Tag: bookses precious

Madeline Ashby, Glass Houses. Discussed elsewhere.

Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown. This is the Dust Bowl novel that wasn’t published at the time because Steinbeck took her research and The Grapes of Wrath made it to press first, startling both Babb and her publisher. Tastes vary, and it’s trying to do something very different from the Steinbeck, but for my money it’s such a better book. Babb is writing from life experience, trying to write naturalistic character rather than symbolic theories in vaguely human form, and her eye for human detail is excellent. I wept at more than one spot–and not just over death, but over life circumstances, which is a greater achievement than melodrama. Highly recommended if you care at all about the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression–and frankly, these days, we all should.

Terry J. Benton-Walker, Blood Justice. Sequel to Blood Debt, a fun, fast-paced YA fantasy novel with racial justice considerations and New Orleans worldbuilding that is not stereotypes of Mardi Gras. A fun read, interested to see where the next one goes.

Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Cryoburn, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Falling Free, and Ethan of Athos. Rereads. This is the first time I’ve read the late series books in their chronological rather than publication order, and the first time I’ve reread Falling Free in this millennium. It’s also the first time I’ve reread Cryoburn since my father died of an aneurism. So–well. If you know, you know. In any case, my favorites come earlier in the series, but it’s a fun project I’m glad I’m doing.

Sylvie Cathrall, A Letter to the Luminous Deep. Epistolary and abyssopelagic, this is not quite like anything else. It’s also the first in its series, leaving me interested about where it’s going rather than fully satisfied with where it’s been.

Z. Z. Claybourne, The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan. Fast contemporary adventure fantasy that’s doing all the things at once, with a jaunty hat on. Once you know that the protagonists are Ramses Jetstream and Milo Jetstream, you’ve got the vibe. Probably still fun even if you don’t have a fever, but reading it with a fever was like, yeah, I’m just gonna…go with whatever ten things are happening on this page, and we’ll see what’s on the next page, cool, cool.

Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. Absolutely lovely and I would like more things that were both trying at this and succeeding. It really does do a thorough flip of POV, giving what events look important to the Islamic perspective of this era, what the records we have focus on and what they definitely do not focus on, and the Christian Crusader kings’ internal politics have about the same percentage of the text as Islamic rulers’ do in most of the texts I’ve read before. Great perspective shift, much needed, it doesn’t even start and end in the same places, of course it wouldn’t, yeah, wow, very cool.

E.M. Forster, Howards End. Kindle. This is the last of the Forsters for me to read as an adult–it’s technically a reread, because I read it when I was 14? I retained nothing of it from then, though I vividly remember some other things I read at 14. I’m glad I saved this for last, because this is one of the times when “one of the most famous ones he did” and “one of the best ones he did” absolutely are the same. I think Forster sometimes gets grouped with other people of a similar vintage who are also writing about class and society, but he’s doing so much more with at least people who are trying, people who actually want things to be better, for others and not just for themselves and possibly their immediate family, that it stands out so thoroughly.

Margaret Frazer, The Boy’s Tale. Kindle. Very much more into the “these really are tangled with historical politics” than some of the other volumes, but still in the basically gentle medieval murder mystery genre–and still with the structure where no one is dead at the halfway mark and the book is over the minute Dame Frevisse finds out whodunnit. Huh.

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution. I have run into so many people complaining that nothing happens in mainstream novels and read so many mainstream novels in which a great many things happen (often even adding up to a plot!) that I had started to forget why people were saying it. This is why. This is a mid-century novel of observation, quite witty in spots, in which nothing happens, quite aggressively. Several times something thinks about happening, and then there’s another trenchant personal observation of a higher educational figure (that’s the institution in question) and nothing does happen after all. I did not regret the time spent reading these trenchant and witty sketches, especially since some of the characters turn out to be worthwhile, generally decent people, but I don’t think I’ll want it again.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Reread, for the first time this millennium. What I said to my online book club is that I don’t feel like this was intended to hold up so much as it was to break ground, and that’s a different kind of construction. Lots of politics here that didn’t work as well for me as some of what she did later with scenes of politics, and the climactic bit about fleeing across the glacier is shorter than anybody remembered it. Still not sorry I read it (again), but also of course it’s not a perfect shining work of eternity, it wasn’t supposed to be, it’s a thought experiment from a very specific time.

Ian MacLeod, Song of Time. Kindle. The prose in this near-future science fiction thing is very readable, and so I was happy to keep seeing where he was going through all the catastrophes, personal and global: what’s going on with this old-young musician’s life that we are having retold to us? The answer at the end is boringly cliched in a number of demographic directions (gender! race! oh dear) in ways that I think were probably unawareness rather than malice, but still it was enough for me not to recommend the experience at large. “And then her Black husband turned out to be abusive of both her and substances, and things unfold from that late twist”: oh, did they, huh, yeah, no thanks.

Ekaterina Sedia, Moscow But Dreaming. Reread. These vivid fantastical stories, largely set in Russia but some not, held up and were still enjoyable to read a decade later, which is always a relief.

Katie Siegel, Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective. A light, fun murder mystery about a Former Kid Detective dipping her toe reluctantly into the waters of adult crime-solving. Solid relationships with her friends and family, generally a good time and definitely what I wanted to read while sick in bed.

D.E. Stevenson, Winter and Rough Weather. Kindle. A disappointing end to its trilogy, it continued the second book’s tendency to make things the most socially cliched option possible. Stevenson can write sentences, she sometimes can write things that don’t go on rails, ideally the next thing I try of hers will be more in that line.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor’s Wife. Kindle. I am not opposed to people working things out in their fiction, truly I am not. I’ve read more than one lovely book that made me think, “right, you’ll feel better having said that then.” This, however, was a grim and horrific slog through the second half. Various ideas suggest themselves for the theme of the book, which could be “iron supplements and birth control for all!” or it could be “what these people need is something like zeroth wave feminism” or perhaps “seriously she’s HOW naive after six children, WHAT” but mostly you just…don’t want to be there with her, I don’t think. Let her work through it herself, you don’t have to stay for the horrifying conclusion.

Izzy Wasserstein, These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart. Some of the most interesting cyberpunk-ish stuff I’ve read in recent years, at novella length and with trans themes.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Clicking of Cuthbert. Kindle. I have all sorts of things on my Kindle for random perusal, which mostly happens when I’m sick or traveling (or, as in this interval, both), and I don’t keep track of what they are and why I have them. So that leads to me opening this collection and finding that it was Wodehouse golf stories. They ranged from mildly ridiculous to notably ludicrous, but there were funny bits, and the racism-nationalism wasn’t on the bad end of his fare (I discarded another that was, alas), so: okay, golf jokes! Golf jokes from the old days when the clubs had funnier names! Sure, why not.

Don J. Wyatt, Slavery in East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph about the range and legal roots of slavery across East Asia in what we consider the medieval period. Not an in-depth or vivid work but extremely useful for the facts of the matter and who was doing what to whom where.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Madeline Ashby should go in with Cory Doctorow and Jon Evans to get T-shirts reading, “You Don’t Have to Be Canadian To Tell the Truth About Shitty Startups (But It Helps).”

Should you get on a private plane with the rest of your startup senior staff all at once: seriously no, don’t do that, there are solid reasons that they should not want you to do that, so if they’re asking you to do that, red flags. Kristen does that. And Kristen wakes up on a tropical island in the wreckage of a plane crash with, uh, most of her co-workers. Stellar start to celebrating your company’s sale, there. The island is home to a single mysterious house that’s automated…for some members of the group and not others…and injuries and deaths keep racking up. Kristen has to figure out what’s going on–and what’s been going on–if she wants to have any chance of getting out of there alive. And her past has more to do with it than she really wants it to.

This is a short, tense near-future thriller. Ashby has nailed startup culture, as it deserves–but there are also fine details of language that point so clearly to the startup being Toronto-based rather than Silicon Valley or Research Triangle, and it’s beautiful to see those bits making the thing specific and real. Is it a nice book, no, it is very much not a nice book, but it was a gripping read, and you’re not always looking for a nice book.

Nathalie Bardet, Alexandra Houssaye, Stephane Jouve, and Peggy Vincent, Ocean Life in the Time of Dinosaurs. Lavishly illustrated, divided by era so that it will be useful for reference if you want it by time period, lots of interesting ocean creatures, basically exactly the sort of natural history book I liked as a little kid but for grown-ups and yes, I still do like that sort of book.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance, Memory, and Komarr. Rereads. Now it can be told: I’m rereading this series to do a conversation with Lois focused on Mirror Dance as a middle book at Fourth Street Fantasy next month. These three really are the meat of the middle of this series, and while Miles still gets to make mistakes, he also gets to do some genuine growing up. I’m also pleased that we’re in the portion of the series where we’re seeing changes in Barrayaran culture rather than being told that Barrayar is a culture in flux. Some of that is spending more time on Barrayar, but some of it is the long-series aspect of “setting expectations in order to overturn them.”

Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?. This is a valuable thing to do, albeit more valuable for people paying less attention than I am, but I think I was expecting the title to be more rhetorical, and instead it could be rephrased as Some Jerks Who Are Afraid of Gender. Which was more of an “ugh, these people, in specific and at length, I already knew” than I was entirely anticipating, though some of the details were new.

Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors. I really like it when there’s no immediate “oh this is just another one of xyz” comp title in-genre for new fantasy novels, and this is one where there isn’t. The protagonist is substantially reactive, which means that the plot drifts weirdly and has its own shape, Aristotle be damned. I’m not that attached to his unities myself anyway, and the setting is the most interesting part here–inspired by various aspects of Sri Lankan history and dystopian thought rather than some of the more common sources for fantasy setting, wrestling with the divine and the chosen from a completely different angle.

H.A. Clarke, The Feast Makers. Third in its trilogy, “the triumphant conclusion of.” Sideways Pike and her friends are dealing with consequences upon consequences, and I would definitely not recommend starting here, you’ll be confused and besides the other two are in print. But I’m generally pretty happy with where it went, where they went.

Margaret Frazer, The Outlaw’s Tale and The Bishop’s Tale. Kindle. Two medieval mysteries with a detective nun protagonist. They’re structured as mysteries more than as novels, so I wanted more denouement than Frazer was interested in giving me, but they were still fun short reads, I’m still happy enough to go along with the rest of the series, the reign of Henry VI is not particularly one of “my” periods but it’s still an interesting set of thoughts about how someone would figure things out then and what they would consider important.

Marie Howe, New and Selected Poems. Worst-case scenario for a “new and selected” happened here: I did not like the direction of the new, only the “selected” (which I already knew). Howe’s poetic style is extremely forthright, which usually I am okay with, but for whatever reason she is going in a direction of forthright that doesn’t particularly do anything wonderful for me. Well, there’s the rest of what they selected from still there if I want to go back.

Jose Pablo Iriarte, Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed. A fun middle-grade fantasy about a young boy finding his own way in the shadow of his talented relatives–including his egotistical musician grandfather, who is hanging around being far more present after death than he ever was in life.

Gish Jen, Tiger Writing. Thoughts about culture, individualism and collective identity, and how it affects writing, interesting lectures turned into essays. Short and personal, to the point.

Elin Anna Labba, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi. Also short and personal, featuring family photos and letters about the threads of the displacement in Labba’s own family, with searing and complicated stories making the human cost of these political decisions very clear.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night. Reread. This is a bit like reading James Clerk Maxwell on electromagnetics. There are some insights that are brilliant and original, there are some things that are wrong but you can see how she wasn’t to the point where she had the data to see it yet, and there were some bits of speculation, wondering if anyone would be able to do things that are now more or less taken for granted, and seeing someone that sharp come at it that soon is fascinating.

Darcie Little Badger, Sheine Lende. A prequel to the stronger Elatsoe, its structure is a bit loose for my taste, and the mammoths of the cover underrepresented, but it held onto me throughout all the same. Ghost dogs for the win.

Noel Streatfeild, Mothering Sunday. Kindle. Finally another adult Streatfeild that I actually enjoyed. A family (except its missing black sheep) descends upon their aging mother for a Mothering Sunday surprise, and she has to scramble to hide her secrets from their good intentions. People are allowed to be more complex here, as they are in the other good Streatfeilds–I wish there was some pattern I could figure out to which ones were like that, but it doesn’t seem to be when she published them or even, from the elements that appear in the books, that some of them were published far off from when they were written. Life stuff that’s opaque from here or mood, maybe, or editor, I don’t know.

Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hill. The latest novella in its series, stands alone reasonably well but is not as strong as some of the others at doing really striking worldbuilding or characterization things without the rest of the series (that is–you could read it first but I think it’s much better if you don’t), asks very open questions about who the monsters are and how we know them when we find them.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup. A fantasy murder mystery that succeeds for me in both genres. The subgenre of both is darker and nastier than most of the fantasy murder mysteries I’ve read before, I think to its success–this is not a story that would benefit from a twee tone. Its protagonist’s disabilities are handled smoothly, and the bodily variation, both natural and induced, in this setting is very much part of its appeal to me. I hope Bennett has the chance to write more of these.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior’s Apprentice, The Vor Game, Borders of Infinity, Cetaganda, and Brothers in Arms. Rereads. For a project, and it’s interesting to take them from this distance, to see where the characters who have had a chance for full subplots and lives are brief hints in their first appearances. There’s a noticeable gear-shift in the middle of Brothers in Arms, a shift in what we’re doing here and why, toward more intensity, all to the good.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Water I Won’t Touch. Poems about healing from top surgery, poems about coming from a hardscrabble region and an abusive family, poems that reach for cool water in a polluted land. These were beautiful and harrowing, and I’m glad that my local librarians had them on a Poetry Month display for me to randomly pick up and experience.

Nino Cipri, Homesick. A collection of short stories, dark and witty and skillful. Cipri always has a different angle than anyone else has taken, and I’m glad these are all in one place to enjoy, even the ones I had already encountered elsewhere.

Aliette de Bodard, Navigational Entanglements. Discussed elsewhere.

Reginald Hill, Asking for the Moon. Reread. I was contemplating how the mystery worked at short lengths, and my recollection was that in this collection the answer was: not too well. Upon reread I felt the same, and I doubt I will want to return to it–the short form didn’t play to Hill’s strengths in reference and characterization, and these felt more like gimmicks than gems. I don’t really need to keep this one around, I have the novels in the series when I feel like returning to these characters.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors. Reread. Not enough mosaics in this one per unit book about mosaicist, but still satisfying for what it is. Don’t read it first, read the other one first, it’s basically a two-volume novel. Once somebody mentioned all the women in Kay’s books wanting to sleep with his protagonists I can’t unsee it, but mostly to the point of it entertaining me rather than truly annoying me at this point.

B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. Do you want Jansenists? Because this is how you get Jansenists. Or rather: this is a lot of details about Jansenists. Interesting about that but not so outstandingly written that I’d recommend seeking it out if you’re not particularly interested either in early eighteenth century Paris or in Christian sectarian in-fighting as specific topics.

Jo Miles, Dissonant State. The second in its series of interplanetary fiction with multiple species trying to do labor organizing in the face of interstellar corporate skullduggery. Each volume focuses on a different main character but there’s continuity of cast from volume to volume. There’s no reason not to read the first one, it’s in print and you’ll get better context for this one, but this is an entirely cromulent middle book in a series I’m having such fun with. Gosh I love middle books. Gosh I’m looking forward to seeing how Miles wraps this up. They are really good at letting their characters make characteristic mistakes.

Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things. Poetry, some of which touches on the end of a friend’s life. I didn’t end up aligning well with much of it, but I’m not sorry I read it.

Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. This is a nice little book. I think sometimes historians are aware that they’ve written a nice little book and sometimes not, and this is definitely in the “aware” camp: Parker has brought together references from lots of poetry of this era to think and talk about the seasons and festivals of the early English year. Fun, light, short.

Julia Phillips, Bear. Discussed elsewhere.

Duane W. Roller, Empire of the Black Sea: The Rise and Fall of the Mithridatic World. This is the kind of history I like least, the kind that is entirely focused on who was king and what battles they fought. Did I still read it? yes. Did I start tearing my hair and wishing for information about what kind of roofing they used on their houses, how the king’s advisors were selected, what instruments they played and who constructed them, whether they were professional specialists or amateurs who mostly made other things, etc……also yes. Still, if you want information about the Pontic kingdom of this era, here it is.

Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. Class and academia and spaceship and limitation. Claustrophobic and fascinating.

Sheng Keyi, Death Fugue. This is the kind of dystopia you get written when the author has a lot to say very directly about specific things in the real world rather than general thoughts and philosophies. The aftermath of Tiananmen Square and the impact of that movement on a whole generation is clear and fascinating here–there are aspects that are classically dystopian and aspects that are very, very individual.

Jesse Q. Sutanto, The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties. From the afternotes this looks like it will be the last of its trilogy, and I think that’s just as well. Meddy has reached her honeymoon, her happily ever after visiting family in Jakarta with her new husband in tow. The criminal shenanigans that ensue are by this point more forced than successfully farcical, and if I thought it was going to keep on like this forever, I probably wouldn’t have read this one; as it stands, it’s a farewell tour with the four aunties, and I was willing to come along for the ride.

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers. Kindle. I’m told this is the most famous one in this series, but I don’t prefer it; it focuses on people getting their comeuppance who don’t interest me as much, and basically every time Trollope tells me what I’m probably thinking, I’m not. There are still some funny bits, but if you were to ask me for a Trollope rec, this would not be it. Onward.

Kiersten White, Mister Magic. I was honestly not sure what I was getting when I picked this up at random: child stars all grown up? a children’s show that seemed to have disappeared? how many kids were on this show, anyway? Was this dark fantasy, psychological horror, what was the deal? But the writing was assured and personal enough that I kept reading. It’s not my wheelhouse–very much to the darker end–but the character relationships kept me going through the twists of trust, betrayal, magic, and warped community.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not a fairy tale.

It’s clearly got “Snow White and Rose Red” very much in its DNA–there are two sisters and the love of a bear–but this is not a magic story, it is not transformative, it is not just rooted in reality but stays firmly put there. Elena and Sam have been barely scraping by, their mother getting sicker by the week. Their existence was always precarious, and the pandemic knocked a large dent in their hospitality industry jobs–and made them worry about bringing home an exposure to their mother’s fragile lungs.

When they find a bear on their front doorstep, it’s Sam’s first flicker of awareness that the sisters’ reactions to the world are not always attuned. She finds the giant beast’s presence terrifying. But Elena seems exhilarated, even seeking out the bear in the odd intervals that her overwhelmed schedule allows. As their mother’s condition deteriorates, Sam expected the two sisters to be relying on each other, but instead their differing reaction to the megafauna is only the beginning of the wedge between them.

If you’re frustrated and appalled by people treating actual bears like teddy bears, this book will not disappoint you. Terrible decisions related to bears, finances, interpersonal relationships, whatever, are recognized as such by the narrative and not rewarded. As such it’s not always a cheerful book–but the unfolding of the tragedy is vivid, sharply observed, and incredibly realistic about aspects of contemporary life that are often genteelly ignored.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

How much can one novella hold? Aliette has attempted to find out. Navigational Entanglements has space battles with tentacled space aliens! It has political intrigue among several clans of humans with shifting alliances! It has personal growth! And both leading into and following from that personal growth it has a love story! This is a novella, pals. It’s a novella that is not set in default-generi-white-American-space, so there’s cultural stuff to cue in as well. And it never feels rushed or crowded!

Việt Nhi would rather not be sent on this mission, and she has no problem saying so. She’s introverted and blunt, a good problem-solver, not a politician–and this mission is substantially politics. But when one of the members of the mission dies, Nhi has to discover ways to apply her problem-solving ability to the highly political situation–before the invisible tentacles of the alien Tangler cause more casualties. All while dealing with fragile new feelings for her teammate Hạc Cúc–who’s in just as much danger as Nhi if things go badly. The plot is fully character-driven and never stops until the triumphant end. What a rush of a novella.

Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland 1904-1907. Kindle. Interesting and focused, lots of useful stuff about schools and labor unions and other pieces of information that broader texts might not think to go into. I know lots about Finland under Russian rule in this period and very little about Poland, so the compare-and-contrast was valuable as well.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Rereads. For a different project than other recent rereads, and while I’ve read others in this series more recently, it’s been a while since I saw the very beginnings of things that are fixed reference points in my family and immediate friend circle discourse.

Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey. This is a Freaky Friday (body swap) novel from the ’30s, but the characters doing the swap are two women of different classes rather than a parent/child pair. It’s light rather than overtly hilarious, and nothing of great dramatic consequence happens; it’s a short and pleasant enough read, and if you’re interested in this trope, it sure is a one of those, but the two women’s classes aren’t so staggeringly distant that Cairnes was attempting massive social commentary: they are an upper class and upper middle class woman, this is not the ’30s of the bread line, nobody is coming out of this with a particularly raised consciousness.

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849. I loved so many things about this. If you have any interest at all in the ’48 uprisings, I recommend it very much. For example, Clark uses women sources as a matter of course rather than as a separate, vestigial How Women Did In All This section; he is clear that Europe is not the entirety of the world and yet notices that the rest of the world affects Europe and says so. For a 700+ page book it goes so fast, you’ll hardly know you spent any time reading it.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. Reread. Probably I wouldn’t be rereading this quite so soon after a previous project if it didn’t fit a current project so well, but it does, and I didn’t entirely want to stop myself, I just fell right in rather than consulting it for one or two references. I caught myself talking like Molly for a week afterward. I never regret a reread of this one, never.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels. Brief and light and concerned with the intersection of worlds academic and otherwise through the intersection of people from those worlds; I finished it and immediately added another of her books to my list.

E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey. Kindle. Less funny than some of his other work, and I think less well-conceived, the abrupt death in this one is toward the beginning and of an adult, so it’s not as upsetting as Where Angels Fear to Tread, but there are flashes of absolute cold-bloodedness about the death of a disabled infant and some weird ideas about disability in general, so while it has some virtues as its hero struggles toward a clarity of purpose, I think I will neither want to revisit it nor particularly recommend it.

Victoria Goddard, Till Human Voices Wake Us. Kindle. This is a corner of Goddard’s universe that’s new to me, the corner that impinges upon our own and has magicians moonlighting as actors. Much shorter than the ones I’ve read before but with similar themes.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium. Reread. Not for a project, I just felt like mosaics. I like the birds, I like the chariots, there are parts of this I don’t like but I know what they are going in, I’m ready for them.

August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen, with Lea Laitinen, Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar. A compilation divided by type of folklore, including proverbs as well as stories. I think some of the proverbs are not adequately explained in English and would be happy to argue with the translator about them, and by “happy” I mean “what a fun time that would be, gosh that would be great.”

Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls. What I see in these stories is that Ann is short story lab person, which we used to see a lot more of in science fiction. You can watch her tinkering with theme and concept and making sure they work and then deploying them later at greater length in novels, but they do work at the shorter lengths, if there were experiments in the lab that didn’t work so well they didn’t make it into the collection. More than half of it is in one of her preexisting universes or the other, but I believe the Raven Tower stories predated the book, so it’s very much not the sort of thing where you’re getting the cutting room floor with a collection label slapped on and already have to be invested to care at all, more the opposite, that this is a fine road in.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home. Reread. For book club, and the sort of reread where I say reread, I know I’ve read it before, but that was before I started my booklog 25 years ago, so the things I remember and the things I don’t are an interesting study. This book is clearly labeled “a novel” on the cover, and I think it isn’t one, I think “a fictional experiment in science fiction anthropology” would have put people off but there’s no particular reason to look at the way Le Guin wrote this and think, yes, that’s definitely a novel, although when the bits with character continuity come around I’m glad to have them, glad to immerse with them. There isn’t a lot else that’s like this.

Jeffrey McKinnon, Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History. This is actually mostly “fish in ancient lakes: speciation is weird and not maybe as clear or important as previous generations would like to think.” And he was cheerful and interesting about it, and I don’t resent the fish, but also I was hoping for more geology. Well, win some lose some.

Barbara Sjoholm, From Lapland to Sámi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture. A highly illustrated examination of which parts of Sámi material culture are where and why and how that looks culturally–mostly not sacred items, for example, but how craft was maintained against overwhelming cultural forces and where it was not entirely, that sort of thing. Interesting, and the illustrations are quite useful.

D. E. Stevenson, Music in the Hills. Kindle. This novel runs very much on rails: every twist goes exactly where you think it will, the ending is just what you expect it to be. Which is fine enough, I suppose; Stevenson can write sentences, and it’s not a very long book. But given that the running on rails undoes some of what was an interesting ending in the previous (but theoretically stand-alone) one, I was a bit disappointed. It’s a straightforward romance where much of the falling in love is various people falling in love with a farm.

Caroline Stevermer, A Scholar of Magics. Reread. When I finished A College of Magics in March, I thought, why have I never read this and its sequel in close proximity? and the answer is: it is not a very close sequel, I now remember. You do not have to have the previous volume’s details close to hand, and it is considerably more idiosyncratic in structure (this is in no way a complaint, I like its singular nature a lot) whereas this is a lot more normal for fantasy novels. Except for having a cowboy sharpshooter falling in love with British magic, that’s not something you see every day, pure Caroline.

Noel Streatfeild, Luke. Kindle. This is one of the bad Streatfeilds, and I strongly recommend you skip it. There are no plot twists. Everything is just as it appears on the surface. It’s not really a spoiler to tell you that the creepy boy did it and his weak mother covered up for him, because you’ll know that right away, and there are never any twists that make you think, oh, but maybe not. No, it’s that, it’s always that, and it’s never any deeper than that, it’s always, you shouldn’t be too precious over your child or he’ll be a murderous creep. Thanks for that I guess? But no thanks? Ugh.

Aisha Abdel Gawad, Between Two Moons. The moons here are metaphors and also the two moons that mark the beginning and end of Ramadan; they are not a fantasy element, and this is not a fantasy novel. It’s a novel about a contemporary Egyptian-American family in New York, and it’s really well characterized and beautifully written and I liked it a lot. I felt like the ending wasn’t quite as much of a strong punctuation as I wanted, but on the other hand it was not the obvious thing I feared it would be, so yeah, very much worth the time.

Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport. Science fiction adventure Aladdin! Do you want a fun one of those? Because this sure is a fun one of those.

Frederic L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours. Does what it says on the tin. Are you interested in southern France before it was firmly France per se? I am. So is this book, using the lens of this historical figure to get there.

Elwin Cotman, Weird Black Girls. Discussed elsewhere.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. Reread. This was a reread with a purpose, but on this go-round I was really taken by how much the time sense portrayed in this book aligns with what my friends with ADHD describe of their experience. I don’t mean to say that Pamela wrote it with that intention–far from it, with a 1998 copyright date. But I do think that there are books that later get looked at metaphorically through lenses that work for people and I think this might be one of them? But I, Captain Executive Function, am the wrong person to write about this extensively–in the context of this book I am such a Becky–I can love this book, but I can’t be the one to chew on it from that direction.

Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock. Reread. What is it with the bibliophile Tam Lin retellings, do we have any theories? There’s nothing in the ballad that’s like, kirtle green a bit above her knee and also lots of books. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I will take another if anyone wants to write a third one of this description and I will reread that one too.

Lyz Lenz, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. I was somewhat amused to have gotten this rec from a fellow happily married woman, but as I said to another friend, it was no threat to us, we didn’t have to get defensive about reading an interesting book. One of the several appalling things here that stood out to me–that I’ve seen before in bad husbands, and maybe bad partners of other genders do it too and I just haven’t seen it, who knows–is the conviction that there is an easy type of writing to do that one’s spouse just isn’t doing, that would be just as satisfying but far more lucrative per unit labor and could be swapped out for the type of writing one’s spouse is inexplicably doing, no problem. Why! Why do some terrible people believe this! It’s not the first time I’ve seen this belief in the wild, sometimes I’ve had conversations with the actual people who are espousing this belief. Where does it come from, this sense that all writing is basically equally satisfying to all people, so anyone can/should just swap out theirs for the “easier” one? What??? I mean, there’s a bunch of other stuff in here about marriage and labor and respect, it’s an interesting read, I just…that one piece jumped out at me personally.

Gideon Marcus et al, ed., Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women Vol. 2 (1953-1957). An anthology read for book club. I wish I could recommend it more strongly–the book club discussions were good, but not because the stories were a series of gems. There are some quite good science fiction stories by women from this period, and this book is mostly not them. It is also quite badly edited. I’m not clear on whether there was an overall editorial hand–some of the stories are fine, others have random line breaks in places the story shouldn’t have them, the standards for the notes to them are wildly inconsistent, and they don’t seem to have been put in a particularly thoughtful order. I feel like there are better ways to get at stories from this period’s women than this.

Zohra Nabi, The Kingdom Over the Sea. I enjoyed this Islamic-inflected middle-grade fantasy a great deal except for the ending, where the heroine’s success depended very, very directly on her blood line, which is not really a thing I enjoy particularly as key plot elements go.

Aimee Pokwatka, The Parliament. This is much darker than I usually enjoy, and it was so, so good. The characters are trapped in a public library and dealing with their own pasts as well as the dark forces trapping them there, and it actually copes with some of the violent social issues of our time in a respectful and thoughtful way but also has kid characters realistically interacting as kids (this is not a kids’ book, it’s adult perspective on them) and…yeah, beautifully done, love it.

Arthur Ransome, The Picts and the Martyrs. Reread. My other rereads this fortnight were at least thinking about a project, though not all of them will end up being for that project. This one was just random, I just kept thinking about this old children’s favorite until I took it down from the shelf. It was exactly where I left it, great-aunt relations and living in the woods and all.

Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. This is not a book I was glad to be reading, this is a book I’m glad to have read, so that I have the information in it. Oh gosh was it upsetting. But no, it was not just stuff I already knew, actually, it was worse than that. The focus here was the design of video poker machines specifically to create as addictive an experience as possible, and what shape that addictive experience took. I was completely mistaken about the latter–I would have said that it was chasing a win, chasing a high, and the research says it’s not that at all, it’s locking into the repetitive experience, a sort of broken version of flow state, which is useful to know but extremely disturbing in its details. Worth thinking about. Oof.

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. I didn’t know a lot about Fanon or his role in Algerian independence or any related topics, and I felt like Shatz did quite a good job of focusing on him while keeping perspective about his flaws–for example, Shatz is extremely clear that Fanon could in no way have been considered a feminist or gender egalitarian–while not making the entire book only about those flaws.

Caroline Stevermer, A College of Magics. Reread. I always forget how little of the book is at Greenlaw College, but I enjoy the whole thing regardless, the travel adventures, the feel of the magic, the friendships, all of it.

Michael Walsh, ed., Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology. This takes an extremely broad view of both what constitutes queer poetry and what constitutes nature poetry. The poems are arranged alphabetically by author, which sometimes is jarring and sometimes leads to interesting juxtapositions.

Jo Walton, Among Others. Reread. Another of the rereads with a specific intention, and I really like Mori’s forthright attempts to cope through books–same, buddy, same–and also how successfully of her era she is, how firmly Jo resists giving her knowledge and attitudes she wouldn’t have access to–she doesn’t have access to the Oz books in the UK of the time, she doesn’t know how bras are sized because girls of her age and class aren’t necessarily told, there’s all sorts of stuff she knows heaps about and the stuff she doesn’t understand yet fits with that perfectly, it’s all human knowledge even with the book having fairies.

Aliya Whiteley, The Arrival of Missives. Short fantastical work dealing with a village in the aftermath of the Great War and some strange happenings unfolding in it. Hope and fate and choice are intertwined without having to take forever to do it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of the great skills in life, I have found as an adult, is knowing when you’re not part of a conversation. Sometimes you’re allowed to sit in on the conversation while your friend and their sibling talk about family stuff, but that doesn’t mean you’re part of the family, it just means you’re here for it. A lot of the stories in Weird Black Girls are very much in that category: am I actually part of the conversation about the use of violent punishment in Black American families as an attempt to ward off white violence from Black children and/or a reflection of white violence through the parents, refracted through a fantastical lens? I sure am not. That is someone else’s conversation I am sitting here listening to. And while these stories are not all that specifically, a lot of them touch on themes that are not really mine to dig into. It’s not “I’m not the target audience for this” in the sense of “I don’t appreciate this work,” because I did appreciate this work. It’s “I’m not the target audience for this” in the sense of “I am literally not the person being addressed here.” But I can still stand by and find it interesting.

What I can say is that this is a short story collection with a great deal of range. The voices of the characters are distinct, and their settings and speculative elements vary extremely. Whether they’re exploring a Boston that jutted suddenly into the sky in an alternate history or running a convention LARP tournament that’s suddenly populated by fantastical figures from anime, each character has their own voice, their own yearnings and grudges and firmly situated milieu that are totally absorbing. There’s big thematic stuff here, but there’s also the tiny finely drawn characterization that keeps me around for the theme to have a chance to sink in. The shape of the speculative conceits is never “oh, another one of those” but always firmly his own. Highly recommended.

David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. I felt like Kenya is too large a country and the Mau Mau Rebellion too large an event in its history for me to be as wholly ignorant as I was, so I set out to remedy some of that with this book. As often happens to me, remedying some of my ignorance left me aware of how much more I don’t know. Still, this is from all I can tell a fairly even-handed book that avoids a lot of the colonialist assumptions that all rebellion against the colonizer must have been irrational and manages to convey what the propaganda was in that direction without endorsing it–but also does not pretend that everyone who has ever rebelled has been a holy saint, nor that they have to be. I don’t recommend this for happy fun-fun times, but if you’d like to know more about the topic, it’ll sure help with that goal.

John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages. Baldwin is definitely not fanboying Philip Augustus, which is good because neither am I; there were points at which he is using fairly elevated speech to say, “Y’know, buddy, if you hadn’t expelled the Jews from France, you’d have had more options here, my my my, if it isn’t the consequences of your own actions.” But the interesting thing about Philip Augustus was not the person himself but the documentation of his reign. When he left for the Crusades there was quite a lot of writing down of France: How I Runs It By Phil Age 24 (okay, he didn’t actually write it down, his scribes wrote it down), and then there was quite a lot more of What We Did While You Were Gone, so it was…basically he turned on Track Changes for the country of France. And Baldwin poked at that in this book, and I liked that, but if you aren’t particularly interested in twelfth century governmental Track Changes…welp, there sure are other books on this list.

Renan Bernardo, Different Kinds of Defiance. Discussed elsewhere.

Bertrand Bickersteth, The Response of Weeds. Poetry about one person’s Black experience in Alberta, which is sure not a thing I had a surfeit of poetry about and you probably didn’t either.

Winifred Boggs, Sally on the Rocks. This was mostly a light-hearted village satire about a young woman who has “ruined herself” by the standards of the (1915) day (she went and had sex with a man in Italy for a month, not on the page), having made up her mind to settle down and marry for the sake of her fortune only to find it less easy than she thinks to snag a not very appealing man. The up side: she and her rival for his fortune are entirely pleasant to each other rather than getting in the designated cat fights, seeing each other’s virtues immediately; this is also a book that sees and deplores gender-based double standards. The down side: there is some absolutely appalling “go have white babies to maintain the Empire” nonsense in the ending, just jaw-dropping “you didn’t actually say that oh no you did” stuff. Fortunately I watched Blazing Saddles at a formative age so I always have clips from it ready to play in my head in times of need; unfortunately the miniature Cleavon Little in my head who abides with me always had to abide with me particularly on that day.

Samatar Elmi, Portrait of Colossus. Absolutely beautiful poems about being an immigrant to modern Britain. This one I will want to return to, and gosh how nice that it was the next thing to hand after the Boggs. (This is a coincidence, the alphabetical nature of these entries does not usually reflect my reading order.)

Margaret Frazer, The Servant’s Tale. The second in its medieval murder mystery series, with a troop of players traveling through around Christmas time. The festivities were period-appropriate, not Victorianized for the modern reader. The ending was a bit…if it had been the first in the series I would have thought “oh is this what she thinks is a good twist, thanks but nah,” but as I’ve already had a pretty good one I’ll keep going with the series.

Merilee Grindle, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations. A long-overdue look at a very interesting scientific figure who bridged eras of anthropology and fought for recognition that was due her.

Kathleen Jennings, Kindling. I’ve followed Jennings’s career pretty closely, so I’d read most of what had already been published here before, but not all, and in any case there’s a lovely new story and also it’s good to have things I previously liked collected in one volume, hooray, hooray.

John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of American Musical Theatre. I was doing all right with the early part of the book that was mostly names-dates-places, and then we got up to the part where Jones had really personal opinions about things he’d experienced and I’d experienced, and the wheels came right on off this bus. I found his opinions about Fiddler on the Roof pretty risible and it did not get better from there. It doesn’t help that this was a book from around the turn of the millennium, and events since shed a rather different light on American musical theater; he couldn’t have known where it was all going, nobody could have predicted Hamilton for heaven’s sake, but when you feel someone’s gone off the rails fifty years before that, you can hardly think not predicting Hamilton is the main problem. Not recommended.

Rosalie M. Lin, Daughter of Calamity. Discussed elsewhere.

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. I loved this, well written and interesting, about four mid-century women at Oxford looking at the world as it unfolded and thinking that it absolutely had to influence philosophy and…not always finding that the men around them felt the same, and persevering in their own ways despite a university system that was not particularly interested in women in general and women who wanted to think about the horrors of our time in specific. Complicated relationships, still meaningful friendships all the same, more like this please.

Lauren Markham, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. I have to tell you, I’m sorry, this book is not as good as its title. Just look at that title, what an amazing title. Would it be possible to live up to that title? I think so. This, however, is a fairly ordinary book that interweaves Markham’s search for her own roots in Greece with how Greece and the rest of the world are handling refugees. It’s got some solid interviews and reporting. It is not the transcendent shining thing that title promises. Many of us can benefit from a workmanlike book about the current handling of refugees and won’t mind some musings about personal identity thrown in. Just…set your expectations.

Marianne Moore, Complete Poems. Moore’s line lengths are all off from my own sense of rhythm, and her references are all off from my own sense of reference, so she will never be one of the poets of my heart, but I still liked reading this all the same, and will almost certainly read it again later.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Delia’s Shadow. Reread. What I want to say here is that it is a very strange experience to have a memorial reread of a recently deceased friend’s book when that book is a ghost fantasy full of Tuckerizations of other friends.

Jared Pechaček, The West Passage. Discussed elsewhere.

Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, Tone. This is short, this is very readable, and also I’m not sure it will tell you a lot about tone (in writing, prose tone) if you aren’t already thinking a lot about it on your own. This is a book that is part of a conversation with writers who are already knee-deep in this subject, not Baby’s First Tone Book.

Noel Streatfeild, Grass in Piccadilly. Kindle. The inhabitants of a large house turned into flats in the immediate post-WWII period have to sort their personal lives in the upheaval of that period. Streatfeild is trying something with a German Jewish refugee family that doesn’t entirely work–she was always terrible at writing German accent dialect even when it’s word choice rather than phoneticization–but is clearly entirely well-intentioned, she’s going out of her way to show what a lovely generous person the mother in particular is and that the children are–in the end the whole family is–British, dammit, that German Jewish refugees can by her lights be British. It’s one of those attempts at Philosemitism that go a little off but only in a mildly embarrassing way, not a hateful way. The ending is not as tied up with a bow as it might be, and I think that tying it with a bow would have been cloying but I’m not sure the suggested ending is more satisfying–I think among other things it relies on a concept of childhood resilience that I do not for a moment believe and a certain amount of biological essentialism about motherhood. There is some brief and absolutely gratuitous homophobia at the end. (Are there queer characters throughout? no, they show up to be sneered at in the end. Noel what are you doing stop it.) There is also interesting stuff about what you can and cannot get done in the immediate postwar period and how people of different classes manage to get along. Take from all that what you will.