Tag: bookses precious

Exclusive of manuscripts, which I don’t talk about publicly.

Octavia Cade, Chemical Letters. This was a joyful, beautiful, nerdy romp through poems and chemistry. The world needs more like this. Hurrah. Hurrah.

Thomas Goetz, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. Oh, this book. So first of all: it is gross. It does not stay with the parts of TB where someone dies looking pale and ethereal. It goes into TB and the rest of medicine in the time, in ways that are useful and disgusting. Now, me, I am the sort of person who read this while eating lunch, no problem. You judge for yourself whether you are, though, because Goetz…does not hesitate to go there. And not just with the gross, though. It is tragic: people not accepting procedures that will be lifesaving. People self-deluding that they have cures they do not. Koch, a great medical man in some ways, gradually painting himself into a corner wherein he believes himself to be unjustly persecuted just because he peddled a false TB cure and also opposed pasteurization of dairy products. (OH IS THAT ALL. POOR YOU HOW THEY PERSECUTE YOU THERE THERE.) The other thing this is, though, weirdly, is a piece of biographical criticism, of how Arthur Conan Doyle could become the man who could invent and write Sherlock Holmes in the first place. And John Watson. The influences upon him, the things that touched his life that pushed and pulled and added up to…yes, there he is: the creator of Holmes and Watson. And it’s not even a very long book, to pack in the medical background of the time, serious amounts of Franco-Prussian War politics, and the character of the two men and their families. So if you have the stomach for it, I do recommend this. But if you don’t, I don’t blame you for it.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. A spooky ghost novella, but a kinder one than I feared to begin with, and worth the trouble. I’m glad that Magonia made me seek it out.

Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir. I should have guessed from reading the Moomin books that Jansson would have an unerring feel for what it is like to be a child, but you can’t tell in advance that someone is going to write a memoir in that frame of mind, in the frame of mind of what it was like at the time. Remembering that perspective. It was so lovely, because she was sensible in the way that children are sensible, and there were so many important details that adults leave out, things that one would want to know about 1910s-20s Finland.

Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960. Lots of pictures, less text. The jacket copy focuses on radical sexual politics, which is not much in evidence in the minimal text at all–I personally am a better source on that than this book is–and there’s a bit more on radical non-sexual politics, but only a bit. As for influence, yes, there’s some of that, but only darting into it here and there, considering how broad and deep Morris’s influence runs. I’m glad to have this book, but it’s weirdly frustrating. Not even so much shallow as spotty. And that particularly surprised me from MacCarthy, who gave us the giant exhaustive Burne-Jones biography that took up so much of my time in 2015–but this was a volume from curating an exhibit, so. Well, there’s other Morris stuff out there.

Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Fascinatingly, the fantasy plot is both completely crucial and entirely relegated to the edges of this book. What a neat needle to thread. This is a YA telling the story of the kids who aren’t in the middle of saving the world from the giant fantasy menace. They’re caught up in their own senior year relationships, and oh, does Ness remember what it’s like to be a high school senior. To be in love with your best friend, to be weirdly awkward with your other best friend for reasons you don’t fully understand, to be trying to figure out how to be good to your family and still have things the way your newly adult self needs them…with magic you can’t control or even quite see, that isn’t much to do with you, all around the edges…yes, Ness has a handle on the end of childhood very, very well.

Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown. The last Terry Pratchett novel, and you can see where it’s not quite done, where in some spots it’s an outline–gesturing at Terry Pratchett Discovers Third Wave Feminism, sketching in Pterry’s Last Love Letter To the Old Codger He’ll Never Get To Be. And yet he gave us one more bit of Tiffany Aching, and the death of Granny Weatherwax–the loved ones of Granny Weatherwax mourning her–and you know, that was enough, I think. Not his chart-topper, his greatest masterwork. But enough. Trying for more even to the last, I hope we can all say as much.

Alter Reiss, Sunset Mantle. I must admit that I critiqued this novella in draft form. And now it’s published! Go team! This is fantasy with strong religious worldbuilding (by which I mean in-world religion, not our-world religion) and a military component, with a loving central relationship and practical work, all packed into a plotty action-filled novella. But I’ve admitted my bias.

Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, eds., Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. In addition to having amazing cover art (seriously, who did that?), this covers a wide range of what Delany has meant to various people, in both fiction and nonfiction. Some people are just doing their own thing, which is influenced by him indirectly. Some are more directly trying to demonstrate his influence. For me the standout stories were Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The First Gate of Logic” and Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl’s collaborative “Jamaica Ginger,” but I imagine that this is very much a “something for everyone” anthology, and what that something is will vary considerably.

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. My subtitle: “Why Nonfiction Voice Matters.” This is a book whose author does not know who his audience is. Is it people who are interested in highly technical things? That would have been fine. Is it a lay audience with no technical skill? That would have been okay, too, because I could have skipped it; his voice when writing for the lay audience is really, really patronizing, and his metaphors completely unenlightening if you didn’t understand them from the technical passages. And then there are the chapters where he wanders off outside his own fields of expertise to speculate about things like Why Modern People Are Obese and goes completely off the rails, and if you want someone speculating about that on little to no expertise, why pick someone with a terrible prose voice? The parts that were Shepherd writing technically in his field were a-okay with me, but for that I think looking up his papers in journals on academia.edu or some such is a far better way to go. Also this is what happens when people who are obsessed with visual processing try to do other things; they can’t even see that something that is processed spatially in the brain may not be processed visually, come on, people, this is not hard. ALSO. Let me be the first to tell you that it is possible to write about taste/smell and memory without dwelling on Proust. Do it now. Do it today.

Salla Simukka, As Black As Ebony. The third in the “Snow White” trilogy of Finnish crime YA novels. It felt tacked on, obligatory; Our Heroine…does some stuff…figures out some stuff…has some stuff done to her and triumphs in the end. All very short chapters. If you liked the first two in the series, this one is still skippable, unless you are really really set on learning what happens to Lumikki.

Leslie Valiant, Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World. This…is an excellent example of what happens when you know your own field (mathematics/computer science) really really well, are interested in someone else’s field (biology/evolution), and…do not perhaps take as much time as you ought to understand what they are saying. About evolution and its mechanisms and why. As a result Valiant is very clear when he’s talking about algorithms, and less insightful than he hopes when he’s talking about evolution.

A bit late, as the new year has been a series of minor mishaps. Ah well, no one is on a very tight schedule to find out what the last few things I read in 2015 were, I don’t think.

Mike Allen, ed., Mythic Delirium Issue 2.2. Kindle. I find that whenever I get things to read on my Kindle that are also available online, I end up mostly reading them online and then flipping through to confirm that I didn’t miss anything. Up side: this confirmed that it was a very solid issue and I should make more of a point to read Mythic Delirium regularly if this is the sort of stuff they’re putting out. Good to know.

Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection. Like if Chesterton and early Lethem had a rain-soaked bike-riding baby. (Okay but I meant that as a compliment.)

Leah Bobet, An Inheritance of Ashes. A heartfelt and beautiful book about the aftermath of war and its effects on the homefront. Also about the ripple effects of abuse in a family, and about keeping the world turning–practically and emotionally–with the limited resources we have, and–stuff. There’s a lot here. Go read it.

Chaz Brenchley, Three Twins at Crater School, Chapters 4-7. Kindle. I read a lot of boarding school books as a kid, and so I was sufficiently excited about Chaz’s Patreon project to let my enthusiasm for it overwhelm my general sense of how serials work for me. These are short chapters. I need to let more story stack up before I read more, because I am impatient for more about the aliens. MOAR ALIENS NOW CHAZ KTHX.

A.C. Buchanan, ed., Capricious Issue 1. Kindle. For me the standout story of the first issue of this new magazine was A.J. Fitzwater’s “She Must.” The way the prose twisted around the fairy tale tropes entertained me. I’ll keep an eye out for more Fitzwater and more Capricious.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents. Reread. This is not one of my favorite of Butler’s body of work. It’s still worth the time–I’m not courting controversy to say that everything of hers is–but the crucial step of how the insightful young teenage refugee becomes the cult leader is elided, dreadfully elided. Swooped through. Skimmed. The heartbreak of the mother-daughter relationship is entirely clear. So the emotional core, she doesn’t flinch from. But the science fiction plot is oddly unbalanced for me this time through. Especially with the end commentary, where Butler is talking about what she did and didn’t know how to do in this story. A partial success, I guess.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. I finally got this for Christmas after years of feeling like it should be in every library system I used and not finding it where it was supposed to be. I particularly connected with “The Erl-King” and “The Company of Wolves”–yes, give me the deep forests, I am predictable both as a person and as an ethnotype–but in general it was interesting particularly remembering how early it was in the fairy tale retelling sub-genre, how much it was shaping and informing the things it looked like to my eye.

Diane Duane, Lifeboats. Kindle. A Young Wizards novella that read mostly like fanfic by its own author. Kit and Nita are side players to the main thing going on, deliberately this time, and introduce aliens to crucial Earth culture while they struggle with how to celebrate Valentine’s Day. A reasonably entertaining thing to read on an airplane, but not horribly deep, ends abruptly, uses a really cliched joke/story as its central premise.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society. Finnish magic realism about books mutating and relationships mutating and garden…creatures…and general oddments. Really lovely, less repressed than a lot of fiction that gets translated from the Norden, more overtly speculative than some magic realism and yet still feels like it belongs in that category. Weird stuff. Recommended.

E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights. Very, very different from her Owen books. Not as funny. As one might expect from the title, it’s a riff on the Thousand and One Nights story: a desert civilization, a bride telling tales and figuring out how to survive. She is brave and strong, a weaver, a sister, and while this is not Owen and Siobhan, I don’t actually want the authors I like to get stuck doing one thing for their whole careers, so: yeah. Neat different thing.

Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light. A classic I am delighted to encounter. Bears! Dragons! Princesses who go off their own way to do their own dragonish things and stomp around alternately-named Byzantium and decline the opportunities to choose the slain! How could I not love this book from the moment the bears got involved?

William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson. Kindle. Two entirely separate things packaged together by Gutenberg. The former is a Robin Hood tale/early Socialist lecture from when you had to have some frame story excuse to be telling a fantasy at all, and it’s largely a discourse on What Was Wrong With England Then And Now. The latter is What Is Wrong With Monarchies. William Morris: fascinating about vegetable dyes, not always Captain Subtlety. I was reading this for research on him and not for pure pleasure; and a good thing too. Unless you also have a research interest in Uncle Will, skip it.

David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861. Entirely about faction politics between formally active white male politicians of some means. Had interesting spots, but if you’re interested in acknowledgment that, for example, Native Americans had agency in this period, or that immigrants were relevant in some way other than as a focus of Know-Nothing ire, this is not the book. It should by no means by the only book on the era anybody reads. For filling in gaps, okay. Nobody in this book likes anybody else in this book. I was relieved when the Fremonts showed up, because they at least appeared to like each other. Then the Fremonts left again abruptly. Drat.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Defiant. Second in its series, definitely wants the first to make sense. Backstory development while forward motion continues, focus on friendship while not losing politics and worldbuilding. Eager to see how the series resolves in the third book, and I’m behind enough on my to-read pile that it’s already available, so.

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 7. Kindle. Another of the “making sure I’ve caught up on what’s in this issue” issue.

Derek Walcott, Omeros. A Homeric epic by a contemporary Caribbean poet. I like the passages about the sea best–yes, who’s being ethnotypical again–but the characterization is fascinating, the places where it draws on the classics and the places where it’s making its own place, engaging in an erudite way with its own locale and making the classical texts feel their own context more strongly. Would like to talk about this with people who have stronger Mediterranean feelings than I have.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also I have known the author approximately since the dawn of time, though I think it’s fair to say not particularly closely.

Another thing I think it’s fair to say: this is not “another one of those.” While the focus is on two races of anthropomorphic elephant people, there are dozens more anthropomorphic races. (And unlike my complaints about a certain comic series, there is no human savior for the animal folk.) Their story takes place tens of thousands of years in the future–farther out than all but a handful of stories have been set in recent decades.

And the main thrust of the plot deals with koph, a drug that allows its visionaries to talk with the dead by gathering their soul particles from the farthest reaches of the universe. Koph–and its refinements and control, and the wisdom of generations past obtainable with it–is the center, the heart of the book–that and the relationships of the elephant people on the planet from which it is obtained.

So yeah: not another one of those. Quite uniquely itself. There is only the tip of the galactic iceberg here in how the different anthropomorphic species relate to each other and among themselves. There’s room for more, much more, and if this is your style of science fiction, Schoen definitely executes on it.

One thing that surprised me was that I’m used to thinking of Lawrence wearing his linguistics hat, and the linguistics aspect didn’t come into the book until very late. It’s there! So if that’s something you’re looking forward to in a Lawrence Schoen novel, rest assured that it is present! But it doesn’t come in until quite late in the narrative.

Please consider using our link to buy Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard from Amazon.

Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer. Reread. I find that I am less enthusiastic about this over a decade later, but the science- and scientist-related poems are still of interest. I think other Ackerman volumes will be where I find my favorites. I may find that I am wrong.

Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. Usually when I read a short story collection I like to call out particular favorites. This whole thing is my particular favorite. Read the whole thing. This is so good. I–so from the very beginning, if you have any Malaysian friends, the dialog. Oh, the dialog. There is this comfortable confident feeling that she is telling the truth about your friends, and that makes you feel like she is also telling the truth about whatever speculative element. This is what good dialog does. (See also: good whatever else.) If you give readers the sense that people don’t really talk like that, it’s a short hop to these aren’t really people, they’re just ink marks on a page. These are really people. They are really particular, beautifully drawn people. Doing various things with heart and interest. I liked Sorcerer to the Crown a lot a lot, but this–I love this so much.

A.M. Dellamonica, A Daughter of No Nation. Discussed elsewhere.

Angelica Gorodischer, Prodigies. This is about the house of a poet, in Berlin. It is not the masterwork Kalpa Imperial is, and it makes me so very happy to have the chance to read something secondary, to get a translation that isn’t the One Biggest Best Thing. What a great future it is where I can read not just one Angelica Gorodischer book, oh yay yay yay. I mean, this is an interesting book. I just…don’t take translations for granted.

Ryan North and Erica Henderson, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Power. Extremely exuberant. Punny. Pugnacious. I heard someone say that it talks like the internet; yep. There are better audiences than me for this book, but I smiled at bits of it all the same. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, though.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. I feel like this is a book that is doing a lot–a lot–to try to reach audiences who are unfamiliar with some aspects of African cultures and get them African-based alien interaction SF that they can be okay with. I love alien interaction SF and am pretty comfortable with less hand-holding through African cultures, so rock on.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus Three. Near future dystopian comic continues. Don’t start here, see if you like the early ones. I’m feeling pretty lukewarm at this point and would rather have his prose in something like Alpha, but writers are allowed their choice of projects and not mine. (What is this free will nonsense. What.)

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. I keep saying that things do what they say on the tin; this does not. I am deeply interested in the future of neurodiversity, and there is almost nothing about that in this book. It is substantially Awful Things People Have Done To the Autistic Through History. I wanted to read it to see what mainstream people will think about my autistic/other neurodiverse friends and family, since it’s a pretty popular pop-science book, and aside from a few moments of historical diagnosis (staaaaaap) it didn’t have a lot that I’m going to have to beat out of people with my shoe. But it’s not very much fun to read if you already know the Awful Things Etc., and it does pretty much nothing for the future of neurodiversity if you’re a nerd/proto-activist in that direction. Well. We’ll just have to build it ourselves, folks. (And by “we’ll just have to build it ourselves,” I mean “I will be calling on you to build this with me, so saddle up.”)

Molly Tanzer, The Pleasure Merchant. Eighteenth century…science fiction? ish? or just historical fiction, depending on how you read it. Not like anything else out there, that I know of. Proto-mesmerism, and sex, and people’s best and worst natures, and oh my goodness so very eighteenth century. I love the eighteenth century, and Molly hits on so many things about it. Recommended.

The Hmong American Writers’ Circle, How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Quite a lot of poetry, some fiction, a little nonfiction, some art. An interesting mix. I’m a little frustrated by how many people told these writers that they had to “speak for their people” when white writers are put under no such constraint, but having a forum for their voices to be heard is a good thing regardless of whether you’re leaning that on them.

Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013. Lots to love here. Some political, some highly personal, and not clustered at one end of his career or another, either. You can watch him struggle with the legacy of colonialism pretty explicitly and in a fantastically erudite way. You can also just revel in what he does with language. Gorgeous, great. More.

Review copy provided by Tor.

This is the sequel to Child of a Hidden Sea, and I recommend that you read that first.  I am a sucker for a middle book; this is very thoroughly one. I am also a sucker for a portal fantasy, and this is that, too. The culture clash aspects of it run very high, not just for plot but also for humorous moments, the kind of humor that has some lines you can quote but some things that are character and situation, the kind that are hardest to read out to someone because they’re so embedded in the book itself.  Which is the kind I like best.

It’s not all about the humor, though–this is not the sort of slapsticky book that gets described as “humorous fantasy.” (I don’t like humorous fantasy–I say this a lot, I have said it again in an email just today–because I like things that are funny.)  There’s quite a lot of serious stuff about how to handle being in the middle of a culture doing something you disapprove of–in this case slavery–and figuring out the lines between people you like and people you trust.  And there’s also magic and complicated family relationships and questions of foreign ecosystems and science research when people don’t want you to do science research.  It’s a romp but not a brainless one.  First and foremost, though, I’m pleased to have a portal fantasy that’s doing interesting stuff, because you can pretty much always get me to sign on for that.

Please consider using our link to buy A Daughter of No Nation from Amazon.

Light fortnight for books–partly because of one monstrosity, partly because of a disproportionate amount of manuscript reading.

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. Reread. I got lured. Again. This is one of my best examples of a book that teaches you how to read it as you go. I love all three of the main children so much, Arry and Beldi and Con. I miss the days when Moo was sometimes like Con. I don’t miss them always. Just a little. And I love the things it does with doubt and certainty and relying on other people.

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, eds., Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales. Quite a few stories in this anthology worked particularly well for me. Holly Black’s “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)” is the kind of lighthearted space SF that makes me think that the old guard complaining how there just isn’t old school SF like there used to be just aren’t paying attention to the right areas. M.T. Anderson’s “Quick Hill” was a sad creepy march toward the inevitable. Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Diabolist” worked quite well for me as the portrait of a girl and her own, her father’s, and a town’s demons. Patrick Ness’s “This Whole Demoning Thing” made me suspect (in combination with Carrie Vaughn’s “The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife” from Haikasoru’s recent Hanzai Japan) that I might have a previously unsuspected fondness for apocalyptic high school rock band stories. Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Wings in the Morning” was the kind of teen relationship crack that she peddles so well–I could see the emotional buttons she was pushing, and that did not make them pushed any less effectively.  Also, harpies. Also, self-acceptance. Also, harpies. Finally, the volume closed with Alice Sola Kim’s “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” which was a lovely examination of extra-dimensional alien who even knows what ghost things and adoption and three very different girls and their friendship. I loved it. I want more like it. I mean, also, look at the title. Just look at it. If you think “meh,” then maybe that is an accurate meh for you, but: that title, oh, oh.

Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Aaaaaand this was the monstrosity. So much Burne-Jones. So. Very. Much. How many times can one woman exclaim, “Shut up, John Ruskin”? Let’s find out! I said. I am not as much a fan of Burne-Jones as I am of William Morris, and let’s find out why! I said. MacCarthy is an affectionate but not blinkered biographer. She is reasonably sensitive to the women in Burne-Jones’ life but does not (sometimes alas!) let them take over his biography. This is a thorough ramble through Victorian England, where everyone appears to be related to everyone else, or if not (Paderewski came over from Poland and could not be expected to be everyone’s cousin) at least ran into them in the street. Quite a few moments of wanting to kick Rossetti.  It’s briskly written, fun to read, but you can look up and a hundred pages have passed and there’s still more of it. It’s a commitment, is what. But I would seek out more MacCarthy, and if you’re interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, I would recommend it for sure. Even if you’re only interested in the period.

Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems. Reread. This was the strangest experience. I remember loving Anne Sexton the first time around, and I honestly cannot point to more than one poem I loved or even liked all that much this time. I have a really strong sense of continuity of self. Usually even when I don’t still love things now, I can say why I did then. And I can’t even point to which ones I used to like. It’s baffling, disorienting. I know what year I read this originally–2002, it’s in my booklog–and other things from 2002 are explicable if not still loved. Honestly, no idea.

Amy Stewart, Girl Waits With Gun. A brisk, fun novelization of the story of one of America’s earliest women crime fighters. A run-in with a thug that ruins their buggy sets Constance on a path to law enforcement–since heaven knows it isn’t being enforced without her. Brave, stubborn heroine; quick read.

Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Lots of things about going smash against the Spanish in the 16th century, mostly, although extending around it. Fun bits of culture clash where the Spanish are baffled by the Low Countries and vice versa. Their women! Their literacy!  Yyyyes, excellent. A bit of a specialist volume, but interesting for that.

Holly Black, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. I have enjoyed some of Black’s novels, and others have just not really hit me well. Apparently I appreciate her much more at shorter lengths. I’m motivated to get the novel version of “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” just to compare, because I thought that the short version did an excellent job with the gaps between our perceptions of other people and their reality. And so did a later story in the volume, “Paper Cuts Scissors,” which had lovely library imagery as well, even though I am a tough sell on library stories–in fact the stories I liked most were the ones I would have expected to be a tough sell on–so in general I will keep looking for Black’s short fiction from here on out.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. I suspect that Bolz-Weber’s book will resonate most with those who are most aligned with an organized church. They will probably feel rueful about themselves in spots, supported in spots, nudged in spots. A lot of the places where Bolz-Weber says “we,” though about what we expect, what we want, what we do…become less applicable the less aligned you are with a formal and hierarchical church. If you are not aligned with organized Christianity at all, this is not the book for you, I don’t think.

Vera Brosgol, Anya’s Ghost. This is one of the places where my status as a non-visual person really limits my interactions with the comics medium, because for me this was just a random ghost story, pretty well-done but not amazing, and the art also being pretty well-done was not that big a draw. For others it will probably be more so. (I was reading comics recommended to me as possible Christmas presents for a few people on my shopping list. Not, alas, successfully, but also not painfully.)

Kurt Busiek & Benjamin Dewey with Jordie Bellaire and Comicraft, The Autumnlands Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw. This comic mostly has anthropomorphic animals as characters, but the champion who is summoned is a human. And I’m done; I hate that. Humans are the special ones! What about badgers? I ask you. Some beautiful landscape pictures here, but: there are venomous shrews in the world. Echidnas. And yet the human has to be the chosen one? Get away from me, book with pretty landscapes.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle. A memoir of his family and their setting. I found it to be a fast and compelling read that gave a very different personal context than I’d had access to before. Worth the time for sure.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. Reread. Yes, I know, but I gave it to a friend to read and we were talking about it and I got lured. This time one of the tiny points that hit me that was different, being at a small private Minnesota liberal arts college in the early ’70s vs. the late ’90s: being “on financial aid” and having an on-campus job was a specific thing, not just, like…life for every single person you knew except literally one. I have no idea how many times I’ve read this book, and I love some of the same things every time, and yet there’s always something different.

Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. Quite a focus on the Orthodox Jewish culture of the setting, so if you know someone who wants to see themselves in such a heroine and/or would like to learn about that culture, here is a way. I didn’t find the action plot to be very well-paced, and it felt a bit preachy about skills/values in the resolution, but not offensively so.

Peter Haining, ed., Time Travelers: Fiction in the Fourth Dimension. This book…someone picked it up randomly ages ago, and I can’t put “reread” because it’s not in my booklog. In fact I’m not sure any of us ever read it. I think it might just have accompanied us around from apartment to apartment to house, looking like the sort of thing we might like. Which it is not. It is from 1997. I remember 1997. Women had been invented then; I remember specifically having been invented then. You would not know it from this hostile, smug book, where women are not only not authors but also substantially not protagonists, not anything really in most of the stories but dizzy objects, prizes. And the time through which these men’s thoughts traveled–all of time, all of space in most cases–was so damnably small. These were the sorts of stories that would have made me write The Stuff We Don’t Do in a fury if I hadn’t already written it, so it was a relief that I already had, because I was busy that week. And no. Just no. At least we can stop hauling this book around with us. Uff da.

Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm, Good As Lily. It felt like the title wasn’t adjusted after the comic evolved. Still: teenager has to deal with different ages of herself, hijinks ensue. Good enough that I reached for the next DKK thing on my library pile.

Derek Kirk Kim, Same Difference. Friends figuring out an interpersonal minor mystery of sorts. Mostly friend interaction of a young adult sort. Entertaining and light.

Hope Larson, Gray Horses. Slightly surreal bilingual foreign exchange student comic. Pretty but not as insightful as I had hoped.

Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do. Ask me if I was actually surprised. Oh, just ask me. There is some actual science here confirming that my habit of finding water and walking near it is very sensible and healthy. There is also a near-epic amount of woo, some of it in evo-devo directions, so…handle with care.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia! Unlike Russell’s short story collection, this is more grounded-weird than way-out-weird. Grounded weird is enough: it is set in Florida. It’s the story of a family of teenagers who have lost their mother and are figuring out which parts of their world were real without her and which were a collective delusion. The alligator wrestling is entirely real. Much of the stuff around it…well, that’s the book. Beautifully written, much to enjoy without the way-out-ness. Very well-characterized. I am a Karen Russell convert.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, and Takeshi Miyazawa, Runaways: The Complete Collection Volume Two. More of the same, more or less, without quite so many of the original characters, with more crossovery characters. This is not improving, but I still like some of the original “your parents are supervillains and you run off to do better” premise enough that I’m still with it, but I probably won’t stick with it to the bitter end.

Review copy provided by Sterling.

The subtitle on this glossy coffee-table book is “Legendary Automatons and Androids from the Ancient World to the Distant Future.”  It spends a lot of time on the fictional robots, spending a full page spread on most of the author’s favorites from both written media and the movies.  But there are also real life examples of automata and robots, including gems like Su Son’gs Cosmic Engine.

The author’s stage name makes her passion for the topic clear, but even if she was writing as Betsy Peterson, it would be apparent from the way that she squees about robot after robot how much she loves the subject matter.  This is not a book for serious academic research.  This is a book for poring over the pictures, for going, “Gort!  I love Gort!”  (What? I do love Gort) and, “Daneel is the best thing he ever wrote,” and other bouncy happy fan reactions.  And its timing, coming out at the end of the year, is very convenient: if you’re trying to come up with the right present for someone with a lot of nerd identity but no particular inclination toward cerebral research, that person might well enjoy a hundred favorite very shiny robots, with pictures of Elektro and Sparko from the 1930s and allusions to Marge Piercy and Kraftwerk.

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Constance Ash, ed., Not of Woman Born. Reread. We have a bunch of anthologies on the shelf that no one has picked up in ages, and I’ve been reading them a bit at a time, looking for forgotten treasures. This one was very late-’90s focused, not at all what you’d get out of asking people to do a reproductive tech anthology now (which is interesting in itself–same theme every twenty years?), but the hidden gem for me was Janni Simner’s story. When I read it the first time in college, Janni’s was just a name, one of the unfamiliar names in the table of contents, and while the story charmed and interested me, I don’t remember it particularly.  This time it read as a harbinger of thoughtfulness to come from Janni.  Perspective can make all the difference.

Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Focused on how the Spanish colonists used some kinds of writing and denigrated others to colonial aims.  A certain amount of interest in native writings, though not enough for my tastes.  Interesting book, brief and to the point.

Lyndsay Faye, The Fatal Flame.  The wrong timing of this book for me, I’m afraid. I have really liked this historical mystery series of Faye’s, but I had just finished bouncing off yet another historical TV series that treated prostitution as the default historical profession for women. (Farmer, people. The default historical profession for women was farmer. I get it that you don’t always want to film that, but: farmer.) I am glad that some people–some of them friends of mine!–have thoughtful things to say about sex work and sex workers in historical settings, but on the whole I am becoming a tougher sell for casual portrayals.  Faye’s book really skirted the edges of that.  And yet it did all sorts of things I like, mid-19th century early policing and immigration and labor tensions and politics, woo! so I really think this is a case where it was a badly timed selection for me. I’d start at the beginning of the series, not with this one, though.

Katrina Firlik, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. All sorts of interesting mechanical details about what neurosurgery feels and smells like. Unevenly paced and edited, so Firlik will be chirping along about various infections and then suddenly hit you with a Raymond Chandler poem that knocks your knees out from under you. I think this one doesn’t cross the line into “of interest no matter what,” it mostly really is of interest if you like brains.  (Brains!) But I do.

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Starts with the very earliest colonial days, goes through to the 20th century, all the reasons why a person with some African and some European ancestry might choose to cross what we as Americans perceive as the color line and try to be perceived as purely white.  Also went into some of the logistics of that type of passing and some of the things that might be considered drawbacks or losses from that choice. I understand why Hobbs chose to focus on a black/white split only, but I wish I knew where to get more of the books (or if there are any yet) that go into the gradations of brown: what persons of partial Native American ancestry had as options, what persons without that ancestry managed to use as options all the same, where there were shades of not-quite-whiteness perceived at the time that are less clear to us now (did some people we would call African-American consider it useful to pass themselves off as Jewish? some Mediterranean European ethnicities? other world ethnicities that were lesser known to white populations at the time? when/where were those choices common?).  It’s totally okay for that not to be the book Hobbs wanted to write, and yet it is a set of dimensions about race, racial passing, and the American experience that I hope someone does choose to write about in depth.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy. At one point I laughed loud enough to alarm the dog.  And I love the Translator so very much.  There’s more going on with Stations and Ships and who is Significant, and I really love those questions–human vs. Significant–I really love how this series is wrapped up in that way.  But what I think is likeliest to stick with me and make me want to reread and reread is the Translator.

Jenny  Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan. Many of you have read an essay or article from this book, about girls in Afghanistan dressing as boys and living as boys for part of their childhoods for various reasons.  Nordberg goes farther into gender in modern Afghanistan and how it is not quite what Westerners assume.  My main qualm about it is that she often seems too surprised herself that gender is not a monolith, that the treatment of it in her Swedish upbringing was not universal. The anecdotes about Afghani life and gender are fascinating, though, and well worth the (short) time.

Daniel José Older, Half Resurrection Blues. Some of these characters have short stories associated with them, and I’ve liked the short stories, so I was glad to pick up the novel. It was at least as good.  It’s pacey and fun, its characters what we should have seen in urban fantasy ages ago–sharp and funny and emotionally involved with each other and with their city. I’m very glad to see this is the beginning of a series.

Kim Stanley Robinson, ed., Futures Primitive: The New Ecotopias. Reread. This anthology made me so angry. It was not making even the vaguest attempt at writing ecotopia, at tackling any of the ecological problems that were already, by the mid-’90s when it was written, starting to become quite clear–I remember, I was there. Robinson had written actual ecotopia himself, and this was a reprint anthology, so one couldn’t even chalk it up to “he asked a bunch of big names and was disappointed in what he got but had to go with it.” Much of it was undirected primitivism, some of it not even that, but the ecological component was nebulous at best. We’ve kept this anthology on our shelf since the late ’90s, and I’m afraid it was not one that rewarded the shelf space or a reread.

Matthew David Surridge, Reading Strange Matters. Discussed elsewhere.

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 5. Kindle. It turns out that when I got around to reading the Kindle copy, I had already read basically the whole thing online. So I merely note the completeness for my own records.

Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance. Discussed elsewhere.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, and Takeshi Miyazawa, The Runaways Vol. 1. This made me smile, although the ending of the volume–well, I’ll be interested to see whether anything happens in volume 2 that makes me like the very ending any better.  There were all sorts of fun bits along the way, enough to make me want to keep going in the series, but the very ending left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. This is the story of a bunch of teens who find out that their parents are supervillains, basically, and run away and try to deal with the entire situation themselves. Many of them have some flavor of superpowers themselves, and there are other superpowered people in the world, and…well.  Hijinks, as you would expect, ensue.

Brian K. Vaughan et al, The Escapists. This is an incredibly establishment comic for a comic about indie comics. The self-awareness factor did not seem high. It wasn’t offensive, but I didn’t see a lot of point unless you’re a rabid fan of Kavalier & Clay and possibly even then.

Review copy provided by the author.

Matthew is someone I know a bit from Farthing Party in Montreal; I’ve talked about books with him in that context. If you don’t know him but the name sounds familiar, it’s either from his essays on Black Gate or for the Puppy slate Hugo nomination he declined for same. Since he had nothing whatsoever to do with either subgroup of Puppies, I was not at all surprised to see him decline.

This is a collection of those essays, existing on the borderline of reviews and book analysis.  At the same time as I was reading it, my husband Mark was reading Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great, and the similarities and differences were interesting.  Reading Strange Matters has a much newer skew, whereas What Makes This Book So Great goes back much farther.  The Surridge covers only short series, focusing mostly on stand-alone works; the Walton goes into depth on long series.  But both focus primarily on books for which they have at least some good things to say. Both focus on books that are worth their time and yours, and why those books are worth a look.

After a few pieces, I found myself getting up to jot down titles–I have read most of the works covered, but not all, and I wasn’t trusting that I’d remember which ones exactly piqued my interest.  Even with as much as I read, there were some titles that were new to me.  While Surridge gives us thoughts about books that got wide mainstream coverage–Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus comes to mind, a favorite with book clubs all over the continent–but most of the titles could use more attention.  He touches on several of my neglected favorites: Minister Faust, for example, gets lengthy attention.  There is analysis not of a Nalo Hopkinson novel but of each of the short stories in a collection.  Leah Bobet and Susan Palwick each get an essay.  The nature of the collection means that if you do happen upon a rare piece of no interest whatsoever, it’s easy to flip pages to the next item.

A quick and broadening reading experience, if you’ve enjoyed Surridge’s thoughts in the past or wondered about them, this is your chance for more.

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