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Harmattan Season, by Tochi Onyebuchi

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of my complaints about noir written in this century is that some of the people who try it are trying for an aesthetic rather than depth. Onyebuchi has both here. There is the form of noir, which is easy enough, but also its deeply disaffected substance. The reality of French colonialism in West Africa has seriously informed this short fantastical novel–there is a richness to the details, even the ones that are not within our physical realm. It feels simultaneously extremely fresh and specifically creative–post-colonialist genre noir West African fantasy, not very common in publishing to date–and so well combined that it feels natural, almost inevitable. It’s a hard balance to pull off, and Onyebuchi does it beautifully here.

Boubacar has had a run of catastrophically bad luck, and his work as a private eye is not going well. Disappearing women (cut to bloody ribbons!) on his doorstep do not make him feel like his luck has turned. And his city–which is his all the way through, French occupiers’ and indigenous dugulen’s quarters both fitting and neither fitting him–is getting more full of gory mysteries by the day. It’s hard for Bouba to stay true to his inmost self when he’s not sure what that is–and maybe getting justice is more important anyway? but if he could see his way clear to both….

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Books read, early January

Clara Benson, The Trouble at Wakeley Court. Kindle. She really does better with straight-up mysteries, so the part of this that is spy story is…kind of purple, not better than it had to be. But the part that’s mystery is fine, and the story moves along and arc plots arc.

Sophie Burnham, Sargassa. Even saying what specific subgenre this Roman speculative fiction is would be a spoiler, but you can gradually learn where this new part of the Roman Empire is and why, and it acknowledges that not everybody loves an empire, go figure. I will probably read the next one, though I was hoping for a different subgenre.

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter. This was not even a very functional short story. It was an absolutely beautifully illustrated vignette with no momentum. I hate to be a crank here, but if this had not been written by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell who has not given the publishing industry loads of other things to sell, I’m not sure it would have sold at all, much less in an edition dedicated to itself.

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Spanish and Italian attitudes toward animal breeding and how they affected (and were affected by) attitudes about differences in humans, including both of what we would now call race and disability. Some of the worst applications of Plato’s Republic ever, with some terrible applications of Aristotle for a little treat. Gosh these people were confused by New World camelids.

Rosaleen Duffy, Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Securitization and militarization of conservation are unfortunately somewhat taken for granted in a lot of writing–of course if there’s bad outcome A, we must respond with militarization B, and so on. Duffy takes a moment to look at that and its drawbacks and alternatives.

Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. I like Eco, I like books on translation, this one is not long, there you are.

Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told: Poems. This is a great example of how poetry from a very different point of view than mine can still have spots of absolute resonance for me.

Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier. Gosh I liked this, what a nice book. It’s a gay Sleeping Beauty story about a Union soldier from the American Civil War waking to figure out his life with an earnest, sweet 1960s college student. Gray choosing to make this historical in both streams rather than waking into the present was a stroke of genius. I was a bit worried that some deeply unpleasant things would happen, so I will tell you: don’t worry, it is not that kind of book, it has people figuring out friendship and love, not people going to the hospital or jail because of the horrors of the time they’re living in. There is still plenty of tension about how they’ll do that.

Kerstin Hall, Asunder. An entirely cromulent fantasy novel in which the protagonists keep doing their best in hard (unplanned body-sharing!!!) circumstances and sometimes people are mad at each other for understandable reasons that still make their lives harder and do not make one of them the villain. How I feel about this will depend partly on whether she comes out with a sequel; any sequel at all would make the ending feel lesser to me. But we’ll see. People do like sequels (not even necessarily author people).

Ilkka Hanski, Messages from Islands: A Global Biodiversity Tour. Do you want to learn a lot about dung beetles? because this has a lot about dung beetles. Also several other island creatures, but: dung beetles, get your fresh hot dung beetles here.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Inheritance. This is my last favorite of Jaswal’s books. You can see that she’s not quite hit her stride yet, and there are lots of Issues she tries to handle in fairly small word count, with mixed success. I recommend everything else of hers I’ve read first, and only this if you’re a completist (as it turns out I am).

Rich Larson, Tomorrow Factory. Something for everyone in this collection, quite varied science fiction, all of it well done, probably not all of it to any one person’s tastes, but that’s the nature of variety of this type. One of the best collections of the last decade I think, in terms of sheer scope of science fiction from one person.

Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers. What it says on the tin. This is a book from 1892, a British woman going to Siberia to nurse lepers and talking about the voyage the whole time. This edition has not been edited and doesn’t really have commentary on it, so if you don’t want unfiltered late 19th century, this is not for you. If you want pre-contemporary travel in the north in several seasons, well, here we are.

Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter. How much can I be pushed to horror because of plants and fungus? The answer is that I read this straight through but could not be induced to love it, it’s definitely on the horror end of things in ways that don’t resonate with me, but it’s quite well done and very full of the non-animalia kingdoms.

Premee Mohamed, And What Can We Offer You Tonight. Dark and deathy and atmospheric and revolutionary and brief.

Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?. I think this is the most offensive book I’ve read in ages. It’s supposedly about a woman, a therapist, mourning the death of a friend she’s had for decades. Instead it’s about being secretly in love, and the resolution to losing someone you’ve been in love with for decades is oh yay falling in love again. And her colleagues, also therapists, are like, seeee, we THOUGHT you wouldn’t be so upset if you just lost a FRIEND. Friends are crucial, friends lift us up for our entire lives, friends are how we connect to the vast tapestry that is most of the human experience, what the actual hell, Anna Montague.

Roy Morris, Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. This was published shortly after the 2000 election, so there are bits of it that feel very certain about what parts of the present (recent past) are going to resonate with election fraud, and…welp. Huh. But anyway it’s an interesting book in which Morris is very clear that trying to identify with one side as heroic is…probably a really bad idea.

Jake M. Robinson, Treewilding: Our Past, Present, and Future Relationship With Forests. A Nice Book About Trees. Do you need one of those now? You might. I did.

Alanna Schubach, The Nobodies. This is a body swap story in which the people swapping bodies do not seem to gain much insight into each other’s (extremely ordinary) lives. Not so much Freaky Friday as Aggressively Mundane Friday Actually.

Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. My book club’s latest read, some really lovely pieces but mostly from the expected people. Makes for interesting discussion.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories. What a difference Lucifer makes. Stories of people who dislike each other making each other unhappy just aren’t the same without him.

Amy Wilson, A Girl Called Owl. This title is less spoilery than the UK one, although I really prefer unified titles. Owl finds out about her father and her own powers and deals very realistically with friend issues in this fantastical book.

P. G. Wodehouse, Mike. Kindle. I have said before that I hate when one book has two titles depending on what country you’re in, and I ran into one of those this fortnight with a Wodehouse novel I liked but did not want to reread just now (Jill the Reckless/The Little Warrior). Undeterred, I plunged into Mike, and felt utterly confident that it was not one I’d read before, because it was the cricketiest cricket school story you ever did see, in ways that were utterly unfamiliar. However, the second half of this book bears almost no relation to the first except that it’s (hypothetically) the same person in it, and the second half was published separately as Mike and Psmith. Ah well. The lot of a commercial author etc. I don’t know a darn thing about cricket and was still amused, that’s what.

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Oh we like sheep

New story out today in Diabolical Plots: The Year the Sheep God Shattered. You might think that the presence of divinity would make growing up easier, but….

In addition to being a story I wrote because I have big feelings about the godkids growing up (yes, another one, there are a lot of feelings to process here, they’ve been doing this for a minute now), this was one of the stories I write when I’m turning over the standard fantasy worldbuilding premises in my mind and going, “Okay, but….”

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Books read, late December

Su Bristow, The Fair Folk. Entirely readable British modern fairy tradition novel, not as transformatively creative as some others out there. I can’t really complain about “this person has clearly read a lot of AS Byatt and also a lot of folklore,” that’s my own demographic and the demographic of other people I like, but also it was a fine rather than outstanding read within that group.

C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, Alliance Unbound. Second in its series and don’t start here, absolutely chock full of galactic economic politics. If you ever think that Cherryh (now with Fancher) is not doing enough plot in the atevi books, this may be where it’s all going. SO MUCH PLOT. Eager for the next bit.

Agatha Christie, The Plymouth Express Affair. Kindle. A short Poirot piece, the kind of mystery short story that’s just a little puzzle that gets solved rather than anything more, but basically okay if you have a few spare minutes and want to entertain yourself.

Mariana Costa, Shoestring Theory. Romantic queer time travel shenanigans, meditation on the nature of making the world better in cat-endowed fantasy novel form.

Stacey D’Erasmo, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. This author interviewed a bunch of artists with long careers, trying to think about doing art over a long period of time. I didn’t end up feeling like she had a particularly deep set of conclusions and there were some points about which she seemed fairly obtuse to me, but it was a comfortable enough read with bits and pieces of interesting artists along the way.

Margaret Frazer, Winter Heart. Kindle. A shorter Dame Frevisse story that comes at the end of the series, so there are plot developments from the novels that will be spoilers if you haven’t finished the novels. Not as rich as a novel-length thing with the same characters but reasonably fun to read all the same.

David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Thought-provoking essays about this, that, and the other.

Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon. Discussed elsewhere.

Laurie R. King, Beginnings. Kindle. Sort of what it says on the tin: a novella that delves into detective Kate Martinelli’s past to have her solve a cold case that influenced her early life. Not the strongest Martinelli mystery but still fun if you’ve enjoyed the series, don’t start here–it’s not a flashback, it’s “and here’s how the character you like got here, from the perspective of the present,” and if you don’t already like the character in question, it’ll be less effective.

Jane Pek, The Rivals. Second in its series of dating/social app tech thriller mystery things, good fun and dealing with the consequences of the first book. Start with the first one, but I’m glad this exists too.

Veronica Roth, When Among Crows. Fantasy novella that draws heavily on Polish mythology for its framework while still acknowledging the larger world at the edges of its legends’ lives.

Melissa Scott, Burning Bright. Reread. This was written in the same era as John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless: specifically, the time when some smart authors had had the chance to play a bunch of D&D and think about social dynamics in and around games. The setting is very space opera, not at all similar to GUW, but you can see that they were written in the same social moment, by people who did not have the same thoughts but were having something of a productive conversation in fiction about the same general topic.

Catherine Shaw, Flowers Stained By Moonlight. Kindle. Second in its Victorian murder mystery series, and the mathematics was far less well-integrated this time, unfortunately. Still thematically present, just not as strongly. Ah well, a cromulent enough mystery novel.

Christine Shearer, Kivalina. Kindle. This book is mostly background information, so if you had no idea how anti-environmentalism has been marketed to the public, how tort law works, etc., this is a good book for you. If you were more interested in the specifics of an Alaska town’s reaction to the threat climate change poses to its existence, it really doesn’t go very much into that, to my disappointment.

Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind and Secrets Typed in Blood. Pentecost and Parker mystery series, volumes three and four, and I remembered I had not stayed caught up just in time to read these before the fifth one comes out soon. Mid-century women who do not meet basically any of the stereotypes of what women were supposed to be, to their benefit, and the mystery part works for me as well.

Amy Stewart, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Thumbnail bios of tree collectors, lavishly illustrated, highly diverse group of people on a number of axes (race, nationality, gender, ability, age, sexuality…people just like trees, all kinds of people just like trees).

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). Kindle. An exploration of who gains power in marginalized groups and why, interesting stuff. Also refers to the group below, which was nice synchronicity.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Kindle. Interviews with older Black ladies who were part of the core of this influential group, talking about what they did with the collective and also what they think about the world since. Really heartening stuff if you need a boost to your sense that activism matters even (especially!) when it’s hard.

Emily Tesh, The Incandescent. Discussed elsewhere.

Greg van Eekhout, Happy Town. This is a very broad satire of modern corporate culture and advertising. I hope it succeeds in inoculating some of the grade school kids of today against the cult of the tech genius who actually does none of the work himself. Friendships and artificially created zombies.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Prince and Betty. Kindle. One of the more charming Wodehouses–this is from early in his career but not so early he hadn’t gotten into the swing of things. The plot will not surprise you. The characters will not surprise you. But the whole thing is entertaining, and he could turn a phrase with the best of them.

Francis Young, Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King. Thoughts about nationality and saint cults, including a bit of the life of Saint Edmund but mostly his death. Not so transcendent enough that you should seek it out if you’re not particularly interested in the era/subject matter but reasonable enough if you are.