Books read, January

Ben Aaronovitch, The Furthest Station. Abigail is great. Why do I always like the supporting cast better than the main characters in this series? I don’t know, but in this novella we meet Peter’s young cousin Abigail, and she is great. More Abigail. Blah blah rivers, magic, ghosts: Abigail. Yay.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Fox. Kindle. A particularly metaphysical installation in this novella series. What do nonhuman species contribute to our experience of life and knowledge, in fantasy novella format! So!

John Crowley, Totalitopia. Very short collection of short stories and essays. The very first one did white ethnicity as a presence rather than a default, very thoughtful, I enjoyed it a lot. I think I like Crowley better as a fiction writer than an essayist, but that’s okay, that’s where the bulk of his work is too, so that’s good for me.

Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton, Karen Lord, and Racheline Maltese, Tremontaine Season 3, Episodes 12 and 13. Discussed elsewhere.

Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies. This was fascinating, about a woman who was kept from credit substantially by the machinations of J. Edgar Hoover. She not only worked in wartime codebreaking but also in Prohibition and other projects. Codebreaking was in its infancy at the time, and Elizebeth Friedman and her husband William were crucial to the American effort. If I had one complaint about Fagone’s focus it was that he sometimes was not at all alert to the nuances of some of the things he said, in his hurry to focus on achievement rather than obstacle. At one point he said that asking whether she faced sexism was like asking whether Mme. Curie faced sexism. I blinked at that and said, “So…yes, then. Really really super yes.” (He was making a different point about being ground-breaking, the first in your field, etc. Sure! And sexism STILL….) Focus on achievement rather than obstacle is admirable, but let’s not actively minimize the obstacle along the way, dude.

Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens. This is a New England-and-Guatemala novel. Its sense of place and relationship is fascinating, and the way it handles both is not like anything else I’ve read. The title misled me completely and then once I had read the book very much fit. It’s very contemporary, deals with modern immigration and adoption issues…I’m not sure what else to say about it. Very interesting book that I’ve only been able to discuss with one other person because it just isn’t widely known in my circles.

Elizabeth Hand, Last Summer at Mars Hill and Other Short Stories. Kindle. Reread. This was the source of insight for me about short stories pivoting rather than unfolding, and I think I prefer Hand’s work when it unfolds. Several of them had a very strong sense of place that I enjoyed, and it was a reasonable thing to revisit when I was exhausted on an airplane I did not expect to be on.

Janet Kagan, Mirabile. Reread. A mosaic novel of genetic emergency, made of fun, reread for my disaster response panel only to find that it was not as relevant as I’d hoped. Still pretty much always worth the time.

Lydia Kang, The November Girl. A runaway kid and a spirit of Lake Superior in the winter find each other, help each other…this is a fast-paced and deeply felt YA, and I liked lots of things about it while not being the main target audience for it. Although. It’s still my lake, so…yeah, soft spot here.

Fonda Lee, Jade City. I have been recommending this everywhere, because it’s just plain fun. Lee draws on fantasy novels but also kung fu movie structure in ways that make her plot less predictable than a lot of novels for me, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. First in a series, yay! Magic jade, clans warring, people trying to stay true to themselves but also to people they care about…oh yes. Yes please.

Naomi Libicki and Alter Reiss, eds., The Scintillation Collection. Kindle. A small convention jam-packed with people I know and like is going to be great, and I am so excited…but it meant that a lot of these stories were rereads, because I follow pretty much everybody’s work. On the other hand, it also meant that I liked a lot of these the first time around and was glad to see them again (on an airplane…I did not intend to be on…).

Leena Likitalo, The Sisters of the Crescent Empress. I expected this to be very much an ending, since it is the second book of what I thought was two. But instead it felt very much like a middle. The worldbuilding and the family relationships continued to appeal to me, but…the ending felt…ongoing, very much ongoing…well. Perhaps we will be going on with this series.

Kuzhali Manickavel, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings. Extremely quirky and surreal stories, mostly focused on Southern India. Very, very short, so easy to read in short bites if that’s a thing you’re looking for.

Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman. A structurally unusual accounting of first contacts. Mitchison is one of the women you still occasionally run into, who mistook the limitations placed on her personally for gender differences in general and yet who did not mistake them for a general inequality, and so there are all sorts of ways of trying to write about this galactic explorer and communicator in ways that are weirdly warped by Mitchison’s own upbringing. What communication means and what the protagonist brings to her interspecies communications…this is a weird and fascinating plot, not really much like anything else.

David R. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life. This is very popular-level science. Any of you has enough science background to understand it, and in fact in the first few chapters he is a bit patronizing in prose tone. After that he settles into the nuts and bolts of how farming should be revamped to be better for the soil, less costly in terms of chemicals, better for people and plants and even herd animals. He’s immensely convincing and in places even touching. I did not expect that so much of this would take place in the eastern Dakotas and western Minnesota, in places where I have people. I cried in spots, where families managed to save not only the soil but their farms thereby. It’s good stuff, inspiring.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: The Night Masquerade. The last in its trilogy, and definitely do not start here, as a great deal of the emotional weight rests on knowing the people and their meaning to each other. A satisfying conclusion but not a satisfying start by any means.

Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. This is a beautiful book, essays from a Black woman visiting American landmarks. It’s nature writing from an angle I don’t see often, looking at the land from a different angle, from a very personal and human angle that illuminated it. Highly recommended.

Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, Viking Friendship: The Social Bond in Iceland and Norway, c. 900-1300. There is some very interesting stuff here about chosen social bond as opposed to family in saga and history. There are also some places where Sigurdsson…well, look, if you don’t listen to what people know, you won’t know it. And there were places where I just rolled laughing because you could ask any Nordic auntie, any at all, some of the things that he thought were mysterious, and they would either tell you or snort in disbelief that you had to ask such an ignorant question (why women were so prevalent in wedding seating disputes, dear God, do I even have to unpack that for you in the comments), so look, it is not their fault if you look like a fool in your book sometimes, they’re right there, child.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. This was, I think, the first book I read this year, and I was so glad of it, its wanders and focus on wandering, its meanders through thought and relationship and landscape. I am so very much enjoying making my way through Solnit’s works.

Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts. Spaceship life through an incredibly intersectional lens, with detailed attention to how relationships change in confined spaces around power in so many ways, energy in so many ways, so many assumptions examined. Powerful, reaching, fascinating.

Kanishk Tharoor, Swimmer Among the Stars. Lovely short stories, amazing. I am not seeing these discussed among genre readers, and they’re mostly not traditional speculative genre stories, but they range through space and time in beautiful ways that I would like to see more of, and I’m so very glad to have found them, and I wish more people were finding them.

Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus. I think I’m very glad that I started with late period Vizenor, because this is whimsical and interesting, and of course it’s good that Vizenor has learned better on some issues, especially some gender issues, and yet…and yet there are some places I sigh and roll my eyes a bit and am glad this is not where I began. And I would not necessarily recommend that you begin here either. There is some magic to this recasting, this…re-legending?…but if you have to pick just one Vizenor, really probably not this one.

J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven. I was absolutely enchanted by this story of siblings and power and gender and empire, by the worldbuilding, by all of it. I can’t wait for the other novella in this pair.