Year: 2015

Simon Barnes, Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom. Very, very short essays about animals. All sorts of animals. I thought my adult life would contain more of these, since one’s childhood does. Not a lot of depth, but gosh, animals; it was cheerful and nice.

Cole Cohen, Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders. Too much memoir, not enough neurology. It was very interesting, although if you are in any way prone to reading memoirs of illness and thinking, “OH NO MAYBE I HAVE THAT,” be careful with this one; I am not so prone, and therefore I could cheerfully read this about what it is like to have a lemon-sized hole in one’s brain. (Also they have looked at my brain and given it a structural thumbs up. So.) It was interesting, but I was glad it wasn’t longer. If you, too, are interested in the wide variety of Ways The Brain Can Cope Through Quite A Lot, this is that genre.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Discussed elsewhere.

Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History. I keep filling in my gaps in knowledge of Korean history as best I can despite the difficulties in finding things in English. This one was much more focused on the Japanese occupation than a lot of general Korean histories, which was interesting in itself–it read as though some specialists in that period had written some chapters, then decided that they didn’t want to expand them into a book on just that but rather wanted to stick on a few earlier and later chapters and sell it as a general history. Fine by me, no worse than other approaches, and hey, at least with a couple of people of Korean background doing some of the writing, it was not all “history begins when the US begins shooting, or possibly when the UK does; France at the absolute outside.” (I really hate that mode of history.)

Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height and Arms and the Women. Rereads. These may be my two favorites in the series. We’ll see what I think of the last few when I reread them, but right now I am feeling that On Beulah Height is one of the best mystery novels written since the death of Dorothy Sayers. I recommend reading one or two of the others in the series before it (Arms and the Women will do, although when I finish the series reread I will do a comprehensive “where do I start? what order?” post of some sort). It is a dark and lovely thing, and some of the emotional weight of it depends on having a strong feeling for who these people are to each other. It also depends on having had enough feel for Yorkshire dialect that when Andy Dalziel declares that he’ll not thole it, you don’t have to stop a minute to figure out what it is to thole something. If you have to stop for that minute, you won’t choke up at that point in the book. (Aaaaagh that SPOT and later with the DASHBOARD OH ANDY.) Arms, meanwhile, is the one I started with, and is lovely but not nearly so fraught. It’s an interesting one to have started with, because it has callbacks to books much earlier and only moderately earlier in the series, but the way they fit in the text are entirely fine if you read them as if they were just introduced at that moment.

Li Kunwu and P. Otie, A Chinese Life. This is a graphic novel memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese history since. Other than its format, the main way it stands out from other memoirs of the time is that Li is clear and honest not only about what was done to him during the Cultural Revolution but also about what he did to others. He was a child at the time. If you know the Cultural Revolution, you know that that did not actually stop people from committing atrocities. It’s a harrowing read in spots, and if you have family/personal connections to the Cultural Revolution or are otherwise feeling sensitive, I recommend that you time your reading carefully.

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. Note: not actually surprising. I was hoping for quite a lot of octopus neurology and biology, and instead I got some very chatty accounts of hanging out with octopus at an aquarium. Which was nice, and it’s a short book, but…too many monkeys, not enough octopus.

Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen and The Wee Free Men. (The latter a reread.) What different books. The former is a short fiction collection, which I feel is not at all his strength and frankly only worth the time for a Pratchett completist. The latter is one of his best works: the first of the Tiffany Aching books, a beautiful rallying cry for the stubborn, the precise, the caretakers, the people-herders, the over-prepared, the curious, the lookers-up…me, okay? It’s a rallying cry for me. One of my friends told me she pictured Tiffany as a young me, and when I reread this book, I got tears in my eyes over that comment, because I realized that it is the most overtly sentimental she is likely to get over our friendship, because she is also a one like that, and we mostly don’t go around saying things like that with our out loud words, mostly we say things like, “How’s your mom doing now?” and also we make soup. And Terry Pratchett: he understood that, and he wrote a book for us, and not only that, it starts for those of us who know it even when we’re little, it’s for my Lillian, my goddaughter who is already a people-herding little one of us, because this stubborn dark hilarious little book is for kids too. Oh, and also: I had not reread this since my grandpa died. And the important grandparent in it is a Granny, but: yeah. So. I will have to wait awhile before I read another of these, because there’s only so much of it in me at once. I knew when Pratchett died that I’d have to make a run up to Wintersmith, and I was right. But this is the beginning of that run. And now there’s the last one out. Crivens. Also quite funny, for those who for some reason don’t know.

S.E. Smith, The United States Marine Corps in World War II: Volume III: Death of an Empire. Grandpa’s. These stories were compiled from actual Marines and the journalists who were embedded with them, very shortly after the war. There is not the level of polish or perspective one might hope from a later account, but the value of the immediate version is very clear. The photo illustrations are smudgy and not really worthwhile, and the language is full of ethnic slurs on the one hand and elisions of the kind of crudity that they actually used on the other. And yet there is something very true and very useful about it, and I am glad to have it. This is the last in its set.

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Wedgwood and Watt, Priestley and Erasmus Darwin and Matthew Boulton, plus assorted connections and hangers-on. They didn’t have the same lines that we do, they were just doing their cool things, and wandering about having their 18th century lives and affairs and stubbornness. I like Jenny Uglow a great deal, with one caveat that I would apply to more than one historian, and that is this: diagnostic medicine has improved so much even in the last fifty years, much less the last three centuries, that I am not at all comfortable with blithely labeling eighteenth century figures “hypochondriac.” That was a very small point in a very interesting whole, though.

Greg van Eekhout, Dragon Coast. Discussed elsewhere.

Fran Wilde, Updraft. Discussed elsewhere.

Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. Winchester…really needs to get control of his footnotes. And this coming from a Terry Pratchett fan! It’s not that there are too many. It’s that he seems to be unable to know a thing without sticking it in a footnote without regard for whether it is relevant or even interesting in context. He has the sort of footnoting style that left me expecting to come upon “*I like cheese” as a footnote at any time. I am interested in very early geology, but Winchester’s style made this short book more of an eye-rolling slog than the length should have allowed. Seriously, you do not have to explain who Joseph Priestley is three times in one book–particularly not always with the same Priestley-you-know-the-oxygen-guy tagline. People who want to read about the beginning of modern geology either 1) already know Priestley, 2) got it the first time, or 3) don’t actually care (although they should because Priestley is a kick). Also if no one has ever required a dude to be married to be the Father of [His Field], no one should ever require a lady to be married to be the Mother of [Her Field], so PUT A SOCK IN IT, SIMON WINCHESTER: THAT IS MY MATURE AND CONSIDERED OPINION. Ahem. Yes. Well then. On that note.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Every once in awhile there is an epic fantasy that makes me say, “Oh yes, right, that’s why I read epic fantasy!” Even better when it’s a debut author, so I can say that and anticipate more of that person later. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is one of those books. It’s not perfect, of course, but this is not the universe for perfect. (Ours, I mean. Baru’s either.) What it does quite effectively, though, is show a young woman in the process of using the tools of empire to subvert the empire in question–and Dickinson has correctly identified bureaucracy and monetary policy as major tools of empire.

This, folks, is a fantasy of logistics. All the things that we talk about wishing there was more of–accounting, supplies, all of that–in exciting form. Any time someone tries to tell you that bashing people with swords is the main fantasy theme because supplying armies is boring should be turned around so they are pointing at The Traitor Baru Cormorant and then given a gentle shove.

(Also there is bashing people with swords. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…true love not in the direction one might expect….)

There is twistiness. There is plottiness. There is double-crossing, there is a sense of priorities not going where they necessarily would for the modern reader. More. More.

Please consider using our link to buy The Traitor Baru Cormorant from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. I think I’ve met Fran in person one weekend unless I’m forgetting another time (if so, sorry, Fran!), but we’re friendly online.

The best first novels are the ones where you can tell that the author is having fun with tropes and images they particularly enjoy. In the case of Updraft, that’s human flight via gliders. The humans in these books live in giant, at least somewhat-living structures, towers, that are interconnected with a few bridges but mostly conduct their trade and social contact through glider pilots flying back and forth. The Singers in the highest Spire keep the secrets of the towers, enforcing the Laws and protecting the tower denizens from the monsters who fly around them.

Or do they? Kirit and her friend Nat are trying to earn the right to fly alone between the towers as adults, but their curiosity leads them to some strange places and even stranger questions. They don’t have the backing of rich and powerful adults like some of their peers do, and the evidence that there’s more going on in their home than they’ve been taught keeps piling up. They take more risks and then more to find out what’s going on, and soon their loyalties to their home and each other are at risk. They find relationships they thought were lost and gifts within themselves that they never suspected existed.

This is really fine adventure fantasy that made me feel fourteen again in the best way.

Please consider using our link to buy Updraft from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the third in its series, and I think there’s enough weight of story ahead of it that it’s really worth going back and reading California Bones and Pacific Fire if you can. The story in Dragon Coast will do an entirely great job of reminding you who these people are and why they matter to each other if you’ve already read the first two, but I think the emotional heft of it will be diminished if you just pick it up as “converging on a dragon on Treasure Island, osteomancy, go!”

The earlier volumes were very focused on Southern California; this one moves north and to a partially new cast of characters, whose relationships to each other are important and unknown to the people trying to navigate them. One of the great strengths of these books is van Eekhout’s portrayal of how people bond in complex ways in stressful situations, and having the previous sets of emotionally close people contrasted and shoved up against new sets made that strength particularly clear.

That makes the books sound cerebral and measured, and in fact they are action-packed and rollicking. They are action-packed, rollicking books with bone magic, and they are about relationships formed and tested and warped in stressful situations.

And also there is a recognition of the importance of water and water magic, particularly in California, so there’s a hot button of mine lovingly pressed.

They’re a good time, is what I’m saying, this one no less than the previous books. There is convergence of three storylines upon the disabled dragon on Treasure Island. That’s what these books are doing. So yeah.

Please consider using our link to buy Dragon Coast from Amazon.

John Joseph Adams, ed., Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 57. Kindle. This is the disadvantage to reading things on my Kindle in bits and pieces when I am waiting in line places etc.: it takes forever, and in the case of short fiction, I note what to recommend and then forget what was in that issue. In this case I mostly remember Bear’s reprint novella as really lovely. Very old issue of Lightspeed, but I am not the only one with a giant reading queue, so I think I will not stress about it.

Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self. Fascinating neurological cases focused (in some ways loosely) around disorders of sense of self. This is one of those books that makes me uneasy, because I felt it was fascinating and well-researched pop neurology, except for the chapter about autism, where I know the most from research and personal experience. That chapter had some statements that were utter bullshit. (Example: autistic people do not engage in imaginative play? The hell you say, they do it in my living room. In most rooms of my house in fact. Also, I continue to maintain that treating autism as all one thing is a major problem, and the fact that Ananthaswamy was willing to charge merrily on with the idea that autistic people have trouble with theory of mind when over a third of the autistic people in the tests he was discussing did not have any such trouble is only one example of why I think this is problematic.) And…when that happens, I have to wonder whether the people with other neurodivergences or neurological diseases and their family members are reading the book going, oh yes, great stuff except for the one chapter I know about….

Victoria Brehm, ed., Star Songs and Water Spirits: A Great Lakes Native Reader. This book does not divided along US/Canada borders for the quite sensible reason that the Native/First Nations tribes/groups did not use that national boundary for their cultural boundary. It has a wide variety of authors telling very different types of stories, some old legends, some poems, some talk about life in various eras. Very interesting reference book, good jumping-off point for further reading.

Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid. Interesting study of a semi-legendary figure that takes a brief and startling left turn into Saint Olaf, and if anybody should be incapable of being startled by that venerable personage it should be me. Goes into the contrast of the legend and the fact and how political needs shaped later stories. Probably not a great introduction to the legend of the Cid or to the Moors in Spain and the Moors going out of it again, if you’re looking for an introduction.

Reginald Hill, Underworld, Bones and Silence, Asking for the Moon, Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond. (Ed. note: only the last four of these seem to be in print.) So two things happened here. One: I got a cold, and rereading a favorite series felt just right, comfy and nice. Two: I hit the really good part, the part where I would recommend people start reading for the first time. That line happens at Bones and Silence. That book is still of its time in a few demographic details, but it is, in my opinion, the point in the series where Hill really cuts loose and starts playing with literary reference and structure; after that, the books have the reasons I wanted to read the whole series in the first place. Even a volume like Pictures of Perfection, which is structurally weak and gimmicky, is still essentially charming as a reading experience. The exception here is Asking for the Moon, which is a set of four shorter pieces and highlights why short mystery pieces are harder. It also contains a dead-end: Hill had no idea, twenty years in, how much longer his mystery series would stretch, so he had a 2010 moon base setting with an elderly, retired Dalziel, when in fact the last volume of the series was published in 2009 and…no moon base, not nearly so elderly a Dalziel, not nearly so cynical a relationship between the titular two detectives. The other thing that happens at Bones and Silence besides structural and literary complexity is that the role of Wield consistently continues to expand, and I love Wieldy; he is my favorite. His life improves and his role in the books expands and la la la yay Wieldy.

Nalo Hopkinson, Falling in Love with Hominids. Cannot lose with this volume of varied speculative short work from one of the modern masters of the genre. I don’t feel that the very short pieces are her strength, but otherwise just dive right in. Recommended. One caveat: if you have zero tolerance for horror or creepiness, this is not the place to start with Hopkinson, because some of these stories are quite effective at being unpleasant.

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest. Discussed elsewhere. I would like to talk about the title metaphor with someone who has read the book, please, if such a person would email me.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. Nineteenth century, mostly early. Oh lordy there is so much James Fenimore Cooper. You might think, “How much James Fenimore Cooper can there be?” And the answer is, “ARGH TOO MUCH.” There are other people who are more interesting than Cooper (LIKE EVERYBODY), some of them even crossing the line into actually interesting. But the pressing need to slay James Fenimore Cooper with a dull spoon pour encourager les autres really dampened my enthusiasm for this book. Especially since there were lots of 19th century American medical women who got short shrift thereby, and I was promised plagues! Promised plagues and received Fenimores! What a thing!

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life. I am very glad that I read this eminent and chatty neurologist autobiography a few days before Dr. Sacks died, rather than having the fraught decision of whether to read it immediately upon hearing his death or having it hanging around being a thing I want to read but freighted with different meaning. Its structure is very much “here are some things I wanted to say about myself before I go,” and I’m glad he got the chance. I am gnashing my teeth in particular about the missing book about myoclonus (noooooooo)

Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang. This was just the sort of nice rural Chinese 17th century history, focused on a region and its inhabitants in ways that one doesn’t get often, that allowed me to brace myself for the titular darkness of The Dark Forest. I hold further volumes of Spence in reserve for future need of similar kind. I feel sure they will have famine and bandits and trials and other things like that, things that are quite interesting when happening far away to other people.

Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score. I didn’t want to put this down while I was reading it. Afterwards I felt somewhat less positive, though I still liked it. I guess I feel that Mo is not as successful a voice as Bob–her concerns are too similar to his, the details she notices too similar. Also the ending made me furious. FURIOUS. Not in a “haha the author sure got you” sort of way that one should feel smug about but literally incandescent with rage, and yet I did not dislike the book enough–and I love the series–that I am anti-recommending the book on the basis of the last few FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE pages. Somebody who has read this please email me and talk to me about this so that I can vent without harming the innocents. Breathing. Yes. Really, as I said, love the series. Did not want to put it down while reading it. Have hopes of further volumes. But those last two pages OH MY GOLLY. And really: do not start here. Do not. Start at the beginning of the series, there’s a dear. You have direct evidence further up the page that I am not a “start at the beginning at all times” purist, and I bet you don’t have to start with volume one here. But not this one. And not just because of the flames. Because there are all sorts of places where follow-ons and consequences matter quite a lot here.

Jeff Sypeck, Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of AD 800. This is a warm and charming book. It is a quite reasonable introduction, so it probably has things many of you won’t need. On the other hand, it talks about what we can know about Charlemagne’s relationship with his daughters and with the nascent Frankish Jewish community, which was awfully nice. And there was the poor fellow who walked most of the way from Baghdad to Aachen with the elephant. Which is bad enough, being him or being the elephant, but can you imagine being the Frankish peasant along the wayside? “Gran, there’s got to be ergot in the rye, you won’t believe what I’ve just seen.” “Na, lass, come look what it’s left behind as a gift, the fields will bloom for years. Get the shovel.” Give me a book about the Empress Irene and I still end up in the fungus and dung. Peasant ancestry woooo! Annnnnyway. I brought that bit with me, you can’t expect it in the book. There was the Empress Irene in the actual text, though, so that’s all right then.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Translation by Joel Martinsen. I note this because I felt that Ken Liu walked a very fine line between keeping the Chinese feel of the text in the first volume of this series, The Three-Body Problem, and rendering it in smooth English, and he did it carefully and well. While that is still true, I want to say that I think Joel Martinsen did equally good work with the same hard job. Regular readers know that I am a giant translation nerrrrrrd, so kudos Martinsen hurrah. I wrote this review before I knew that The Three-Body Problem and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” won the only Hugos given for written fiction this year. It is a great time for works in translation to English, and I hope we see even more.

I had to steel myself to read The Dark Forest, not because I expected it to be bad, but because I did not expect it to be, well, cheerful. And it is not. Most of humanity continues to freak out at the impending aliens and at each other. (Note: you could probably pick it up without the prior volume, but I really recommend starting at the beginning.) While this installment lacks the Cultural Revolution, look, folks, he went and put “DARK” right there in the title, and he went and made up a future historical event that makes the Cultural Revolution look like a cotillion and ice cream social.

So what I’m saying is that this is a book that is more interesting than pleasant to read.

Add to that the fact that while it has tons of East Asian influences, the major Western influences are Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. That means psychohistory and alien artifacts, awesome! It also means tons of exposition, weirdly uneven pacing, and almost no women characters. And one of the largest roles a woman character plays is in and “ideal girl/dream girl” subplot, which would have been iffy enough if there were lots of interesting, full-fledged women characters. But there weren’t. There was, however, an incompetent beautiful waitress killer fembot. So hey, there’s that.

I do find it interesting where someone steeped and rooted in the Cultural Revolution–and before that, more happily, in Chinese classics–goes with their tale of humans freaking out and trying to cope–to varying degrees of success–with impending contact with an alien race. I’m very interested in where the third volume of this trilogy goes. I want to read more of this in particular, and of SF in translation from Chinese and from other languages in general. It’s just that sometimes the things that I want are a bit less fun and a bit more of a slog than I had hoped for. Well. Next book maybe.

Please consider using our link to buy The Dark Forest from Amazon.