Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge. Cooking themed fantasy with strong (disapproved of by the text and POV characters! but still!) threads of cannibalism throughout. Very much the sort of fun magic adventure a lot of friends have said they’re not getting enough of, if the cannibalism mentions (again, none of the positive characters is in favor!) don’t bother you too much.
Camille T. Dungy, ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. I really liked that this volume was organized thematically rather than chronologically–the sections are different things Black American writers have done with nature poetry rather than decades. Dungy takes a broad view of what nature poetry is, which I appreciate in general, and is not afraid to recast some famous poems in that lens.
Louise Erdrich, Original Fire. This book of poems has sections that are each doing very different things, thematically and structurally, which is very cool–historical persona poems done differently from prose poem legend retellings and so on. A lot going on here.
Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. I really like the title poem and was delighted to find that there are more collected in a convenient format, just as ferociously political and searing, hooray.
Megan Fernandes, Good Boys: Poems. There were only a few poems in this volume that really hit me hard, but I think that’s a mismatch between me and the material rather than any lack in the material per se. Also while these posts are alphabetical rather than chronological, I did read this one after the three previous volumes, which is a hard act to follow and I probably needed to breathe a minute first.
Sally Franson, Big In Sweden. Franson appeared on a Swedish reality TV show, and this is about a protagonist who did that, but it appears to be a “novel based on” rather than a novelization of Franson’s own specific experiences. The exception is: if you share the friend in common with her that I do, that friend is very visibly herself at all times. (That is, I hope that’s the exception.) This was light-hearted and reasonably fun, but the protagonist’s decisions were always and in every way opaque to me, which is a shame, because I was hoping to get more of a sense of “people on reality TV shows: why these decisions, what is it like.”
Margaret Frazer, A Play of Isaac. Kindle. This is the first volume in her second series–I’ve been reading the Sister Frevisse mysteries, and these are a spinoff series based on a traveling player character from early in that series. I often find that mystery writers only have one series I like, and I blame this on trying too hard to distinguish the main characters and ending up with one of them being unappealing or forced (most people have at least some things in common, most people with a similar profession or hobby even more so). The circumstances of Joliffe the traveling actor and the perceptions of those around him are naturally so different from Sister Frevisse that Frazer is not contorted into an unnatural angle to make the two series different. Hooray. So I expect I’ll be continuing with these as well.
Laura Gao, Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American. Very forthright biographical comic, lots of immigrant experience material and young artist material.
Erich Hoyt, Planktonia: The Nightly Migration of the Ocean’s Smallest Creatures. This was more photographs and less text than I expected, but the text is high quality and the photos are even better. Want to think more about plankton, here you go, lovely.
Dan Jones, In the Reign of King John: A Year in the Life of Plantagenet England. Jones wanted to give us a sense of what else was going on in 1215–yes, the Magna Carta, but what was life actually like for people around that. A lot of it was stuff I already knew (sometimes from a previous Jones book), but this was lavishly illustrated and briskly written.
T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call. One of the things that sometimes happens in a Kingfisher book is that the villain is so evil that you end up with an alliance of everyone else, more or less. And I like that. I like that this was largely a middle-aged woman/adolescent girl alliance story and then more people were added to the alliance. The sorceress in question was hugely creepy and evil, one of the most hateable characters in fiction I’ve read recently, but she cast a deep shadow that let everyone else shine.
R. B. Lemberg, Yoke of Stars. The contrast of different society’s forms of restriction and oppression makes for rich character relationships in this latest Birdverse book, beautifully done, recommended.
Jorell Melendez-Badillo, Puerto Rico: A National History. This is a whistle-stop tour of Puerto Rican history. I wanted to know more about basically everything. It had barely started before it was finished. On the other hand, if you don’t have a large commitment to learning more about Puerto Rican history, this is definitely not a large commitment, you can just dip a toe in the water and see what’s going on.
Sas Milledge, Mamo. A young witch’s self-discovery, in graphic novel form. Conflicting views of home and wandering. Which young witch? Well.
Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem. Extremely modernist in some lovely ways, a portrait of an interwar city. I wonder how it would hit if you didn’t speak French–it’s mostly in English but there’s French interspersed. This volume was more commentary than poem, and still not much of either to make a separate book, but I wanted to read it and this is how it’s available.
Liz Moore, The God of the Woods, Long Bright River, and The Unseen World. I discovered this author and immediately got the two other things the library could get me that she’d written, and I read them all in quick succession. The titles seem custom-designed to give speculative fiction readers a misleading view of what they’re about–the first two are very non-speculative thrillers, and they work on me in a way that most thrillers do not. Specifically: the short chapters and scenes really do pull me along through the text just as I’m told short chapters and scenes are wont to do. “Can there be good rich people” and “can there be good cops” are both answered no, at length, but it’s interesting length. Then there’s The Unseen World, which is historical fiction about AI development in ways that aged weirdly. It’s mostly about human relationships, though, so that part is fine. The least fine part is the ending, which is attempting to be speculative in ways that have not really considered speculative fiction takes on the same ideas and so manages to be trite. If you don’t fall in love with Moore’s work from the first two, I’d skip that one.
Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Newitz takes a beneficially broad view of what counts as psychological warfare and upon whom it has been waged. Lots of interesting material in this comparatively short volume.
Emilio Ocampo, The Emperor’s Last Campaign: A Napoleonic Empire in America. A book with this title could have taken its emphasis one of two ways–a NAPOLEONIC empire in America vs. a Napoleonic empire IN AMERICA. I was hoping for the former and got the latter. I ended up shelving this under French history/politics rather than any Latin American country, as there was basically no perspective from people living in Latin American countries at the time. It’s very well-researched if you’re looking for internal French or English politics, it’s not a worthless book, it just…does not do what I was hoping.
Nnedi Okorafor, She Who Knows. A prequel of sorts, with sequels to come, and I think that knowing that there is already more of this world and these characters makes this novella interesting rather than unsatisfying, made me able to settle into the salt magic and the family dynamics.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Lost Ark Dreaming. Sea level has risen with a vengeance in this one. It is all post-disaster, the disasters we can make of trying to recover, trying to survive. Interesting characters and personal dynamics, glad I read this.
Jacqueling Riding, Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion. What a mess, what an interesting mess. Straightforwardly about the most powerful people involved in this rather than the least, but still good to have it all laid out like that with clear arrows for where it all goes.
Jonathan Scott, How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. Extremely interesting to watch someone tie together the cultural forces that found common points between England and Holland in that time period–I’ve read a lot of English history and a lot of Dutch history, and it’s absolutely valid and interesting to consider how strongly they were influencing each other.
Sarah Seltzer, The Singer Sisters. This is not a subtle novel. It’s about a couple of generations of a family of musicians, and if you would like any plot points, any emotional insights, in this book to be less obvious than giving the people in that family the surnames/stage names Singer, Cantor, and (the more slick and Hollywood one, obviously) Foley (God help us), you will be disappointed. It’s not a long novel, it’s reasonable prose, I wasn’t angry about it, it just…sure took the easy way at every turn. I wonder what people who know nothing about the music of the ’60s and ’90s would make of some of it, because it is very referential to both.
Danez Smith, Bluff: Poems. I rushed to get this the moment I saw it had come out. Also, it is not meant for me. Both of these things can be true at once. Smith is saying all sorts of things it’s important for them to say, important even for me to hear, to think about…but still, I am pretty peripheral to this one. Anyway I’m glad they wrote these poems after all that happened in our mutual city in 2020, all that is not, horrifyingly, done happening.
Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Science Fiction from the African Diaspora. I read this for a book club that does a handful of short stories per meeting, and it was one of the better things we’ve done that with, more stories that sparked discussion and interest. I was also impressed that Thomas managed to find some authors I’d never read, because I read a lot, and because this is a volume from 2000, so the shifts that some of the essays at the end of the book predicted for the demography of SFF writing are with us now, they happened, they’re here–so some of the “new voices” of this book are now extremely established. This is a good thing.
Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási, The Science of Science. Specifically the data science of science: lots of graphs and analysis about which papers are influential, how to build effective teams in modern science, etc. They actually do the math on diversity benefitting science and have pretty clear illustrations of how. There are a few places where I think they’re overly optimistic–I don’t think that sexism in economics department tenure committees is going to be particularly strongly influenced by changing from listing collaborative papers’ authors by in contribution order rather than alphabetically, and I think they could have found that out for themselves by comparing tenure committee behavior with other fields that have the alphabetical convention–but I’d rather that than the opposite I suppose.
Martha Wells, Wheel of the Infinite. Discussed elsewhere.
G. Willow Wilson, The Hunger and the Dark. A fantasy comic that is dead-center of modern not-quite-grimdark secondary world fantasy, vivid and interesting and probably of more interest to people who are more visual than I am.
Kelly Yang, Finally Seen. My second MG book by Yang, and this is just as earnest and heartfelt–and deals with similar immigrant themes–to the previous one.