Samira Ahmed, Love, Hate, and Other Filters. This is a charming story about a Muslim-American teen from Chicago who is trying to navigate her life as an aspiring filmmaker around the usual teen beloved obstacles of family, friends, school, etc. I was pleased with how Ahmed stuck the landing.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. A brief history of Existentialism, fairly idiosyncratic but not a bad thing to read while thinking about what to talk about on a Readercon panel. Probably not my top pick if you want to know more about Existentialism, though.
Basho, The Essential Basho. Lots of nature poetry in the kind of translation that made it hard to see why it was essential if you didn’t already know. Perhaps get introduced to Basho somewhere else, but on the other hand a great thing to read if you’re already dressed for your dad’s memorial service and not sure what else to do. (I do not advise being in that situation if you can at all avoid it.)
Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe, The Supernormal Sleuthing Service: The Lost Legacy. This is a fun kids’ book set in a hotel full of magical creatures. I particularly like a couple of the places where characters decide to trust each other and work together instead of dragging out a different kind of drama.
Stephanie Burgis, Spellswept and The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart. The former is a prequel that takes us up to the family I’ve enjoyed in previous romantic fantasy novellas, but it was the latter that really blew me away. I adored the fierce young dragon protagonist and her newfound passion for the ways of human life and chocolate. This was a book I’d saved for a rainy day, and it was perfect–definitely looking forward to the sequels, which I’m afraid I will not have the willpower to save any more!
Aliette de Bodard, The House of Shattered Wings. This was vivid and Gothy and only the beginning of its series, and I have the second one on my pile, and I am getting to them just in time for the third, so go timeliness.
Tim Flannery, Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, A Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Creature. Sometimes a book about kangaroos, including the tree kangaroos and the prehistoric kind, is just what you need. It was sort of comfort reading, this book. Granted, the bits about kangaroo reproduction were…not comforting. But still, it’s a bit like being five years old, being able to curl up with a nice book about animals. Sometimes one needs that.
Donald Hall, Without. This is a harrowing book of poetry about Hall’s wife, poet Jane Kenyon, dying of leukemia, and also his grief thereafter. I think for some people it would be the absolute worst thing to read while grieving, but for me it was quite companionable. I have no real interest in reading anything else of Hall’s but have put the complete works of Jane Kenyon on my library list. But for me this was like…this was like the people you meet in the ICU family lounge, you have an intense and real bond with what they are going through in that moment, and then you don’t need to keep meeting up for coffee thereafter.
Carol Kendall, The Gammage Cup. Reread. I have had this book on my shelf in several states but have not reread it since, I think, Kansas, which would be 1990. It’s a fairly straightforward kids’ fantasy about villages of simple peasants, some of whom are odd and need to be more accepted for their oddity, and how they fight mushroom people. I found it more charming when I had less to read, and there is a lot of Message per unit book.
Dorianne Laux, Smoke. This is another poetry book that was recommended to me for in grief, less focused than the Hall and less successful for me but striking in a number of images.
Yoon Ha Lee, Hexarchate Stories. Discussed elsewhere.
Ken Liu, ed., Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. A very wide mix of types and lengths of story–there’s so much SF being published in Chinese that I wish there was the funding for four or five of these a year, but I’ll take what I can get. Favorites from this volume included Chen Qiufan’s “Coming of the Light” and of course Xia Jia’s “Goodnight Melancholy.” Xia Jia is an international treasure, a favorite in any language. The more she publishes, the more impressed I am.
Rose MacAulay, The Furnace. Kindle. This one was written before WWI. Two English siblings living in Italy have their “Bohemian” lifestyle tested by various trials in life, and…it’s Rose MacAulay, so the eventual moral of the story is not modern but not completely odious either. I am going to keep picking away at her back catalog, and finding them interesting and readable as I go. And while I say “not modern,” more modern than 1907 had any right to expect to be.
Robert MacFarlane, The Lost Words. This is a brief and beautiful book of poems. I don’t usually expect this much commitment to a particular formalism to come out so well–in this case, the poems all spell out the words they’re about, acorn and otter and so on, a list of nature words taken from one of the children’s dictionaries for insufficient relevance to the lives of modern children, and MacFarlane objects beautifully.
Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. I think I am not the target audience for this book, I think the target audience knows a great deal less about adrenal response and organization, but it has a calm tone and generally a level head, so all right. It is rather gendered but tries, in that direction, not to be a jerk–that is, it recognizes that many things are different for people socialized female in our culture at various times in their lives but tries not to assume various essentialist things along the way while acknowledging that.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa, David Mogo, Godhunter. Discussed elsewhere.
Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. These volumes keep not being complete works, and I keep trying.
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch. Reread. This is one of my favorite Pratchetts. But also. But also. A book about time traveling to teach your younger self some things is a particularly odd and wonderful book to reread, because…you can see your younger self reading it and see yourself learning different things, apprehending different things. So that’s a strange dual vision.
Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories. I was halfway through the first story when I let out a contented sigh, knowing that I was in good hands. And I was. She does such beautiful weirdness, such a lovely exploration of the way the world shifts and is not where you expected it, possibly because it has changed, possibly because you were wrong. Estrangement, I have been thinking about literature of estrangement, and this is a lot of that. In such a lovely way.
Charles Sheffield, Vectors. Reread. This is a very early collection of Sheffield’s short work. It contains the seeds of his later ideas, several early works that later became parts of short story series, types of things he later did more of. It also contained false starts, things that were more “of their time” and less impressive…the sort of thing those of us who write a lot of short stories have early in our portfolios. Since he did go on to write so much more, this is the sort of short story collection I’d recommend picking up if you’re in an Airbnb and it’s on their shelves but not seeking out over his other work.
Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner, eds., Do Not Go Quietly. Lots to really enjoy in this anthology, quite varied stories. I think my favorites were Rachael K. Jones “Oil Under Her Tongue,” Cassandra Khaw “What We Have Chosen To Love,” and Meg Ellison “Hey Alexa,” but it was a really solid selection of a variety of genres, styles, and types.
Sherwood Smith, A Sword Named Truth. Discussed elsewhere.
Rebecca Solnit, Cinderella Liberator. Sigh. Apparently I don’t love everything Solnit does. It’s not that this was offensive or horrible, it’s just…this is what happens when people who don’t work in fantasy or children’s books think of an illustrated fairy tale as something they don’t have to think much about before bringing in an innovation, and then their innovation is basically something that was done in heaps and truckloads in the ’70s. And ’80s. And ’90s. So…there’s nothing wrong with Solnit’s version, per se, it’s the same, hey, what if a fairy tale character was empowered. But on the other hand there is something disappointing about watching the person who wrote Men Explain Things to Me not notice that a field that is dominated by women…exists. At all. And is worthy of notice. Oh well. Next time, Rebecca.
Tui T. Sutherland, Wings of Fire Book One: The Dragonet Prophecy. My goddaughter urgently wanted me to read this as part of a conversation we were having about moral complexity of characters in kids’ books, and I got the graphic novel version from the library. When I went to talk to her about it, I realized that she now feels that I will read the other eleven in the series. Well. I liked the teamwork aspects, the self-discovery, it will not be too bad to read some more, but…it is very much the sort of kids’ book that is a kids’ book rather than an all-ages book. But the different kinds of dragon are also pretty cool.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam. The strange thing about this edition is that it was for study, and I was not reading this to study, I was reading this to grieve across centuries with Tennyson, for which it worked admirably. There is a poem very early on where he confesses that he has chosen his particular formalism in hopes of numbing his grief, and further confesses that it is not working. And if you are fluent in Victorian formal poetry, the entire rest of the thing has spots that are very like Tennyson snotting on the sleeve of his frock coat and wailing things like, “I feel like he could just come in the room at any minute and just be here!” Which: buddy, I know. I am with you, Al. So all the essays afterward were…slightly askew for me, except Eliot, Eliot was fine, this nudged me another step closer to reading more Eliot because we had some solidarity in how we read Tennyson, which was a strange feeling. Also: I think we have this twenty-first century thing where Darwin is the synecdoche for how Victorian science turned people’s worldviews on their heads, but in this Tennyson is flipping his lid about the news that the sun will someday burn out, and it’s a powerful reminder that the entire 19th century was one thing after another like that–that in fact we have had a good solid two centuries and counting of what do you mean it’s like that I was not prepared from science.
Rey Tercerio and Bre Indigo, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. This is a graphic novel resetting of Little Women (obv) in modern Brooklyn, in a multiracial blended family with modern problems but also a great many of the beats of the original book reproduced exactly. I know Little Women. I know how the beats fall really well. So it was fascinating to watch them choose very deliberately which parts to keep, which to alter only slightly, which to change deliberately for modern readers, because the lessons that a modern reader needs–the lessons Alcott would likely have wanted to teach–are not the same. I ended up liking it, and I will be interested to see if I can talk to goddaughter about it, to see how well she knows the original and what she thinks of the changes. Ditto anyone older of course.
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood. Discussed elsewhere.
Fran Wilde, The Fire Opal Mechanism. An astonishing, lovely and in spots bleak, time travel fantasy where intention and reality diverge sharply. What are we trying, what do we achieve, where have we gone wrong from what we meant to do and can we get it back again. Beautiful and caring.
P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City. Kindle. I had run out of cope one day, and there was Wodehouse, and this was one where he was on his game, the title character and his bosom companion attempting to work for a beleaguered bank who was possibly not the better for their services when they could have been playing their beloved cricket. It was short and made me giggle when I very much needed to, and about the time it grew tiresome it was over.
Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, The Last Tsar’s Dragons. Discussed elsewhere.