Novel Gazing Redux

Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Lots of things about going smash against the Spanish in the 16th century, mostly, although extending around it. Fun bits of culture clash where the Spanish are baffled by the Low Countries and vice versa. Their women! Their literacy!  Yyyyes, excellent. A bit of a specialist volume, but interesting for that.

Holly Black, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. I have enjoyed some of Black’s novels, and others have just not really hit me well. Apparently I appreciate her much more at shorter lengths. I’m motivated to get the novel version of “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” just to compare, because I thought that the short version did an excellent job with the gaps between our perceptions of other people and their reality. And so did a later story in the volume, “Paper Cuts Scissors,” which had lovely library imagery as well, even though I am a tough sell on library stories–in fact the stories I liked most were the ones I would have expected to be a tough sell on–so in general I will keep looking for Black’s short fiction from here on out.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. I suspect that Bolz-Weber’s book will resonate most with those who are most aligned with an organized church. They will probably feel rueful about themselves in spots, supported in spots, nudged in spots. A lot of the places where Bolz-Weber says “we,” though about what we expect, what we want, what we do…become less applicable the less aligned you are with a formal and hierarchical church. If you are not aligned with organized Christianity at all, this is not the book for you, I don’t think.

Vera Brosgol, Anya’s Ghost. This is one of the places where my status as a non-visual person really limits my interactions with the comics medium, because for me this was just a random ghost story, pretty well-done but not amazing, and the art also being pretty well-done was not that big a draw. For others it will probably be more so. (I was reading comics recommended to me as possible Christmas presents for a few people on my shopping list. Not, alas, successfully, but also not painfully.)

Kurt Busiek & Benjamin Dewey with Jordie Bellaire and Comicraft, The Autumnlands Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw. This comic mostly has anthropomorphic animals as characters, but the champion who is summoned is a human. And I’m done; I hate that. Humans are the special ones! What about badgers? I ask you. Some beautiful landscape pictures here, but: there are venomous shrews in the world. Echidnas. And yet the human has to be the chosen one? Get away from me, book with pretty landscapes.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle. A memoir of his family and their setting. I found it to be a fast and compelling read that gave a very different personal context than I’d had access to before. Worth the time for sure.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. Reread. Yes, I know, but I gave it to a friend to read and we were talking about it and I got lured. This time one of the tiny points that hit me that was different, being at a small private Minnesota liberal arts college in the early ’70s vs. the late ’90s: being “on financial aid” and having an on-campus job was a specific thing, not just, like…life for every single person you knew except literally one. I have no idea how many times I’ve read this book, and I love some of the same things every time, and yet there’s always something different.

Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. Quite a focus on the Orthodox Jewish culture of the setting, so if you know someone who wants to see themselves in such a heroine and/or would like to learn about that culture, here is a way. I didn’t find the action plot to be very well-paced, and it felt a bit preachy about skills/values in the resolution, but not offensively so.

Peter Haining, ed., Time Travelers: Fiction in the Fourth Dimension. This book…someone picked it up randomly ages ago, and I can’t put “reread” because it’s not in my booklog. In fact I’m not sure any of us ever read it. I think it might just have accompanied us around from apartment to apartment to house, looking like the sort of thing we might like. Which it is not. It is from 1997. I remember 1997. Women had been invented then; I remember specifically having been invented then. You would not know it from this hostile, smug book, where women are not only not authors but also substantially not protagonists, not anything really in most of the stories but dizzy objects, prizes. And the time through which these men’s thoughts traveled–all of time, all of space in most cases–was so damnably small. These were the sorts of stories that would have made me write The Stuff We Don’t Do in a fury if I hadn’t already written it, so it was a relief that I already had, because I was busy that week. And no. Just no. At least we can stop hauling this book around with us. Uff da.

Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm, Good As Lily. It felt like the title wasn’t adjusted after the comic evolved. Still: teenager has to deal with different ages of herself, hijinks ensue. Good enough that I reached for the next DKK thing on my library pile.

Derek Kirk Kim, Same Difference. Friends figuring out an interpersonal minor mystery of sorts. Mostly friend interaction of a young adult sort. Entertaining and light.

Hope Larson, Gray Horses. Slightly surreal bilingual foreign exchange student comic. Pretty but not as insightful as I had hoped.

Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do. Ask me if I was actually surprised. Oh, just ask me. There is some actual science here confirming that my habit of finding water and walking near it is very sensible and healthy. There is also a near-epic amount of woo, some of it in evo-devo directions, so…handle with care.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia! Unlike Russell’s short story collection, this is more grounded-weird than way-out-weird. Grounded weird is enough: it is set in Florida. It’s the story of a family of teenagers who have lost their mother and are figuring out which parts of their world were real without her and which were a collective delusion. The alligator wrestling is entirely real. Much of the stuff around it…well, that’s the book. Beautifully written, much to enjoy without the way-out-ness. Very well-characterized. I am a Karen Russell convert.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, and Takeshi Miyazawa, Runaways: The Complete Collection Volume Two. More of the same, more or less, without quite so many of the original characters, with more crossovery characters. This is not improving, but I still like some of the original “your parents are supervillains and you run off to do better” premise enough that I’m still with it, but I probably won’t stick with it to the bitter end.

Review copy provided by Sterling.

The subtitle on this glossy coffee-table book is “Legendary Automatons and Androids from the Ancient World to the Distant Future.”  It spends a lot of time on the fictional robots, spending a full page spread on most of the author’s favorites from both written media and the movies.  But there are also real life examples of automata and robots, including gems like Su Son’gs Cosmic Engine.

The author’s stage name makes her passion for the topic clear, but even if she was writing as Betsy Peterson, it would be apparent from the way that she squees about robot after robot how much she loves the subject matter.  This is not a book for serious academic research.  This is a book for poring over the pictures, for going, “Gort!  I love Gort!”  (What? I do love Gort) and, “Daneel is the best thing he ever wrote,” and other bouncy happy fan reactions.  And its timing, coming out at the end of the year, is very convenient: if you’re trying to come up with the right present for someone with a lot of nerd identity but no particular inclination toward cerebral research, that person might well enjoy a hundred favorite very shiny robots, with pictures of Elektro and Sparko from the 1930s and allusions to Marge Piercy and Kraftwerk.

Please consider using our link to buy Robot Universe from Amazon.

Constance Ash, ed., Not of Woman Born. Reread. We have a bunch of anthologies on the shelf that no one has picked up in ages, and I’ve been reading them a bit at a time, looking for forgotten treasures. This one was very late-’90s focused, not at all what you’d get out of asking people to do a reproductive tech anthology now (which is interesting in itself–same theme every twenty years?), but the hidden gem for me was Janni Simner’s story. When I read it the first time in college, Janni’s was just a name, one of the unfamiliar names in the table of contents, and while the story charmed and interested me, I don’t remember it particularly.  This time it read as a harbinger of thoughtfulness to come from Janni.  Perspective can make all the difference.

Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Focused on how the Spanish colonists used some kinds of writing and denigrated others to colonial aims.  A certain amount of interest in native writings, though not enough for my tastes.  Interesting book, brief and to the point.

Lyndsay Faye, The Fatal Flame.  The wrong timing of this book for me, I’m afraid. I have really liked this historical mystery series of Faye’s, but I had just finished bouncing off yet another historical TV series that treated prostitution as the default historical profession for women. (Farmer, people. The default historical profession for women was farmer. I get it that you don’t always want to film that, but: farmer.) I am glad that some people–some of them friends of mine!–have thoughtful things to say about sex work and sex workers in historical settings, but on the whole I am becoming a tougher sell for casual portrayals.  Faye’s book really skirted the edges of that.  And yet it did all sorts of things I like, mid-19th century early policing and immigration and labor tensions and politics, woo! so I really think this is a case where it was a badly timed selection for me. I’d start at the beginning of the series, not with this one, though.

Katrina Firlik, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. All sorts of interesting mechanical details about what neurosurgery feels and smells like. Unevenly paced and edited, so Firlik will be chirping along about various infections and then suddenly hit you with a Raymond Chandler poem that knocks your knees out from under you. I think this one doesn’t cross the line into “of interest no matter what,” it mostly really is of interest if you like brains.  (Brains!) But I do.

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Starts with the very earliest colonial days, goes through to the 20th century, all the reasons why a person with some African and some European ancestry might choose to cross what we as Americans perceive as the color line and try to be perceived as purely white.  Also went into some of the logistics of that type of passing and some of the things that might be considered drawbacks or losses from that choice. I understand why Hobbs chose to focus on a black/white split only, but I wish I knew where to get more of the books (or if there are any yet) that go into the gradations of brown: what persons of partial Native American ancestry had as options, what persons without that ancestry managed to use as options all the same, where there were shades of not-quite-whiteness perceived at the time that are less clear to us now (did some people we would call African-American consider it useful to pass themselves off as Jewish? some Mediterranean European ethnicities? other world ethnicities that were lesser known to white populations at the time? when/where were those choices common?).  It’s totally okay for that not to be the book Hobbs wanted to write, and yet it is a set of dimensions about race, racial passing, and the American experience that I hope someone does choose to write about in depth.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy. At one point I laughed loud enough to alarm the dog.  And I love the Translator so very much.  There’s more going on with Stations and Ships and who is Significant, and I really love those questions–human vs. Significant–I really love how this series is wrapped up in that way.  But what I think is likeliest to stick with me and make me want to reread and reread is the Translator.

Jenny  Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan. Many of you have read an essay or article from this book, about girls in Afghanistan dressing as boys and living as boys for part of their childhoods for various reasons.  Nordberg goes farther into gender in modern Afghanistan and how it is not quite what Westerners assume.  My main qualm about it is that she often seems too surprised herself that gender is not a monolith, that the treatment of it in her Swedish upbringing was not universal. The anecdotes about Afghani life and gender are fascinating, though, and well worth the (short) time.

Daniel José Older, Half Resurrection Blues. Some of these characters have short stories associated with them, and I’ve liked the short stories, so I was glad to pick up the novel. It was at least as good.  It’s pacey and fun, its characters what we should have seen in urban fantasy ages ago–sharp and funny and emotionally involved with each other and with their city. I’m very glad to see this is the beginning of a series.

Kim Stanley Robinson, ed., Futures Primitive: The New Ecotopias. Reread. This anthology made me so angry. It was not making even the vaguest attempt at writing ecotopia, at tackling any of the ecological problems that were already, by the mid-’90s when it was written, starting to become quite clear–I remember, I was there. Robinson had written actual ecotopia himself, and this was a reprint anthology, so one couldn’t even chalk it up to “he asked a bunch of big names and was disappointed in what he got but had to go with it.” Much of it was undirected primitivism, some of it not even that, but the ecological component was nebulous at best. We’ve kept this anthology on our shelf since the late ’90s, and I’m afraid it was not one that rewarded the shelf space or a reread.

Matthew David Surridge, Reading Strange Matters. Discussed elsewhere.

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 5. Kindle. It turns out that when I got around to reading the Kindle copy, I had already read basically the whole thing online. So I merely note the completeness for my own records.

Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance. Discussed elsewhere.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, and Takeshi Miyazawa, The Runaways Vol. 1. This made me smile, although the ending of the volume–well, I’ll be interested to see whether anything happens in volume 2 that makes me like the very ending any better.  There were all sorts of fun bits along the way, enough to make me want to keep going in the series, but the very ending left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. This is the story of a bunch of teens who find out that their parents are supervillains, basically, and run away and try to deal with the entire situation themselves. Many of them have some flavor of superpowers themselves, and there are other superpowered people in the world, and…well.  Hijinks, as you would expect, ensue.

Brian K. Vaughan et al, The Escapists. This is an incredibly establishment comic for a comic about indie comics. The self-awareness factor did not seem high. It wasn’t offensive, but I didn’t see a lot of point unless you’re a rabid fan of Kavalier & Clay and possibly even then.

Review copy provided by the author.

Matthew is someone I know a bit from Farthing Party in Montreal; I’ve talked about books with him in that context. If you don’t know him but the name sounds familiar, it’s either from his essays on Black Gate or for the Puppy slate Hugo nomination he declined for same. Since he had nothing whatsoever to do with either subgroup of Puppies, I was not at all surprised to see him decline.

This is a collection of those essays, existing on the borderline of reviews and book analysis.  At the same time as I was reading it, my husband Mark was reading Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great, and the similarities and differences were interesting.  Reading Strange Matters has a much newer skew, whereas What Makes This Book So Great goes back much farther.  The Surridge covers only short series, focusing mostly on stand-alone works; the Walton goes into depth on long series.  But both focus primarily on books for which they have at least some good things to say. Both focus on books that are worth their time and yours, and why those books are worth a look.

After a few pieces, I found myself getting up to jot down titles–I have read most of the works covered, but not all, and I wasn’t trusting that I’d remember which ones exactly piqued my interest.  Even with as much as I read, there were some titles that were new to me.  While Surridge gives us thoughts about books that got wide mainstream coverage–Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus comes to mind, a favorite with book clubs all over the continent–but most of the titles could use more attention.  He touches on several of my neglected favorites: Minister Faust, for example, gets lengthy attention.  There is analysis not of a Nalo Hopkinson novel but of each of the short stories in a collection.  Leah Bobet and Susan Palwick each get an essay.  The nature of the collection means that if you do happen upon a rare piece of no interest whatsoever, it’s easy to flip pages to the next item.

A quick and broadening reading experience, if you’ve enjoyed Surridge’s thoughts in the past or wondered about them, this is your chance for more.

Please consider using out link to buy Reading Strange Matters from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

The old phrase “planetary romance” has been out of style for decades, and it’s a shame, because it’s just the description we need of Radiance.  The planets in it are not the ones we’ve researched, and they’re not meant to be–they’re more the old romantic notion of a solar system that might contain civilizations and settlements livable to the human race in the blink of an eye.

And not just civilizations but art, and not just art but the movie industry. Radiance is a cascade of images, a filmstrip spliced together from bits of its characters’ lives and works–some of them overwhelming, meant to be, metaphors and bits of tossed away worldbuilding to sum to a felt rather than a logical whole.  Its main character, Severin Unck, is the documentarian daughter of a filmmaker, found on his doorstep; she finds in turn a boy with a horrible wound.  And then there are the callowhales, necessary for the idyll of space travel to be even as much of a flawed idyll as it is.

I loved the callowhales most. I loved the callowhales best. I think some people will stay for the tough-talking detectives, or the drugs, or life in the movies. But for me it was to find out everything, anything I could about the callowhales. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? I found them much more compelling than Severin Unck and her human compatriots in and out of the film world, but they were needed to give the callowhales context, contrast, and–oddly, given their descriptions–heft.  A Radiance of callowhales alone would have swum murkily through the solar system–it took the film industry to bring them into the light.

Please consider using our link to buy Radiance from Amazon.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. This is short and interesting, and I think most of the reviews I’ve seen of it that react badly do not take into account that it is not talking to them.  I think it’s legitimate to have a specific audience even when you’re publishing (with “public” in the root of “publishing”), and when you’re outside that audience to take it into account.  I particularly liked the way that Coates cited some of his stronger influences; that comes into play later in this book post.  Doesn’t take long to read, part of a conversation on race in America that’s long overdue.

Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution. If you don’t know a lot about how the US went from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, this is a pretty straightforward book about that era and the personalities at the centers of power who shaped it.  It was fairly short and did not really subvert any of the standard narratives that I could see.  It’s a lot more useful as an introduction than as an in-depth look.  If you’ve been listening to Hamilton and wanting to know more, this is not the place.

John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion. Reread.  Reread for the first time since the week Mike Ford died.  The story that really stayed with me this time was “Erase/Record/Play.”  It’ll be a different one every time.  Weirdly, I have only ever read this book in late September/early October: 2004, 2006, and 2015.  Also I am having a perennial struggle with anger at the universe, because I would like to have new Mike Ford stories to compare these to, and right now it is for various reasons being hard that I do not.

Maria Dahvana Headley, Magonia. I fell in love with this book immediately. She knows things about chronic illness that are so true and funny, and she knows things about that intense passionate teenage friendship that is on the verge of being something else, and all of it goes with bird people in ways that made me sit down and get swallowed up right away.  I just said yes to this whole book, yes, families, yes, cloud ships, yes, all of it, give me more of this book. Sing me this story. Make me lists, tell me about your people, yes.  All the yes.

Reginald Hill, Death’s Jest Book. This is the other half of the story with Too Much Franny Root in it, and it’s probably my least favorite of the late half of the Dalziel and Pascoe series.  I will be glad to have moved on in the series from it, but things kept coming up, so this is the only one I got to this fortnight.

Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington, Hanzai Japan. Discussed elsewhere.

Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, An Apprentice to Elves. Discussed elsewhere.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Against a Brightening Sky. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove.  Okay, look.  Genre is a tag cloud, right? It’s not an exclusionary thing where one label bumps out another.  So I’m all for some weirdo getting paid extra money by the establishment and having her books sold all sorts of places–I bought this one in Half Price, but the original sale sticker said Urban Outfitters, which, really? no.  But let’s be real: Karen Russell is, in fact, some weirdo, kids.  She’s one of us.  There is a story in here with US Presidents reborn in the bodies of very confused horses. The vampires in the titular story: they are not just a meeeeetaphor, they are vampires, with, like, the fangs and stuff.  (Not that it does them any good, but I like that part.)  This is the weird shit.  Don’t let the fact that she’s not publishing in Uncanny and SH distract you: this is the serious weird shit.  They can tag it with literary all they want, and that’s great, pay the weirdo, very glad for her. But you need to not lose track of it just because someone who doesn’t read it told you that literary is four pages of description of a tree or all about someone’s divorce or some other dumb description I’ve heard of literary fiction in the last six months.  Lady will make you go, “What?  What?  What are you even doing?”  Which is part of what we’re here for.  Well.  I am, anyway.

Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Sanchez is one of the influences Coates listed above, and I was looking for some new-to-me poets anyway.  I’m not the main audience for her poems, either, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t touch me.  I got to “Malcolm” and knew they would be powerful, and “Towhomitmayconcern” made me smile.  I paused also on “On Passing through Morgantown, Pa.” and “Aaaayeee Babo (Praise God)”–four poems in a short collection is a good number for me.  Glad I picked it up.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks. A light compendium, engagingly written, lots of side bars (yeah, sorry, I don’t know what to call them that isn’t punny), lots of quick information if you’re feeling like plants and booze. A good worldbuilding reference guide for writers or probably a pretty good present for the relative in your life with whom you have very little in common except that you both like [fill in booze here]: if you can’t take a bottle of the previous on the plane, get them this and you’re set for Christmas.  Or do both if that’s your price point.

Chris Van Allsburg, Zathura. Well, this was the deciding factor: I went and took all the other Chris Van Allsburg books off my library list.  Striking visual style has consistently not added up to any of them being the book that I like and want to keep around for poring over with small people; I give up.

Jonathan Waldman, Rust: The Longest War. This book jumps all over the place, with varying chapter lengths, about the wars we’re currently fighting against oxidation in industrial and consumer settings, and what consequences those have, good and bad. It’s nerdy and engaging but a little unfocused in places.