Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.