Month: August 2019

Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists. This was my dad’s and kept among his chemistry texts. It was a charming example of medieval philosophy, debunking a notion that another group had come up with that was very inside-baseball but deftly handled with the tools available at the time.

Ruthanna Emrys, Imperfect Commentaries. I’d read, loved, and recommended several stories in this–I think even critiqued one or two in beta form actually–but it’s so nice to have them in this lovely volume where I can return to them again and again. Which I will, because there are so many favorites here, it’s impossible to pick one or even three or four. Highly recommended, you will want this on your shelf.

Kathleen Flenniken, Plume. This is a volume of poetry by a nuclear engineer who grew up in a town of nuclear engineers, in the shadow of a nuclear facility, and watched cancer clusters form in her childhood neighbors. It’s well-informed and technical and also poetically beautiful; it’s footnoted for those of you who need it, but for those of us who have the background it can be searing straight-up.

Sarah Foot, Aethelstan. A history or biography-of-sorts of this tenth century monarch, who is peripheral to a project I’m working on–hard to do biography as we think of it for modern figures on someone this far back in time, but it’s a different kind of interesting, seeing what we can piece together about him. I remain fascinated by what British historians are and are not interested in talking about regarding the Anglo-Saxon period, so there are several cultural holes I’ll continue to look to fill, but this is still a good thing to have on my shelf.

Gwynne Garfinkle, People Change. I was surprised and charmed by the breadth of the Hollywood poems in this. Less surprising but still favorites were “Man-Size” (already enjoyed elsewhere) and “The Paper Doll Golems” (I am a sucker for paper dolls, and this one was new to me).

Ruth Kassinger, Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us. This was less algae biology than I wanted and more algae engineering. It was interesting algae engineering, so it worked out okay! But I had been hoping for lots and lots of detailed algae subspecies biology. Ah well. Algae engineering is good too.

R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic. Discussed elsewhere.

Fonda Lee, Jade War. I love this series. It’s so much fun. And I love middle books, and this definitely is one–scope widening, ramifications and implications at every turn, no need to stick the landing yet. Don’t start here, for heaven’s sake, start with the first one, but you’ll want to keep going, because the fantasy gangster kung fu movie mashup in this series works so brilliantly.

Rose MacAulay, The World My Wilderness. Okay so. This book. This book! This book is about a teenage girl who was with the Maquis in WWII and now has been taken back to London by her British father and is supposed to learn to be a “civilized woman” and instead is wandering around the bombed out bits painting them and stealing stuff because Maquis come on. Rose MacAulay is so great and I just keep reading her weird amazing books and this was basically exactly contemporaneous with The Catcher in the Rye. So when you were being handed something about some rando kid slouching around muttering about phonies, you could have been reading painter Maquis girl who is used to bombing Nazi train tracks is faintly baffled by your conformity, come on now, really. Really.

Amanda Owen, The Yorkshire Shepherdess. This is a memoir of a woman who decided to go off and raise sheep and children. She has some moments of “wait you what”…even more so than that decision process might indicate…and there are a few places where I really feel that her husband wants a good kicking, like where she has the ritual commentary about how he doesn’t know how to turn on the grill (American English: broiler) and yet has seven children to feed. But I’m revising a novella that features several sheep, so! It was entertaining and interesting, mostly!

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. This ended up mostly being about matsutake mushroom hunters from various subcultures in different regions of the world, their sale and trading and interactions with the larger cultures around them. Occasionally Tsing wandered off into pronouncements of her personal philosophy that connected a little oddly with the mushrooms, but it was always back to the fungus eventually.

J.Y. Yang, The Ascent to Godhood. The fourth in a series of linked novellas, giving more of the history of the setting, but in a way that was all character and story, not a bare recitation of details. This centered on a relationship that shaped a world. My catnip.

Review copy provided by Haikasoru Books.

If you were ever thinking, okay, what if steampunk, but deeply Japanese, absolutely Edo period Japanese, this is the book for you. The sections unfold in sort of a spiral structure, seemingly handling disparate stories that turn out to ramify into a larger political structure for which the steampunk plot is entirely crucial.

This is a book that is obsessed with the soul, with ensoulment and the spirit and what makes us human. My workshop buddy Molly is quoted on the cover blurb comparing it to Blade Runner, and there’s a lot of that–a lot of “if it walks like a human and talks like a human, when does the soul come in,” and I have some pretty strong suspicions about where and how the word kami is used in the original that isn’t quite translating but is still interesting in translation, is still not at all a Helen O’Loy story.

But honestly my favorite part is the clockwork fighting crickets. That’s a worldbuilding detail that threads through delightfully and entirely appropriately, and I just…clockwork automata in the fighting cricket rings! If that is your jam, this is your book.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the sequel to The Poppy War, and in the shape of a classic second book of a trilogy, things get significantly worse here and do not get significantly better at the end.

Yes, from the state of things in The Poppy War. Yes, I remember how things were in that book. There is, it turns out, a lot darker to get.

And yet. And yet and yet and yet. Is this book a catalog of unremitting horrors. No. No, not unremitting. There is a lot of bleak here. There is a lot of darkness, a lot of betrayal, a lot of people fleeing from horrible situations in their world, in their politics, in their own hearts and minds, in their…theologies, I guess I would say, in a very concrete and immediate sense. This is a book that takes some of the worst situations in our own history and gives magical and divine weight to metaphors about them, and those are…not even necessarily the worst situations it describes. Some of the worst situations are very real ways humans have treated each other historically.

And yet.

Still not unremittingly bleak.

Still ways for humans to keep trying, to keep hoping, to keep reaching for a solution, for understanding, for some way for things to get better.

This is a second book.

Will book three be about the day the teddy bears have their picnic? I expect not, no. I expect there to be addiction and loss and turmoil, starvation and death and upheaval, fire and flood and betrayal. But I expect Rin to fight not just for the barest edges of survival but for something more in herself. I expect Rin to keep finding something more. And that’s why I keep reading these books. And why I think you might want to also.

Sophie Anderson, The House With Chicken Legs. This is a kids’ book about death and finding your own place. It is not actually a particularly hard book to read when you’re grieving, which…is kind of a signal of some pretty pulled punches, so if you don’t want a book with these themes and that set of decisions, tread carefully. The title is literal, however, and if that strikes you as charming, consider this one.

Maurice Broaddus, The Usual Suspects. This is a kids’ mystery, which is all too rare in my experience of reading middle grade. The protagonist is a member of a mixed group of kids with behavior issues that the school district deals with…about like modern school districts do. They have varying needs and abilities and types of family support. They are beautifully characterized, with their loyalties and friendships drawn incredibly clearly. If you are at all up for MG mystery, this is quite a good one.

Stephanie Burgis, The Girl With the Dragon Heart. This follows fairly closely on The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart, but it has shifted protagonists to a closely related character. The adventure has expanded to include not only a different viewpoint, but…elves. Elves! So much fun! Oh, these books are just what I needed right now, I can’t wait for the next one to come out.

Michelle Cuevas, The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole. This is a fun, charming, whimsical book wherein the black hole is mostly a metaphor but also has some bits of science education in it. ALSO IT IS A BOOK ABOUT A GIRL WHOSE DAD JUST DIED. IT DOES NOT SAY THIS ANYWHERE ON THE COVER. The grief reactions are very real, it is beautifully handled, I think this would be a great book for a kid who has not just suffered that type of loss to have as part of their emotional vocabulary to refer back to when they do have loss in their life, but I WAS SITTING UNDER THIS SLEEPING DOG AND I HAD NOTHING ELSE TO READ AND IT WAS A DEAD DAD BOOK DO NOT GO IN UNWARNED.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War. This is a beautiful epistolary time travel battle poetry love story. It is not like other things. It rewrites the world in full color.

Minister Faust, The Coyote Kings Vs. the Myconauts of Plutonium City Scrolls 7-8. Kindle. This continues to be a pop culture adventure extravaganza singularity. Where is he going with it, who can say.

Peter Fiennes, Oak and Ash and Thorn: The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain. Trees trees trees trees. There are a few places where I felt a little baffled that Fiennes didn’t want to do more comparative work, but on the other hand limiting his scope is admirable in his way: he is by God writing about the woods and forests of Britain, and other comparable latitudes and habitats are not the point. There are also tidbits about forest creatures and the evolution of the British forest as habitat, although I feel like there could have been still more about what one is to do with a well-documented habitat as its climate changes–when the previous state literally could not be restored no matter what, how do you shape policy goals for its wild or wild-ish habitats? That was not Fiennes’s purpose here, and that’s okay, I still like tree books.

Nancy Kress, Beaker’s Dozen and Trinity and Other Stories. Rereads. What a relief to find some old favorites (and even a few more minor works) more or less where I’d left them, deftly characterized and passionately thought through.

Mary Oliver, Dog Songs. A poetry collection focused on Oliver’s dogs. Not entirely free of dog death, not handled graphically or in a maudlin way, but still: if you are not up for the raw emotions of losing a dog right now (or in fact on any day), tread carefully here, have someone recommend a few of the delightful works here that are not about that.

Susan Orlean, Saturday Night. Kindle. This was written to be a study of American casual leisure, more or less, in the handful of years leading up to the year it came out (1990). From this distance it ends up looking more like a portrait of the late ’80s as a cultural phenomenon. There are all sorts of things that Orlean carefully explains that strike me as common knowledge, like what a quinceañera is, and then others that have fallen completely by the wayside, like the ideas and attitudes around video rental. It was a very strange time warp of a book.

John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air/Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. Kindle. OH JOHN RUSKIN NO. Look, I keep reading John Ruskin as background for a story I’m writing, but he is not going to be the hero of that story, I’ll tell you that much for free. And he keeps going on about how you can tell that Western art is superior to non-Western art because blah blah reasons–that all of Greek art is superior to all of Chinese art and then he sets up his bullshit that is often not even true, but even if it was it wouldn’t mean that and it’s all so insecure and pointless and you just want to give him a time out until he can treat the other children with respect. Occasionally he’ll have a sensible line about a particular painting and then right away he will ruin it with crashing racism. YUCK.

Siegfried Sassoon, Picture-Show. Kindle. Sassoon is of course a Great War poet, and this is one of the volumes of Great War poetry that came out in 1919, full of anguish and the trenches. It is very thoroughly itself, but go in braced if you’re going in at all.

James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Scott has a bone to pick with agriculture–several, really–and he is not always careful along the way. I think he is most interesting when he’s taking down assumptions, not always as clear-headed when he’s building his own conjectures. There is a great deal about early agriculture that’s clearly not as we thought it would be, and this book has a great deal that’s interesting about it, but also a great deal that it misses, I think.

Breanna Teintze, Lord of Secrets. Discussed elsewhere.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, et al, Uncanny Magazine Issue 29. Kindle. I make a policy of not reviewing magazine issues I’m in, and I’m in this.

Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne. Kindle. A creepy and satisfying novella, far outside my usual range in the direction of horror but well worth the time.

Jessie L. Weston, Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys. Kindle. True confessions time: of all the knights of the Round Table, Sir Gawain is my dude. So yeah, I’ll duck my head in to read early 20th century authors doing versions of Belgian things. Hell yes I will, every once in awhile, on airplanes, under stress. Sir Gawain relaxes me.

Jane Yolen and Rebecca Guay, The Last Dragon. Graphic novel in a sort of Canty-esque style, very Scottish-ish, a fun fast read with bonus fantasy herbalism.

Damon Young, The Art of Reading. A slim and self-aware volume, fast and reasonably fun to read but honestly…sort of like the others of its kind. If you like books by passionate readers, for passionate readers, it’s that thing.