Tag: bookses precious

A large percentage of manuscripts not yet to be publicly discussed in early July, as an odd coincidence; a very, very small percentage of books too awful to finish (or, more politely, just wrong for me).

Megan Abbott, The Fever. A literary thriller that is about a high school but does not appear to be shelved as YA, about girls getting mysteriously sick. The beginning was quite readable, and I found the ending immensely, horribly unsatisfying. If you ask yourself, “What is the most boring thing that could be the cause of all this without actually being an offensive anti-vaccination screed?,” it’s that. (The anti-vaccination stuff comes up as a reaction people have–“OMG the evil vaccinations must have caused this”–but gets shot down.) Not at all recommended.

A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Immersive and compelling. The people who complain that nothing happens in literary fiction are clearly reading the wrong literary fiction, because Byatt is impeccably literary, and quite a lot happens in this book. I don’t guarantee that those same people will like it, and I didn’t entirely find the interwoven fragments successful in their eventual context. But really, the “I don’t like literary fiction, nothing happens in it” complaint is one of those ritualized complaints that people have discovered they are allowed to make, not something that bears resemblance to an actual Byatt novel.

Ariel Cohn and Aron Nels Steinke, The Zoo Box. Discussed elsewhere. Of a length that I would not usually have discussed at all, except that it was sent to me as a review book.

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time. Not, as someone suggested, the grimdark version of The Last Hot Time, but in fact a history of the Dust Bowl for white and a few Native American Oklahomans. I already knew quite a bit about the subject, and yet this was crammed with interesting tidbits and interviews, definitely worth the time. I’m still not sure how it got into the references for a different Depression-era project completely, but it was interesting enough that I’m not upset at the time spent.

Gary Kaunonen, Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America in Michigan’s Copper Country. Detailed work on how the Finns settled in and built their part of the copper mining labor movement in Michigan, with some attention to Minnesota as well. Lots of useful detail, even more tantalizing stuff around the edges. A little more intersectionality would have held Kaunonen, because he had a few complete misses, like thinking that office work was traditional for women in 1907. (The women who had to fight for those jobs at that time would laugh like a drain to hear it–but in retrospect, so many of them were successful that they now look traditional.) But most of the book was really solid and quite useful to me.

Ian Lendler and Zack Giallongo, Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Macbeth. Discussed elsewhere.

Alan Palmer, Northern Shores: A History of the Baltic Sea and Its Peoples. Okay, so first, the title of this book is a lie. It is not even remotely a “people’s” history, it is a history of who was king or tsar or very, very occasionally prime minister in the countries around the Baltic. And second, it was utter crap at that, because Alan Palmer had the world’s biggest set of sexist blinders on, so he acted like we didn’t know Christina Gyllenstierna’s name, referring to her only as Sten Sture the Younger’s widow, when in fact she was a person, a known person, a quite interesting person, held Stockholm against four months of siege and was elected king for that period (yes, kong, that was the word, not drottning, queen, that’s something different). And if you’re going to do a history of the Baltic that isn’t focused on mercantile issues, then you’re kind of an idiot and missing out on juicy bits at least don’t close your eyes to the crazy cool stuff that the noble orders are doing just because it doesn’t fall into your preconceived notions of how kingship, noble orders, and–I will actually go all the way here: history. Because it doesn’t fall into your preconceived notion of how history works. Nor is Sweden the only issue here–Jagiella down in Poland was just as scare-quoted and sneered at by this Palmer person who doesn’t seem to have the faintest notion that the English Victorians made up the gender roles he thinks the Middle Ages and Renaissance had, and not all of the English Victorians signed on for them, even, so you can’t go imposing them on Gyllenstiernas and Totts and the like, they didn’t know them, they had no idea what you would later show up and be on about–yes, they had gender roles, certainly, just not the ones he thinks. And Christina Gyllenstierna wasn’t important because she was the widow of one of the Stures, one of the Stures married her because she was important, for the love of Mike; he wouldn’t have had a wife who simpered while Stockholm burned, it wasn’t how they made matches then, certainly not in Scandinavia. This is just a narrow slice of what I think of this book, substantially edited for public consumption. But seriously, don’t get this book. It’s like one of the bad Kalevala translations, with all the marrow sucked out and the rhyme scheme left in. (This book does not actually rhyme. Sometimes the internet is bad at analogy, so I feel I have to say.)

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A little bit iffy at math: you don’t get to average all the things he thinks you can, just on a “math doesn’t always work that way” level. Mostly okay with math, though. Considerably iffier with literary criticism and social criticism, hoo boy. Quentin Tarantino: not a reliable source for life in the antebellum American South. The US: considerably endowed with nostalgia for the immediate post-WWII period. And other howlers. Still an interesting book, and not a slow read considering what it was trying to do. But some pretty gaping holes in his attempts at examples.

Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin, Battling Boy: The Rise of Aurora West. Discussed elsewhere.

Hannu Rajaniemi, The Causal Angel. Discussed elsewhere.

Christie Yant, ed., Lightspeed: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue. I make a policy of not reviewing books I appear in, and I have an essay in this. Nonetheless: it exists, and I read it, and you can read it too.

Review copy provided by First Second.

One of the hard parts about picking out picture books from a catalog or online is that some of the crucial information is how the text will read, and that’s very difficult to tell from the illustrations. Some books with clearly cute or gorgeous illustrations have stilted text that sounds like it was written by someone who hasn’t yet been taught how contractions work.

This is one of those.

The premise is also not really enough for the size of book they’ve got. It’s a box of animals in the attic! The animals get out and go to their own zoo where humans are on display! They chase the kids and jump back in their box for no reason! So…okay then, I guess!

Most kids–and most childless people who have kids’ books around–have books like this in their collection, if they have a big enough book collection. This is not an outstandingly terrible example. It’s not offensive. It’s just sort of a low-budget Jumanji with less plot, less purpose, and far worse illustrations. Might as well go for Jumanji if you want a one of those.

Review copy provided by First Second.

This comes out in September, but I read it today, so here we are. It’s the story of a young girl who is learning the ropes of the superhero trade–the Science Hero trade, they call it–from her father, while trying to figure out what role the imaginary friend of her preschool years had in her mother’s death. Aurora is eager for everything: eager to fight monsters, eager to get her own jet pack, eager to find out what really happened to Rosetta West.

And actually I think that’s where it didn’t grab me as well as it could have: Aurora didn’t have that much to her beyond that eagerness. She didn’t have a superhero name, but the right visor would have made her a very keen Bright Eyes. Occasionally people nickname her Roar, but despite the proximity to her name, it’s just…not that appropriate. It’s not appropriate directly, and it’s not appropriate like calling a big man Tiny. It’s just…sort of there. Maybe she’ll grow into her Roar? This wasn’t a tedious read, and it didn’t take long. There were lots of monsters for Aurora to stun and her father to slay, so if that’s your thing, come on ahead. If they send me another in this series, I will be glad to read it. Just not as excited as I’d hoped to be.

Review copy provided by Tor.

This is the sequel to The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince, and I recommend that you start with them. You might be able to pick up what qupting is and what the gogols are and all the other elements of Rajaniemi’s world from context, but I think it would be pretty rough going, honestly; these are pretty idea-dense books to begin with, and it’s probably better to start with Jean le Flambeur at his own beginning.

I do find that sometimes I pick up a book and am reminded immediately of what was initially charming in the series, and this was one of those. Jean’s early interactions, trying to keep juggling a great many flaming torches to find Mieli and fix everything and keep a young Matjek happy, made me smile, went very quickly, made me want very much to keep reading. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the ending, and there was a Moomin along the way. (I can be bribed with Moomins. I can even be coaxed past a very brief and virtual zombie appearance with Moomins. Especially NOT SIMULTANEOUSLY.) But it was the beginning of the book that made me say: ah, yes. This is why I was happy to pick this series up and dive into it.

So: there is zooming around the solar system, there is forming and reforming oneself and one’s environment, there is working around what one thought one knew. There are reversals and betrayals and coming back for people and lots and lots of zoku jewels. There are iterations and considerations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It has, in short, the things that one has been looking for in one of these books. And if you haven’t been looking for one of these books, go back and start. They’re nerdy good fun, and they’re not very long. And now there are three of them.

Diane Ackerman, Animal Sense. I am now afraid to reread Diane Ackerman’s poems for adults, since this was for children and was so bad–flames on the side of my face–that I am seriously afraid that I was badly, badly wrong about what she wrote as poetry for adults and will go back and read it with horror. And I’m not sure if that would be worse or if it would be worse if she believes that things don’t have to be good if they’re for kids. I suppose there’s always the alternative that she thinks that “good for kids” is this hideous twee category with the scansion of a badly fitting boot and didacticism that isn’t even right. I just. Sorry, I’m just going to have my Madeline Kahn moment with that YouTube clip up there. Aaaaagh. “I know, I’ll have the library get me a book of children’s poems from a poet I like while I’m sick aaaah what is this aaaaah.” When my godson Rob was two he liked calamari rings, and someone accidentally put the tentacles on his plate. And he got to that part of his plate and recoiled in horror and intoned, “I–I–I DON’T YIKE DIS” from somewhere deep in his two-year-old soul. The depth of his offense was much more than one might think proportional from an outside perspective. And that is where I am with this book somehow. I love the tentacles. Maybe you will like these tentacles. But I am very glad I did not buy this for a small person in my life on the strength of author name.

Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising. A very satisfying ending to this trilogy, but I think not at all satisfying if you started here–lots of emotional weight from earlier events. There was a bit of the trick to the ending that made me kind of scrinch up my nose, but I was overall so pleased with the fast, fun reading experience that I didn’t, in general mind, and will be pleased to look for what Bardugo does next. Go start at the beginning for the weird Russian-esque YA fantasy stuff.

Andrea Barrett, Lucid Stars. A novel following the women of one American mid-century family, with a focus on astronomy that never gets particularly passionate or technical–an interesting angle, since usually somebody in that kind of novel actually gets really quite good at astronomy. It walks a fine line of almost getting compassion for a particular kind of depression right, but interested readers should go into it forewarned that Barrett is a little iffy on the topic of weight and dress sizes–she gets ill-advisedly specific about how big the character who is supposed to be really quite big is, and if it made my eyebrows do the tango with my hairline, I imagine it would be quite a bit worse for some of you. She’s also iffy on the line between “this character finds a healthier place for herself to be in all areas of her life that happens to be at a smaller though still not thin weight” and…worse than that really. So: with caveats, this book. With definite caveats.

Jianing Chen, The Core of Chinese Classical Fiction. Short bits and excerpts from lots of pieces of Chinese classics throughout the ages. Alec lent me this as part of our discussion about the range of Chinese ghost stories, but it also has bits of non-ghost-related Chinese classics. A good jumping-off place if you want to go further, probably not a good place to stop and say, “Oh good, now I know about Chinese lit, the end.”

Tim Cooper, The Reader: War for the Oaks. I make a policy of not writing reviews of things I’m in, and I have an essay in this (as well as being in some of the photos). But it’s here, the thing that I posted about Kickstarting. It can now be ordered and read as an actual book, including my bit, and I did read it as one.

Pamela Dean, The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim of the Dragon. Rereads. I am often very stern with myself about rereads. “You can’t just reread the same things all the time!” I tell myself sternly. And then when I was sick in bed, after some days of being too sick to read when I could read again, what I really wanted to read was the Secret Country trilogy, and I was really quite sick, so I said okay, let’s do that. And then when I went to put it in my booklog when all was said and done, it had been nearly a decade since I’d reread them. So I think the moral of the story is that I should be somewhat less stern with myself. Also, the Secret Country books make me happy in my heart and are totally where I left them, untouched by the Suck Fairy, hurrah, and I love everybody. Someone–maybe even Pamela?–was saying how much Patrick was their favorite, and Patrick is not my favorite because I don’t have a favorite because I love all the main people. All of them.

Samuel Delany, Driftglass. Reread. I am pleased that in the years since I read this, it’s looking a lot more influential on the short fiction being published in the field, although I can’t say how much of that is direct. It was less of a “wow” because of that than it was the first few times reading it, and I think that’s a good thing.

A.M. Dellamonica, Child of a Hidden Sea. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. What a good title for the shiny and reflective stories herein. Particularly the opening one made me glad I randomly returned to this collection.

Julia Mary Gibson, Copper Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

Benedict Jacka, Fated. Someone–Rose? someone who is perhaps Rose?–recommended this when I was less than satisfied with the Paul Cornell book I had just read, and that someone, whether or not it was Rose, was correct to do so. It is a fun urban fantasy of the sorta-noir-but-not-depressingly-noir school of urban fantasy-ing–set in London, as several of them are, but it did not feel repetitive with Aaronovitch, Carey, or Cornell–and I will be glad to get the sequel from the library. It goes well in that set and did not annoy me. Hurrah.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium, and Lord of Emperors. Rereads. The Lions of Al-Rassan remains the one true GGK book, for my money. I read it and wondered whether everyone else also thinks that he wrote one of the three religions in it to be the one that is obviously correct, but the people I’ve consulted so far (my mom and Alec) are not really the people one would want to consult to get a viewpoint that is, one might say, most distant from mine. So please chime in, if you’ve read this book: the Kindath, the Asharites, the Jaddites? Then I reread the Sarantine Mosaic books, and if there is direct observed evidence of the truth of any religion in this world, it is none of those three. Huh. Well, I stick by my impression anyway. Also: while the suck fairy had not visited Lions and in fact I liked the Sarantine Mosaic books better this time around (having remembered them in the context of comparing them directly to Lions, which would leave many things unsatisfying), I had not remembered the amount of sexual violence implicit in any of them. I don’t think it was badly handled, but I do think it’s indicative of how much more weary I am of feeling battered by it all, even in the books I love.

Walt Kelly, Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Yonder: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1. This was in some ways a Christmas present from both my grandparents, despite the fact that Grandpa died and was not technically around to consult on the present. I remain convinced–I become even more convinced–that Pogo is mostly one of those things you had to be there for. There were three or four strips out of this collection that made me laugh and laugh, and the rest made me say, “Ah, I see, that was certainly…a comic strip, yes, I have read comic strips, and that was definitely one.” Even when I was very clear what the topical references were, I just tend not to find them particularly funny. But it was an interesting insight into Things Grandpa Liked, so okay then.

Seanan McGuire, Midnight Blue-Light Special. Second in its series, and I can’t believe that was still the same month. This is why I do fortnight posts instead of month posts, aughhhh. Anyway, this book establishes that while the InCryptid books are a series, they will not be a “sitcom reset, everything back to normal” style series–there are major changes for Verity throughout. This makes it more fun, for me at least. While on the Fourth Street writers’ seminar with Seanan I got promised werewolf rabies if I stick with this series, complete with Seanan actually getting to dissect rabid brains as research. This is a pretty good promise to dangle in front of a Mris, I have to say, and “start with unusual elements like the waheela, so that when you move on to werewolves, readers trust that you will do something unusual and interesting with them” is really quite good writing advice; people should take it to heart.

Robin McKinley, Sunshine and The Hero and the Crown. Rereads. More of my sick in bed “you can’t always reread the same things!” rereads. The thing that struck me about The Hero and the Crown was how very, very much younger Aerin was than anyone else in the book–in fact how completely inappropriate some of these people’s behavior was considering the age gap. “We are both seven years old and still in the process of being civilized” is a very different set of behaviors from “I am seven and you are fourteen and could have reasonably been considered a responsible person to be put in charge of me, except that you are apparently an abusive psychopath.” I…am not entirely sure what was going on there. When I was seven, I read it as “vaguely older” not “holy crap what is wrong with this entire culture.” I still like the bits where Aerin experiments and figures out how to slay dragons. But the people who think that Deerskin is McKinley’s important book about abuse…should really go back and reread The Hero and the Crown, because it is not just about injury and recovery, it is also all about abuse and complicity. As for Sunshine, I did a Sunshine rant on my attention-direction panel at Fourth Street. It’s not that I don’t like it on the reread. I do! I still enjoyed it very much. But just as we acknowledge that Santa Claus only happens if we buy trinkets for each other’s stockings, we need to acknowledge that Robin McKinley does not write direct sequels. She just doesn’t. Her publisher claims that the other half of her pegasus book is coming out this year, but that’s the one where she literally wrote half a story rather than a whole story. So all the threads that she left dangling in Sunshine…with Rae’s father and grandmother and whether they are dead and if not where the hell they are…with Rae’s badass boyfriend and his crazy wizard tattoos and how it is that he can control so many of them and why she doesn’t ask for his damn help when they are having the throwdown…with all the things. All the things that she put in that book that go beyond “hey this might be cool” and well into “no really, this is a plot thread; I’m just going to leave it here.” Those things are going to keep dangling for the rest of our lives. And we just need to cope with that. Because this is all we are likely to get, if statistics bear out. Also, when we first got Sunshine, it was the first in the “Robin McKinley’s prose rambles” books, and it was charming because Rae was a charming narrator, and she still is. But now I look at it being followed by Dragonhaven, Chalice, Pegasus, and Shadows, and it starts to look like a turning point in her work. Sunshine is the pivot where things stop being dense and start being tangly. And it is a tangle I love, but it looks to me like a crucial turn.

William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue With His Century: Vol. II: The Man Who Learned Better, 1948-1988. Discussed elsewhere.

Harold B. Segel, Renaissance Culture in Poland: The Rise of Humanism, 1470-1543. A fascinating look at Polish participation in Latin culture before the rise of the vernacular, with various interactions with what we would now call Italy and Germany. A reminder that not only was Copernicus Polish, he did not exist in a Polish cultural vacuum.

Clete Barrett Smith, Aliens in Disguise. Finishing up a trilogy of children’s SF. Probably better for its target age audience but still silly fun with lots of light-hearted aliens and the kids taking charge of situations that very much need it.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer. Kindle. An Englishwoman who has married noble German, pre-wars, talks about a summer of not having company, and dealing with her children and her garden. This sounds dull but in fact is gentle and warm instead. And short; the shortness probably helps.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes. Oh how I loved this book. It gets described as the story of a witch, but she is a witch in very classical deal-with-Satan terms, and the thing that she makes a deal with Satan for is very early twentieth century introvert upper-middle. Oh so lovely. Highly, highly recommended.

Richard Zimler, The Warsaw Anagrams. A completely wrenching mystery novel about the Warsaw ghetto of WWII and murders therein. Vivid and well-done and detailed, and you will probably want to pick your time to read it very carefully if you can bear to read it at all. Oof.

Review copy provided by Tor.

I love portal fantasy. Drop somebody through from our world to a different world, and I’m pretty much with you. Cheesy, corny, whatever other State Fair food adjective you like: sure, whatever, don’t care, I’m there. Add to that the fact that I’ve read and enjoyed Dellamonica’s work before, and I was on board for this book from the start.

Which is a good thing, because I will warn you: I found the start pretty rocky. Compared to the rest of the book, the prose is a bit choppy, and I took awhile to care about the character we were actually spending time with (as opposed to the mentioned backstory characters, who seemed frankly more interesting–and did show up later). Sophie’s transportation to the alternate world lands her in the water, and that level of disorientation is difficult to show–especially when you’re trying to throw preceding backstory at the reader. I recommend perseverance, because things improve swiftly.

The premise: Sophie loves her adoptive family like crazy, but she’s still curious about her birth family. When she goes looking, things get wild very very quickly. There’s an angry birth mother who wants nothing to do with her, there’s an aunt who’s slightly more reasonable, there are people attacking the aunt, there’s transit to a watery world of ships and weird magic tech and different species of bug and bird and sea critter, with variable languages and national customs…and the variable languages and national customs matter. A lot. If you’ve ever complained about books where it was raining on such-and-such an entire planet, Dellamonica has your back.

And when you get a whole new birth family, fighting with itself and from more than one culture, you get a whole new set of enemies, free of charge, home grown just for you! Sophie at least gets to go home and get some of her gear and her (adopted) brother Bram to help her out, but mostly she wins through by her wits and her mindset, and the said mindset involves things like collecting and observing evidence. So really, I’m very glad I kept on through the first chapter, because that’s catnip for me. I hope there’s more. I hope there’s lots more. There’s room for it.

Review copy provided by Starscape Books.

Michigan in 1906 is a pretty easy sell for a YA fantasy setting for me, and I have a feeling it might be for several of you, too. Violet Blake is 12 years old, and her mother and little brother have left her alone with her taciturn cherry-farming father. The small town in which they live has a spiffy resort hotel that has drawn a newfangled photographer–a newfangled lady photographer–and Violet gets to be her assistant.

All this is because of–maybe because of?–a copper hand Violet finds that grants wishes. And is ancient and Indian, but that’s okay, because so is Violet. (Well. Not ancient. Just Indian.) Through her mother’s side of the family. And all the Indian/Native American characters care about nature, in a vague and unspecified way, and….

Look, this book is very readable. It’s fun to read, and there are some pretty good bits, particularly as Violet figures out that intentions don’t actually count for all that much compared to what you actually do–especially when you have no excuse for not following through with real actions. But I really felt like Gibson leaned pretty heavily on her own intentions when it came to the Native American characters in the book. They were very much a string of tropes about Caring About the Environment without a lot of real impact to that. There wasn’t a lot of depth to the old-time photography, or the ecology, or the First Nations tribe portrayed, or any of the elements that the marketing copy touted. I’m having a hard time finding a balance of how to talk about this book, because there were real consequences for Violet’s actions, and that was good, and I sat down and read it without much pause, so really there was that type of appeal. On the other hand, a bit shallow in handling of speculative and cultural elements. Fun, readable, but not amazing. Would like to see whether Gibson goes deeper with later work or whether this is what she was aiming for.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

You would think that Robert Heinlein was a writer who could, if he chose, offend plenty of people all on his own without any help. But he has not been left to his own post mortem devices in this! Oh no! No, he has the assistance of William H. Patterson, Jr., to make sure that no stone is left unturned if it might have creeping, crawling things under it that represent stomach-turning levels of ignorance to pass off on the reading public as somehow relevant to the first SFWA Grand Master’s career.

Oh, sorry, maybe I should start this review more straightforwardly: I did not like and do not recommend this book.

Let’s go with the paragraph that brought actual tears of rage to my eyes:

They [the Heinleins] had both fallen in love with the northern countries on their earlier trips, but Finland (which does not consider itself to be “Scandinavian”) was special even among them, with a national character of fierce resoluteness–sisu–that precisely suited their mood on this occasion. The Suomic “do what must be done” was the only attitude that a free people could possibly take, living next door to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states–Latvia, estonia, Lithuania–did not have it, and they had been eaten up by the USSR.

That last piece of toxically inaccurate drivel, friends, has no footnote. No. Footnote. That is not Robert Heinlein talking in any sense. That is William Patterson slandering the people of the Baltic states–using Finland to do it, no less!–on his own hook. For fun. Because it suits his own political agenda to declare, ex cathedra, that if only they had wanted it badly enough, the facts of geography and political support of the 1940s would have been different for those small countries. He knows less than nothing about the Singing Revolution. Nothing about the resisters who went to the camps or who lived in the forests resisting Soviet rule for years and in some amazing cases decades. He knows nothing about what the west did on behalf of Finland–“brave little Finland”–that it never once considered doing for any of the Baltics. No. William Patterson was an American of the Baby Boom generation who decided that what a biography of Robert Heinlein most needed–what people reading about Robert Heinlein most needed–was to have lies about these people just tossed into their reading material for giggles. Because, you know, most people who pick up biographies of mid-century science fiction writers read reams about the history of the Baltic region and can easily have this kind of blatant falsehood countered rather than lodged in the back of their brain as the truth about the people of this region.

Most of my regular readers know that I am a serious Finnophile. I find it all the more offensive to have Finland used as a club on other countries that did not have the advantages of geography and political support. This is just wrong. I used up all my obscenities on this yesterday when I was reading, and believe me, I used many. Today I’m left drained. Today I can just say: this is so very wrong.

I wish that was only one thing. I wish that was the only time that the staggering arrogance of Patterson’s ignorance made itself known in this volume. But alas. If I was the sort to write in books, the single most common thing I would have written in the margins of this one would have been, “Who asked you?” When Patterson was reporting that Heinlein decided to vote for Eisenhower in 1956, he notes, “He was not a Republican, but he voted for Eisenhower–probably the least harmful choice that year.” Who asked you? Seriously, who needed this bozo to be patting his biographical subject on the back at every turn? And on what grounds? What research did he do other than reading Robert A. Heinlein on the subject? Here’s another of Patterson’s un-footnoted long-winded political digressions:

Perhaps there had been embedded in Roosevelt’s New Deal the seeds of this current leftism that was softening the brains of otherwise bright and well-intentioned people, who seemed not to realize that they had conceded important intellectual and moral ground to that stunted and malign child of socialism, as Wells had called Lenin’s and Stalin’s Communism. America’s leftism now had no room for that strain of American progressive optimism and benevolent patriotism that married love of country to love of the great ideals of the Founders, that went back to the last century, through Emerson and back even to that old Puritan thunderer Jonathan Edwards.

This is notable because 1) again, this is all Patterson, not a word of it Heinlein; 2) Heinlein was himself a New Deal Democrat; 3) citation, please? What exactly makes Patterson an expert of any kind on the state of the American left or the Democratic Party as an institution at mid-century or in fact at any time? He can tell you how Robert Heinlein was feeling or at least writing about it, certainly; he had unprecedented access to the letters that would do that. But to just bloviate about what America’s leftism had or had not room for: pics or it didn’t happen, basically.

And this is sprinkled throughout, sometimes in a phrase or two and sometimes at far, far greater length. We are treated to an expansion of Heinlein’s view of Joe McCarthy in which, Patterson opines, “the worst that happened was that some people had reputations blackened, possibly deservedly if they had in fact been engaged in treasonous activities.” (Loss of livelihood to Americans exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and free association: eh, whatever, no big, as long as William H. Patterson Jr. still finds them suspicious. Nor does he feel the need to actually look into what happened. Reading one single reputable book on the matter would be too much to ask; he’s got pontificating to do.) His citation of Emerson is particularly hilarious given that he’s not at all clear who and what Fourier influenced in American politics, even given a footnote to expand on the matter, and the surrounding material about European liberalism or lack of same is not worth the paper it’s printed on. And again: who asked him? As fascinated as we all are with the 1848 revolution, why on earth does it belong in a Heinlein bio that is already bloated in two volumes?

Various places in the book, Patterson cites Heinlein’s letters feeling that America had moved to the left without him after the Second World War. However, Patterson expands upon this at length and adds his own feelings about it without citing a single political position that would support it. I spent a pretty good chunk of yesterday reading platforms and campaign speeches for Adlai Stevenson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just to see if I was completely mad, and the single place that I could find where Roosevelt looked considerably less “leftist” was on the matter of race–where Patterson is careful to cite letter after letter showing that Heinlein was pleased at the direction of the Democratic party away from segregation. So what would a responsible biographer do here? At most, a responsible biographer merely says that this is how Heinlein felt. It’s also responsible to interrogate that feeling–to say that this is how Heinlein felt but to note an inclarity as to why he felt that way. Patterson does not. He takes it as given that everything, everything Heinlein felt must be right.

Even in non-political issues (or inter-field political issues), this leads the biography to be a lesser work than it could have been. For example, in writing about a falling-out with Ben Bova over an Alexei Panshin review of Expanded Universe, Patterson does not apparently contact Dr. Bova for any memories he has of this incident. Last I saw or heard, Dr. Bova was alive and well, and his perspective could at least be noted. If it was so “clearly polemical” and “simply malicious,” why did Bova commission a “hatchet job” of one of the most notable writers in the field at the time? Patterson doesn’t care to know–even to dismiss the point of view directly. For him Bova’s point of view simply doesn’t exist. The only place that Patterson notes anywhere that Heinlein might have been wrong is in a dispute with the L5 board over SDI, where he notes that the situation was “more complex” than Heinlein was predisposed to see it. Everything else gets a rubber stamp–not only does Heinlein apparently learn better, he never fails to learn better.

That’s not biography, it’s hagiography.

And the worst of it is, some of this stuff is going to get attributed to Heinlein. Some of this stuff is going to get attributed to Heinlein by the people who think he could do no wrong, and some of it is going to get attributed to Heinlein by the people who think he could do no right, and especially it will be attributed to Heinlein by people who think that he is a symbol of everything right-wing about America today, whether they personally love it or hate it, whether he actually said or thought any such thing. Patterson had unprecedented levels of access to Heinlein’s papers. He could have written a real biography. With the first volume, it almost looked like he was going to. And instead this. It has immensely detailed information about what Heinlein wrote when, which drafts were called what and how they developed. In places there are the sketched outlines of a touching portrait of how a married couple can work together as a team for the benefit of the career of one of them. It’s just interspersed with a pointless, ill-informed, and occasionally sickening slog through What William H. Patterson Jr. Thinks Of Every Damn Thing (Without Actually Looking It Up).

(The most hilarious line of WWHPJTOEDT(WALIU): when he was shocked, just shocked, that even some figure skaters might not be nice people. Golly. Even some figure skaters? If you can’t trust the profession that brought us the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal, indeed, what profession can you trust? That was twenty years ago. No one has any excuse for still thinking that figure skaters are all sweetness and light. Twenty. Years. Yeah. We’ve got some real depth going here, people.)

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History. This is one of those wrenching books that you want to think hard about whether you want to read or not. It’s a history of the gulag system in the Soviet Union. It does not pull punches, and it’s well-researched, and…I already said it does not pull punches. Some people should hold and perpetuate this knowledge. I am glad this book exists. But it is very much not an easy book. If you think that what you’re writing is dark and grim, go read this book and find out what a piker you are compared to Stalin. Otherwise…well, think it over. (A note: Applebaum has a habit of falling into the language of the people she’s writing about, so occasionally there will be a reference in authorial voice to a “Chinaman” or a “Balt,” which, seriously, Applebaum, cut that out. But still generally worthwhile.)

Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross, The Children of Kings. It’s been years since I read a Darkover book, and I fell right into this one like it was yesterday. The Dry Towns! Not enough about the Dry Towns previously. This one skimmed the surface a bit, I felt, but still, fun time, felt very retro.

Alice Cholmondeley, Christine. Kindle. Technically this was from early May but got left off the list accidentally. It was a piece of propaganda for the British during WWI, purporting to be letters from a young British woman who had been studying violin in Germany before the outbreak of hostilities, exposing the deficiencies in the German mindset. It was…interesting that way, very overt. Apparently it was not believed very long in its pen name (Alice Cholmondeley) even at the time; the real author is Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, which really gets to be a lot of names for a handful of letters to Chris’s dearest little mother.

Deborah Coates, Strange Country. Discussed elsewhere.

Paul Cornell, The Severed Streets. Discussed elsewhere.

Helen Cresswell, Bagthorpes Battered and Bagthorpes Besieged. The last two books in the Bagthorpe series, and they are not a patch on the early ones. Now there’s only one I haven’t read. I still recommend the early ones (they’re British comedic family books), but these are fairly skippable. They’re also an object lesson in setting a time period and sticking with it. William, the eldest YB (Young Bagthorpe) is a ham radio operator, which had very different characterization implications in 1977 when Ordinary Jack came out than it does for Bagthorpes Battered in 2001–having them stay “roughly contemporary” just doesn’t work. The Bagthorpes do not have cell phones and the internet. Just…no. Also, the more phoneticized Daisy dialog we get, the more it’s clear that her personal idiolect is not at all how a 4-year-old would talk or consistent or even very funny. And these are fairly extensively Daisy-filled. Should have left us with more Grandpa, Jack, and Zero. Ah well. I’m not sorry I read them, but I’m a Bagthorpe completist. They’re hard to get in the US, and the rest of you will not be missing much if you stay with the first six or so.

Gavin Francis, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence, and Emperor Penguins. There was a little bit of too much monkey, not enough penguin here, proportionally, but there was enough penguin in absolute terms to keep me happy, and also I don’t mind polar monkey stories. I actually sort of like them when they’re not getting in the way of penguins, especially when they’re not a rehash of the same explorer tales. This is short and reasonably pithy. And, y’know: penguins.

Ursula LeGuin, Searoad. Reread. I remembered liking these stories about various people in the same small town in Oregon, but I didn’t remember much about them. I think it will probably be the same again in a few years–people run seaside town motels, people get into and out of relationships, and having lived in Oregon the summer before I read them the first time gave me a pleasant grounding in place for what she was trying to do, but none of it bit deep for me. Worth keeping and revisiting but never going to be my favorite LeGuin.

Sharon Kay Penman, A King’s Ransom. About halfway through I began to wonder whether it was a sound notion, basing a book around the portion of Richard the Lionheart’s life when he needed ransoming. But spoiler alert: he is not still languishing in need of ransom. Whew. More seriously, the book did pick up despite a sagging middle, and I’m not sorry I read it, but probably you won’t want to start here; there are plenty of other Penmans that are better places to begin if you’re looking for a thumping big historical thing.

Melanie Rawn, Elsewhens and Thornlost. Discussed elsewhere.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Planet on the Table and Other Stories. Reread. These sort of prefigure the things he’s done since, and they were pleasant enough to read, but none of them really jumped out at me individually. I don’t think I’d recommend Robinson mostly as a short story writer, at this point. If you’re feeling completist, there’s nothing wrong with this collection, but if you’re not already familiar and enthusiastic, this is probably not the place to start; they’re very much of an era, and the themes get better developed in novels later. Also, despite the title and his later career, it does not look from this vantage point like a very strongly environmentalist work.

Patricia C. Wrede, Wrede on Writing: Tips, Hints, and Opinions on Writing. Kindle. Pat’s blog is substantially more focused than this one. It’s about writing, and pretty much only about writing. This book, Wrede on Writing, is the refinement of years of blog posts, organized and revised for your edification and set forth to be an actual book on writing. I read it in part because I’m one of the seminar leaders for Fourth Street this year, and I wanted to be able to talk knowledgeably about it for the seminar. I expect it will be particularly useful for the beginning writer, who will find all manner of things, practical advice on actual work but also how to run writing as a business and things like that.