Tag: bookses precious

Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night. I read this space opera in draft and loved it then. I love it now. And not just for the Mantis Cop! Although: Mantis Cop. Seriously there is fun with space travel, there is fun with alien species, there is, most importantly, fun with the human brain! How do we become civilized people, what alters free will and what is a means of asserting it…there are some huge questions in this book, and also loving chosen family, and also quite a lot of vacuum along the way. Highly recommended.

Mary Beard, How Do We Look and Women and Power: A Manifesto. Both of these books are Beard’s generalist side, turning her extensive knowledge of history to wider questions. They’re not going to revolutionize ideas about art and gaze or about women, but they’re solid works, the sort of thing that helps bolster reasonable views. She has the lovely skill–not all that common in a Classicist or Classical historian in my experience–of being able to write without assuming that Rome is the world’s eternal center, which makes things 1000% more readable for me. I’d previously read her book about Pompeii but will pursue more.

H.W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants. This book was a bit disappointing for me. It did what it said on the tin, sort of; the epic part was lacking. But I felt that there was less of the zany context of the era than I was really hoping and more focus on these three dudes, most of whom should have been kicked sharply in the shins. There are better books about the early Republic out there.

Zen Cho, The True Queen. Light and frothy and fun. Some of the plot twists are visible from space, and yet it’s experiencing the specific way that Cho writes them that provides the joy. Recognizes that pre-20th century England was the center of a global empire and not an ethnic monoculture, and used that fact as the basis for a glorious romp.

Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House. Children’s historical novel about a young Ojibwa girl. It is mostly bright and suffused with light, but there are moments where history makes the shadows in this child’s life very deep indeed.

Meg Frank and Julia Rios, eds., Hope in This Timeline. This is a beautiful collection of hopeful stories from Fireside. I had read them already, but having a copy to shelve makes me very happy.

Tessa Gratton, The Strange Maid. This is the second book in a deeply weird series about Norse gods. It is the right kind of deeply weird; I am so fond and so pleased and I cannot wait to get the third one. Also it’s the kind of series that doesn’t just do more of the same but goes into different ideas and places and perspectives. Yay for this Valkyrie book.

Larry Hammer, These Things Called Dreams: The Poems of Ono no Komachi. Discussed elsewhere.

Kate Heartfield, Alice Payne Rides. Discussed elsewhere.

Carlos Hernandez, Sal and Gabi Break the Universe. What a lovely way to spend a snow day. I bounced around full of joy at the adventures of Sal and Gabi. Which are not always joyful adventures! There’s some deep stuff going on here! But it’s fun, it’s funny, it’s serious, it’s full of parallel universes, and the protags and their families and friends are immensely charming. I loved Carlos’s collection of short work for adults. This MG novel won my heart in a totally different–and very much similar–way. Highly recommended.

Kelly Jones, Are You Ready to Hatch an Unusual Chicken? This is the sequel to the previous chicken superpower book, and I love them so much, they make me so happy, I am all in on whatever Kelly Jones wants to do next, because: yay super chickens.

T. Kingfisher, Swordheart. This was funny and adventurous and very sharp about problems with our world while also taking on genre tropes. I laughed and gasped and enjoyed the heck out of this. More.

Sonya Taaffe, Forget the Sleepless Shores. These stories remind me of a certain era of Elizabeth Hand stories in their beautiful prose, but with somewhat different roots. The ones that drew on Jewish sources were my favorite, but honestly there’s not a badly-written piece in here.

Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work. Poems about everyday life, mostly not in the poet’s immediate present but in her past, through photos of her family and thoughts about what that past has meant. Also some beautiful poems on the line between domestic and nature poetry. I’m very glad I read these.

Anne Ursu, The Lost Girl. A book about sisterhood, about making space for other people and finding what you want to do with your own space, about friends and stubbornness and saving each other. What a fierce book this is. Yay.

Review copy provided by the author, who has been a friend on this here internet for…gosh. A minute.

This is a selection of 9th century Japanese poems, with translation notes and images of their author from various sources. The images are very high quality reproductions and add to the sense of what was going on with Ono no Komachi, whose life is more speculated about than firmly documented.

The poems themselves are short and evocative–mostly in one genre of love poetry or another, with room for playfulness. Larry’s chosen layout does a good job of letting the reader appreciate the translated poem as a poem, just as it is, and only then transition to the translation notes, which are easy to understand even without a strong grasp of Japanese and give cultural as well as linguistic context for each poem. Where there is wordplay that’s impossible to translate, that’s noted–but not in the middle of the poem where it would distract from writing that is on one layer still easy to enjoy on its own terms over a millennium later and in a different language. This volume is short but rewarding.

Review copy provided by the author’s agent, who is a personal friend.

This is the sequel to another novella, Alice Payne Arrives, and really you should not read it as a stand-alone when the first one is so readily available. The relationships, the technology, the consequences, are all spelled out much more thoroughly in the first volume. This one assumes you’ve already gotten all that and are ready to ride on.

And it does ride on, right away, with all the things happening at once–and since this is a time travel novel, I really do mean that they are all happening at once. The future and the past are here and neither one is letting up for a minute–except that they keep shifting out from under each other.

There are a few things that strike me as somewhat off in the timelines–specifically, I feel like the late 18th century is being treated like the late 19th century when it is way more decadent and scandalous–but it’s not enough to stop the full-on time travel fun. And steampunk swashbuckling. It’s an alternate history! It’s a time travel book! It’s a steampunk adventure! Friends, it’s all of that.

Ben Barres, Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist. This is a very brief and to-the-point volume–although some of its points are kind of sideways from most people’s points, which is delightful. I could attribute this to the fact that Barres wrote it very quickly when he knew he was dying. But honestly it seems like that’s just how Barres was. He wanted to describe some fairly rare experiences he’d had and talk about how they extrapolate more broadly…but even more than that he wanted to give credit to junior scientists in his lab and talk about glial cells. Which I found charming and relatable.

Gwenda Bond, Girl on a Wire. Disclosure: I am not a sucker for circus stories. If anything, the opposite. I know some people find a tightrope walker main character to be an automatic yes, but I’m not in their number. However, the subtle magic and family dynamics of this book won me over fairly early. I found it to be a fun read even though balance is definitely not my forte.

Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister the Serial Killer. This is another brief fun read, although it’s very dark. The perspective character is a long-suffering elder sister who feels roped into her younger sister’s bad habit of killing her boyfriends. The characterization and the setting and basically the whole thing are vividly handled, but it’s not something you’re likely to find uplifting, if that’s what you’re looking for today.

Brendan Fletcher, Karl Kerschil, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, and Msassyk, Gotham Academy Second Semester Volume 2: The Ballad of Olive Silverlock. Frankly I’m glad they got this out of the way, because it’s a part of the story they were fairly clearly angling to tell for quite some time, and it was pretty cliched. There were a few fun moments, but basically I’m glad they got it out of their systems.

N.K. Jemisin, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month. Controversial opinion time: I think this is the best N.K. Jemisin book. It has emotional and tonal range, it has strong worldbuilding in tight quarters, and almost all of the stories are satisfying arcs in themselves, even when they take place in the same world as novels. The settings and themes vary widely and deftly. Unless someone absolutely hates short stories, this is such a great place to start someone on reading Jemisin’s work. Or to continue, if that’s where you are!

Kelly Jones, Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer. This is so charming. What a delight. Highly, highly recommended. My goddaughter has been talking about this book for years (which in her young life is a pretty high percentage of how long she’s been on the planet!), and I finally got a copy and it is so much fun. The chickens have superpowers. None of the superpowers are being human, though–they don’t talk, they don’t act like humans, they act like chickens. And the human girl who is raising them has to figure out what to do and how. She is amazing and I love her and I am getting the sequel stat.

Anna Meriano, Love Sugar Magic: A Sprinkle of Spirits. And speaking of middle-grade delight, this is the second one in a series. I would recommend reading the first one first, because there’s a lot of implication and ramification here, but that’s no hardship, since the first one is also delightful. A family of young Latina sisters doing baking magic! So much family! So much deliciousness! So much magic! This is exactly the sort of thing I like.

Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents: A Memoir. (I still do not know why he spelled discontents with a y.) He talks a bit about life as a translator and then goes into detailing his many projects and how they went, which is fairly interesting considering how much of magic realism he translated. This is very much a curmudgeon of 25 years ago, though, and I rolled my eyes a lot–at the bit where he claims there has to be a better word for a particular situation than homophobic but does not indicate the direction of his objection (YOU ARE THE TRANSLATOR SIR BETTER WORDS ARE YOUR JOB), the passage where he flags that where he says “he” you should think “he or she”…and then promptly uses “she” as the generic for copy editing because that is a girl job. Not cool, Rabassa. So really I recommend this if you’re particularly interested in translation or if you’re particularly interested in twentieth century writing in Spanish and Portuguese and how it got into English.

Susan Hand Shetterly, Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water’s Edge. This is a lot more about the human use and cultivation of seaweed than I was expecting/hoping, but it’s still a gentle, interesting book, and it’s not so long that you can really get tired of kelp. At least I couldn’t.

Erin Thompson, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present. I often describe nonfiction as doing what it says on the tin. This does considerably less than it says on the tin. It is extremely narrowly focused on collecting antiquities from Greece and Italy that were from the Greek and Roman Classical periods. There is a whole lot of interesting material about the psychology and history of collection that is immediately ruled out there. I think Thompson does a better job with this focus than she would if she was following a fairly common pattern of actually talking about this focus and then handwaving vaguely in the direction of Chinese or Mayan antiquities–much less modern “collectibles”–but it does make for a book that’s somewhat less interesting for me than if it had had a broader scope.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend.

This is the sequel to Snowspelled, which I found utterly charming and full of snow, but I repeat myself. (I know, I know: not everyone finds snow as charming as I do.) (But! So much snow!) The seemingly natural force at work against Cassandra Harwood this time is fast-growing ivy–and it’s threatening her new school for magic, the first such to educate girls.

The interpersonal conflicts keep this story humming in the best possible way: with the characters motivated mostly by care so that the few who are motivated by animosity sticking out as unusual. The social webs in which all the characters exist are fascinating and believable, and their determination to strike out on new paths is inspiring as well as fun. I’m looking forward to the third in this series.

Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping. This is the latest in this long urban fantasy series, and it relies very heavily on both plot and character arcs from earlier in the series. Good news: there is plenty of movement on things that have been going on for several books. Bad news: if you want to start somewhere, this is not it. Peter and his friends, enemies, relations are all barreling forward at top speed, but a lot of it will make no sense without the rest of the series.

Jill Baguchinsky, Mammoth. This is a charming YA about a plus-sized teenage fashionista with a passion for paleontology. It has a lot of genre-YA themes about finding yourself and also maybe someone else, but at the top of the list of things the protag finds is BONES so that is pretty great. I want to put a CW on this for the protagonist starting the book fixating on guessing other women’s weight. This is flagged as unhealthy but may still be difficult for some readers, so: choose when you read it accordingly.

Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al, eds., Mediaeval Scandinavia 1968. This is a hardbound annual journal for its field. A lot of the stuff therein has either become basic knowledge since then or gotten debunked, but there were still some interesting rune-deciphering passages. Not recommended unless you’re constantly eager for new medieval Scand studies stuff, which…I am.

Blair Braverman, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. I read this author’s twitter, and she writes about dogsledding there. YAY I LIKE DOGS. It was also a good time for me to read about dogsledding, as I revise a book with significant amounts of dogsledding in it. This book…was not really about dogsledding. Very much at all. It was mostly about recovering from sexual abuse, assault, and trauma. Braverman chose to do that in the far north of Norway, and there are interesting cultural things going on there, and I engaged with this narrative, but–if you’re here for the dogsledding, not so much.

Roshani Chokshi, Aru Shah and the End of Time. This was a lovely, charming middle-grade adventure. I got a copy for a kid in my life for their birthday. Friendship and magic and figuring yourself out. Yay.

Linda Collister, The Great British Bake Off: Big Book of Baking and The Great British Bake Off: Perfect Cakes and Bakes to Make at Home. I flipped through these and wrote down exactly three recipes, but that’s actually pretty good for library cookbooks–I mostly am not a big recipe cook anyway.

Philip Cushway and Michael Warr, eds., Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin. This was a harrowing book of protest poetry that was very much worth engaging with, a little at a time. I was a tiny bit frustrated that such a large percentage of the page count was dedicated to writing about each poet rather than showcasing their poems–for most poets there were more words dedicated to their bio than in their poems, which seems backwards to me. I feel like most of the poets showcased probably had more than one good protest poem. But the ones that were there were good to have.

Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America. This traces the roots and results of a major meeting between American Black intelligentsia/artists and Robert F. Kennedy. Dyson has lots of ideas about the implications of this conversation and conversations like it, and this was fascinating–especially with the range of talent that Baldwin could get to show up on a moment’s notice.

Lissa Evans, Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms. This is a fun MG about magic (the stage variety…or is it…) and puzzles and family.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. Kindle. Several of the “Grace Notes” are familiar, much-anthologized poems, tacked on here as extras. The “Notes” tend to be longer, often dialect-laden local poems. And then there’s the titular poem. It’s massive and rambly and reminds me a bit of W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland in form/style. I really like this geographical ramble poem thing. I would like a book of them. (But mostly I would like to reread Letters from Iceland because I love it unreasonably and Uncle Wys is the best.) (Ahem. Okay you can read Robert Frost too I guess, but really you probably already know that.) (AUDENNNN.)

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. All the other grimdark books are like teddy bears having their picnic compared to this. It is full of multiform rape, genital mutilation, excretion in its various types, cruelty…it is a lot. It is vividly imagined and beautifully written, and so, so very dark. It is doing things with worldbuilding that no one else has tried, and also it is so very dark.

Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly? This is both a spy novel and a young woman’s coming of age story. It is the kind of spy novel I have wanted, light and fun and firmly placed in space and time. It has the short, zippy chapters of some earlier works in this genre while leaving out the sexism. Yay for this book.

Rose MacAulay, Crewe Train. In many ways this is a charming and eccentric narrative of a young woman who does not want what she is told to want and the mild chaos that ensues in her life because of that fact. I will read more Rose MacAulay for sure, because this was intriguing and mostly good in an early 20th century way. However, I do feel the need to flag that there’s about a chapter of staggeringly racist content that is not only awful but completely unnecessary to the plot, the sort of thing that makes you repeat, “Rose, what are you doing, Rose, what are you doing,” over and over as you read. Is one chapter of that too much? You get to decide.

Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream. This is the most recent of Seanan’s portal fantasy novellas, which are my favorite thing she’s doing right now. This one stands quite well alone and is very distinctive in setting and character from the others. I was mostly okay with which things were summarized and which shown (an interesting calculus of novellas), until the ending, which wasn’t quite as satisfying because of that ratio. Still glad I read it.

John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. This is the book equivalent of sitting at John McPhee’s feet listening to him talk about his long and storied career and how it all has worked. I wouldn’t start here if you haven’t read McPhee before, I’d start with Annals of the Former World, because that is amazing. But if you already like McPhee this will probably be an interesting and fast read. (Note for people who are always on the lookout for writing books: this is about writing nonfiction, if that changes anything for you.)

Robert Muir-Wood, The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters. Interesting stuff on structure and materials and their adaptations to place. I’d have liked more of the title and less of the background for the title, but I’m told there are storage and organization issues with having everything.

Dennis Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c. 1100 to c. 1440. This goes into a lot of detail about the relationship of the sacred and secular in this context, and about how the different Italian city-states varied but had common elements in how they handled marketplace issues. One of the things that was interesting to me was how much focus there was on fraud–which makes sense, but…well, if you have friends and family who spend a lot of time on deregulation as a political hot button, direct them to the medieval Italians.

Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names. This is a collection of Solnit’s recent essays on the contemporary scene. I’d already read several of them in their original magazine publications, but it was still an interesting book–and I basically always reach for Rebecca Solnit first whenever I get one of her books.

Vanessa Tait, The Looking Glass House. I didn’t see one of the marketing points of this book before I picked it up in a used bookstore–namely that Tait is the descendant of Alice Liddell of Alice in Wonderland fame. This is a novel about the Liddells’ governess. Basically everyone in it is unhappy and unpleasant, parents, children, governesses, random family friends, all of them. This is a “sucked to be them” book, and while it’s written reasonably well, all that did was make me keep reading until the end, with nothing but frustration and misery as far as the eye can see. Not recommended.

Sara Teasdale, Love Songs. Kindle. There are several things that Teasdale appears to think about love that make me want to rent her a cabin for a year so she can get some time to herself to think, and then introduce her to people who are kind and don’t play power games, because wow, kiddo, wow. But then there are the moments where she is wrapped up in natural beauty, and I’m here for that.

Kate Atkinson, Transcription. A literary spy story, infiltrating the British fascists of 1940 and what has happened beyond that. I thought that Red Joan was better at some of the tropes that eventually came up as events unfolded in this book, but they’re actually both worth having.

Noel D. Broadbent, Lapps and Labyrinths: Saami Prehistory, Colonization, and Cultural Resistance. This is a lot of northern archaeology, which means that ski fragments and seal bones are discussed in great detail. That is in fact my jam. It may also be yours–and even if it isn’t, there aren’t loads of readily available sources on Saami culture before/during colonization, so if that’s an interest, it’s not going to be in the “yawn, another one of those” category.

Brendan Fletcher, Karl Kerschil, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, and Msassyk, Gotham Academy Second Semester Volume 1: Welcome Back. They’ve added to the title of this I guess? Presented it as a new run instead of just having, like, volume 4 of the previous? It doesn’t work at all as a place to start this series–if you’re interested in spoopy youngsters in the periphery of Bruce Wayne, go back to the beginning. The plot twists struck me as really obvious this time, but this may be a results of me not being a teenager and new to this.

Morgan Jerkins, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. The ending of this book really built to something strong and worth having. I was a little unsure of several of the chains of association earlier in the book, but I can’t honestly tell whether it jumps around a lot or whether there are implicit links that I’m missing because I am not, in fact, living at the intersection of Black and anything, and y’know, not everything has to be spelled out anyway, and not everything has to be aimed at me.

Pat Parker, The Complete Works of Pat Parker. If you’re looking for righteous wrath, Pat Parker brings it. She occasionally brings other emotions, but there is a lot of Black lesbian anger here, well grounded in the reality of Parker’s lived experience.

Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. Quite often when people describe non-Latin American works as magic realism, they are neglecting elements like the post-colonial/anti-colonial thread to magic realism. Shange’s story of three sisters exploring the arts, the world, and themselves is exactly the magic realism of the American South. Beautiful stuff here.

Django Wexler, Ship of Smoke and Steel. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also I’ve known Django for several years, we’ve taught a workshop together, he’s marrying a friend of mine, it’s all…like SFF generally is, there.

So. If you’ve liked Django’s MG work, and/or you’ve liked his adult work, but you thought, y’know, this stuff is just too shiny and perky for me? Good news, he is writing this YA series that makes his previous series look like the teddy bears are having their picnic. It is all Django all the time, and then more stabbing with magical blades. Also giant crabs.

If you have not read Django’s previous stuff and are not sure what sort of thing this might be: stabbing with magical blades! Giant crabs! Treachery and scheming and forbidden sources of magic! Self-propelled sentient ships of doom!

It’s not quite as dark as I’m making it out to be. (It’s pretty dark.) One of Django’s common themes that crops up here too is people finding out that they’re better than they thought they were, finding reserves of goodness either on their own or with a bit of inspiration or coaxing. Also this is a kissing book, and not all of it is meaningless and Machiavellian. (Some of it totally is, though.)

The ending is very open, so I’m anxious to see what comes next in this series.

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Reread. This is going to be a clear theme in this fortnight’s reading: I was preparing for the humor panel I was doing at ConFusion, and I didn’t want to talk about whether things did or did not hold up when I haven’t read them in [checks notes] [hides under desk]. Seriously, that long? wow. Anyway! I am very pleased with how the humor of this book arises from a surreal sense of the universe, and I am astonished at how much the recent show managed to keep the tone and basically only the tone of the book. Each is very modish, very of-its-time–but in the same way, for different times. Weird. Good.

John Appel, Jo Miles, and Mary Agner, eds., Skies of Wonder, Skies of Danger. It would probably be the most politic, when talking of an anthology filled with friends and cordial acquaintances, to say some vague nice things and move on, but honestly I think A.J. Hackwith’s “Lips of Red, Lips of Black” and Jennifer Mace’s “Thou Shalt Be Free As Mountain Winds” were the stand-out stories in this volume.

Robert Aspirin, Phule’s Company. Reread. I was mostly pleased with how this held up. Mostly. The message of “we need to all work together and share our highly varied strengths to succeed” and “underdogs go!” was still there…but in places it read like “we need all the stereotypes to work together and….” And what’s with a happy ending that’s basically “rich dude finds a loophole to get his rich family richer”? The part that has really not held up well here is “look at how much this rich guy is bypassing regs because he knows best.” Uh. We see how that goes in reality, and it’s way less funny.

Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are. This…was not the book I was looking for. I enjoyed it! You might enjoy it too! But it’s a great deal more of Paul Bogard Has Dirt-Related Emotions than In-Depth Look At Soil Science.

Aliette de Bodard, In the Vanishers’ Palace. I love the worldbuilding on this. Love it so much. Oh wow. I kind of don’t want to talk about any of it, because I want you to discover it for yourself. Eeeeee this worldbuilding eeeee yay.

Jonathan Drori, Around the World in 80 Trees. This was such a beautiful volume, visually as well as in prose content. It’s just what I needed, like the book equivalent of walking in a green cool forest.

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black. This is a beautiful wrenching historical novel about a young enslaved man who is assigned to assist his owner’s brother in scientific experiments and hot-air ballooning. I enjoyed every page of it, and there were several places where I am thrilled to announce that I had no idea where it was going next. Not science fiction but science-important fiction.

Amy L. Handy, War-Time Breads and Cakes. Kindle. Okay, so my friend Justin is a weird influence, and I will download basically anything from Gutenberg. This one is from WWI and talks a lot about stretching (but not eliminating!) yeast and flour and sugar, techniques involving potato sponges and like that. I did not come out of this wanting to do the things in it, but it’s really good as worldbuilding influence, and also quite short.

Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant. Reread. I feel like this is one of the mid-period books where Pratchett was finding his feet again. He did good things here with policing and diplomacy and race and relationships, but…not as good as he would do with those themes later. Still fun from start to finish. And it sets me up for my favorite of the grown-up books next.

Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Reread. I am one of the people who had a lot of social associations around the Callahan books, so I really wanted this to hold up well. It did not. Hoo boy did it not. There is gratuitous racism, both explicit and implicit. The gender politics are wretched, and are specifically enumerated so that you can’t think “well but maybe he just hasn’t said that…” nope. Nope! The way that the first woman to come into Callahan’s is treated is simultaneously breathtakingly awful and really transparent as a primer for how I, as a young woman, was expected to behave in science fiction fandom. It was so upsetting. In fact, one of the general things I took from even the better stories in this volume is that this was never so much funny as it was fannish. Lots of not-particularly-clever puns and bonhomie, not so much humor structure beyond that. Sigh. Sorry, teen self.

John Schoffstall, Half-Witch. Generally quite charming, inventive, more medieval than the people trying to feign medieval fantasy by a long shot. I hate to call stuff out that is literally one tiny sub-scene, but…I felt like the sexual violence in this book was handled rather badly. But it was such a small sliver that it didn’t make the entire book not worth having. (On the other hand, it was such a small sliver that WHY.)

E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. I do love me some E.P. Thompson. This was more Anti-Nomianism R Us than in-depth William Blakiness, but William Blake is widely available, and I do like the infinite branches of Protestantism, at least as a field of study from a distance.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Reread. Much to my relief, I still found this entertaining. Willis skews toward farce in a direction that can be hard to pace in prose writing, but for me To Say Nothing of the Dog is still on the correct side where the “one MORE thing OMG” aspect of farce really comes through and doesn’t drag into “this is just repetitious, not funny.”

Elizabeth Bear, The Chains That You Refuse. Reread. I usually have one book of short things (poems, essays, short stories) going at any given time, and this time I just needed something that would reliably not smack me in the face and would have “old friend” characters. This delivered.

Elizabeth Bear and Katherine Addison, The Cobbler’s Boy. Kindle. A murder mystery featuring crypto-Papists and a 15-year-old Christopher Marlowe. Fun times, a very fast read.

Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Buell is fairly satisfying about Thoreau and those who came after him, and this book is particularly good in talking about American women writers who are not as discussed as Thoreau but contributed significantly to American nature writing in their time–and are available on Gutenberg, so stay tuned.

Stephanie Burgis, Snowspelled. This is a fun and light-hearted romance-mystery-fantasy in–and here is where my buttons are thoroughly pushed–a massive snowstorm. You could hardly fit more snow in this book if you used a plow to stack it up very high and let the neighbor kids sled off it. The ending is a bit less satisfying than the rest of the book–proving things is hard–but not so much so that I’m not going to immediately seek out the other published volume in the series.

Michael J. DeLuca et al, editors, Reckoning Issue 3. Kindle. The mix of stories, poetry, and essays in this issue is excellent. The types of each vary a lot (although several stories reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki’s environmental thinking; I mean that in a good way). My favorites included Octavia Cade’s “The Feather Wall” and Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar.” Danika Dinsmore’s poem in the editorial slot was a lovely choice for that, and Adelia MacWilliam’s “Paddling in the Sound” also struck me particularly well.

George Eliot, Adam Bede. Kindle. The prospect of reading George Eliot on the airplane appealed to me mightily, so I just picked one more or less at random. It turns out that Adam Bede was Eliot’s first novel, and there are some places in the ending where you can see her figuring out the form or…not quite getting there. The ending does not work as well as a portrait of humans as the rest of the book, for me. But the middle has some extremely solid excellent stuff about compassion and loving others around us for who they are and not who we wish they were. While I wouldn’t start here (START WITH Middlemarch!!! You could be reading Middlemarch right now!!!), I’m very glad I read it and will probably continue to while away happy hours of travel with her oeuvre.

Emiko Jean, Empress of All Seasons. This is an interesting YA fantasy with strong worldbuilding (…sort of a theme for this fortnight…). There is an aspect of it that started to be unsatisfying to me in theme/implications halfway through the book, and then just as I was getting restless about that aspect, the ending did not go where I thought it would go and all of a sudden the theme issues were entirely resolved for me into “YAY doing its OWN THING.”

Neil Kent, The Sami Peoples of the North: A Social and Cultural History. If you want a beginning book on Sami history and culture, this looks to me like a pretty solid one. If you’ve already got the basics, you probably don’t need this book to repeat them. Unlike some histories it does extend into the present day or fairly close to it, with important yoik musicians and other figures of the last few decades discussed.

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior. I sometimes do very poorly with similar titles, and so I went most of a year without noticing that the Akata W— book people were talking about was not the one I’d already read and enjoyed (Akata Witch). Enlightened, I went and got this book. It’s a lot of fun, interesting, good worldbuilding, good characterization.

Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum, A Day of Small Beginnings. This is a multigenerational novel about the ghost of a devout Jewish woman haunting three generations of a Jewish family not her own as they move from Poland to the US and then rediscover their Polish roots. It’s a beautiful example of moving writing about religion that is not attempting to proselytize. Also it’s very singular; or at least I don’t know of other books with this general shape of plot. I’m very glad I stumbled upon it.

Sherwood Smith, ed. It Happened at the Ball. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Every time I get a Rebecca Solnit book, it moves to the head of the queue immediately. This one did not take many pages to make it clear why. Solnit’s ideas about environment, idealism, and practical consequences are broader, deeper, and more clearly expressed than the other writers I’ve been reading on those themes. Such a joy.

Tasha Suri, Empire of Sand. This is intense and vivid YA fantasy with strong worldbuilding and major upheaval in the plot in just the ways I like. Definitely looking forward to whatever Suri does with the sequel.

Molly Tanzer, Creatures of Want and Ruin. This is the sequel to a book that was very special to me, Creatures of Will and Temper. It’s the kind of sequel that allows for a large time gap and different characters, so the touchstones that were my own buttons to push have been replaced by a different set. I have every hope that this will be someone else’s very special book, and I’m always glad to see a series where someone is doing quite different things in each book.

Sara Teasdale, Rivers to the Sea. Kindle. This book of poems felt very young to me. A lot of them were about Old Love and New Love in the sorts of ways that people who haven’t loved anyone for more than about six months tend to write about, extremely breathless and full of broad pronouncements. Some of it was quite good of that type, and then there were the moments where the image part of the Imagist poetry broke free of the sweeping statements.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota, eds., Uncanny Issue 26. Kindle. I have a story in this issue, and I make a policy of not reviewing things I have work in.

Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Ayme Sotuyo, et al, Lumberjanes: Parents’ Day. A lot of stuff that has been foreshadowed or otherwise hinted at came to fruition in this volume, featuring bunches of family members and–of course–supernatural incursions into summer camp hijinks. And friendship to the max. Can’t forget the friendship to the max.