Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor. Reread. Gosh I still do really like this. I like the gentleness of it, how the earnest attempts to do things right don’t always or even mostly make things easy, the sudden immersion in largely unfamiliar social dynamics. I like seeing the beginnings of the pieces we’re later having drawn out in related works. I wanted something I knew I liked a lot, and this was a good choice.
Elizabeth Gaskell, A Dark Night’s Work. Kindle. This is not a Gothic per se, but it has a lot of the elements of murder and despair and cover-up and purity/innocence being touched incidentally by sin, and…yeah. I like to read Victorian works cold, and sometimes the result is that I have no idea I’m walking into, “Stop! You cannot hang this man, for he is NOT the murderer! He is merely an accessory to murder, which you think is great and will give a holiday in the country!” (Yeah, that was a spoiler. But there is much better Gaskell for your time.)
Rochelle Hassan, The Buried and the Bound and The Summer Queen. Back in the glory days of livejournal, I included both “interstitial arts” and “stitial arts” in my interest keywords list, and this is why: these two books are firmly in the middle of their contemporary YA fantasy genre, and I am here for it. They’re well done, the characters are compellingly drawn, and I had a good time. Are they doing something wildly different for their genre? They sure are not, and they don’t have to.
Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300 to 1300. Really lovely book, tracing the spread of Christianity, why and how it went where it did, without resorting to “it was just so darn right, is why.” When you look at how accurately Heather maps the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia toward the end of the book (blotches! rather than solid polities!), you will see why I am so happy with his analysis. He also looks at why various things wound up heresies rather than orthodoxies and how things could have gone differently there. Good times.
Sarah Henning, The Lies We Conjure. Discussed elsewhere.
Lawrence A. Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-US Border. Oh what a sad and disappointing book. Poor Herzog, he was talking to us from the ’90s, when the shopping mall looked eternal and NAFTA was going to make all borders in North America dissolve. So uh. There’s a lot of “uh oh, oh dear, nope” going on here.
Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789. This one is coming to us from the ’50s, so it is very…which white men formed which science-related societies at which times. We live in a house where this information might be useful for any number of projects at the drop of a hat, but it is not more expansive than that in its scope, and in general you probably would like something else about this topic/period better. (Was I reading a lot in bed while sick? you bet I was. Did this mean I delved deep in the pile? I sure did.)
Sarah Orne Jewett, Old Friends and New. Kindle. Slice of life short stories about 19th century Maine. Gentle. Notable for me in their use of the verb “to matronize.” Let’s make matronize happen. (It doesn’t mean “the bad kind of to patronize, but done by a woman”! It means “to sponsor fun activities for younger people, to host them,” basically.)
Gideon Marcus et al, eds., Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963). My book club read one of the books in this series, and I bought this one with it as it technically comes first. We didn’t enjoy that one and won’t be doing this one, I don’t think; the editorial notes aren’t quite as maddening but are still pretty random, and the stories are not as well-filtered as one might hope. There’s that line between “I want to read the stories that aren’t immensely anthologized” and “oh I see why not.” Sigh.
John McPhee, Tabula Rasa Volume 1. This is the stuff McPhee isn’t going to get to, his false starts, things that he might have written at length about but won’t and how he thought about it while he was getting to that conclusion. It’s a very weird book and interesting for me as a professional writer. Don’t read it as your first McPhee, though, go read Annals.
Jo Miles, Ravenous State. The triumphant conclusion (gosh I love getting to say that) of its trilogy, and you’ll want to read the other two first. Good news, they’re available. Each one has a different sibling’s perspective, and it took me a minute to get used to Libbi, but I really liked what Jo was doing with point of view in the end, that this sibling really did not see the world the same way as her siblings did and that changed the dynamic a lot. Space opera, evil corporations, grass roots organization, yay.
Samantha Mills, The Wings Upon Her Back. Deprogramming from fascism, now, for mechas! There’s more depth to it than that, but also, really, if you don’t want to read a book that’s that, I don’t know what to tell you.
L.M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web. Reread. I remembered liking this as a small child and hadn’t revisited it in a while. The weird inclusion of the racial slur on the last page, irrelevant to the entire preceding book, is still jarring; the characters are still reasonably charming, but as I’m spending less time immersed in the dynamics of a giant family, I have less need of books like this that are basically “giant families, amirite?”
Su Fang Ng, Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies. Kindle. A short monograph about Portuguese and Malaysian writing about the era of early encounters between the two, highlighting some of the ways in which Portuguese travel writing varied from other European writing about early encounters with other cultures. Interesting, brief, would be happy to read more of this kind of compare-and-contrast.
Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River. I really liked Kaikeyi, so I was pretty excited to see another retelling by Patel. I felt like this one was not quite as special–it’s interesting but very straightforward, a very linear narrative. Possibly if I was more immersed in the Mahabharata I would feel that it was wildly original in its divergences, but as things stand for this reader at least, it flowed from event to event following the mythic structure more than imposing novel structure upon them. Which didn’t make it a bad read, just not as outstanding as the related debut.
O.O. Sangoyomi, Masquerade. Discussed elsewhere.
Evelyn Sharp, The Youngest Girl in the School. Kindle. I’d read Sharp’s fantastical/fairy tale writing before. This is a fairly period-standard school story, complete with dramatic injury that draws the distant parent’s attention. (Gosh kids in that era fell off things regularly, if this kind of literature is to be believed.) If you like that sort of thing, this sure is a one of those, but it’s not particularly outstanding of its kind.
Noel Streatfeild, Skating Shoes. Reread. There was less in this than I remembered. Like–temporally, it just goes less far in the two girls’ lives than my brain had filled in as a kid. It is also very very wish fulfillment in the characterization directions. Which ends up being fine, it’s not one of the toxic Streatfeilds, but it’s not one of the best ones either, it’s just sort of there.