Ann Aguirre, Like Never and Always. Discussed elsewhere.
Chaz Brenchley, Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost. Kindle. This is a novella in the same world as the Crater School stories, and its heroine is one of the Crater School’s graduates, all grown up and moved into intelligence services. I think it would stand alone fairly well, if you’re not already supporting Chaz’s Patreon for these projects, but in any case it’s full of winter sports and spies, so I was entirely on board.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos. Reread. This is a single-gender planet book, just outside the main Vorkosigan sequence. I reread it for my feminist socialist SF panel, and while I don’t think Lois was trying to write a perfect work of either ideology, there were elements that were extremely interesting to discuss in that context: the way that this society accounts for the labor of childrearing when childbearing is something that literally cannot happen accidentally to anyone in it, for example. This book doesn’t represent Lois’s current thinking on gender or sexuality, and also there are people in it who never were meant to–I’ll put a content note here for homophobia directed against the protagonist–but there are things it’s doing that I’m not sure I’ve seen done elsewhere.
Zoraida Cordova, Bruja Born. This was such a fast read. More family ties, more magic, more complications and difficult emotions and getting things done despite them. I really like this series. I like the way this protagonist is allowed to be wrong for all the right reasons, and the way that her family is there with her in all the worst situations.
Edward Eager, Knight’s Castle and Seven-Day Magic. Rereads. The latter is the one of Eager’s works that I feels holds up best–minimal racism, sexism not a major plot element. Knight’s Castle has a message that I guess you can read as anti-sexist, but it doesn’t really balance out the ongoing scorn for girls, in my 21st century experience, since the former is quite overt and the latter a great deal more subtle. Seven-Day Magic leans into Eager’s strength in a big way: doing explicit homage to other children’s writers. It’s a book for kids who love books, and it’s the one that brings me closest to my grade school appreciation of Eager.
Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces. It’s easy to see why this is a classic of writing place. The way it evokes Wyoming, its people, its weather, its landscape, is astonishing. It’s also a 30+-year-old book, so there are places where I sigh looking at how Ehrlich has described what actual cowboys do (nurturing baby animals for heaven’s sake) vs. the cultural stereotypes of a cowboy…because we’ve had an increase in factory farming, a decrease in actual cowboys, and an increase in invested toxic stereotypes of that job from people who have never held it but would like to be seen in a certain light. Particularly politicians. Bleh.
George Eliot, Silas Marner. Kindle. I am not astonished at the people who were forced to read this in high school and told me it was boring, because it’s not a book for teens. But the people who read it as adults–come on, this is a beautiful book. It’s about community connection in an era of financially spurred isolation. And there’s that beautiful coda that is even more beautiful if you know Maryann Evans’s personal life…I cried at that ending. That was one of the most cathartic endings ever. I mean, it’s no Middlemarch, but nothing is.
Nicola Griffith, So Lucky. A thriller about being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I’m not kidding, and it’s searing and amazing and left me with all kinds of thoughts about disability representation and expectations and what makes experiences in this area the same and different. Recommended.
William Hjortsberg, Symbiography. Kindle. Very rooted in its time in its concerns about dream and “civilization.”
Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds., Fiyah Issue 6 and Fiyah Issue 7. Kindle. These were two very solid issues–I think Issue 7 may be my favorite yet, with each story really firing on all cylinders. Tade Thompson’s “Yard Dog” and LaShawn M. Wanak’s “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good” were my favorites but honestly it was all good. In Issue 6 I thought the stand-out was Juliana Goodman’s “Furious Girls.”
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars. Discussed elsewhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Reread. This was for my feminist socialist SF panel, and there were some ways in which it was fascinating, and there were some ways in which it is exemplary in the area of “authors who kept learning for their whole lives.” Because there were parts of this book that were simply appalling and heartbreaking in gender terms. The protagonist, let me be clear, commits sexual assault, and when he reflects on his feelings of guilt immediately thereafter, guilt for having assaulted another person is not in the list, there’s only reflection on political complicity. Nor, I feel, does the narrative complicate or undermine that reaction. Shutting women out of the sciences is used as a puppy-kicking plot point to show how terrible a society is, but there are literally no women characters who are directly negatively affected by it, no women who want anything better than they have, no…look, it’s a lot. Go into this prepared, because Le Guin got better than this over her lifetime, and it is a lot.
Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen. And speaking of a lot…there is so much sexual violence and toxicity in this book. There are so many relationships that are utterly, thoroughly horrid for all concerned. And this is the book that made me realize how many older women had cis women in their books wishing to be men, routinely, as though it was something obvious that everyone would do, and that made me cry, and I have not been able to unsee it since. But…this is also a fascinating angle for an historical novel, its setting, its worldbuilding and attitudes toward magic, everything. I’m not sorry I endured to get to the whole thing. (But there’s some part of me that’s sorry that Naomi had to.)
William Morris, The Defense of Guenevere and Other Poems. Kindle. Do you want rhyming couplets? Lots and lots of rhyming couplets, that only extremely rarely avoid an obvious rhyme? Do you want them on Arthurian and other chivalric themes? Uncle Bill is your dude, then. This…look, I love him, I love William Morris to pieces, it’s why he’s one of the very small number of historical figures I refer to with an avuncular nickname. But this is not, in fact, good. It’s ponderous and sentimental and everything, everything that the Pre-Raphaelites got criticized for being. “Chivalric themes” means that this is not actually even remotely the feminist end of his thought. If you want to read this at all, you want to read it for very specific reasons, and I have those reasons myself, I just…most of you can really let me take this one for the team.
E. Nesbit, The Book of Dragons, The Magic City, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet, and The Wouldbegoods. Rereads every one. Nesbit–like Eager after her (but before her in this book list!)–wrote for a very particular imagined child reader. That child was of her era, British, upper middle class or upper class. Servants and their families are people who help her readers, not people who are her readers. And yet. And yet she’s trying to juggle Fabian sensibilities and a strong sense of children as actual fallible people, not needing to be role models but real characters, and there’s still so very very much to love in her books. I read these because I was on more than one panel at Readercon about her, but I don’t regret a moment of the reread.
Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver. I think that Naomi Novik and I will just never align on the subject of romantic plots/fictional relationships, and I would love to talk to other people who have read this about the ending of the romantic plots in this book because…so many thoughts and feelings here. However. This was a medieval fantasy with Jewish people who interacted with their own and Gentile culture in nuanced and varied ways. This was a medieval fantasy where a stubborn peasant girl got to stay a stubborn peasant girl. There were all sorts of portrayals of work, different kinds of work, in ways that were fascinating and, again, nuanced. There was more than one villain, and more than one antagonist, and they didn’t necessarily align. So the romantic plot…differences of opinion…did not manage to undo all the good done in this book, reminding me that we like books for what they do right, not what they fail to do wrong.
Daniel Malory Ortberg, The Merry Spinster. These are short stories that take a different angle on stories we feel we know. They’re unsettling and upending and sometimes grim (and sometimes Grimm) and generally worth your time. Every time you say, “I know how this one goes,” you probably don’t.
Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure and In the Hand of the Goddess. Rereads. These were formative for me in so many ways. They were desperately important books in my adolescence. I read them again because they were an important example, for adolescent me, of how fantasy can handle sexuality and sex ed, without bogging down the ongoing adventures in preachiness. Upon reread it became clear to me how much they reinforced the idea that talking about your harassment will prove to the men and boys around you that you’re not worthy to be among them, and that made me sad. But I’m still glad I had it when I did.
Hannu Rajaniemi, Summerland. Discussed elsewhere.
Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire. This is an Alastair Reynolds novel! If you haven’t read one yet, this is an okay one to start with I guess? but Blue Remembered Earth has elephants so really go with that one. Anyway: there’s a consistency of feel in the universe he writes here, and he nails that again, so if you want one of those, this is a one of those.
Kelly Robson, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. This is very weird science fiction in ways that I didn’t expect from the title. It kept surprising me, which is always a valuable thing.
Jennie Rooney, Red Joan. This is not a traditionally structured spy novel, it’s a novel about a spy. It’s a novel about an entire long life and what leads to some decisions and what forces others. Old women are allowed to be characters here. It’s a lovely character study.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Fuego. A slim and passionate volume of poetry about childbirth and long-distance swimming and all sorts of interesting things.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. This is lovely. It talks about pilgrimage and mountain climbing and city strolls and the history of garden philosophy and Jane Austen and the Wordsworths and all sorts of things. There is a passage toward the end that feels very firm, very deliberate, where Solnit talks about some of the ways in which walking is not the same for every demographic in every culture, especially ours–I feel like I can almost feel her saying to herself, “This is not what my book is about and yet I can’t not talk about it,” and the balance works beautifully for me. I’ve been enjoying reading my way through her works, and this was no exception.
Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota, eds., Uncanny Issue 22 and Uncanny Issue 23. Kindle. Two solid but very different issues, since one of them was dinosaur themed. I don’t generally review things I’m in, and I’m in here, so I will speak only generally.
Jessica Weisberg, Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed. This is a history of advice writing, particularly of advice writing in the US, although there is a brief early part that’s about British advice writing, on the theory that it contributed to the genre here. This is short and interesting if you like the topic, which I do; I love advice columns. It’s so compelling to see how people formulate their problems and solutions. And watching the genre evolve socially over time is great.
Barbara Willard, A Sprig of Broom. Reread. This is a series of historical fiction from when the boundary between middle grade and young adult had not sorted itself out thoroughly, or at least not into what it is now. As a result, this series is…readable on the individual sentence level, and aimed at teens in content, but much thinner than what would be expected now. This one is the aftermath of Henry Tudor’s accession to the throne, as seen in a small manor house/family. It was fine to read, but I don’t have any reason to think I’ll want to reread it again.
P. G. Wodehouse, Three Men and a Maid. Kindle. I was on a plane, okay? This is a Wodehouse that does the things Wodehouse does. It does what it says on the tin, which is be by Wodehouse. Sometimes you’re on a plane and want a story where people run about and get into scrapes and dogs do various things and someone has to hide somewhere improbable and it all works out in the end.
Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake. A love story between two people with emotional baggage and some very weird life experiences. Compelling and thoughtful and short.