Tag: bookses precious

I was traveling, and I have had a cold, and also it is for some reason A Very Novella Christmas. So…lo these many things read.

Michal Ajvaz, The Other City. This is a short Czech surrealist novel. It’s very, very much about Prague–very detailed about Prague along with its stained-glass surrealist imagery–but the strange thing is that it was written in the early ’90s and did not contain even a hint of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics in the very year this book was published. That was not only practically but as far as I could tell thematically absent. Which for me was an interesting statement on how creative brains work, which is to say, not always as one might expect.

Miguel Angel Asturias, The President. Beautifully written account of life under the titular dictator. It was censored at the time of its writing. There’s a lot of how evil flows downhill in this, a lot of how the people in the middle of an oppressive system end up complicit. Like a lot of books of the early 20th century, it is not at all sensitive to disabled and mentally ill people as people rather than symbols, so heads up on that front.

Charles S. Brant and Jim Whitewolf, The Autobiography of a Kiowa Apache Indian. Whitewolf talks to Brant about his childhood, his life, the traditions of his people as he knows them. This is not trying to be anything like comprehensive about all Kiowa Apaches, but it’s not as deeply personal as a solo-written memoir would be. Brant’s commentary sometimes feels extremely off to me (this is a book from the middle of the twentieth century, and Brant is not more culturally understanding/enlightened than you would expect of his time), but Whitewolf’s character continues to shine through the snarky footnotes. He is not in some way an idealized noble Indian figure, nor is he the stereotype Brant alludes to of a supposedly-dissolute people. He’s just some guy, some guy that you can easily believe is someone’s uncle, who tells you about how things were when he was a kid, what his family and their neighbors used to do and what they still do now, and Brant can’t ruin that.

Marie Brennan, Cold-Forged Flame. Adventure fantasy that I stuck with despite main character amnesia. I have often complained that the failure mode of novellas is to have the worldbuilding of a novel and the payoff of a short story, but while the novellas I read this month mostly followed the pattern of being worldbuilding-heavy, I wouldn’t describe it as failure for these specific cases.

Paul Cornell, Witches of Lychford. The characterization of this was sharp and individual. It was an urban fantasy with what seems like it should be a standard urban fantasy plot (faceless corporation interrupts structure of village life for nefarious magical purposes and with nefarious magical consequences), but the characters are so individual that this is not a problem…and when I ask myself for actual examples of other stories that do this, they are not abundant. I particularly like the inclusion of a vicar as one of the titular women; this is a varied and matter-of-fact treatment of faith and organized religion that we don’t see often enough.

Michael J. DeLuca, ed., Reckoning Issue 1. Kindle. I’m in this, and I don’t review things I’m in–too much potential for tackiness. However, I will say that several individual pieces got mentioned in my year-end favorites, and when they’re available on the internet I’ll link to them.

S.B. Divya, Run Time. Another worldbuilding-heavy novella that did not turn out to suffer unduly from that balance. This one is near-future adventure-racing SF. If you miss EcoChallenge since adventure racing went all reality TV, this is for you. The plot twists are not very twisty, but they don’t have to be; there’s a diverse cast doing adventure-racing SF, and there are several of you who will want that if you don’t have it already.

Elizabeth Dodd, Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World. Essays on nature and place. Dodd’s lens has some beautiful views from it, and some extremely quirky personal ones. I’ve gotten a lot more interested in personal essay/memoir lately, so expect more of this.

Jean d’Ormesson, The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, A History. Oh, what a weird book, oh, what a weird book. This is one of the rare places where the “a novel” style subtitles are really called for, because the format of this book is that it is a history of a place that never existed. It is written exactly like a history of the era it covers–I read a lot of history, so I know–and if you are prone to Clausewitz and Liddell Hart jokes, the footnotes are hysterically funny. If you don’t like reading history, for heaven’s sake don’t read this, it’s like that but nonexistent. The introduction may be daunting for genre-familiar readers, since the person writing it seems to be going, “OMG Alternate history! can you say ‘alternate history,’ children?”, but the book is better than that, the book is doing things with the stories we tell ourselves in different contexts, how we talk to each other and what’s given priority, what is this fiction endeavor anyway. Highly but narrowly recommended.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Public festivals, dancing mania, carnival, all sorts of expressions of group positivity. Interesting angle from which to take on various parts of history. I kept making wry faces at the fact that historians are divided on whether carnival-esque festivals are necessary for authoritarian regimes to keep the people blowing off steam or harmful for authoritarian regimes by allowing a place to conspire and invert the status quo. It can be both, people! It can totally be both, that can be part of how authoritarian regimes do not work well. Nothing on this earth guarantees that things that are necessary will not also be harmful to the entity that needs them.

Zetta Elliott, The Phoenix on Barkley Street. This was a chapter book, the stage before middle grade, so it was extremely brief and it did not attempt much in the way of nuance. City kids and their phoenix attempt to clean up a place where they can hang out safely. Probably you know some kids who could use some magic that doesn’t look like it’s just for dominant cultural groups; here’s some.

Dorothy Heydt/Katharine Blake, The Interior Life. Kindle. In the introduction, Heydt/Blake (each name appears on my Kindle file once) notes that this book came out in 1990 “and promptly went back in again.” I can see why, and not because it’s worthless. It’s an interesting example of the domestic fantasy subgenre/superset/whatever it is. And yet the part of the novel that takes place in our world is deeply confused about time. I am the same age as the oldest children in the book, and…this is not the world I grew up in. It’s the world somewhere between half a generation and a generation older. Except with enough computer details that you really can’t just say, oh, fine, yes, it’s 1965-75, onward. The crossover between the two worlds is handled interestingly, and I cared deeply about the mundane details of this world–I loved the fact that fantasy was a positive force and not a negative one–but the weird handling of the sexual harassment subplot made it very clear to me that this came out the year before the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. So I find this book to be worth reading, I care deeply about the characters, it’s not quite like anything else…but I can see why the mass market of 1990 did not fall upon it with glad cries, and I’m glad that we have ebooks now so that the mass market doesn’t have to in order for it to be available. (Unfortunately it seems to have become unavailable again. -ed)

Rachel Ignotofsky, Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World. This is a book primarily intended for a young audience. It’s lavishly illustrated and does not always choose “the usual suspects” for its subjects. These fifty women vary considerably in nationality, race/ethnicity, and religion–and in what fields they represent. A great resource to inspire kids. (I do wish that the woman who used a wheelchair had been pictured in it, but at least Ignotofsky was clear that she had disabilities and worked through/around them.)

Emmi Itäranta, The Weaver. I’m always interested in whether people do something very like their first novel for their second or very different. This felt very different to me, much closer to the mainstream of stories that get told in speculative fiction (in this case fantasy). It was a fun novel with cool worldbuilding elements, not nearly as special as Memory of Water but not everything has to be.

Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, eds., Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Issue 35. Kindle. A lot of this was deep into weird-for-its-own-sake. “The History of Harrabash” by James Warner was fun to read in conjunction with The Glory of the Empire (I read them on the same day), since the Warner story is a much lighter, younger voice on the teaching and learning of history even when it doesn’t exist. Jack Larsen’s “The Equipoise With Lentils” was I think the most successful for me at being unabashedly surreal and still keeping my interest.

Foz Meadows, An Accident of Stars. This felt so very very much like a big fat portal fantasy of my early teens. It’s exactly like the best of the sort of thing I was reading daily in junior high…except without the worry that the suck fairy will have visited it with attitudes about race, gender, or sexuality that now feel like a slap in the face. Portal fantasy: probably you miss it, here is one, it’s not a jerk to people, go.

Emma Newman, After Atlas. This is set in the same universe as Planetfall but is not a direct sequel to it, and I think that’s to Newman’s credit. After Atlas is aiming at a completely different thing, rather than trying to replicate the appeal of the earlier book. I’m glad of that. It’s a procedural with the future tech worked in rather than ignored or only showcased when it was convenient for the author. The ending was not as abrupt as Planetfall‘s, but it does make the “very abrupt ending, several interesting questions unresolved” thing look like a pattern rather than a fluke.

Marta Randall, Islands. Kindle. I had not even heard of Marta Randall, and I know a lot about SF of ages past. Turns out she was the first woman VP of SFWA and also the first woman president of same. And she wrote this and some other novels that I also downloaded to my Kindle, and it was definitely worth reading. It felt far more modern than most of what was presented to me as “classics of ’70s SF” when I was a teenager. I wonder how much sexism played a part in it not joining their ranks, how much it was random midlist blues, and how much it was that SF was hurtling toward cyberpunk while Randall was musing about mortality, relationship, and environment. I think one of the things that was particularly appealing to me is that Randall reached for connection and understanding of others’ viewpoints. But scuba-diving sunken Hawaii was pretty cool as a set of images, too.

Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. This was full of interesting tidbits that didn’t quite come together into the whole Solnit hoped it would be, in my view. Muybridge was extremely eccentric, and the times surrounding him no less so; lots of fodder for an interesting book here. But it felt to me like there was perhaps one or two steps of bringing things together missing between this book and a really great one. I’m still interested in Solnit’s work and looking forward to reading more of it, but this was not as good as A Paradise Built in Hell.

Fran Wilde, A Jewel and Her Lapidary. Worldbuilding-heavy novellas for the win. This one was also adventure fantasy, very vividly built, with relationships central to the plot.

Connie Willis, Fire Watch. Reread. I have been revisiting some of the old short story collections we have around here to see how they stand up. In this case: not well. The older I get, the more Willis’s time travelers seem implausibly foolish, the less they seem entertaining. Everything reads just a bit flat, all the emotions primary colors and very little nuance. I am a little worried about revisiting the longer works of hers I remember enjoying, in this light.

Kai Ashante Wilson, A Taste of Honey. You’d think with all the worldbuilding-heavy novellas I read this fortnight, they would start to run together, but they were all quite distinct–Wilson’s worldbuilding continues to be like no one else’s. This was a fantasy love story, tinged with melancholy but not depressing, the plot leaving room for the characters and their world to be the focus.

Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries From a Secret World. Forest health and tree tidbits. Stuff about how trees exist in community, how they share nutrients through the fungal network around their roots, other cool arboreal things. Yay trees.

Daniel Abraham, The Spider’s War. The end of its series. Too much abusive boyfriend, not enough banking. Seriously. It felt like Abraham started out doing cool things with banking, and then the banker did not get to use her banking skills in the climax of the book basically at all. She got to use metaphors for them, which were her feminine wiles. This did not thrill me. Also, the person she was forced to use feminine wiles on was incredibly distasteful to her and me, and I totally get what Abraham was doing with the portrayal of a Nice Guy TM wreaking havoc without really understanding why what he was doing was not okay, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed spending any time with him in fiction, either in his perspective or the perspectives of those around him. I really loved the series that started with A Shadow in Summer, and every project Abraham does is quite different from the others, so I’m glad this series has found its resolution so we can see what other themes and tropes he feels like playing with.

Chaz Brenchley, Three Twins at Crater School Chapters 20 & 21. Kindle. I know, I keep saying I am terrible at reading serials, but the thing is we’ve got to the point in the book that’s jam-packed with plot. Each chapter is fairly short–think kids’ book chapters, that’s the model Chaz is using–and yet things! keep! happening! So if I’m in line at the post office and need something on my Kindle, I can find out what. And I am such a sucker for school stories.

Avner Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb. Cohen apparently has another book about Israel’s development of the bomb. This one was about Israeli attitudes and discussion practices around nuclear weapons. I found it mildly intellectually interesting and not the least bit emotionally engaging. Probably falls in the category of “if you have a particular interest in this topic but not otherwise.”

Charles de Lint, Waifs and Strays. Reread. One of the problems of collecting an author’s stories around a particular theme is that it can feel repetitive or expose weakness. In this case de Lint’s sense of teenage dialog is a serious weakness. I have found some of his work compelling, but this is just not a collection of his best stuff. Start somewhere else if you’re curious about de Lint.

A. M. Dellamonica, The Nature of a Pirate. Discussed elsewhere.

Bradley Denton, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede. Reread. I am really curious about how this reads to someone who wasn’t living on the prairie in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Denton’s sense of prairie, of that part of middle America, is literally incomparable. I have no idea what other author even tries to get across that sense of the world, especially in the late 20th century. The music references were fun, the gonzo sf conceit continues to be better than I would have assumed without reading other Denton, but it’s the dust of the middle and southern plains that I really love in Denton’s work.

Maria Emilia Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the US as Allies in World War II. I really like having specific references about parts of the world wars that were not the obvious theaters, books that make clear the ways in which it was a world war. Paz has a keen sense of where each country was clueless about the other’s perceptions and motivations here–particularly the fact that the US no longer thought of itself as an invading power that had taken some Mexican land (on the “that was a long time ago” front) but Mexico really did perceive it that way and have several diplomatic needs accordingly. Interesting stuff, and brief enough not to become tedious.

Benjamin Rosenbaum, The Ant King and Other Stories. Reread. Rosenbaum’s stories are clever (sometimes the failure mode of clever), and I really like the other cities section. (I am a sucker for that.) The stories I liked best outside that section tended to be the least wry, to feel the least like they were smirking at their own characters. And I do love the off-the-wall surreal moments. That’s what I keep this collection around for.

Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Brooke Allen, and Carolyn Nowak, Lumberjanes: Band Together. The thing about Lumberjanes is that every new thing feels natural but you can’t see them coming. “Oh, mermaid music festival, sure,” is a thing that makes emotional sense in context, and it was fun, and we got a little more Roanoke cabin backstory along the way. Not clearly a major advancement in plot, but a fun, fast read.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Thomas, and Michi Trota, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 13. Kindle. I really liked the Sofia Samatar prose poem or whatever it was (I don’t have to know what it was! it was a thing I liked!), and the nonfiction of this issue was particularly strong, to the point where I am tempted to call it a service to the community. The stories were all quite readable but just barely not into the “favorites” category for me, although Amal’s thing was close, thoughtful and personal and wrenching and why not a favorite again? Hmm. Maybe I just needed to sit with it for awhile.

Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. This goes into a lot of detail about the Congress of Vienna, which apparently lasted for quite some time. Zamoyski is interested in the personalities as well as the policies, so it’s a fairly engaging read, but if you pick it up on the wrong day it will replicate the “gahhhh will this never ennnnnd” feeling experienced by so many of the people involved. And suddenly there’s Napoleon! and then not! So really: pretty accurate emotionally as well as detailed in facts.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the third in its series, and there is no reason not to read the first two and every reason to do so. But this one I think really comes into its own. This is the first time I have been able to figure out that it reminds me of Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series with people applying scientific method in circumstances where that is not the default. Lots of people are wanting more like that while they wait for more Steerswoman–at least lots of people in my social circles–so here you go, a portal fantasy with Steerswoman-like traits.

It also has lots of examinations of trust, complicity, and assumptions. The stuff about complicity in particular, how you work for change within a flawed society, which things are effective, which things make your position clear…all of that has timing that I’m sure Alyx wishes was not quite so apt.

There are also some quite vivid creations called frights that sink ships and cause other kinds of mayhem, so…yay mayhem.

Please consider using our link to buy The Nature of a Pirate from Amazon.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun. I’ve watched the movie several times, and it seemed like time to find out how the book is different. The book is less unified, more disjointed, aiming more at a psychological realism. There were places where the fact that it was nearly a memoir but cast as a novel distracted me a lot, mostly in the places where Ballard reported Jim’s future thoughts/feelings. I was fascinated by the way it did not try to cast anyone as nicer than they were, replicated the moral short-sightedness of Jim’s inexperience without trying to shape it into something nobler, but at the same time was not wallowing in nastiness, not being proto-grimdark. This book walks a very precise line. It isn’t a happy fun line, as you would expect for the subject matter, and now may not be the right time to read this.

Chaz Brenchley, Three Twins at Crater School, Chapter 19. Kindle. I know I shouldn’t read serials as they come out, but I was waiting for the eye doctor and it was right there. So yes, it is a serial, it is a very tiny chunk of plot, moving forward and then waiting some more. Soooooon.

Susan Cooper, Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children. Reread. A lot of the essays here are not essays but reprints of speeches given to/for different organizations. This makes a difference in tone. This is not a chewy volume of thoughts, it is a set of impressions that she can exhort people with when they might have come in late or been distracted by their neighbor chewing salad. There is also a lot of assumption that television is not an art form, or is an art form with nothing to offer, a lot of electronic alarmism. Ah well. I will go back and read The Dark Is Rising instead next time.

David Edgar, Pentecost. A short play about war and human rights and art. Explores interesting things about priorities and assumptions, context for what is derivative and what is ground-breaking. If I never read another work where someone uses a prostitute as a stand-in/metaphor for a disadvantaged country, it will be too soon.

Nicola Griffith, Stay. Reread. This book is about consequences (it’s the sequel to The Blue Place). Griffith writes gorgeously about the physicality of grief, finding your way back, figuring out a new reality after trauma. I love this book. Caveat: she appears to have been badly misinformed about borderline personality disorder and is rather stigmatizing about it. This is a brief plot point, but I’ve become more aware of mental health stigma in the fourteen years since I last read this book, and I didn’t want to gush without exception.

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Wow, is this a gappy book. For a supposed history of class in America, it does not include, for example, labor unions, immigration, white ethnicity, international socialism, William Jennings Bryan’s populism, the GI Bill…yeah. It did not include a lot. Elvis as a “country boy/white trash” archetype: yes. Broader class distinctions in American popular music over those 400 years: surely you jest. So…there were some interesting bits, but if you read it, go in thinking about it as “some possibly interesting thoughts about class in the US” rather than a history of.

Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages. I said to myself, I’ve only really read the very obvious bits of Shirley Jackson, I should get some more from the library. So I chose a title more or less at random, and it was this bubbly bit of 1950s autobiography as a mom/housewife/writer (but mostly not about the writer part). Oops. I mean, not oops, it wasn’t like it was terrible, but it was not what I was aiming for. Still, it was short and fun; you could do worse.

Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, eds., Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins. An interesting and varied anthology. Some stand-out stories included Jaymee Goh’s “A Name to Ashes,” Alec Austin’s “The Paper Sword,” and E.C. Myers’s “In His Own Image.”

William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art. Kindle. William Morris continues to be the cranky Victorian uncle of my heart. Oh dear. This set of speeches/essays contains a digression into Morris admonishing people that if they claim to care about art but don’t care about air pollution, they don’t really care about art. You can just see his whiskers quivering with indignation. I love it. He also goes into some discussion about how to get cheap art without treating artists badly, still a live question, and has a list of colors you could in good taste paint the interior of your home. For which I really wanted pantone samples of the field of possibilities he was choosing from in paint technology of the time.

Mark Rosenfelder, The Language Construction Kit. Goes into phonemes, grammar, nuts and bolts of how to make a constructed language. I am a lot more interested in how those things fit with culture and story, but if you don’t have language instincts, this could help a lot with fantasy/alien worldbuilding.

Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. This was the real win of this set of books. So lovely. I went and put everything else she’s written on one list or another halfway through, I was enjoying this so much. Solnit goes into the way people work together in disasters and in their aftermath, and the ways in which preconceptions about that can seriously hinder communities. The stories she tells from a variety of disaster types match patterns a lot with my post-tornado experiences. Really good stuff for SF writers in particular but really for anyone.

Edward Struzik, Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on Edge. This is about a bunch of follow-on effects and second order consequences from current climate change in the Arctic, particularly on animal populations. Interesting stuff but not cheerful. Not even a little bit cheerful. But worth knowing anyway.

David Suzuki and Keibo Oiwa, The Japan We Never Knew: A Journey of Discovery. This is a very strange book. It’s a series of profiles (written in the mid-90s) of activists, ethnic minorities, and other members of Japanese countercultures. It’s basically trying to be a counterweight to the western reporting that gives us Japan as a monolith of conformity and cosplay. I’d like a modern version, but one from twenty years ago is also useful because there were, for example, still people who were adults during the Second World War and counterculturally activist because of it, and hearing about them is valuable too.

Django Wexler, The Price of Valor. Third in its series. Don’t start here. Relationships continue to unfold and develop. Still some revolutionary politics, not following the French Revolution linearly but taking inspiration from it.

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Fascinating book about how Native American and European groups (mostly the French) created rituals and means of interaction that partook of both sets of cultural norms. Also goes into the breakdown of those crosscultural developments, not only but particularly with the advent of the British and the people who had just started thinking of themselves as Americans. Definitely worth the time, not just if you have an interest in the Great Lakes region of the US and Canada but particularly so if you do.

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me. This…might not have been the best time for me to read a noir novel. It’s quite well done, and I’m not taking Abbott’s other books off my library list. But there is nobody whose age is in the double digits who is a kind and thoughtful person in this book; it is the story of how far a family is willing to go to preserve one member’s gymnastics career. It’s brutal in directions that we don’t often see people willing to be brutal in fiction.

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. Rereads. I have loved this series for thirty years. I see different things in it every time I reread it. On this reread–how circumscribed and how limited the hope. And yet hope. The image that accompanies the death of Stock the poet is one of the very specific images that has stuck with my very non-visual self. And this is where my button for barricades in fiction got installed. It still works on me. I think it always will. This time it struck me how fast people in this series fall in love and how matter of fact Alexander is about it: oh, he’s in love with her, she’s in love with him, yep, that’s what’s going on, no need to beat around the bush. Okay.

Karen Babine, Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life. These essays. Wow. This is…this is one of the books that speaks very well for me in many of its parts. We have several things in common, Babine and me. I was not expecting the chapter on the Red River flood to segue into her showing up on the Gustavus campus post-tornado. That was a little close to home. I cried. Highly recommended even for people who are not me, though.

John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America.This is not a compilation of myths but a discussion of their patterns, and of how scholars figure out which regions share similar myth structures, which are culturally quite different. It’s one in a series of three, with North and South America each getting their volume. You can tell that Mesoamerica is where Bierhorst’s heart lies, though; he goes into more detail here and also puts some parts of Mexico in with North America and some parts of Central America in with South America. As if he didn’t have enough to cover in those entire continents.

Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d. The most recent Flavia de Luce mystery. Not enough chemistry in this one, and not enough character development–he’s picking up the arc after what could have been a firm series ending, and the developments he’s throwing in feel a bit forced. Flavia is still a fun detective narrator, but this is not the peak of the series. If you only read one, don’t let it be this one.

Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan. This is the meaning of  “modern” that is not contemporary, and it is focused mainly on the countryside. With those caveats, it’s an interesting book–talking about the roles of women in rural Japan, family relationships, farming, village life, ethnicity formation within a genetically non-distinct group, all sorts of things.

Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim, eds., Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. A strong collection of fiction here. The reprints were almost all things I had liked before, which would be frustrating if I wasn’t aware that I’m not the main audience for that sort of thing–and there is a main audience that will benefit from having things like Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which is one of my favorite stories of all time. Standout new work included Karin Lowachee’s “A Good Home,” Gabriela Santiago’s “As Long As It Takes to Make the World,” and S. B. Divya’s “Binaries.” The nonfiction and personal essays were also interesting, and the art gallery was a lovely touch (well done, Kickstarter). A valuable collection.

Charles Johnson, Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos. This is extensively scholarly, with each tale told in both Hmong and English, in two aligned columns so that you could compare the translation if you spoke Hmong, plus pages of endnotes for most stories. Some of the notes are things that are kind of basic, but that’s needed in the context of an ethnic group where every single book seems to start with “the Hmong: who the heck are they anyway”–even if I’m not the target for that sort of thing and find it a bit frustrating.

Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. I wanted to love this, but I don’t find Mann reliable. She would probably say that’s because I have a Eurocentric focus, and that may be true. But it’s also true that she’s willing to belittle other Native/First Nations people and use wrong ethnic terms for them if they disagree with her, and to denigrate women from European cultures in terms that smear all cultural distinctions together. So…which parts of what she says about Iroquoian women are true? Hard for me to say, when she’s willing to do that sort of thing. Also, for a book that was supposedly about Iroquoian women, quite a lot of it was dedicated to rants about European men. I can read other books about European men, so that made it less useful to me.

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. A series of prose poems about Rankine’s lived experience as a Black woman in America. They very effectively sum in a way that microaggressions and racist encounters also sum, showing how one incident could be nothing but all of them together are a great burden. Interesting stuff.

Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence. I have loved a Rushdie book, but it was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is a bit of an outlier. This was not something I loved. It was clever and reasonably entertaining but fairly cold in its character relations.

Rick Wilber, Alien Morning. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Also, Rick was one of the very first people I met in this genre, since he is the administrator of the Dell (Asimov) Award for Undergrads. The introductory acknowledgments to Alien Morning show you the kind of person Rick is in this community: he not only thanks people, he thanks them meticulously and specifically. He’s warm and considerate and always there to make sure other people get credit.

…which is why I was relieved that I liked his book, because the people you like and the books you like don’t always go together. Whew.

Alien Morning is a first contact story that’s also a near-future speculation about media, tech, and human relationships. Its protagonist, Peter Holman, is on the cutting edge of a new kind of journalism/social media, sweepcasting, which lets people share his sensory experiences. He’s walking on the beach near his Florida home when mysterious lights appear in the sky, and gradually he becomes one of the first humans to figure out even a piece of what’s going on.

The S’huddonai visitors appear to be kind and friendly at first, even slightly comical, but their tech and personal abilities are beyond what humans know how to manage–and they are not entirely forthcoming about who is doing what to whom and why. The S’huddonai politics clash pretty quickly with the politics of Peter’s own dysfunctional family. If you want the galactic brought in to the personal scale, this is a book that does that on every page. It’s setting up for the rest of a trilogy, so there are events in motion that aren’t resolved in this volume–but the others appear to be coming soon.

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Blue Balliett, The Calder Game. The third in a series of kids’ books that are nominally mysteries. The plots basically don’t work–there is handwavium and then something falls into their laps–but that’s not the point of these books. The point of these books is to talk about things Blue Balliett thinks are cool in a way kids can understand. They’re factually rather than morally didactic–hey, kids, let’s talk about mobiles! let’s talk about modern art!–and honestly they work just fine that way.

Colin Cotterill, I Shot the Buddha. The most recent Dr. Siri book–we’re into double digits, and he’s showing no signs of stopping. We have hit the part of the series where the books get written whether Cotterill has really cool inspiration for one or not. In this case it looks like not. So this is in the category of “if you like this series, here’s another one!”, but for heaven’s sake go back and start with The Coroner’s Lunch if you don’t know whether you like the series.

R. F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days. A gigantic mess of a book. It was pitched to me as “man home from the trenches of the Great War heals from shellshock as a classroom teacher in rural Devon,” and that’s true for as far as it goes, and then there are something like 500 pages more of various things. The protagonist comes right out and cheerfully states that the ups and downs of his life have paralleled those of Britain in the interwar period, and that’s true…and less interesting because it’s both fictional and stated aloud in words. Also the last third or so of the book is weirdly sketched in, in terms of character motivations, and covering 20+ years of being a teacher means he’s constantly feeling the need to remind you which boy is which when they show up again later. Which is better than asking you to remember ten gajillion British surnames, but…yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sorry I read this. It was very episodic, and the episodes were entertaining. But 600 pages was a lot of this type of episodes, and the overall arc plot got less and less satisfying as it strayed from the initial premise.

Rita Dove, Collected Poems, 1974-2004. One of the things I’ve been loving about reading large collections of poems by one poet is seeing their breadth and range. Rita Dove has quite a lot of it. Lyrical poems, prose poems, persona poems and personal poems, history poems ranging through time and space, linked series of poems…she does it all, or at least quite a lot of it. I really liked “November for Beginners”–good timing there–and “Arrow” went straight through me in a way I don’t think it would have before I hit my mid-thirties. Which is not to say there wouldn’t have been plenty to read here earlier, just–different pieces would have jumped out, I think.

Maija Gimbutas, The Balts. This is an old book about the prehistory of the southern Baltic and the people who spoke Baltic languages there–Latvians, Lithuanians, East Prussians. Lots of stuff about potsherds and axeheads, which I find interesting, and it’s a region of the world that’s hard to read about in English. It wasn’t one of those nonfiction books that transcends individual interests, but if you’re interested in this place-time, it does what it can. And the last section about the pre-Christian religion of the region is worth the price of admission. Or at least worth the price I paid for admission; hard to say what a used book might cost elsewhere.

Linda Hirshman, Sisters in Law: how Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World. Basically a joint biography of these two Supreme Court justices, and Hirshman really gets the bit between her teeth when she gets a chance to talk about their working relationship. I love working relationships, and it seemed clear to me that Hirshman found them more interesting because they worked together than she would have if they were personal besties. Also, if you’re feeling like we’ve had no progress in the last fifty years, read this book. Some of the court cases will curl your hair. Some of the ones you were alive for will make you say, “They didn’t get that settled until [year]???” and pace and rant.

James Laxer, Tecumseh and Brock: The War of 1812. This is also something of a joint biography, but more an exploration of the role of the War of 1812 in building Canadian national identity. Which is a weird thing to do, but okay. Also taking the Native American/First Nations front in that war seriously is a good thing to do and far too rare.

Ken Liu, ed., Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation. Discussed elsewhere.

Garth Nix, To Hold the Bridge. Most of the short stories in this were not to my taste. The title story was set in his most famous world, the world of Sabriel et al, and as a story its structure was very weirdly balanced. I keep saying, ruefully, that nerds love training sequences. This story was almost all training sequence. One of the common failures of novellas is to have the setup of a novel and the payoff of a short story. This did that. But the individual sentence-level and page-level reading experience was fun.

Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder. A brutal and beautiful children’s book about Russia under the last days of the tsar, a girl who helps aristocrats’ pet wolves learn to be their wild selves again, a boy whose dreams don’t fit the military mold he is pushed toward, and more. I’m going to be very careful which children I give this book to, because there are sad and angry parts that will not be right for every kid who is skilled enough to read the words. And yet it’s so good.

David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. And speaking of having the idea of progress reinforced–reading history of statistics basically gives a clear picture of how little we knew in the 19th century and how we had no idea how well we knew it. This is a pop math book, so Salsburg is careful how he handles technical subjects for the amateur. A bit more careful than an amateur with a physics degree probably needs, but–dive in, the water’s fine.

Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen, et al, Lumberjanes: Out of Time. I love the Lumberjanes and their relationships. I am not very coherent about these comics because they hit both my “I loved Girl Scouting and 4H” buttons and my “fantasy writer and modern weirdo” buttons, all at once. Start at the beginning, not here.

Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. I really enjoyed this author’s book about Belarus. This history of Ukraine was not nearly as vivid. More dry, more downbeat. Still interesting, still glad I read it, but there just seemed to be less spice–it’s more in the “recommended if this is an interest of yours” category than the “recommended for all” category.

Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, eds., Press Start to Play. I feel like there are a lot of really cliched things to be done with a speculative anthology with a video game theme. For people who like these particular tropes, they’d probably be described as “tried and true,” but I ended up feeling like a lot of the stories were rote and familiar. One exception was Holly Black’s “1Up,” which handled video game playing relationships as well as other tropes, did it well, and wrapped the story up while I was still enjoying it rather than dragging on.

Yoss, A Planet for Rent. Add another entry to the list “works in translation I wanted to like.” Yoss is Cuban, and this hits the humans in the galaxy as a metaphor for Cubans in the world note early and often. I totally get why people under regimes with a lot of censorship often use that kind of correspondence to say what they can’t say out loud, but it meant that the book got fairly tedious fairly quickly. And also…also I am kind of a tough sell on sex workers as metaphors. I feel like sex workers are handled badly enough often enough in fiction that if you don’t have a really really good reason why you need to use them as a metaphor…probably don’t. Let’s go with don’t. Even if you think you have a good reason, actually. Probably just no. Sigh.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I was in a book doldrums when I got this review copy, and oh, was it a relief. An anthology where I didn’t skim half the stories! What a treat. I was a little surprised to see that Ken Liu made the choice to include multiple stories by most of the authors, but I really liked that once I got used to the idea: it gives at least a little bit of triangulation on an author’s career, rather than letting a single story stand for an entire body of work.

I’m particularly pleased that Ken Liu focused so much on newer Chinese authors–I feel like the temptation and the expectation, when you know that you’re doing an anthology from a region that hasn’t appeared in that language before, is to try to rehash the entire history of a field/region, and that’s not necessarily the most readable or interesting anthology from anything but a scholarly viewpoint. Further, an anthology of this length could not possibly cover the entirety of China’s SF history. Ken Liu makes the point that it isn’t doing that, it isn’t trying, in multiple places–people will certainly try to take this anthology as representative and/or interpret it through the lens of their own politics. Immunity to the latter tendency is hard to come by. But the reader is given no excuse to do so, no encouragement–and in fact active discouragement–from the text.

Some of these stories were familiar to me and may well be familiar to you also–“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” and “Folding Beijing” were the ones I remembered seeing before. And yet the other stories by those two authors, Xia Jia and Hao Jingfang, were at least as good in my estimation, possibly better. I also really enjoyed the Chen Qiufan stories, all of them–and I came away with a very different opinion of Chen Qiufan than any one story would have given me.

I’m not surprised that there were Liu Cixin stories in the anthology–he’s the Hugo winner, the big name in China, the person whose novels Ken Liu has translated. (The reason why I’m saying Ken Liu every time instead of just defaulting to Liu!) And yet for me these were the weak point in the anthology. Upon reflection, I don’t think they’re a weakness per se–I think including them was a good idea–but they’re not the stories that spoke most to me. And this is no surprise: when I reviewed Liu Cixin’s novels, I said that the thing that excited me most was the prospect that they were the tip of the iceberg, that there would be more new Chinese SF in translation coming our way. I’m glad to see Tor carrying through on that. Long may it last.

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Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. This was interesting but not very satisfying. While it makes some gestures in the direction of being about an entire hemisphere, it really focused on broad movements of Anglophones–neither the specific stories of individual situations nor the rest of hemisphere as a whole in nearly as much detail as I would have liked. It’s kind of one of those in-between books that tries to do a whole lot and ends up not doing as much as would have been useful if it had focused. I particularly wanted more about the enslaved peoples’ thoughts and lives as best we can know them at this point. It’s probably a valuable addition if you’re building a reading list about the history of slavery and freedom, but it should definitely not be a main source by itself, or even with its preceding volume. Also, what is lacking between the establishment and the overthrow is the experience–which varied considerably over the Western Hemisphere, and I think that a study that went into those experiential differences would be fascinating. This is not that book.

Berit I. Brown, ed., Nordic Experiences: Exploration of Scandinavian Cultures. A series of essays by various authors about various Nordic figures–Grieg, Strindberg, etc. Having recently been to an exhibition of 19th century Swedish outsiders in painting, the insider nature of the choices was particularly glaring (overwhelmingly male, no Saami figures), but taken individually they were reasonably interesting scholarly essays. This is another “add it to your shelf if you have a shelf but don’t read it as the only thing” book.

A.S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind. Critical essays, where before I have only read her fiction. Mostly quite interesting, and they motivated me a great deal more than the Brown collection above did to add various authors to my collection, or bump them up the priority queue. Not anything like as engrossing as, say, The Children’s Book or The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, but I didn’t need it to be.

Mat Johnson, Pym. What a weird book. What a weird, weird book. This is about Edgar Allan Poe and race in modern America. It follows the shape of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, including the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. It tells you that it’s going to do that, it foreshadows the crap out of the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. And there are funny satirical bits, and quite a bit of it takes place in Antarctica, and…yeah. This book. This is the kind of book that totally qualifies as speculative fiction and yet doesn’t seem to come up in discussion very much in the genre community, so: this is a thing, read this thing.

Astrid Lindgren, The Brothers Lionheart. Reread. This was a childhood favorite. It is stark and spare and morbid and beautiful and Swedish. It is also a prime example of how the reader’s 50% is more like 80% in the case of children’s books. There’s a lot you have to fill in for yourself, not plot-wise but in terms of what the small descriptions and character interactions mean. Which is not a bad thing, just a thing.

John Lindow, Trolls: An Unnatural History. A brief survey of how trolls are portrayed in sagas, in folk tales, in literature. Interesting but not life-changing.

Microsoft (?), Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft. Kindle. This was a free offering, and I do hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. There are a lot of authors I like in here. But Elizabeth Bear’s story was the only one I really liked, and that meant that I was gravely disappointed because there were a lot of other stories I expected to like. Conclusion: Microsoft is maybe not the best source of cutting-edge science-inspired science fiction? or maybe just doing a one-off like this isn’t? I don’t know.

Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration. It really is what it says on the tin. Goes into different trail-formation patterns and techniques in the animal kingdom, some discussion of humans–especially North Americans–and their different concepts of trails (as opposed to roads). Appalachian Trail is present but not obnoxious. Quite an interesting meander through the concept.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Towers Fall. The end of a trilogy. Threads wrapped up, good triumphant and evil downcast, more or less. The ending is healthy and organic in ways that it was not obvious that it would have to be. I was also delighted by the imagery of the very ending, and I’d be interested to see if it was also delightful to people who don’t know Karina personally.

Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship. The subtitle of this book put me off for some time. On the one hand it’s got “DICTATORSHIP” right there in the title, which does not promise a sprightly read, and on the other hand, “the last,” really? that seems optimistic. But the title aside, this was really lovely. It talked about various proto-Belarus ancestral states. And crucially, it skipped over the sentences that would have started, “Like the rest of the tsar’s territory at this time, Belarus…” or, “As in other Soviet Republics, Belarus….” So it could spend its time on things that were unique to Belarus, confident that if you care, you can get the other information elsewhere. And in fact I can! and more time to medieval sorcerer-kings was all for the best for me. Also, I hit a moment where I was thinking, “He really hasn’t talked much about the Jewish population, this was a really important region for Judaism,” when bam, entire section on Jewish Belarus. I call that thoughtful. Now I’m looking forward to the history of Ukraine I have on my pile by the same author.

Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman. This is another book that is totally speculative fiction and yet I haven’t seen it discussed by many people in the community. It’s a mystery novel where the policeman in the title is investigating deaths in the face of an impending apocalyptic asteroid strike. People are coping via hedonism, despair, and various other extremes, and then there’s our hero, making sure that people are not neglected and the law is upheld. I’m not sure I need more in this series, but this was an interesting thing to do, created a mood quite thoroughly and yet followed through on implications.

Fiona Wood, Wildlife. This is mainstream YA, and it points out how fine the line is between a problem novel and a novel of character. It would be very easy to make this sound like a problem novel, where grief and toxic friendships are the problems in question. Instead it was a novel of character, far more broadly worth reading. I like Wood’s characters, fumbling as best they can toward treating each other decently, and I will look for her other work.