Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend of mine.

Beck Garrison doesn’t really remember life on land. Her father Paul brought her to live on the cluster of libertarian seasteads when she was in preschooler, when he told her her mother died in an accident. Since then she’s gotten thoroughly accustomed not just to the pitch and yaw of the repurposed yachts and other holdings but also the rules of the different steads. Which ones have no laws, which ones have minimal laws, where she’s allowed to go alone, where she needs to check in with private security…where she just cannot go, period. Kids are resilient, Beck even more than most, and by her mid-teens she has picked up a part-time job as a finder, helping people trade rare goods like sandals and shoelaces so that everyone has things they want from land and Beck has a little pocket money.

Not everything people want to find is quite so simple as a swimsuit or a bottle of fancy whiskey. Looking for a missing person leads Beck through a cascade of discoveries about her home that isn’t what anyone intended her to find, but she’s not going to quit, and she’s definitely not going to abandon people to some of the circumstances she’s discovered.

Because frankly? Have you read some of articles about actual attempts at libertarian utopian communities? Naomi has. They tend to be gross in a number of directions. Sewage treatment is one, and that’s a pretty key element of seasteading. Human right violations would be another. Liberty’s Daughter walks a really good line between not flinching away from these elements and not getting screamy, wallowing, or unpleasant to read. It also points out some of the ways that spontaneous organization can be a really good thing. I don’t actually think that Naomi specifically sat down and said, “How could I demonstrate the difference between classical anarchist thinking and the contemporary American libertarian movement with a fun teenage protagonist and her adventures?” but if she had, it might still have come out like this. Which is not to say that it’s an anarchist treatise or in fact any kind of treatise. Beck’s reactions are a lot more pragmatic teenager “well that’s dumb, how do we fix that” than “and I will give you a several page speech about liberty,” which works a lot better and makes for a more fun book.

There are villains here, but they’re not grandiose and chiseled. There are heroes here, but they’re mostly just trying to make life work better for the people around them with limited resources. So…like life, really. But with more adventures. Yeah, I’ll sign on for that.

Shahzad Bashir, The Market in Poetry in the Persian World. Kindle. Short monograph placing poetry almost as a commodity to be traded and Persian as a poetry language in a set of communities which were almost always multi-lingual. For me the relationships of poets writing in Persian and how they categorized themselves with relationship to each other–sometimes aggressively so–was the most interesting part.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. A fairly brief, not very deep but generally cheerful and interesting, memoir of being a guard at the Met.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning: Volume 1, 1845-1846. Kindle. One of two that I’d had going for a bit and just finished up in the last fortnight. I found her letters to other people once they were married delightful, and watching them fall in love mostly through letters is extremely sweet. There’s also a moment where Robert Browning earns my “arright, mister, you gets to stay” reaction by telling a story about an acquaintance of his who humiliated his wife at supper and the ferocious way Browning treated him after, also by his utter relief at hearing that Ba intends to keep Barrett as part of her name once they’re married. They misunderstand each other, they get melodramatic, they’re still at this point dealing with her father who seems to be an utter piece of work. Here for it.

Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. Ironically not a very deep book, lots of detail about making the trips in submersibles, less detail than I wanted about the species in these ecosystems.

C.J. Cherry, The Pride of Chanur. Reread. It had been long enough that I had not remembered how much this is aunt/niece fiction, and gosh did I need that right now. I really love how the human perspective never takes center stage here, how it’s always a hani book, with Tully as a MacGuffin but not a protagonist. I love how Cherryh thinks of humans in a plurality of alien intelligences as small and fragile and raw.

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. I think I expected this to be less memoir and more theory, or maybe memoir is how Clare does theory. Anyway it was interesting. Class is in here too, not just sexuality and disability.

Jon Evans, Exadelic. I have honestly no idea how this book would strike someone who didn’t live in or adjacent to the Bay Area tech community in 2003, but for me there was a lot of the feeling of recognition, oh, these people, okay, I know them. This book is very twisty and full of several reality resets, but for me it always stayed on the side of “adequately foreshadowed and/or explained” rather than “wait what I don’t get it” to be gonzo fun rather than incoherent.

Nicola Griffith, Menewood. Sequel to Hild, and there is a lot of hard stuff in here, there is infant death and child death and battlefields are in no way glorious, though the people who treat them as glorious are portrayed accurately to their cultures. People are struggling their way through history here, doing the best they can in this firelit world, trying to make sure there’s enough to eat for the winter and a place to hide if someone treacherous comes and a way to outmaneuver the reckless. It’s so well-done and I love it so much.

Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. Rush was on an expedition to Antarctica at the same time as she was preparing to get pregnant, and she talked to all sorts of people involved with this scientific research community about their births, their experiences birthing, their sense of community in this setting. An interesting and unusual book.

John Sayles, Jamie MacGillivray. I am surprised to say this about a John Sayles novel, but this is a very conventional historical novel. It has fewer perspectives than his usual, mostly being tightly focused on two people from very similar places, and while it was fine and entertaining, I’m really not accustomed to being able to predict the ending of a John Sayles work in detail from 10% of the way in. Also he really did not appear to have any interest in dealing with religion with any depth or personal engagement, which…when you’re writing about people from the 18th century Highlands is sure a choice I guess? but again not the complexity I would have expected from Sayles. Ah well, not everything can be A Moment in the Sun, which might even be a good thing I guess.

Joanna Schwartz, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable. This lays out the legal precedents that allow police misconduct to flourish, one at a time and with clear examples. It’s a fairly short book, but a very useful one, and if you’re not sure why police are allowed to do what they’re allowed to do in the US–why it’s not just a matter of one or two bad cops but a system that makes things difficult for the good ones to make any kind of precedent that their goodness is structural–this is going to explain why, with all the receipts.

D.L. Soria, Thief Liar Lady. A Cinderella story wherein Cinderella is not a dewy innocent but in fact a girl on a mission. More than one, in fact, and navigating the world after the ball is the story here. A good enough time that I’m looking into Soria’s previous work.

Peter Stark, Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation. Peter Stark seems to be frustrated that some people think of William Henry Harrison as a trivia question answer (“shortest presidency”!) instead of as a crucial part of the machine of genocide. Well, if you read his book you will definitely get the details on the machine of genocide and William Henry Harrison’s part in it. And also some stuff about Tecumseh and his place in his culture and family.

Valerie Valdes, Where Peace Is Lost. Hey, remember when we thought the Jedi might not suck? Valerie does, and she’s written us book with a fallen-hidden order of mystic space knights doing galaxy protecty stuff on backwater planets with eager young locals, and it hasn’t been ruined by some guy going off on his own ego that nobody else cared about. Also Valerie’s had all genders in it from the start. I’m just sayin’.

Greg van Eekhout, The Ghost Job. Four friends died in a chemistry accident, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still have fun and do heists! Middle grade romp. Featuring a Very Good Dog, not dead.

Martha Wells, System Collapse. Discussed elsewhere.

P. G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie and The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories, both Kindle. The latter is an unremarkable and highly mixed set of short stories, the animal stories of which feature the animal treatment mores of previous days (skip them, IME). The former stood out to me by being a standard lighthearted Wodehouse comedy in which the Great War has explicitly and on the page just happened and is allowed to be acknowledged. Our titular hero, though an idiot in fine Wodehouse Hero form, has been demobbed; he has had war experiences; when he runs into someone he met during the War, he has the sorts of feelings one might have, and while comedic events surround this, the bond itself is taken utterly seriously and respectfully. It’s the strangest thing. In some ways I had been reading Bertie Wooster as “let’s not think about all that, look, a clown,” and…here’s another clown, and his khaki is hanging in the open wardrobe. Very strange.

Lisa Yaszek, The Future Is Female! This is the other thing that I’d been reading for quite some time and only just finished up this fortnight. I’m in a book club that’s taking this anthology and its sequel a few stories at a time so we can dig into the discussion of them. It’s an anthology that’s got historical organization (going from the 1920s to the 1960s) and some of the stories in it fairly strongly appear to have been chosen for historical documentation purpose (why else is this appalling Marion Zimmer Bradley story here). There are both rarities and warhorses, solid thematic groupings and througlines, and you could do a lot worse for a book club, although I will add the caveat that you will want it to be a book group with good known moderators if so, because some of the subject matter requires basically all the content warnings.

Ovidia Yu, The Yellow Rambutan Tree Mystery. The latest in this series of historical mysteries set in Yu’s native Singapore, and I continue to appreciate her willingness to go through a notably interesting period of Singapore’s history at an astonishing clip. The series started before the Second World War, and this volume is about the war’s aftermath. Were she interested in doing “the same, but more of it” she could have lingered at any moment, but instead she wants to do different things as the setting and characters develop, and this is just what I want in a mystery series and makes me happy. Don’t start here, there’s a lot of character backstory you won’t fully appreciate even though there’s also, of course, an episodic mystery to be solved.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

There’s a lot SecUnit doesn’t want to talk about.

Unfortunately repressing trauma has a time limit even when you’re a SecUnit, a.k.a. Murderbot. And when you’re in the middle of trying to find and deal with a lost outpost of humans who are vulnerable to corporate manipulation may be the worst possible time to pretend that nothing is wrong, just when you most need to integrate your human and machine sides. “Need” and “want” are definitely, definitely not the same thing here.

This is the latest installation in its series, and I wouldn’t recommend starting here; Murderbot’s personality and relationships and backstory are all well-established from other parts of the series, and the momentum you have from those will not be the same if you try to start from scratch with this late-series entry. If you already know Murderbot well, though, watching its development to this point is very satisfying. This is the good time I was looking for.

Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds. Oh this was lovely, lots of interesting facts about owls. If you, like me, have moments when natural history is just the most soothing thing you can possibly read, do I have good news for you, there is this book that will tell you several more things about owls. Also it has lots of picutres of different owls. It’s just owls all the way down, here, people.

Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun. Sometimes when there’s a very long book I think about whether it could have been done at shorter length and the author was just enjoying the longer length. This book meanders and meanders, but I actually don’t think it could have been done shorter, despite the repetition of character arc, despite the set pieces that could be cut, etc., because the meander is the point. Goddard was not trying to write a bijoux little thing that somehow ran away, this was meant to be a long journey, the entire form of the book is a long journey, that’s the book it is. Now, did I like the new fire of the sun better when I thought it was a metaphor, yes, but that’s me. This is the literal story of it, things keep popping up being not metaphors after all, and almost every time I sighed and went “oh well,” because I actually do like metaphors. But it’s clearly done deliberately and oughtn’t to be changed just because of my fondness for metaphor.

Marie Howe, What the Living Do. This series of poems is not only about the loss of her brother, but it is centered around that loss. I found them to be spare, moving, and also have the kind of life associations that grief brings, where you remember random things from your history with the person, distilled in poetic form. It is a good addition to my grief poetry library. (Some of us like companionship in grief. I do.)

Jin Xu, Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China. I found this book interesting but frustrating. It was a history of monetary policy rather than money, in a lot of ways. It overexplained some things and then didn’t go into a lot of areas that would have been useful for the whole picture (basically there were no ethnic minorities in China who were acknowledged to have an effect on money…which is a pretty big omission given the effect on the silver supply of the Miao and other people in the hill regions…). It also jumped around in some ways, and in general was less coherently organized than I hoped. I liked having the different perspective than I usually can find on world history, and even on Chinese history, I just…probably expected too much here.

Juhani Karila, Fishing for the Little Pike. Northern Finnish Rural Weird, small-scale mythologies with large effects on the lives of individuals. Lots of small town social dynamics, including with magical creatures. I loved this, and I hope we get more of Karila’s work translated.

L.R. Lam and Elizabeth May, Seven Mercies. Second in a duology, definitely read the first one first, lots of shooty shoot space opera, mostly women characters, many of them prickly and damaged and doing the best they can in a cold hard galaxy with their friends at their back.

Suzannah Lipscomb, The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc. Late 16th/early 17th century consistory records give a lot of testimony from women who didn’t have opportunity to testify on their own behalves in as many contexts before, and Lipscomb has gone through that testimony to find out what we can say about the veryday lives of these lower an dmiddle class women. Their insults and reasons for getting into fights are particularly interesting. This is why we read history. Not all of why. But definitely why.

Erin Noteboom, A Knife So Sharp Its Edge Cannot Be Seen. And these poems are sharp too, very sharp about science and its rewards and costs, so lovely, dark sometimes in ways that I love without being–quite exactly?–in the category of grief poetry? but also not entirely not, because Noteboom is willing to look where we sometimes want to look away.

Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World. Another that’s second in a duology, another where you definitely should read the first one first. Almost every content warning in the world here, lots of violence including sexual violence, lots of horrible decision-making but Parker-Chan knows it’s horrible and doesn’t endorse it. I was a little surprised by how explicitly the ending metaphysically endorsed the Ming dynasty, that was…very clear. But it was a really interesting read and I’m glad to have it.

C.L. Polk, Soulstar. Reread. I think this is my favorite of the Kingston Trilogy, definitely worth sticking around for the ending, where there’s consequence piled on consequence but not in a zero-gravity-throwing-lightning-bolt way, in a doing politics that sometimes hurt people we care about accidentally and we have to deal with the fallout way. Everything ramifies in more than one direction, and we just have to keep doing the hard work. Yay. Yay.

Kay Ryan, Synthesizing Gravity. I found these essays so compellingly written, I very much wanted to go back to reading them at all times when I wasn’t reading them, and also in many cases Ryan is either laughably wrong or, more commonly, has decided that a valid personal opinion ought to be applied universally to the writing or reading of poetry. At one point she asks why she couldn’t love Auden, and I do love Auden, and I do not love Kay Ryan, and I stared bemused at the page, because it was very much a–yes, okay, we will just be very different, that’s just how it is. I ended up having her voice in my head as one of the characters frequently played by Joan Cusack at the turn of the millennium, slightly over-enunciating and over-the-top and frequently wrong but very interesting on the way to doing it. (Just don’t go to the AWP if you don’t like conferences, Kay. It doesn’t make other people troglodytes to gather together and discuss the sonnet form. Get on over it. Lordy.)

William Shakespeare, Richard III. Reread, Kindle. I am doing a project, and I wanted to make sure there weren’t any more small touchstones I wanted in it, which there were. Gosh everything is right on its sleeve in this play. DID EVERYBODY CATCH THAT THE CURRENT DYNASTY IS THE CORRECT ONE AND IS IN ITS PLACE RIGHFULLY OKAY GOOD.

Margery Sharp, The [slur redacted] in the Parlor. Kindle. So to get the title out of the way first: this appears to be a pretty clear-cut instance of an early twentieth-century British person using a slur for Romany people to mean any person who fits that stereotype that they made up about Romany people. No person in this book actually is Roma, and I have no indication that Sharp thought for one second about what this kind of usage did to people of this actual ethnic heritage. (For extra fun, the titular character appears from her name to be Welsh while everyone else is very, very solidly–even aggressively–ethnically English!…Sharp is usually much better about spotting shitty things to do and not doing them than this.) So that sucks. Especially because it’s otherwise mostly an interesting novel about family dynamics, about gender dynamics in farm life in the mid-late 19th century, about attempts at undermining or weaponizing decency and how those can fail. Sharp has a good eye for children who are not miniature adults but do have internal lives of their own, one of whom is the narrator here…but you can have that with The Eye of Love and not have to wince every time someone asks you what you’re reading. I have become a Sharp completist somewhere along the way. If you have not, by all means skip this one.

P. G. Wodehouse, Something New. Kindle. This was fluff, and it was fun fluff, it was the good kind of Wodehouse. You’ll mostly read me saying that here because if I start reading and it’s the bad kind of Wodehouse, I stop. Sometimes things are stressful and people disguising themselves as servants and having hijinks in country houses is about what I can deal with, and there was this for one of those days.

Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt. Very much does what it says on the tin. Do you want to read more about revolting peasants? Have thoughts about Jack Straw and Wat Tyler? Here we are then.

Gloria Dickie, Eight Bears: The Past and Imperiled Future. There are eight species of bear on earth now, and Dickie gives each of them a chapter, talking about their habits and habitat and relationship with humans. I learned particularly about the bears most distant from me here–there was little I didn’t know about the black bears we have here in Minnesota but quite a lot about the sloth bears and the moon bears. I find reading natural history soothing even when the news about habitat is not itself soothing, so this was a good book for its timing for me.

Heid E. Erdrich, New Poets of Native Nations. I’d already read about half of these poets, but in many cases I’d read them with great enthusiasm. It’s a really good volume, lots to discover here.

Joshua Hammer, The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird. This is an excellent example of how reality does not always produce delicately nuanced villains for us. Sometimes in reality people who do awful things are just people who think they can get some (often fairly low-grade) material benefit from an awful thing and get away with it. I learned a lot about falcon racing and the rare bird’s egg trade in the modern world from this book. Was I happier for knowing it, no, but I was probably better for knowing it, alas.

Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (reread) and The Woman Warrior. Read in opposite order. I can definitely see why The Woman Warrior was revelatory both for Asian-American Studies and for memoir at the time. It shouldn’t be the only perspective you have about any Chinese-American ever, good grief, should I even need to say that–but it feels like some of the in-community criticism of it is of the “we’re not all like that” and no, absolutely, nobody’s memoir can be asked to stand for everybody, but that’s not the fault of a memoir, that’s the fault of trying to use a memoir, one person telling the story of one life or at most one family, to represent an entire gigantic group of people. It’s vivid and personal and familial, just don’t read it like it’s trying to be the word from on high about The Chinese Experience.

Karen Lord, The Blue, Beautiful World. I feel like I’ve been seeing more of 1970s tropes done in contemporary books without the sexism and racism, and this is a prime example of that. This has secret human space colonies and telepathy! But actually thinks about colonialism and human variation not in a horribly racist way! I felt like the pop star aspect was less pop star at the end, though, ah well.

Sujata Massey, The Mistress of Bhatia House. The latest in a series of reasonably well-written historical mysteries. It’s one where I’d recommend starting at the beginning of the series because there’s ongoing character relationship stuff here, and this one was not my favorite of the bunch, but it was still a worthy entry in series context.

Nisi Shawl, ed., New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. A really lovely anthology with several quite good stories and a bunch of entirely fine stories that weren’t as directly aimed at me, which is good, not everything should be aimed at me. Stand-out stories from Darcie Little Badger, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Malka older. Great addition to the shelves.

D. E. Stevenson, Vittoria Cottage. Ah for the days when a book could just be called after its protagonist’s house, more or less regardless of its importance. This is a low-key story of middle-aged love and intended self-sacrifice. I was startled by how quickly it wrapped up until I found out that there are two more in the series; that explains it, I suppose.

Alice Winn, In Memoriam. Oh what a gorgeous book, oh what a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s about two quite young Englishmen–teenagers really–who go from their prep school to fight in the Great War, and they attempt to figure out their romantic relationship within the context their times have given them, and also within the literature they know very well, and it is not any “nicer” than you would expect from the trenches and the wounds and the POW camps and PTSD of the Great War, and I cried a lot and they thought about Tennyson as per the title, which I love, and lots of other poetry, and yeah, this was written straight at my heart. I’m so glad to have read it. Whatever Winn writes next, I’ll want to read. There was a moment when a character’s father says a particular thing and I said “OH NO OH NO OH NO” out loud and I was not wrong but also not sorry I was there for it even with the way it ended.

Patricia C. Wrede, The Dark Lord’s Daughter. The first of a duology, and you can tell that Pat isn’t done with everything she wants to do with this very Dark Lord Tropey book. It’s a portal fantasy. I hope this means MG portal fantasies are a bit more available now. I particularly liked the tablet that became a familiar.

Stephanie Burgis, The Raven Throne. Second in a duology, and you should definitely read the first one first, because this is a lot of follow-on consequences from it. It’s very much a “you thought your problems were solved? no, they’re just beginning!” novel. Some problems that might be more frustrating in older characters (why don’t they talk to each other!) are entirely understandable when the protagonists are literal adolescents: this is the time in their lives when they’re learning these exact skills, this is exactly when they figure out to do this, and having them behave like adults would be silly when they really are 12 even though they’re 12-year-old shapeshifter royalty. With a kingdom to protect from all sides but still, as with being 12, themselves to figure out.

Octavia Cade, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories. Discussed elsewhere.

Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets. This is one of those books that’s good to have read but not much fun to read: so much of it is banal and depressing with so little prospect of comprehensively fixing it. It really does what it says on the tin, though.

David Cooper, Badon and the Early Wars for Wessex, Circa 500 to 710. Archaeology focused military history trying to match up the written record and the artefacts we can find. Dang is Cooper mad when people get fixated on the “historical” King Arthur.

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders. The last of the Deptford Trilogy, and in some ways the most sordid–quite a lot of it is dedicated to the carnival boyhood of the entity eventually known as Magnus Eisengrim. Quite a lot of literal filth, some repeated anal rape of a child, this is not a book to read if you’re not up for an unpleasant time. It contrasts with the previous volumes and ties them together, but if you want the most magical version of stage magic, this sure is not it. But also you should know that by the time you get to volume three.

Deva Fagan, Nightingale. Stand-alone MG fantasy adventure about an orphan girl fighting a system that is designed to grind her down. Now with fun elements of worldbuilding and friendship. Aetheric swords, soda fountains, labor unions!

Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World. This is about 90-95% what it says on the tin and a quite good version at that. Lots of interesting facts about fabric! Finlay in top form! The other 5-10% is Finlay grieving for her parents. If you are not up for a parental grief memoir, it is not one, but it’s not not one, either, so…maybe wait until your own grief has settled another 6-12 months if that’s newly your situation, yeah? Because if this had been fresher for me, it would have set me off far more than the details about ramie and kinte cloth (consecutive, not concurrent) would have been worth it.

Carol Gigliotti, The Creative Lives of Animals. Gigliotti is very clear-headed about the places where people have decided that animals are not being creative as a matter of definition and…sort of deconstructing those, looking at the actual behaviors rather than being defensive about how special humans need to feel. Lots of good stuff across a range of animal kingdoms here, hurrah.

Theodora Goss, The Collected Enchantments. This is structured as a few poems and then a short story, repeat. Several old favorites and some stuff new to me.

Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir. Harkaway understands all the important notes of classic noir, including/especially despair about the class system, and he hits those notes here in a science fictional context without bringing in the incidentals like the staggering sexism. Sometimes a bit too on the nose for my tastes but worth the time all the same.

Sarah Hilary, Someone Else’s Skin. This is a mystery novel with a cop protagonist, and it features loads of sexual violence and domestic abuse, and it has the most common and most annoying twist for that kind of book. If you’re willing to deal with all that, it’s a good one of those. I will probably read the next one in the series the next time I’m willing to deal with one of those. But it sure is one of those, nothing in the world will make it not one of those.

Jordan Kurella, When I Was Lost. By turns tender, haunting, lovely, this is such a good collection, I’m so glad to have these stories all together. I’d read most of them, but it’s a case of being able to return to them whenever I like.

Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic. Lots of stuff about fungal plagues and heat-resistant fungus, very interesting, not very cheerful.

Doris Langley Moore, Not at Home. The jacket copy made this look like a comic novel–the funny story of a middle-aged lady who takes in a lodger in the straitened circumstances of postwar London and devolves into an Odd Couple comedy. It was not like that at all. The lodger was not comic-awful, she was just awful-awful. The worst of this is that she borrows a friend’s dog and gets it killed and lies about it. The moral of the story seems to be “put your contracts in writing,” or possibly “have good boundaries,” or both, which is all very well but not worth a couple hundred pages of novel to say, and certainly not with horrifying illustrations of that type. Especially when one is looking forward to light fare with low stakes and instead gets two neglected children and a dead dog and some dead parakeets. Yuck.

Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians. And can we find them, the answer is no, no such persons. But a lovely exploration of why not, how we know what we know about ancient identities, what the people in that area were thinking about themselves instead.

Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown. Kindle. One of Sharp’s upbeat funny books in which a midcentury young woman looks at the world and thinks, well, gosh, surely not like that, I’ll just do something different, then. And everyone around her is horrified but she’s basically right. As this book was set but not written in 1939 (it was in fact written in 1944), the bits where all the upper class people were terribly concerned about the impending war and whether the Polish political refugee character would be all right had a different shape than if it had been written in 1939 or in 2023. He is all right, it’s not the sort of book where he’s not all right, it’s a nice book where everyone is confused about their world and what it’s going to be like, which: scoot over, pals, I can sit on that bench with you.

Noel Streatfeild, The Winter Is Past. Kindle. If I had started with this one I would have thought that Streatfeild’s adult novels were fairly slight takes on serious matters. The protagonist of this book has suffered a miscarriage, and everyone’s attitude seems to be that she should get over it because loads of people have miscarriages, and the plot of the book is that she does. This is an oversimplification: there’s interesting business about having evacuees living in her house and learning to be nice to her mother-in-law, but it’s one of those plots that takes early 20th century women by the shoulders and says, look, nothing in your world is ever going to change except your own attitude so you just have to decide to accept your lot in life. Treat everyone around you, especially men but basically everyone, like giant children whose mother you are, including the fact that you are honor-bound to just deal with their temper-tantrums, and…yeah, no, I cannot really recommend this, and I really extra super cannot recommend it if you have had any experience of miscarriage/infant loss yourself. She has some astonishing gems and this is sure not one of them. If you’re fascinated with interactions between evacuees and their hosts and ready to steel yourself for the rest, go ahead, otherwise nope.

Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream. Second in its series, more tightly focused than the first and more conventional, in some ways more successful in terms of pulling me in but less structurally interesting. I find myself not knowing where the third one is going, which is a place I like to be. But for heaven’s sake don’t start here.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Hill does an excellent job of not assuming inevitability: knowing what we do of which groups survived does not mean that they “had to” be the surviving groups. Absolutely full of Quakers, Diggers, Levelers, all the sort of thing you’d want, and I do want, and I’m glad to have it.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society. This actually disappointed me a bit. It spent quite a lot of time on theories of the body that I already knew–which you might not, and if so, go nuts, this is the book for you–and not nearly as much time on work and social organization as I had hoped. The chapter on work was brief and fairly general, which felt to me like the exact opposite of what was called for to overturn assumptions about medieval women’s roles in society. Ah well.

Elizabeth Lim, Her Radiant Curse. Discussed elsewhere.

Anna Neima, The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. This is about utopian societies after WWI and the effects of that war on people’s theories of what a better world would look like. That makes it basically catnip for me. I also appreciated Neima’s willingness to go around the world to look at communities in different regions, not just one country or continent–especially as they interrelate in this period. Good stuff.

Noel Streatfeild, Saplings. Another of the books that has a surface-happy ending whose entire point is that it is really, really not happy. This one is about how war, in this case the Second World War, terribly damages children even when they’re on the “home front” rather than the front lines. It’s beautifully observed and well-characterized and terribly sad, and it further cements my belief that part of Theatre Shoes is not as it seems. (This is for adults.)

Stephan Talty, Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day. Briskly written and interesting work about a Spanish man who basically forced his way into being a double agent. Not terribly long.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances. I have a gift for picking up grimdark I might otherwise like at the worst personal moments. Tchaikovsky does some really good worldbuilding with the gods of this world and with passing the story from character to character in a way that almost reminded me of Yourcenar (but without the coin), but he also writes some very successfully dark scenes, so be braced for picking it up on the right day.

Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings. Ueland was more a newspaper opinion columnist than an essayist, and that was very clear from the depth or lack thereof in these writings. Sometimes it was charming to see how she presented social elements that now wouldn’t have to be explained; some ideas aged much worse than others. (Seriously, just…do not propose corrective rape of people whose opinions you disagree with. Just. Don’t. Not charming. Not okay.)

Izzy Wasserstein, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From. A fun and varied SFF collection, some of which I’d enjoyed previously and some of which was new to me, glad to have it all in one place.

Katy Watson, The Three Dahlias. Three actresses who have played/are playing the same iconic detective are in a country house for a convention of her fans when murder strikes, and everyone is–of course–a suspect. They must use the skills they’ve learned from playing her onscreen to solve the case before one of them gets blamed. This was light and charming, but for me it ended up spreading the characterization a little too thin among a few too many characters, not leaving me with a strong sense of any one of them, including the one who eventually turned out to be the killer. I would probably read another if there was a sequel, but probably from the library rather than purchasing it.

Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004. A lot of “collected poems” volumes start at the beginning and you get to watch the poet get better, and this did the opposite, and…it turns out I like that better? I don’t necessarily think that the latest work is the best work, but when someone does start to get more callow and less skilled, there’s that sinking feeling of “oh dear, this is it then,” and I definitely had that in the middle of this volume. Wilber turned out to be another poet I mostly connected with intellectually, and that’s okay.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a stand-alone prequel in the world of Six Crimson Cranes; if you know the characters and the events of that book, some events of this one will be enhanced, but this is a perfectly reasonable entry point to this world and its people.

Channi’s life revolves around her amazing and beautiful sister Vanna, and it always has. When she was a toddler, Vanna was born with a special magical glow–perfect, beloved, amazing. Her father attempted to sacrifice Channi to the jungle witch Angma to save his wife, and it failed–she was cursed with the face of a serpent and poisonous blood, and her mother died anyway. In all the years since, Channi and Vanna have grown up together, each other’s polar opposite in looks–but always the best of friends.

Now their father is choosing a suitor for Vanna. Kings from all around will come to bid on her hand. Her sister Channi, however, is more concerned about her sister’s happiness than about their cruel father’s wealth. Her friends the snakes of the jungle are willing to try to help her protect her little sister–but the entire endeavor gets, as one would expect, quickly complicated, with dragons, demons, and armies pursuing them around the island landscape.

The relationship of sisters and snakes is devoted and charming, and this book serves well either to add dimension to a world already known or to introduce the reader to its environs.

Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution. This did not do what I hoped. It was organized conceptually. Several of the people I have said this to have gasped, “Oh no!” but it isn’t as bad as all that, but it isn’t amazing either. It made the ending less predictable than a chronological biography, but on the other hand there are just great heaps of what I would find interesting missing. I’m reading another book that has the edges of Julian in it already, absolutely accidentally, and already I’m muttering, “why wasn’t there any of this in the other thing.” Not enough Huxley per unit Huxley is not a complaint I expected to have here, and yet here we are. There’s absolutely nothing like the bit in the Haldane bio where Naomi Mitchison bit him. Surely with this many Huxleys somebody had to at least kick somebody sharply. I would have. Maybe it was even Naomi Mitchison, she had several chances. Well, someone else will have to tell me, it’s not apparently Alison Bashford’s job, she was doing something different.

Stephanie Burgis, Claws and Contrivances. Kindle. The second in a series, but it stands alone–frothy fun that has a little bite to it as animal welfare is at the heart of the plots. The animals in question are dragons, and the title format should tell you what era they’re drawing on. Just what I needed for an adventurous escape in a stressful time.

Jackson Crawford, trans. etc., The Wanderer’s Hávamál. I really like this edition of this very old Norse poem: side by side original and translation, followed by lots of translation notes and then a much more loosely done “cowboy” dialect version that was a tribute to the translator’s grandfather and made me smile–I know the Mountain West US dialect he was using pretty well, and he did a good job of it.

Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500-1700. Lots of tables and facts about what was going on in those Dutch towns, some interesting bits but mostly I read this because it was here and I was waiting on my birthday, probably only interesting if you are really interested in the topic.

Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo. Like me, like Auden, like several of my friends, de Waal is in the club of people who write letters to friends who have been dead since before they were born. In this case he became interested in a neighbor of his family and how that life had unfolded for a Jewish person in that part of Paris in the early 20th century. It is not a story with a happy ending, as you can expect from the first half of the 20th, but de Waal notices all the good and bad his absent “correspondent” has along the way, and it’s poignant, lovely, and brief.

Samuel Delany, Empire Star. Reread. I read this for a book club, and I’m afraid I won’t have much to say in the book club. There are things Delany wanted to do here with time and mentality that were fine but not particularly exciting to me at this point in the genre. I’m not sorry I read it but I didn’t engage with it strongly either.

Rebecca Fraimow, Iron Children. Kindle. A novella that explored the sense of grinding permanence only to explode it, looking into questions of loyalty and personal transformation…with mechas and survival in the snow. I tore right through it, lovely stuff.

Margaret Frazer, The Novice’s Tale. A nice little medieval mystery from the reign of Henry VI, who ever bothers with Henry VI, well done Frazer for even remembering him. It’s the first in a series, so it looks like I will have several ahead of me to enjoy when I want nice little mysteries.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. My favorite part of this wasn’t actually the main thread of it, although that was fascinating–it was the parallel case of the werewolf. This was “sure, we’re witches, but we’re good witches, and we fight crime in our dreams”: oh bless, well done, neighbors. But there was also a person on trial for being werewolf and he gave the judges an absolute epic hecking about where they would be without the werewolves going down and harrowing hell for them. This period was a wild ride and I love them for it. Early moderns, bless. Trying to sort out worldview, bless.

Sophus Helle, trans., The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author. Translations from the Sumerian, wow, and then lots of essays and notes about what we know about this poet (or poets) and how poetry and its composition was regarded and who this poet’s contemporaries were, really interesting stuff.

Beth Lincoln, The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels. A Wacky Family Reunion novel and also a MG mystery novel and also an exploration of how much one’s family can predetermine one’s identity vs. how much one gets to choose one’s own. The trans characters’ identities are handled with a light and deft touch in this context. Generally an interesting read and certainly as fast as you would expect for being MG. Walks right on that line of “how much murder can be in a MG mystery really.”

Premee Mohamed, No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories. Premee, on the other hand, has no limits of how much murder. A lot of this is overtly horror, in the vein of cosmic/existential/personal rather than chompy chomp horror, and it’s beautifully done, and also maybe plan to read it a bit at a time so as not to be overwhelmed by the aaaaaaah because it’s beautifully done. Some previously known favorites here and some new to me.

Susan Palwick, Shelter. Reread. I don’t feel like this aged well, but then I look again and some of the problems were problems I feel like Palwick could have seen in 2007 as well, they just…got worse instead of better with time. If you want to talk about failures of compassion in modern society–and it’s explicitly a near-future American setting–I feel like making up a fake environmentalist religion as central to the near-future society and having those people fail in their community and compassion is…passing quite a lot of buck. There were also some pretty serious issues with the portrayal of mental health and its treatment, and yes, some of that was that Palwick was trying to point at lack of compassion, but some of it was Palwick herself conflating symptoms and rushing past potential treatments with a handwave in order to get to the desired science fictional result. This was a book where choice of point of view was a serious problem, because there were two main points of view, both of whom were almost completely isolated–which was deliberate, it was a statement, but it meant that when they held horrifying views and the people contradicting them were also pretty terrible, there was no ground to stand on, you were just stuck in the horrible with nowhere else to go. I don’t intend to return to this; the parts I remembered fondly turned out to be a tiny fraction of the whole. I read it for an online book club, and other people found other things upsettingly handled as well, including adoption.

Pierre Riche, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe. More Carolingians, yes, but also more about their aftermath and periphery, which I enjoy.

Margery Sharp, The Eye of Love. Kindle. An adult book about an artistic little orphan girl who is about as far from Anne of Green Gables as you can imagine. I love them both. Martha is a stolid, laconic little soul who doesn’t give a rip for the neighbors’ opinions, who almost entirely wants to be left alone to draw, and who only really wants to draw things that matter to her. She does not gush. She occasionally, with distaste, uses people’s preconceptions about small girls, but it is not something she enjoys doing and only does it out of dire necessity. Meanwhile there is another plot going on, about her aunt’s domestic situation and whether it will resolve satisfactorily, and the theme ties in with Martha as a young artist seeing the world her own way as per the title. There are two more in this series, which is good because it only got up to about the first third of a coming of age young artist novel while doing the whole plot about Martha’s aunt, but also I am now really curious about what other plots will go alongside Martha’s.

Noel Streatfeild, Aunt Clara and It Pays to Be Good. Kindle, both. What a fascinating pair of her adult novels to read at once. They’re both character studies, extremely well-done character studies. The former is an absolutely hilarious portrait of an extremely nice unfashionable old lady who inherits disreputable property and responsibilities and goes around taking it in her stride and doing the absolute best she can with it while her supposedly respectable relations have fits and try to keep her from realizing what it all is. It’s lovely and also makes some pretty good points about how goodness is not stupidity, thank you very much. The latter, on the other hand, is also talking about respectability, but in its case superficial respectability is rewarded in just the way other novels of its time (and especially the time preceding it) believes that it should be. It is one of the most appalling tragedies you can ask to encounter. Both just beautifully observed.

Amy Wilson, Shadows of Winterspell. A MG fantasy with kids trying to figure out how to make the world better on the limited information given them by adults, but their world has ghosts and all manner of fey creatures. A fun read.

Serge Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Primary sources in translation, so this varied highly from “oh wow this is fun actually” to “how appalling,” as one might expect from several centuries and varied topics and genres. One of the notes I would make on this is that it was published in the late 1960s, and its editorial staff/annotator saw no particular reason to be careful about the distinctions among Kievan Rus, Muscov, Russia, and other polities. I don’t entirely blame them for this; I don’t expect that a Russian writer of the time would have been exacting about Mercian vs. English vs. British vs. Scottish–heck, some American writers aren’t–but there are times when things are discussed or translated with a rather sloppy hand in that regard that’s a bit wince-worthy in the current political climate, and worth keeping an eye on when you’re thinking about what’s actually being claimed about the history of the region (as in, not what certain parties would love it if you thought).

Anta Baku, The Cell Phone Towers of Elfland. Reread. Upbeat serialized fairy tale fantasy with contemporary twist, now collected into one volume and readable in that format, so I did. Not my Richard III but basically still always glad to see Richard III.

Victoria Bates, Making Noise in the Modern Hospital. Kindle. An interesting survey of what has made which kind of noise in hospitals over the last hundred years, how people have tried to address that and what problems they’ve created in the process. Deals with both the objective sense of how much sound there is and the subjective sense of how bothersome it is.

Peter Dickinson, The Blue Hawk. A children’s book of speculative theology and falconry, more or less–Tron (this predates the movie of that name) has an evolving relationship with his gods is not always convenient to the other humans around him. I was not as charmed by this as some other people in the book club for which I read it, nor as I have been by other Dickinson books, but it was a quick read.

Emma Goldman, Living My Life. I put off reading this because autobiographies of people who have lived colorful lives don’t always have the best prose, but I was wrong to do so, the prose is very readable and this long volume goes quickly. And man, you can see how she was willing to piss off everybody here and say basically whatever. Love to see it, honestly. You don’t read Emma Goldman to agree with every word, you read Emma Goldman for the WOW SHE WENT THERE factor, both literally and figuratively.

Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost. This is a novel about an Arabic translation production of Hamlet being put on in the West Bank, and about a Palestinian-British actress returning to Palestine and having massively complicated feelings about her own history, family, identity, work, and everything else. I really liked it.

Alix E. Harrow, Starling House. Discussed elsewhere.

Kat Howard, A Sleight of Shadows. The consequences of trying to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved. You’ll want the first one in this series first, but for that tag-line it really isn’t a downbeat book in the end, it’s just–more implication, more ramification, more fantasy from the generations of us who are not content with “power just is, don’t worry about where it comes from” as an answer in our magic.

Jac Jemc, Empty Theatre. I was disappointed in this. I was promised “over-the-top social satire,” and for 19th century German-speaking monarchs this was…very far under the top. Nor was the satire particularly biting, and no, I am very sure I didn’t just miss it, it was just…a rather blunt instrument. I’d also like to warn that there is a lot of what I’m sure is quite historically accurate depiction of disordered eating, but it is nevertheless depicted in great detail to not a lot of purpose. Meh. Too much Wagner, not enough Bismarck, and yes, I’m aware that could also be said of Ludwig of Bavaria’s life, but really. So much meh.

Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travelers. This is very focused on the uppermost classes (not a lot of merchant travel here, not a lot of thought about economic migrants) and on the most obvious places in western Europe, so it ended up being unsurprising if you’ve done any level of thought about this topic. Not really recommended, alas.

Ian R. MacLeod, Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod. Kindle. Some of these short stories were absolutely gorgeous and some were not for me, and the great thing about a short story collection is that you can just stop on the ones that aren’t for you and go on to the next thing. I haven’t read any of his long form stuff in a while, might be time again.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. This was depressing but interesting. It’s an accounting of who funded what propaganda to make the magical action of the unfettered market look like it works in ways that it doesn’t and had never been proven to do. It’s just astonishing how often economists get to make claims without backing them up. “Does it, though?” ought to be the first question every time someone says, “the market does blah de blah” and yet here we are, dammit. Naomi Oreskes is a treasure. I’m glad I know these details. Also: ughhhhh.

H. G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter. I do like it when I can say “best yet!” about an author’s latest publication, and this is one of those. It’s an Edwardian fantasy that’s another in the sub-genre of fantasy that’s thinking about where power comes from and who pays for it, and the way it handles both familiars and family went really well for me. Excited to see what Parry does next.

Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places. An absolutely lovely collection of recent Pinsker stories, many of which I’d already read but it was nice to have them in the same place, and I had managed to miss a few all the same.

C.L. Polk, Witchmark and Stormsong. Rereads. Here’s another thing I meant by “another in the sub-genre of fantasy that’s thinking about where power comes from and who pays for it.” I really love how Cee does this. I picked up Witchmark for a book club and am just going on with the reread a bit at a time. On the second go-round I really liked what a mirror Grace is of how all of us sometimes only want to fix the parts of what’s wrong with the world that are personally inconvenient to us, how we sometimes have to grump and stumble into doing more.

James Tynion IV and Rian Syngh, The Backstagers Volume One: Rebels Without Applause, Volume Two: The Show Must Go On, and Volume Three: Encore. Comics where high school backstage crew kids at an all-boys’ high school find doors to weird stuff in their backstage areas, have theater nerd adventures together. I read these because there are teens in my life who are 100% the target audience and have birthdays coming up and yep, they’re getting them, they’re absolutely getting them as gifts.