Novel Gazing Redux

Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria. Seventh century Northumbria is not something I’ve gotten a lot of outside of Hild (which is fiction), so it was a lovely gap to have filled in. I really like the interesting interplay between various ethnicities and religions/religious subtypes. Fascinating stuff, lots of maps, lots of discussions of how we know various things about this period.

Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust. I squeed when I saw this existed. It’s the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and the sixth put a pretty firm period to the series, [redacting] Flavia off to [redacted]. Well, it turns out that [redacted] has murders and opportunities for intrepid girl chemist-detectives to poke their noses into things, too! So Bradley is ending plot arcs, not the series, HURRAH MORE FLAVIA HURRAH HURRAH.

Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. Interesting take on the saga writer, effects on his life and his effects on further sagas. Sometimes good to argue with.

Greer Gilman, Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Kindle. One of Greer’s Jacobean noir novellas. Language just a perfect romp. Not long enough to get tired of any particular playwrights, fey, etc. even if you have low tolerance for any particular among them.

Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel. Latest in the Benjamin January series. I think it would work all right as an entry point, although I recommend reading the whole series. This dovetailed nicely with my reading the last few months, because it’s partially set in the Caribbean and deals with the effects of the Haitian Revolution, among other things. Slavery, family, and more. I probably shouldn’t have read the latest installations of two of my favorite mystery series in one fortnight, but I am weak.

Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm. What a strange little book. It’s a very narrative style, telling the story of that year in retrospect–the things that we think of as important harbingers of future things now rather than what the people of 1913 would have thought of as important. It’s translated from the German, and that’s remarkably clear: the focus is Germanophone (? is this the equivalent of Anglophone or Francophone? what I mean is not just citizens of Germany but also throughout the Habsburg lands of the time), and the focus is very much avant garde, to the point where someone who has not thought much about the continental avant garde of the early 20th century would end up saying, “Who?” repeatedly. There is nothing of Asia, Africa, or South America in this book, and apparently the main notable thing that happened in 1913 in North America was that Louis Armstrong first picked up the trumpet. (Which, hey: notable. I just think that once you’re reporting on when in 1913 Picasso had a cold, you might notice a few other things in the world.) Funny in spots, interesting in spots. Very weird.

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland. Reread, but not since approximately grade school. This says “1” on the spine, but I don’t recommend starting here. Jansson is clearly still getting her feet under her. It has some funny bits (OH THE HEMULEN), and I think it’s worth reading, but you’ll get the wrong impression of how good the series is if you start here, and there’s no reason to read them in publication order, really none–on the first page there’s mention of the flood that’s in a later book, so. May as well start later, with something where she’s got it on all cylinders.

Matsu Kannari, Kutune Shirka, the Ainu Epic. This is very short but filled with otters. It is not a complete epic, it’s a fragment of an epic. Still, there’s not that much in English about the Ainu–Japan is mostly presented as a monolith, culturally/mythically–so this is a good thing to have.

Frank L. Klemen, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War. (US Civil War, just for the record.) This was not what I hoped it would be. It’s not really the book’s fault: it did a perfectly cromulent job of covering mostly pro-Confederate conspiracies and secret societies in the North during the US Civil War itself. But I was hoping for a broader scope than that–leading up to the war and after the war would have been nice, and more of the pro-Union secret societies as well. (MORE WIDE AWAKES.) So I will have to find another source for that stuff.

Pascu Stefan, A History of Transylvania. This is an old book, from the Soviet era, so there are weird things about it. Particularly there is a firm and abiding hatred for Pan-Slavism that takes its form in insisting that Romanians are true Dacian Romans dammit. And you can see why, living under the Soviet influence, that might be a direction of subtle rebellion–Russia has often used Pan-Slavism to mean Russian domination. But Pascu didn’t really seem to see how similar the situation he was describing was to, say, Gaul. Ah well. Still some interesting gaps filled in, mostly in the “kings and crowns” direction.

Abra Staffin-Wiebe, A Circus of Brass and Bone. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the second book in a series. The first one, some of you will recall, was a bit disappointing in that it focused on the two brothers who were fairly standard fantasy novel archetypes and gave very little space to their sister who was a princess who was also Minister of Finance.

Well! You will be pleased to know that Adare, the princess in question, appears a great deal more in this book.

She is no longer Minister of Finance. She acts very little like a former Minister of Finance. I don’t really understand why Brian Staveley came up with a POV character who was Minister of Finance if he didn’t want to write about one.

Also in increased content over the previous book: torture. Lots and lots more torture. General misery, despair, and definitely torture.

Oh, and also phoneticized “peasant” dialect. You know, for the scum common people.

Whee.

And yet I read this volume all the way through, so there have to be some good things about it. I was mostly invested in a handful of secondary characters, honestly, and the prose style is readable (when not doing phoneticized dialect), and I was hoping that the spoilerific means of getting from place to place would have some interesting stuff attached to it.

I’m not sure this is grimdark proper, but I suspect that people with a higher tolerance for grimdark than I have would enjoy it more.

Please consider using our link to buy Providence of Fire at Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the sequel to California Bones, and while having read the first one adds a lot to one’s understanding of the characters and setting, I think it would be a perfectly reasonable place to dive into this world. There are lots of weird things going on, but I think they’re weird things a reader could pick up on readily: golems who are functionally pretty human, osteomancy as a major force in human culture, an alternate Southern California that’s filled with institutions that are close but not quite the same.

The main character of California Bones, Daniel, returns older, wiser, and with a teenaged golem in tow. Sam, the golem, has been learning magic and life from Daniel, not that it’s a great life under the circumstances. Sam is the late Hierarch’s golem, and everyone expects him to be one of the greatest osteomancers ever. To date he has been completely underwhelming. He has to stay mostly hidden, because he looks like the Hierarch, so–no friends, no school, no home, nothing stable, nothing normal. Nothing a young golem’s heart yearns for, nothing but more magic practice and more truck stops.

Until the powers-that-be in LA start putting together a Pacific Firedrake. Sam and Daniel know that this is the magical equivalent of the H-bomb, the super-weapon, the one thing you do not want the other guy–or pretty much any other guy–to have. So they set about stopping it. Naturally, this doesn’t go quite as planned, and they need a series of allies–old friends, new clones, a throwaway reference to a pretty cool creature–to help them achieve…something. That is sort of like their goal, sort of? In a goal-like way? Look, I try to avoid spoilers. There’s closure, I will say that. Definitely closure. Fun stuff, and the LA references feel more geographical and less cultural to me this time around, so there are fewer “really, alternate history got there?” moments. (Also, I like second books for a reason, and one of them is that my expectation structure is set.) Recommended.

Please consider using our link to buy Pacific Fire at Amazon.

Elizabeth Bear, One-Eyed Jack. This is the Promethean Age book without an “And” in the title. It’s full of the Matter of Vegas, and full of sidelong cultural references that clarify themselves if you don’t get them the first time. The cultural myths touched on here aren’t my personal myths, but they’re still well-handled.

Mary Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. Lots of stuff about Pompeii and what we know about it pre-lava. The factoid that will haunt my mental nostrils is that they had an amphitheater/coliseum that seated 20K people, and archaeologists have not yet found any trace of any latrines whatsoever, so–20K people using the stairs and corridors. Aughhhhh Rome.

Tobias S. Buckell, Mitigated Futures. Kindle. This is a very well-chosen title. The futures Buckell portrays in these stories are alarming in spots, but never overwhelming. There’s always a human note–not always hope, but at least one of its cousins–to temper the rough spots.

Sean B. Carroll, Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize. This is about Monod and Camus, at the beginning and at the end. In the middle it’s substantially about the French Resistance, to the point where I shelved it with WWII history when I was finished. Carroll is a biologist I saw at Nobel Conference this fall, so I was excited to have his latest book. Readable and interesting, and I was not particularly interested in Camus, going in.

Peter Dickinson, Inside Grandad. Kindle. I am so glad that Jo warned me what kind of book this is when she recommended it, so that I made sure I could read it when I was going to see Mark’s grandpa and could get a hug from him. This is the incredibly well-done story of a boy coping with his grandfather’s stroke. If you’re a person who has had a grandparent who was really, truly central to your life, this is a book that understands that down to the very finest details–and also understands what it’s like for that person to be old and dying. Some kinds of understanding are both needed and difficult, and this is one of them: I always want more grandparent books, but in this case I wouldn’t have wanted to read it without Grandpa Lyzenga or Uncle Phil around imminently, since Grandpa can’t be. So hard, so good.

Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound. A YA portal fantasy that goes into really gritty awful detail about the logistical down sides of some of the methods used in other portal fantasies. The fantasy world has not been an unmixed blessing for the protag, but neither is it an unmingled horror. I like logistics, and I cannot lie, although the ending was a little off for me.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South. Kindle. This is a Victorian novel that refutes all sorts of ignorant nonsense about what kinds of things women were interested in and what kinds of things Victorian writers were interested in. It has a young woman figuring out her future, but it also has union organizers and factories for weaving cloth, it has all sorts of classes of person, it has the effects of technological change on philosophical outlook and practical daily life. It is really really good, and I have no idea why it’s not the sort of thing one gets assigned early and often in school. If I were conspiracy-minded…well, let us say that I like this book and find it very worthwhile and think more people should read it. Yes, let’s leave it there.

Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey. Biography of a writer in the middle of a large circle of interesting acquaintance. The cover helpfully points out that it is now a major motion picture, which I doubt extremely for any reasonable definition of major. (Perhaps it was made by someone who mustered out before they were promoted to Lt. Col.?) And it was also confusing, how this giant sprawly biography could become a movie. Then it became very clear when I found out the title of the movie: Carrington. It’s not a movie about Lytton Strachey per se. It’s a movie about Dora Carrington. Who is not in several hundred pages of this book. That does make things easier.

Benedict Jacka, Cursed. Very fast read, fun urban fantasy methodone for until deeper urban fantasies about male magicians in London come out with their next installation. This was filling in book two of the series when I had already read one and three, so it was probably slightly less interesting than it would have been, but still held my attention just fine. Will keep on with the series.

Ursula K. LeGuin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. A slender volume–probably too short for today–of mainstream YA, figuring out how to handle oneself and relate to others without actually being a “problem book.” Fluid and readable without standing out particularly.

Blair MacGregor, The Key. Kindle. A fantasy novelette or novella. I think Blair’s better stuff is at longer length, but it still kept me entertained throughout.

Dominica Malcolm, ed., Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Kindle. I enjoyed having this anthology in general, with its diversity of voice and setting, but I didn’t find that any one particular story jumped out at me for mention. I guess it was bound to happen sometime, but usually if I don’t feel like mentioning any stories it’s because I didn’t enjoy the anthology, and that’s not the case here.

Salla Simukka, As Red as Blood. First in a Finnish teen thriller/mystery series, with a protag who is wise beyond her years and many of her peers who are…not. Zippy fun, will look for the next one when we get it in English.

Lynne Thomas and Michael Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 1. Kindle. An oddity of how I reckon what I’ve read: entire issues of magazines don’t make the list unless they’re on the Kindle. In any case, I’m glad I took a look at it as a whole (I had read a few things that were linked before but not worried about catching everything; I knew I had an ebook), because it reminded me to tell people how much I liked Amelia Beamer’s Celia and the Conservation of Entropy. There were other good things, but that’s the one that really spoke my name.

Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story. Kindle. Another anomaly in how I count books read: if it’s a separate ebook, it gets counted. But this is just an essay. Entertaining enough, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect from knowing that Mr. Clemens wrote an essay with that title.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Kindle. A short volume, very domestic as one might expect, but more given over to complaints about some kinds of houseguests than the title would indicate. She’s very readable and entertaining so far, even when she’s not writing about very much in particular.

Jo Walton, The Just City. Discussed elsewhere.

Richard Zimler, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. Kindle. Zimler’s specialty is apparently murder mysteries while horrible things are going on. This one is set during anti-Jewish pogroms as the Jews are being removed from Portugal. Like the Warsaw Ghetto mystery he wrote, this is vivid and well-done and not for moments when you are low on cope, which is probably why it sat on my Kindle for months until I was cozily tucked into a family Christmas situation.

Review copy provided by Tor. Also the author is a dear friend of mine, and I read this book in manuscript before I read this published version.

This is a book about time travel, robots, and eccentric philosophers using ancient slave children to experiment with approximating Plato’s Republic, with the help of the goddess Athene.

It’s also a book about consent. Once you bring Platonism in this far to the front-and-center, theme is not going to be an optional extra that can sort of sneak up on you, and The Just City is not an exception to that rule. Consent–not just in a sexual context, also in a work and personal context–goes from first page to last. If you don’t want a book that’s dealing with consent (and with historical figures and Greek gods not always having a great grasp of it), then this is not the book for you.

I think substantially because I never had a Mediterranean focus, I never had the, “I want to live there!” or “I want to try that!” reaction to Plato’s Republic–which makes it more fun to watch it twist and disintegrate than if I was a hard-core Platonist, I think? There may be hard-core Platonists about who can give me the report on the experience from their perspective. But mostly I got to enjoy Simmea and Maia striving so hard for this strange thing that kept shifting under them, and what I do like that it was like is the kind of utopian commune experiment that 19th-century America was chock full of. Um. What I do like to read about. Because I would not live on one for love nor money. Really: no. Really really: no.

One of my consistent complaints about fantastic fiction is that it’s hard to find books that treat the Greek gods as genuinely not very nice. This is a definite exception. The Greek gods in The Just City are not horrible brutes, but they are definitely not your pals–they take some of the worst aspects of being human and being alien, without becoming nuance-free monsters. I also enjoyed how thoroughly Socrates was rolling his eyes at people’s reactions to Plato. Also just structurally, the last sentences of the chapters are so very well done. But my favorite thing is probably the robots, actually. I like the robots quite a lot, and all the stuff around them, most of which is spoilery. More robots. Robots yay.

Please consider using our link to buy The Just City at Amazon.