Tag: bookses precious

By Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton, Karen Lord, and Racheline Maltese

Review access provided by Serial Box.

This is the end of the season of Tremontaine, and it’s very obvious. Some season endings are about wrapping up plot threads, some are about setting up new plot threads for the next season. This is both. This is a ton of both. There is more than one scale of fight scene here; there are personal confrontations and decisions not to confront. There are relationships, if not repaired, at least…in détente.

There are deaths. Unexpected deaths. Surprises. Fencing fighting torture revenge…not so much true love. But it’s not really that kind of series. Chocolate, though. Lots and lots of true chocolate.

And something quite new in all the world of Tremontaine. Something looking up. A new direction (nudge nudge) for season 4. So that’s very interesting.

Sarah Gailey, The Fisher of Bones. A grim and affecting fantasy novella about the leader of a group of people on a trek across a wasted landscape. Gailey’s previous novella, with the hippos, was not exactly pure joy, but was a lot of fun. This is a different tone completely, displaying her range. It’s very dark. Very, very dark. Well done, but…brace yourself.

Tessa Gratton and Karen Lord, Tremontaine Season 3, Episodes 10 and 11. Discussed elsewhere.

Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free. The first half of this book is a history of peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, the second specifically a history of the British peasants’ revolt of 1381. As it is not a long book, both halves were interesting, but I could have done with twice as much of each. There is not a sufficiency of peasant uprising history running around, though, so we take what we can get I guess. There’s a lot of discussion of what worked and what didn’t, in which ways peasants got which rights when, how they conceived of what they were asking for and when they just flailed angrily and why, etc.

Justina Ireland, Troy L. Wiggins, et al, Fiyah Issues 3 and 4. One of the lovely things about Fiyah is that I can read it purely as a fan, not being eligible to submit. That being the case, I have no idea how their issue themes hit their authors, whether they feel inspiring or frustrating from the author side. From the reader side, I think they’re succeeding admirably at picking things that are broad enough and deep enough to give a body of work that feels united without feeling samey. The specific stories I loved best will show up in my short story recommendations post, but I’m definitely glad to have a subscription here for the next year.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties. Oh, these stories. I had read some of them, most I had not. And they just…unfolded beautifully, relentlessly. The title is perfect. I think the one that hit me the most, the best, started out feeling like a catalog of lovers, like a mimetic story, and…went from there into something far more speculative. But there’s so much here. This is another example of the hype I heard being absolutely worth it. I was entranced.

Peter Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague. Weird book about a weird man. A lot of this was background and biography, trying to put Rudolf II in his context in his place and time with the Habsburg family and Austria and Spain and…hoo. That era. They were in that “we are figuring stuff out!…we really don’t have stuff figured out!” era, when “maybe pour mercury on it!” was as good an idea as anybody had. “It might be a comet who knows!” Yes sure give that a look. This is not an outstanding book on the topic, but if you’re really enthusiastic about the topic, well, here we are.

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. This is a history of the concept of human rights, and a discussion of a) why people associate it with the 1940s, b) why the 1970s were actually an even stronger time for its rise, c) other aspects of human rights as a global concept/focus. Interesting, far more focused on those two decades than I expected, not too long and not too abstruse. Made a good case for human rights as a social minimum rather than a social maximum when figuring out a society.

Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun. Oh, this one was lovely. It’s about missionaries to fairyland, a missionary and his sister more accurately, and it has all sorts of grounding in what missionaries actually were like and did, and also all sorts of grounding in what old fairy stories were actually like before they got prettified, and as a result there are strange and dark and terrifying things going on here, many of them human. Captivating, thoroughly recommended.

Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle. Discussed elsewhere.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars. This is a Serbian novel in translation, a somewhat Ruritanian novel in encyclopedia entries. It would be another mildly interesting entry alongside the others I like of that type–I am a sucker for Ruritanian novels–except that being Serbian ends up distinguishing it extremely, because when Anglophones try to set a Ruritanian novel in that part of the world, they quite often attempt to leave out religion, or at least dash past it with a glancing blow. Pavic has no interest in that. Dictionary of the Khazars is in three sections for the three largest religions of that area, and quite often each section will have different things to say in its encyclopedia entry about a person or element of “Khazar” life. The shape of thing comes out distinctive and interesting, coming together at the end with a bang.

Molly Tanzer, Creatures of Will and Temper. I critiqued this book in draft and loved it then, so I saved the polished version for when I knew I would want something I would enjoy. This, it turns out, was prescient; nothing gets you through a six hour airline delay while recovering from multiple illnesses like a book you already know you like but haven’t gotten in quite its final form yet. This is a book of fin de siecle art world, family relationships, fencing, and diabolism. It’s fun. It’s got significance and depth and the ending goes straight to me–in ways that I can claim no credit for, because Molly had nailed it the very first time I saw it. I’ve been wanting to be able to rec this book for two years now, and here it is. Yay.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trotta, et al, Uncanny Magazine Issues 18 and 19. These were two very strong issues, and I had notes on which stories I really loved from them, and…those notes went wandering when I was in the process of recommending stories on Twitter. I have them for my big short story recommendation post! So it’ll be in there! Short version is: enjoyed them, glad I subscribe so I don’t miss things in passing, but it does mean that I’m less likely to read things in passing because I know I’ll get there eventually.

Deborah Weisgall, The World Before Her. This is a novel with two parallel time streams, one of which is about George Eliot adjusting to her late life marriage, the other about a sculptor in the ’80s whose marriage is not really working. The details of her art work are delightful, and both timelines actually end up working fairly well for me, although I have to confess that since I have recently read Middlemarch the main effect of this book is to make me want to read Daniel Deronda. There are worse effects for a book to have.

Emily Wilson translating Homer, The Odyssey. Yes, this is counter to my usual policy of listing the author first. But come on, we all know that it’s Homer’s Odyssey…and we all know that this translation being by Emily Wilson is immensely important and immensely specific. This just feels so clear on the page. I didn’t struggle with the Fitzgerald Homer I read in college–I don’t ever recall feeling like this was hard material–so the clarity I mean is aesthetic, like sparkly water. The focus on hospitality, the characters getting to be characters, even the slaves. This is just a joy to read. I’m so glad of it.

Access provided by Serial Box.

We’ve reached the part of a season of Tremontaine where plot elements start to spiral very actively. A few of them are bureaucratic, but most of them are very action–violence abounds in these two episodes, and even its avoidance is active and specific. At this point in the series, getting all the regular characters appearances while the plot moves in the ways it needs to is quite a feat, but Gratton and Lord are both skilled enough with ensemble casts that it doesn’t feel contrived–even though as a writer I looked at some of what needed to happen in fairly short space and took some deep cleansing breaths. Personal favorites like Micah and her math are not getting a lot of attention here, but that’s understandable–there’s a lot to do for the plot to get to fruition.

This is basically the bit where everyone is running ahead of the rolling boulder and trying not to get crushed. Some of them are, in fact, getting crushed.

We’re also back to chocolate, so that’s a relief.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Further, the author is a dear friend of a dear friend.

How do you prevent the world from destroying itself? I wish there was a time in my adult life when this had felt like an irrelevant question. I can certainly see why Ada made it the central question of this series; we’re about the same age, and it has been relevant since before we showed up on the planet.

And this is a book that spends basically all its time on that question, that one question: how do we keep the planet from destroying itself or more specifically all the humans. Is war inevitable, how big a war is inevitable, how big a war is permissible if it siphons energy off that would otherwise contribute to a more catastrophic war. What kinds of violence can be permitted between groups of people and in what conditions. This is all on the page, and it’s practically the only thing on the page; there is a moment of dramatic filibuster when a character chooses to read the articles of the world constitution on the page. (While the concerns fascinate me, that part of the writing style was not my favorite.)

And unfortunately, this very passionate concern is very thoroughly based on the worldbuilding of the previous two books–on the gender politics and the religious politics, specifically, but also on the class politics–that are working less and less well for me the more I see of them. The former two elements are not nearly as foregrounded in The Will to Battle as they were in Seven Surrenders, but they are basic to the functioning of the entire narrative; it’s impossible to say, okay, but never mind that part, because that’s the world, that’s the functioning of the whole system. It’s not moderated, it’s not soft-pedaled, it’s all there, so if you had trouble with suspension of disbelief about anything previously, there really isn’t anything to change that in this volume. It depends very heavily on the previous ones for plot and characterization. This is not a good place to start.

I think the thing that makes it most curious for me is that the focus is entirely on the very, very, very most powerful people in the world. The nosebleed levels of elite, the .00001%–and no one else. “The people” are pawns, rioters, never major actors, never forces of their own–no one is going to rise from the herd, no one is unexpected outside very narrow circles. The world is the canvas of this book, but the world’s population behaves like an ocean in ways that ultimately don’t end up working very well for me. Ada commented, in an interview a few books back, that issues like bash’ formation would be delved further into in later books. I’m wondering where there will be room, with this focus in so much of the volume of pages so far. I guess we’ll see.

Please consider using our link to buy The Will to Battle from Amazon.

Liz Duffy Adams and Delia Sherman, Joel Derfner, and Karen Lord, Tremontaine Season 3, Episodes 7-9. Discussed elsewhere.

Ann Leckie, Provenance. I enjoyed this mightily. It had questions of identity and belonging and a spot of murder here and there, it had aliens and drones and families with complicated emotional politics interacting with larger world/worlds politics. It is set in the same universe as the Ancillary books but is a very, very different reading experience, which makes me so happy, because it feels like Ann has not let herself get pigeonholed early, hurrah, I love to see range. And I love questions of forgery and provenance and authenticity. Mooooooore.

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, eds., Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Issue 36. This was full of stories that were beautifully done but did not individually grab me. I’m glad I read the whole issue–there wasn’t a bit of it I was sorry I read–but I’m not finding myself wanting to talk about the individual stories now that I’m done with them.

Margaret Mahy, The Haunting. Very short children’s book that is substantially about magic family politics. Barney has a very curious vision when his great-uncle dies; he and his sisters have to untangle their family history as a result. Hard to find, reasonably fun, not earthshaking. A lot of things are treated very matter-of-factly for such a short span: the kids have a stepmother they adore, one of the sisters is fat and enjoys swimming and has no time for people who try to fat-shame her, and probably several others I’m forgetting because the tone is so straightforward about human variation.

Robin McKinley, A Knot in the Grain. Reread. I think this one is somewhat stronger than A Door in the Hedge, less formulaic, more of McKinley learning to strike out on her own. The title story is interesting to me because it feels so dated and doesn’t have much of a plot and yet feels so emotionally strong that I loved reading it anyway, each time. It points out that stories are not a matter of doing the right things on a checklist, they’re a matter of hitting chords with a reader. Which we all know, and yet…having an example turn up again is never a bad thing.

Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands. This book took a lot of risks, and I think only some of them paid off. The narrator was deliberately annoying–he was the sort of teenage smart kid who blunders all over other people’s emotions in an attempt to prove himself the smartest person in the room for the vast majority of the book. I think most readers will have had a high school friend who was like him (and if you can’t see who it was…). He was often a useful commentary on portal fantasy–there were lots of places where he was completely right–but he was allowed to be annoying in very realistic ways that were sometimes incredibly tedious to read about. And I think one of the reasons for that is that the deliberately annoying narrator risk got combined with another, which is: I understand that this book was originally written on tumblr, and that’s cool, it’s just that it looks to me like it did not get edited down significantly from its tumblr form. So the pacing is not tight. It rambles and saunters and meanders through the years of its characters’ schooling. There is a mermaid on the cover; the mermaids are purely hypothetical for most of the book. So are the harpies. I like a leisurely pace of book, with the right voice. I can deal with a grating voice, with the right pace of book. The combination made this one a pretty tough sell. Also–I’m having a hard time seeing how the relationship messages are going to get through to the people who need them, rather than the people like me, who are the aunts of the people who need them and see them coming from hundreds of pages off. It made me laugh in spots. I’m not sorry I read it. But what an odd set of choices, in some ways.

Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. Fascinating weird book about monetary policy and money as physical objects and all the stuff floating around those ideas. Lots of politics–Spang explicitly has no time for the people who think that economics can be separated out from politics–and lots of concern for what actual people were actually doing. There is a huge focus on how people made change in both senses of that: how alterations to the system were accomplished, but also how people who wanted to pay a certain amount and had large money got small money back in return, because this was a serious problem. HOLY CRUD were these people messed up. The investments they had…well. We certainly are messed up differently now! Fascinating, definitely recommended especially for SFF writers who want to look at how a time that sort of looks familiarish can be really, REALLY different in a lot of particulars.

Written by Liz Duffy Adams and Delia Sherman, Joel Derfner, and Karen Lord. Review access provided by Serial Box.

The trend of identifiable style among the Tremontaine writers continues. If you want mysticism in the woods in this world, apparently you bring in Delia Sherman, because Episode 7 was the most like The Fall of the Kings of any Tremontaine episode so far. (I am here for it. Any time. I love that book.) Deer in the woods and everyone slightly addled…yep, I know who wrote this episode.

This season continues to expand on holidays in the worldbuilding. It also continues to ramify. The school is actually starting, maybe; the murder mystery is collecting evidence; the relationships are relating, and that doesn’t mean everyone is returning to season 1 configurations like swallows to Capistrano.

There is a lot less chocolate in these episodes. I don’t want the chocolate to get repetitive, but…there’s a bunch of sex that is not particularly my thing, there’s only a little swordplay, I’m leaning heavily on academic politics and investigation and woodland woowoo here because the chocolate is substantially absent. Sigh. Well. I’m told one can’t have everything. But usually one can have chocolate.

Desirina Boskovich, Never Now Always. Sometimes knowing people gets you reading things that are outside your wheelhouse. Desirina’s novella is far more horror-skewed than I usually pick up, but the writing is beautiful as I expect from her. The children in it are trying to recover their memories, trying to figure out who they are and why they are there, what it is they’re struggling toward. The cover makes the horror look visceral, and there will be a certain amount of needle-and-blood, but the main horror element is strongly existential. Skillfully done, very much recommended to those who are fond of that…and even those who aren’t and want to push their limits a little.

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. A strange and interesting book, not entirely satisfying. Gonzales would desperately like for there to be a “true survivor” personality type and/or skillset, people who had the knowledge and grit and so on to survive fire and flood and blizzard and, well, anything. And he interviewed people who had done so, and he correlated traits. Problem: the universe was not written by Laurence Gonzales. So while there were tendencies that helped with survival, and while of course some skills are useful in some conditions, he had to keep admitting that “true survivors” sometimes died, that people who did everything wrong sometimes lived. Still, there were fascinating tales of people just making dreadful decisions, and of people managing to keep their heads when all others etc., and if you write about humans in extremis, this may well be of interest.

Tessa Gratton and Paul Witcover, Tremontaine Season 3, Episodes 5 and 6. Discussed elsewhere.

E.K. Johnston, That Inevitable Victorian Thing. This felt very rushed, from the title on. It’s a charming title, but it doesn’t fit all that well with the book, which…is not actually Victorian, it’s neo-Victorian alternate history near future SF. It’s the sort of title that sounds like a working title that everyone can easily fall in love with but…as fitting the actual book? Eh. There is a truly essential character for the first third of the book who completely disappears for the rest. There’s all sorts of interesting worldbuilding that is literally in the author’s note at the end, which…frankly does not count, sorry. And having talked to the author a couple of times I’m pretty sure what the shape of the ending was aiming at for a love triangle resolution, and…I think it could have gotten there with another draft or two? I was really glad that the main characters were not forced into being nasty within their private relationships, but their relationship with the public…I felt could have used some development. This was a book that was there when I needed something fun and fluffy, but the farther I got from it, the more I said, “Wait a minute.” And I wish it had waited a minute, because it’s not a book that I felt was terminally broken.

Naomi Kritzer, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories. I had read many or most of these. I was happy to read them again. Having them collected in one place is charming and useful, and they have emotional range as well as genre range. A really great collection, highly recommended.

Fonda Lee, Zeroboxer. Mixed martial arts in space, with genetic engineering, the YA version. If that pitch makes your ears perk up, this is definitely for you. I’m not the target audience, and I still enjoyed this book. I would have liked a little more denouement, but even without it, this was entertaining and fun, and I’ll be interested in the rest of Lee’s work, which looks widely variable in topic.

Kari Maaren, Weave a Circle Round. Discussed elsewhere.

Robin McKinley, The Door in the Hedge. Reread. There is a lot of metaphor repetition here, and the characterization is often extremely shallow, and yet…and yet these stories manage not to make me furious, they manage to be interesting and gentle and fairy tale-ish and themselves. I should probably wait longer before another reread, but there was another short story collection that was a slap in the face on page one, so…this was a good antidote.

Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. I picked this up because I wanted to understand more of the roots of the Catalan independence movement, and I didn’t feel I could do that without more about the Spanish Civil War. Preston gives a master class in how to destroy both-sides-ism here, saying, sure, yes, there was violence on both sides, let’s look at how much violence, let’s look at what kinds of violence. This book was shattering to read, and he did an amazing job with intersectionality for a book that was not “about” any particular subgroup of the Spanish population. He started in the introduction talking about the anti-Semitism of the Spanish Right and went straight on from there; the complex relationship with Catholic faith, both using it and attacking it; sexual violence against women (including nuns as a specifically addressed sub-category). Harrowing. Awful. I had to take lots of breaks. Extremely, extremely well-done.

Robert Sheckley, Untouched by Human Hands. Reread. I wanted this to hold up well, and…it really didn’t. The women were nearly nonexistent, the men barely better, the satires…I think I was most disappointed in the satires, actually, because of gaping mental holes like: the satire of consumer debt had consumerism and militarism as opposing forces. What? In Sheckley’s lifetime, what? How did that even, you lived through the rise of the phrase “military-industrial complex” for a reason, dude. The prose was better than a lot of the people who are touted over Sheckley from this era, but as idea fiction goes, the ideas were…not where I hoped I had left them, alas.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Fascinating as a study of social and economic life in Maine in that era, with all its intricate concerns. Courtship customs are handled here, debt, cloth manufacture, rape trials, all sorts of things. One of my old teachers used to say, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you, it’s what you know that ain’t so,” and there’s a lot of debunking of that sort of thing here–for example, the assumption that the day that you get married and the day that you move in together are necessarily the same day. Apparently not in this culture, usually they were separated by about a month. Fantasy writers take note, this is great stuff.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is a very prickly book with a very prickly protagonist. Freddy (Frederica) starts out constantly angry at the world in general and her family in particular. Her main life strategy is to fly under the radar, to remain unnoticed. When new neighbors add a stream of confrontation and chaos to her sister and stepbrother’s unabashed differences, it infuriates her.

Bouncing through space and time with one of those neighbors in a series of uncontrolled time leaps brings her anger to a point where she has to deal with it, where she can deal with it–where, over the course of a deeply syncretist, confusing (to Freddy, but not particularly to this reader) journey she matures enough to deal with it. But bouncing around space and time is only the beginning–well, okay, the middle. There is still plenty of pointed plot after that, and it’s not just herself Freddy has to sort out.

There is a lot to like here. The fantasy part of the structure is entirely itself, the characters are stubborn and fierce and allowed to be flawed, and the resolution is resolute without being neatly tied.

This book does the opposite of most books that have any connection with role-playing games. Most RPG-related books have some connection to a campaign; this one blatantly could not be any kind of campaign. Instead, Maaren has thought about initiative and perspective from a role-playing perspective…and then done the work of putting those thoughts into the context of this medium. One of my major complaints about a lot of science fiction is that it appears to take place in a world with no science fiction; lately I have added to that complaint that it seems to take place in a world with no modern gaming. This book, thank heavens, has noticed that the last 30-40 years of gaming exist, in the same way that writers since time immemorial have noticed that card games exist: not everyone has the same relationship with it, not everyone gains the same insights from it, but people do gain insights from it without the poker game itself having to be the plot of the book. Instead of taking the shallow end of games, she’s taken the deep end; like most of the things I like about this book, more would be a spoiler.

There are also a few things that make me scrinch my nose up. Mel is charming and completely underused; Freddy herself is the type of teen protagonist whose flaws are spotted by the boys around her, a plot arc I am getting a little tired of (and barely redeemed here by the facts that 1. they are not romantic interest boys and 2. they are pretty flawed themselves). Also…this is a book where the protagonist has a growth arc that involves going from being a jerk to her stepbrother Roland about all sorts of things that include his disability (he is profoundly deaf, she refuses to acknowledge that she can communicate with him in ASL, making him read her lips instead and not doing a very good job of that either) to being less of a jerk to him about various things that include his disability. ASL plays some pivotal roles in the book and there are some bits that aren’t pivotal at all and still nicely done…but if you’re a reader who has already had it up to your eyebrows in your ordinary life with people being jerks about deafness, well, here it is again. And if you found yourself asking why exactly this book was about Freddy when Roland is pretty awesome and entirely plot crucial, well, sometimes books do a thing, and this is that thing, and there are lots of other things to like in the course of this book, but it might not be enough if that’s your thing. If you decide to skip it, you’d be missing out on Roland himself, who is pretty damn great, and on some very well-done supporting characters who are deaf (and not all to the same degree and not all with the same interfaces with the hearing world–variety of disability for the win). But for some people, sitting through the part where Freddy’s an ass to Roland may be more painful than having Roland as a really great character, and for others the opposite; judge for yourself which you are.

There’s a lot about initiative and choice and story here, a lot about growth and family. There are awkward bits. There are good bits. And in some ways I find the title particularly amusing, because it is very much not a circle, it is a very very spiky shape, and that’s what it needs to be.

Please consider using our link to buy Weave a Circle Round from Amazon.

Review access provided by Serial Box.

Now that I am caught up, I am considering the episodes more as individual episodes. Which is not my best mode of interacting with serials–it’s me, not them–and yet it does expose interesting things about the construction of serial narrative as a unique form. No installation is trying to tell a complete story, but each is trying to be satisfying in its own right, thematically, individually.

These two have a paired focus that I think works as the heart of this season of Tremontaine: the holes left by losses from the previous seasons. Consequence and ramification is the hallmark of good series storytelling for me–not just doing the same thing over again but letting it go on to become more and different than it was.

With chocolate, and the organizing of a new school. The new school in particular is something that seems to be finally finding its logistical feet in these episodes. I hope so. The university is my jam, was some of why I loved The Fall of the Kings so much. I pin some hopes on this new school as a plot element.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Americanah. This is a really beautifully done book about immigration and alienation and belonging, about Nigeria and the US and a little bit the UK, about race and nationality and culture and love. And hair. There is a lot of stuff about hair in here, all interesting and good. There is complexity and challenge and acceptance and its opposite. Recommended.

Marie Brennan, Ars Historica. Discussed elsewhere.

Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones. This is about a massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937, a novel, a novel about surviving it and about those who don’t, and about the relationship between Dominicans and Haitians in the DR at the time and after. It is sparely done, it goes quickly if you don’t let yourself look away, which you possibly should. The relationships are allowed to be complicated. It is not a long book but still a grueling one.

Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ellen Kushner, Karen Lord, Racheline Maltese, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Paul Witcover. Tremontaine, Season 2, Season 3 Episodes 1-4. Discussed elsewhere.

Cory Doctorow, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Reread. I have been seeing what I connect with on the short fiction shelves upon reread, and the answer here is: these are modern stories, well-constructed and well-written, and they are not hitting me in deeply emotional places, but they are still worth my time to read again, and probably will be again in another decade. So it went back on the shelf. None of the stories made me gasp and say, oh, that one, have to talk about that one. But I kept the book. Okay.

Ross King, Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power. This is one of the places where a subtitle contradicts the book it’s appended to. This is not actually about Machiavelli and The Prince, mostly; it’s about Machiavelli the dude, wandering around Florence and around Italy at large, writing plays and other things, arranging for people to preach sermons that were not in the least of interest to himself, surrounded by syphilis at every turn or so it seemed. So much syphilis, so much strappado. Fascinating, short, not at all a nice book really.

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give. This is a young adult novel that’s hard to describe without making it sound like less than what it is. It’s about a young woman who is in the car when her childhood friend is killed by a police officer, and all the life complications that ensue thereby–and that makes it sound like a “problem novel,” like an “issue book,” when instead it is a deep exploration of character, relationship, culture, family, history, and more. Thomas is not out to make a quick buck on current events, she is writing a deeply personal exploration of historical trends she places in much broader perspective for her characters while still giving them the kind of individual story that makes a novel really work. Highly recommended. One of the cases where widespread buzz is wholly, wholly justified.

Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe. When it says personal, it basically means that Simon Winder is going to intrude his stories of his kid’s school program or whatever in the middle of his stories of sixteenth century monarchs. Not because he has enough for a memoir, because he doesn’t, but because he feels that you need your hand held through the Habsburgs, that if you don’t have your hand held through the Habsburgs you will be very frightened. Sometimes he is wry and funny, though not usually when talking about himself, and there were enough ways in which he was insightful about other historians’ failings early on that I did not immediately flee, which I should have. Look, here is the thing about family trees: they are there to make things easier, not harder. If someone tries to tell you that a family tree is confusing, it’s almost certainly because the family is confusing. LIKE THE HABSBURGS. There is a certain category of person who is convinced that maps and diagrams of any kind are Technical and therefore Difficult and therefore Intimidating, but these things are tools for visualization and clarification, it’s worth learning to use them rather than running away and hiding, unless you have a genuine learning disability. And if you do, just ignore those bits. Turn the page and move on. Because Winder’s attempts to do without are kind of emblematic of what he means to simplify and does not manage, that didn’t really need to be simplified anyway.

(Disclosure: I feel this way about equations also, so you may want to discount what I say based on that. If you have both equations and text, and you didn’t screw it up, things should be clearer, not less clear, than if you’re trying to express something that has an equation without saying the equation. Equations are a really bad thing to play charades with.)