Novel Gazing Redux

Jarod K. Anderson, Love Notes from the Hollow Tree. I found this volume of poetry rather didactic, focused on supposed insights the poet had without a lot of fireworks in the language or image department.

Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. This is about mammalian evolution from their first distinguishable appearance, and it has a lot of really interesting parts. I felt it was somewhat marred by the author’s tendency to talk about evolution as directed and/or directional in ways that I’m sure he felt were easily understood to be figures of speech, but…people do not actually understand that very well, it’s important not to reinforce that proto-bats were not following their dreams and working hard to make it happen when they evolved the features that allow for flight, just for example. Nobody is the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution is not a thing that has pinnacles. Lots of great stuff about jawbones here, though.

P. Djeli Clark, The Black God’s Drums. I see why this got so many rave reviews a few years back, because it’s so much fun! Airships in a fantasy historical Louisiana, wow, yes, love it, more.

Brandon Crilly, Catalyst. Discussed elsewhere.

Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation. I love Nanette and Douglas, I think Gadsby is so brilliant, and this book was an interesting companion to that material. I wanted to give it to the parents of a few friends who are queer and neurodiverse, because there were very relatable elements in this book that I think might be much easier to get across about a third party than about their own children, and Gadsby did such a good job of communicating them. Mostly I just wanted to bake her cookies.

Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. This was another case where the poet and I were ships passing in the night–I could see what she was doing but I couldn’t feel what she was doing. Our rhythms did not mesh. This happens.

Kate Heartfield, The Embroidered Book. Best thing she’s done so far. Love it. Did you need Hapsburgs in your fantasy? you totally did. It’s just chock full of Hapsburgs, Hapsburgs as far as the eye can see, and the concept of magic Kate’s got going is far more intense on the subject of exchange and personal sacrifice than most of what you see out there. I had a tiny quibble with a minute fraction of the ending, but not enough to prevent me recommending this book wholeheartedly.

Winifred Holtby, Anderby Wold. Holtby’s first book, about a Socialist agitator coming to a small Yorkshire village in 1913 (written in 1923). It’s hilarious in parts and outright tragic in other parts; it is not the masterwork that South Riding is, and there is some Irish stereotyping in it. But that last bit aside it was still a mostly lovely read.

R. F. Kuang, Babel. Another “best thing she’s done so far. Love it” book for August. As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a sucker for writing about translation, and this is explicitly about translation, and explicitly about colonialism, and also it is a beautifully done historical fantasy, and it is also a great college novel (I love college novels), and it is also a lovely book about friendship, and…look, I recommend it, okay? I highly recommend it.

Ken Liu, Speaking Bones. The stunning conclusion of this series. I felt like this was somewhat tighter than the third book but still had quite a lot of Liu’s eagerness to show the backstory of every fantastical military innovation…but at the same time, did I enjoy those backstories? I sure did. Don’t start here, but I do recommend the series–it gets where it’s going eventually, and as long as you’re not in a hurry it’s a good ride.

Anna Meriano, Love Sugar Magic: A Mixture of Mischief. The third in a series of MG books about magic, friendship, family, and baking. Probably better to start at the beginning of the series but fine to start here. The family stuff in this book shook me up (in a good way), and I loved it when the characters had the opportunity to be stupid and not confide in each other and rejected that opportunity. Because there are still plenty of problems when you are not making more of them by being a jerk to the people you’re closest to and/or fueling the classic “idiot plot.” Anyway, fun times.

John Milton, Paradise Lost. Reread. So when you go to do a retelling, you ask yourself: what am I bringing to this retelling? What’s the new bit that’s me? And from what I can see, some of the crucial things Milton brought to the story of the Fall were: 1) English verse, 2) lashings of sexism (no really, way more sexism than the original), and 3) a sense of the world as the size that we now know it. That last part was fascinating to me, that when he was talking about the whole world, he meant it in roughly the way that a modern person would mean it. He knew there was such a place as Peru and felt like it had to be accounted for somehow in this story’s references. And considering how recently he had a chance to know that, it was astonishing to me how integrated it was into the text, how he didn’t just handwave it away as of no consequence. The sexism, though. Lord. There is an entire speech from Adam that’s basically, “the angels are all dudes, why didn’t you make us all dudes? why didn’t you make Adam and Steve, God?” I am paraphrasing but not maliciously, that is really what his speech says. There is a whole heaping helping of “she’s beautiful but wow is she dumb” in the concept of Eve in this telling. Sigh.

Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope. Kindle. Parker is quotable–we all know she’s quotable. What was interesting to me was how differently she came off in aggregate than in snippets. Yes, there was the bright, brittle, witty cynicism, but also there was quite a lot of acknowledgment that she had been hurt, more willingness to have something beneath that surface. (But still funny.)

Lina Rather, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars. Sequel, and I recommend reading the first one first, because this is a lot of consequences from the first set of actions, and the characters hang together perfectly well if you know what’s come before, but I think if you didn’t there would be several moments of “who’s this other person, why do we care.” The rebel space nuns have not stopped space rebelling. Did you want them to? I sure didn’t.

Emma Southon, Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. Okay, this is a very weird book. It’s a biography of Agrippina that Southon decided to write with loads of pop culture references to make the Roman stuff make more sense to the modern reader. Except…I feel like a lot of the specific references she chose were for a very specific audience. I am in that audience. But there was at least one reference that friends ten years older and ten years younger than me did not get when I asked them about it, and I suspect there are a lot more. So…I suspect that within the next decade the pop culture stuff in this book will be more alien than the Roman stuff, not less. Is that okay? Of course it’s okay, I read Victorian writers who are doing exactly the same thing 150 years before Southon, and it’s fascinating. But it’s something to know about the book, that it’s not very formal and is very referential. Also Agrippina, I mean, Nero’s mom, Caligula’s sister, this was going to be a weird book anyway. No way it couldn’t be.

Rebecca Stott, Dark Earth. For me this book suffered from being set in a milieu I have put a lot of research into and therefore have a lot of opinions about, that is to say, immediately post-Roman Britain. So I kept being snagged out of the story (it’s an historical fantasy) by reactions that can be summed up as “I see why you think that but I think this instead and have you read….” Which is too bad, because the character relationships and prose were quite good, so if you’re not weird about post-Roman Britain like me, you may well enjoy it.

Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Maltesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889-1900. I think one of the most gratifying things about this book is how literally the title is true: Turcato is actually going on the premise that people often do things for reasons that make some sense to them at the time–shocking, I know–and that it’s worth looking at what those reasons are rather than throwing our hands up and saying, “Anarchists! they were irrational!” They quite often were not, and by taking this approach, Turcato manages to do radical things like…actually looking for someone rather than taking a contemporary letter that he has “disappeared” as in some way factual (since…human beings do not actually have that power…this was fruitful). Should this be your first or only book on 19th century anarchism, probably not, but it’s really interesting for the portion it is about.

Nghi Vo, Into the Riverlands. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also, the author is a convention/online friend.

There’s an entire subgenre of books that look like fantasy on the surface but are actually science fiction when you look close. Or straddle the line: are these energy beings aliens? are they a magical race? does it matter?

Brandon’s book is one of those: you start with a stage magician called Mavrin, doing what is clearly stage magic. Sleight of hand. Tricks. And then things unfold: the objects Mavrin has, are they magic, are they a kind of technology he doesn’t fully understand. Are they trouble: oh yes, definitely that.

This is a world that humans have altered beyond recognition, and they–and others–are still learning to live with the fallout of their alterations. And as has been the case so often in history, sometimes humans have no idea what they’ve done. Crilly does an admirable job of showing a variety of characters with different reactions to their world and its implications, always making sure that the humans are comprehensibly human (and the aliens are consistently themselves). This was fun to read, and I’m excited to see what he does next.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Cleric Chih and their hoopoe with perfect recall, Almost Brilliant, are traveling and, as is their wont, collecting people’s favorite stories. They agree to skip the ferry and take a faster road with four new companions: a young martial artist and her sworn sister and a curmudgeonly middle-aged couple. But “faster” is not necessarily “easier,” and her companions are not what they immediately seem–and the stories they tell are not necessarily just stories.

This novella is a charming addition to the Singing Hills Cycle. I think it would actually be fine to begin here and go back–I think it stands reasonably well alone, and its opening tells you what you need to know about the protagonist. I devoured it in one sitting. I don’t actually want Vo not to write her other stories, because I like those too, but I immediately wanted more. I’m here for as many more as she’s got.

Max Adams, The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur. Subtitle appears to largely be chosen to appeal/signal to the mass audience–this is not an author who is going to try to wedge an historic Arthur in where a mythic one serves us all better. Lots of the sort of analysis Adams does best, fits well with his other books of Britain/early England.

Hanna Bervoets, We Had to Remove This Post. A Dutch novella about people who do content moderation for social media. I was frankly disappointed in this, because I’ve had friends who do this job–who burned out on this job–and the things that happened to them were far more nuanced than what Bervoets shows here. Nor does she really seem to have anything to say other than “wow this job sucks,” which: yes it does, but I was hoping for more substantive commentary and less…gratuitous description of how awful people can be, look, how awful, very awful.

Casey Blair, Royal Tea Service. The third in its series, and so far as I can tell the last–there’s a definite conclusion here in Miyara’s relationship with her family as well as the larger world and its magic. And the mysterious old lady reappears….

Chaz Brenchley, Mary Ellen–Craterean! Chapter 13 and Interlude. Kindle. Still reading the serial, even when its characters are on term break….

A. R. Capetta, The Heartbreak Bakery. A charming story of a magical baker figuring out powers and relationship stuff all at once–and also attempting to come out to family and friends as agender, which is why I carefully avoided pronouns in that sentence. Syd’s recipes appear with commentary as well as Syd’s interpersonal shenanigans. I left this book wanting to make scones.

Zoraida Cordova, Valentina Salazar is Not a Monster Hunter. She’s a monster protector, and this is a fun romp. The plot twists are only twisty if you’re in the target age range, but you know what, MG books are allowed to be mostly for MG people, and plot twists are definitely not everything. Internet friends who turn out to have cool magical [spoiler] matter a lot too.

Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors. Two archaeologists with the approach that humans have dealt with changing climate before and surely we can learn things from how it’s gone. The ending is a bit repetitive, but it’s still an interesting take, and not horribly long.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India. Kindle. I am very much of two minds about this book. On the one hand, “can the colonized and the colonizer be genuine friends or will institutional/structural questions get in the way” is a very interesting question on which to center a book, especially a book of this era, and I love books that are fundamentally about friendship and people trying very hard. On the other hand, I went into this book unspoilered for anything except theme–which is how I like to read “classics,” I like to read them as books rather than institutions–and thus I was entirely unprepared for the fact that a sexual assault accusation would be plot-central and Forster would not care even a little bit about the experience of a person being sexually assaulted. Not. Even. A little. He does not even want to take a stance on whether anyone was sexually assaulted–maybe she was, maybe bitches be crazy sometimes, who could say. And that…is pretty hard to take, frankly. Having a book that both centers on and completely dismisses sexual assault is very hard to take, no matter how much I like the rest of what it’s doing, which is a lot.

Rachel E. Gross, Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. Bacterial ecosystems! Adjacent organ structures! Intersectionality as far as the eye can see! There’s something for everyone in this book, which is reasonably brief and breezy but not so breezy as to be ridiculous. It’s an explicitly inclusive book, with respect for both those with vaginas who are women and those who are not and also a thoughtful discussion of the construction of neovaginas.

Winifred Holtby, The Land of Green Ginger. This is a much smaller book than South Riding–most things are, conceptually if not literally–but I still loved what Holtby was doing at this scale. Its heroine is a dreamer of grand dreams, a square peg in a round hole who does not let her edges get filed down, and it is both precisely observed and specifically hopeful. Just what I needed.

Fonda Lee, The Jade Setter of Janloon. Kindle. If you’ve been wondering whether you’ll like Lee’s Green Bone Saga but are not prepared to commit to a thick fantasy novel, this is the novella for you. It’s one self-contained bit of side story, prequel to the events of the series so it won’t spoil anything, but it gives a very good taste of the world.

Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop. Kindle. This was delightful and entertaining, a 19th century novel about four sisters who are orphaned and start a photography shop to support themselves, their various fates and works. Levy was friends with Eleanor Marx, and she’s doing that New Woman thing where she’s trying to figure out things about women and work and respect and relationships. I really like that thing–especially when it has funny bits, which this does.

Naomi Mitchison, Vienna Diary 1934. Do you ever say to yourself “I wonder what it would be like if one of my nerdy leftist friends could have been in Austria at the beginning of Austrofascism”? Wonder no more, this is your book. Victor Gollancz dispatched our girl Naomi to Vienna for a couple of months to write a book directly reporting on conditions on the ground in Austria and what on earth was going on there, and she did just that, and it’s personal and heartbreaking and glorious. Remarkably few cringe moments given the era. Gosh I wish there were more like this. Mitchison also talks about her frustrations in trying and failing to get the press at large to pay attention to the conditions she was seeing on the ground–if Gollancz had not been willing to pay for the book, this material would have gone completely unpublished, because article after article was rejected while the mainstream press of the time ran wishy-washy articles infected with both-sideism rather than eyewitness reports. Take whatever lesson from that you will.

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World. I strongly suspect that the subtitle was chosen to try to sell more copies to the American audience, because this book also goes substantially into the effects of Russian Empire wheat (largely Ukrainian wheat) in the era in question. Lots of chewy detail, very good stuff.

Winifred Peck, The Warrielaw Jewel. By far the slightest of the three of Peck’s books I’ve read so far. This is when people were still learning to write mystery novels–still moving from “detective story” to “novel, but with a mystery in,” and this book is part of that progression but again a fairly slight one. There’s some fairly sketchy stuff about Romany people that never crosses the line into overt narrative-supported racism per se (racist characters for sure) but still is not the good kind of uncomfortable, and also some internalized misogyny, and on the whole I think her other novels are a better choice.

Aimee Pokwatka, Self-Portrait With Nothing. Discussed elsewhere.

John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet. If you read a lot about forests this is unlikely to have much that’s particularly new in it, but it’s a good one to introduce to people who are interested but not particularly immersed in this topic. The authors also talk seriously about the relative benefits of many small vs. fewer large habitats, in conservation terms, which is a useful policy conversation to keep abreast of.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems. Kindle. I had hopes that there would be title possibilities in this, and there were, but not for the thing I meant to be titling. (Darn.) Rossetti is that particular kind of Victorian overwrought that is very hit-and-miss for me. Her religious poetry in particular is less successful for me–and the amount of “someday I’ll be dead and you’ll be sorry” that slips through is really not to my taste. She was very thoroughly herself, though.

Margery Sharp, Harlequin House and The Foolish Gentlewoman. She is so good and I love her. There are occasional moments when colonialism has crept into her default metaphors, fair warning there. On the other hand, Sharp has a trick for writing light, fun books that turn out to have more to them than meets the eye. There was a moment of The Foolish Gentlewoman when I gasped and teared up at the character who had been given clear (and modern!) moral truths, in the middle of a fluffy confection. It’s like biting into divinity and finding out that they’ve put the really good pecans in. Sharp cares about the internal lives of people of all ages, and while not everyone in her books is trying to be a good person, the ones who are are supported by the text, and sometimes that’s such a relief.

Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner, eds., Apex Issue 132. Kindle. Generally good issue, with Iori Kusano’s “Have Mercy, My Love, While We Wait for the Thaw” as the standout story.

Jasmine Walls, Dozerdraws, and Micah Myers, The Last Session Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative. This is a sweet story about a group of friends who met in their Gender-Sexuality Alliance in high school and started a D&D group adjusting to new adult life and their old gaming group changing. It’s not very substantial but reasonably well-done throughout.

A.C. Wise, Hooked. A sequel to Wendy, Darling, and I’d recommend that you read the first one first; this relies on reacting to its emotional impact several years on. It does more with consequences. I love second book consequences.

Samit Basu, The City Inside. This is a really engaging book that takes on all sorts of ideas about livestreaming and social media forms of entertainment–what they do to our relationships and the world around us. The Delhi in this book is extrapolated into the near-future with loving but clear eyes–not an ideal but a place actual people do and will live, beautifully drawn.

Elizabeth Bear, The Origin of Storms. Will I sound too much like a marketing document if I call this the triumphant conclusion of this series? Still and all: it is. Dragons in various forms, diplomacy and betrayal, a sentient fountain pen and a Really Good Doggo, all the things you’ve come to love in this series, brought together for the conclusion, hurrah. (Or maybe you haven’t come to love it yet. If not, don’t start here, the others are still in print!)

Casey Blair, Tea Set and Match. Second in the Tea Princess series, the structure is not quite as strong as the first one simply because the fun Casey decided to have (GBBO/other reality competition show analog) wasn’t smoothed into the fantasy world quite as well. The characters are still endearing, their adventures engaging, but I’d start with the first one here too.

Stephanie Burgis, Touchstones: A Collection. Kindle. This is a collection that really shows Steph’s range, from sweet to dark and all sorts of things in between. I’d read some of these stories before, but it’s nice to have them collected–and I definitely hadn’t managed to find all of them.

John Cardina, The Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly. This is structured to use several botanical examples to illustrate larger points about how humans attempt to control the plants in our environments–and how those attempts can backfire hugely. It’s a very US-centric book, but I think it should be clear which of the principles apply elsewhere (which is most of them).

Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Mosscap and Sibling Dex have returned to human lands, to a flood of interest neither of them is quite sure how to process. Their relationship continues to be tender and inquisitive. Less tea than you might hope, but more robot. I would once again start with the first one here, but if you liked the first one I think you’ll like this one too.

Marq De Villiers, The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement. This is one of those books that made me think, well, congrats to De Villiers for managing to get a book deal for putting together sections about things he’s interested in, fair play to you, sir, may we all have the same. Interesting details here, although toward the end there are some places where his detail-orientation collides with big picture questions like climate change in ways that didn’t work ideally for me.

Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby, eds., The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume. So…there are several ways to come up with a multiple-poet collection. You can select poems from an open call! You can solicit pre-existing poems you’ve enjoyed! You can do all sorts of stuff. In this case the editors sent scent to poets who had agreed to write them a poem inspired by each scent. I feel–I may be wrong–that this gets a much broader range of poems than if the poems are selected rather than the poets. What I discovered about myself: I was much more interested in the less literal takes on this challenge. Okay.

Barbara Hambly, Death and Hard Cider. The latest Benjamin January mystery is set during the chaos of the 1840 election, which is frankly a neglected period for historical novels. Tippecanoe and Tyler too, lots of campaigning, lots of politics–even if this was an election you usually saw a lot of, having a free man of color in 1840 New Orleans as the viewpoint character would not be standard for what this genre has been, and Hambly really leaned into that. The range of historical issues she’s willing to take on is part of what keeps this series fresh.

Guy Gavriel Kay, All the Seas of the World. This was only a few of the seas of the world, but I liked it anyway. It’s Kay doing the secondary world history that he does best, and I found it immersive and lovely. Would I start here? Probably not ideally, but maybe, probably it’d be fine. This set of books has few linear sequels, and this is not one of them.

Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. A ’60s mystery that is very, very much of its time. There were places I could watch Kemelman using the opportunity to educate Gentile readers about Judaism: what’s going on here, which I’m sure was (and still is, in some ways) valuable–but not at the expense of mystery story. Went very fast.

C.S. Lewis, Poems. There’s a reason Lewis was not a famous poet in his lifetime. More than one. He has the confidence in knowing the rules of poetry that comes of the kind of education he had, but it turns out that rules are a rather small part of poetry. Lewis actively, on the page not by implication, advocates for having what he calls the Stock Responses–the emotional reactions that your culture tells you are the right ones to have–and he is both smug and resentful about other poets who do not have those responses. Also, for people who argue about whether he was really a misogynist or not, with various positions about Susan, I refer you to the poem in which he’s really mad that he’s attracted to some lady because she is definitely not all that. (No, seriously. That’s the poem.) Or rather, I do not refer you to that poem, it is very, very skippable. Frankly I read the second half of this book in train wreck mode.

Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind. This is a very solid poetry collection, but it’s not my favorite of hers–just a different set of ideas and references than the previous work, which is great but didn’t hit quite as dead center with me. Still enthusiastic about whatever she does next.

Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds. Climate change and plagues and…not nearly as dark or upsetting as I feared it might be. Life after the apocalypse, friendship and family after the apocalypse. I had not braced myself for the sweetness.

Winifred Peck, The Warrielaw Jewel. A mystery from 1933. She was still finding her stride in this one, and she spends some time talking about how in the years when this book was set we didn’t yet know how to treat…what she means is developmentally disabled people, but it turns out they still did not know how to treat them in 1933. (Guess my feelings about whether we’re particularly great at it now, just guess.) So I would recommend either of the other two books of hers I’ve read above this one–it’s not ill-intentioned, but she’s very early in her novelist game and also in the Anglophone world’s development of genre mystery.

Aden Polydoros, The City Beautiful. A very gay, very Jewish, very fantastical visit to turn of the last century Chicago. Sometimes really grim but also beautifully vivid.

Kelly Robson, High Times in Low Parliament. This was a romp through a fairy government with a bit of an edge, giving humans a hard look through a side of whimsy.

DaVaun Sanders et al, eds., Fiyah Issue 23. Kindle. Two standout stories in this issue were Lina Monroe’s “The Usual Way” and A.M. Barrie’s “Just Desserts.” I remain glad to subscribe.

Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised By A Voice in Her Head. These poems are mostly about Shire’s immigrant experience and her relationships with other members of her community. There is a combination of kindness and clear sight that I find very appealing.

Edward Struzik, Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat. (The Improbable World of Peat is my next theme park.) So much interesting swamp stuff. I enjoyed this a lot, and if you like this general kind of natural history, this should fill a great “swamps and wetlands” niche.

E. Catherine Tobler et al, ed., The Deadlands Issue 15. Kindle. Beautiful issue. My favorite story was Leah Bobet’s “Sunday in the Park with Hank,” but I also recommend Amanda Downum’s column. I know I say that a lot, but this time I feel like it’s not just interesting but also important.

Elizabeth Van Duine, Paper and Knife. This is a collection of images of papercuttings, sent to me by a friend who knows I like to do that myself. My only complaint with this volume is that the kind of photography they used for the book sometimes makes it hard to see that you’re looking at a papercutting rather than a print of some sort.

Kalynn Bayron, This Wicked Fate. The second of a pair, and you really don’t want to read it as a stand-alone, as it’s very much the kind of duology where the story just dives in and keeps going as soon as the second book begins rather than trying to ease you in. Poison mythologies and family relationships, YA fantasy, very fond.

Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality. Discussed elsewhere.

Julie C. Day and Ellen Meeropol, eds., Dreams for a Broken World. This was a very mixed bag. Day and Meeropol were trying to bring two different genre sensibilities to this fundraiser anthology, and for me, at least, the genre stories were immensely more successful than the mimetic ones. (And as you all know from reading this blog, I do read mimetic fiction avidly, so it’s not just that I’m more accustomed to the speculative stories.) There was a nice reprint from Sabrina Vourvoulias in this, and Zig Zag Claybourne (“Finding Ways”) and Marie Vibbert (“Subscription Life”) had the stand-out new stories.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters. Kindle. Famously unfinished, but just barely: you can see the shape of the ending they are barreling towards, and I believe it’s only the very last chapter she didn’t get to complete. A Victorian novel focused on the life, particularly the loves, of one provincial doctor’s daughter. This is not my favorite nor yet my second favorite Gaskell, but I’m glad I read it all the same.

Louise Glück, American Originality: Essays on Poetry. I was more interested in the things that actually were essays on poetry than on the introductions written for other people’s collections–but those felt more satisfying to me than the Jhumpa Lahiri versions of the same genre in last fortnight’s reading.

Roger T. Hanlon and John B. Messenger, Cephalopod Behavior. Very much a textbook rather than something structured as a smooth prose read, but I wanted to find out about cephalopod behavior for a project, and boy, did I.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. Discussed elsewhere.

Fady Joudah, Tethered to Stars. This is one of those poetry collections where the astronomical theme is very loose/metaphorical, rather than mostly writing poetry about astronomy. I liked it for what it is, but do not mistake it for the other thing, because it definitely isn’t.

Christopher Kemp, Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation. Kemp walks the fine line of a modern nonfiction writer telling you about himself, but in this case it’s mostly anecdotes about how completely bad his navigation skills are, how he was fascinated with this topic due to his own shortcomings rather than his own skills. I learned interesting things about which parts of the brain are doing what. Unfortunately the section at the end about getting better at navigation was all the stuff I’ve already done to compensate for having a balance disorder–it seems that this is not an entirely surmountable problem. Well. Sigh. Still good stuff to think about, though.

Dana Levin, Now Do You Know Where You Are. Short answer: no. I think these poems are probably quite good for someone who is not me, but I felt un-grounded in them, un-rooted, and not in a deliberate and systematic way. I didn’t hate them, I just…did not orient myself to them successfully.

Philip Mansel, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV. Okay, so I’m not entirely clear why Mansel feels that someone will be interested in reading 450+ pages of Louis XIV bio and have no knowledge of what happened in France before or since, but he does seem to hold that belief, starting the book with Clovis and carrying on to the present day. Those sections are short but kind of baffling in their existence. But otherwise it’s an interesting look at not just Louis XIV himself but also the institutions surrounding him from earliest infancy.

Margery Sharp, Something Light. Wow is this title ever accurate. This is a frothy, fun, funny book from 1960 about a career woman deciding to methodically seek a “good” husband only to find that she can’t go through with it in a number of the obvious places. The ending is a little abrupt but the entire thing is entertaining. (Caveat: I remember at least one moment of casually Antisemitic language toward the end.)

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Selfies. This is the most recent Phoebe & Her Unicorn collection. You can pick it up basically anywhere–it’s a daily comic strip from the contemporary era, so while there are plot arcs, they’re all pretty bite-sized. Still fun, took me only a minute.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 47. Kindle. Another very satisfying issue of this magazine. John Chu’s “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” was my favorite of the issue.

E. Catherine Tobler et al, The Deadlands Issue 14. Kindle. Also another good offering of this magazine, in which I felt that Iona Datt Sharma’s “Give This Letter to the Crows” was particularly fine.

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. Now look. Nobody made him make this book stretch to 1931. I don’t know why he did it, except that he wanted to put in a slapdash chapter about the beginning of the Great Depression. Frankly he would have been much better off if it had been 1916-1922, and no one would have stopped him; that’s clearly what he wanted to write about and was the bulk of the book. So if you decide you want to read about global geopolitics in the late-Great War/immediate post-Great War period, that’s all very well, but if you want to read about global geopolitics in the 1920s, don’t blame me if you pick this book up and are disappointed.

Hannah Whitten, For the Throne. Another completion of a duology where I do not recommend reading it without the one that comes before. Echoes but does not directly follow several fairy tales, makes its own space in the dark woods.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Oh, this is gorgeous. It’s a novella about the world falling apart and being put back together again, all at once–there’s no stage of the novella where people are not trying to hold the world together for each other. There are people saving library books from flood, planting seeds, teaching each other, making musical instruments. There are so many people going about the work of the world as best they can under difficult circumstances.

It’s the shape of piece that has different characters threaded throughout, one section leading into another by theme and other elements less than by continuity of character, so even at novella length you get different angles on the same places and problems. Some of it is generational difference but some is just personal–Sophie is a different individual than Kit or Benno or any of the others, as it should be. But themes keep coming around, themes keep coming back. This is a novella that looks climate disaster in the eye and does not flinch from the harm it will do, is already doing, but also speaks to the resilience of human hope and beauty in the face of it.