Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of the things that I find important in talking about other people’s books is not to get annoyed that they didn’t write the book I wanted, that they wrote the book they wanted instead. But sometimes that’s very hard, because it’s difficult to fathom why they wanted to write that book when another (coughbettercough) book was so close at hand.

Hopeland is about all sorts of things I like to read about. It’s got found family and giant scope both temporally and geographically; it’s got people coping with the reality of climate change, people making art, people growing things and making music and trying to figure out how best to rear children. It’s got Iceland and Tonga (okay, he calls it Ava’u…but really…) and several other locations in between.

And for some reason I will never understand, McDonald has decided to center his tale on Amon Brightbourne, one of the most boring sadsack white men ever to helm a science fiction novel. He believes himself to be living a charmed life, but there is some question about whether that charmed life is a zero-sum game, whether the good things come to him at the expense of others. When I thought this might be dealt with directly, I was cautiously interested, but no, people go on making decades’ worth of life choices based on the premise that his superpower is Captain Zero-Sum, and nobody seems to say to themselves, “hey, this guy’s life really sucks, so…let’s reexamine our premises.” Very late in the book there’s a moment where another character says of Amon, “Oh, he makes me so angry and he’s stupid and entitled and he has no sense about anything.” YEP. THAT IS SURE TRUE. And then she goes on, “All that. But I’ve never…stopped…loving him.” And I went: what? literally why???

Everything else in this mildly woowoo science fiction fantasy mashup is framed around the existence and importance of Amon Brightbourne. Raisa and Atli and Morwenna and the princesses and Kimmie and all the other characters…they continue to refer back to him, to constantly care what he’s doing and thinking, which means that the elements that might otherwise build a fascinating story just sort of hang around with this guy. I’m not even annoyed with him except as a protagonist, I just find him fundamentally so dull that the rest of the novel is colored by his constant presence. I couldn’t wish him ill, but I also couldn’t wish him well, and I felt that if I wished him weird, he would leach all the pigment out of that too. So. I dunno. Lots of good stuff in here, but for me the sum was much less than its parts.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an absolutely lovely brick. I loved reading it, and I recommend it highly. Wilson is the author of a similarly huge history of the Thirty Years War which I also really enjoyed, and he starts this book in 1500 in part because he knows that a lot of the “common wisdom” about things that started with or after the Thirty Years War is not true and wants to give a fuller context.

This book isn’t called The Swiss: They Exist, Dammit but that’s a major theme that works really, really well: Wilson doesn’t mistake the current national boundaries among German-speaking peoples for inevitable eternal destiny, and this makes a lot of things make a lot more sense than they do if you assume that we have arrived at the one true set of national boundaries toward which everyone was always yearning. This is true of the Austrians but especially of the Swiss, they are so often relegated to “I dunno they were up in the mountains somewhere what do you want from me.” Not this time. Detailed accounts of the establishment and maintenance of Swiss neutrality, Swiss mercenary corps, etc. Hurrah.

It’s quite a long and eventful bit of history to cover, so my one complaint is that Wilson has chosen to divide into periods and then into theme within period…which is great…but his periods are extremely long. And I get that he has stuff he wants to cover about how various things in WWII segued directly into how militaries were handled in the divided Germanies of the 20th century and that segued into how the reunited Germany handles those same issues in the present, but…it made for a lot of back-and-forthing. 1930s to present is…rather long. As periods go for this kind of discussion.

Nevertheless, this is a book that has a lot of interesting things to say both about fun details with which you can amaze your family (plunderhosen, my pals) and about the larger patterns–and also what they weren’t. It’s the sort of book that seems essential once you have it.

Daniel Abraham, An Autumn War. Reread. Third in its series and for heaven’s sake don’t start here, this is all ramification all the time. Wow is this the difference between a good book and a nice book. Abraham lets his characters screw up massively with world-altering repercussions, and I am 100% here for it.

Jeanne E. Abrams, A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe. This is one of those nonfiction books that was interesting but left me wanting a slightly different book than the author wanted to write, namely a history of the early diplomatic corps of the US. Somebody go write this for me. This is a little bit of that and a lot of Adamses, which is fair because that’s what it says on the tin.

Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night. Personal poetry with a shifting set of angles on illness and disability, loved it, absolutely recommend.

Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids. I wanted this poetry collection because of the title poem, and it did not disappoint. Trans issues, mythology, mythologizing one’s own issues, good stuff, hard-hitting stuff.

Caris Avendano Cruz, Marikit and the Ocean of Stars. A romp through Filipina legends and mythology and growing up. It feels a little younger than most of the middle-grade books with this title pattern, but not babyish or anything, and the legends are well-handled.

Don Duncan and dave ring, eds., Opulent Syntax: Irish Speculative Fiction. A slim volume, none of which was really outstandingly my sort of thing, but I want more of this sort of exercise, more angles on different voices in sff; it only stands to reason that they won’t all hit me the same way.

George Eliot, Romola. Kindle. Well, this is it: now I’ve read all of George Eliot’s novels. I’m very glad I have. Romola was not my favorite but was still very much worth a read. It’s set further back in history from where the author was writing it than most of her books–late 15th century Florence–and you can sort of see the shape of some of the ideas she was working with that would eventually become Middlemarch.

Sonja Fritzsche, Science Fiction Literature in East Germany. Kindle. A friend sent me this because he’s colleagues with the author, and it was fascinating to watch her trace the different science fictional literary movements in a tradition almost but not completely disjoint from mine–she has a lot of the same touchstones in western SF to ground the discourse in what I do know. (There was, for example, a moment where she cited Darko Suvin, and I said, “Okay but the thing about Darko Suvin–” only to find that in the next paragraph she was basically giving the same points as I’d been saying. Yes. Good.)

Carrie Jenkins and Carla Nappi, Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato. Mostly responding to Plato’s dialogs with feminist poetry, sometimes other things as well–a bit of Shakespeare, a bit of Earth orbit, a bit of a lot of things. I found this more intellectually interesting as an exercise than emotionally affecting as poetry, but I think that’s just because it wasn’t quite my kind of poetry rather than that it was badly done in any way.

Catherine Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America. Kerrison did an impressive amount of research around Patsy and Polly Jefferson and Harriet Hemings, including attempting to trace Harriet’s life after she left Monticello and looking for people who might have been her, with a lot of attention to education and status for varied women in this era. Unlike many people who might be drawn to this topic, she doesn’t seem to have been pulled into the black hole that is Thomas Jefferson’s charm–she never actually writes “what a jerk,” but its presence is pretty strong, and appropriate in context.

L.R. Lam, Dragonfall. Discussed elsewhere.

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Lots of analysis of who was hanged and why (by profession, by gender, all sorts of variables), with further attention to ideas of criminality, class, and society around it. Extremely interesting.

Dipika Mukherjee, Dialect of Distant Harbors. Poetry around themes of immigration and distance, beautiful stuff.

Alex Roland, Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail. All sorts of technical stuff about mines and diving bells and cool stuff you might want to know if you’re that kind of nerd.

Drew Sarkis, Schemes of the Wayfarer. Discussed elsewhere.

Chris Scott, with Sarah Zorn, Homage: Recipes and Stories from an Amish Soul Food Kitchen. This was a really interesting read not because I wanted to make these recipes (I don’t) or because the author was such a stunning prose stylist (he isn’t) but because his entire way of thinking about food was interesting and made me think about it differently too.

Margery Sharp, The Innocents. Kindle. The story of a sixty-something woman who ends up caring for a developmentally delayed toddler during WWII. There are a few uses of language/concepts that are not contemporary (the r-word once, other casual slurs from well-meaning people around the child’s intellect and mutism but honestly not nearly so many as I would have expected, and also the child is said not to be autistic with a complete misunderstanding of what that would mean), but in general this is a very affirming story of a young person and an old person who manage to be their best selves together, and it’s really not a shape of story I see much.

Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex. Poems with a witchy theme and an immigrant theme. Not one of the volumes that resonated most with me, but worth reading.

Daniel Arthur Smith, Oceans: The Anthology. Kindle. This was a place where previous favorite authors shone: the stories I liked best were from Ken Liu and Caroline Yoachim. Lots of watery ideas, always room for more water, yay.

Nathan Tavares, Fractured Infinity. A multiplicity of other universes, with other versions of oneself and one’s partner, combined with a machine that tells the future foretelling extremely tough choices. A gay love story, a story of possibilities.

Martha Wells, The Witch King. Discussed elsewhere.

Ovidia Yu, The Mushroom Tree Mystery. The latest in this series of historical mysteries set in Singapore. This one takes us up to the very end of the Second World War, with all the chaos and change of that. I love that Yu is burning plot this way. I love that she’s not saving anything for the proverbial swim back.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

When people were talking about interstitial fantasy some years back, I used to joke that I liked both interstitial and stitial fantasy–both the stuff that blurs the boundaries and the stuff that’s dead center of its genre. This is in the latter category. It would be hard to come up with more of a fantasy novel fantasy novel than this one.

It has: a human thief whose community blames them for their family’s past, who wants to learn more (MORE MORE) magic and triumph over their expectations. It has: a dragon fallen from the world of dragons–or pushed–to save his people and bring them back into the world of humans. Mostly wearing a humanoid form. It has con jobs and plotting and corrupt people in power; it has moments of transformation both literal and metaphorical.

In short, if you’ve been saying to yourself, “but I would really like a classic fantasy novel but maybe with a little more openness to contemporary ideas of gender,” here you go, this is the thing, it is for you. I raced through it, having fun the whole way.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an entirely new fantasy setting by Wells, and Tor (her publisher) is quite rightly sounding the horns and banging the drums about it. Wells spent twenty years writing mostly fantasy before Murderbot came out, and now she’s right back in the game. This is also a stand-alone. (I can see several of your eyes lighting up with heart emojis from here.)

We’re not in an era where secondary world fantasy really has a mold that everyone else is doing, but this sure is not it. Its protagonist, Kai, whose name is sometimes modified for various informative reasons, is a demon who inhabits bodies that would otherwise decay and rot. Dead people. He pilots dead people around all the time. This is not a book that handles it in a gross way, but it’s sometimes emotionally important whether he’s switched bodies and so on. There are also another couple of types of magic users, and there is quite a lot of conflict among them, who gets to be in power over whom, what things it’s ethical for them to do to each other.

All that sounds fairly abstract, but in the book it’s handled very concretely: there are two timelines, one of which gets you the backstory of these characters and their relationships (both the political and the personal) and the other is–well, they’re both adventure plot, more or less, with a lot of “who are we going to overthrow today and who can we trust” mixed in. It’s not a book with a lot of interiority (a funny thing to say about a book whose protagonist is literally interior to several other people along the way…), but it’s got a lot of interesting moving parts.

Review copy provided by the authors, who are friends of mine. (This is a joint pseudonym.)

COURT POLITICS. Do you like fantasy novels about court politics? Because this sure is one. I like them myself, so I need to assure you: when it has “schemes” in the title, it is wall to wall scheming. The titular Wayfarer, various members of royalty, and nearly everyone else. All scheming, all the time.

Well, not quite all the time, there’s also food and sex and fighting. But many of those things come with a side of scheming sauce.

Keth has risen to the sort of minor prominence that comes from military service, and now her duties are mixed between the very physical kind of policing the Guard still needs to do and standing around smiling at annoying courtiers, wearing fancy court armor with a sword that wouldn’t do her any good in a real fight. She is startled to find that one of her old…friends? no…enemies? nnnnot quite…crushes? well, that’ll do…has returned to court as a wise and serene Wayfarer, ready to offer her services to the kingdom that raised her. All out of pure-hearted gratitude, of course…and all of Keth’s fears about “real” fights in court dress are about to come true, for various values of “real” and “fight.” Some of which include a gleeful minotaur. So onward, romping all the way.

Andrea Barrett, Natural History. Barrett has been writing historical fiction about people who care about science and the natural world for decades now. Her characters and settings interconnect and span a great deal of time and a large range of personalities. This is a collection with several more short stories in that oeuvre. It’s probably neither the best nor the worst place to start; as someone who’s been reading them for most of that span, my reaction was “oh good, more of this thing, hooray.”

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. What a very strange book to want to write. It’s mostly a professional biography of von Neumann aimed at people who have never heard of him and have no understanding of modern math, physics, or computer science, which is in itself a very weird thing to do (is this audience very interested in a von Neumann bio, then?) and not one Bhattacharya does exceptionally well. But he does take side trips into personal matters more or less for two topics only: 1) to tell you if someone is fat; 2) to tell you if they are mentally ill. He is happy to expand on #2 at length, giving very detailed accounts of the suicides of people close to Johnny von Neumann…but not to say how that might have affected him, and in most cases it could not because they happened after his death. I was thinking I would put a content warning on this book for that purpose, but honestly it’s just not a very good book.

Roshani Chokshi, Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality. Do not start here! This is the last volume in this series! It is fun and satisfying and does all the lovely things the rest of the series does, but seriously, start at the beginning, get the whole thing, friendship is magic, goofy jokes are magic, magic is also magic. Yay. I would be sad to see it end but I like good endings, and also it looks to me like Chokshi is happy to write other things I’ll probably like (hey, thanks for that!), so generally yay for a solid ending to a favorite series.

Rachel Corbett, You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainier Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. This is a short joint biography of these two artists and the relationship they had as artists, solidly done and briskly written. They knew ten million people in their era, and it’s astonishing how many of them are relevant in a biography this short.

J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Discussed elsewhere.

John M. Ford, Casting Fortune. Reread. If you haven’t read other stuff set in Liavek, you may be tempted to think, oh yes, it’s Mike being opaque again. But he’s really not, he’s drawing on stuff you know from other works, or don’t, as the case may be. I love the way he does his theater company and all the moving pieces in that one. I love it all, but the moving pieces really just looked so well-done this time around.

V. V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Laura L. Lovett, With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism. Lovett takes the famous portrait of Hughes and Gloria Steinem doing the Black Power salute together and uses it as a springboard to talk about how much more Hughes did and in what context. I picked this up because it popped up on a completely unrelated library search, and I like knowing more things; it was quite short and interesting.

Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait. I wished O’Farrell was doing more with the pentimento theme in this book. It was a pretty straightforward story of Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici, interesting enough but not as much larger as I wanted it to be from where it started.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City. A geographic memoir, full of photographs, beautifully done, thoughtful about place and neighborhood and influence.

Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster–Who Profits and Who Pays the Price. This is one of those books that talks about things I think I already know about dangerous environments and the rhetoric of responsibility but gives them a much more thorough and detailed grounding than I had before. Lots of statistics without being dry, lots of analysis of propaganda that creeps into all sorts of weird corners of our lives. Well worth thinking about.

Moses Ose Utomi, The Lies of the Ajungo. Discussed elsewhere.

Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. When I saw this in the used bookstore, I snapped it up without even reading the back to find out which period that might be called “the Chinese Enlightenment” it referred to. The answer is the early 20th century, and Wang did extensive interviews with several women who had been involved in feminist movements and other women’s political action of the time. Really good stuff, hearing from a lot of interesting people firsthand and with analysis that gives good context.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Haunt Yourself. Kindle. A collection of horror stories I didn’t quite get around to when they sent it out near Halloween. Merc is quite good at this, good enough that I’m happy to read a collection of horror stories even though I am not basically a horror reader. Some may be familiar if you’re a regular reader of their work, but that’s okay, now they’re in a nice little digital collection, yay.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a very short work, not on the long end of novellas. In the afterword, Utomi thanks people who helped him situate this book on the spectrum from fantasy to fable, and that’s it, that’s exactly what it is, it’s very much in the middle of that spectrum. I was surprised to see in the marketing materials that there will be a sequel, because it works very much on the level of stand-alone fantasy novella.

Which is not to say there is not more to be said of the Forever Desert and the City of Lies, simply because there’s space left that might be filled with almost anything. But Tutu’s story as the hero of his waterless city is very well contained in these 84 pages–the friends he finds where there are said to be no friends, the powers in the rest of the world but also in himself, and the beginnings of the shape of magic in the Forever Desert. The descriptions of thirst are appallingly strong, distressingly strong, and this is not a fable in the sense of it being comforting or easy. This is a tale of betrayal, death, despair, and definitely, certainly lies. After 84 intense pages, you might well want a breather.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

There are so many ways that a novel about a real and recent civil war can go wrong. It can be partisan, showing the saints of one side and the demons of the other; it can be clinical, with a distance better suited to nonfiction. It can be maudlin and sentimental about the joys of the world before the war. It can devolve into swagger about the toughness and bravery of certain people and elide their suffering. Ganeshananthan is writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War, and she threads the needle perfectly, dodging all of these things to give us a vivid, specific, humane novel of a young woman’s family inside a shattering conflict.

Sashi wants to become a doctor–and this is not a tragedy about how war stole that dream for her, it is a thoughtful and nuanced book about someone who keeps pursuing that dream in the face of great difficulties but not to the exclusion of all other things. She has four brothers and a family friend from their block, a young man she feels a strong connection to, and having those five young men with their varying experiences gives Ganeshananthan a chance to portray a diversity of opinion and experience. Some of the young men are frankly described by the protagonist as terrorists. Others are more acted upon than acting, or carve out places to stand apart from the politics. Both author and protagonist are extremely clear about how oppression and war shape people’s choices with no ideal outcomes, no pure hands, but in a beautifully specific way, so that no one character is The Representative Of This Or That but instead all remain fully portrayed, three-dimensionally human characters.

Does one need to content warn past saying “this is about the Sri Lankan Civil War”? I guess the content warning here is: Ganeshananthan is not interested in giving you a sanitized vision of oppression and civil war. She is not interested in looking away. So there is violence, including sexual violence, and loss and fear and anger and all of the things that a book on this subject needs not to be a travesty of itself. What do you think a book about a modern civil war would have in it, yes, it has that. Done well. But it absolutely does.

I loved this book so much. It made me cry four separate times (Sashi’s grandmother’s reaction to a crucial event, oh God that broke me). It made me look up all sorts of things about Sri Lankan history, not because I needed them to understand the book (Ganeshananthan puts everything you need in the text) but because I wanted to know more. I immediately requested her previous book. It is so good, it is so clear and vivid and strongly written and so very, very good. I have been chattering about this book in most conversations I’ve had this week. I told the nurse at my grandmother’s medical appointment about it. If you get monetary gifts or bookstore gift cards this time of year, by all means consider buying it in the new year. It’s overwhelming and wonderful.