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The Zita the Spacegirl Trilogy, by Ben Hatke

Review copies provided by First Second Books.

First Second was really smart here. The most recent of the Zita books, The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, just came out, so instead of sending me just that one, they also sent me Zita the Spacegirl and Legends of Zita the Spacegirl so I could read the whole thing. Which I could do in a total of less than an hour, because they’re graphic novels for kids, or more to the point for all/most ages. I would say that the main restraint on the Zita books will not be age but temperament. There are going to be a few people who find their cartoon levels of threat frightening or bothersome, but that’s probably going to be as true at age 2 as at age 82.

Zita is extremely charming. She has adventures, she is extremely stubborn, and she makes a very wide variety of friends, including robots and a giant mouse and aliens of all sorts. (I am very much attached to Strong-Strong in particular.) Zita and her friend Joseph are thrown into their adventures, but she is very active and very much attached to virtues like justice, loyalty, friendship, and stubbornness, without being too didactic about them. She has a cool costume and all sorts of aspects one could easily attach to as “favorite,” and while the first story is pretty straightforward and sweet, the second and third ramify from there and have consequences that are not quite so obvious.

It’s rare that I can recommend something without regard to age, but I really can here. The question is whether you like mild, sweet, cartoony space adventure comic books. If you do, Zita will probably make you smile.

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using my words

I have been trying to find a way to say this that will not make the wrong people–which is really pretty much anyone–feel like I am guilt-tripping them.

I am pretty short of social/chatty email these days except for a very small number of the most usual suspects. While things may have turned a corner in terms of getting adjusted to this med, I am still not to the point where things are what one might call “good” or more to the point “highly functional and able to do things like drive and arrange for social outings and stuff.” So if you are a friend of mine and find that you have the time/energy for social/chatty email, that would be a good and useful thing to do. I would appreciate it.

This is the sort of request that is very hard to phrase for two reasons. The first is that I really, really do not want to nag or guilt-trip. Really. The second is that when you ask something like this and then do not get it, that is not always easy. And I have had the “I would like to hear from you more”/”yes I could do that” conversation with a couple of friends in the past and then not heard from them more, like, at all, and that was with individuals who knew that I was talking to them specifically and personally; a more general request is deliberately not meant to be a burden on anyone (anyone! really!) and yet leaves open the possibility that everyone will be unable to do an email blathering about what they read or what they are thinking about ancient Greek wind instruments or what line of paint color names they have thought of next, and will hope that someone else will take their turn at being helpful.

Still. Things have gotten enough better that I can say that this is a thing that might help make this next bit a little less rough. So I am saying.

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Cooking vs. gardening

I’m still working on revisions. I have two kinds of writing process. This kind is cooking. The other kind is gardening.

When I’m cooking, I have one project that I am working on, and I will work on it until it is done, and most of the work (vast majority) I am doing goes towards it. I will still sometimes open a file and write notes or even sometimes complete scenes on another project, so that I don’t lose those ideas (/complete scenes). Sometimes when I’m working on a novel, I write short stories in the middle of it. The longer it takes to write a novel, the more likely it is that I’ll write short stories in the middle of it. The longer it takes to write a particular short story, the more likely it is that I’ll write another short story in the middle of it. Or a novel. Things happen. But when I’m cooking, I might do bits of side project–I might finish chopping the rest of the broccoli that I’m not using in this particular stir-fry, so that it’s ready next time I want broccoli–but I’m not going to start cutting things up for stir-fry and suddenly find that I have chopped everything in the kitchen. Cooking is about knowing the task and working steadily towards the end of the task, which is the meal. Yum.

When I’m gardening, I’m not writing any less, but it’s less focused. I will write a thousand words on one idea and a thousand words on another. Sometimes less–sometimes it’ll be 500 words on a project, or 200. For some people this is a really bad sign. It means that you’re completely unfocused, that you will never get stuff done, that you’re just noodling around with things and enjoying the idea of being a writer without ever finishing anything. At this point I think I can stop worrying about that. I have the assurance from long experience that while some stories never reach the point where they get finished, many to most of the stories that I work on this way do. Most of the stuff I work on in “gardening” mode gets to the point where it’s ready to be “cooked”–it reaches a critical mass where I’m ready to just work on it until it’s done. So it’s not actually something I should feel bad about. It’s not pointless, it’s practice. It’s weeding, tending the soil, picking off aphids. Keeping the whole garden growing.

The weird thing about how I’ve been writing lately–other than the fact that it’s been a lot for months now–is that I haven’t been having to tell myself not to stress about what comes next. That’s…totally unlike me. It’s totally unlike me in general, and it’s not like I am going through a period of less stressing/fussing just now in particular. (Hahahaha no. Seriously, um, no. Nearly everyone who has vertigo ends up with at least some degree of anxiety, and I’ll tell you why. Because it is somewhere on the spectrum from stressful to producing of clinical anxiety to not have a reliable sense of the vertical and to fall over and stuff. Seriously, just on a physical level: your body wants a vertical. And to not fall over, and to not throw up, and stuff. Your body has opinions on that stuff. If you haven’t had vertigo problems, your body might not have made them known. But trust me, they’re there.)

So anyway: it’s not like I’ve generally become a more laid-back, chill person. I’m just…feeling like, yep, there will be a thing that I write next, and nope, I don’t have to be absolutely certain whether it’s Wielding the Stars or King of Flowers, King of the Sea or The Winter Wars or something else on the list or something I think up tomorrow in the shower. A few years back I was asking people to remind me that I didn’t have to figure out what book to write next, and apparently that’s become an automatic function for the time being. Which: cool, okay, plenty else to worry about, thanks, brain. The part of me that can’t resist poking things with a stick is kind of going, “But…why are we…?” But never mind, that part! We’re fine. We will write something else next. It’ll be fun. So okay then.

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short list…sorta

I have a very short to-do list this week, because nearly everything on my to-do list is large. I’ve handled the birthday present shopping and the letter writing and most of the errands and calls to get things fixed and thises and thats, or else I’ve put them off to next week.

So basically there is a flowchart with two questions on it, each with two outcomes. 1. Do I have a glass of water readily to hand? If not, get one. (This is not about some nonsense someone came up with about an abstract number of glasses of water everybody should supposedly drink every day. This is about the med I personally am on, which turns people into raisins. Seriously, this stuff makes you turn your head around and drink from the shower, because the length of time to wash and condition long hair is too long to go without water really.)

2. Do I feel good enough to work on book revisions? If so, do so. If not, go curl up on the couch with someone else’s book.

Seriously, that’s…pretty much the list. I have a couple of stories to work on also. But I have the revision letter from my insightful agent, and I don’t have a lot else on the list for the week, and (possibly not coincidentally) I’m not up for a lot either, so…it’s sort of a pure feeling, when it comes right down to it. Everything is very straightforward. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. No, that’s something else. Drink the water, pet the dog, revise the book. Yes. That’s the one.

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Books read, late February

Michelle-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, eds., Rocket Dragons Ignite: Daily Science Fiction Year Two. I make a policy of not reviewing books I’m in, and I’m in this, so, hey: this exists, I’m in it, I read it.

Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. A mystery series that has a definitive ending other than the death of its author or its main detective is like a dancing bear, and this is no exception. Compared to the delights of the early series, this is not nearly so good, but goodness, look at that! it ends at all! The long-term plot threads are wrapped up, Flavia is more or less launched in the direction we have long suspected she would go…but while I sat down and read it in one big gulp in an hour, there was a lot about it that felt a bit perfunctory the minute I thought about it. I still recommend the series, and I expect that if you get going and like it, I’m not going to be able to talk you out of getting the last tidbits you can about who Dogger is and what happened to Flavia’s mother and that. But the exuberance of the first few was just not there for me in this series ending.

Susan Chitty, Gwen John, 1876-1939. All sorts of interesting tidbits in this bio, but uff da, what a mess these people made of their lives. It was like they were all 22 from age 15 until their deaths, and they forgot to pick someone to be The Sensible One in their group of 22-year-olds. Also I will never look at Rodin statues quite the same way again. My main complaint of Susan Chitty is that she never found a way to refer to her subject other than by both names, even though there is no indication that John went by “Gwen John” compulsively (and in fact every indication that she did not). And 200+ pages of “Gwen John, Gwen John, Gwen John” started to get to be a bit much. I understand that John is a common male name and so might feel funny for a female subject, and that on the other hand one might not feel chummy enough to be constantly calling one’s subject Gwen. Get over either one problem or the other.

Kate Elliott, Cold Steel. Very much dependent on the earlier volumes, so if you want to read this, you probably already know it. I was mostly interested in the worldbuilding, which did not get developed much more in this volume, but the momentum was enough to carry me through happily enough.

Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. The stories in this were mostly too similar and not twisted enough–“here is almost a Cain and Abel story but not quite, but not doing anything very interesting with the differences.” So mostly I would read them and want to say, “okay, and?” The “and” was the art. (It was a graphic novel.) Unfortunately I am the wrong audience for “weak story, nifty art.”

Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot. Quite well-done bio that managed to explain, without going into long digressions, the social and economic forces that led to women artists (particularly Morisot but also others) being a force in Impressionism in ways that were less possible earlier. Discussion of who could afford to paint and what would previously have kept people from it, as well as lots of personal and interpersonal stuff. Very pleased.

Bennett Madison, September Girls. This was the other thing I read in a gulp from the library yesterday while not feeling good. It’s very YA, male protagonist with some chapters of female perspective. I enjoyed it well enough, but I kept noticing how white it was, because I kept expecting it to be a plot point. Because “here is a town in North Carolina that is filled entirely with white people and all the crap jobs are done by teenage blonde girls” did not occur to me until most of the way through as potentially not signaling something interesting about plot, until…there was nothing political it was signaling about the plot. It’s just that everything else I’ve read about that regional setting…anyway, I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say: nope. So there was that then.

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. A very long novel about the personal lives of French Revolutionaries. Screamingly funny in parts; I am still giggling about where the women started imitating Desmoulins. Having come to Mantel from her later work, though, I was a bit startled that she wanted to do something so conventional as these very well-known and central figures’ lives. Further, I felt that the explanation for the final rift was…I’m actually going to hope that “beneath her” is not inappropriate here. Certainly the very ending left a bad taste in my mouth. Not enough to ruin me on Mantel in general. I just felt that she was seeking for an interpersonal complication for something that politics entirely well explain, and also that the interpersonal complication she came up with was, in context, not great.

Jaime Lee Moyer, A Barricade in Hell. Discussed elsewhere.

Marie Rutkoski, The Celestial Globe. Sequel to her previous MG novel. I was a little disappointed because this one was set in Elizabethan London, whereas the one before it was set in Bohemia of the same era. Bohemia: little-used setting, very interesting. London with Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, Shakespeare, Marlowe: not at all little-used, been done quite well by quite a few people. I’m hoping that the third in the trilogy returns to a solidly Central European setting, because I found that a lot more unique and interesting.

Howard M. Sachar, Farewell Espana: the World of the Sephardim Remembered. This book was interesting in parts but not very well-organized. It was not entirely clear that it was going to start with Spain and then go on to the different regions and treat each mostly-temporally-sort-of, so when I got to twentieth century Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complicated relationships rather abruptly halfway through the book, I was pretty startled. Some gaps filled in, but this should definitely not be your first or even your third volume of Judaica/Jewish history/Sephardic history.

Mark Siegel, Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson. Discussed elsewhere.

Johanna Sinisalo, It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction. Kindle. Interesting stuff I couldn’t get elsewhere, although I don’t really like having excerpts of longer works in an anthology. I know tastes vary on that, but that’s mine. It contained the single most disgusting short story I’ve ever read, Carita Forsgren’s “Hairball,” which was good enough that I kept reading despite being more grossed out with every page, but uff da, what a thing. I was much more fond of Maria Saario’s “The Horseshoe Nail” and her time traveling blacksmithing and consideration of what suits which people, and also of Tiina Raevaara’s “Ospreys.”

S. E. Smith, The United States Marine Corps in World War II: Vol. II: Battering the Empire. Grandpa’s. This is all first-person accounts from much closer to WWII, from Marines and journalists who were with Marines. As such, it’s fascinating and valuable, and I’m looking forward to Vol. III. It does bear some caveats; there is a certain amount of racism of the sort that tends to be encouraged in war, and it has not been filtered or softened by time (or any other force) in these accounts. It’s particularly fascinating to watch some of the more virulent racists and how their racism was shaped entirely by propaganda cartoons, because I only know what they’re talking about because I’ve seen those cartoons. I’m referring to the idea that the Japanese, as a people, have buck teeth. At the time this was apparently considered a thing. From the perspective of someone who has seen a great many Japanese and Japanese-Americans while not at war with them, it is as though someone decided that all Germans have either gigantic chins or weak receding chins. I can think of Germans and German-Americans with either trait, but it’s just not a generalized ethnic trait at all. And the buck teeth thing is like that: you think, “What were they talking about?” You can picture the cartoons and think, okay, that’s what they were talking about. But when you try to picture actual Japanese people, you can’t make the propaganda link up with any statistical trait. It makes you wonder what we’re thinking now is just “how [group] is” that our grandchildren will look at and go, “Uh…what are you talking about? No, seriously, what are you actually talking about?” The other thing in this book that was just heart-rending, that I wished for more of, was the account of the surgeon. He was talking about the casualties, and his attitude towards the psychiatric cases was particularly interesting, because he treated them as real but beyond his expertise. This particular surgeon–maybe typical? hard to tell?–would basically say, “Sure, yep, stomach pains,” about the shell-shock cases who claimed they had stomach pains but didn’t check out with any injuries/illnesses, and give them water and leave them alone, saying he tried to talk to the first one and made him cry, so he figured psychiatric work was beyond him. And…I think that’s so much more interesting than the movie version we have, where either you have the gruff military doctor barking at soldiers to get back to the front, or else you have the understanding healer who can talk it all out, the Hawkeye Pierce if you will. This guy talked about how he was a lung specialist back home, how this was all beyond him, and he just didn’t want to make some poor shell-shocked kid worse. Really glad somebody bothered to write it down.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, War Master’s Gate. I am really torn about this book. Philosophically I completely approve of what Tchaikovsky is doing here. He is making the plot arc bend towards an ending! He is not just wandering around endlessly complicating things further and having his characters do ever more stuff and find ever more interesting bug species! This is good! This is what we like! Shaped plot arc, determined action, hurrah, this is artistically satisfying. But in my heart of hearts, I can’t help it, all I really want this series to do is wander around meeting interesting bug kinden and finding out what their different powers are and how they live and what they look like and what their habitats look like. Basically I want Lonely Planet: Bug People. I am not proud of this urge, and it is not one that Tchaikovsky should indulge in me. I will dutifully go and buy him doing the artistically better thing. But bug people. That is what I am reading this set of gigantic fantasy bricks for.

Michael Wolf, Chinese Propaganda Posters. This is what it says on the tin: it’s reproductions of lots and lots of Chinese propaganda posters. They’re sorted by category and translated into English, French, and German. There are some very ordinary ones and also some completely alarming ones like “how a gas mask is supposed to fit properly on Comrade Horse and Comrade Mule” and “we need a whole mess of children to haul this gigantic peach of immortality to Chairman Mao, that is just how much immortality the Chairman needs,” and of course the ever-popular “send your propaganda artist out in the street to look at babies, because I have seen Chinese babies and they do not look like spherical pinkish kewpie demons.” Fascinating stuff.

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A Barricade in Hell, by Jaime Lee Moyer

Review copy provided by Tor. Additionally, Jaime is a personal friend, and we share an agent.

As I read A Barricade in Hell, I kept thinking, “Why can’t I have a TV series like this?” Jaime does the research into her visual cues meticulously, from the flowers to the furriers to the Chinatown streets. They’re touchstones, jumping-off points for the narrative, grounding the fantastical in the historical. And the two main characters fit together so well: Delia’s work with ghosts and poltergeists meshes so well with her husband Gabe’s police work, each complementing and balancing the other, that I keep thinking, “This is such a good place for a scene break in a book…and it would also be a good place for a scene break in a TV show…if I could have a TV show in which a married couple had work strengths that complimented each other like this!” But honestly, it’s not that common in the written side of things either.

And 1917 in the US is such a volatile setting, such a fascinating time, with “modern” technologies just introduced but not ubiquitous (cars, telephones–present but not to be relied upon), and also of course with the US poised on entry into the First World War. A Barricade in Hell uses that and all its attendant tensions without being directly about the politicians in Washington, and without forgetting that even a country that’s been isolationist can’t be isolated. I was so pleased with this, so very pleased. Highly recommended. It doesn’t come out for awhile, which makes now your perfect time to catch up on Delia’s Shadow if you haven’t already.

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Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson, by Mark Siegel

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is a graphic novel with a very distinctive style. The art is all charcoal drawings, not at all period (the setting is 1887) but evocative of period, and when I saw the stag rising up from the Hudson River, I went, “Oooooh,” and wanted to fall in love.

I wish the stag in the Hudson had been, y’know, a great deal more important. Or that the references to Twain and Lafayette had gone somewhere interesting. Or that the two little boys had, or the black boiler workers or…or…something. This was a book of loose ends and missed opportunities. If you’re the sort of person who finds that graphic novels usually have entirely enough story to be satisfying, possibly you won’t feel that way, but if you often feel that there isn’t quite enough there in the best of times, then maybe give this one a miss.

Also…I have been trying to think how to say this tactfully. Some people are in a place personally where “protag is a jerk to disabled spouse” is a perfectly fine narrative component for them and doesn’t really interfere with story. “Oh, jerk to disabled spouse, okay, cool,” they might say, I guess? I don’t really know. I am not those people. I am not in that place. And this is a book with that narrative device, and it is not handled in a self-aware enough way that makes me think, “Well, at least there was the part where….” There is not that part. No. It’s just kind of jerkish. And I wonder if I’m supposed to be using the potential spaces in the narrative to make excuses for the protag? But the other narrative devices (the “cure” for mermaid “affliction” is…what, really? really?) did not really incline me to be in an excuse-making mood.

The acknowledgments thank Pete Seeger and the Clearwater gang, so that’s kind of awesome.

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“I’m so mad, I’m not going to sing my aria!”

(Supernerd points to those who get that joke.)

My story The Suitcase Aria is up at Strange Horizons! Go, read, enjoy! There is also a podcast that I will confess I have not listened to, because I am terrible at listening to podcasts and I have not been well enough to put energy into extra things like, um, listening to podcasts, so please tell me how it is, those of you who are good at podcasts.

The things I find strangest in this story, the dual-purpose canals under the Berlin Opera House, are absolutely true. I made up several other bits, but that was not me, that was history.

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Books read, early February.

Things are really quite bad here. Lots of time on the couch with a book. Hoping for it to ease up…any time now, really. Any time now would be good. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been reading:

Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. I cannot think of any reason you might want to read this book. Bering has a breezy, jokey tone, but he’s very patchy on documentation vs. blathering on with his opinions. There are several interesting books to get written on how we know what we know about sexual response and hard-wiring vs. experiential wiring and how knowledge of taboos and accepted practices gets passed along culturally. This is none of them. Also, Bering starts early on with the assumption that harm should be a gold standard for what is and is not tolerated by a wider society, though individuals and groups may have additional standards for what they personally cannot or will not do or stand for; sounds reasonable enough to me, but he never makes the argument for why–and then halfway through the book says that he hopes he has demonstrated why. Well…no. He didn’t even try to demonstrate why. (Seriously, it was: “I hope I demonstrated the thing I asserted.” “No, you just asserted it.”) And that kind of shaky logic underpins all sorts of discussion here, on a set of topics where it is least helpful and most fraught. NOT recommended, and this is the second book in as many months I’ve gotten on New Scientist’s recommendation only to find it shallow and disappointing.

Gillian Bradshaw, London in Chains (Kindle) and A Corruptible Crown. A pair of English Civil War novels about a young woman who comes to London and becomes a printer and a Leveler. They’re pretty melodramatic–the villains twirl their mustachios with great glee–and there is an element of sexual violence for our heroine to get past. But how often do I get English Civil War novels, much less novels whose plot is “our heroine becomes a printer and a Leveler”? I mean, feel free to go write me more without the sexual violence if you like; until then, beggars, choosers, you know.

James L. Cambias, A Darkling Sea. Discussed elsewhere.

Betty Boyd Caroli, The Roosevelt Women. Mothers and wives and daughters and aunts and cousins of the two Roosevelt presidents, very different personalities and politics. In some places this volume went more in-depth than I’d seen, and in others it glossed over, so it was a good companion volume for others, I think, rather than a place to start. Caroli pointed out that when she’s written about First Ladies in the past, she’s discovered that it’s less that they’re interesting for the men they’re married to and more that we get better documentation of these independently interesting people because of who they married. That’s certainly the case here. I think her decision to deal with Eleanor entirely in the context of her relationships with the rest of the Roosevelt family was a good one, since there is so much available Eleanor material elsewhere, and that’s not the case for the others.

Lyndsay Faye, Seven for a Secret. This has happened twice in a row now: I have mistaken a Lyndsay Faye title and cover on my library list for a random urban fantasy thing. “Oh, I’ll try whatever this urban fantasy thing is,” I have thought. “Maybe it’ll be good.” Lyndsay Faye does not write urban fantasy, brain! (Lyndsay Faye does not write urban fantasy, cover designers!) She writes historical mystery. No fantasy elements. Try to remember this, brain! Also, you already know you like her series, brain! Seriously, brain, keep up! (I remembered the book, just not the author/title. Oh, brains.) This is the series that’s set immediately after the founding of the New York police. This volume deals with blackbirders and the evil they did, entangled with the politics of the early New York City police being funded almost entirely by the Democratic Party, which was not at all sympathetic with abolitionists. I enjoyed it. It would probably be okay to start with this volume, but there is some arc plot that will have more emotional impact if you have the first one under your belt.

Zoe Ferraris, City of Veils and Kingdom of Strangers. Second and third in the series of mysteries set in Saudi Arabia, written by an American woman who married into a Saudi family and lived there for awhile. I think the third one is really the best, so I hope she keeps writing more, if that’s an indicator of how she’s learned to do it. The way that she explores what women manage to do within the Saudi strictures, and how the Saudi strictures change how a murder mystery can be solved, both make for fascinating twists on mystery fiction.

Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600. A pretty good first text if you need a first text on this period. Does what it says on the tin. Also had a screamingly funny section on an extant phrase book for Korean businessmen traveling to China at the end of the period described. Every conversation included phrases like, “You’re joking! Tell me the real price!” and, “Please stop shouting!” I feel that more early language lessons should include, “Please stop shouting!” Especially language lessons for Minnesotans. Teaching us to say, “Can you please say that louder?” in Japanese but not, “Please stop shouting!” looks like a grave oversight in retrospect.

Rawn James Jr., Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. I hope Rawn James Jr. goes and writes more books, because I liked this one pretty well, and the one he wrote on the desegregation of the US military was excellent. While it just says “segregation” in the title, the main focus was on educational segregation, with a little bit of union segregation thrown in where it was relevant. James’s legal experience came in very clearly with the relevant court cases. Good stuff, interesting stuff.

Snorri Kristjansson, Swords of Good Men. Grimdark Vikings. Such grimdark Vikings. There were a few quite good moments, but I…don’t actually like grimdark. Even when it’s done really quite well. I don’t enjoy the levels of bodily fluids and sexual violence. So if you want one of these, yep, here’s one of these. I don’t want one of these. You go ahead.

Peter H. Lee and Wm. Theodore de Bary, Sources of Korean Tradition Volume One: from Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century. What they mean here is Korean Religious tradition, which is why I ended up muttering, “too much Buddhism, not enough roller derby” at this book repeatedly, and at one point wailed, “there is no Dana, only Buddhism!” Don’t get me wrong: I recognize that Buddhism is immensely important to Korea’s history. It’s just that every time I would come upon a reference to something else–anything else–that might in the broader sense be considered part of Korean tradition, I would seize upon it eagerly. “So-and-so got on the ship to China.” Yes, ships? Tell me about the ships. Merchant fleets separate from the fishing boats in this period? How big? Made of what? What kind of sailing technology? “Here is what Buddhist texts they studied when they got to China.” Aughhhh. Or else something about mulberries and silk, and I would perk up, yes, tell me about the silk, tell me about the weaving industry, the dyeing industry, the silk trade, the mulberries. “Here is how they are a metaphor for Buddhism.” AUGHHHH. So I now have an extensive reference about how Buddhist and Confucian thought affected Korea in this period, which is good to know, it really is. It’s just…Korean history. A continuing quest.

Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. Two comic novels, not really upbeat but not tragic either, one in the 1930s and the other in the 1940s. The spy novel ending of Pigeon Pie had me just howling, so if you’ve read ten million non-comic spy novels, by all means go to. They’re quite short, and while there’s not a lot there, there are worse things for a day on the couch.

Chris Moriarty, The Watcher in the Shadows. I have been waiting for this sequel to The Inquisitor’s Apprentice, and then it slipped out without my noticing somehow. Definitely recommend that you start with the first one for full effect, but: magical early twentieth century New York with all sorts of class warfare and ethnic variety thought through. Very much my cup of tea.

Kenneth Oppel, Such Wicked Intent. Another of his prequels to Frankenstein. Gothy, angsty YA. Meh. Not sorry I read it, glad there aren’t more so I wouldn’t have to decide whether to keep going.

Guy Rickards, Jean Sibelius. Tolstoy was so wrong. Dozens, thousands of Finnish families of this era were unhappy in precisely this way: father drinks and everyone is miserable; father stops drinking awhile and everyone is miserable; father starts drinking again and everyone is miserable. Death of one of the children. Additionally, typhus. Seriously, the biographer was of that suboptimal kind who went around armchair-diagnosing with all sorts of things, but even so it really looks like the only interesting thing Janne Sibelius ever did was write music. If you ever think that being brilliant is enough to save you from being a crashing bore and kind of a jerk, go read a Sibelius biography. Also: I have read a great deal about a great many Finns, and Sibelius appears to be the first one who hasn’t had anything whatsoever strange and amusing happen to him. Really. Anything. Unless it’s the fault of the biographer, who didn’t seem that bad, you just would not want this man to dinner, because he would be devoid of anecdote and drink up all your booze. Go listen to the music instead and save yourself the trouble.

Marie Rutkoski, The Cabinet of Wonders. First in a middle-grade Middle-European fantasy series. Clockwork, magic globes, alchemy, plenty to like. I look forward to the rest, but the afterword made me howl with laughter, because apparently Rutkoski’s Czech relatives are my Swedish relatives in disguise.

Anya von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. Oh, I loved this. So glad that Zalena recommended it, because I probably wouldn’t have gone and found it on my own. von Bremzen goes through the decades of the Soviet Union from a culinary perspective but with digressions into other points of interest–the fate of the 1927 Uzbek Women’s Day festivities made me cry and go put various books on Uzbekistan on my wishlist, for example, and apparently I’m going to have to make Stalin’s favorite dish this summer when the little eggplants are good at the farmer’s market. Fascinating book. Vivid, funny, sad, fascinating.

Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great. Discussed elsewhere.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Scenes of Childhood. Perfect for curling up on the couch while not feeling good, especially if you have an Edwardian sense of humor, which is one of the kinds of sense of humor I have. This book features The Poodle, and I kept reading bits of it out to the long-suffering Mark; it’s that kind of book. The only down side is that the rest of Sylvia Townsend Warner is not easy to get, and now I want it more.

Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. This is an extremely important book to have out there, and an extremely difficult book to read. For example, the things that the “father of gynecology” actually did with black women to figure out how to treat fistula…the details are harrowing to think of. Even if you think you’re thinking of them now, unless you actually have the details, they will be more harrowing than you think. Washington was apparently quizzed by more than one person while writing this book about whether the book would make black people distrust medicine, and I think she’s correct that the practices in it would, but the book would not. I think it’s extremely important to have this information available for people who need it for specific purposes, and also I think it’s important for some people who don’t specifically need it to know it. That said, you’ll want to consider carefully whether you want to be one of those people, because…as I said, harrowing. Carefully researched, carefully considered, really intelligent and thorough. But oh, those poor people. I told a family member that I am okay with being the one in our family who holds this knowledge. It needs knowing, but…not everyone has to make themselves deal with it. We can spread that out a bit.

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Being imperfect, together

In my internet wanderings, I ran into this open letter to lung cancer patients who smoked. And…I feel pretty strongly this way. I run into obits sometimes where they specify that someone died of lung cancer even though they never smoked, and I think to myself, because if they had, their families wouldn’t have permission to grieve? My grandpa smoked, back in the day, and he quit before I was born, but his COPD contributed to his death. He didn’t have to earn my grief with perfect lung-related behavior. He didn’t even have to earn my grief with perfect Grandpaing. Not a one of us is perfect. Not a one, though some of us are amazing. Sometimes we get a chance to do better. We try our best, except sometimes we don’t. We try our best at the things we can manage. Except sometimes we don’t. And we love each other anyway. And then we’re gone, and we’re allowed to grieve. We don’t have to justify our grief with righteousness.

I get upset about this in the fundraising letters from the charities I support. Habitat for Humanity sends me these letters about these families in trouble, all the good choices they’ve made and how they’re in trouble anyway, the virtuous poor, and I think, okay, yes, I believe in those virtuous poor, I believe that happens sometimes, but. But. I also believe in people who didn’t make perfect decisions and still need a place to live. It’s all right to say, “We believe that it’s not okay for people to be homeless.” It’s entirely fine to say, “We are people who think that other people should have a safe warm place to sleep. Is that who you are too? Join us. Be people who think that too. Be those people, together.”