Category: Uncategorized

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Between my downloading this book from NetGalley and reading it, it won the National Book Award, so it’s clear that I’m not the only one giving it a look these days.

I think with books like this it’s important to understand what they are and are not. This is a map, a highlights version, hitting the high points. You can’t do four hundred years of history of a large portion of a continent and the people who live on it and go into really satisfying analysis and detail about…really much of any of it. So if you aren’t very familiar with Indigenous history in the US, this is a book that will have you making a list of what else is out there that you should find out about in more depth.

If you have taken the time to become familiar with Indigenous history in the US in some depth, you will probably only encounter one or two concepts and figures that are new to you. If your reading intention is to murmur, “I never knew that about the Mandan!” or similar phrases, you will likely come away from this large and magisterial work disappointed. Its purpose is relational, contextual. For the relatively informed reader, it is putting together pieces that you may previously have only had separately, the Ghost Dance and the arguments about citizenship in their temporal proximity.

It’s easy to see why it won a National Book Award; it’s a very useful sort of road map to have, to put this kind of information together and be able to have it all in one place, to be able to gesture clearly to the informed and the uninformed alike and say, look, these are the throughlines, these are the themes, this is what was happening all along. And Blackhawk does a very clear and briskly-written job of that.

M.A. Carrick, Labyrinth’s Heart. This is what I believe is known as “the triumphant conclusion” to this trilogy. There’s a recap in the front so you don’t have to commit to rereading two giant fantasy novels to get to this third one, but all of Ren’s birds sure are coming home to roost, with betrayals and reveals and confrontations galore. “Carrick” (writing team Brennan and Helms) could do more in this world but not because they left anything for the swim home here, this is an all-out extravaganza of magic and relationships.

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven and Selected Stories and Sketches. Kindle. “Sketches” is a very accurate way to describe this: it’s extremely gentle descriptions of the people and places of the Maine coast in the mid-19th century. There’s nothing that could be accused of being a plot here, and I didn’t really want one, I just wanted to wander around mid-19th century Maine and meet old sailors and fishers and farmers who had strong opinions and funny bonnets.

Ariel (A.E.) Kaplan, Grendel’s Guide to Love and War, We Are the Perfect Girl, and We Regret to Inform You. A friend recommended the last of these, I got it from the library, and I immediately got the other two and read them, one per day three days in a row. Was that because I was stressed and well-written YA was what I needed? Absolutely. But this is well-written YA. I particularly love that Kaplan takes seriously that teenagers have genuine problems, she is not trying to gloss over everything with a hug and a Hallmark lesson. In Grendel’s Guide, for example, Tom Grendel’s dad has seriously bad PTSD, and the kids next door are realistically seriously inconsiderate about it even when they have it explained to them. Some problems teenagers are facing are not “we just needed to be vulnerable and understanding!” Some problems are holy shit problems that do not conveniently go on hold just because you’re under 18! And these books are well-written, funny, tender, not wallowing in woe and angst, and at the same time treat the problems of people under 18 as genuine and worth consideration and respect. So for thumbnails of each, you have: the Beowulf-inflected one, the Cyrano one, and the one that’s about college admissions and honestly is my favorite (even though another one is about Beowulf! I know! but still!). I am waiting for my copy of Kaplan’s fantasy novel. Eagerly.

Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai’i One Summer and Other Writings. A bunch of essays on various topics, some of which touch on being treated as the Sole Representative in ways that one didn’t ask for, some of which are about parenting or conferences or living somewhere new…not nearly as striking as her early work but interesting.

Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang. Reread. There are things I find fascinating about the construction of this book–the structural placement of its central concern, having to live with oneself wherever one is, at the one-third mark rather than the beginning or the ending, is really unusual, and it’s handled well. I like that it’s a quiet mosaic novel and still remains science fiction. I like how the relationships are not sensationalized. But it front-loads the racial slurs a lot, and while most of them are self-directed by the character, they are not self-directed by the author (that is, McHugh has written a mixed-race person of partial Chinese ancestry using racial slurs for Chinese people about himself and other Chinese people; she is not herself Chinese), and I’m not thrilled with how they’re situated in the context of American Sinophobia even though I’m very sure that’s not McHugh’s intent. So…a lot to appreciate here but proceed with caution/awareness.

Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory. It was a bit disappointing that this only covered fairly recent (basically late 19th century up to the present) American (more or less, with few exceptions) attitudes towards women’s butts, as this is an area where a broader contrast of times, cultures, and genders might have been really interesting, and I doubt that there’ll be a lot of interest in a similar work with this one recently published. I was interested in her interview with Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ex-girlfriend (the voice of “oh. my. God. Becky…”) for her perspective on the song and phenomenon, but if you pick this up, do so knowing that it’s not a very broad portrait. So to speak. I also wanted the section about drag prosthetics and adjustments for trans women to be much longer and more detailed–glad that a cultural historian focusing on women acknowledged trans women, but it was fairly brief, so go in aware if that’s one of the major reasons you’d pick this up.

Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist. Late 19th/early 20th century Brazil is extremely more complicated than I know about, and Condon’s biography is a great introduction to that complexity. “They did what? They had what?” I found myself asking incredulously as I read, but it was grounded enough in things I did know about that I was never confused, just surprised. Condon, himself mixed race, was very committed to the rights of Indigenous people, and his interactions with them were considered a model for those in that movement for generations to come–not just “he was good for his time” but “oh gosh why didn’t later people do that well,” things that seem obvious now like commitment to de-escalation when encountering a new group in the jungle. Fascinating.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Lavender House and The Bell in the Fog (the latter discussed elsewhere). So I read the second one, The Bell in the Fog, first, and I was enthusiastic enough to go get Lavender House right away and read that. I have to issue a caveat here: some of you may want to just start with The Bell in the Fog and hope for sequels. Because Lavender House starts with our detective, Andy, at his lowest point, kicked off the police force for homosexuality, and he is suicidal. He spends the book investigating a murder among a rich queer family and figuring out what he thinks of the idea of there being queer family at all (it’s the 1950s, this is not intuitive to everybody–sadly I suppose it’s not even intuitive to everybody today) and whether he can figure out a shape of a life for himself at all, whether he might have something to live for. For some of you, the existence of the second book will be enough there: spoiler alert: he does in fact find things to live for. And for some of you, it will be life-affirming to spend a book with someone who is finding that hope–but for others, being in close perspective with a character in that much despair is not going to be what you can deal with, and I want to indicate that content clearly for you: it starts that way on page one, that is the book it is, if you don’t want that book start with book two. It has lovely interesting period details about clothes, music, soap, all sorts of things. I really hope there are more in this series. But I’m glad I can point to the second book for those for whom the first one will be the wrong fit.

Susan Scarlett, Poppies for England. Kindle. This was just lovely in some very weird ways. It shows families adjusting after the Second World War in ways that are neither “let’s just pretend THAT never happened, everything is literally exactly the same hooray” nor “everyone who fought in a war is now abusive due to trauma” but had things like “you have bonded with your buddy from the POW camp and need to get to know your family again.” It also made me cry by valuing a character who very much resembled someone I loved and miss, someone who is not often seen and valued in fiction. People are not flattened into heroes or villains who usually would be in this kind of fiction, it’s so much better than it “had” to be.

Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding. This is not a pop philosophy book meant to be sold to the mass market, it’s a chewy thing that had me making notes on ideas to follow up on. Which was lovely for me, I like having more ideas about implicit understanding, unspoken knowledge, and background information to think about. It is not, however, the version Alexis will give you if she wants to make it the easiest possible on-ramp to her work (she is a friend, so I know she absolutely can do that easy on-ramp).

Dana Simpson, Punk Rock Unicorn and Unicornado. Every so often I catch up on the comic strip adventures of Phoebe and her unicorn friend Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, plus the assorted tiny dragons, goblins, parents, and other magical beings who populate their environs. These are the two most recent collections, they are entirely accessible whether you’ve read the fifteen or so before them, but also we’re getting to the critical mass of “basically infinite amounts of Phoebe and Marigold, hard to remember which one is which” for this series, and that’s totally fair.

Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors. Too much W. Somerset Maugham, not enough Sun Yat Sen. The prose was lovely, the characterizations were beautifully done, but I expected the politics of mainland China to have much, much more bearing on the eventual resolution of this plot than they did, and was disappointed thereby. I will still read more by this author, but with my expectations adjusted way, way toward the “two humans had emotions” end of the scale that goes from that to “oh gosh several new governments.”

Marissa van Uden, ed., Strange Machines. Kindle. A brief anthology of fictional manuals for fictional dark machinery, science fictional or fantastic or just odd. If you don’t like the one you’re reading, it won’t take long to get to the next one, just a little tasting menu of fiction.

Mariet Westmann, A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic, 1585-1718. If you know things about Dutch art of this period already, the main thing you will get from this book is the agricultural art. Gosh they painted nice cows. I think it is really underestimated how nice a painting of a cow you can get from the Dutch Golden Age, but if you want a very nice painting of a cow, the Dutch of this era are hard to beat. “Just look at that cow,” I said unironically. “That sure is quite a cow.” And so on. I am hard to please with cows. I come from a dairy farming family. So, you can readily see, did these Dutch artists. They had seen a cow or two, let me tell you. If you don’t know other things about Dutch art of this period, you can learn, and it’s quite nice, lots of glossy pictures of the sorts of things you expect and won’t be sad to have reviewed if you already do know. But even if you do, for example, happen to live with the sort of person who has a lot of stuff about the Dutch Golden Age scattered around underfoot (or shelved neatly, to be fair) and if you do, for example, happen to just pick up books that are around the house because you need reading material, there will be the nice cows that are new. So there’s that.

Kell Woods, After the Forest. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

It’s been a long time since they’ve been to the gingerbread house, and things have not gotten a lot easier for Greta and Hans in early adulthood. The Thirty Years War has left a lot of hardship in its wake, their local lord has been replaced by somebody–or something–much worse, their father is dead, and the villagers are pretty suspicious of a girl people say pushed an old lady into a fire. Even if her gingerbread sells out every Walpurgisnacht.

But there’s a bear in the woods, and wolves, and a soldier from the south, and even when things are not easy they can always get a little harder. And quite a few things are not as they seem in this story–in fact, quite a few things are from the next story over, or the next one over from that. Yes, these woods are dark, and it’s getting pretty Grimm around here….

But it’s not actually grimdark. This is an historical fantasy with fairy tale references in every part of it, and it’s a coming of age fantasy about choosing who you want to be as you rise from your horrible past. Also it will make you terribly, terribly hungry for gingerbread if you like gingerbread even a little bit.

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds. This is not a metaphorical title: this is a book about bird intelligence and how we know what we know about how different groups of birds think about things. If you follow the popular science press you will probably know several of these examples but their grouping is still instructive.

Theodore Bestor, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. A popular anthropological study of the fish market in downtown Tokyo, so yeah, that was outside my usual fare in an interesting way. What are the official regulatory bodies, what are the unofficial relationships among vendors, what does the year look like there…interesting stuff. Also guess who ordered takeout sushi when finished reading this book.

Stephen B. Bright and James Kwak, The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. Lays out a lot of stuff about American court systems and the guard rails they set up against admitting that they’re doing anybody wrong, especially anybody poor, especially anybody Black or Native or Latine. The examples and the rulings and the court cases put out in black and white like this are extremely instructive if you haven’t been paying attention to the details of it, or even if you have.

Su Cho, The Symmetry of Fish. These poems are so precise, and they are so weighted, and also I read them and went out and bought yellow kiwifruit, because sometimes my reaction to poetry is very deep-dive nerdy about word use in the fifth line and sometimes it’s…rather shallower than that. There’s a lot about being a two-cultures kid and later adult here, there’s a lot of family relationship and sensory culture and…I will want to reread this. But in the meantime, also, I will be eating yellow kiwifruit. (Look, there are worse themes to a book post, okay.)

Roshani Chokshi, Once More Upon a Time. Novella-length, an after-the-fairy-tale story that is very transparently about modern love, not actually one of my favorites of hers but fine, she knows how to write sentences.

Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. I think one of the most surprising take-away points from this for me was how much we know that we can actually do to make things ecologically better for animals around roads and highways. There’s a lot of fatalism around this topic that simply does not have to be there! Yes, things are very bad for animals around roads and highways, but we already know things to improve this and can learn more, and Goldfarb is really interesting on the topic. So this was far less depressing than I expected it to be.

Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, eds., Lives of Houses. A nonfiction essay anthology–I’m used to reading fiction anthologies or essay collections, the distinction being multi-author vs. single-author, so this was a pleasant change. As with fiction anthologies, it was a mixed bag of “oh what a delight, this is just what I wanted to read about” mingled with a few of “I don’t really care about this at all.” A lot of it is about the homes of famous writers and other figures in the arts and letters, many of whom were famous writers I care about (see Hermione Lee right there on the tin). It’s not a book of great heft and substance, and sometimes that’s okay.

Naomi Kritzer, Liberty’s Daughter. Discussed elsewhere.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Reread. I wanted to read the generation ship novella at the end again for my own generation ship project, which is different but having influences is nice. It just kept striking me how very anthropological she gets and how nice that can be. Lots of ringing changes on “would you look at that shape of human relationship” in ways that I like, and I think I liked it better than last time I read it.

Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life. These are generally quite short, they are alphabetical, and it was just what I needed. Not all the pleasures aged well. Of course they didn’t. Ours won’t either. Some of them are extremely simple and direct, some of them are screamingly funny, you’ll be able to spot the mildly xenophobic products of their time coming and they won’t be as frequent as a lot of other people of her era, and I will just skip those and read her being funny about family albums again later. The thing that is odd about this new edition is that they had someone footnote it who didn’t like made-up words, and look, this is Rose Macaulay, she makes up words like a champ, she makes up words like the proto-SFF author she was, and she does it in a perfectly comprehensible way, from roots you know and with incluing you can get from the text. So to have sniffy endnotes where the person writing the endnotes is clutching their pearls about how it is another made-up word–she’s done it again, Howard–and it probably means what it transparently does mean–is to sigh. The other thing about the endnotes is that they’re so odd. They put notes on things that you probably have to know if you’re going to get anywhere, and–look, these are vastly referential, and they endnote most of the things you’ll need to know to get what she’s being funny about, but then not all. But then some of the deeply obvious things they also endnote. But again not all. What a weird set of endnotes. But oh gosh, Rose Macaulay can be funny pastiching Hemingway just to be a brat about it. Love her so much.

Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller Poems: The Lost Poetry of Wilma Mankiller, The Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. This is quite a small collection, and a lot of the poems are very much on the nose. I came out of it thinking how interesting it was to see the poems of a political leader rather than what a shame it was that she didn’t spend more time as a poet.

Temi Oh, More Perfect. A science fiction novel about the perils and joys of connection, personal and artificial. The characters make believably poor choices for their ages (they are mostly in their very early twenties–it’s not YA but they are adults who are quite young, and they aren’t the kind of quite young adults who are cautious and unemotional). There’s been cataclysm and social upheaval that’s run right over their childhoods, and you can tell. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I ended up glad I’d read it overall.

Naomi Salman, Nothing But the Rain. A mysterious rain induces amnesia on the residents of a town, and they also don’t always treat each other well. This is a novella, and I didn’t want any more of it than that.

V.E. Schwab, The Fragile Threads of Power. Another in her parallel Londons series, and the title is extremely appropriate both with the magical system and metaphorically. Lots of magical gadgets and world-crossing and the sorts of things I like. I had fun with this one and am glad there’ll be more.

Melissa Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon. At the height of the Great Depression, the Colorado River was not very navigable by anybody, and at the time a lot of people thought that adding “ESPECIALLY LADIES” made sense there. (Ugh.) Two botanists from the University of Michigan took a river trip sampling plants and mapping where they were found in the Colorado River canyons, and this goes a little bit into the botany involved but a lot more into the social history of the trip and them doing that kind of work. It’s interesting and not terribly long.

Margery Sharp, Martha in Paris. Kindle. What a weird little book, what a weird, weird little book. Fair warning: Sharp makes some very offensive assumptions about who can be sexually assaulted. (There isn’t sexual assault in the book, but she has the old-fashioned and wrong-then-too assumption that one must be conventionally attractive to be a target, which: NO and also GROSS.) This is very much a middle book, and in it Martha is sent to Paris to study art, and she does that despite other people’s determination that she should focus on other things, some of which another person very well might focus on under the circumstances. I feel like in some ways this is almost more like the middle section of a book than a middle book, really, and it has less of other people than The Eye of Love both for good (Martha is more interesting than they are) and for ill (they gave The Eye of Love more shape and substance).

Emily Wilson, trans. The Iliad. This is so readable, it just rushes along at such a clear and angry and grief-stricken pace. You’re never going to miss that this is full of the wrath of men and gods; you’re never going to lose sight of the deaths of everyone who matters to you, assuming that anyone here matters to you. Even the section that I think of as “ancient box scores and shout-outs” (battinnnnnng fooooor the Greeks! numberrrrr seventy-two! etc.) went by at a good clip, but not enough for the prose to feel rushed. I wrote two poems while I read it. I still hate the vast majority of the characters. This is entirely expected and in no way Emily Wilson’s fault; my people would have gone home with enough gold in book two, acclaiming Thersites as the most sensible soul they’d ever met. Sure is fun to take enough gold and go home to our nice houses and families! Wonder why they didn’t call it the Thersiad! Guess we’ll never know, we’ve wandered off home with enough gold!…there’s more poem then? how odd. (I did read the rest. I like Scamander also. The rest of them. Well, they’re not there for me to like, is the thing.)

F. C. Yee, The Legacy of Yangchen. Definitely a sequel, and I’d start with the first if you’re interested in Yee’s explorations of Avatars past. If you read these book posts, you know that I don’t read much in the way of media tie-ins at all. These are a notable exception because Yee is given enough space to really play with the setting, which I appreciate.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend of mine.

Beck Garrison doesn’t really remember life on land. Her father Paul brought her to live on the cluster of libertarian seasteads when she was in preschooler, when he told her her mother died in an accident. Since then she’s gotten thoroughly accustomed not just to the pitch and yaw of the repurposed yachts and other holdings but also the rules of the different steads. Which ones have no laws, which ones have minimal laws, where she’s allowed to go alone, where she needs to check in with private security…where she just cannot go, period. Kids are resilient, Beck even more than most, and by her mid-teens she has picked up a part-time job as a finder, helping people trade rare goods like sandals and shoelaces so that everyone has things they want from land and Beck has a little pocket money.

Not everything people want to find is quite so simple as a swimsuit or a bottle of fancy whiskey. Looking for a missing person leads Beck through a cascade of discoveries about her home that isn’t what anyone intended her to find, but she’s not going to quit, and she’s definitely not going to abandon people to some of the circumstances she’s discovered.

Because frankly? Have you read some of articles about actual attempts at libertarian utopian communities? Naomi has. They tend to be gross in a number of directions. Sewage treatment is one, and that’s a pretty key element of seasteading. Human right violations would be another. Liberty’s Daughter walks a really good line between not flinching away from these elements and not getting screamy, wallowing, or unpleasant to read. It also points out some of the ways that spontaneous organization can be a really good thing. I don’t actually think that Naomi specifically sat down and said, “How could I demonstrate the difference between classical anarchist thinking and the contemporary American libertarian movement with a fun teenage protagonist and her adventures?” but if she had, it might still have come out like this. Which is not to say that it’s an anarchist treatise or in fact any kind of treatise. Beck’s reactions are a lot more pragmatic teenager “well that’s dumb, how do we fix that” than “and I will give you a several page speech about liberty,” which works a lot better and makes for a more fun book.

There are villains here, but they’re not grandiose and chiseled. There are heroes here, but they’re mostly just trying to make life work better for the people around them with limited resources. So…like life, really. But with more adventures. Yeah, I’ll sign on for that.

Shahzad Bashir, The Market in Poetry in the Persian World. Kindle. Short monograph placing poetry almost as a commodity to be traded and Persian as a poetry language in a set of communities which were almost always multi-lingual. For me the relationships of poets writing in Persian and how they categorized themselves with relationship to each other–sometimes aggressively so–was the most interesting part.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. A fairly brief, not very deep but generally cheerful and interesting, memoir of being a guard at the Met.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning: Volume 1, 1845-1846. Kindle. One of two that I’d had going for a bit and just finished up in the last fortnight. I found her letters to other people once they were married delightful, and watching them fall in love mostly through letters is extremely sweet. There’s also a moment where Robert Browning earns my “arright, mister, you gets to stay” reaction by telling a story about an acquaintance of his who humiliated his wife at supper and the ferocious way Browning treated him after, also by his utter relief at hearing that Ba intends to keep Barrett as part of her name once they’re married. They misunderstand each other, they get melodramatic, they’re still at this point dealing with her father who seems to be an utter piece of work. Here for it.

Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. Ironically not a very deep book, lots of detail about making the trips in submersibles, less detail than I wanted about the species in these ecosystems.

C.J. Cherry, The Pride of Chanur. Reread. It had been long enough that I had not remembered how much this is aunt/niece fiction, and gosh did I need that right now. I really love how the human perspective never takes center stage here, how it’s always a hani book, with Tully as a MacGuffin but not a protagonist. I love how Cherryh thinks of humans in a plurality of alien intelligences as small and fragile and raw.

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. I think I expected this to be less memoir and more theory, or maybe memoir is how Clare does theory. Anyway it was interesting. Class is in here too, not just sexuality and disability.

Jon Evans, Exadelic. I have honestly no idea how this book would strike someone who didn’t live in or adjacent to the Bay Area tech community in 2003, but for me there was a lot of the feeling of recognition, oh, these people, okay, I know them. This book is very twisty and full of several reality resets, but for me it always stayed on the side of “adequately foreshadowed and/or explained” rather than “wait what I don’t get it” to be gonzo fun rather than incoherent.

Nicola Griffith, Menewood. Sequel to Hild, and there is a lot of hard stuff in here, there is infant death and child death and battlefields are in no way glorious, though the people who treat them as glorious are portrayed accurately to their cultures. People are struggling their way through history here, doing the best they can in this firelit world, trying to make sure there’s enough to eat for the winter and a place to hide if someone treacherous comes and a way to outmaneuver the reckless. It’s so well-done and I love it so much.

Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. Rush was on an expedition to Antarctica at the same time as she was preparing to get pregnant, and she talked to all sorts of people involved with this scientific research community about their births, their experiences birthing, their sense of community in this setting. An interesting and unusual book.

John Sayles, Jamie MacGillivray. I am surprised to say this about a John Sayles novel, but this is a very conventional historical novel. It has fewer perspectives than his usual, mostly being tightly focused on two people from very similar places, and while it was fine and entertaining, I’m really not accustomed to being able to predict the ending of a John Sayles work in detail from 10% of the way in. Also he really did not appear to have any interest in dealing with religion with any depth or personal engagement, which…when you’re writing about people from the 18th century Highlands is sure a choice I guess? but again not the complexity I would have expected from Sayles. Ah well, not everything can be A Moment in the Sun, which might even be a good thing I guess.

Joanna Schwartz, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable. This lays out the legal precedents that allow police misconduct to flourish, one at a time and with clear examples. It’s a fairly short book, but a very useful one, and if you’re not sure why police are allowed to do what they’re allowed to do in the US–why it’s not just a matter of one or two bad cops but a system that makes things difficult for the good ones to make any kind of precedent that their goodness is structural–this is going to explain why, with all the receipts.

D.L. Soria, Thief Liar Lady. A Cinderella story wherein Cinderella is not a dewy innocent but in fact a girl on a mission. More than one, in fact, and navigating the world after the ball is the story here. A good enough time that I’m looking into Soria’s previous work.

Peter Stark, Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation. Peter Stark seems to be frustrated that some people think of William Henry Harrison as a trivia question answer (“shortest presidency”!) instead of as a crucial part of the machine of genocide. Well, if you read his book you will definitely get the details on the machine of genocide and William Henry Harrison’s part in it. And also some stuff about Tecumseh and his place in his culture and family.

Valerie Valdes, Where Peace Is Lost. Hey, remember when we thought the Jedi might not suck? Valerie does, and she’s written us book with a fallen-hidden order of mystic space knights doing galaxy protecty stuff on backwater planets with eager young locals, and it hasn’t been ruined by some guy going off on his own ego that nobody else cared about. Also Valerie’s had all genders in it from the start. I’m just sayin’.

Greg van Eekhout, The Ghost Job. Four friends died in a chemistry accident, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still have fun and do heists! Middle grade romp. Featuring a Very Good Dog, not dead.

Martha Wells, System Collapse. Discussed elsewhere.

P. G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie and The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories, both Kindle. The latter is an unremarkable and highly mixed set of short stories, the animal stories of which feature the animal treatment mores of previous days (skip them, IME). The former stood out to me by being a standard lighthearted Wodehouse comedy in which the Great War has explicitly and on the page just happened and is allowed to be acknowledged. Our titular hero, though an idiot in fine Wodehouse Hero form, has been demobbed; he has had war experiences; when he runs into someone he met during the War, he has the sorts of feelings one might have, and while comedic events surround this, the bond itself is taken utterly seriously and respectfully. It’s the strangest thing. In some ways I had been reading Bertie Wooster as “let’s not think about all that, look, a clown,” and…here’s another clown, and his khaki is hanging in the open wardrobe. Very strange.

Lisa Yaszek, The Future Is Female! This is the other thing that I’d been reading for quite some time and only just finished up this fortnight. I’m in a book club that’s taking this anthology and its sequel a few stories at a time so we can dig into the discussion of them. It’s an anthology that’s got historical organization (going from the 1920s to the 1960s) and some of the stories in it fairly strongly appear to have been chosen for historical documentation purpose (why else is this appalling Marion Zimmer Bradley story here). There are both rarities and warhorses, solid thematic groupings and througlines, and you could do a lot worse for a book club, although I will add the caveat that you will want it to be a book group with good known moderators if so, because some of the subject matter requires basically all the content warnings.

Ovidia Yu, The Yellow Rambutan Tree Mystery. The latest in this series of historical mysteries set in Yu’s native Singapore, and I continue to appreciate her willingness to go through a notably interesting period of Singapore’s history at an astonishing clip. The series started before the Second World War, and this volume is about the war’s aftermath. Were she interested in doing “the same, but more of it” she could have lingered at any moment, but instead she wants to do different things as the setting and characters develop, and this is just what I want in a mystery series and makes me happy. Don’t start here, there’s a lot of character backstory you won’t fully appreciate even though there’s also, of course, an episodic mystery to be solved.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

There’s a lot SecUnit doesn’t want to talk about.

Unfortunately repressing trauma has a time limit even when you’re a SecUnit, a.k.a. Murderbot. And when you’re in the middle of trying to find and deal with a lost outpost of humans who are vulnerable to corporate manipulation may be the worst possible time to pretend that nothing is wrong, just when you most need to integrate your human and machine sides. “Need” and “want” are definitely, definitely not the same thing here.

This is the latest installation in its series, and I wouldn’t recommend starting here; Murderbot’s personality and relationships and backstory are all well-established from other parts of the series, and the momentum you have from those will not be the same if you try to start from scratch with this late-series entry. If you already know Murderbot well, though, watching its development to this point is very satisfying. This is the good time I was looking for.

Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds. Oh this was lovely, lots of interesting facts about owls. If you, like me, have moments when natural history is just the most soothing thing you can possibly read, do I have good news for you, there is this book that will tell you several more things about owls. Also it has lots of picutres of different owls. It’s just owls all the way down, here, people.

Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun. Sometimes when there’s a very long book I think about whether it could have been done at shorter length and the author was just enjoying the longer length. This book meanders and meanders, but I actually don’t think it could have been done shorter, despite the repetition of character arc, despite the set pieces that could be cut, etc., because the meander is the point. Goddard was not trying to write a bijoux little thing that somehow ran away, this was meant to be a long journey, the entire form of the book is a long journey, that’s the book it is. Now, did I like the new fire of the sun better when I thought it was a metaphor, yes, but that’s me. This is the literal story of it, things keep popping up being not metaphors after all, and almost every time I sighed and went “oh well,” because I actually do like metaphors. But it’s clearly done deliberately and oughtn’t to be changed just because of my fondness for metaphor.

Marie Howe, What the Living Do. This series of poems is not only about the loss of her brother, but it is centered around that loss. I found them to be spare, moving, and also have the kind of life associations that grief brings, where you remember random things from your history with the person, distilled in poetic form. It is a good addition to my grief poetry library. (Some of us like companionship in grief. I do.)

Jin Xu, Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China. I found this book interesting but frustrating. It was a history of monetary policy rather than money, in a lot of ways. It overexplained some things and then didn’t go into a lot of areas that would have been useful for the whole picture (basically there were no ethnic minorities in China who were acknowledged to have an effect on money…which is a pretty big omission given the effect on the silver supply of the Miao and other people in the hill regions…). It also jumped around in some ways, and in general was less coherently organized than I hoped. I liked having the different perspective than I usually can find on world history, and even on Chinese history, I just…probably expected too much here.

Juhani Karila, Fishing for the Little Pike. Northern Finnish Rural Weird, small-scale mythologies with large effects on the lives of individuals. Lots of small town social dynamics, including with magical creatures. I loved this, and I hope we get more of Karila’s work translated.

L.R. Lam and Elizabeth May, Seven Mercies. Second in a duology, definitely read the first one first, lots of shooty shoot space opera, mostly women characters, many of them prickly and damaged and doing the best they can in a cold hard galaxy with their friends at their back.

Suzannah Lipscomb, The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc. Late 16th/early 17th century consistory records give a lot of testimony from women who didn’t have opportunity to testify on their own behalves in as many contexts before, and Lipscomb has gone through that testimony to find out what we can say about the veryday lives of these lower an dmiddle class women. Their insults and reasons for getting into fights are particularly interesting. This is why we read history. Not all of why. But definitely why.

Erin Noteboom, A Knife So Sharp Its Edge Cannot Be Seen. And these poems are sharp too, very sharp about science and its rewards and costs, so lovely, dark sometimes in ways that I love without being–quite exactly?–in the category of grief poetry? but also not entirely not, because Noteboom is willing to look where we sometimes want to look away.

Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World. Another that’s second in a duology, another where you definitely should read the first one first. Almost every content warning in the world here, lots of violence including sexual violence, lots of horrible decision-making but Parker-Chan knows it’s horrible and doesn’t endorse it. I was a little surprised by how explicitly the ending metaphysically endorsed the Ming dynasty, that was…very clear. But it was a really interesting read and I’m glad to have it.

C.L. Polk, Soulstar. Reread. I think this is my favorite of the Kingston Trilogy, definitely worth sticking around for the ending, where there’s consequence piled on consequence but not in a zero-gravity-throwing-lightning-bolt way, in a doing politics that sometimes hurt people we care about accidentally and we have to deal with the fallout way. Everything ramifies in more than one direction, and we just have to keep doing the hard work. Yay. Yay.

Kay Ryan, Synthesizing Gravity. I found these essays so compellingly written, I very much wanted to go back to reading them at all times when I wasn’t reading them, and also in many cases Ryan is either laughably wrong or, more commonly, has decided that a valid personal opinion ought to be applied universally to the writing or reading of poetry. At one point she asks why she couldn’t love Auden, and I do love Auden, and I do not love Kay Ryan, and I stared bemused at the page, because it was very much a–yes, okay, we will just be very different, that’s just how it is. I ended up having her voice in my head as one of the characters frequently played by Joan Cusack at the turn of the millennium, slightly over-enunciating and over-the-top and frequently wrong but very interesting on the way to doing it. (Just don’t go to the AWP if you don’t like conferences, Kay. It doesn’t make other people troglodytes to gather together and discuss the sonnet form. Get on over it. Lordy.)

William Shakespeare, Richard III. Reread, Kindle. I am doing a project, and I wanted to make sure there weren’t any more small touchstones I wanted in it, which there were. Gosh everything is right on its sleeve in this play. DID EVERYBODY CATCH THAT THE CURRENT DYNASTY IS THE CORRECT ONE AND IS IN ITS PLACE RIGHFULLY OKAY GOOD.

Margery Sharp, The [slur redacted] in the Parlor. Kindle. So to get the title out of the way first: this appears to be a pretty clear-cut instance of an early twentieth-century British person using a slur for Romany people to mean any person who fits that stereotype that they made up about Romany people. No person in this book actually is Roma, and I have no indication that Sharp thought for one second about what this kind of usage did to people of this actual ethnic heritage. (For extra fun, the titular character appears from her name to be Welsh while everyone else is very, very solidly–even aggressively–ethnically English!…Sharp is usually much better about spotting shitty things to do and not doing them than this.) So that sucks. Especially because it’s otherwise mostly an interesting novel about family dynamics, about gender dynamics in farm life in the mid-late 19th century, about attempts at undermining or weaponizing decency and how those can fail. Sharp has a good eye for children who are not miniature adults but do have internal lives of their own, one of whom is the narrator here…but you can have that with The Eye of Love and not have to wince every time someone asks you what you’re reading. I have become a Sharp completist somewhere along the way. If you have not, by all means skip this one.

P. G. Wodehouse, Something New. Kindle. This was fluff, and it was fun fluff, it was the good kind of Wodehouse. You’ll mostly read me saying that here because if I start reading and it’s the bad kind of Wodehouse, I stop. Sometimes things are stressful and people disguising themselves as servants and having hijinks in country houses is about what I can deal with, and there was this for one of those days.