Novel Gazing Redux

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Essays on race, music, personal relationships with both. Some of Abdurraqib’s subjects were musicians whose work I know well and some were not, but it was all a very interesting perspective quite different from my own.

Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead. Discussed elsewhere.

Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming. Does what it says on the tin. Are you interested in the main sources of raw materials of this period? Here we are. Quite enjoyed it. Some of the things that were revelatory might not have been if I’d been from a comparable climate–it never occurred to me that having waterlogged fields could be a problem in winter–but still, better to know these things. (If, on the other hand, you are not particularly interested in this topic, it is not likely to be a book that strikes you as transcendent.)

Lois McMaster Bujold, Masquerade in Lodi. Kindle. The most recently published Penric & Desdemona novella, but not the chronologically most recent–this is somewhat earlier in Pen’s career, when he could wander around a strange city with a young saint and only worry himself and his demon. Simpler times.

M.A. Carrick, The Mask of Mirrors. A thumping great big con artist fantasy by two of my favorite people. I sometimes really really like a secondary world fantasy with a great deal going on, and this had that for sure. Looking forward to the next in the series, as there are more doors opened than closed here.

Wangari Maathai, Unbowed. This is the autobiography of the founder of the Green Belt Movement, who has led an interesting life. It’s labeled a memoir, but if there’s a distinction between the two I would put this on the autobiography side: it’s more dates and places than it is inner reflections.

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems, 1950-2012. This is a great example of why I like to read people’s collected poems all at once. You can watch Rich growing from a slightly formal young woman in 1950 to the political force she later became, and from a fairly concise poet to one who is willing to go on for as long as it takes to say what she needs to. There are some searingly great moments along the way as well as a lot of poems I can take or leave on their own, but in combination they make something greater, they make the panoramic view of a career.

Sun Yung Shin, ed., A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. This is a collection of essays from various voices, talking about their own experience of race in Minnesota, including but not limited to their own experience of racism in Minnesota. If you’re from around here, a good thing to mull over.

Karin Tidbeck, The Memory Theater. Magical and patterned, a bit closer to a traditional faerie novel than Tidbeck’s previous works have been to traditional anything, but in a way that’s satisfying and well-done.

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now. Kindle. This is doing a lot of the things that old-school science fiction readers complain that mimetic fiction doesn’t do, when they’re feeling beleaguered: considering the social implications of technological and cultural change, notably. It’s a satirical novel, and I think a good one to revisit in this decade, as it focuses a lot on what happens when the thing that has been keeping bad behavior in check is a set of norms that some people are completely willing to set aside when it benefits them. I think I liked some of the characters more than Trollope did. There was also a plot-crucial thread of antisemitism throughout, some of which was antisemitism of characters but some was of the author. So consider how much of that you want to deal with when you’re thinking of classic and currently relevant 19th century novels to dive into.

Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. An interesting biography of an engraver and woodcut artist, adorned with a lot of his work. Lots of interesting period details about his field and milieu as well as about his own life. I picked this up because Jenny Uglow has not disappointed me yet, and that’s still true.

Ovidia Yu, The Mimosa Tree Mystery. The fourth in this series takes a sharp turn in tone: instead of the Second World War threatening, it has arrived, in the form of the Japanese invasion of Singapore. This is a mystery series that is apparently willing to drastically alter its characters’ circumstances in the course of a series, and I will go into the fifth volume with the expectation that I don’t know what it’s going to do in that way. I think this would be more effective with the previous three volumes under your belt but might work all right without.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a personal friend for, wow, let’s not count how many years.

This is in the same world as The Goblin Emperor, and it takes place soon after it, but it’s not a sequel per se. We already know Thara Celehar, a bit: he’s the Witness for the Dead who found the truth about the previous emperor. But this book takes Celehar somewhere quieter, somewhere completely new. Somewhere no less surrounded by death and doom, but y’know, that’s the life of a Witness for the Dead.

This is a murder mystery with strong fantastical elements. The deaths and lives Celehar is trying to witness tangle themselves around each other, each piece leading to another. There are cemetery ghouls rather than court etiquette, and the main role of airships is…not healthy for those near them…but the essential goodness of the Celehar himself, and of some though not all of the people he encounters keep this book very much buoyed up.

There’s so much scope for characterization and worldbuilding here, and Addison uses both to their utmost. The world of the opera and how this world’s ideas of race change who gets to do what; domestic violence and family grief; a very shy person realizing, tentatively, that he can have friends, that though he faces opposition he also has support. I love all these elements so much.

One of the great virtues of mystery novels can be good people making sense of the world, and that’s here, that’s very much here–along with the potential for so much more to follow. Highly recommended. Here if you want to squee about it.

Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Discussed elsewhere.

Aliette de Bodard, Seven of Infinities. This is actually my second time reading this, because I also read the manuscript. It’s in the Xuya series and stands quite well on its own as a place to start those stories.

Sarah Beth Durst, Even and Odd. Discussed elsewhere.

Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake. I picked this up after being impressed with Farmer’s book about Ebola. I think he was still finding his feet here, because this reads more like a report of time on the ground for a charity than…a book with scope and perspective. And it’s interesting for that! It’s that there are areas where the focus is very different from what I expected or hoped for–it was written soon after, there was far less of the context that is more possible with time. (It is, however, no less emotionally grueling. Handle with care, as you’d expect.)

Nicole Kornher-Stace, Firebreak. Discussed elsewhere.

Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. Newitz has chosen four examples from all over the globe and time to look at why cities “die” or “get lost,” and the similarities, differences, and misconceptions are fascinating. Won’t take you long and has lots of cool tidbits.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Autobiographical essays with a poetic focus on natural history metaphors. This is beautifully illustrated and very short, and Nezhukumatathil’s perspective is not one that’s over-represented in American publishing by any stretch.

Janice P. Nimura, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women–and Women to Medicine. I ended up finding this less interesting than I’d hoped–it does what it says on the tin, but it’s a little unfocused, a little bland. Ah well.

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, and Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: My Best Friend’s Squirrel. These are all romps, but for some reason this one felt even rompier. Possibly I just read it when I most needed it. Seems like a fine place to pick up the series–there’ll be stuff that gets inclued, but I expect you’d be fine. A lot of it is handled in “in case you forgot this” comic book incluing style, which can be amusing in itself.

David Pietrusza, 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR: Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal, and Unlikely Destiny. This is the fourth of Pietrusza’s books on US election years, and I have read all the others (1920, 1948, and 1960). I have long said that if he does one for every election year, I will just keep reading them, and 1932 does not negate that statement, but I do think it’s the weakest of the lot for two reasons: one, he’s trying to do two political systems, not one, and there just isn’t room for as many of the neat sociopolitical tangents; and two, the fact that it is the year of both FDR and Hitler ends up deforming things in the direction of the Second World War a lot, when there’s Depression stuff that was interesting in its own right. Ah well, still a fun read.

James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s View: Modern Photographs from an Ancient Landscape. A companion photography volume for his previous prose work, which is better and more interesting.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf. I don’t see any indication that Tolkien intended this for publication, but I’m not sorry to have it in my exploration of Beowulf translations even though it is probably the worst of them so far. It contains three versions, and the one I really wanted is actually a fourth one–a colloquial Beowulf of which you can see glimpses in the translation notes. The translation notes are great, and I learned a lot, but…also they have bits of basically Gandalf-by-the-fire voice, and that would have been an interesting Beowulf. Ah well. The first one, the straight-up translation, was fairly plain, the second a re-telling and had stripped out several interesting elements, the third a short poem that stripped out even more interesting elements and…is probably going to hit you about like the rest of Tolkien’s poetry. But oh, the flashes of inspiration in the translation notes! Sigh.

Dawnie Walton, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev. Discussed elsewhere.

Walter Jon Williams, Fleet Elements. I’m afraid I no longer find this central relationship interesting, especially since it seems to return to the same misunderstandings, the same secrets, and the same will-they-won’t-they. I don’t think this one would work without the earlier parts of the series, but my recommendation if you want fun military-focused space opera is to read the early trilogy and then stop.

Ariel S. Winter, The Preserve. Short, snappy, interesting mystery about crime on a human preserve when the world is mostly populated by humanoid robots. I…have to say that I was a little put off by the fact that Winter does not seem to have considered what he was doing in the context of Native/First Nations experience. The Canadian word for “place where we shove the First Nations people” is one letter off, reserve (rather than reservation, in the US), but the entire concept was…well, it was curiously empty that way.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is very much like the other things Becky Chambers has published, and also substantially different.

The elements that are very much like are the gentleness, the belief that humans might relate to each other better in the future, that better human structures are possible; the knowledge that small comforts matter but are not the only thing that matters; the sense of people of goodwill who are bewildered by a very complicated universe but trying their best.

The elements that are substantially different: everything else I’ve read by Chambers has been very focused on space, on built environments. This book is explicitly in a world that has been ravaged by a climate apocalypse, among humans who have had to figure out a better way. It has a strong focus on sustainability. And it also has bunches and bunches of enthusiastic nature-loving robots who wandered off into the wilderness generations ago.

I suspect that this means that the people who have loved Chambers’s work in the past will still love this one, and also some additional people who like other subgenres of science fiction will love it too. I am very fond of Sibling Dex the tea monk and Mosscap the robot, and the indications that this will be a series make me very happy.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Once upon a time in the Before-Times, I traveled to New York City. (Pause to stare off into space and consider how distant this now feels.) And while I was there, I went to a reading that featured Nicole Kornher-Stace reading a section of Firebreak, and I got really excited, because it was really good. I was recovering from a bad bout of influenza and did not have the energy to stick around after and enthuse about the book. But! I received it in eARC form and have that opportunity now!

I’m really glad that I heard the late section of the book early, because the beginning of the book is the characters’ work in computer games, and I am a hard sell on computer game books. One of the reasons, though, is that a lot of books that feature computer games struggle with how to make them important and resort to silly melodramatic tropes like “if you die in the GAME you die in REAL LIFE.” Kornher-Stace, on the other hand, understands that games are important because they are an art form humans invest with importance, and Firebreak reflects that on every level.

(“If you die in the opera you die in real life,” come on, nobody feels the need to do this. Ahem. Anyway.)

The other half of this book, besides involvement with online gaming, is water scarcity, and it is vivid and dystopic for sure. As a very water-focused person I found this just horrifying and needed to have a glass of water by my side the entire time I was reading this book, because oh wow, yikes, Kornher-Stace makes you really feel every detail of this system.

I feel like Firebreak deals with tropes and themes that cyberpunk wanted to handle, but in a way that’s taken the last 30-40 years of human politics and culture into account. Corporate behemoths focused on their own profit to the exclusion of human well-being? Check. Online life providing both respite and sinister problems? Check. But unlike most cyberpunk, Firebreak is well grounded in environmental change and in the desperation that can come from humans being ground down in a system that pits them against each other for the barest necessities. Firebreak is not anybody’s-movement-punk. It’s just plain punk. And I for one am here for it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Imagine a world where border closings are disrupting environments and separating families, dividing parent from child. Further imagine that the villain responsible for these atrocities is confronted publicly and declares that they simply don’t care and won’t stop. Sarah Beth Durst has done that here, but the border is that between a mundane world and a magical one, and the villain is…a spoiler to be determined later.

Even and Odd are two sisters who share one person’s normal amount of magic between them, alternating days. Even loves magic and wants to dedicate her life to its practice. Odd would rather help out in an animal shelter, rescuing strays and socializing new puppies and kittens. Both of them have to help out in their parents’ border shop, which sells mundane items to magical beings. But when magic stops working, Even is stuck as a skunk–and their mother is on the wrong side of the border. Distressed centaurs and worried unicorns only add to their complications.

This is a fun kids’ book whose social conscience will probably dawn on some of its target readers only years later. Some of the plot twists are pretty clear if you’re an adult who has read extensively in this genre, but one of the joys of MG is getting to be the place where kids discover a particular trope in the first place.