Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat. The last in its series. Do not start here. I really felt like this made the consequences feel like consequences and stayed interesting throughout. I was a bit relieved about a couple of the “mundane world” plot developments because they felt consequential as well. Good times.
Ennis Rook Bashe, Beautiful Malady. Kindle. Lush disability science fiction poems. More like this please.
Becky Chambers, As You Wake, Break the Shell. This is the first half of a story, not a complete story. Luckily it looks like the second half is coming soon. I enjoyed this and felt like it was moving in a different direction from her previous work, and it’s a kind of intimate-perspective science fiction I’m glad we’re seeing more of.
P.A. Cornell, The Astronaut Among the Flowers. A very solid collection, and also I like it that I can’t say that it has all of my favorite of Patty’s stories because she keeps doing new stories and collections can’t keep up. Yay that.
Susan DeFreitas, ed., Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. Kindle. A very mixed bag of how much Le Guin was visibly an influence. Some really good stuff in here (Fonda Lee and Rachael K. Jones can write, news at 11), some that were less for me but still worth giving a look.
Gayle Feldman, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built. I’ve seen this compared to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (about Robert Moses), and Bennett Cerf does not seem to be nearly so loathsome as Moses (high bar to clear) but it is that kind of comprehensive biography that illuminates not just the person but the world he inhabited and built. It really does feel to me at least as much like a bio of Random House as of Cerf himself, and I wonder if Feldman was assuming readers who would be familiar with Cerf as a television personality etc. (I was aware that he was one but I have no sense of that personally.) Anyway it was really well done.
E.K. Johnston, The Third Period Comeback. I have seen that a few friends liked the ending better than I did, but even with that said, it was delightful to see Johnston writing a full-on sports fantasy about puberty for the middle-grade set. And so Canadian! And so full of cousins! I feel like the era of people having ten million cousins is coming to an end, so those of us who do in fact have ten million cousins may be clinging to stories like this wherever we can find them. Also who doesn’t like a solid Bill Barilko reference.
C.H.B. Kitchin, Birthday Party. Kindle. This is a Golden Age mystery/thriller that’s an exercise in perspective. The chapters alternate whose perspective we’re seeing through, and it’s really good, and I love how gradually the titular event comes to hang more and more ominously over the narrative.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu. Rereads. I haven’t reread these in this millennium and frankly I’m not sure I will again. They’ve just never been my favorite Le Guin. I think it’s a case where she kept working with a concept that was very much of its time, trying to do better by it in ways that are very understandable, when I preferred it when she just came up with other ideas. Her prose is always readable, I don’t regret revisiting these, but I also don’t feel like I have been wrong when I talk about other work of hers as more to my taste.
Val McDermid, 1989. Kindle. The second in its series, demonstrating the concept–the first one by itself doesn’t really give you the feel for how much you’re going to follow the detective characters and their work through personal and social change. I really liked this and am looking forward to the planned next two.
Chloe Smith, Virgin Land. A very tightly done environmentalist science fiction romance with snaaaaakes. Do not read if you don’t like snakes, no, I am very serious about this, they are alien snakes but if you are freaked out by snakes then you should not subject yourself to this. Any reptiles really. Comfort level with reptiles required.
D.E. Stevenson, Green Money. Kindle. A light mid-century middlebrow novel, silly in places but reasonably nice, about people finding their right situations and people in life. Not one of her stand-outs but perfectly nice to read on an airplane.
Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard. I think my main complaint here is that this was not mostly about snow leopards, it was mostly about being a field biologist in that region. Which is a thing that’s also interesting! But it means that the odds of getting another book that is about snow leopards any time soon seem fairly low. Ah well.
Katy Watson, Death on a Lively Sea. Kindle. If you’re already enjoying this series, here’s another. It’s not really doing more with the characters, and some of the mystery plot points were a little shaky, but it’s a light, breezy mystery in a reliable enough series.
Helene Wecker, The Gates of Midnight. The third in its series, and don’t start here; while there are reminders of what’s happened before so you don’t have to reread the whole trilogy to be able to keep your place in this one, they’re only reminders. We dive right into the emotional significance of these relationships and these fantasy conceits in midstream in this book. You know I like to say “the triumphant conclusion” in these book notes, but in this case I think it’s the mildly satisfying conclusion. If you like how Wecker writes, which I do, you’ll find this to be a good read, but I’m not sure it’s doing as much to build on the first one as I’d hoped. I’ll be glad to see what she does next that isn’t this series.
Jane Yolen, The One-Armed Queen. Kindle. I am pretty sure this is not a reread. I am pretty sure this slipped between the cracks for me, since I don’t see it on this millennium’s book log and I can’t think when I would have read it in 1998-2000. It also did not have the familiar feel of the two books ahead of it in the series. So okay! This one was new to me! What I found particularly interesting was the way that adolescent familial relationships were allowed to sometimes prefigure adult ones but not completely. When the progression from adolescent to adult in a family is shown at all, it’s usually just one of “you can see how they’re going to be as adults from how they are together as kids” or “people are allowed to grow and change and are not stuck being how they are when they’re 12.” This one is both, with fantasy dynastic politics and a frame story about how history is recorded, formed, forgotten.