Category: Uncategorized

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. Rereads. These were not my intended memorial rereads when A.S. Byatt died, and in fact I still have that intention (Possession) on my pile. But I just sort of fell back into these, the familiar cadences of semi-fairy tale language and the places where she is thoughtful about creative work happiness and the chill of grief and all the other places.

Catherine Chidgey, Pet. A disturbing novel about a young girl in the thrall of a manipulative teacher who also has most of the adults around her conned. I didn’t like the way that her epilepsy played into some of the twists in the end–I don’t think it was entirely thoughtfully handled–but the prose and characterization were well-done.

Samuel K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425. I can’t think of a better way to handle subtitling something when you want to talk about a small but not clearly defined subset of Europe so you can’t say “Western Europe” (because it’s not all of Western Europe) or any other category like that, but really the subtitle vastly overstates the case here, Cohn is only going to talk about Italy, France, and Flanders. Which is a shame, because I was really interested in the whole–I was particularly interested in the overarching comparisons, but I think what was going on in the Germanies was interesting and hoped that he would have insights into Eastern vs. Western Europe that he obviously isn’t going to have if Italy is as far east as he goes. There was interesting stuff here, but it really wasn’t the book I wanted, and also he had a disconcerting habit of referring to France as Northern Europe (stop that, Cohn).

Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History. After I finished Soil, I went immediately to find out what else the library had, and this did not disappoint, a collection of explorations of place and reception of herself and her daughter. Beautifully done.

Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. Discussed elsewhere.

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story. This was a very short novel, interesting in its way, about a couple with a toddler, living in a cramped apartment, who discover that when one friend comes over–and only then–they have a beautiful terrace. The handling of the speculative conceit as it unfolds is very literary, but the fact that additional speculative elements are introduced into this story with a fundamentally literary focus and resolution makes me feel even more like the speculative genres have made their way into the culture–it feels like the kind of short surreal novel that would have been trying to distance itself from genre fiction 20 years ago, not matter-of-factly ending with some characters on a space station.

Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown. Reread. I was reading The Blue Sword for book club last month, and this one was always more of a favorite. One of the things that interested me about it was that when it shifted the geography of Damar, it also substantially shifted the culture, so that it felt like all the references to things in The Blue Sword were very much “oh yes, they’ll have that later” and not “I have to deal with the cultural choices I already made about what will be important here.” I still love Aerin’s experimentalism so much. I am completely confounded by some of the age differences in characters now, though, and while I don’t think it was written as an explicit argument against monarchies (“don’t have a king, kids, or you might end up with the one guy in charge being barely functional while he’s personally grieving for decades, and that’s in the event that you got a halfway decent one to begin with!”), it sort of came out like one.

Megan O’Keefe, The Fractured Dark. The second in its series about mind-control parasites taking over a space opera series. Er, I mean humanity. And the humans who love them. And would like to not love them, but can’t, because see above. Do not, do not, do not start here, it’s very much a second book.

O No Yasumaro, The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. This very much read like a listing of spirits and how they came to be. It was a very different kind of origin epic than many of the origin epics I’ve been reading. I can’t say that it resonated as strongly as a narrative, but taken in small chunks it’s fascinating, all the ways people can enumerate parts of spirituality and place.

Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind. It feels deliberately hilarious to describe something as noir that’s so full of color, I really appreciate Pardo’s sense of humor about this. This is a novel in which mood-altering pigments allowed Argentina to win what we know as the Falklands War and become a world-dominating power, and the subtlety and thoughtfulness of the worldbuilding from there is only one of the novel’s many charms, since it’s by turns an investigative mystery, the story of someone pulling her career together, and the story of someone sorting out her interpersonal relationships (of various shapes) in a very difficult time for doing that. It was simultaneously doing something no one else is doing and behaving as though the good parts of cyberpunk hadn’t died all those years ago.

Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces. A collection of essays about different aspects of how we interact with human faces and expectations thereof. Slim and well-done.

Genevieve Warwick, Cinderella’s Glass Slipper: Towards a Cultural History of Renaissance Materialities. Kindle. A monograph about luxury goods, particularly in dowries and marriage goods, in the Renaissance and their influence on the specific shape of the stories we get told as fairy tales. Small enough not to overplay its hand.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

The world is on fire, so I did not successfully hold off reading Max’s book about how the world is on fire until closer to its release date. Also, I’m not sorry.

Okay, look, middle books in trilogies are the traditional place for the wheels to come off, right? Everything has been set up in the first book with Tara’s apprentice Dawn making some god-level dubious choices with the Craft, and now’s the time for all the pieces on the board to scatter into chaotic woe, that’s how trilogies work. But this isn’t just a trilogy, it’s also the culmination of the Craft books from before the trilogy, so when we say all the pieces on the board—

The gang really is all here, friends. Is there a major character you’re missing from one of the previous Craft books? Because Max has dropped them in the shit here. Basically all of them. Many of the fires are literal, people die (gosh that’s inconvenient and hard on their clothes), and the conviction that you and your team are saving the world…doesn’t actually guarantee that the world will get more saved by the stuff you get yourself into.

Because wicked problems are not just “problems! wicked!” They’re the ones with no stopping point, the ones that are complex to the point of insolubility. They’re the ones where attempts at solution reveal more problems. And all of that, absolutely all of it, comes up here, as literal apocalypse bears down on gods, priests, lawyers, family, friends, and whoever else they can rope into helping. Or hindering, or…if they can even tell the difference.

Seriously don’t start here, but if you think you might be excited about all this? Yeah. You’re excited. Because this book just does not let up.

New story out in Uncanny today, A Piece of the Continent! Friendship, family, road trip, middle America at its windiest.

And when you’re done with that, Caroline Yoachim interviewed me about the piece, so there’s more to read! One of the things we didn’t get a chance to talk about was the title, which some of you will already have spotted is cribbed from John Donne–we often get the beginning and the ending of the passage cut off in tiny pieces but not the full extent of it:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Hits differently with the full context, doesn’t it? And when I was writing about driving across the middle of America, a piece of the continent I know all too well–a piece whose loss I would feel like a friend–that is as much as the loss of Vanuatu, of a swamp in Louisiana. So what better way to think about life with our friends. There’s tribute to more than one friend in this piece, there is entanglement–involvement, thanks, John–with more than one part of mankind here. I hope you enjoy.

Jake Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. This was a very strange and somewhat disappointing book. I understand that climate migration is a very large topic and that Bittle needed to draw some constraints on it to make it manageable at book length, but he focused mostly on the kind of natural disaster that anyone even remotely likely to read this book already understands fairly well (and in some cases went into details that were vividly sad but not particularly climatological). He didn’t do a lot with discussing infrastructure challenges to that coming migration, sort of gesturing in the direction of “yep, might be some” and moving on (and in some cases not gesturing sufficiently in that way–some of the Rust Belt cities that have had falling population are not left infrastructurally well-prepared for re-rising population thereby, because the infrastructure is not necessarily maintained, a point that seemingly escaped him). But particularly: a lot of the major challenges ahead due to climate migration are not due to internal migration but to international migration, and he deliberately did not address any of those here, which rather nerfed the entire set of problems. Someone who lives in Florida now has the papers to live in Michigan later, and while the locals in their new town might have a range of attitudes about “newcomers,” it’s absolutely nothing compared to the attitudes people display towards international immigration, no matter how well-motivated. Basically I just need a different and much better book on a broader version of this topic. Or, like, twelve of them.

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History. Discussed elsewhere.

Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man. Reread. I was afraid to reread this, because one of my favorite teachers ever placed it in our hands in seventh grade as her example of how science fiction could be good. I was right to be afraid. These stories are definitely more about the human heart than about equations, certainly, but the human hearts he was most interested in were almost exclusively fearful, angry, and closed–almost more so when it was congratulating itself on being open. I remembered some of the stories vividly but not what they added up to, not the anger and fear they added up to, and it made me so sad.

Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance. What a disappointment. If you want to do an honest reckoning with how people who have been oppressed can themselves be complicit in oppression, you have to actually be honest about how they were complicit, and at this Clarren utterly fails to the point of being counterproductive because her family ran a bar and bootlegged at the edge of a reservation and she frames this as rebelliously “sticking it to the man” instead of taking a good hard look at the ways white settlers used unfamiliar intoxicants to wreak havoc in Native cultures. (I say this as a person whose ancestors bootlegged in logging camps! Not on the border of a res but yeah, I am familiar with what taking a good hard look at ancestral harms actually looks like here, Clarren! Much easier to handwave about what the government did, much harder to think, oh shit, this completely optional choice of businesses was a choice my specific people made to line their specific pockets–but if you’re setting out to do the no-excuses we-should-have-thought-it-through version, no dodging this one. Mine did it. Hers did it. It hurt real people. One of us is willing to say so. The other wants to posture about rebellion. Unfortunately, I’m not the one who wrote a book.) The other failure mode here is that if you’re going to expect people to take you seriously, you need to be accurate when you’re making claims about which harms are unique (and why it’s important to you that they are unique–why that particular form of grief poker is crucial)–and Clarren utterly fails at that, not only claiming that certain harms happened only to Native people that happened to other PoC in the US as well, but also completely missing on her own ancestral history. If you say that a particular kind of oppression didn’t happen to Jewish people that actually did, you’re going to lose credibility–and you should. It seems like her intentions were good here, but that doesn’t end up counting for a lot. Reconciliation work is important. I wish I could recommend this book as part of the nuanced nature of that work, but I really can’t.

Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. An absolutely delightful piece of local nature writing, from the perspective of a Black mother in Colorado whose work is going on during lockdown–and, one hopes, beyond, but the focus of this book is having a mid-sized kid and garden during lockdown. Dungy’s work is new to me but vivid and assured; I immediately rushed to put more of her books on my list.

Linda Gregerson, Canopy. I really like Gregerson’s poetry but I’m not sure she’s doing any better than any of the rest of us with current events, friends. Place-aware, nature-aware, acute, and…struggling. But in a way I still like to read.

Ariel Kaplan, The Pomegranate Gate. The first fantasy novel by an author whose non-speculative work I devoured, and this did not disappoint. Its take on Jewish mythology was fresh and lovely, its characters were great, I was captivated and definitely want more of this world. Which it looks like I’m going to get! Go team!

Freya Marske, A Power Unbound. I don’t know whether this counts as romantasy or just fantasy with a strong romance component. In any case, it has a strong enough romance component that it’s doing a genre romance trope thing quite deliberately, and I think probably quite well? but it’s a trope I don’t like. So in all the fantasy ways this is very much The Stunning Conclusion Of this trilogy, but for me the romance part is Oh Well That Thing I Guess. This is entirely me and not the writing, and I was still glad to be reading it, it’s just that for the first two in the series it was YAY THIS YAY THIS all the way through. Ah well, no trope is for everyone, and the fantasy is still well-executed–especially the very ending.

Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword. Reread. This was for book club, and we had a lot of good conversation about the weird colonialism of this book, the fact that it was published as children’s in the US and adult in Britain (and the nature of agency in the book touching on each), and all sorts of other things, but for all the things that are very weird about this book, I still love Hari and the way she opens herself to loving Damar.

Foz Meadows, All the Hidden Paths. Discussed elsewhere.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society. What a strange set of things to read. This is a Library of America collection of writings, so it’s a chronological selection of letters, papers, and more public work. Olmsted was not, so far as I can tell, a particularly prolific diarist or personal letter writer–his personal letters seem to represent stopgaps in conversations that were more commonly carried on aloud. There are still flashes of him being a person who can learn but who has to. There is, for example, an early section where he talks about how the Southern slaveholders are kind to their slaves, which he knows because they’re impressively aristocratic people and have told him so; followed a few dozen pages later by the shocked revelation that he looked into it and they’re not. there are all sorts of bits like this. Also there are long sections of “this is what you ought to do with bushes this is what you ought to do with trees HOLY SHIT I HATE HORACE GREELEY WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS this is what you ought to do with ornamental plants.” So that’s…fun. It’s a very weird thing to read bits of over the course of a few months, with lots of holes just where you’d like to know more, but I’m not sorry I read it.

Sarah Tolmie, The Fourth Island. A novella about despair and the sea and the Aran Isles. It goes for just as long as it needs to and then it stops, and the wind blows through it.

Matt Wallace, Nowhere Special. A children’s book about living out where nobody else wants to be and having to struggle your way up with the odds stacked against you. Not speculative, and some of the pieces of this will strike some of us as all too real–in my case not for my own experience but that of some people I know. There’s abuse here, there’s violence of other sorts, but none of it gratuitous and all of the book extremely life-affirming and hopeful in the long-term. I know some people don’t ever like “problem novels” (that is, books in which kids have to deal with the problems real kids have to deal with), but this is the absolute best of what that kind of book can be, full of heart and care.

Kate Wilhelm, Children of the Wind. Reread. Five novellas. I felt like this was…also very fearful about the future and those who would people it? but in a way that was far less angry than Bradbury, and made me feel tender rather than angry. There’s a lot of worry about where the potential of the human mind is taking us in Wilhelm’s work, and I don’t think it’s well-founded as science speculation, but it makes me want to get her a blanket and some tea rather than roll my eyes and tell her to snap out of it. I always feel like she’s grasping to do better, and to hope that other people think about doing better too, once they’ve read these novellas. (But darlings. Oh my darlings. I am more afraid for the children than of them.)

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This sequel to A Strange and Stubborn Endurance doesn’t strictly require reading the first volume, but it’ll help a lot, because this is a book about next chapters. Velasin now lives in a place where he can be out as a man who loves men, where he can be married and have his marriage not only accepted but the basis for a political alliance. He and his new husband Caethari are just getting settled into their marriage, with all the complications that come from cross-cultural relationships in the public eye, when they have to travel to the capital city to meet the monarch and deal with court–something Cae never wanted to do in the first place and Vel is not very well prepared for.

Oh, and someone is trying to kill them. And/or break up their marriage. So that’s fun.

We even know a bit of who/why, because we run into that person early, and the suspense of where they are and what they’re doing is part of the early tension of the book. Once they do show up clearly, figuring out which way he will jump next only ratchets the tension up further. This is fundamentally a very political book, where politics are the interaction of human motivation and relationship, and having another character to be a dark mirror for motivations of the ones we already had adds depth and places to reflect. This is the kind of fantasy that has a light touch with magic, all the better to spend more time on speculative societies and politics, and I like it that way.

One of the things that starting with the first book will make clear is that this is a series that is dealing with consent and its grey areas and the fallout that sometimes comes from not being careful about those. If you are not interested in reading explicit sex scenes whose participants did not always manage consent well, this is not the book for you, please take the content warnings on the introductory page seriously. This is not a book that endorses the grey areas of consent, and in fact it does a lot more with “hey, these things can have lingering effects” than some books that are a lot less careful about warning about them. But these elements continue to be explicitly present, and readers should carefully manage when, how, and whether they want to encounter them.