Melissa Albert, The Children. I found this very readable at the sentence, paragraph, and chapter level. When I put it down, I very much wanted to go pick it up again; it was the sort of book I wanted to be reading. Part of this is that Albert is good at the mechanics of writing, and part of it is “something mysterious and probably magical [but not necessarily] is going on with the family of a children’s book writer” is really my jam. As I got further into the book and the protagonist processed more about her childhood, I started thinking that what I would say about this is that it’s an interesting example of a book that works despite the protagonist being very reactive and having almost no agency for most of the book, at times seeming to flee from agency. Then I got to the ending, and that’s not what I’m saying here after all, because I don’t think it works after all, and I think the protagonist’s avoidance is a large part of why, all the way through to the end. I didn’t even feel like her agency had been taken, so I couldn’t make it work in that direction, just: welp. No thank you. Sigh.
Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. Kindle. On the quirky end of Christie’s mysteries, which for me is nice.
Jennifer Graham, The Fall of Iris Henley. A teen thriller about a girl who’s anonymously accused of murder and finds very little support from the people she once trusted. A very tense read, unfortunately all too real in its social dynamics.
Christopher Gravett, Towton 1461: England’s Bloodiest Battle. A friend picked this up, I don’t know whether it was at Towton or somewhere related, but this is definitely the kind of lots-of-pictures battlefield history they sell at battlefields and related museums. Lots of detailed maps from different points in the day. Useful if you’re interested in this specific topic, which I am, it’s adjacent to my Ricardian needs.
Scott S. Greenberger, The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. I would love to say that Chester A. Arthur was more interesting than you’d think, but truly, he’s not. Now we know, I guess. I don’t even blame Greenberger. Just: yah, nobody wanted this guy to be president including himself, and he was, and then he died.
Inhabit Education Books, The Life & Art of Germaine Arnattaujuq. This title came up when I was searching (fruitlessly) for some other Arctic art topic in my library’s card catalog. It is very much a children’s book, the sort of simple summary of a complex career that I didn’t really like even when I was its target age. But the bits of her work visible in it were cool.
Kim Choyeop, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light. I feel like we’re getting a wider range of East Asian SFF translated into English than we were a decade ago, and I feel like particularly Korean SFF is now allowed to be human-focused and “soft” in ways that 1) I love and 2) were not considered translation-worthy in the not-too-distant past. So when there’s a very human-focused short story collection like this one, I feel very lucky indeed. Recommended.
E.C.R. Lorac, Crock o’Lune. Kindle. A not particularly quirky regional mystery, reasonably well done as the other Loracs generally have been.
Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution. Lots of books about the American Revolution this year for obvious reasons, and I appreciate that this one treated both the lead-up and the fallout as parts of global phenomena contributed to by many people and many types of people. Interesting stuff, in some ways wish it had been longer (but it’s not a super-short book already!).
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age. So much about printing and selling books! So much! So much attention to printing ephemera! This is for the dedicated nerd, but if you are one, here it is.
Maya C. Popa, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. The kind of poetry collection that takes language musings and runs with them at poetic length, which is nearly always of interest to me. The titular poem and related ones thread through in a very good way.
Mykaela Saunders, ed., This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction. This is a book club book, and the “First Nations” in the title refers to Australian First Nations only. I can’t say it’s one of our more successful selections, I think partly because it has several excerpts and we, on average as a group, really don’t like excerpts. (I personally do not like excerpts! I am part of bringing the average well into the negative on this point!) I think the other thing that was difficult about this anthology is that none of us had the experience to be able to sort out editorial bias from general cultural viewpoint. So…now we’ll all have this when we read more Australian First Nations SFF, and that’s a good thing? But it didn’t make the experience of reading and discussing this volume as satisfying as some others.
Nghi Vo, The Scarlet Ball. Discussed elsewhere.
Jesse Wegman, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution. Wilson was an absolute personal disaster, and Wegman never gets so entranced with his subject that he loses sight of that. (To be fair, Wilson would make it very hard to lose sight of that.) He pointed out a lot of the things many of us see as problems now in the US Constitution! He fought for it to be better than it eventually was! Also he had absolutely no financial skills and considered running and hiding to be a great approach to problems, so. Yeah.
G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register. This is the sort of graphic novel that I can see would better suit people who are far more visual than I am. Its art is lovely, its text goes beautifully with the art, and there just isn’t enough story there for me to find it particularly satisfying.
John Wiswell, The Dragon Has Some Complaints. I really really hope this book finds its audience, because it’s warm and funny and also extremely honest about physical and emotional trauma recovery, and frankly when I’ve had physical and emotional trauma recovery, things that were both honest and funny were extremely hard to come by. Especially things with dragons! Especially things with dragons and political machinations! I love those things! I love this book! Read this book.
Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. I really like that this book is primarily organized temporally but also has geographic sub-organization after that, because it reflects how much Young is not assuming that the beliefs of, say, the Saami and the Estonians had to be at all similar to be dealt with in a similar analysis and time frame. He’s very careful about the places where he can talk about the people but not about the details of their beliefs, and that’s fascinating too. I’m very interested in this topic, but I think that even people who are less keen on it might find a lot that would be of interest here.
