Year: 2015

I honestly don’t know how people who don’t read nonfiction do it. One needs such a lot of fiction to make up for it. I hope to regrow my ability to read nonfiction for fun in April, with some more rest, but in the meantime I am constantly surrounded by loads of good fiction, so I’m not actually suffering.

Lloyd Alexander, The Beggar Queen. Reread. I picked this up because it went with the “fantasies about countries dealing with not having a king any more but not really being over the concept” group I was reading. I love that he lets Sparrow and Weasel grow up. I love that the political realities of deposed monarchs are considered even when they’re personally awesome. This is probably my least favorite of its series, which still puts it very high on my all-time list. Always happy to discuss these books with whoever.

Alan Bradley, The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse. Kindle. This is a Flavia de Luce short story; it was entertaining, but mystery shorts tend to be a bit monofocus, so I don’t love it as much as I do the Flavia books. Still, though, 11-year-old chemist: hurrah.

J. Kathleen Cheney, The Seat of Magic. I think this is pretty dependent on having read the first series, but it does fun things with Portugal for a setting and all sorts of magic sea creatures I am not at all tired of at this point. And also race and class, in a way that’s integral to the story and its setting rather than tacked on as a message about ours.

James S. A. Corey, Cibola Burn. Simultaneously gross and grim and not gross and grim enough. (Seriously. Way more people should be dead at the end. WAY MORE. And not in the “I hate that guy” way, either.) Also the villain is very mustache-twirling. If you want very dudely space opera, well, this dudes like anything. If I was not starved for good space opera, I would not still be reading this series, but it’s reasonably written, and…well, I am, in fact, starved for good space opera.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. Reread. So very much of this is so perfectly, so exactly, resonant with my college experience. Some of that, of course, is that I read it before college, so in addition to having the moment where Janet is dealing with a particular kind of professor resonating, I remember that when I got my similar professor, I thought OH GOSH LIKE IN TAM LIN at the time. So many small perfect things. So lovely so lovely.

Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword. Reread. I think every Kushner fan has their Riverside book, and this is not mine, but it’s lots of fun anyway. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…well, the torture is mostly emotional. I really liked that Katherine ended up a swordfighter without having spent her whole childhood being That Girl. There should be room for all sorts of roads to swashing one’s buckles.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, and Jingo. Rereads. One of my questions, as I barrel towards my favorite Watch book and in fact my favorite adult Pratchett novel (Night Watch) is where people have to start to get the full effect of Night Watch. So far I have kept thinking that each succeeding volume would actually be fine as a place to start. Lois said that she thought you had to start with Vimes in the gutter to get his full arc, but Vimes in the gutter is fully implied by Vimes as he exists in each later book–you can see the trail it left–and Guards! Guards! is not deep stuff. It’s fun–it’s just not deep. Vimes is a cardboard cutout of a drunk copper–this is even more clear to me now that I’ve spent the last decade watching quantities of cop shows. And Lady Sybil is practically Honoria Glossop. (For the record, of all the toffs in those books, I expect I’d get along fine with Honoria Glossop if I was socially thrown together with her–we could talk about dogs and, when I was steady enough, go for walks–whereas nobody else in Bertie Wooster’s social circle would be worth talking to for more than five minutes. Well, possibly Gussie on the topic of newts. And Barmy for that whole [college friend’s name redacted] experience of never having any notion what was going to come out of his mouth next. I DIGRESS BOY HOWDY.) My point being: the characters add depth as the series rolls along, but not linearly with each paragraph. Yes. I think that’s what I was trying to say. But: I had forgotten how much “fantasies about countries dealing with not having a king any more but not really being over the concept” Guards! Guards! was, and in fact the other two directly after it too, so that was interesting.

Delia Sherman, Young Woman in a Garden. Lovely stories, just lovely. Most of them explicitly historical fantasy, variety of voices and settings. Did not skip a one. Recommended.

Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Reread. Remember what I said above, about every Kushner fan having their Riverside book? This is mine. It goes with The Beggar Queen and the early Watch books in the “fantasies about countries dealing with not having a king any more but not really being over the concept” category, and it goes with Tam Lin and Caroline’s “of Magics” books (below) in the “academia fantasies” category. But I don’t love it for its categories, I love it for its lush precision. (Okay, I’m a sucker for its categories too.)

Caroline Stevermer, A Scholar of Magics. Reread. I want more fantasy inspired by this general era: the time when motor-cars were new and no one had fought a world war (but they might be thinking of it), basically. I chose this rather than the one before it because I hadn’t read it in awhile and had reread A College of Magics not long ago, and they’re very different for being so related to each other. Visiting scholar experience vs. undergraduate. Both with some cool world magic. Recommended.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Radiant. Lots of chewy interesting stuff in this, and it was also good fun to read. There is a minor plot element that…I don’t want to spoiler it, but there is a very small plot element that looks a lot like a trope I hate. But there is plenty of room for Karina to develop it in later books to have its own depth/complexity, so I was satisfied with that part. Also with the towers and the magic currency ideas. Next one went on my list right away.

Jo Walton, Farthing. Reread. This is almost the perfect inverse of the structure of Pratchett’s Vimes novels, which there is no reason to notice unless you’re reading them right next to each other, which I was, so. I have read more of the influences on this book since last time I read it, which only makes it better. Also, Jo is one of the best out there at actually managing theory of mind: that is, keeping it feeling reasonable when you know something and not all the POV characters do. Very hard in an ordinary mystery. Even harder with two very different POVs.

You can tell that I had a cold by the type of reading I’ve mostly been doing. I have a half-read volume of fairly dense political history on my desk, and…we’re just not going to get there until next fortnight. Just: some weeks, no.

Marie Brennan, Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent. Discussed elsewhere.

Hilary McKay, Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, Permanent Rose, Caddy Ever After, Forever Rose, and Caddy’s World. All rereads. Oh how I love this series. Definitely comfort rereads. I like Sarah best. I don’t know why I might overidentify with the fierce character (with a good hat!) who can’t walk right and whose mother uses her prodigious organization to be kind to people and whose father fixes the water feature. That part will have to remain a mystery. But the bits that reliably make me laugh instead of smiling on the third go-round are almost all Sarah. I think that the prequel nature of Caddy’s World simultaneously saves it (it would be unbearably dark if we didn’t already know that Rose does not die as a newborn–and I really don’t think that counts as a spoiler since her name is in two of the titles) and makes it worse (Caddy’s friends really should have shown up in the earlier published/later chronological books). But it’s still a fun read, and I feel like there’s room for more interstitial additions if McKay is careful.

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, and A Tangled Web. All rereads. One of the things that jumped out at me this time was how much there is stillbirth, infant death, and miscarriage in Montgomery–and how differently it’s treated than in a modern book. Anne’s own loss is part of the actual plot, a notable event–but there are places where there’ll be just a brief mention that this is something that happened to another character–and that it affected them strongly, just–this isn’t their story. You’re allowed to know about this sort of loss when it isn’t the main character’s. It reminded me of the people who want a “reason” for a character to be anything but an American white dude: being a person who has suffered that kind of loss is something that modern books seem to think needs a “reason,” in a way that these older books really don’t, they just acknowledge it as part of being human. There was also a moment in AoGG in which Anne reports that her beloved and respected teacher has told her that she should never put anything in her stories that couldn’t happen right there in Avonlea, and…given how much L.M. Montgomery wrote about imaginative girls in mundane settings, and given how the advice was framed, I seriously wonder whether this happened to her. And whether we were robbed of a Maritime Hope Mirrlees by it. (So I have a story to write with that.) Anyway, I still like these books and still find their anecdotal approach entertaining. A Tangled Web, I will note, ends with gratuitous racism on the very last page–product of its time blah blah, but still, it’s totally unnecessary, and if you’re not braced for it, it’s a poison pill in a puff of cotton candy.

Arthur C. Parker, Skunny Wundy: Seneca Indian Tales. This is a pretty old book. Parker was himself Seneca, but it’s an old enough book that it was explicitly addressed to young white male readers. It’s mostly animal tales, mostly the just-so kind of animal tales. Interesting both for the stories it tells and for the assumptions involved in telling them. I’d be interested in contrasting this with some Seneca stories that were aimed at an adult, female, and/or Seneca audience.

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Interesting Times. When I heard the news of Terry Pratchett’s death, I wanted to reread something, but I didn’t feel up for rereading the ones that are most personally meaningful to me yet. (Soon.) So I picked up MR, which I recalled enjoying, and I enjoyed it again. If it was Sir Terry Pratchett’s Grand Statement on Gender, it would leave something to be desired, but it wasn’t, it was a light comic novel that did a few good gender-y things. Then I grabbed IT, which I didn’t remember at all. It’s not one of his best. There are some entertaining bits, but I am generally less enthusiastic about Rincewind than about most Pratchett characters, and also I feel he is much stronger when making his jokes about an “us” rather than about a “them.” (IT has both, but the pseudo-Chinese culture just didn’t really work for me, as a joke or as serious.) Well, with the number of books the man wrote, to have some of them be kind of forgettable is not a horrible thing. And there are so many wonderful rereads ahead of me.

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn. I really need to learn that when people say, “This is the next Calvin & Hobbes!”, they mean, “I wish this was the next Calvin & Hobbes…oh God, I’m so lonely…COME BACK TO ME, BILL.” This was a moderately entertaining comic about a girl and her snotty unicorn best friend. It was fine but in no way had the range of C&H.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Seal of the Worm. Last in a very long series, and for the love of Pete do not start with this one; it will make no sense and be emotionally unsatisfying if you don’t have the rest of the series. I felt that in some ways Tchaikovsky’s strengths were also his weaknesses here: he kept introducing new antagonists, which is great but didn’t really wrap up some of the potential of the other groups he’d introduced at all. I did like the fate of the Wasp Empire, and for a ten-book series of this size, I suppose any more wrapping up might have felt tied with a bow. I’ll look forward to seeing what he decides to do next.

Review copy provided by Tor. For further disclosure, the author is a friend of mine.

This is the third in the series of fictional memoirs by the dragon naturalist Lady Isabella Trent. In this volume, Lady Trent’s young son Jake is old enough to accompany her on her travels, which adds a note of domestic logistics but neatly avoids the “child as constant source of idiotic trouble” plot that I so hate.

This series is set up to go very readily to new places and see new dragons there, and this volume–as one might expect from the title–is no exception. The main body of the action takes place in a Pacific Island analogue, but there are some other places along the way, and also there is a great deal of Victorian-analogue sea travel.

There is also more arc plot than it may seem to begin with, beyond just “Lady Trent would like to find out more stuff about dragons, and does,” which would in some ways be enough for me, but I do like arc plot as well. I think this would be a quite reasonable starting place for the series; while you’d ideally then go back and read the others, I think it would be perfectly comprehensible to just dive right in (…so to speak) to sea serpents, fire lizards, and other taxonomic goodness.

I do love taxonomy.

Please consider using our link to buy Voyage of the Basilisk from Amazon.

Philip Ball, Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler. This was fairly short and contained entertaining/appalling anecdotes as well as a pretty comprehensive idea of which physicists went which ways under the Nazi regime and why. Ball walked a very fine line very, very well: he didn’t overstate Nazi sympathies based on continued residence in Germany (even talking about why it could be hard for Germans of any religious/ethnic background to find places elsewhere in the world), but at the same time he was not really up for overstated nonsense about who was in danger and why. Good stuff.

Ellen Datlow, ed., The Doll Collection. Discussed elsewhere.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, A Red Heart of Memories. Structurally weird but doing fantasy things I don’t really see elsewhere. I find Hoffman’s prose very readable but somehow manage to forget to get more of her stuff for large swaths of time and then binge.

Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition. Despite the title, this will not be an erotic book for the vast majority of readers. (Some people would find the manual to their crockpot erotic. Never say never; the world is full of differences.) It’s a pictorial history of Chinese women’s foot-binding and the shoes that covered the bound feet. Jackson manages not to exoticize the historical binding of Chinese women’s feet while exoticizing literally everything else about the existence of Chinese people, which was quite, um, the accomplishment. (See what I didn’t do there?) The photos speak for themselves and are fascinating and horrifying. And splendid: the needlework put into these shoes is astonishing.

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. What a strange book. It ends with 1920, and I get why: because Prohibition is such a huge topic. Still, in 1920 the Progressive Movement had not really fallen, and Prohibition is a huge relevant topic. Also it barely mentioned the Tafts and skated past the longer-term effects of Roosevelt and Wilson. I was glad to see some more obscure figures covered, but…this is not going to be enough if you’re looking for a history of the Progressive Movement. It has interesting tidbits but huge incomprehensible gaps.

Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. The ancient Mediterranean is not one of my main things, but this seemed like a reasonably well-done history of a civilization not much covered except as The Opponent, so it was a good gap to fill in.

Andrew C. Nahm, Introduction to Korean History and Culture. It fascinates me how the various people I’ve read trying to write a history of Korea focus so differently. It’s fun to watch. Anyway, this one–like pretty much everything else I’ve read–spends half its time on the twentieth century, which is frustrating for someone whose main interest is three to five centuries earlier. Still good stuff, though; if you’re going to start reading about Korean history, this is as good a place as any and much better than some.

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Does what it says on the tin…if you assume that only white women worked in turn-of-the-century New York. Which: hahaha no. Or if you assume that non-white women had the same access and interest in leisure activities in that era, which, seriously, come on, can anybody say rise of jazz? But it was really solid on white ethnicity and religious variability, and there’s good detail here for those who want more texture in a heroine of this era (or even a hero). Just…the dimension that was missing was a bit glaring to me.

Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell. So…back in the day my college friends and I discovered Connie Willis books. And we tore through them and raved over them and loved them. And then I picked up the collaborations between her and Cynthia Felice. And fie! no! how horrible they were! And we gnashed our teeth and muttered dire imprecations about Cynthia Felice for ruuuuuining our Connie Willis books. But then! I graduated, and I went to a convention where Connie Willis was the GoH, and she was on panels talking about how the collaboration had worked. And it turned out that every single thing that I liked in those books was Cynthia Felice, and every single thing that I thought was horrible was Connie Willis. So! While I know Jennifer Graham somewhat, I don’t know what balance of ideas in this book was hers and what was Rob Thomas’s. (For those of you who are not Marshmallows, Thomas is the original creator of the series.) But! Given the amount of control a co-writer of tie-in novels has compared to the creator of the series, I strongly suspect that the scenes with Veronica and Logan buying and training a puppy were Jen Graham’s and the…direction…that the overall plot arc regarding long-time beloved characters took…was Rob Thomas. The first of these tie-in novels was good fun, like a middle-of-the-road episode maybe. This one…I only recommend it to Marshmallows who will want to know in detail where the continuity is going. But if you do read it, email me and we can…discuss. Possibly with many ellipses.

Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Does what it says on the tin. If you don’t want to read about when they issued what coins and which counterfeiting techniques were prevalent, you will probably not be tempted anyway.

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, The Last Changeling. Second in its series, very much a series book, but with new fun elements and clear and significant furtherance of the plot. And not in a way that made me want to punch anybody, either, so go people who are not Rob Thomas. Um. Wait. That was my outside voice. Anyway, this is Faerie fantasy with one of the main characters an apprentice midwife not just in name but in personality/practice, and I really enjoy that.