Tag: bookses precious

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.

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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.

Daniel Abraham, The Widow’s House. Best read quickly so that one can focus on the dragon and the banking and not on saying, “Ugh, Geder, shut up.” I mean, dragon! Banking! But: Geder, shut up. This is the fourth book in the series, and I really think it would be completely incomprehensible if you hadn’t read the others. There are spiders where? The spiders and the dragons relate how? What? What? So really, don’t start here. Dragons and banking, go to the back of the line. The start of the series. Whatever. And don’t read too slowly, or you may need to smack some characters.

Tina Connolly, Silverblind. Discussed elsewhere.

Frances Hardinge, Fly By Night. I am grateful to Marie Brennan for pointing this out to me, because its marketing hits some of my bad buttons, but the book itself is not like that. (Basically I don’t like it when people pat themselves on the back about how their chosen profession is the really great amazing one that is better than all the others, and writers are not exempt from that. The cover and blurbs of this book suggested, wrongly, that it might fall into that category.) Anyway, there are times when Hardinge is trying a bit too hard for the whimsy for my tastes, but there are conspiracies and coffee shops and things, and it is good fun. There is much rushing about, and if you want much rushing about and many secret signals, it is that kind of book. I did have a bit of difficulty with the goose feathers being white, because that’s just not what we have here, but I did eventually get my brain to behave.

Edgar Holt, The Making of Italy, 1815-1870. Very much what it says on the tin. This is an old book I picked up used, and it goes over the basics of the Italian unification–if it was breezier it would have been called “Garibaldi and All That,” but that would have misled a person into thinking it was breezy, and it wasn’t. It laid out the straight path. The obvious background. What Pius IX was doing. What Victor Emmanuel was doing. What the Sicilians were doing. It is useful, and I will keep filling in bits of this, because I am left with plenty of questions. But that’s how this sort of thing works.

Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata, Hikaru no Go, Volumes 4-8. Several more volumes of melodramatic teenage Go manga. Do you want melodramatic comics about Go, wherein stones are placed with a ringing “KLAK”? Because this is that. Yep. It sure is.

Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire. This book is vast and contains multitudes and multitudes of people. So many multitudes. There are cool things going on with plants and parallel worlds; Kameron has given herself room, with the large cast, to ring changes, to be an epic fantasy that is really epic, and yet she hardly goes any of the same places that other epic fantasies go. I will flag that there is a domestically violent relationship fairly close on here, and I didn’t find it less distasteful for being in directions less expected in our culture–that wasn’t the point, one wasn’t supposed to find it any less distasteful, if you think Kameron was endorsing it, go back and read again, but if your background is such that close views of domestic violence will upset you, this one is vivid enough that it should probably be flagged, even though it’s a fairly small component of the book.

Emmi Itaranta, Memory of Water. This worked best for me as an exploration of emotions and symbols and not really as a work of science fiction. It’s Finnish post-apocalyptic stuff, and I just didn’t believe in the future Finland in the book, in a pure physical sense. Socially, possibly, once you had the postulates. But scientifically, eh, no, not really. But there was a lot of water and tea and hiding, and I liked those things. I liked the experience of reading the sentences, when I could stop thinking about the hydrology.

Gwyneth Jones, The Grasshopper’s Child. Kindle. This is a YA with a substantially local/domestic focus, in the world of her Bold as Love series. If you want this book, you really want this book. Oh my did I want this book. (Pamela, I’m pretty sure you want this book!) The protag is a teen who has to care for old folks, as most teens in her culture do, and I would be interested to see how it works for someone who doesn’t have the previous five books. It’s an entirely different set of main characters, with cameos by the protags of the previous five books, but many of the worldbuilding implications and their importance–which are crucial to the mystery plot, I suspect–are sketched in as reminders rather than filled in thoroughly. But having had the previous five books and loved them, I was very fond of this, both for more of the world and for Heidi herself and her friends.

Sebastian Junger, War. The account–largely a psychological analysis–of front line American troops in Afghanistan, by a journalist embedded with them. Junger talked about how this kind of war changes young men, what it asks of them and by extension what we as a country are asking of them if we send them to this kind of war. I felt that he neglected to account for how much the particular front-line troops he was writing about were self-selecting, though, which doesn’t mean that we should be asking them to self-select into those situations, but it does raise questions about what we do with young men of the backgrounds some of them described and the extreme combinations of hormone balance and reaction time some of them seemed to have if we, as a society, are not throwing them into combat situations. Junger was acknowledging that the front line troops he was dealing with were in many ways different from the armed forces as a whole. He wanted to talk about the bravery and intelligence of the men he was dealing with, which is valid, and I think that he felt he needed to elide the ways that their specific kinds of bravery and intelligence are not necessarily transferable even to other jobs within their own branch of the military, much less other jobs outside it. And he wanted to talk about how combat and even life in the combat zone had broken them for other things, which is again a reasonable point to make, as long as he did not elide the point that in a conflict of this size, these specific people were also pretty broken going in, and that is something we can’t really ignore as a culture, either. We’re struggling with how to handle what football does to young men, what hockey fights do, what all the modes of violence do to the bodies of those who participate in them, what it does to shape their minds and personalities and their expectations of the people around them who are not participants, and war is that writ much, much larger. But what we don’t want to talk about, I think, is that sometimes the people we are feeding into our dark machines have been through them already when they were small. Junger writes that whatever a society asks its young men as a group to do, they will become good at, and that might be true (and is worth thinking about what it implies in reverse, and also about young women); but his is not a book about the generation that fought World War II, when somewhat larger percentages of America’s young men were asked to become good at the front lines of combat. For the most part–and Junger doesn’t really want to talk about this–we are asking our young men not to get good at combat. And the ones in his book are the ones who hear our culture, our government, when we say, “Except for perhaps a tiny sliver of you. A tiny, tiny fraction of a percent, we still need to have doing this,” and they say, “I think that means me.” That doesn’t mean they’re horrible people. It doesn’t mean they’re not polite to waitresses or fond of their sisters or any of the redeeming things Junger shows. But it does mean that pretending that they’re identical to the people who signed the enlistment papers next to them and said, “Maybe I could learn to fix airplanes,” or, “I’d be a good quartermaster I bet,” or, “I dunno, Sarge, whatever Uncle Sam wants I guess,” is more than a little disingenuous. Still worth reading about the details, though. Still very much worth reading about the details.

Blair MacGregor, Sand of Bone. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. I spent this book rolling my eyes. Sarah Moss appears to have gone to Iceland for a year with two small children and a husband in tow without thinking for even a second that it would be substantially different from the UK. Did you know! Iceland is not the UK! And then even when she figures out what’s going on, she takes forever to figure out why, and sometimes she just never manages it. There are some interesting things about modern Icelandic culture that I slogged through this book to get to, but basically, ugh, sometimes a memoir can make you think, “I…really dislike this memoirist personally.” (Do not put a preschooler in a preschool for three weeks before checking out whether it is a preschool you approve of. Just: no. Don’t do that. Especially when your husband is otherwise a stay-at-home parent and presumably could…go have a look? Maybe? Either you’re so easy-going you don’t care, in which case, fine, be that easy-going, don’t fly into a tizzy when you can finally be bothered to look into things–or else go have a look to start with. It was just this horrible half-assed mix throughout. Ugh.)

Luke Pearson, Hilda and the Midnight Giant. My friend Shannon poked me about this, and I requested it from the library right away, and I brought it home from the library and read it in about fifteen minutes, because it is a kids’ graphic novel. It is a charming and lovely kids’ graphic novel. It has three different scales of action and trying to treat people decently when they are very different from you and bureaucracy. And giants. And a mother who is in some ways very like Lisa from Ponyo. Do want.

Ekaterina Sedia, Moscow But Dreaming. Collection of short stories with a fabulist twist and mostly a Russian twist but not always. Different strengths in the Russian and non-Russian stories. All quite readable, very much Sedia’s vividness shining through.

Peter Watts, Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes. A shorter collection of short stories, and a very different kind of vivid. I didn’t find them all readable, not for lack of skill, but because Watts’s level of dark sometimes goes over the line into too nasty for my tastes at that moment. However. That thing I was saying above, about Junger not wanting to talk about what we do with the people who have already been fed into the dark machines when they reach adulthood? Peter Watts is willing to talk about that. Peter Watts is by no means going to flinch from that, or pretend that those people don’t need useful places to fit in, don’t need to find happiness and productive things to do with their time. And that’s why I keep returning to Watts’s work even when there are some stories that make me go “oh ick no.” Watts doesn’t worry that people will not be able to see bravery and brokenness at once. He trusts his readers for that, and to see that situations may change who is the functional one in a situation in the blink of an eye.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Tina Connolly’s previous books, Ironskin and Copperhead, both earned her popular attention and critical acclaim, and rightly so. Silverblind is better. Much better. Silverblind is the book where everything starts really working, where I sit up and take notice and start poking people so that they do the same.

Silverblind takes the story begun in Ironskin and moves on the better part of two decades, to Adora–Dorie–as a young woman, half-fey and trying to make her own way in a world that has changed drastically, but not drastically enough for bright young women (half-fey or not). She has mostly set her fey powers aside in favor of pursuing a career as a naturalist, but when her society’s attitudes keep shutting doors in her face, she turns back to those powers to try to wedge those doors back open.

This book features baby wyverns (that sometimes behave quite inconveniently), Edwardian-equivalent social justice crusaders (ALL THE LOVE), underrated young lady artists who have to worry about rent (some love, it turns out, was left over from the social justice set after all), shapechanging in ways that actually uses possibilities, and trust questions that go beyond “I just met you and this is crazy.” I raced through it, and then I was sorry I did, because I got it in a very advanced ARC and there will not be more for even longer–I have no idea when there will be more–and this. This is such a big step, the book where Tina Connolly goes from “sure, reliably readable, will pick up the next one and it will be fun” to “OH HOW EXCITING IT IS A TINA CONNOLLY BOOK.”

Review copy provided by the author.

(I’m including a link to one source, here, since it’s hard enough to find self-published books as it is.)

This is grim and dark, but is it grimdark? Wait, no. That’s just about the least interesting question you could ask about Sand of Bone. It is, however, quite grim and dark. The dry desert society portrayed is a backbiting, nasty one, its ruling caste interbred and endowed with powers they don’t even try to deserve, its warriors bound by oaths that compel a loyalty in all particulars. Its magics are half-forgotten, the source of ghost tales and fearful superstitions.

The characters who start to change this world–because this is very much the first book in a series–don’t necessarily come into Sand of Bone intending world-shaking change. Mostly they want smaller things, manageable things. They are driven by what they can–or usually cannot–stand. This is not a book of grandiose crusaders railing against an unjust system. Characters do stand up against injustice, but usually one person at a time, one face at a time–and usually a fairly familiar face at that. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes their failures cause at least as large a cascade of consequences as their successes. And their endings…don’t always come when it looks like they will.

The question of loyalty is huge in this book. MacGregor gives her characters a world in which loyalty has become unidirectional and unearned, and begins to change that, a little bit at a time. For my taste there is quite a lot of Training Sequence and quite a lot of dark, but I know that for some people those are two favorite elements in secondary world fantasy, so I wanted to flag them for the interested. One of the things I particularly appreciated is how much MacGregor committed to her characters being part of their own cultures rather than ours–there’s one element that’s highly taboo in our culture but has been normal in various historical Earth cultures and is normal in the ruling caste of this book, and MacGregor carefully handles her characters’ attitudes towards this to be internal to their culture without making it particularly problematic for ours–very neatly handled.

There isn’t quite as much Making Stuff as in KJ Parker, but otherwise I’d recommend this to Parker fans as having tonal similarities so far. I suspect that the series may wind up more positive overall than Parkers’ works just on statistics alone, but from the first book it’s hard to tell, and there’s plenty of grim and dark to start.

H. W. Brandis, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace. This is a corrective biography, and I think it goes too far in the corrective/excusing direction. It’s all very well to talk through why Ulysses Grant is excoriated unfairly, and that’s useful. But it gets undercut when you start going on and on about how terrible it must have been for poor Ulysses to be forced to manage slaves. It’s one of the places where the bare facts do speak reasonably well for themselves given the context of the time, without embellishment, and the embellishment made me later call into question how reliable Brandis’s assessment of other questions was. (Notably things like Grant’s drinking and whether it was a problem.) Still mostly worth reading, but it made me roll my eyes in spots.

A. S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. I made a try at this before I’d read the stuff that came before it and couldn’t care about the characters at all. Now that I’ve read the books before it in its series, it worked quite well and was very immersive, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s not a good starting place. Also I didn’t really care about most of the supporting cast, except the ones we didn’t get to see much of–I felt that Frederica and Leo’s story would have come together perfectly well without the details of the people they were interacting with. Ah well; I didn’t regret reading it.

Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. This is a very physically heavy volume, since it’s written in normal amounts of prose with normal numbers of pages (five or six hundred, she said, too lazy to get up and look) but is printed on art paper due to the sheer number of reproductions of images involved. There are all sorts of salacious and politically scandalous images, drawings and woodcuts and all sorts of things. There is an entire chapter on farting and butt humor in the politics of the eighteenth century. It’s very erudite, well-handled, and also somewhat tiresome. A useful window into that time and how things shifted to become the Victorians, but…really, there is only so much to be said about, “I fart in your general direction, [insert political opponent here],” and Gatrell said it fairly thoroughly.

Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead. Notionally the first in the series but I read it second. Not quite as tight and pacey as Full Fathom Five but still exciting, well-characterized, and well worth the time. Dead gods, magical legal/financial firms, very entertaining.

Adam Hochschild, The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey. This is a South African history written in 1990 by a white foreigner. Hochschild is very good and very careful about what that perspective as a white foreigner means for limitations, but those limitations are still there. Also: 1990. That’s before…well, quite a lot really. He was very hopeful about the future of South Africa, but it turns out not quite hopeful enough. Which is in some ways really cool and in some ways really jarring.

Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata, Hikaru no Go Volumes 1-3. The first three volumes of a manga about a young Japanese kid possessed by an old Go-playing ghost. Lots of manga-type silliness, lots of hyperdramatics around Go that…don’t really stand up if you’ve played much Go. But still entertaining enough to keep on with a bit longer, so I will.

Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Kendall studied the 1980s versions of female ritual practice in a small Korean town, and this is very clearly written about that town. What I’m not so clear on is how much this is regional, and I’d like that context. I’d also like to know how much those practices have shifted and varied over time. As a snapshot of that place and time–and even with some context of what we can’t say that some historians assume we can–it’s extremely valuable. But like a lot of narrowly focused books in fields where it’s hard to find material, it brings up a lot more questions than answers.

Alistair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze. I am easily purchased, and one of my prices is elephants who are characters as elephants, not as humans in elephant suits. Elephants, people. I mean, this book has other things. This book has interstellar whosits and clones and intergenerational scheming and whatever. BUT ELEPHANTS. I will wait patiently or at least feign patience until there are MORE ELEPHANTS. This book was my answer to everything wrong for several days: “WHATEVER I HAVE ELEPHANTS LEAVE ME ALONE.”

John Sayles, The Anarchists’ Convention. In some ways it seems like it should be heartening that John Sayles was not born able to do an amazing thing like A Moment in the Sun immediately without practice. But if he had been, I would have rolled with it. This was…not that. This was a collection of mediocre 1970s mainstream stories. This was a vast disappointment. There were some moments of keen observation to prove that, yes, it’s that John Sayles, but if I’d read this first, I would never have picked up A Moment in the Sun (WHY AM I NOT REREADING THAT NOW I LOVE THAT BOOK) and that would have been a shame (SO MUCH LOVE). I would have thought, well, stick to movies, John. So…unless you really, really like 1970s mainstream short stories, such that you want most of them, you can probably skip this. Which is good, because it will give you more time for A Moment in the Sun, which is good, because you’ll need it for the reading (and also the wrist strengthening exercises, unless you read it on an e-reader) and also the long emails to me about which parts you like best. It’s okay. I am patient. For this as well as for the elephants.

Jonathan Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-Hsi. This is mostly a translation of the small bits of autobiography we have of K’ang-Hsi, also spelled Kangxi, the longest reigning emperor in Chinese history, late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries western reckoning. What’s really lovely here from an SF writers’ standpoint is the places where he thinks something is obvious to the reader–when he’s talking about sentencing of criminals, for example, or rearing of royal children. The things he feels he has to explain or contradict and the things that go without saying are just beautiful outlines of what his culture is doing. It’s a short book. It’s worth your time.