Tag: bookses precious

Charlie Jane Anders, Even Greater Mistakes. Anders’s work is very bifurcated for me–the hits really hit and the misses really miss–but not in a way that’s offensive, just in a way that’s, oh, that’s definitely not for me. Which makes a short story collection a great format for me to read her, because it’s very easy to go YAY YAY skip skip YAY skip YAY (not necessarily in that order), which for me is a much better reading experience in a short story collection than fine-I-guess fine-I-guess okayish sure-fine.

Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs. This book’s main thesis is that treating the Ottoman Empire as a thing apart from Europe because it is a thing (mostly) apart from Christendom (except for the parts of its population that aren’t) is…not very justifiable, actually, and let’s stop doing it. And when you look at that point, uh, yes? Actually? And Baer makes very clear points throughout about the Ottoman Empire’s participation in various movements in European cultural and intellectual history in ways that seem embarrassingly obvious to have pointed out. I hope this book is one of those popular histories that people find baffling in a decade or two: like, yes, of course the Ottomans were not completely isolated from the Renaissance except to throw old manuscripts on it and run away, literally what are you talking about. It did sometimes feel rushed, but, well, there is a lot of Ottoman Empire to cover in a not very long book. So.

Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian. I got two cookbooks by Indigenous chefs (and cookbook-writing assistants) for Christmas this year, an interesting theme gift. This is the more elementary of them. If you’re looking to give a cookbook to someone who has very little knowledge of First Nations peoples in North America and will want to use a lot of familiar European-transplant ingredients in any recipe they make, this is the correct choice of the two.

Michael DeLuca, Gabriele Santiago, AÏcha Martine Thiam, et al, Reckoning Issue 6. Kindle. What an issue, what a barnstormer of an issue. I am going to be tweeting out links to favorites all year long as they come out. Brianna Cunliffe’s essay “Sweetwater, Poison.” In fiction, Nicasio Andres Reed’s “Babsang Luksa,” Wen-yi Lee’s “Rooted,” Mari Ness’s “Footnotes from ‘Phosphates, Nitrates and the Lake A Incident: A Review.'” In poetry, Russel Nichols’s “Move, Mountain, Move,” Tom Barlow’s “Surprise,” Cislyn Smith’s “Water-logged Roots,” Grace Wagner’s “Onions,” Ellie Milne-Brown’s “Carcinisation,” Laura Adrienne Brady’s “Tyrni.” There was just so much in this issue. I couldn’t believe it, it just kept going.

Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, eds., Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World. This is a collection of BIPOC nature essays. Many of them touch either directly or indirectly on the question of why there isn’t more nature writing from BIPOC viewpoints, which is an interesting and valid question. This is more a starting point than an ending point for that question, I think.

Brian Jay Jones, Jim Henson: The Biography. As I have read a bunch of biography lately I have gotten a feel for the spectrum of approaches biographers can take. Brian Jay Jones is very much in the “my subject can do no wrong, and any flaws he might happen to have automatically do not matter because what a great guy” camp of biographers. And in some ways this is good, because…let’s be honest, very few of us pick up a biography of Jim Henson for heaven’s sake looking for muckraking. Do you? Really? About the guy who came up with the Muppets? No, you want wonder and coolness and a little bit of pathos from time to time. I do too. And this delivers that, absolutely. It gives you what you really want in a biography of Jim Henson. Even if…even if there are places where you should stop to say, wait a minute. Even if there are places where Jones sweeps things under the rug about Henson’s general sexism, pushing his wife Jane out of the Muppets that she helped create, sowing difficulties at work by sleeping with multiple employees in ways and at times that caused definite problems in how the work got done…even if there are places where Jones deliberately creates a fine haze of that not really mattering, because it isn’t the vision of Jim Henson we want to see. It isn’t, is it? Surely not. Well. We’ll just…gloss over all that. This is definitely the biography of Jim Henson we wanted, then. Good.

Michael Kleber-Diggs, Worldly Things. A poet close to my home–closer than I knew, as a few references clarified. Some shattering and gorgeous things here in his debut. The kind of poetry that makes me go off and write response poems.

Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock, Salt Magic. A graphic novel about a young girl whose brother comes back from WWI changed, and the changes she makes in turn–and the desert witches she meets in the process.

Yoon Ha Lee, Dragon Pearl. I read this series out of publication order, but it worked fine that way. This one was full of shapeshifter foxes trying to find their own way in a galaxy that did not particularly welcome them.

Ken Liu, The Veiled Throne. Let me make it clear that I enjoyed this book. However. It is not the length it is (nearly a thousand pages) because it could not have been any shorter. No. Liu is having fun here. Each scene has the theme and variations he wants, and each scene in turn contributes to the larger baroque structure that he wants, and could I honestly say that not a word is out of place, not a scene extraneous? Absolutely I could not say that. But you know what? Not every piece of prose has to be trimmed to the bone. Minimalism is not an unlimited virtue. So know going in that this is the third book in a series full of ramifications–for heaven’s sake do not start here–and that it is not going as fast as it could, and be prepared to enjoy the pace that this book is taking. There will be more.

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, Fiyah Issue 21. Kindle. My favorite piece in this issue was C.L. Polk’s poem “Delivery.”

Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen. Obviously this is the second of the two Indigenous-themed cookbooks I got for Christmas, and for me the more successful–this one will probably take specialty shopping for ingredients like maple vinegar, but it’s proposing recipes that aren’t things I’ve basically made before, and it doesn’t assume I need my hand held on very introductory cultural elements to the people who live around me. We’re all in different places in cooking and in Indigenous studies; this is the one that better fits where I am.

Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner, eds., Apex Issue 129. Kindle. The standout story for me in this issue was Bianca Sayan’s “Sheri, At This Very Moment.”

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 44. Kindle. Several favorites in this one: Kylie Lee Baker’s “Lily, the Immortal” on the fiction side, and in poetry Sonya Taaffe’s “The House Snakes” and Lisabelle Tay’s “Weaver Girl Dream.”

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens. Here is how good Claire Tomalin is: I don’t actually like Charles Dickens that much, and I already read her book about his relationship with Nelly Ternan, so when the library’s copy of this came through on my hold requests, I thought, I’ll just glance at it. Probably I don’t want that much Dickens, ever, and I’ll send it back unread, and that’ll be fine. And within a few pages I was absolutely convinced that I was going to read this entire biography of an author I don’t even like, and I was right to do it, it was a sharp, keen perspective on a fully-fledged person and the era he lived in, she takes no prisoners, she turns over all the stones and thinks very hard about the invertebrates beneath them but knows that beauty can be found there as well as squalor, she is so good. Gosh I’m going to be glad to be reading another of her books. Especially when it’s not about Charles Dickens, though, because while I came out with a greater cultural appreciation of his place and time, that did not translate to “I should reread some of this.” At all.

Matt Wallace, Bump. Middle-grade fiction, no speculative elements, about a young girl (Maya/MJ) who is struggling to figure out her place in a world with family upheaval and begs her mother to let her train as a luchadora at her next door neighbor’s school. Maya and the school both have challenges to overcome, and this is fun and lovely and goes very quickly.

Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation. So you have to ask yourself: are you willing to put up with an entire book about the music of the 1960s and ’70s by someone who thinks that furniture appraisal is a crucial part of “Norwegian Wood.” Because that is the level of missing the mark Sheila Weller achieves here, and no, that is not a made-up example. Weller is one of those incredibly tedious upper-middle-class coastal Boomers who thinks that the Sexual Revolution fixed several varieties of “everything” (she is willing to concede that AIDS later un-fixed some of them but only some), blithely stating that now if a female musician gets pregnant the baby is a marketing accessory, and Sheila, unless you’re providing free babysitting to the working-class women who got pregnant as teenagers and are trying to break into the music scene, I’m going to need you to shut your yap on that one. Also, every time you make a claim that now reproductive care is completely available, yay! in a book about Roberta Joan Anderson goddamn Mitchell, you have to donate ten bucks to a clinic somewhere sparsely populated, preferably the prairie, I don’t make the rules, wait, I do, I just made that rule, but it’s a good rule. So this book is full of brilliant women, and also hey, some brilliant men, that’s great, but for some reason Weller decided that it was a great opportunity to carry as much water as possible for as many shitty men as possible. Like. This is not a he-said she-said situation. I have read interviews with Chuck Mitchell where he freely says just loads of stuff–boatloads–that indicates, without any apparent self-awareness, what a piece of shit he was, both in general and to his ex-wife Joni. You absolutely do not have to make excuses for people that their own testimony and behavior does not make for them. That’s not journalism, that’s…well, that’s a lot of things, but in this case, it starts to add up to look like the damn patriarchy. She makes classic victim-undermining statements about domestic violence. She strongly implies that Carly Simon not only should have tried harder to stay married to James Taylor (to what end, Weller? and who asked you? because I sure did not) but also that Simon was somehow to blame for Taylor’s heroin addiction which he had before he met her. So–there was all kinds of good stuff here, but also it is not, when you get right down to it, a good book, it is not a book I can recommend, it is clueless about its own privilege in some staggeringly important ways, it misses understanding of several pieces of art crucial to the artists in question, it’s politically incredibly shallow, and WOW is it mired in the sexism it would like us to believe is a thing of the past. Oh, and the font changes a couple of times from one section to the next for no reason. So. Yeah.

Anta Baku, The Cell Phone Towers of Elfland Season 1. I put books in these when I finish them, and this was a long-running serial that wrapped up in December…for now. Light-hearted, unexpectedly full of hedgehogs, fun.

Kate Elliott, Servant Mage. Discussed elsewhere.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Becoming the Villainess and Unexplained Fevers. Two volumes of poetry from more than a decade apart, watching Gailey grow in her explorations of fairy tales and comic books and other feminist takes on fantastical tropes.

Gwynne Garfinkle, Can’t Find My Way Home. Discussed elsewhere.

Matthew David Goodwin, ed., Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy. I particularly appreciated how much room this anthology made for very short and literary pieces so that there was a range of voices, many of whom I had never read before.

Amelia Gorman, Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota. A beautiful slim volume, each poem lavishly illustrated, gently science fictional, amazing, highly recommended, snuck in under the wire to be one of my favorite books of the year.

Alex Hernandez, Matthew David Goodwin, and Sarah Rafael Garcia, eds., Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. Though one of the editors of this volume was the same as the volume above, it was a very different feel, a more genre-central feel. Sabrina Vourvoulias’s story was the stand-out piece here, but it was a very solid work in general, and again had a wide range of voices.

Judith Herrin, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe. Late Antiquity/early Christendom in a city that doesn’t get as much attention as perhaps it should–lots of politics, lots of mosaics. This was really interesting. The Goths still confuse me. (I think this is a case where the Goths are fractally confusing, though, because I read an entire book about the Goths and got more confused, not less.) It was a relief when we got to the Lombards and were on much more solid ground.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. “Now wait just a minute,” Johnson says at several points where other people should have said it, and I am grateful for that. This is just a weird situation and a weird book about a weird situation. A flutist stole a bunch of rare birds more or less because he could, and people behaved extremely strangely about it thereafter. It’s not a long book. It’s one that will leave you going, huh. Huh.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. This, on the other hand, is a longish book, and it’s just horrifying at so many turns. Keefe seems to specialize in writing beautifully and meticulously about people doing just hideous things to each other–seeing their humanity and not letting that sway him from seeing what horrible things they’re doing. And it’s the sort of thing where you might think, oh yes, I understand how the opioid epidemic is terrible, and–I still learned so much, I still learned so much about the details in ways that I think really are important, pieces of propaganda that neighbors and relatives repeated and did not know that they were pieces of propaganda meticulously crafted to make this family a buck (many, many bucks) from the suffering of others. The details really do matter, and Keefe documents them so well and writes about them so humanely and also I hope he has taken some nice walks and eaten some nice apples and petted some nice dogs to balance out the horrors he deals with in his work, my God. There’s a reason this is on all the recommended nonfiction lists this year, though. So important, so well done, such a terrible topic.

Yoon Ha Lee, Tiger Honor. Discussed elsewhere.

Ada Limón, Lucky Wreck. A reissue of her first book of poems, worth your time from the very beginning, still amazing to watch her grow as a poet, so great.

Xueting Christine Ni, Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction. I found this more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging, but I’m very glad this sort of work in translation is becoming more available so that I can have more and less favorite volumes of Chinese SF in translation rather than having only one that’s all we get.

Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American. Lots of Audubon running about trying to figure out how to make a place for himself in the world being the singular figure that he was. Lots of Audubon nearly getting himself killed in novel ways in the process–I did not expect nearly so many cliffhanger chapter endings as there were, and part of that, sure, was how Rhodes chose to frame it, but honestly, we almost did not have Audubon so many times, apparently. Huh. This jaunt into the world of biography has more plot twists than I ever would have guessed.

Dave Ring, ed., Queer Space Force. Kindle. It’s good for us to read things for which we are not the central audience, and this is one of those for me.

Elsa Sjunneson, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism. There’s a lot of this that I nodded along with already knowing, and a lot more of it where the details were new to me, even me, even as interested as I am in disability activism–so how much more, if you aren’t already interested in disability activism. The personal and the political entwine very well here.

Tracy K. Smith, ed., The Best American Poetry 2021. A surprising lot of this is poetry that is trying, very actively, to be about 2020, and yes, I wrote poetry that way this year too, but also I wrote poetry not that way, and…I don’t know, it will be interesting to me to look at this series later and compare what the editors thought was important poetry in the year vs. what actually turned out to be important poetry. Or interesting poetry, or all the other adjectives a poem can have. But mostly important, and that’s…kind of the problem I’m having, even though I was not sorry to have gotten this volume from the library and read it.

Yoss, Red Dust. Hey, do you want a science fiction novella from the 1950s, complete with psionics, particular kinds of alien and robot, and lack of girls? Cuban writer Yoss absolutely has you covered. If you read enough of those earlier in your life, well, this one is another one of those.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I have once again known the author just short of forever On Here.

Jo is a young actress trying to make it in New York in the mid-1970s. She’s got a role on one of the few soap operas still filming there–not her dream job, but steady work she unexpectedly loves. It’s all interrupted by the reappearance of her best friend Cyn from her younger, activist days protesting the war movement, who is determined not to let Jo settle into complacency in her new life.

Cyn does not happen to be alive any more. She died in a protest bombing of a draft office gone wrong–and Jo was supposed to be there with her.

So what does her ghost want? How can Jo exorcise Cyn, or help her find peace, or…whatever it is that falls between antagonism and collaboration in their complicated friendship? She keeps being thrown into might-have-beens in her own life that last longer and longer, showing her more and more of her own potential, roads not taken but worth considering…but why? How will they help her with the ghost of her best friend?

I am a total sucker for explorations of mid-twentieth century women’s work lives and choices, and I don’t mind a bit if the speculative element of something takes awhile to unfold, so I was absolutely the target audience for this book. Jo’s soap opera work was not something I’d really thought about before, but Garfinkle clearly did her research into the details of that field and treats it with respect but not reverence–just the right balance. Jo’s reconsideration of what was needed, what was useful, what was right, in regards to her past activism is well-situated in the ’70s–she is close enough to our own attitudes to be engaging but not unduly contemporary, and some of the questions she grapples with are still of interest today. This one is frankly feminist and takes its time with some very worthwhile questions, and it allows its humans to be human rather than insisting on Good Guys and Bad Guys. I’m so glad I got this copy.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I have known the author since the beginning of forever.

One of the problems with writing a lot is that it’s hard enough to have people compare your work to other people’s work–you can quite justly object that you are not someone else and cannot be expected to write their stories–but an entirely different kind of frustrating to have it compared to your own previous work. And I…loved Phoenix Extravagant more than anything else Yoon has written. And Tiger Honor is not Phoenix Extravagant.

But it’s not trying to be. It’s a different category–middle grade–a completely different genre and tone and characterization. Sebin is a young would-be spacefarer–spacefaring officer–in a long tradition of proud tiger spirits in their family serving in the Space Forces. They are just preparing to start their cadet term when disaster strikes: their admired Uncle Hwan, a respected officer in the Space Forces, is disgraced, stripped of his rank. Instead of using their time as a cadet only for the usual purposes of learning the ways of Space Forces and gaining a toehold on the ladder to fame and glory, Sebin now has to do those things and attempt to figure out what went so badly wrong with the relative they so admired. Surely he can’t be guilty of the things he’s accused of–so what happened? And who among the other cadets and officers can Sebin trust?

Sebin is believably guarded and focused, given their upbringing in the ruthless Juhwang Clan. The other cadets’ characters are mostly hinted at in outline, but that’s totally appropriate for the shape and length of the story. This is related to Lee’s previous MG book, Dragon Pearl, which I haven’t read yet, but now I want to–it worked perfectly well in this order, leaving me wanting more, but it seems like knowing more about the titular object would also have made this an interesting story. Not everything can be Phoenix Extravagant, and not everything should. Tiger Honor, like its protagonist, comes into its own as it progresses and is very much what it needs to be in itself.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I often say that the failure mode of a novella is to have the exposition of a novel and the payoff of a short story. I was concerned about Servant Mage because so much of Kate Elliott’s work is so epic. How would she adjust to the novella format?

Well, I find the results interestingly mixed. Servant Mage reads to me like the beginning of a longer work rather than a truncated stand-alone. There’s a lot of exposition going on here–five types of mages and several political factions with characters attached to each, which is exactly my jam. The ending is not so much anticlimactic as it is an opening of possibilities. Our heroine Fellian remains inquisitive despite her difficult circumstances, an ideal character for exploring a large and varied world. Which is what we’re getting here, I think; we’re getting the beginning of a world with a lot going on. But this is only the beginning. It’s Kate Elliott, and it’s Tor.com. We can feel confident that there will be more.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Team of Visionary Female and Nonbinary Creators. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising. Reread. I’m fascinated by the ways in which this holds up despite the ways in which I intellectually feel like it somewhat shouldn’t. Specifically the gender roles. It’s as though Cooper internalized that women are basically mums, sisters, and old ladies. The places where women are among the Old Ones, they often fade in and out of even counting, they do things like sitting at each other’s feet, just…being there. She is doing certain myths in the modern world without apparently even thinking of modernizing some aspects of those myths. And yet. And yet Will’s is a vividly syncretist story that I find just as compelling as I did when I was a midsized child. And nothing, after all, has to be perfect in order to be loved. One more thing, though–now that I understand that the south of England gets nothing like proper winter, I see that it’s all there in the book–that they don’t have, for example, snowplows, that the amount of snow I assumed would be required is in no way described, it’s much less than I assumed as a northern child who was familiar with the “and then they had to go out the second story because there was snow over the door” blizzard stories. That is simply not here. This is in part the story of southern England being brought to its knees by a freak ordinary snowstorm. The reader’s 50% is so strange even when I’m the reader.

Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live. This book traces a field taken too much for granted, looks into what its focus was assumed to be in different eras and why, what it has to offer and who offered it, who did the work and who got credit and who got forgotten. Dreilinger doesn’t mince words about the places where some figures were racist or others had racist ideas perpetrated upon them, she’s absolutely clear about how sexism shaped this field, but she also is straightforward about the power it has had and can have. And that’s very interesting.

Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. Duncan is sometimes a clunky writer, and he doesn’t always bother to research the figures who are peripheral to his main quest. (“He writes about John Jay and Gouverneur Morris in the same way!” I said indignantly to a family member on DMs.) But this is still a pretty entertaining biography of someone who saw a lot of interesting history.

Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783. Ellis is attempting to give perspective of what the people involved (both sides) thought they were doing at the time, sorting that out from what we think they were doing now. Not the most outstanding work on its period, but a reasonable place to either start or continue.

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Franklin would like to yeet Jackson’s mother and husband into the sun, and she has extensive documentation for why this would have been a great plan if only we’d been able to get there in time. I think that some of her well-intentioned commentary about contemporary attitudes toward Jackson’s weight may still be triggering to some readers, so heads up there (on the other hand, this biographer is distinctly well-intentioned in that direction, so good), and there’s also a need for serious content warning about sexual assault. And…it’s Shirley Jackson, so be aware that this is not going to be a happy read. But interesting.

Alexandria Hall, Field Music. I picked up this volume of poems because one of them spoke to me in a poetry newsletter I read, and it turned out that was the poem that still spoke to me most out of the entire volume. A lot of this was sort of a ships passing in the night volume for me, poems where I could see what was going on but not quite touch it. Perhaps it will reach you better.

Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth. Compelling. Deceptively simply told and pulled me through the alternating strands of narrative with eager attention to both. I hope she does more in this universe–there’s room but not necessity. (Young adult. Fantasy. Native inspired, own cultural roots.)

Kliph Nesteroff, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy. I picked this up on a whim because I was seeing it recommended, and it’s short and interesting. Like a lot of writing about comedy, it’s not itself particularly funny, but that’s all right. I was a bit startled by the amount of connection it had to places and people I know personally, but not in a bad way.

Nnedi Okorafor, Noor. A novella with a wind-storm eye in Africa forming an interesting cultural locus for highly modified characters. Went very quickly.

Mayukh Sen, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. These profiles are only slightly longer than a long-form magazine profile–it’s a very short book. So while it’s interesting, don’t expect a lot of depth here. On the other hand, even having a start on this topic is lovely and a good idea.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses. I always want to read Solnit right away when I can, and this was no exception. It is literally about some roses planted by George Orwell, and also about various other things sparked by thoughts of them, in the interesting and unconstrained way that she has. I immediately ordered a copy as a Christmas present.

E. Catherine Tobler, Sonya Taaffe, David Gilmore, et al, The Deadlands Issue 7. Kindle. Once again haunting and interesting. Glad this is here.

Sarah Vogel, The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm. I don’t feel like I know enough about the US farm crisis of the 1980s, and this is a start on that. I hope to find more soon. (Recommendations welcome.) Another thing it is, quite unintentionally…look, Sarah Vogel is from where I’m from, this is about my people, but she expects that you, the reader, will not be where we’re from. And so she explains, translates, and even footnotes a lot of cultural stuff that made me laugh or left me speechless by turns to have it so earnestly set forth for outsiders. If that’s an experience you want, well, there it is, even aside from a bunch of farm crisis stuff that will be very enlightening. (I called my mom. “Mor. She footnoted ‘uff da.'” Silence, then: “Well. I suppose you could.”)

Subtitle: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Well, this was a complete joy. In addition to having several stories that were individually lovely to read, it was extremely thoughtfully composed in terms of which story preceded which other story and where the essays on translation were seeded through the volume. It’s so satisfying to find an anthology that’s so well-balanced and -assembled.

Usually I consider an anthology a rousing success if I can call out two stories as particular favorites. In this anthology there were four–and with the way it’s assembled, their translators were listed so accessibly beside the authors that it’s easy to credit them here. The anthology started off in beautiful style with “The Stars We Raised,” by Xiu Xinyu, translation by Judy Yi Zhou. Its poignancy set a tone that kept me eager to find out what the other stories would do.

Xia Jia has long been one of my favorite Chinese authors in translation, but I’m not sure she qualifies with her quite short story “What Does the Fox Say” in this volume, because she experimented with writing it in English–in my opinion entirely successfully.

Later in the anthology, “A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu, translation by Ru-Ping Chen, and “The Painting” by Chen Qian, translation by Emily Xueni Jin, were stories of types that don’t usually appeal to me but in this case managed to transcend my subgenre preferences, which is high praise indeed. The other stories were interesting and charmingly done as well, but these were my favorites. I also really appreciated the inclusion of the essays about genre, gender, and translation, as I felt they added a lot to this particular volume. Very well done, will be looking for a physical copy as soon as I can get one.

John Joseph Adams, ed., Lightspeed Presents Futures and Fantasies. Kindle. Magazines have different approaches to digital swag for conventions. Some give recent issues to try to promote recent stories; some do compilations of older “greatest hits” material. This is the latter, and in that way it’s very successful–lots of really well-received stories from years past here. Adams focuses on stories that work as stories, not on stories that tie in with famous novel series but are basically outtakes, which shows his commitment to the short story form, and I really appreciate that. In another way it’s a little self-defeating, because at the end of every story is not just a list of the other stuff the author has published with Lightspeed (lovely! good!) but also a full–on my Kindle multiple-page–ad for a Lightspeed subscription. Since one can generally read Lightspeed without that much ad content, this seems counterproductive to me, but maybe it’s worked well for them in combination with the good stories.

S. Bear Bergman, Special Topics in Being Human: A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way About Caring for People, Including Myself. This is a comic book general advice book by the author of an advice column. I think it’s best aimed at the young and uncertain, and the art style didn’t really add anything for me, but it was a pleasant enough diversion.

Leslie Brody, Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy. The thing about Louise Fitzhugh is that she really did not want to be well known or understood by the people around her, and that means that this biography has a lot of flashes of illumination of its supporting cast and…less of Fitzhugh herself. She packed some points of extreme interest into a quite-short life, but there were areas Brody either could not illuminate or didn’t want to–she gestures, for example, at Fitzhugh’s amphetamine abuse but does not clarify its extent in either time or intensity. Is that because she doesn’t know or because it’s not the part of Fitzhugh’s life she finds important? It’s hard to say. But when you stack up enough of those points–why did she break up with that person? what was she doing there? and so on–the biography starts to feel out of focus, distanced. Still an interesting person, never a happy one, always one who wanted to be a little farther away than a biographer stands.

Carolyn Burke, Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury. In some ways group biographies of twentieth century figures are so weird after my beloved seventeenth, because there is enough information about the first two of these artists, at least, for several individual biographies, which do exist. Burke is not writing a group biography because that’s all she can piece together, it’s because she feels this is an interesting angle on this group of artists. And it is, somewhat, mostly. I end up glad that there are individual biographies of O’Keeffe that I can read later. Also I wound up mistrusting a biographer who seemed not to have heard, as of the publication of this volume in 2019, of bisexuality. I don’t know whether O’Keeffe and Salsbury had a sexual relationship. Unlike Burke I haven’t gone through all their papers with a fine-toothed comb. But I do know that “they sure were attracted to men” is…basically a separate question and a very silly thing to bring up as a counterpoint, because: bisexuals, they definitely exist, I have even met some myself and can introduce you if you’re civilized about it. This is the sort of point that is just so ridiculous that it makes me distrust the author’s judgment in other areas.

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. The title of this work is somewhat misleading. It looks like a biography, and in many ways it is a biography. I picked this up on–you will be able to tell from other things here and in the next fortnight and probably beyond–a biography kick, not sure whether I wanted a biography of Keynes. Within the first few pages I was utterly sure I did want one, I wanted this one. Except…Carter starts when Keynes was about thirty. And not because he felt that Keynes’s early life was irrelevant to his motivation and personality, either–he kept darting back in odd ways to early influences. And then at the end there was 150 pages of gratuitous Galbraith. It was a very weird book. I enjoyed it, it was just…”let’s just lop of early influences and tack on a mini-bio of the next feller” is not standard biographical form.

P. Djeli Clark, A Master of Djinn. The first full-length novel in this world, and it was worth the wait. This was a delight, ranging through Clark’s well-developed alternate Cairo and giving him the room to really let the characters develop and play. Recommended.

Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone. Reread. I’m going to be talking about The Dark Is Rising with someone later this month, so I thought I’d start at the beginning this time, with the hints and signs, questing for the Grail without full magic. And I found that it held up pretty well, although the bits of gender attitudes and approvals of colonialism that were baked in made me sigh in spots. The thing that made me mad as a kid that still made me mad as an adult was Merriman’s insistence that the evil vicar was not a real vicar. Even as a grade schooler I jutted my chin out at that, utterly sure that clergy came in wrong ‘uns and that people should know it; it felt at the time as though Cooper put that bit in at the end to soothe sensibilities rather than because it made any sense. I feel that way as an adult too.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Mercies. This was harrowing and beautiful and horrible. It’s about women in a fishing village in northern Norway in the seventeenth century, when a tragedy at sea has taken most of their menfolk, just as the king in far-off Denmark has decided to make an example of witches. They discover strength and weakness in themselves and each other, individually and as a community, and it’s vividly done and sometimes quite hard to read.

Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura, eds., We Are Meant to Rise. Discussed elsewhere.

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic. I would like to read some D/deaf commentary about this, because I am mostly sure I’m missing some of the things Kaminsky was doing with his fictional republic, its sudden deafness in the face of tyranny, his commentary about disability and community and resistance. But what I see is quite enough to go on. These poems were heartbreaking in spots, amazing.

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. An examination of several of the things people might be doing to try to mitigate climate change and other environmental concerns, and also the ways they can go weirdly wrong. A strange little book full of strange technologies and the weirdoes who advocate for them.

Yoon Ha Lee, The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales. Beautifully put together, illustrated little fantasy vignettes, many of them with a rather fairy tale theme but not all.

L.M. Montgomery, Kilmeny of the Orchard. Reread. I remember disliking this novella as a kid. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say that it was because it was sexist, astonishingly ableist, and racist against, of all things, Italian people. (This is from the period when Italian people were dubiously counted as white, so I really do mean “racist.”) So very not recommended–I’m glad to have thought to look at it again so that I can remove it from my shelves and reclaim the space, because this is one of the grossest things I’ve ever read. The protagonist’s mutism is psychological but inherited and innate from birth but can be overcome when she really really has strong enough motivation (violent Italian man threatening the man she loves so that he needs to be verbally warned, but somehow she couldn’t chuck something to get anybody’s attention). Oh, and it didn’t matter that she was disabled not because she was a fellow worthwhile human being but because she was the prettiest. Eyeroll forever, definitely anti-recommended.

Jill Paton Walsh, Debts of Dishonor. A reasonable enough mystery of its time, nothing outstanding but entertaining. Imogen Quy is a nurse at a Cambridge college, giving her all sorts of good skills and opportunities to be a detective. I’m not compelled to read the two in this series I haven’t read yet, but I absolutely would if they were convenient.

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism. Discussed elsewhere.

Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. A discussion of how we know what we know about the Polynesian peoples and how they got where they are. I particularly enjoyed the attitudes that led Thompson to title one section something like “why don’t we just ask them and listen to what they say.” What a useful idea, though not the only useful idea. Lots of interesting stuff to know about the migration of humans and the way humans from different cultures learn about each other, as well as about the Polynesian triangle and its peoples.

Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Brooklyn Allen, Alexa Bosy, and Kanesha C. Bryant, Lumberjanes: End of Summer. The last volume of the series, and as such…I’m afraid it was a bit anticlimactic for me. There were several elements that the authors clearly wanted to draw back in from previous volumes, but in a way that ended up feeling perfunctory and formulaic for me. I wish this had had its definite ending four or so volumes ago. It wasn’t offensive, it just was not as good as the series peak as far as I was concerned.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a book of poems and essays written by a very diverse selection of Twin Cities-connected people in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. In less technical terms: this is my neighbors. This is what happens when my neighbors cry out in pain, for justice.

The editors of this volume have done what I would call an outstanding job at getting a truly great cross-section of Twin Cities life. In a world where too many journalists report something as a trend when their next-door neighbor says it and their cousin agrees–where too many editors go back over and over again to their immediate circle of friends to fill a table of contents–this book is something different.

The writers are all ages. All stages of writing experience. Some of them are Native, some immigrants, some in that status in between that describes many to most Americans. Some want to talk about their personal past, some about larger history–some about the present and future. And these editors have given them the space and the freedom to do so. This book is a snapshot of a very particular moment but also has extension into past and future. This is a gift from a greater Minnesota.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

What a weird book.

There are places where it does an excellent job of focusing on mainstream fashion, where a lot of what I’ve read about feminism and fashion has been focused on radicalism. And that’s really useful–the places where the average woman’s attitudes about each topic interrelate can be interesting and illuminating. Rabinovitch-Fox is fairly good at looking how white middle-class examples percolate into respectability for working-class and/or Black women, too.

However, one of the major limitations of this approach is that it ends up giving the rather strong impression that fashion flows from White women to Black women–because the pattern of “and then Black women picked up this middle-class White trend to gain respectability” does of course only flow one way, but that is not the only thing that happens in fashion, not in general and not in its relationship to feminism. It’s just the focus of this book that makes it look that way.

Further, as often happens with American history writing, the ideas of race are basically limited to Black/White…even when the fashion in question is “kimono”/”Oriental”-style. Rabinovitch-Fox has a chance to discuss what actual Japanese-American women thought of the Western fashion trends that claimed to derive from their own heritage but actually had only a loose relationship to those garments, how those women’s access to those trends differed from White women’s, but that was an opportunity lost here. As were several others–rural women. Cleaners. The generalizations Rabinovitch-Fox falls back on here hold in many cases but sometimes obscure more than they illuminate. If you want to know what middle-class women are buying off the rack as relates to mainstream feminism, this isn’t particularly deep, but it makes a start.