Katherine Addison, The Tomb of Dragons. Discussed elsewhere.
Lisa Baril, The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and Future Without Ice. Gosh so many ice mummies. I think I learned more about the ice mummies than anything else here, but it really was nicely procedural.
Clara Benson, The Incident at Fives Castle and The Riddle at [slur]’s Mile. Kindle. Honestly why did she feel the need to use that slur in the title, there were literally no Roma people in the book. It gave me serious pause over reading it at all. And the unfortunate part is that it was the better book of the two; in terms of the entire rest of the text if I could advise you to skip one it would be Incident because the political conspiracy was not particularly well-drawn. I did not intend to become an expert on political conspiracy mysteries but they keep popping up, and also I don’t dodge in the least, if you have more in mind please do tell me.
Maurice Broaddus, The Breath of Oblivion. Discussed elsewhere.
David Brown, A Hell of a Storm: the Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War. Did not do what it said on the tin: specifically this was a book about the lead-up to the American Civil War more generally and not really about Bloody Kansas in any more detail than anything else. It’s a fine enough “lead-up to the American Civil War” book but not the best I’ve read. Oh well.
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country. Very short and very quiet. This is a book about a recently demobbed soldier whose life has generally fallen apart, restoring the art in an old church in a small town. It’s an older book, but it was written as an historical, not contemporary to the 1920s, but I felt that it did a really good job of combining the feel of the books of that era with perspective from later–that is still the perspective of forty years ago now.
Cathy Coats, To Banish Forever: A Secret Society, the Ho-Chunk, and Ethnic Cleansing in Minnesota. A short book but not an emotionally easy one. Apparently there was an entire secret society–very well documented and in locally prominent positions–in the Mankato area in the second half of the 19th century, dedicated to the genocide of the Ho-Chunk people. I lived four years in that area and knew nothing about it, which is a flavor of horrifying in itself. Extremely useful for opening my eyes, but not a light read, of course.
Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop. This, by contrast, is a light read, a cozy fantasy with jam and books and talking plant friends and a romance. The obstacles to the protagonist’s happiness were so readily overcome that it felt frictionless, a bit insubstantial, but honestly that was just fine on the day I read it.
Margaret Frazer, A Play of Knaves and The Squire’s Tale. Kindle. One each of the Player Joliffe and Sister Frevisse series, and I really continue to like how organically these characters are different in a similar setting. I am finding these to be quite reasonable comfort reads and will keep doing so until I run out.
William Gibson, Burning Chrome. Reread. Gosh, he can write a sentence, always could. There’s a lot of sexism here, and I haven’t found early cyberpunk particularly compelling over time, but on a sentence level this is some of the best science fiction writing of its time.
Holly Gramazio, The Husbands. Very small-scale science fiction: the protagonist, who starts the book unmarried, comes home to find a life and a husband she doesn’t remember having, and every time he goes up in the attic, he disappears and a different husband/timeline takes his place. This is the sort of story where prose voice is everything for me, and I enjoyed the prose voice here, it was warm and compelling. The different shapes of relationship possible to her, the different ways that would direct her life, and the way that she exercises agency among them, is thought-provoking and fun.
Jack Kelly, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America. Very much what it says on the tin, and I fear that the Gilded Age is all too relevant to our time, so I was glad to learn more about it.
Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest. Very short and creepy. I felt like the strength of this book was how Knútsdóttir wrote about chronic illness and the reactions people have to it. The plot twists were…not very twisty. The ending was unpleasant but unsurprising. But the writing about chronic illness early in the book was absolutely solid stuff.
Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous. Not a reread, this is my first exposure to this one, miraculously enough. The journalism spin on the Arthurian tale was charming–the commentary on perspective and legend. Very glad I read this and will want another go at it.
Lauren E. Oakes, In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World. Oakes puts a lot of herself in this book–possibly too much depending on how much you’re interested in her personal life while doing the research she describes here, but it’s still an interesting account of how this kind of botanical research works.
Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II. Other suggested titles: Not All Nonfiction Needs a Three-Item List In Its Subtitle: Now Conclusively Proven! Sorry, it’s just been a heck of a pattern lately. Anyway, this is an interesting take on how strategizing itself evolved and who got to be involved in it, in the UK dealing with the U-boat problem.
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Science. A warm and charming account of the different young women who followed directly on the path she blazed–the lab assistants and fellow scientists who had opportunities in her lab. Good stuff.
Ashley Spencer, Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire. I don’t know much about this part of culture, and I don’t like ignorance, so I picked this up from a library display. I was disappointed in its depth and type of analysis–this was more a straightforward account of what there was than why it succeeded and failed–and I think the reason is that Spencer is a celebrity journalist of a type that has and needs access. She’s less likely to dive into problems with streaming or other networks’ competition in ways that might jeopardize future interviews, and this book is much shallower than I hoped as a result.
Jonathan Strahan, New Adventures in Space Opera. I will be so glad to have this book in another five years. Today, though, I was frustrated that it has this title while being entirely a reprint anthology. Adventures in Space Opera that you’ve already read in the last few years, and you liked some of them is a less-catchy title. It’s a solid volume, it’s just that I didn’t realize that it was reprints.
Nghi Vo, The City in Glass. I am a hard sell on demon perspective–also on angel perspective, when it comes to that–but Vo is engaging with this ages-long (but reasonably short) fantasy of a city.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. This short story collection had moments of racism and animal cruelty. There’s a sharpness to the fairy stories here that has its good sides but also its quite negative ones. Not the place to start with her work, I wouldn’t think.
Ovidia Yu, The Angsana Tree Mystery. And speaking of not the place to start, this series does such a satisfying job of unfolding its plots as the history of Singapore progresses that it would be a shame to miss what’s come before. We’re now in the post-WWII repercussion section of this series, and I continue to really enjoy it.