Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. A history of China through its rivers. And other water, but really mostly rivers. Gosh they’re important rivers. Some of it was more basic than I hoped, but the part where he talked about the millennia-long conflict between the Confucian and the Daoist views of flood management–that’s the good stuff right there. That’s what I need to think over.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Testimony of Mute Things. Kindle. A neat little murder mystery fantasy novella, earlier in the Penric and Desdemona timeline than most of the others in the series. I really like that Lois is feeling free to move back and forth in the timeline as fits the story she wants to tell.
Traci Chee, A Thousand Steps Into Night. Demons and time loops and complicated teenage relationships with oneself and others, this was a lot of fun.
Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule. The latest in the Craft sequence, and hoo boy should you not start with this one, this is ramifying its head off, this is a lot of implication from your previous faves bearing fruit. I love middle books, and this is the king–duly appointed CEO?–of middle books, this is exactly what I like in both middle books generally and the Craft sequence specifically. But for heaven’s sake go back farther, the earlier Craft novels are better suited to read in whatever order, this has weight and momentum you don’t want to miss out on.
Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, I Killed the King. A fun YA fantasy murder mystery, better as a fantasy than as a murder mystery structurally but still a good time with the locked room and the suspects and their highly varied motivations. Are we seeing more speculative mysteries? I kind of hope so, I really like them.
Lauren Morrow, Little Movements. This is a novel about a choreographer who gets a chance to work slightly later in life than would be traditional, of a group of Black artists who deal with insidious racism, of a woman who has miscarried and is trying to put her life and identity and romantic relationship back together. In some ways it’s a very straightforward book, but also it’s a shape of story I don’t think we get a lot of, the impact of being all of the people in my first sentence at once. It’s a very intimate POV and nicely done.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. The authors were journalists in Russia early in the Putin era and had a front row seat to watching people they respected and trusted become mouthpieces for Putin, and this is that book. Unfortunately I think some of the answer to “how could they do this” was that many of them–as described by Soldatov and Borogan!–were already those people, and Putin gave them the opportunity to be those people out loud. I was hoping, and I think they were hoping, for more insight on how someone could become that person; what we got instead was insight into how some people already are and you don’t necessarily know it clearly. Which is not unuseful, but it’s not the same kind of useful. Anyway this was grim and awful but mostly in a very grindingly mundane way.
Serra Swift, Kill the Beast. Discussed elsewhere.
Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill does not like Ernest Hemingway any better than I do, bless her, but when she picked her other subjects in writing about a group of journalists and photographers in the Spanish Civil War, she was apparently kind of stuck with him. Did that mean she learned to love him? She sure did not, high fives Amanda Vaill. Anyway some of the other people were a lot more interesting, and the Spanish Civil War is.
Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect. Discussed elsewhere.