Katherine Addison, The Orb of Cairado. A novella in the world of the Goblin Emperor, with a believably flawed protag and neatly fitting together mystery plot. Very happy with this.
Elizabeth Bear, Angel Maker. Discussed elsewhere.
William Blake, The Portable Blake. “I’ve mostly read the much-anthologized, heavily-quoted parts of Blake,” I thought, “I should look at the rest.” Hooooo boy. There is a reason they stop at burning tigers in your early education, pals. I knew he wandered off into (substantially nonsensical) apocalyptic visions, but I didn’t know know, you know? And now I know. In detail. Welp.
Erik J. Brown, All That’s Left in the World. Post-apocalyptic YA with a queer central love story. Brown’s writing is smooth and readable, and the two boys falling in love will be just what some young people need out of a post-apocalypse, so I’m not sorry I read it. The post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and story beats are very much of their genre–this is not a book that is attempting to revolutionize those elements, it’s attempting to recast them for the enjoyment of the reader looking to feel seen in this landscape.
K.J. Charles, Death in the Spires. Absolute catnip for me. This is a murder mystery hinging on the college friend group of the main characters, leaning hard on social dynamics of historical higher education, class, sexuality, etc. If you know more like this, please send them my way. If you’re K.J. Charles and want to write more like this, I will read every single one.
Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry. Discussed elsewhere.
P. F. Chisholm, A Murder of Crows and An Air of Treason. Fifth and sixth in the Sir Robert Carey series of historical mysteries, these go deeper into the politics of the English court–which is all very well but I’m glad there are indications that the series will return to the Scottish border soon. There’s more arc plot here than is standard in a mystery series–I think it’s more important to read them in order than it would usually be.
Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Danticat is looking at writing about death from multiple angles, all of them thoughtful and interesting.
Christopher de Bellaigue, The Lion House: The Coming of a King. For me this attempt at writing nonfiction as though it was fiction was not a success. It didn’t go far enough into the fiction territory to be a successful historical novel, and I found it more cumbersome than winsome in the direction of “make this nonfiction easy to read.” I mean, it was easy to read, just less informative per page. Suleyman the Magnificent is considered at length, but there are other works that do so in ways that I found more congenial. Oh well.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. When I have to grieve, I like to do it in company with the art of other people who are grieving. I had never read Joan Didion’s famous books about her grief(s), so I got them this time around, and the first one, The Year of Magical Thinking, was a really beautifully observed book about the loss of her husband while her daughter’s health was fragile. She was specific and personal about her husband and about losing him and what that meant to her. Wonderful. Brilliant. So I eagerly went on to Blue Nights, which is about the subsequent loss of her daughter, and that’s where we went off the rails. I see–I even agree with–the sense that there are fewer consent issues around writing intimately about one’s partner, whom one consensually married as an adult, an equal, than about one’s child, whom one encountered first as a vulnerable infant and who got issued oneself as a parent rather than consenting to it. I see why she wanted to be careful about that. But what she ended up doing was flirting with personal revelation in weird ways that were fundamentally not about her daughter Quintana, dwelling on weird rich person brand name trivia, and getting inappropriately defensive on a number of fronts. Sigh. Well.
Amal El-Mothar, The River Has Roots. A beautiful faerie tale with murder ballads at its heart, short and captivating.
Margaret Frazer, Volo te Habere. Kindle. Even shorter–much shorter–this is one of her murder mystery short stories that’s very much puzzle structure rather than anything else.
Jendia Gammon and Gareth Powell, eds., Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers. My favorite stories in this volume will not surprise you, because you’ve seen the names here before: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Holy Fools” and John Wiswell’s “An Asexual Succubus.” Both are sequels to other works I have enjoyed previously
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. Discussed elsewhere.
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. Intensely personal, deeply comprehensive, ferociously angry, more or less devoid of the smug moments that make me roll my eyes at him……unless you read the edition I read, which had the world’s smuggest preface from Madeleine L’Engle, in which she primly observed that she never doubted God and God’s goodness while grieving, she felt close to God, but she supposed people did differ. I am frankly aghast that they let that preface run with this book; it was a different version of “treating a book like an historical object instead of a work of art that a person could interact with personally now, today” than the prefaces that spoil the whole plot of novels for you, but it’s the same thing. The grief Lewis observes (his own, for his wife Joy, in case you didn’t know) is intensely human and unfortunately relevant to somebody every day; skip what L’Engle has to say about it. (Why did they ask her? “Known fellow Christian” is a rather large category, pals, it’s not like there was no one else to choose from.)
H. G. Parry, A Far Better Thing. Discussed elsewhere.
Herman Paul, Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Kindle. A slim monograph on what, exactly, the ideal historian was supposed to be aiming for and how it has shifted over the ages, what it has to say to us today. For history nerds only, but I expect you knew that from the title.
Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant. Rereads. These were massively influential on me as a young writer, as they were for many of the women my age who write fantasy. I could still see all their virtues–the action, the freedom, the ways that Alanna’s sexuality is handled–but also there were some clearer flaws than when I was 11, most notably the handling of the Bazhir (yikes, and Pierce also seems to have moved away from that element of her early work) and the fact that every single dude in Alanna’s life is patronizing as hell. Welp.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. This is right on that borderline where social commentary shades into political commentary, and I’m absolutely here for it. There were heartbreaking stories in this book, but it was weirdly not depressing, considering the subject matter. And having some details of what things were like in Russia as of the writing of this book a decade ago feels relevant.
Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. A lot about what the Paris Commune thought they were doing and how it’s affected the rest of us since, interesting stuff but not a good introductory book on the Paris Commune if you haven’t read something like Paris Babylon that will give you more of a straightforward who what when etc.
Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Tackett, like many authors before him and likely many after, is taking on the question of what the heck happened to move from passing resolutions to The Terror. Again probably not a good place to start on this period but a really interesting examination if you’ve already got the basics.
Gerard Toal, Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hasten Climate Change. This is much better at outlining problems than thinking about solutions, and if you’re the sort of person who might read a book with this title on your own hook, you probably have already encountered the majority of what he’s going to say. So…a book to press on your more neutral relations? I suppose?