Clara Benson, The Trouble at Wakeley Court. Kindle. She really does better with straight-up mysteries, so the part of this that is spy story is…kind of purple, not better than it had to be. But the part that’s mystery is fine, and the story moves along and arc plots arc.
Sophie Burnham, Sargassa. Even saying what specific subgenre this Roman speculative fiction is would be a spoiler, but you can gradually learn where this new part of the Roman Empire is and why, and it acknowledges that not everybody loves an empire, go figure. I will probably read the next one, though I was hoping for a different subgenre.
Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter. This was not even a very functional short story. It was an absolutely beautifully illustrated vignette with no momentum. I hate to be a crank here, but if this had not been written by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell who has not given the publishing industry loads of other things to sell, I’m not sure it would have sold at all, much less in an edition dedicated to itself.
Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Spanish and Italian attitudes toward animal breeding and how they affected (and were affected by) attitudes about differences in humans, including both of what we would now call race and disability. Some of the worst applications of Plato’s Republic ever, with some terrible applications of Aristotle for a little treat. Gosh these people were confused by New World camelids.
Rosaleen Duffy, Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Securitization and militarization of conservation are unfortunately somewhat taken for granted in a lot of writing–of course if there’s bad outcome A, we must respond with militarization B, and so on. Duffy takes a moment to look at that and its drawbacks and alternatives.
Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. I like Eco, I like books on translation, this one is not long, there you are.
Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told: Poems. This is a great example of how poetry from a very different point of view than mine can still have spots of absolute resonance for me.
Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier. Gosh I liked this, what a nice book. It’s a gay Sleeping Beauty story about a Union soldier from the American Civil War waking to figure out his life with an earnest, sweet 1960s college student. Gray choosing to make this historical in both streams rather than waking into the present was a stroke of genius. I was a bit worried that some deeply unpleasant things would happen, so I will tell you: don’t worry, it is not that kind of book, it has people figuring out friendship and love, not people going to the hospital or jail because of the horrors of the time they’re living in. There is still plenty of tension about how they’ll do that.
Kerstin Hall, Asunder. An entirely cromulent fantasy novel in which the protagonists keep doing their best in hard (unplanned body-sharing!!!) circumstances and sometimes people are mad at each other for understandable reasons that still make their lives harder and do not make one of them the villain. How I feel about this will depend partly on whether she comes out with a sequel; any sequel at all would make the ending feel lesser to me. But we’ll see. People do like sequels (not even necessarily author people).
Ilkka Hanski, Messages from Islands: A Global Biodiversity Tour. Do you want to learn a lot about dung beetles? because this has a lot about dung beetles. Also several other island creatures, but: dung beetles, get your fresh hot dung beetles here.
Balli Kaur Jaswal, Inheritance. This is my last favorite of Jaswal’s books. You can see that she’s not quite hit her stride yet, and there are lots of Issues she tries to handle in fairly small word count, with mixed success. I recommend everything else of hers I’ve read first, and only this if you’re a completist (as it turns out I am).
Rich Larson, Tomorrow Factory. Something for everyone in this collection, quite varied science fiction, all of it well done, probably not all of it to any one person’s tastes, but that’s the nature of variety of this type. One of the best collections of the last decade I think, in terms of sheer scope of science fiction from one person.
Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers. What it says on the tin. This is a book from 1892, a British woman going to Siberia to nurse lepers and talking about the voyage the whole time. This edition has not been edited and doesn’t really have commentary on it, so if you don’t want unfiltered late 19th century, this is not for you. If you want pre-contemporary travel in the north in several seasons, well, here we are.
Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter. How much can I be pushed to horror because of plants and fungus? The answer is that I read this straight through but could not be induced to love it, it’s definitely on the horror end of things in ways that don’t resonate with me, but it’s quite well done and very full of the non-animalia kingdoms.
Premee Mohamed, And What Can We Offer You Tonight. Dark and deathy and atmospheric and revolutionary and brief.
Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?. I think this is the most offensive book I’ve read in ages. It’s supposedly about a woman, a therapist, mourning the death of a friend she’s had for decades. Instead it’s about being secretly in love, and the resolution to losing someone you’ve been in love with for decades is oh yay falling in love again. And her colleagues, also therapists, are like, seeee, we THOUGHT you wouldn’t be so upset if you just lost a FRIEND. Friends are crucial, friends lift us up for our entire lives, friends are how we connect to the vast tapestry that is most of the human experience, what the actual hell, Anna Montague.
Roy Morris, Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. This was published shortly after the 2000 election, so there are bits of it that feel very certain about what parts of the present (recent past) are going to resonate with election fraud, and…welp. Huh. But anyway it’s an interesting book in which Morris is very clear that trying to identify with one side as heroic is…probably a really bad idea.
Jake M. Robinson, Treewilding: Our Past, Present, and Future Relationship With Forests. A Nice Book About Trees. Do you need one of those now? You might. I did.
Alanna Schubach, The Nobodies. This is a body swap story in which the people swapping bodies do not seem to gain much insight into each other’s (extremely ordinary) lives. Not so much Freaky Friday as Aggressively Mundane Friday Actually.
Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. My book club’s latest read, some really lovely pieces but mostly from the expected people. Makes for interesting discussion.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories. What a difference Lucifer makes. Stories of people who dislike each other making each other unhappy just aren’t the same without him.
Amy Wilson, A Girl Called Owl. This title is less spoilery than the UK one, although I really prefer unified titles. Owl finds out about her father and her own powers and deals very realistically with friend issues in this fantastical book.
P. G. Wodehouse, Mike. Kindle. I have said before that I hate when one book has two titles depending on what country you’re in, and I ran into one of those this fortnight with a Wodehouse novel I liked but did not want to reread just now (Jill the Reckless/The Little Warrior). Undeterred, I plunged into Mike, and felt utterly confident that it was not one I’d read before, because it was the cricketiest cricket school story you ever did see, in ways that were utterly unfamiliar. However, the second half of this book bears almost no relation to the first except that it’s (hypothetically) the same person in it, and the second half was published separately as Mike and Psmith. Ah well. The lot of a commercial author etc. I don’t know a darn thing about cricket and was still amused, that’s what.