Tag: bookses precious

Chaz Brenchley, Mary Ellen–Craterean! Chapters 5 and 6. Kindle. The Martian boarding school adventure rattles breathlessly on.

Sarwat Chadda, City of the Plague God. Discussed elsewhere.

Roland Enos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization. Enos is coming at this from a biomechanical perspective, which is really interesting. He goes into the physical and chemical details of wood’s reactions to various inputs, and also into how humans biomechanically interact with some of them, and there are all sorts of technologies along the way, literally all sorts. He is very much a wood booster, but it’s okay, so am I.

Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Whales and their ecosystems. Do you like whales? Of course you do, and so do I, and so does Rebecca Giggs. Not everyone she writes about does, be forewarned, but it’s still a lovely book.

A. Kendra Greene, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, and Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums. In addition to thoughts about whales, penises, and other Icelandic museum specifics, this very short volume is thoughtful about museums and collections and how and why we do them.

Barbara Hambly, House of the Patriarch. The latest Benjamin January novel takes our hero to the religious revival movements of western New York in the years before the Civil War. The constant awareness of Ben’s peril makes all of these pretty tense, but it’s short and not more tense than you’d expect for that setting. I feel like Hambly choosing to range within the setting available to her is a good thing, overall, even though there’s a lot more she could still do with New Orleans; I feel like it’s part of her trying not to get into too much of a rut with these but to deliberately explore different aspects of the theme and setting.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, The Thread That Binds the Bones. Reread. This is very much id fiction. “We have to get married right away upon meeting each other! Never mind why! Also we are both amazingly magically gifted and I can instantly sift through your family and sort good from bad and neutralize your bad relatives!” I mean. If you want that, it is very that. Wish fulfillment and all. And sometimes people very much do want that. I didn’t remember quite how much it was that, though.

Kathleen Jamie, The Overhaul. These are beautiful local nature poems and personal poems, and I just love her. More please. (Her “local” is Scotland.)

Helen Jukes, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings. This title sounds like it goes with a very metaphorical, lyrical short story collection full of little lapidary stories that make you gasp. In fact it is about bees. It is a memoir of this author’s beekeeping. And it is very straightforward, it is not particularly lyrical. But if you’d like a person who finds solidity in her life through bees, this is that book.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Darkest Road. Reread. The last of the Fionavar Tapestry, and I 100% do not recommend reading it without the first two, although I know someone who tried going without the first one. It is high-contrast and mythic and thoroughly itself.

Madeleine L’Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother. Reread. Oh, this was terrible. Oh my God it was so terrible. She keeps telling stories of her father and her husband being just terrible and she does not seem to know that they’re terrible. And then she gets to the point where she’s trying to justify her Southern plantation-owning ancestors as somehow seeing their slaves as doing honorable work because they referred to them as servants. Aaaaagh. Like, the story about how her alcoholic father was rude to waiters and this was a sign that he was awesome and her mother just didn’t understand was bad enough, but then when she got into slavery and the parts that she is literally not the person able to forgive these people…aaaaaagh. Oh Madeleine no.

C.S. Malerich, The Factory Witches of Lowell. A lovely novella that is about what the title tells you: labor movement plus witchcraft in the mills, hurrah, this was so much fun, I want more like this.

Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children. This is a sequel, and frankly I think you will do much better if you read Bodies of Light first; it actually gives weight to some of the consequences that are playing out in this book. I feel like this is one of the most elliptical books I’ve ever read. So many important, crucial things happen off the page, between scenes, and must be inferred. I also frankly found only one of the two viewpoint characters, Allie, to be interesting. I wanted to care about the lighthouse builder visiting Japan, but I really didn’t. Ah well. Still a topic and type of book I don’t see enough of.

Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China. An interesting short book that deals with how we know things and how various cultures have approached that and how a shift in it works.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I am worried about this book.

It’s a romp through Mesopotamian mythology, transported into the present day in a story about a Sikander, an Iraqi-American kid who works at his parents’ New York deli. Gilgamesh makes cookies, there are some truly excellent cats and demons and fashionistas–generally it’s a really fun middle grade fantasy.

I am concerned that people might not find that out for themselves, because of the title and the year in which it’s coming out.

And I can’t even say, oh no, that’s just a marketing convention…because actually it’s not, it definitely is a book about a plague god ravaging New York, all sorts of people get horrifically ill in this book, including the protagonist’s parents. There is a section where the protag can’t visit his unconscious parents in their hospital rooms but can only observe them through the windows, and…yep, that’s a very real thing right now. If you’re not up for dealing with that in your fun kids’ fantasy, you’re going to want to steer clear of this quite well-done book, because that’s the book it is. With writing and publishing being what they are, I expect it was written before any of this, and yet…well. You can see why I’d be concerned. It’s sort of an “enjoy at your peril” situation.

Claudie Arsenault, C. T. Callahan, B. R. Sanders, and RoAnna Sylver, eds. Common Bonds: A Speculative Aromantic Anthology. For me the absolute stand-out story of this anthology was Adriana C. Grigoire’s “Seams of Iron.” It played with speculative tropes in a deft way that had me captivated throughout. I enjoyed other stories, but “Seams of Iron” is one of my favorite all year.

Jane Austen, Persuasion. Kindle. My booklog does not list this book, and when I read it I had more the sense of having seen it discussed than the sense of having read it before, even back in the mists of time when I read some other Austen. In any case, it was keenly observed and very funny in parts, and everything came together very satisfyingly. As you’ve probably heard, since it’s Austen, but: yes.

Rachel Manija Brown, ed., Her Magical Pet. Kindle. I bought this to read Pamela Dean’s “Five Quests and the Oracle,” and I was not disappointed. Pamela’s family relationships and new adults finding their way never disappoint, and the theatrical setting of this one was particularly satisfying. I also found that Sara Joiner’s “Uncontrolled Variable” was a lovely nerdy piece of fun. Many of these stories are structurally romance genre stories with some speculative elements rather than speculative genre stories with some romance elements, which is neither good nor bad but something I hope helps the volume find its proper readers. (They’re all f/f romances, if that matters to you.)

Olivia Chadha, Rise of the Red Hand. Discussed elsewhere.

P. Djeli Clark, Ring Shout. This is not really my genre, since it’s pretty horror-y, but I am fascinated by the ways in which supernatural horror and psychological horror are blending in some works like this one, maybe…social horror? super-psycho-social horror? Where there are indeed monsters, and also there are humans who are (some of) the real monsters, and also monstrousness added to itself has sweeping social effects. With action scenes. Very well done.

Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday. This, on the other hand, is a fairly standard example of its local nature-writing genre. Basically everything it quotes is something I’ve already read and found more worthwhile than this volume. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, but that’s not, it turns out, the highest recommendation.

Megan Crewe, Fearless Magic. Third in a trilogy, all the pieces falling together in a satisfying action-packed ending but for heaven’s sake don’t start here.

Paula Guran, ed., The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1. I make a policy of not reviewing books I’m in, and I’m in this one. Still: I read it.

Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night. A beautiful family narrative, a beautiful trans narrative, two strands of Syrian-Americans working out who they are and who they can be, with art and birds and family interwoven. I found this captivating.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree and The Wandering Fire. Rereads, and I’m in the middle of the third one now. There are obviously things that are not how Kay would do these books now–things that are not contemporary about them–for example, the fact that the characters start out studying the law and medicine in our world is basically irrelevant, in a way that I don’t think would be how he’d structure it now. But from the first sentence I could relax into these books and know that they were exactly the kind of high heroic fantasy they’d always been, that the suck fairy had not visited their heroism and left something nasty in its place. High drama, myths in a blender: sometimes you want that. This is how I learned to want it, and I still do.

Francois Neveux, A Brief History of the Normans: The Conquests That Changed the Face of Europe. Quite often when I read a book in search of an answer to a particular question, I end up with a bunch more questions, and that’s what happened here. Interestingly focused on the Normans rather than on one particular place they ended up, so this ranges over much of Europe.

Patrick Samphire, At the Gate and Other Stories. Kindle. And speaking of a wide range, these stories have a lot of different tones and elements, some funny and some serious, all sorts of different speculative elements. An interesting snapshot of a career at this point.

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, eds., Fiyah Issue 16. Kindle. Joy is such a great theme for a magazine right now, right on, let’s do this. For me the stand-out was Margaret Saunders’s “Ambrosia,” but the Fiyah staff continues to publish really solid issues.

A.J. Sass, Ana on the Edge. This is a charming kids’ book about a young competitive ice skater who is negotiating that extremely gendered world while figuring out her (for now, her) own nonbinary identity. For some kids this book will be life-changing; for me as a cis adult it was still a fun evening’s read.

Janine A. Southard, ed., Silk and Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology. Kindle. Lots of fun lovely stories in this! I basically romped through the entire volume, so glad I got it. If Her Magical Pet was weighted toward “romance story, speculative elements,” Silk and Steel is the opposite balance, “speculative story, romantic elements.” (Again f/f throughout.) Hard to pick favorites, but mine were Alison Tam’s “Margo Lai’s Guide to Dueling Unprepared,” Freya Marske’s “Elinor Jones Vs. the Ruritanian Multiverse,” Jennifer Mace’s “In the Salt Crypts of Ghiarelle,” and Aliette de Bodard’s “The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute.”

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 37. Kindle. Another solid issue. Favorites from this one included John Wiswell’s “The Bottomless Martyr” and Brit E. B. Hvide’s “Words We Say Instead.”

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen. Kindle. A charmingly odd bit of entertainment–a lightly fictionalized travel narrative from the very early 20th century, when a writer with a German husband could use the phrase “blood and iron” without knowing how horrifying it would get later. Mostly she is trying to circle a small Baltic island and being wry and observational about the other humans she encounters there.

E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves. Discussed elsewhere.

Ovidia Yu, The Betel Nut Tree Mystery. Second in its series, more of Singapore as a Crown Colony before the Second World War, more of its determined but quiet heroine Su Lin, more of her expansive and alarming family and circle of friends. I immediately put the third one on my list when I’d finished.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This debut is only gently fabulist, but what it lacks in magical fireworks, it makes up for in human relationships. It’s the story of a young Afghani girl whose family travels as refugees to Australia. She continues to have a relationship with a friend she meets along the way that is the most speculative element of the book, and also one of the warmest elements.

Because life in Australia is not the welcoming paradise of their dreams. Firuzeh, her parents, and her brother Nour have profoundly different struggles from each other, making it hard for each family member to understand the others’ behavior. Their stories diverge, but Firuzeh’s relationship with story is a major part of what gets her through some of her worst struggles and brings her family back together.

For me the chapter where “the writer” appears from America, doing research into her book, is the least effective part of this story. If Yu hadn’t chosen to apply the language of a calling to writing about this specifically, I would not have questioned it in those terms, but bringing it up felt like trying to stave off criticism rather than enhancing Firuzeh’s story–and some of the most pertinent questions remained unasked. (For example, “why was your ‘calling’ to criticize another wealthy nation’s handling of the immigrant crisis in ways that were impeccably researched to be specifically Australian rather than turning your thoughts to a similar system in which you personally might be implicated?” Not, apparently, on the list of earnest self-searching questions; ah well.)

But when Yu gets out of her own way, Firuzeh’s relationships and struggles are compelling, and this is a book well worth reading.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the second time in its comparatively short life that I’ve been surprised and impressed by Erewhon Books putting out something that is a very fresh, very modern instance of a genre I don’t see much. Olivia Chadha’s Rise of the Red Hand is dead-center-of-the-genre classical cyberpunk. It deals with a gigantic gap between the haves and the have-nots; it literally uses the word cybernetics for its concerns; there is even a character who gradually goes more and more by their hacker name over the course of the book.

But utterly modern. Yes. This book is set in South Asia, in a world divided into continent-spanning provinces by the powers that be. The environmental concerns are entirely pervasive, much more successfully so than in old-school cyberpunk. The way that issues of family and truth and social balance are handled are fresh and contemporary. The “punk” sensibility is on every page, with dismantling toxic systems on every level the main concern–including the way those toxic systems are reflected in individual and familial relationships.

So if you’ve been missing cyberpunk and yet know that you wouldn’t react the same way to old cyberpunk if you encountered it for the first time now–Olivia Chadha’s got your back. And since this says “book one of The Machinists,” it looks like she’s got plans for more. Yay.

Melissa Bashardoust, Girl, Serpent, Thorn. Poisonous girls and Persian mythology. This was captivating and lovely.

Eileen Hunt Botting, Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Discussed elsewhere.

Hayley Chewins, The Sisters of Straygarden Place. This is a middle-grade book about a family in a magical house and the creepy and delightful things the house does and the sisters do and…how they put it all back together.

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections. Elegant, insightful, lovely, offbeat short stories. Very excited to discover this author.

R.F. Kuang, The Burning God. The third in its series–do not start here–it is relentless in its follow-through, it is going all sorts of places that are alarming and inevitable.

Darcie Little Badger, Elatsoe. This was so much fun and so engaging. I read it all in one gulp while waiting in the car for a family member to have a medical procedure. The ghost dog is amazing! I love everybody here!

L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest. Reread. This was always my least-reread volume of this trilogy, and I can now see why: it feels more like a summary than a novel. It’s as though Montgomery knew what was to happen in Emily’s life in broad career and romance strokes–and as a child I was thrilled that the career part got as much focus as it did, compared to Anne–there is all sorts of stuff about sending out manuscripts and how it all worked at the time. But the little anecdotes where Emily does something funny or Cousin Jimmy says something weird or whatever (hashtag Team Cousin Jimmy 4eva) are very sparse on the ground here. And the romantic relationships are…well, Dean Priest remains incredibly odious and terrible and I hate him forever, Emily forgave him but I do not. And Teddy Kent…is a Ken doll, basically; he is a label that says “childhood artist friend,” he is not a person. So when Emily achieves publishing success comparatively early in the book and her happy ending is, “hey also you get to be with this potted plant of a man,” well. I hope Ilse and Perry stop by often, is what I’m saying.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Discussed elsewhere.

Jan Morris, Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty, and Irony. I had only read her Hav books, so when I heard the sad news of her death, I went to see what the library had of hers. And it was this: an exceptionally small book of photos and thoughts on the topic of the subtitle. As much as Hav connected for me, this completely did not; Morris had ideas about how “we” respond to war imagery that…I don’t, no, I really totally do not. Still interesting, and I’ll be curious to see how much her other nonfiction is alien in a way that Hav is not, if at all. Maybe this is an outlier.

Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish. Graphic novel with fairy tale retellings tangled up in family stories in a beautiful way. Another one I read in one sitting. Just lovely.

Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City. Discussed elsewhere.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future. Sheldrake has that “we are our own best experimental subjects” attitude that you find baked into a lot of mycologists and mycological enthusiasts, but the enthusiasm is in some ways lovely and refreshing, and reading about a lot of nice fungus in the midst of this year is not a terrible life plan. I wanted some of this to be deeper, but not any more so than with most popular science books.

Shveta Thakrar, Star Daughter. I mistook the genre of this completely and thought the girl on the cover was a starship captain. In defense of the lovely people who actually worked on marketing the book, I could not have made that mistake if I’d read any of their copy at all instead of just saying “ooh Shveta’s book!” and sallying forth. Anyway this is a YA fantasy with stars and art and love and friendship, and it was a lot of fun, so go ahead and say, “Ooh, Shveta’s book!” and pick it up anyway.

Django Wexler, Ashes of the Sun. I think this is the best thing Django’s written. Siblings with divergent life paths, sometimes fighting at cross purposes, both stubborn and fierce and committed to their view of the right thing. Such a fun epic fantasy.

Joshua Whitehead, ed., Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Lots of interesting work here, and the beginning of something good I think. My favorite stories were Kai Minosh Pyle’s “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” and Darcie Little Badger’s “Story for a Bottle.”

Review copy provided by the publisher.

What a weird lot of conceptual holes this work of science fiction criticism has in it. There are whole large sections on which Botting is extremely sound–the rights of the child, for example, and its evolution in science fiction from Shelley onward. Good stuff. Unfortunately, that appears to be her previous book, and in this one she has extended her arguments about political science fiction in some very weird ways.

Whenever I am presented with a taxonomy, I want to look for its underlying assumptions to find the places where it may be missing things. In this case they leapt out at me without much looking. Botting divides political SF since Shelley into Apocalyptic, Hacker, and Loveless, based on its primary anxieties. Problem: not all political SF is primarily anxious. Problem: in order to make political SF fit those categories, you have to warp interpretations of vast swaths of it.

Since Botting seems to have swallowed whole cloth the history of SF that was in vogue 20+ years ago when I was in college, many of the earlier works that would have complicated this taxonomy are absent. I don’t know why the recent ones are except that they don’t support her argument. She doesn’t appear to have ever encountered Lois McMaster Bujold’s speech/essay on science fiction as the fantasy of political agency, which is odd because Bujold is not exactly a minor figure in the field she purports to be examining nor is her work even remotely irrelevant to the continuity of Shelley’s influence in political SF. Missed opportunities.

The text was also filled with small errors and ideas that, if they were not in error, certainly were not supported. Particularly egregious was the label of Shelley as genderfluid in the same passage as Botting directly quoted Shelley as identifying, if anything, more completely with womanhood than Shelley’s estimation of the women around her. Genderfluid does not mean the same thing as bisexual/pansexual, and I would expect either a critic in 2020 or at the very least their editor to understand that.

I wanted this book to be so much more thoughtful and thorough than it was.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an academic work, with all the analysis that implies; it is not itself a work of humor. That analysis, however, is well worth the price of admission for anyone who cares about satire, about 21st century African-American culture, and I think in fact for American culture in general. Morgan is magisterially far-reaching when it comes to satirical lenses of the 21st century. She has no apparent genre bias but sees the potential for satire in any and all genres.

She also sees its potentials for failure. The section on failed attempts at satire and why they missed their mark is fascinating, and by itself it would have been enough to make the whole book worthwhile. While this is academic analysis, she is entirely ready to include “this wasn’t particularly funny, no one was laughing, and for good reason” in failure modes of satire. She’s not doing a comedy turn herself, but she never loses sight of what she’s actually analyzing–and I felt inspired at several places to look for the more successful attempts she describes, to experience or re-experience them.

Morgan gives the reader a solid grounding in pre-21st century works in this genre, quickly and concisely but in a way that made me miss Richard Pryor, which seems like exactly what ought to happen with a work like this. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it also made me enjoy some things more deeply–not required of criticism, but excellent when it can happen.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of the great things about my adult life is that there are so many more histories published that are not Great Man or even Great Event histories. This is one of them. Even with my immigration interest–I literally wrote a kids’ book about Jewish immigrants to the US–and my interest in labor relations, I had never come upon anything about the Kosher Meat War of 1902.

This is compelling stuff. There are people who are struggling to feed their families in an unfamiliar land, there are new technologies causing upheaval on a commodity landscape, there are communities attempting to recreate their favorite parts of community in their previous home only to find that not everyone shares their preferences.

And there are middle-aged ladies breaking glass and pouring kerosene on beef.

The leaders of the Kosher Meat War took a lot of lessons from the labor movement and also contributed some interesting experience to it, but for the most part they were not labor leaders or even labor leaders in training. They were ordinary people who had been pushed too far. What people do in a situation like that is fascinating, and so is this book.

Barbara Bourland, Fake Like Me. A young artist’s studio burns, and the paintings that survived the fire are worth far more. Problem: they didn’t survive the fire. So she has a few months to completely remake a giant show, and also to delve into her assumptions about life and art and other artists. There were some dubious rich people assumptions–namely that a working class artist would get more attention than a rich one, pull the other one, Bourland–but it was still an interesting read and different from everything else.

Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems. By the author of Hyperbole and a Half. This had some funny bits and some sad bits and some frankly deeply alarming bits; the times when Brosh is made unhappy by the world are sad but her own philosophy seems to be making her less happy also, and that’s more alarming to watch.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods. This is another graphic novel, this one of creepy fairy tale-adjacent stories of monsters and dark places.

Roshani Chokshi, The Silvered Serpents. Second in its series, and I would start with The Gilded Wolves, because this has a lot of implication and ramification that follows from that. I raced through it and had a great time with it.

Zoraida Cordova, Wayward Witch. Another sequel, this one the third in its series. I sometimes like the shape of series where the setting and events continue to ramify but the narrative focuses on a different character each time, and this is one of those. I like this series a lot and recommend it.

Robert Darnton, Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. Three different case studies of censorship in Western history. While I would also like a farther-reaching study of this topic, some of the ways in which censorship varies a lot with its environment and assumptions were really interesting–and the fact that Darnton got to interview actual East German censors about their work was just great.

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Lots of large marine mammals, lots of cultural shift here. I particularly liked having this angle on world history, from a region that had a very different concept of what world there was and how to handle it than many of the dominant regions. Content warning, as you would expect, for mass slaughters.

Joy Harjo, ed., When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. This had some really interesting poems in it, but it’s one of those anthologies that skews toward picking poems that are About This Ethnic Experience, which can give a distorted view of what marginalized groups choose to write about or are allowed to write about. So this is another of the “don’t let this be the only thing you read on this topic” category. It’s organized geographically and then temporally within each geographic section, which I enjoyed.

S.L. Huang, Burning Roses. Fairy tale crossover novella from multiple cultures, thinking about monstrousness and relationships. Delightful if you know all the source material Huang is riffing on, but I think it would still work if you only knew some of it.

Sujata Massey, The Satapur Moonstone. Early twentieth century Indian setting for this mystery, which takes some time to really get going.

Hilary McKay, Love to Everyone. This historical makes me feel like McKay is branching out in genres, which I enjoy. It’s got a WWI setting and covers quite a lot of ground. I really like how it–like other McKay–allows the child reader and the child protagonists to see through some of the social niceties adults will claim on behalf of other adults. There’s a certain set of tropes about who dies in the Great War, what specific kind of person, that…goes back to stuff that was written at the time but still is a little frustrating. But in general I enjoyed it anyway.

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs. Rereads. I was always an Emily girl as a kid, more than an Anne girl. These two are fun. I would never be friends with Ilse in real life, but I enjoy her immensely on the page, and I enjoy Emily’s career focus and I enjoy the bits where she is dealing with her large and exasperating extended family. Things I do not enjoy: Teddy Kent; Dean Priest. I knew Dean Priest was creepy when I first read these, when I was younger than Emily. But rereading them now that I have two godchildren Emily’s age when a man in his 30s starts hitting on her…aaaaaaaagh go away and stay away, basically every dude character in these books who isn’t Cousin Jimmy. Maaaaaybe on a good day Mr. Carpenter. Maybe. (I’m a little alarmed by how much Mr. Carpenter is Adult Dude Ilse. But okay, onward.)

Amy Tintera, All These Monsters. Fun monster-fighting YA SF that takes on toxic relationship tropes and kicks their teeth in. Very much enjoyed this.

Megan Whelan Turner, Return of the Thief. I think this most recent volume in this series might be my favorite. It’s got a protag who isn’t the king of anything, and it’s thinking about disability and assumptions a lot. But for heaven’s sake don’t start here, it won’t make sense without at least some of the earlier books in the series.

W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. There are things I aspire to do and things I dread, and reading the collected poems of Yeats was a third category that fewer people seem to have than the previous two, which is things that I expect I will do without feeling particularly strongly about that expectation. “Yeah, that sounds like me,” rather than “ooh!” or “oh no.” Anyway, in addition to the attempts at a mythic ethnic poetry and the poems to various friends and lovers, there was an entire middle section that was substantially about being in a country wracked with plague and political upheaval while adjusting to middle-age (as a pretty bumpy road), so…yeah, poetry, punching you in the teeth between the pretty parts. This is what I wanted from it, and lo, this is what I got.