightful when I read/listen to interviews with artists from the 1960s who are constantly having happenings! So many happenings! Why can’t we have more happenings, I ask you. But this book is significantly more contemporary than that.)

Sean Stewart, Mockingbird. Reread. I had, I am telling you, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I remembered very little of this. It holds up quite well, having really good depictions of family dynamics as well as worldbuilding.

Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. An examination (nonfiction) of what that work actually said and did and also where it ramified in cultures not its own, really interesting storytelling stuff, hurrah, glad to have it on the shelf and think lots of thoughts about exoticization and fantasy.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Reread. I had, I hope you understand, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I had not reread this one since high school. I found that while there were a few images I remembered from the last three sections of this omnibus, it was for the most part the first one I remembered. It turns out there’s a reason for this. Basically anything where White has to depict a female character is terrible, they’re all irrational and yelly and stupid, and it looks to me like he’s going “I don’t know, I guess people want a one of these? sometimes?” The first section, the best-known section, though: when I first read this when I was 11, I got the vast majority of the funny bits and I did not get the cri de coeur, I did not get that it was someone who had been there for the Great War screaming into the void that another was coming and the alternative was worse. I’m glad to have a renewed sense of it, and also ow, ow, ow.

Robert Wrigley, The True Account of Myself as a Bird. This poetry collection was right on my knife edge between “observes something ordinary in a way that makes it extraordinary” and “plods along in the utterly undistinguished ordinary,” with some poems coming down on one side and others on the other.

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Material goods/archaeological evidence in the study of this period. It’s slightly awkwardly balanced in terms of who the audience is–I have a hard time that people who need this much exposition about the era will pick up a book this specifically materially detailed–but not upsetting in that regard.

Elizabeth Bear, Hell and Earth. Reread. Returning to my reread of this series in time to still have all the memories of what’s been going on with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and their connections to faerie realms; as the second half of a larger story, it goes hard toward consequence and ramification from the very start of the volume.

Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age: Europe in the 1840s. I feel like this is trying for more than it achieves. It goes into chapters about Romanticism and the advent of science and some other things, and then there’s a second section with chapters about major empires. But what it doesn’t do is actually talk about Europe in this period–it’s fairly easy to find material about England, about France, even about Russia, but there’s nothing here about Portugal or Greece or Sweden. It’s not a volume I’m going to keep on the shelves for the delightful tidbits, because it’s not a tidbit-rich book. Also some of the language is ’90s standard rather than contemporary. So: fine if this is what you have but I think you can do better.

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism From Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. Good ground-up Third World environmentalism thoughts.

Victoria Dickenson, Berries. One of my friends said, “a book about berries, Marissa would love that!” and she was absolutely right. It is lushly illustrated, it is random facts about berries, I am here for it.

Emily Falk, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Interesting thoughts on working around one’s particular brain processes–the third “c” that did not make the title is “connection,” and there’s a lot about how that can be used to live lives closer to our own values.

Margaret Frazer, Heretical Murder. Kindle. One of the short stories, and possibly the least satisfying one of hers I’ve read so far: there’s just not room for questions, uncertainty, or even a very human take on the life experiences of heretics in this milieu. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. If you’re an English Civil War nerd, this book on the lead-up to it will be useful to you. I am. It is.

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater. A near-future desert fantasy that was creepy and exciting and warm in all the right spots. This is one of Kingfisher’s really good ones. Also Copper dog is a really good dog–I mean of course a good dog but also a well-written dog, a dog written by someone who has observed dogs acutely.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Lyrical writing about gardening in the face of more than one apocalypse at the same time. Laing loves many of the same reference points as I do, in life, in literature, and in botany, so I found this a warmly congenial book.

L.R. Lam, Pantomime. This is very much the first volume in a series; its ending is a midpoint rather than an ending per se. It’s a circus fantasy with an intersex and nonbinary protagonist, and it was written just over a decade ago–this is one of the books that had to exist for people to be doing the things with intersex and/or nonbinary characters that they’re able to not only write but get published now.

Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Glorious. Some favorites from past collections and some searing new work, absolutely a good combination, would make a good present especially for someone who doesn’t have the prior collections.

Daniel Little, Confronting Evil in History. Kindle. This is a short monograph about philosophy of history/historiography, and why history/historians have to grapple with the problem of evil. I feel like if you’re really interested in this topic there are longer, more thorough handlings of it, but it was fine.

Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? Really good analysis of how we parse things as alive and having rights, and also how riverine biology, ecology, social issues are being handled. Personal to the right degree, balanced with broader information, highly recommended.

Lars Mytting, The Bell in the Lake and The Reindeer Hunters. The first two in a series of Norwegian historical fiction, not more cheerful than that genre generally is but more…active? relentless? I really like this, they’re gorgeous, but people will die sad deaths, that’s how this stuff does, it’s just as well that I’m taking a break before reading the next one because too much of it can make me gloomy but just the right amount is delightful. The symbolism of the stave church and its bells and weaving and all the weight of rural Norway hits in all the right ways for me.

A.E. Osworth, Awakened. This queer millennial contemporary fantasy is not rep of me, it’s rep of the people I’m standing next to a lot of the time, and that’s powerful in its own way. Many of you are that person. This does things with magic/witch community that feel very true and solid, and it’s a fun read.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Mirage City. The latest in the Evander Mills mysteries. This one takes Andy to Los Angeles and his childhood home, in pursuit of missing (queer) persons. Some of them turn out to be perfectly well, some of them…a great deal less so…but the B-plot was focused on Andy’s relationship with his mother, whose job turns out to be something he didn’t know about–and will have trouble living with. The last line of the book made me burst into tears in a good way, but in general this is a series that has a lot of historical queer peril, and if that’s something that’s going to make you more unhappy than otherwise, maybe wait until you’re in a different place to try them. I think they continue to stand reasonably well alone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear. Reread. Okay, so at some point in early October I earnestly wrote “reread King Lear” on my to-do list for reasons that seemed tolerably clear to me at the time. Things on the list tend to get done. Somewhere in the last two months I forgot why this was supposed to get done. If there’s a project it’s supposed to inform, reading it has not helped me figure out which project that is. I’m not mad that I reread it, it still has the bits that are appalling in the most interesting ways, but…well. A mystery forever I suppose.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I got this in the mail today and immediately read it. Now, yes, it is December and my TBR is perilously small. But also: new Murderbot! Yay! Still delighted to see more of this series.

In this episode: Murderbot has installed code that allows/requires “emotion checks” periodically, so we get to see the self-awareness process evolve with that (and sometimes devolve…). Murderbot is also assisting with the extraction of several humans, including juveniles and an elder. Juvenile humans do all sorts of things that alarm, annoy, and in some cases terrify Murderbot. This is all to the good.

(“Terrified” is never the response to an emotion check. Obviously. Like the kid in The Princess Bride, Murderbot is sometimes a bit concerned, that’s all. Definitely only a bit concerned.)

Unfamiliar systems, unfamiliar humans, what else could be called for here…oh, wait, is it the consequences of Murderbot’s own actions? WELP. Lots of fun. Still recommend. Don’t start here, it’s mid-ramification.

Sam Bloch, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. Interesting natural and social history–and present assessment–of the uses and needs of shade in sunny climates. Very much the sort of environmental study we need more of. Yay for this weird little book.

Meihan Boey, The Formidable Miss Cassidy. Structurally slightly odd but extremely good. “Some weirdos make friends; hijinks ensue” is one of my favorite shapes of plot, all the more so when there’s more than one culture and a bunch of magic stuff going on. More from this author please.

Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence. This is a good introductory book if you haven’t already read a lot of stuff about the lead-up to the American Revolution. It’s not actually one of the ones I’d put very high on my list if you have, but not everyone has.

Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows. I feel like these were longer and less punchy than his previous poems, but that could be genuine or could be a result of my own mood, hard to guess without more intense study. “Not my favorite Espada collection” is still a pretty good thing to be.

Margaret Frazer, The Stone Worker’s Tale. Kindle. This is another of the mystery short stories in the same continuity as her novel series, slight but entertaining as most of them are. Sometimes you can watch mystery authors try to figure out some twist that will entertain them to write, and I think this was one of those times.

Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. This is a good place to go deeper on recent Ghanan history but also a good place to start if you don’t feel like you know very much about 20th century West Africa. A very interesting read.

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World and Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. I got interested in the first of these when I saw it in a bookstore, and it did not disappoint: it’s a history of the US and Latin America, rather than focusing on the US’s relationship with Europe as most such histories do. It was good enough that I requested the second one based on enjoying his work, and I’m not sure that “enjoy” is the right word for a whole book about Kissinger, but then I’m not sure it should be. Grandin’s view of Kissinger is relentless, and I don’t think he should have relented. And at least it’s not terribly long, it doesn’t make you spend more time with Kissinger than necessary to study his sociopolitical effects.

Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. Hochschild is generally good, and I like to see closer-focus histories. Rose Pastor Stokes definitely is interesting enough for a whole book. I do feel like he wanted to be doing some things with her marriage as emblematic of things that didn’t quite get there, but it’s still worth the time.

Marina Lostetter, The Teeth of Dawn. The last in its series, and I finished it from momentum rather than enthusiasm for where the series went. I really liked the earlier ones, it’s just this two-timeline narrative felt labored at points. I generally enjoy her ideas and writing and will be glad to see what else she does next.

Premee Mohamed, The First Thousand Trees. Another third volume. This one was a bit more genre-standard than its two predecessors, but well-executed on that, fitting it into the established worldbuilding and characters.

Trung Le Nguyen, Angelica and the Bear Prince. A sweet YA love story in graphic novel form. Cute to look at as well as cute storyline, won’t take long.

Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times. This is a time loop novel that’s also a murder mystery, and I really liked that the looping character was attempting to prevent the murder in the process of solving it: how can I make this better. The twist in the ending was not entirely satisfying to me, and there was enough problematic alcohol use that even I, who don’t usually flag that, feel like it’s worth noting for people who really dislike that as an element in fiction.

Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, eds., A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Retellings of Asian mythologies by Asian diaspora authors, somewhat varied but generally quite satisfying. I read this for book club, and it gave us a lot of happy fodder for discussion rather than the more annoyed kind we sometimes have.

Hache Pueyo, Cabaret in Flames. Discussed elsewhere.

Jonathan Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China. There’s a lot about field work with Amur tigers in this. A lot. If you like that kind of nitty gritty about how the science gets done, good news, this is a book for you. I do like that sort of thing, so I was very pleased. My one complaint is that there is almost nothing about China and very little about the cross-cultural relationship work here. For having it in the subtitle, it’s…really a Russian book. And that’s okay! Just some clarity there.

Seamus Sullivan, Daedalus Is Dead. I thought this was going to be a completely different shape of thing, which is my fault and entirely on me. The cover and title made me think that Daedalus was going to be a metaphor. Nope! No metaphors here! Very literal retelling of Daedalus’s experiences in life and afterlife! For some reason Sullivan decided that what he most wanted to do here was Daedalus as unreliable narrator in ways that have nothing at all to do with him as a technologist; there’s stuff to be done with complicity in science/technology work, but very little of it was done here, most of Daedalus’s flaws were…generic unpleasant dude flaws, I would say. It’s written quite well, but I ultimately did not want to spend even a novella’s worth of time with this character.

Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer, eds., Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Some very familiar, oft-reprinted stuff in here, plus some stuff I’ve never seen before. A very mixed bag, the full spectrum of my responses as well as the full spectrum of types of feminist SF.

Ellen Wayland-Smith, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self. Wayland-Smith leans very heavily on similes in this essay collection, which often didn’t work amazingly for me because the similes felt…fine? rather than genuinely illuminating. I feel like a cad saying that her best work was about her own mortality, but, well. Better than her worst work, I suppose? Still. This was fine enough but not a favorite.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Like Pueyo’s debut, this is an extremely well-done example of something that is very, very much not my thing. This is another monsterfucking book! I am using that term as a genre term of art rather than a pejorative: there are guls, they eat human flesh, the main character ends up romantically/personally entangled with one despite or perhaps because of her complicated history.

There’s vivid writing here–which if you are not interested in stories of human flesh being eaten is not necessarily going to appeal to you–and there are cultural touchstones I wish we saw more of in things published in the US. It’s great to see a really Brazilian speculative novella–and the politics of contemporary Brazil give this speculative story weight and deep roots. It’s done so well. It’s just so beautifully written. But also, and crucially for me, it is body horror basically start to finish, so: approach with care, depending on your tastes.