Tag: bookses precious

Eleanor Arnason, Hidden Folk. Icelandic mythology-inspired short stories. There were a few of these that fell oddly into the 1970s-esque trap of “the Irish are a special maaaaagical people,” but the language was right on in all of them for being saga inspired. Generally good fun.

Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. So very good. Sanatoriums, interactions of TB with leprosy, general degenerative interesting stuff.

Octavia Cade, The Life in Papers of Sofie K. Kindle. A magical realist novella about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician. If that doesn’t make you want to read it, I can’t help you; if it does, hey, did you know there was this book? There is this book! It is just the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing! (I do.)

Mike Carey, Lucifer Book Three. Giant graphic novel omnibus, and I think I am done with the Lucifer series on this one. The stories are not compelling enough to be worth the deliberately ugly art. I understand that it’s deliberately ugly for a reason, is making a statement, etc. But it is still a visual assault that I can opt out of, and will.

Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, Women in the Material World. A late twentieth century book of photographs and interviews with women in different countries worldwide, touching on their daily material lives in a very practical and specific way. I would have passed this by without a recommendation, because if it had been less concrete it would have been awful. As it was–fascinating.

Benedict Jacka, Chosen. These are short and zippy–this is the fourth in a series–and if you’re looking for Magical London Books, this is one. This one has had enough room to start ramifying interestingly. I don’t recommend starting here because of that, though–there’s no reason not to read the previous ones, and they’ll make the ramifications here work better.

Laurie R. King, Night Work. I may also be done with this series. There was a lot of exoticization of non-white characters, which was particularly bad as both the characters and the exoticization were central to the plot. I had sort of gotten along with the earlier volumes in this series on the theory that they were from an earlier time, but this is getting pretty contemporary and not acting like it. So–sigh. Onwards in the search for another long mystery series I like.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is a particularly interesting biography because so much of its process geeking is text rather than subtext: Milford will talk about interviewing Millay’s sister and then talk about what she thinks is not being said, what she has doubts about and why, what other sources she’s using. Quite good; I wish Milford had more work out there. (She wrote a bio of Zelda Fitzgerald, but I had enough of Zelda Fitzgerald in Flappers and don’t need an entire book of her, no matter how good the biographer.)

E. C. Myers, The Silence of Six. Myers is quite good at Average Teen Voice, whether or not the teen in question is entirely sympathetic. This is a teen hacker novel in the vein of Little Brother and Homeland. Lots of running around and skullduggery, good fun.

Julie E. Neraas, Apprenticed to Hope: A Sourcebook for Difficult Times. Lent to me by someone with whom I was talking about chronic illness stuff. I’m sure it’s very helpful to some people, but I found a lot of it frustratingly basic.

Greg Rucka, Stumptown Vol. 2. Portland PI graphic novel, with rock musicians. Reasonably fun if you want a one of those, not one of Rucka’s best.

V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

Chris West, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps. Every year I buy myself a book for my grandpa’s birthday. I pick something that I think we could have enjoyed together, because I’m not done sharing things with Grandpa even though he’s gone. This was this year’s purchase, and I’m confident that Grandpa would have found it interesting. A lot of the historical overview was stuff that someone who knows a reasonable amount about GB/the UK would already know, but some of the detail was more middlebrow/person-on-the-street than histories often focus on, and that made it feel more authentic to me: if you asked a bunch of Britons what happened in such-and-such a year, the World Cup is very likely to come up, for example. Also the postal-specific stuff was interesting and explained some institutions we don’t have here, like banking at the post office.

Review copy provided by Tor.

A Darker Shade of Magic is the story of four parallel worlds with very different outcomes. One of the protags is one of the very few people who can move between the worlds, and he has color-coded them to keep track of which one he’s referring to–Grey, Red, White, and Black. The divergence of the worlds is not random but refers to their relationship with magic.

That all sounds a bit technical and inside-baseball; the book is anything but. It was such a fast read that I was 2/3 of the way through before I even noticed I should probably do things like move around and stretch occasionally. I am not one of the genre readers who is a sucker for thief protags, but the thief Lila was brave and useful and entertaining. And the two princes were just what they ought to be (errm, sorry, child of the nineties)–that is, they were sympathetic and comprehensible in their relationship with each other, their parents, and the rest of the world. While not everyone has a fully filled-in backstory, ramification from background is the name of the game–each world shapes its denizens differently, for good or ill.

And there are music boxes and magical artifacts with minds–or at least wills–of their own. And burning ships.

Fun story, hurrah, would read author again.

One note: the city in which all this takes place is London, with the Thames as an important thing. If you pick this up hoping for another immersive London fantasy, it will not deliver. There is not a heck of a lot of our-London historical detail in this book. For me, this was not a disadvantage–I have plenty of Magic London Books and not a lot of good recent parallel worlds magic stories. But best to know what one is getting into in advance: set in London, yes, Magic London Book subgenre, not really, no.

Please consider using our link to buy A Darker Shade of Magic from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second.

The Sculptor seems aimed at young artists and wannabes: a sad-sack sculptor makes a deal with Death that he can sculpt whatever he wants, with his bare hands, in exchange for shortening his life to 200 days. Death’s motivations in this are pretty dodgy, and the text spends hundreds of pages crapping all over the main character (David) and then aims for cheap pathos in the ending.

Oh, sorry, do I sound unimpressed?

The thing is, there was enough good stuff about The Sculptor that I did want to keep reading. One of the things that favorably impressed me is that for all the rest of the times he falls for young-artist-narrative cliches, McCloud is clear that having your work turn out exactly as you intended doesn’t solve everything. Or sometimes anything. That’s pretty important–it’s a mistake I see a lot of young writers making, thinking that the only problem is that it’s not like it is in their heads. Stuff is like it is in David’s head, and nobody cares. He sometimes has bad ideas, he sometimes has obscure ideas, he’s terrible at promoting himself…and superpowers don’t change that.

Some of the sculptures are cool to look at on the page, and it’s an idea that’s fun to think about: if you could sculpt any material with your bare hands, including granite, concrete, etc. at very large scale, what would you come up with? How would you present it to the world? But the idea is better than the execution. The rule isn’t actually “do the worst possible thing to your characters,” it’s “do the worst possible thing that’s interesting.”

Ah well. Even at several hundred pages, it’s a quick read. And it’s not terrible. It’s just…well, it’s just like its protagonist: you start to think its lack of success is because it’s ultimately pretty shallow.

Please consider using our link to buy The Sculptor at Amazon.

Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer. It seems that Aaronovitch is alternating arc plot books with monster of the week books. This is one of the latter, and it’s a fun monster of the week sort of thing, Peter out of his usual setting, but if you were looking for an immediate follow-up to the ending of the last volume, this is not it. There’s just enough to let the reader know that he hasn’t forgotten, isn’t neglecting it, and otherwise this is pretty locally focused. I would still recommend starting at the beginning of the series, but you might be able to make this work as an entry point that’s atypical in some key ways.

Samit Basu, Resistance. This is another “start with the first one” book that’s still a pretty worthy sequel. The suddenly superheroic universe of the last book has evolved by a bit, and this book is fairly strong on following up/piling on consequences. If you wanted a book wherein mechas fight kaiju in a superhero universe, that happens here, but a lot of other stuff happens too.

Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Stranger. Post-apocalyptic mutant adventures! I think my favorite part of this book was the variety of imagined fauna and flora. The human parts were well-handled also, but I found myself hoping that the characters would leave their town (as they sometimes did) so that they could find out about more strange plants and critters. I’m looking forward to finding out what else that world contains in the sequel.

Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory. I didn’t mean to have an incredibly morbid nonfiction week, but sometimes that’s what hold requests at the library do to you. This is short, a very easy read, and yet provides a lot of detail about modern cremation and the modern funeral industry in general. Some of this may be difficult for some people to read–I particularly want to flag that Doughty is detailed about how they handle infant corpses as opposed to adult corpses–but it’s very interesting stuff.

Amal El-Mohtar, The Honey Month. A synesthetic exploration inspired by twenty-eight types of honey–some poems and some short fiction, hard to genre-typify. The sort of strange intense project I wish we had more of.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. This was the second unintentionally morbid book in the week that Mark’s Grandpa Gritter died, and it had a lot more intellectual/emotional depth than the Doughty. Gawande is a doctor who has written extensively about process in some very usefully nerdy ways, and he looks at some process questions here. Much of it is stuff we’ve already handled or are aware of others handling, in my family, but there was still interesting detail that was new to me, and I think it’s a worthwhile book for many/most people. Recommended.

Robert Hughes, Goya. This was physically heavy enough to be a problem to read sometimes, so I’m afraid I had a more fragmented experience than I would otherwise have had. The progression from young artist attempting to make his mark with court to satirist and on to darkly humorous old man pleasing mostly himself was fascinating, though, and I enjoyed having a closer look at a painter I didn’t know much about.

Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter. Most of the Moomins hybernate, so this is a limited-cast Moomin book. Still fun, interesting, so very Finnish, but again probably not my first choice for where to start. (There’s no Thingummy and Bob, so there you have that.)

David Liss, The Day of Atonement. The story of a Portuguese Jewish man in the 18th century returning to Lisbon after having lived safely in England, seeking revenge on those who wronged his family and finding it harder than he expected to determine where and how that revenge should be dealt out. It’s the sort of thing Liss does very well, and I liked this latest volume of it a lot.

Karen Lord, The Galaxy Game. I would have liked more elephants, but it was still another worthy book in the universe of her previous. I also would have liked slightly more perspective balance among the young characters, but that isn’t really very important; it was still a space SF book of the sort that I loved when I was 12 and miss very much right now: different types of human with different abilities, navigating galactic politics and local variations as best they can.

Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease. I do love neurology when the topic of it isn’t a family member. This contains bunches of weird stories of what the brain does and what people do around their own and others’ brain glitches. If you like that aspect of Oliver Sacks, Ropper is not quite as engaging but still a quite reasonable example of the genre. He also handles being Michael J. Fox’s neurologist quite well in the text, walking the line between name-dropping and minimizing with ease.

Janni Lee Simner, Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer. Kindle. Tiernay hunts for very personal treasure. This is a middle-grade novel, but I think it’s almost better suited for adults, because the perspective on Tiernay’s awesomeness and juvenile limitations is very adult. I’m always on the lookout for good adventure fiction for the MG audience, so I was glad to get this one.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them. Every time I read Sylvia Townsend Warner, I say, “What a strange book,” and this was too. It was the story of a bunch of nuns over several decades of the 14th century. For the first half or so, it’s extremely fragmented, with through narratives not always easy to discern, but they do come together eventually.

Review copy provided by Tor. Also, full disclosure, the author is a personal friend.

Remember when I read Emma Bull’s Territory and said I don’t like Westerns, but I like this book?

Yeah. About that.

I also don’t like books set in whorehouses because they are a minefield of bad tropes.

Huh. So. Funny thing.

Karen Memory is a masterpiece of voice. If you read the first chapter and aren’t hooked by the titular character’s voice, I can’t really help you; and it’s achieved almost exclusively by word choice rather than phoneticization. Karen is a logging camp girl, the daughter of a horse trainer, in the process of being educated in the whorehouse in which she works. She is acutely observant but still thinks of some of her vocabulary as belonging to someone else. She is wholeheartedly accepting of her co-workers, except for the places where she doesn’t notice her own biases until they trip her up. There is every reason for this book to be titled with its protagonist’s name, because while there is plenty (plenty upon plenty!) of action plot here, it is really Karen’s story.

(The Memory part…if you are a neurology nerd hoping for a speculative novel whose premise rests strongly on the processing of memories, this is not that book. Her last name is Memery. This is the one with steampunk battle machines made out of the least likely possible domestic implements and a diverse group of people fighting to be treated as people. We can do neurology geeking somewhere else.)

The alternate history-steampunk elements are subtle in some chapters but present from the beginning, and crucial from the beginning. They are not gears glued on after for fashion. There is, for example, a medical machine that is far better with some cures than others, and the machines are sometimes loud and smell funny, and they need people to actually fix them or, better, soup them up. But there’s also a wealth of setting detail grounding the narrative beyond the machines: the smell and behavior of horses, for example, and more kinds of processed carbohydrates than you can shake a stick at. Dear heaven the carbohydrates. If you have celiac and read this book, I sincerely hope you have good substitute recipes, because I defy you to read this book and not long for biscuits and cornbread and flapjacks. There is buttermilk on my grocery list right now because of this book. This is entirely period-appropriate; there are also beans and bacon and molasses and suchlike. But when I finished reading I wanted to a) make a list of people to give this to and b) eat biscuits. Not in that order.

I am finding myself dancing around some of the coolest steampunky/speculative elements because I think the book will be more fun if the reader discovers them at the pace the book reveals them. So “Karen and her friends/co-workers fight a nefarious local would-be politician who has…” um. “Who can…” right. Yes. Well. There is fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, true love. Okay, not so much the fencing. But biscuits and giant crazy machinery are a pretty good substitute.

Please consider using our link to buy Karen Memory from Amazon.

Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria. Seventh century Northumbria is not something I’ve gotten a lot of outside of Hild (which is fiction), so it was a lovely gap to have filled in. I really like the interesting interplay between various ethnicities and religions/religious subtypes. Fascinating stuff, lots of maps, lots of discussions of how we know various things about this period.

Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust. I squeed when I saw this existed. It’s the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and the sixth put a pretty firm period to the series, [redacting] Flavia off to [redacted]. Well, it turns out that [redacted] has murders and opportunities for intrepid girl chemist-detectives to poke their noses into things, too! So Bradley is ending plot arcs, not the series, HURRAH MORE FLAVIA HURRAH HURRAH.

Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. Interesting take on the saga writer, effects on his life and his effects on further sagas. Sometimes good to argue with.

Greer Gilman, Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Kindle. One of Greer’s Jacobean noir novellas. Language just a perfect romp. Not long enough to get tired of any particular playwrights, fey, etc. even if you have low tolerance for any particular among them.

Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel. Latest in the Benjamin January series. I think it would work all right as an entry point, although I recommend reading the whole series. This dovetailed nicely with my reading the last few months, because it’s partially set in the Caribbean and deals with the effects of the Haitian Revolution, among other things. Slavery, family, and more. I probably shouldn’t have read the latest installations of two of my favorite mystery series in one fortnight, but I am weak.

Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm. What a strange little book. It’s a very narrative style, telling the story of that year in retrospect–the things that we think of as important harbingers of future things now rather than what the people of 1913 would have thought of as important. It’s translated from the German, and that’s remarkably clear: the focus is Germanophone (? is this the equivalent of Anglophone or Francophone? what I mean is not just citizens of Germany but also throughout the Habsburg lands of the time), and the focus is very much avant garde, to the point where someone who has not thought much about the continental avant garde of the early 20th century would end up saying, “Who?” repeatedly. There is nothing of Asia, Africa, or South America in this book, and apparently the main notable thing that happened in 1913 in North America was that Louis Armstrong first picked up the trumpet. (Which, hey: notable. I just think that once you’re reporting on when in 1913 Picasso had a cold, you might notice a few other things in the world.) Funny in spots, interesting in spots. Very weird.

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland. Reread, but not since approximately grade school. This says “1” on the spine, but I don’t recommend starting here. Jansson is clearly still getting her feet under her. It has some funny bits (OH THE HEMULEN), and I think it’s worth reading, but you’ll get the wrong impression of how good the series is if you start here, and there’s no reason to read them in publication order, really none–on the first page there’s mention of the flood that’s in a later book, so. May as well start later, with something where she’s got it on all cylinders.

Matsu Kannari, Kutune Shirka, the Ainu Epic. This is very short but filled with otters. It is not a complete epic, it’s a fragment of an epic. Still, there’s not that much in English about the Ainu–Japan is mostly presented as a monolith, culturally/mythically–so this is a good thing to have.

Frank L. Klemen, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War. (US Civil War, just for the record.) This was not what I hoped it would be. It’s not really the book’s fault: it did a perfectly cromulent job of covering mostly pro-Confederate conspiracies and secret societies in the North during the US Civil War itself. But I was hoping for a broader scope than that–leading up to the war and after the war would have been nice, and more of the pro-Union secret societies as well. (MORE WIDE AWAKES.) So I will have to find another source for that stuff.

Pascu Stefan, A History of Transylvania. This is an old book, from the Soviet era, so there are weird things about it. Particularly there is a firm and abiding hatred for Pan-Slavism that takes its form in insisting that Romanians are true Dacian Romans dammit. And you can see why, living under the Soviet influence, that might be a direction of subtle rebellion–Russia has often used Pan-Slavism to mean Russian domination. But Pascu didn’t really seem to see how similar the situation he was describing was to, say, Gaul. Ah well. Still some interesting gaps filled in, mostly in the “kings and crowns” direction.

Abra Staffin-Wiebe, A Circus of Brass and Bone. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the second book in a series. The first one, some of you will recall, was a bit disappointing in that it focused on the two brothers who were fairly standard fantasy novel archetypes and gave very little space to their sister who was a princess who was also Minister of Finance.

Well! You will be pleased to know that Adare, the princess in question, appears a great deal more in this book.

She is no longer Minister of Finance. She acts very little like a former Minister of Finance. I don’t really understand why Brian Staveley came up with a POV character who was Minister of Finance if he didn’t want to write about one.

Also in increased content over the previous book: torture. Lots and lots more torture. General misery, despair, and definitely torture.

Oh, and also phoneticized “peasant” dialect. You know, for the scum common people.

Whee.

And yet I read this volume all the way through, so there have to be some good things about it. I was mostly invested in a handful of secondary characters, honestly, and the prose style is readable (when not doing phoneticized dialect), and I was hoping that the spoilerific means of getting from place to place would have some interesting stuff attached to it.

I’m not sure this is grimdark proper, but I suspect that people with a higher tolerance for grimdark than I have would enjoy it more.

Please consider using our link to buy Providence of Fire at Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the sequel to California Bones, and while having read the first one adds a lot to one’s understanding of the characters and setting, I think it would be a perfectly reasonable place to dive into this world. There are lots of weird things going on, but I think they’re weird things a reader could pick up on readily: golems who are functionally pretty human, osteomancy as a major force in human culture, an alternate Southern California that’s filled with institutions that are close but not quite the same.

The main character of California Bones, Daniel, returns older, wiser, and with a teenaged golem in tow. Sam, the golem, has been learning magic and life from Daniel, not that it’s a great life under the circumstances. Sam is the late Hierarch’s golem, and everyone expects him to be one of the greatest osteomancers ever. To date he has been completely underwhelming. He has to stay mostly hidden, because he looks like the Hierarch, so–no friends, no school, no home, nothing stable, nothing normal. Nothing a young golem’s heart yearns for, nothing but more magic practice and more truck stops.

Until the powers-that-be in LA start putting together a Pacific Firedrake. Sam and Daniel know that this is the magical equivalent of the H-bomb, the super-weapon, the one thing you do not want the other guy–or pretty much any other guy–to have. So they set about stopping it. Naturally, this doesn’t go quite as planned, and they need a series of allies–old friends, new clones, a throwaway reference to a pretty cool creature–to help them achieve…something. That is sort of like their goal, sort of? In a goal-like way? Look, I try to avoid spoilers. There’s closure, I will say that. Definitely closure. Fun stuff, and the LA references feel more geographical and less cultural to me this time around, so there are fewer “really, alternate history got there?” moments. (Also, I like second books for a reason, and one of them is that my expectation structure is set.) Recommended.

Please consider using our link to buy Pacific Fire at Amazon.

Elizabeth Bear, One-Eyed Jack. This is the Promethean Age book without an “And” in the title. It’s full of the Matter of Vegas, and full of sidelong cultural references that clarify themselves if you don’t get them the first time. The cultural myths touched on here aren’t my personal myths, but they’re still well-handled.

Mary Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. Lots of stuff about Pompeii and what we know about it pre-lava. The factoid that will haunt my mental nostrils is that they had an amphitheater/coliseum that seated 20K people, and archaeologists have not yet found any trace of any latrines whatsoever, so–20K people using the stairs and corridors. Aughhhhh Rome.

Tobias S. Buckell, Mitigated Futures. Kindle. This is a very well-chosen title. The futures Buckell portrays in these stories are alarming in spots, but never overwhelming. There’s always a human note–not always hope, but at least one of its cousins–to temper the rough spots.

Sean B. Carroll, Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize. This is about Monod and Camus, at the beginning and at the end. In the middle it’s substantially about the French Resistance, to the point where I shelved it with WWII history when I was finished. Carroll is a biologist I saw at Nobel Conference this fall, so I was excited to have his latest book. Readable and interesting, and I was not particularly interested in Camus, going in.

Peter Dickinson, Inside Grandad. Kindle. I am so glad that Jo warned me what kind of book this is when she recommended it, so that I made sure I could read it when I was going to see Mark’s grandpa and could get a hug from him. This is the incredibly well-done story of a boy coping with his grandfather’s stroke. If you’re a person who has had a grandparent who was really, truly central to your life, this is a book that understands that down to the very finest details–and also understands what it’s like for that person to be old and dying. Some kinds of understanding are both needed and difficult, and this is one of them: I always want more grandparent books, but in this case I wouldn’t have wanted to read it without Grandpa Lyzenga or Uncle Phil around imminently, since Grandpa can’t be. So hard, so good.

Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound. A YA portal fantasy that goes into really gritty awful detail about the logistical down sides of some of the methods used in other portal fantasies. The fantasy world has not been an unmixed blessing for the protag, but neither is it an unmingled horror. I like logistics, and I cannot lie, although the ending was a little off for me.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South. Kindle. This is a Victorian novel that refutes all sorts of ignorant nonsense about what kinds of things women were interested in and what kinds of things Victorian writers were interested in. It has a young woman figuring out her future, but it also has union organizers and factories for weaving cloth, it has all sorts of classes of person, it has the effects of technological change on philosophical outlook and practical daily life. It is really really good, and I have no idea why it’s not the sort of thing one gets assigned early and often in school. If I were conspiracy-minded…well, let us say that I like this book and find it very worthwhile and think more people should read it. Yes, let’s leave it there.

Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey. Biography of a writer in the middle of a large circle of interesting acquaintance. The cover helpfully points out that it is now a major motion picture, which I doubt extremely for any reasonable definition of major. (Perhaps it was made by someone who mustered out before they were promoted to Lt. Col.?) And it was also confusing, how this giant sprawly biography could become a movie. Then it became very clear when I found out the title of the movie: Carrington. It’s not a movie about Lytton Strachey per se. It’s a movie about Dora Carrington. Who is not in several hundred pages of this book. That does make things easier.

Benedict Jacka, Cursed. Very fast read, fun urban fantasy methodone for until deeper urban fantasies about male magicians in London come out with their next installation. This was filling in book two of the series when I had already read one and three, so it was probably slightly less interesting than it would have been, but still held my attention just fine. Will keep on with the series.

Ursula K. LeGuin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. A slender volume–probably too short for today–of mainstream YA, figuring out how to handle oneself and relate to others without actually being a “problem book.” Fluid and readable without standing out particularly.

Blair MacGregor, The Key. Kindle. A fantasy novelette or novella. I think Blair’s better stuff is at longer length, but it still kept me entertained throughout.

Dominica Malcolm, ed., Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Kindle. I enjoyed having this anthology in general, with its diversity of voice and setting, but I didn’t find that any one particular story jumped out at me for mention. I guess it was bound to happen sometime, but usually if I don’t feel like mentioning any stories it’s because I didn’t enjoy the anthology, and that’s not the case here.

Salla Simukka, As Red as Blood. First in a Finnish teen thriller/mystery series, with a protag who is wise beyond her years and many of her peers who are…not. Zippy fun, will look for the next one when we get it in English.

Lynne Thomas and Michael Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 1. Kindle. An oddity of how I reckon what I’ve read: entire issues of magazines don’t make the list unless they’re on the Kindle. In any case, I’m glad I took a look at it as a whole (I had read a few things that were linked before but not worried about catching everything; I knew I had an ebook), because it reminded me to tell people how much I liked Amelia Beamer’s Celia and the Conservation of Entropy. There were other good things, but that’s the one that really spoke my name.

Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story. Kindle. Another anomaly in how I count books read: if it’s a separate ebook, it gets counted. But this is just an essay. Entertaining enough, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect from knowing that Mr. Clemens wrote an essay with that title.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Kindle. A short volume, very domestic as one might expect, but more given over to complaints about some kinds of houseguests than the title would indicate. She’s very readable and entertaining so far, even when she’s not writing about very much in particular.

Jo Walton, The Just City. Discussed elsewhere.

Richard Zimler, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. Kindle. Zimler’s specialty is apparently murder mysteries while horrible things are going on. This one is set during anti-Jewish pogroms as the Jews are being removed from Portugal. Like the Warsaw Ghetto mystery he wrote, this is vivid and well-done and not for moments when you are low on cope, which is probably why it sat on my Kindle for months until I was cozily tucked into a family Christmas situation.