Tag: bookses precious

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.

Review copy provided by Tor. Also the author is a dear friend of mine, and I read this book in manuscript before I read this published version.

This is a book about time travel, robots, and eccentric philosophers using ancient slave children to experiment with approximating Plato’s Republic, with the help of the goddess Athene.

It’s also a book about consent. Once you bring Platonism in this far to the front-and-center, theme is not going to be an optional extra that can sort of sneak up on you, and The Just City is not an exception to that rule. Consent–not just in a sexual context, also in a work and personal context–goes from first page to last. If you don’t want a book that’s dealing with consent (and with historical figures and Greek gods not always having a great grasp of it), then this is not the book for you.

I think substantially because I never had a Mediterranean focus, I never had the, “I want to live there!” or “I want to try that!” reaction to Plato’s Republic–which makes it more fun to watch it twist and disintegrate than if I was a hard-core Platonist, I think? There may be hard-core Platonists about who can give me the report on the experience from their perspective. But mostly I got to enjoy Simmea and Maia striving so hard for this strange thing that kept shifting under them, and what I do like that it was like is the kind of utopian commune experiment that 19th-century America was chock full of. Um. What I do like to read about. Because I would not live on one for love nor money. Really: no. Really really: no.

One of my consistent complaints about fantastic fiction is that it’s hard to find books that treat the Greek gods as genuinely not very nice. This is a definite exception. The Greek gods in The Just City are not horrible brutes, but they are definitely not your pals–they take some of the worst aspects of being human and being alien, without becoming nuance-free monsters. I also enjoyed how thoroughly Socrates was rolling his eyes at people’s reactions to Plato. Also just structurally, the last sentences of the chapters are so very well done. But my favorite thing is probably the robots, actually. I like the robots quite a lot, and all the stuff around them, most of which is spoilery. More robots. Robots yay.

Please consider using our link to buy The Just City at Amazon.

Combination post due to travel at the end of last month.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs. This is some of what I want in secondary world fantasy: weird post-colonialism and interesting magic things and plot plot plot, with room to grow but self-contained. Creepy and horrible in spots (that part is optional for my taste but wants flagging for those for whom it’s either a very good thing or a very bad thing).

Jim Butcher, Working for Bigfoot. Kindle. I had given up on the Harry Dresden books, and I still mostly have, but I got given this collection of three stories earlier than the part in the main sequence where I quit, and they were reasonably entertaining. They center around a set of characters who are not the main set Harry usually interacts with, so if you read the Harry Dresden books for the Molly-Mouse-and-Murphy Show (as I used to when I read them), these will disappoint dreadfully; as it was, the fact that they had self-contained entertaining-enough plot in a series I have quit on was fine with me.

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Lots of interesting bits about a part of history I don’t know much about. More influenced by the Seven Years’ War than you might think. More complicated racial history than people really want to talk about. Well worth reading.

Francesa Forrest, Pen Pal. Kindle. A kind of science fiction that is not much like much else. This is the story of a young girl on the Gulf Coast corresponding with a political dissident in Southeast Asia, how their lives twist and turn and come together, and while it takes a bit of suspension of disbelief to get them into writing letters in the first place, the story is well enough told and interesting enough in its details of two slightly-future cultures that it was worth the leap it took to get there. Recommended.

Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History. (Now a decade old.) Another piece of history I did not have as much of as I felt I should. Gott succumbs a bit to the tendency to think of his own subject as the most central and interesting of all things, which only historians of the Seven Years’ War should do, and some of his explanations are less convincing than they could be with some poking, but in general Cuban histories are not long on the ground in this part of the world, so still worth having. (Also, etymology of “buccaneer”! So thanks, that guy.)

T. H. Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and Genesis. Kindle. An essay continuing to hone my sense of Huxley’s voice for future fantasy projects. Not about Max.

Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Kindle. (Usually I don’t talk about the short fiction I read, but when I read it as an ebook on Kindle, it gets counted as an ebook, so here we are.) Brief, engaging tale of Mars and exploration and the passage of time. Recommended.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword. More space operas should be about tea. The small-scale focus of this compared to the first one in its series was welcome to me–I’m glad that Leckie is willing to demonstrate range. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door. Reread. One of the books I imprinted on at a very young age. I hadn’t gone back to it in awhile, and I notice a different set of things each time–how she was developing how she wanted to handle the twins, this time, and how Calvin and Meg’s knowing/not knowing each other doesn’t really quite work for me in the context of A Wrinkle in Time–but mostly I just like the focus on the work of love and loving people for the unlovable people they are.

Garth Nix, Clariel. I was looking forward to this, and I didn’t really enjoy it much. The various characters’ idiocy was not unbelievable by any stretch, but one spends enough of one’s own life saying, “God, what an idiot,” without wanting to spend books that way too. And the titular character’s arc was…um. Well, let’s say that if this was not in a series I liked, I would be doing even more metaphorical wall-flinging than I was, and I would be happy to discuss it on email with anyone who doesn’t mind spoilers.

Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon. African-setting first contact SF. I love first contact stories, and this one was good fun and chewy and interesting with its different assumptions and touchstones. Being my favorite Okorafor book would be a high bar to clear, but this is still a good one.

Luke Pearson, Hildafolk. The first of the Hilda books, paperback and less substantial than the others but with the same art style and ideals. The kind of lovely setting where the strange is taken for granted and introversion has a place. I like these very much.

Colin Powell and Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey. Grandpa’s. In retrospect, this simultaneously was positioning Powell for a presidential run and contained the reasons why he would not be a viable candidate. Mostly interesting, with flashes of totally appalling.

Jose Saramago, Journey to Portugal. This advertised itself as being history, legends, and travel guide. Ha. It was a highly literary-ized travel guide, with Saramago referring to himself in the vague third person constantly, and history and legends were scarce on the ground. What they really meant by that blurb is that it was not the sort of travel guide that would tell you where you could get good cod balls in Lisbon on bank holidays or what the best museum deals for children under ten were. Which: fair enough, except that histories and legends of Portugal are hard to come by, so I was quite frustrated by this book.

Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains. Kindle. A contemporary novel at its time. A young woman is recovering from grief and loss after the First World War, returning finally to her beloved Swiss vacation home. The ending plot is very predictable, though not upsetting for that, but for whatever reason this is not a setup/period/situation we see much of in books that get recommended into the present day as classics, particularly in its effects on young women’s lives. Engagingly written, interesting stuff.

Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru. Not a good first book on the topic, because it focuses on the provinces and periphery, but that’s an interesting space to have filled all the same.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Gold Bat. Kindle. One of the school stories, not particularly outstanding among the school stories but a reasonably entertaining thing to read when exhausted in airports and doctor’s offices, which is where/when I read it.

Tobias Wolff, ed., Writers Harvest 3. Reread. This was a gift, years back, when my extended family discovered that I wrote short stories and were pretty surprised by it. It’s a random book of literary short stories, and there was not one that caught my interest for character, situation, or even language. Frankly the language all seemed very pat and stilted. I had been keeping it as a memento of that milestone in my life, starting to be published as a short story writer, but I’m far enough along that I don’t really need that, I can just say, eh, bunch of slice-of-life stories, not really doing it for me, and move on.

Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War. Wright was embedded with a unit going into Iraq, and like many embedded reporters, he ended up buying into some of that unit’s assumptions without many apparent questions. For example, he regurgitated the internal explanation of racial dynamics and composition without a murmur, without analyzing how some of the training exercises described might have a differential effect on different groups of people going through them, and not because one group was inherently better suited for the job or was better trained for the actual job. It’s interesting to read the up-close accounts of modern warfare, but it’s troubling that there seems to be an insistence on splitting them into the people who, like Evan Wright, are willing to be mouthpieces for their subjects, and those who are active opponents of the US military as an entire system, with a complete elision of the many potential nuanced positions in between.

Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion. Mostly Turkmenistan and the bits just around it. If you’re trying to fill in early Turkmen history, here’s a start but not a lot of detail/depth.

Daryl Gregory, Afterparty. Near-future SF with designer drugs and a lot of discussion about neurology and religion/atheism. The “party” aspect of the title is not very present in the book–there’s a lot more running around trying to control one’s mental health under the influence of unknown newly engineered substances and also not get killed by various groups.

Ilyon, Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea. Brief tales, good background in an area that’s difficult to find in English. One of the worst copy-editing jobs I’ve ever encountered, though.

Carolyn Johnston, Voices of Cherokee Women. Quite often I say of the works of nonfiction I discuss here, “Does what it says on the tin.” This is the opposite. It is substantially not the voices of Cherokee women. It is mostly the voices of white men, sometimes the voices of white women, and only a small percentage the voices of Cherokee women. Nor are the passages quoted from white people about the Cherokee people particularly well-focused on the women’s roles or experiences. My friends who bought me this as a present were doing a very good thing, because I would have loved a book that actually was Cherokee women’s perspective. This is not it. It’s disjointed, and there’s no particular reason you should read it.

Laurie R. King, With Child. Another mystery in the Kate Martinelli series. I wouldn’t start here–a lot of the emotional resonance is dependent upon already knowing who these characters are and how they relate to each other, and it’s very much a characterization book rather than a pure mystery. A good installment in that series, though.

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem. Discussed elsewhere.

Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. There were all sorts of chewy little details in this book–things that make utter sense in context once you come to them, but are just not the way history is usually presented in our current context. For example, in the introductory section about WWI, there was a bit where two young women shared a comforting needle of morphine on the night when a young man they cared about was shipped out to the trenches in France. Not the standard view of the young ladies in their victory bodices, and another piece of the lead-in to how the Roaring Twenties became the Roaring Twenties. There were some weird quirks in this book, though–for example, Mackrell’s refusal to call Emerald Cunard “Emerald,” insisting on “Maud” when very few people know her by that name and it was not the one she chose–and it fell apart in the last section, when Mackrell seemed to have forgotten that she herself had deliberately chosen to write a book about flappers. It wasn’t that she randomly selected six women of a particular age range and–oh my, who could have guessed–ended up with Zelda Fitzgerald and Tallulah Bankhead among them. It’s that she deliberately picked these women. And they’re interesting women! But then going on to generalize about the achievements of women in this age range when women in the age range she covered included serious scientists, musicians, politicians, writers, and on and on–just not as much in the flapper set–was a step too far.

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Third World. I think my favorite Finder yet. Funny and weird and wry and full of world-buildingness. A perfectly cromulent place to start, although it won’t give you everything; what Finder will?

Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy. Detailed accounts of each of the assassination attempts on Queen Victoria plus the state of her monarchy around them. An interesting angle, and while it looked like a fat tome, it was a very quick read for its size.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus Two. Another chunk of story in this post-apocalyptic graphic novel series. Definitely does not stand on its own. Go back and start with one if you want engineered warriors in major social inequality. Which you might. It sounds like you.

Brian Staveley, The Emperor’s Blades. Errrrgh. So frustrating. Two thirds of the point-of-view characters–far, far more by page count–were doing absolutely standard-issue fantasy novel things. Pseudo-Buddhist monk training in one case (although in Staveley’s favor, he does not have delusions about Buddhism being a religion of peace); military training in the other. Mostly quite, quite obvious. And the third POV was their sister the finance minister, and she got hardly any page count. She was the interesting one! She was the one who was not cut from the same cloth as dozens of others! Sigh, SIGH. I like a big fat fantasy novel from time to time, and this one was readable for that (especially if you are a sucker for training sequences, which…I am not really…but a lot of fantasy readers are), but there was the hint that it could have been so much more. Maybe the sequel will be? Maybe?

Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift. Significant overlap with earlier Peter Watts short story collection, but still enough new stuff to be worth the time.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I don’t usually note the translator of translated works I read, but in this case it’s Ken Liu, and he is himself a notable writer of science fiction. It’s one of the best works of translation I’ve ever read: the translator notes are clear, concise, and well-chosen. At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I would guess that Ken has a lot of insight into what he would want someone in China or Tanzania or Bosnia to know about his stories if they didn’t have that background, while simultaneously being able to say, “Ah, okay, here’s a place Anglo readers are going to trip.”

As for Cixin Liu’s book itself, I recommend it to hard SF readers and to people interested in China, because oh my goodness, it is so Chinese. It starts with the Cultural Revolution, and the awareness of that permeates the book so thoroughly. Even western authors who are trying to write about Chinese characters who endured that period have never managed, in my opinion, to make it so organic and integral as it is to these characters’ thought processes. It shapes all their reactions to the science fictional elements. The fact of having to rephrase “sunspots” so that they don’t have political implications is exactly the sort of grounding detail it’s hard to figure out you’ll need from a different cultural background. Of course a scientist who has had that as their life circumstance will react very differently to news of aliens, will speculate quite differently about who those aliens might be and how humans should react to them. It’s hard to get all that right from the outside. This is why we need more SF in translation.

So anyway: you have people–scientists, thinkers, mostly, celebrities, a few ordinary people–playing a game that’s helping them think through the biggest news in the world: that aliens are coming. That aliens have already interfered from afar and are about to interfere from closer up. And I don’t want to spoiler more than that. It’s fun, it’s good, you should read it. Especially if you like near-future SF or literature in translation, but especially especially if you like both.

Please consider using our link to buy The Three-Body Problem at Amazon.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, editors, Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands. I read some of the Borderlands books when I was a teenager, when I could find them in used bookstores mostly. This collection is much newer–a few years old–and features stories by a much newer set of authors as well as authors whose Borderlands stories I loved as a teenager. There is a tendency for Borderlands stories to feel quasi-autobiographical, and this works beautifully for some authors and less well for others. Catherynne M. Valente, for example, wrote a story that fits so perfectly in the Borderlands universe that one is tempted to explain it with the year she spent in Bordertown in college. Other newcomers who fit in so seamlessly that one is sure they have always been there include Amal El-Mohtar, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Janni Lee Simner; stories by Emma Bull and co-written by Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling reminded me of what I’ve always liked about this series.

Chaz Brenchley, Bitter Waters. Discussed elsewhere.

A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale. This felt a bit like an out-take, like a run-up to better work, particularly The Children’s Book. There were some goodish bits, but mostly it was a bit abstracted and none of the major characters ever really connected for me.

Jean-Pierre Courtiau, Paris: Cent Ans De Fantasmes Architecturaux Et De Projets Fous. Projets Fous: crazy projects. Yep. This is a French book of pictures and discussions of the crazy stuff people have proposed to do to Paris. Like enclosing Notre Dame in plexiglass. My standards for crazy are probably a bit high, but it was still entertaining.

Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise. The middle of the three books of the Craft in terms of publication order, the first chronologically. I don’t know anybody who’s started here, and I wouldn’t, but I was still glad to read it and am still looking forward to more.

Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper. A bit disappointing as Ross King books go: not a lot of nitty gritty about pigments or materials. Still reasonable if you’re looking for a discussion of what it says on the tin. Just not as all-out nerdy about How He/They Did That as King’s usual stuff.

Margaret Maron, Death of a Butterfly and Death in Blue Folders. Two in a mystery series that impinge a bit on the New York art world of their time (a few decades back). I’m generally on the lookout for a readable new mystery series right now, but this isn’t actually helpful, because the library only has one more. I found them quite readable, though, and will be glad to get to that one. Artists, organizational details, people sorting themselves out despite inauspicious beginnings sometimes.

Juhani Paasivirta, Finland and Europe: The Period of Autonomy and the International Crises, 1808-1914. Weirdly focused on newspapers and their subscribers, but okay, that’s useful to know. Also touches on pieces like how Russia wanted their new Grand Duchy not to have access to Sweden and how they attempted to cut that tie and where they succeeded and failed.

Jim Rasenberger, High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline, 1881 to the Present. A bit breathless, both about New York and about its steelworkers; my consistent mistyping of this title as “darling men” was perhaps Freudian. Also the timing of “the present” was very close on the heels of 9/11/01, so there was quite a lot of that and not a lot of the building thereafter. This is understandable–it’s an event that’s hard to overstate in the history of that skyline. But inevitably you will get a different perspective on what the work is like a few months after than a few years. Anyway, there were some startling and some head-shaking anecdotes in this. It was not ultimately very deep, but it didn’t have to be. The interviews with/profiles of steelworkers from different ethnic groups were worth the price of admission alone.

Sarah Rees Brennan, Unmade. The end of its trilogy, and for the love of Pete do not start here. I felt that it was a satisfying ending, albeit rather tied up in a bow in a couple of ways that were predictably more for its main audience than for me. If you’re worried that she won’t carry through on some of the darker aspects of the premise, though–no, there’s dark here, there’s follow-through. It’s not a downer of an ending, but it also doesn’t flinch from consequences.

Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History. Mostly the early modern period here. Pre-industrial, mostly politics, mostly powerful groups and political things rather than peasants and artisans, but I’m told one can’t have everything, and certainly one can’t fit it all in one volume.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show. Sylvia Townsend Warner never met an Aristotelian unity she gave a damn about, and this book is not going anywhere it looks like it might from the first few pages. It is a ’48er book. There are places where its attitudes about race and religion are remarkably progressive for its time, and places where that still falls short, just for a warning if you’re not up for that. But gosh. What a thing. What an odd, perfectly itself sort of thing to have, wandering around the barricades with its jewelry and its prejudices and the prejudices of other people it can see clearly. Gosh.

Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift. Short story collection that overlaps only somewhat with the one I read a few weeks back, plenty of other things to ?enjoy? ?appreciate? whatever the verb is for what one does with Peter Watts stories. Other than read. Read is a good verb.

Roger Zelazny, Unicorn Variations. There is only so much first-person asshole narrator one can have at once, and this was right up at the edge of that for me. Several bits of this are the places where Zelazny was most influenced by Hemingway, which…made me want to sit him down with several volumes of Elizabeth Gaskell until he felt better. This sort of impulse rarely ends well.

Review copy provided by author, who is an online-and-conventions friend.

So few single-author collections have a unifying element these days, or when they do, it’s because the author is a one-trick pony. This does, and Chaz is not. There is a deliberate unifying element of melancholy here–some sweet, some darker– and of male same-sex relationships of varying types. There is a lot of water here, mostly seawater, but not enough to make it feel obligatory. Not enough to hit the point of “here we go again.”

What does not unify the collection–and this is fascinating too–is setting, or genre, or a particular set of characters (though there are some character commonalities across a few). Some of the stories are very clearly in high fantasy settings. Others are what used to be called urban fantasy, before paranormal romance made that term uncertain. Others have no clear speculative element at all but are suspense or “mainstream,” character studies, relational stories. There is an assured movement from each to each, a sense that the reading protocols will be signaled so that no story will be unsatisfying but each will be uniquely and completely itself.

There is love, or not; there is loss, or not; and where there is genuine love, there is sometimes genuine grief to match, and sometimes that love is undermined and taken apart by darker revelations. I finished with the sense that Chaz could have done more of these, that this happened to be the set that he had now but that this was by no means an exhaustion of what he had to say with these themes.

Please consider using our link to buy Bitter Waters at Amazon.

Lauri Anderson, Children of the Kalevala: Contemporary American Finns Relive the Timeless Tales of the Kalevala. This…well, the connections to the Kalevala are less intense than a person might hope, if a person is a Kalevala groupie. On the other hand, there are a few things that are…pretty much on the nose, if you know Yoopers. And if you don’t know Yoopers and would like to, I can’t really come up with a better reference.

David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal. Too concise. I thought of leaving my commentary at that, because it amused me, but there really were some interesting bits–the windmill whistles, the women in North Portugal in 1846 revolting two years before the rest of Europe. I’m just glad we have another, less concise history of Portugal sitting around, because they’re not easy to come by, and this one skimmed many of the figures for whom I wanted a history of Portugal in the first place.

Steven Brust, Hawk. Discussed elsewhere.

A. S. Byatt, Sugar and Other Stories and The Matisse Stories. These are pretty patchy. The last story in the latter volume is tone-deaf on the topic of anorexia and really should be avoided, not just by people who find that topic personally difficult, but by people who are looking for interesting, well-written stories–this is a case where “trigger warning” is less applicable than “not worth being triggered by,” for those who are in that circumstance. Some of the others are differing degrees of charming and interesting, but on the whole Byatt’s stronger short stories are elsewhere.

Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, eds., War Stories. A fairly uniform type of war story despite the variations in trappings. Three stand-outs in high quality, in different sections, so that was pleasing: Susan Jane Bigelow’s “The Radio,” Yoon Ha Lee’s “Warhosts,” and Karin Lowachee’s “Enemy States.”

Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves. I am interested in neurological conditions, and I have seen them interestingly discussed in memoir form (Oliver Sacks, basically). This…is not that. This is very short, is what can be said for it. There are some good sentences in it. Meh. MEH.

Laurie R. King, A Grave Talent. Chaz reminded me that Laurie R. King exists and also that someone (Liza?) gave me a book in her non-Holmes series that I found quite readable lo these many moons ago, so I went to find another from the library. This one is a little sad from this historical vantage, because it’s so carefully working the reader up to being willing to read about a protagonist who is in a lesbian relationship (not gendering the protag’s partner, Lee, for half the book), and from here it’s like, oh, honey, we’re willing! I promise, just tell us about the murder she solves with the brilliant painter at the heart of it, her family life is fine, really. It’ll be interesting to see how much of this kind of easing the reader in King felt needed doing as the series went on, since this type of mystery series is sort of meant to be picked up at random, and yet history was marching on even as she has been writing them.

Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. I do like how Ross King talks about the details of doing things. In this case there are all sorts of bits and pieces about frescoes, what can go wrong with them, what can make them crumble and molder and generally misbehave, short-term and long-, what made for a more prestigious fresco painter, how it all worked. I like that sort of thing very much, and he does it well. He does it so well, in fact, that I went to my library list to go request another of his books, having been reminded of how much I liked this one.

William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone, 1932-1940. Well. There was plenty of Winston Churchill in this, which means plenty of entertaining anecdote, plenty of quip and plenty of perfect zinger, many a line well growled or intoned, many a jaw-dropping upper-class English situation. But I had to put the book down several times not only because it is such a brick that it hurt my neck to read it, but also because William Manchester is such a hideous jerk that he found all sorts of opportunities to make me gasp at how awful, how very very awful he was. And note: this is a bit like the Heinlein bio in that Winston Churchill was not a perfect sweet little angel who could never have offended a soul, and yet his biographer! His biographer could not just leave it at the places where his subject was actually offensive! No no no no! He had to do things like saying staggeringly offensive things about German war widows who were driven to prostitution to survive, repeating the German slander about the Polish cavalry (pop quiz: is it the same to be cornered and slaughtered when you are with your horses as to be so stupid as to think your horses will be great against tanks?), sympathizing with the Russians for of course invading Finland I mean who wouldn’t, and comparing Norway to–I am not kidding–a woman who was available to everyone once she’d been raped. (Note: using a mythological reference for that last comparison does not actually make it less offensive THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT.) And as in the Heinlein bio, it is done gratuitously. Certainly, a biography of Churchill of this period will require some sense of what’s going on in the war (or, more broadly, in politics at the time–but really, 1932-1940, politics at the time mostly means the war). But Manchester really does a terrible job of staying focused on Churchill. He wanders off and does a crappy history of this era of WWII instead, complete with tons of unsubstantiated Manchester opinions and random placements of his soapbox. Whenever he returns to Churchill, it’s fascinating and well worth reading, and I expect I will want to read the rest; there’s a reason I stuck with this one through 700 pages of YOU SAID WHAT ABOUT INVADING FINLAND. I just…will want to be well-braced before I take up with any further volume. Uff da. Wow.

George O’Connor, Olympians: Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, Olympians: Athena, Grey-Eyed Goddess, Olympians: Hades, Lord of the Dead, Olympians: Hera, The Goddess and Her Glory, Olympians: Poseidon, Earth-Shaker, and Olympians: Zeus, King of the Gods. Discussed elsewhere.

Luke Pearson, Hilda and the Black Hound. Not quite as good as the giant one, but still a fun children’s book/comic with nifty art and solid relations between the humans and the spirit creatures of their area. Will keep reading this series and recommending to small people of my acquaintance.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus One. Graphic novel. An interesting beginning to a post-apocalyptic setting, but very much only the beginning, so if you want more than set-up, wait around a few more volumes. Already starting to explore loyalty questions, though, so–yeah, it’s a Rucka, says so on the spine.

Alison Sinclair, Breakpoint: Nereis. A lovely short-ish novel of re-contact that has several elements we talk about wanting to see more of–disabled characters with depth and agency, among other major things. I like re-contact novels (lost colony, human divergence, themes like that) and would like to see more of them, particularly from Alison, but others too.

Jonathan Spence, Treason by the Book. An interesting short study of alleged treason in eighteenth century China. One of the things that I felt was worth noting is that the people who were trying to demonstrate their own innocence had very modern concepts of how to go about proving it–so the whole “they didn’t think of it the same way as we do” really doesn’t apply to the entirety of the system, just the people who were doing the prosecuting/persecuting. And I think that whether that’s true relies on a carefully selected value of “we,” because if you just mean modern people, there’s an alarming percentage of “us” who do go with “some jerk mumbled about it, must be true, off with his head.”

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

So first things first: the direct, word for word, Burn Notice pastiche does not last more than about a page and a half, if you open this book and are worried. If you haven’t watched Burn Notice, it’s a perfectly sensible way to reintroduce the events of the series, a sort of Where We Are And Where We’re Going. If you have watched all of Burn Notice, however…there’s this moment of…”Oh, Steve, did you really want to associate your long-running series that does a bunch of cool stuff with a long-running series that did a bunch of cool stuff and then completely tanked its ending? You did your death-and-sarcastic-shenanigans first and better!”

But as I said, that only lasted a few pages, and then we are into the plot moving forward, really moving forward–giving Vlad progress on things he values, seeing old friends without it being a string of pointless cameos and without edging out room for new things, plotty new magic problems and a return to Vlad’s assassin roots without a return to Vlad’s assassin state of mind. There is, as one would hope for the book centered around the House of the Hawk, magic theory. There is Daymar and his (???) sense of humor. Hawk has, in short, all sorts of the things you would want it to have, and it has them in the right quick-beats moving-along setting-up-other-things sort of way.

This is clearly the latest in a long series, but you know what? It’s the one of the most recent entries I would feel best about handing people and saying, “ready set go.” They would miss a lot–who are these people? why is it such a big deal for Vlad to contact that person? why is she so terminally upset at that other person?–but y’know, sink or swim, kiddo, you want to start a series this late, you’re probably a person who’s okay with some hard knocks, and the crucial “why the heck should I care” is pretty neatly handed to you for this one. Here: care. Good. Onwards with the stabbing and the shenanigans with the improbable musical instruments.

Please consider using our link to buy Hawk at Amazon.

Review copies provided by First Second.

This box set includes the following Olympians titles: Zeus, King of the Gods, Athena, Grey-Eyed Goddess, Hera, The Goddess and Her Glory, Hades, Lord of the Dead, Poseidon, Earth Shaker, and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. It looks like they intend to keep on with the series.

These are pretty straight-up comic book retellings of Greek myths for the young adult set. There are not graphically depicted rapes on the page, but on the other hand there is a great deal less glossing over than one might fear given the “for the young adult set” label: O’Connor understands that bowdlerizing the Greek myths takes a great deal out of them and sets young adults up to make references with undercurrents that they don’t mean, so while he isn’t drawing genitalia, he is drawing implications. In the last two volumes in particular, Hermes starts to develop as a character–his volume should be a lot of fun when it comes around–and to be one of the main sources of humor, but there are others. When I see discussion questions in the back of a book intended for young people, I wince, but some of these included gems like, “Zeus’s dad tried to eat him. Has your dad ever tried to eat you?” and, “Athena turned Aracne into a spider. Was this an appropriate way to resolve conflict? What other animals might she have turned her into?”

My twelve-year-old godson came over for supper when I was in the middle of reading these, and now he is in the middle of reading them too. He devoured four of them in an hour and a half, declined ice cream in order to keep on reading them, and was disappointed when his mother said it was time to go home. (I promised that they would still be here in a fortnight when they’re over for supper again.) So far there have been complete retellings of some of the major stories and bits and pieces on the edges of others; some of the stories in one volume will get called back in another, and there seems to be a lot of room for more. The characters reflect the wide variety of skin, hair, and eye colors, and to some extent body shapes, available in humans around the Mediterranean and the regions that would have migrated there. I particularly enjoyed the sea art in Poseidon’s volume, but the variety stayed fresh and interesting, and there’s plenty of room for more–Hestia, for example, has barely been touched on in these volumes, but she is portrayed as a sort of human flame, and we’ve hardly seen Artemis and Apollo either. The human heroes get a lot of time as the gods interact with them, but O’Connor doesn’t paint himself into the corner of trying to be exhaustive about any god or myth or story, just being interesting, which is a far better job to take on.