A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. Rereads. These were not my intended memorial rereads when A.S. Byatt died, and in fact I still have that intention (Possession) on my pile. But I just sort of fell back into these, the familiar cadences of semi-fairy tale language and the places where she is thoughtful about creative work happiness and the chill of grief and all the other places.
Catherine Chidgey, Pet. A disturbing novel about a young girl in the thrall of a manipulative teacher who also has most of the adults around her conned. I didn’t like the way that her epilepsy played into some of the twists in the end–I don’t think it was entirely thoughtfully handled–but the prose and characterization were well-done.
Samuel K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425. I can’t think of a better way to handle subtitling something when you want to talk about a small but not clearly defined subset of Europe so you can’t say “Western Europe” (because it’s not all of Western Europe) or any other category like that, but really the subtitle vastly overstates the case here, Cohn is only going to talk about Italy, France, and Flanders. Which is a shame, because I was really interested in the whole–I was particularly interested in the overarching comparisons, but I think what was going on in the Germanies was interesting and hoped that he would have insights into Eastern vs. Western Europe that he obviously isn’t going to have if Italy is as far east as he goes. There was interesting stuff here, but it really wasn’t the book I wanted, and also he had a disconcerting habit of referring to France as Northern Europe (stop that, Cohn).
Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History. After I finished Soil, I went immediately to find out what else the library had, and this did not disappoint, a collection of explorations of place and reception of herself and her daughter. Beautifully done.
Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. Discussed elsewhere.
Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story. This was a very short novel, interesting in its way, about a couple with a toddler, living in a cramped apartment, who discover that when one friend comes over–and only then–they have a beautiful terrace. The handling of the speculative conceit as it unfolds is very literary, but the fact that additional speculative elements are introduced into this story with a fundamentally literary focus and resolution makes me feel even more like the speculative genres have made their way into the culture–it feels like the kind of short surreal novel that would have been trying to distance itself from genre fiction 20 years ago, not matter-of-factly ending with some characters on a space station.
Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown. Reread. I was reading The Blue Sword for book club last month, and this one was always more of a favorite. One of the things that interested me about it was that when it shifted the geography of Damar, it also substantially shifted the culture, so that it felt like all the references to things in The Blue Sword were very much “oh yes, they’ll have that later” and not “I have to deal with the cultural choices I already made about what will be important here.” I still love Aerin’s experimentalism so much. I am completely confounded by some of the age differences in characters now, though, and while I don’t think it was written as an explicit argument against monarchies (“don’t have a king, kids, or you might end up with the one guy in charge being barely functional while he’s personally grieving for decades, and that’s in the event that you got a halfway decent one to begin with!”), it sort of came out like one.
Megan O’Keefe, The Fractured Dark. The second in its series about mind-control parasites taking over a space opera series. Er, I mean humanity. And the humans who love them. And would like to not love them, but can’t, because see above. Do not, do not, do not start here, it’s very much a second book.
O No Yasumaro, The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. This very much read like a listing of spirits and how they came to be. It was a very different kind of origin epic than many of the origin epics I’ve been reading. I can’t say that it resonated as strongly as a narrative, but taken in small chunks it’s fascinating, all the ways people can enumerate parts of spirituality and place.
Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind. It feels deliberately hilarious to describe something as noir that’s so full of color, I really appreciate Pardo’s sense of humor about this. This is a novel in which mood-altering pigments allowed Argentina to win what we know as the Falklands War and become a world-dominating power, and the subtlety and thoughtfulness of the worldbuilding from there is only one of the novel’s many charms, since it’s by turns an investigative mystery, the story of someone pulling her career together, and the story of someone sorting out her interpersonal relationships (of various shapes) in a very difficult time for doing that. It was simultaneously doing something no one else is doing and behaving as though the good parts of cyberpunk hadn’t died all those years ago.
Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces. A collection of essays about different aspects of how we interact with human faces and expectations thereof. Slim and well-done.
Genevieve Warwick, Cinderella’s Glass Slipper: Towards a Cultural History of Renaissance Materialities. Kindle. A monograph about luxury goods, particularly in dowries and marriage goods, in the Renaissance and their influence on the specific shape of the stories we get told as fairy tales. Small enough not to overplay its hand.