Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by Tor. Also I am a friend of Jo’s.

Also in personal connections to this book: Jo quotes me as saying that the physics in Anathem is no good, which it true, and which pleases me, because this is just the sort of book I would have read when I was an undergrad doing summer research and trying to find books in Library of Congress system libraries, and having the aside from me and Chad Orzel about the physics might well have saved me from diving enthusiastically into Anathem based on the rest of Jo’s essay only to find out about the physics with dawning horror. I shout through the world of letters to younger versions of myself and people like me: “You’re welcome!”

I read most of this book in its original blog post form, but for me it reads very differently in book form. I’m not sure why. Partly I think that it flows when there’s stuff to go on to: there is the sort of clear path from one essay to the next that is the sort of sensible train of thought that is the exact opposite of what my own reading does, that is how I would construct someone else’s reading if I was going to do it but is not how it actually works out for me. (I am more likely to say, “I’ve just finished Dragon, what do I want to read next, oh, I know, this photography book on the First Nations people of Northern Canada,” than, “I’ve just finished Dragon, next I’ll read Issola.” And I love Issola; it’s my favorite.) (Yes, even more favorite than Tiassa even though I am a Tiassa.) (Yes, even more favorite than Teckla even though it has barricades.) (I digress.) (But so does Jo’s book! So it’s thematic.)

Despite Issola (a graceful sweep, not a trap door!), Jo and I are quite a lot alike in the bits of this that are not about the specific books: the reading in sips throughout the day, the conviction that there are never, ever, ever enough books, and the whole thing is great fun to read. I have seen other people saying that What Makes This Book So Great is going to be an expensive book for them, and it might be that, if you don’t have a good library either in your home or close by. But for me it was mostly a book that made me have to stifle email impulses. The Cetagandans aren’t effete, they’re decadent, it’s not the same thing! And like that. There’s a lot like that. But I like doing that. Genre is a conversation; well, this is a conversation about a conversation. The last essay in the volume is about criticism versus talking about books, and how what this book is doing is talking about books. Well, most of what I do here is book posts talking about books, too. (None of it is criticism, but I reserve the right to talk about food and my dog and so on.) And if you want more of that, here’s a whole lot of more of that, all at once, with Delany and Bujold and all sorts of cool books talked about. Fun, and somehow different fun in book form.

Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons. The good news is, Lawrence Block is just the same as the last time he was writing Burglar books. The bad news is, Lawrence Block is just the same as the last time he was writing Burglar books. I think I am still reading this series out of nostalgia, but on the other hand I still do have the nostalgia.

George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Workmanlike and moderately interesting. Does what it says on the tin, talking about the design of a nuclear-powered spaceship.

P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Also does what it says on the tin. I think this book is why all this information was out there circulating so people like me could take it for granted.

Bernd Heinrich, The Snoring Bird. Kindle. This was my Grandpa’s birthday present this year. (Today would have been Grandpa’s birthday.) I was not really done picking out books for Grandpa when he died, so…I kept doing it, things we might both have liked. This one was a bit disappointing. Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby. In this case, too much annoying horrible father, not enough birds and ichneumon wasps. Not the best Heinrich, and also not at all the most self-aware Heinrich. And the titular bird was almost completely absent in any detail, alas.

Crystal Lynn Hilbert, The Trickster Edda. Kindle. I’m not sure how I am to handle things I read for blurbing as opposed to review. I have had things I’ve read for review lifted for blurbs before, and that’s fine? I hope I’m not violating any norms by talking briefly about this novella here. It was a romp with junk food and Norse mythology and dating and laundry. Good fun.

Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. Fascinating book. Hochschild interviewed not only those who had suffered but also those who were still, in 1991 or so, fans of the late dictator. Disquieting and horrible but very, very interesting.

Kyung Moon Hwang, A History of Korea. This is not where to start. It is where I started. It is not a good place to start at all. It’s a good thing I have another book of Korean history on my desk and probably more to come, because this is sort of an “interesting anecdotes” history of Korea, and…really you need more than that. Really. It is a brief romp through the history of Korea. One can enjoy brief romps, but one can enjoy them even more when one is entirely clear on what one is romping through. So: more needed here.

Ari Marmell, Lost Covenant. Start early in the series for full impact, but still swashing and buckling and thievery and joking and fun.

Nnedi Okorafor, Kabu-Kabu. This is a rare short story collection in a few ways. 1) It is pretty thematically unified. 2) None of the short stories annoyed me enough that I quit reading them. 3) I am pretty sure they were all short stories rather than novelettes or novellas. Anyway, mostly African settings/origins, interesting characters, many tie-in points with Okorafor’s novels, highly recommended. Oh, and Whoopi Goldberg wrote the introduction, which made me think not a bit more highly of Nnedi Okorafor and quite a bit more highly of Whoopi Goldberg.

Philip Reeve, A Web of Air. Very much a sequel, but a fun one. Structurally a bit odd–I was expecting the younger child’s POV to go further and was a bit disappointed when it didn’t.

Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Curse. Discussed elsewhere.

Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil, Bad Houses. Graphic novel about hoarders and estate sales and…yeah, very much off the beaten path.

Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. Ah, a sherbet book. Chilly and insubstantial? Yes, but what I meant was: okay, sure, but…. The argument this book makes is fine; there are all sorts of things the current state of neuroscience can’t touch. I don’t really understand why New Scientist recommended it, because anyone who reads New Scientist even a little bit should have found this book not in the least bit surprising. How is that a useful book recommendation? “Books to bore our regular readers!” Thanks, New Scientist! The other thing is: once you’ve gotten into the minefield that is Stuff MRIs Can’t Show Us About Culpability, 150 pages is not nearly enough to handle questions of culpability and forms of justice, so then you end up with a very slick and shallow version of philosophical questions that people have been wrestling with for thousands of years. Disappointing.

John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun. Oh, oh, oh, this book. This gigantic wrist-busting book. I’m not even sure it works as a book, and I loved it, and I’m so glad I read it, and I want more books like it even if it sort of doesn’t really work. Yes. Because John Sayles is a one of us. Like a you and me and Jon and that other lady, that us! It’s a good us. John Sayles is a voracious inclusive polymath one of us. I mean, you can tell that from the better end of his movies. You can tell that from Lone Star and Matewan and Brother, right, that he’s one of those people who will set out wondering about something and look up five years and four bookshelves later telling you about the mating habits of pandas and how it relates to the silver trade. And he’s a one of us because he can’t look at those things and just see white dudes. I read this book and felt less alone in the world because John Sayles wrote this book about the American war in the Philippines, so naturally it started in the Yukon, like, of course. Naturally. You just let your breath out because we’re like that and there it is. And he’s allowed to do a book like that because he’s John Sayles, but I love him because what he wants to do with being John Sayles is a book like that and not, like, buy a yacht or fancy grills or something. It goes all over the damn place and is so full of people named Mei and Frantisek and you don’t even know who next, white people, black people, Filipinos, Chinese people, men, women, able-bodied, disabled, sick, whoever. I am not coherent about this book. I am not reasonable about this book. I don’t have to be reasonable about this book; it is not a reasonable book. The things people say about James Michener, I don’t really get those things, because Michener has point A, and then he has point B, and eventually you get to Z, and then you are done, and he has gone through the alphabet, whereas John Sayles, he teaches you four alphabets and perspective drawing, and then you’re not sure why, but it’s okay, because you know four alphabets and perspective drawing and whether Jessie’s family is okay maybe. Yes. This book. I would be mad at anybody else who went and made movies instead of writing me more books like this book, but it is John Sayles, so I am not mad, except maybe about Silver City, because that sucked. But this book, oh, oh.

Karl Schroeder, Lockstep. Discussed elsewhere. Kindle, in case you were keeping track for some reason. More to the point in case I was.

Evelyn Sharp, Rebel Women. Kindle. Guys, this was awesome. It’s free, go download it for your own device. It’s an early 20th century British feminist fabulist writing thinly fictionalized stories of her own experiences in the suffrage movement, and they’re sharp and real, and some of them are funny, and they really won’t take you long. And then some of the early 20th century perspective is so “Whaaaaaa?” Like the idea that the 1910s were short on cranks, seriously. It was an eye-opener. And free. Go, acquire, acquire like the wind.

C. J. Underwood, An Army of Judiths. Indifferently-written historical fiction about Kenau Hasselaer of Haarlem. Who was awesome, and honestly, no, the book was not that great on its own, but yes, I did want a novel about Kenau, thanks all the same. I mean, there are things like: if you are writing in English, do not give two of your major characters the nicknames Am and Erm. (Or Um and Is. Or whatever. Common words and mumble-noises: try to avoid as nicknames.) Do not make your readers stop and think about why Dutch servants are speaking with Cockney accents. Etc. But really: Kenau Hasselaer, I am not spoiled for choice in novels about her, I will put up with a lot.

Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos. Sequel to Aurorarama, and I think you’ll want that first. I missed New Venice; the steampunk Paris was fun and interesting but not as vivid and polar-bear-ridden, not as Mris-targeted. Still worth the time. Still will follow Valtat, despite the…central Parisian pun in part of it. (Ow.) I think one of the things that I enjoyed about this is that I don’t as often see time-travel within parts of someone else’s timeline, and I liked that.

Review copy provided by FSG.

Ten pages into this book, I thought, why have I not heard of her other books? A hundred pages in, I went and put them on my library and Amazon lists. Because: sold. Yes. This is one of the times when I see that something is only the first part of a trilogy and think YES GOOD MORE rather than OH CRUD NOT AGAIN.

So one of the two main characters. Kestrel. So well-done on so many, many levels. First of all, Kestrel is allowed to be a strategist, both by inclination and by–brace yourself–study. She is not merely a natural prodigy. She gets better at strategy by studying it and thinking about it. Also, she has blind spots instilled by her culture and upbringing, so even though she is both strategic and treacherous (we love treacherous heroines!), she is not infallible even in the areas of her skill. I loved that. I loved that she was a competent fighter and that she used her areas of more-than-competence to get around her areas of mere-competence.

I loved the blind spots. Really, truly I did. Because Kestrel is on the winner’s side. Kestrel has been raised by the powerful in the empire, in the slave-owning empire, and even when you have compassion for your slaves, even when you have asked for freedom for your very favorite slave and have a loving relationship with her, even when you think that you understand about the things that slaves are not free to choose–even with all of that. If you are part of that culture, if you are that part of that culture, there are elements of it that do not just evaporate like the morning dew no matter who you meet, no matter what happens. And Kestrel was written just beautifully that way.

And Arin, the other main character, has his blind spots, too. He has the places where the things he has learned has taught him to expect very different things of Kestrel than what she is willing to do, able to do, interested in doing…they are perpetually wrong-footed with each other in all the right ways. It works so very well. There are games and friendships and music and politics and I love it.

(I will note that the politics does not happen right away. Trust me. There will be politics.)

And this book: if you are thinking, oh, the winner’s curse, that’s an economics term: you are correct. It is indeed that winner’s curse. Marie Rutkoski has written a YA fantasy novel with a major central love story around an economics term. She’s explored it on more than one level. Because she is smart and trusts young people to be smart. And also old people. Whoever, really. I appreciate that a lot.

Review copy provided by Tor Books (in eARC form).

Karl Schroeder is very good at doing SF that no one else is doing. In this case he’s combined lack of FTL travel with extensive robot presence and effective ubiquitous hibernation, so that colonies choose a ratio of months “wintering over” to months awake–common ratios including 360:1 and 270:1–so that their bots can harvest resources for humans providing much more limited drag on the system.

He does a really good job of not drawing attention to some of the questions that spring to mind most immediately as problems for me in this system, and one of the key skills of writing SF is drawing reader attention towards the things you find interesting and away from the things you do not. (In my case, the first few problems that sprang up were “what are these colonists doing–not their bots but them” and “how does human development work with hibernation, given that almost every long-hibernation creature we know of mature before hibernation/estivation.” There were not really characters shown doing serious high-level work or small-child characters.) He did show a little bit of raiding of the hibernating planets by those out of sync with them, so that was satisfying.

The main focus, though, was on family relations. The main family core of this book actually reacted to each other like family, which I found satisfying, and so did the secondary dynamic family. The resolution of the power dynamics relied very much on who they were in relation to each other, and I enjoyed that very much. I also found this to be a satisfying stand-alone, not the beginning of a series whose resolution is entirely unknown as yet.

The diversity of the “seventy thousand worlds” was a little more referred to than shown, and I was halfway through the book when I was clear on how things like linguistic drift were working over a fourteen-thousand year time-scale. I would like to see less of a unitary culture even with characters like Evayne working to keep it that way–but I was willing mostly to behave as though it was only that those were the worlds these characters cared about. (I did wish that Our Hero had been willing to run off to some worlds “no one” cared about, or at least to consider it as an option. There’s a lot of “no one” in the universe.) But even with those caveats: more like this but different. Yes. Definitely an interesting thought experiment.

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. This was a very hard book to read, just on an emotional level. But it was immensely well-done, and I recommend it highly if you can find the time and energy. The introduction is a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of works of history, talking clearly about the linguistic efforts required but also–more importantly–spending more time on what other people in her field are doing well than on how Someone On the Internet Journal Of My Profession Is Wrong. So I now have a fairly extensive bibliography about this general cheerful subject. Heads up to those whose interests are a subset of the title: Applebaum’s main focus is in East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, although she does discuss the rest of the region, so if you’re really looking for something that will go into deep analysis on Albania or Yugoslavia, this is not the book. But it has all sorts of references for what would be the book.

Andrea Barrett, Archangel. Either a mosaic novel or a series of related short stories, about scientists/naturalists/inventors in late 19th/early 20th century America. Quite beautifully done, left me wanting more–a lot more. Sadly I think I have read everything she’s done that might be in this vein, so I will have to wait impatiently for whatever is next.

Peter Dickinson, Earth and Air. Dickinson and his wife Robin McKinley had put out two previous collections for Water and Fire, but apparently McKinley’s stories for this one kept growing into novels. I’m glad Dickinson just went ahead and published his–I liked the owl story particularly–but the introduction, when he was saying that he did not plan to stick around into his 90s, was a little alarming, and I’m afraid that’s the bit that stuck with me most. (“Plan” and “expect” are not the same verb.)

Zoe Ferraris, Finding Nouf. A mystery set in Saudi Arabia, in which a traditional religious young man ends up having to learn to work with a woman who is nowhere near as traditional, in order to solve a murder. It took me a bit to get into it, but I’m glad I did; I’ll want the others in the series.

James Gleick, Isaac Newton. A short bio that ranges into the bits of things we do know about Newton and the things we don’t, with side trips to explain the rest of his mental world as necessary. I think mostly of interest if you don’t have any idea about Isaac Newton and would like to–there were some tidbits that were new to me, but for the most part it was well-written review.

Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness. I do like Little My. And living in the theater during the flood! I’m almost sure this is a reread, but I don’t have any record of it. (I didn’t keep records of what I read when I was in the single digits.) I missed Thingummy and Bob in this one, but there are other Moomin books for other times.

Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, The Story of Spanish. Oh, these are so lovely. I could read them for as many languages as they were willing to write them. Not really speaking Spanish was no detriment to my enjoying the way they traced etymologies and grammatical developments. Nadeau and Barlow are Canadian, Quebecois, which gives them a very decentralized and democratic view of languages. While they cover “pure Castilian” as a cultural phenomenon, they are in no way likely to get sucked into thinking of it as “the one real true Spanish that should always be spoken,” and they go into interesting “here’s how they do it differently in this area and here’s why” tangents. Hurrah language.

Sarah Rees Brennan, Untold. Very much a sequel, so start with the first one in the series if you’re interested. Town of nasty (and some not so nasty) wizards, family dynamics, Veronica Mars inspiration, annnnnnngst. Just exactly the sort of thing you’d want when you want that sort of thing.

Dodie Smith, The New Moon with the Old and The Town in Bloom. Just lovely. The former is about a family that must learn to make do under straitened circumstances, and the things that they find to do with themselves are positive without necessarily being at all sex/gender traditional, which, given 1960s setting, is really refreshing. The latter is about some old friends who were involved with the theater, looking back at horrible and wonderful things that happened and how it’s all unfolded since, and it’s got some lovely same-sex living arrangements (not sexual arrangements, but dormitory style living for adults) pre-WWII that…you just don’t find that sort of thing in novels mostly. Dodie Smith is fun and interesting and–I don’t even want to say “subversive,” because she just comes out and says, “No, not that way, that way is dumb.” I am going to reread The One Hundred and One Dalmatians just to see what’s in it that I missed as a child.

Anne Ursu, The Real Boy. The word “autism” appears nowhere in this book, and yet it is a very strong portrait of a young autistic hero in his own cultural context. There is a swerve in the middle where I am afraid she is going to do something problematic, and then she doesn’t, and HURRAH. Anyway: herbs, magic, autistic boy figures stuff out and saves the day without doing an interpretive dance about autism and neurodiversity. There is teamwork between friends with different brain types. I liked this. Hurrah this.

Barth Anderson, The Book of Seven Hands. Kindle. Honestly I would not have read this if I didn’t know Barth, because we got to talking somewhere on social media about this era of Spain, and he said he had a novella out set then and there, and I said hurrah and plunked it down on my list. If had heard about it from a different angle, it would almost certainly have been as a side project from the Mongoliad, which larger project I find completely off-putting, so I would have missed this. But honestly it did not seem that you needed to keep up with the Mongoliad stuff in any way to get what was going on in this Renaissance Spanish thriller. So I’m glad we had that conversation, because otherwise I would have missed this, and I don’t get enough Renaissance Spanish thrillers to miss any.

Madeline Ashby, vN. The first of my Christmas books to make me go put the author’s next work on my list. It was in some ways a classic piece of robot SF, engaging with previous works in that sub-genre, while retaining a distinctly modern sensibility/jumping-off point. Do want.

Jo Baker, Longbourn. This is the belowstairs version of Pride and Prejudice. Unlike many “other side of famous book” books, this one had what I felt was a plot and characters that would stand alone without the “literary classic” connection–although to the best of my knowledge Baker did not anywhere contradict P&P. I found the prose quite readable and the servants’ stories interesting and endowed with a sense of proportion/perspective. I definitely recommend this, and not just for Jane Austen fans. (Although if “servant novel early 19th century England” makes you go “ew,” probably not for you.)

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Lost Continent. Kindle. I had grabbed this while working on Atlantis fiction, and…this is not that. This is “Europe has fallen into barbarism” future SF. Fine, readable, not amazing. No more sexist than most other things its age, and one of the notable points was that while Europe had sunk into barbarism, Africa and China were perfectly well civilized for our American heroes to deal with. For 1916 that’s not too shabby.

Rae Carson, The King’s Guard. Kindle. Hector! And backstory for Rae’s trilogy, but backstory that’s interesting and plotty enough by itself to be worthwhile. I would say that you could start with this one and not have the series spoiled for you, maybe get a taste of what the worldbuilding is like and how readable the prose is. On the other hand, if you’ve already enjoyed the trilogy and are impatient waiting for Rae’s new whatever-it-will-be, here you are, methadone.

Greer Gilman, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice. Kindle. Entirely diverting murder mystery both set among and steeped in Elizabethan dramatists. Probably a little opaque if you don’t have some kind of grounding in that group, but for those who do it typified a favorite concept of mine: that fun and smart are not at all opposites in fiction.

Jessica Day George, Wednesdays in the Tower. Whimsical and gryphon-endowed sequel to Tuesdays at the Castle. Not quite as suspenseful but still fun, with the magically shapeshifting castle.

Nicola Griffith, Hild. I wanted to love this book! I did love this book! Hooray! It’s the beginning of the story of St. Hilda of Whitby, a 7th century saint. There is a glossary in the back, I realized only after I’d used Viking-era Scandinavian cultural/linguistic knowledge to decode several things. But it’s very sensible and full of beautiful things and the experience of reading it is lovely and MY BUTTONS THEY ARE PUSHED. But I really think it is a quite excellent book in addition to pushing my buttons. Hild’s observations, Hild’s attempts to be a seer–they are so well-observed. I will be clamoring for more until we get it.

Peter Hoeg, The Elephant Keeper’s Children. I loved the experience of reading this book. It was one of those books where I just wanted to sink into it and keep reading indefinitely. I spent the first rather large chunk with no idea where it was going, because it was as though Hilary McKay and Daniel Pinkwater got together and adopted a Danish baby. But I didn’t mind not knowing where it was going, because it was such fun getting there. The only caveat I would have is that there are no actual elephants in this book. The elephants are a metaphor. This is one of the hazards of reading literary fiction, is a book like this with no elephants. But if you are not attached to elephants, the wacky children of Danish clergy are quite the thing.

T. H. Huxley, The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science. Kindle. Part of my “get this voice down for later use” reading project in odd moments. I think the thing that’s most illuminating about this essay (yeah, I know, sorry) is what exactly he felt had to be defended, at that point in history and culture.

Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll. Reread. I do love Thingumy and Bob. I often forget how I love Thingumy and Bob, because I love so many Moominy things. But they remind me of my grandfather.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. So. It turns out I am no more capable of treating the feminine as a generic unmarked state than I am the masculine–gendered pronouns are gendered, news at 11. However, the thing I really liked was that Leckie got how people screw up languages they don’t speak natively exactly right. Most SF attempts at that have been just wretched, completely inverting the logical structure of what people do and do not remember. (Short version: you remember hello and thank you and one two three. You do not necessarily remember every piece of technical vocabulary outside your own technical field. And you do not necessarily remember when cases or genders are marked in the new language and not in your native one. English speakers are far more likely to call the cake by the wrong gender in French than to forget how to say please for it.) I also liked the structure of the ancillaries, the way the concept was developed. Would definitely read more.

Franny Moyle, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde. I was searching for something else with “scandal” in the title, and the library’s oh-so-helpful search engine gave me this. I still hate the way the search engine parses things, but this was an interesting read: Constance was a writer and an interesting person in her own right. There were several places where I thought the biographer let partisanship run ahead of facts, but this seems to be a common problem with biographies, and I doubt you’ll find a better biography of Constance Wilde somewhere else.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. My coping mechanisms, I show you them. (No, I don’t have cancer. Some people I care about have cancer. Answer #1: make them cookies. Answer #2: LIBRARY.) Of course a history of an entire human disease of this type would have to leave things out or be unreadably long, but this has lots of interesting tidbits in it. If you are the sort of person who finds interesting tidbits comforting in the face of a big awful disease (even a very small and quite treatable version of that big awful disease), then this might be worth a run to your library too.

Gary Paul Nabhan, Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. Aughhhh, flawed flawed so very flawed. Like most people writing pop-evolution books, Nabhan way overgeneralizes. He leaps to conclusions about things that could easily be tested. He has very weird blind spots and assumptions–for example, he manages to write about consumption of chiles/capsaicin-bearing foods without ever considering any form of masochism. I wouldn’t think anyone would suggest that he would need to get into the intricacies of sexual subcultures to notice that people react differently to “ow, that hurts” in a culinary context. The experience he describes of having a former girlfriend react with overwhelming pain to a meal he did not even find notably spicy is a relevant one–but so is the person who is sweating, turning red, and showing every sign of pain–and reaching for another bowl of the chili. He also fetishizes “our ancestors”: our ancestors’ ways of eating were shaped not only by what was best for their bodies but by what was available, what was fashionable, what was traditional, what was just darn tasty–just like ours are. (And they varied, and finding the Hesiodic Golden Age of Food for even one ethnic group is not possible, much less for the varieties of ethnic group that comprise most people’s ethnic heritage these days.) Nabhan had a good point about individual and group predispositions for how to process different foods or even macronutrient balances varying extremely, and that it’s useful to look into that, but he then wandered off into the weeds. Too bad.

Evelyn Sharp, The Other Side of the Sun: Fairy Stories. Kindle. Sharp was a late Victorian/Edwardian suffragist and pacifist who also wrote for children. The stories are of a particular Victorian mode, with character names like Princess Daffodillia, but once you’re all right with that, they are somewhat above average for the genre. I wonder if they’re not better known because she didn’t do a clear novel to latch onto or because of her other work or for other reasons entirely. Anyway, they’re free on Gutenberg if you’re interested in Princess Daffodillia’s cohorts.

Dodie Smith, It Ends With Revelations. It didn’t really; most of the revelations came in the middle. There were several striking things about this book, which was both written and set in 1967. The attitudes towards sexuality were remarkably broad-minded and kind. Kindness was actually a striking feature–almost all the characters who actually appeared (rather than lurking offstage) were people of goodwill, most of whom cared about each other. And there was still a plot and conflict and like that. I don’t think I’d like this sort of thing to comprise most of my reading material, but it was really lovely for a change.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Air War. This is another chunk of story in this universe. There were some new characters as well as continuation of old, there was lots of return to Collegium, there was stuff. I continue to enjoy, but for the love of Pete do not start here.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. This is a narrower work than I thought, covering only the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. Apparently at that point Thompson felt that the working class had been made. Anyway, it got shelved between a book on gin and a book on cant, and did remarkably little with either, so: a piece of the whole, an interesting piece of the whole. I think one of the things that infuriated me was the rich using the Napoleonic Wars to convince the less-rich to sell off village commons For Fortification Against Boney. Arrrrgh.

Jules Verne, The Blockade Runners. Kindle. Straightforward American Civil War adventure romance. Not particularly worth seeking out.

Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire. This is a sequel to Code Name Verity, but it stood alone (albeit with spoilers for the events of the first book). There’s an entirely new main character, and…okay, look, it’s about a German concentration camp. It’s wrenching and vivid and horrible and so very good. Recommended, but brace yourself first.

P. G. Wodehouse, Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories and The Pothunters. Kindle. The former is a highly mixed bag of different kinds of stories and the latter a school story. Either will do if you are in the doctor’s office waiting room or the line at the post office; neither is particularly noteworthy.

Review copy provided by Tor.

This was a really solid Year’s Best collection. Of course there were stories in it I didn’t finish, or didn’t bother to reread, because that happens in pretty much every anthology ever: part of the point of anthologies is that not everything has to be to everybody’s taste for it to be worth the time and paper. But there were far fewer of that type of story than average, and more stories that I felt were worth mentioning in the good way.

I sometimes find Gene Wolfe’s characters frustratingly vague and distant. “Dormanna” is an exception, and it manages to have a child protagonist without being a teddy bear killing story. I like imaginary friends, that may be part of it. I also like complex friends, part real and part imaginary, and I think the titular Dormanna qualifies.

I am a sucker for alien stories, and Eleanor Arnason’s “Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery” is no exception, even though I am generally not a sucker for Holmesiana. But this isn’t Holmesiana, or at least not as I have encountered its worst excesses. Holmes is not a character in this story, but rather a character in stories read by the protagonist of this story. I love alien-perspective stories, and every time I encounter the Hwarhath, I think, “Oh yes, I like them, I should go find more of these.”

I can see where Naomi Kritzer’s “Liberty’s Daughter” would appeal to a very broad spectrum of SF readers, because it’s very like a lot of the SF people who are writing now read as teenagers, but with…how do I say this politely…it’s not with 75% less assholery. It’s with instances of assholery recognized and tagged as such, within the spectrum of human behavior. The seasteads are exactly the kind of varied extrapolative near future cultures I want to see more of in fiction.

In “Waves,” Ken Liu took a conflict that could easily have filled another SF short story and portrayed its outcome (I won’t say resolution) in a few pages, moving on to more and greater extrapolations across time, space, species, and family. One of my favorite of Liu’s so far, he portrays different gigantic life choices, and how they can separate–and reunite–family members.

Finally, “The North Revena Ladies Literary Society” by Catherine H. Shaffer is probably the least overtly SF of my favorite stories of this volume. It’s a spy action story that does SFnal things, but the SF aspects of them come in later. I just wrote out what it could be a crossover of and then realized that my analogy would be a spoiler for the story, so instead: SF spy ladies, hurrah!

Maurice Druon, The Iron King. French historical fiction. Very much of the Batman Villain school of historical fiction (you know: the good guys are physically apparent, and so are the bad guys), but still adventurous and fun.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. This was a quite long book, and yet I still felt like it needed to be longer in order to address its subject properly. The stuff about early 20th century journalism was much better covered in the beginning of the book than at the end, and the lives and interactions of Roosevelt and Taft after their falling out were not really very well covered. There was still a lot of interest in this book, though, and one of its chief results was making me a huge Nellie Herron Taft fan. I am firmly convinced that if not for her stroke, we would remember the Taft presidency radically differently. Fascinating, awesome woman.

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. This was another gigantic piece of nonfiction from the library, and I loved it. I gnashed my teeth a great deal, but not at the historian. It was full of all sorts of tidbits about different aspects of life, not just a “presidents and great landowners” sort of history, and also Howe is clear about the difference between “Americans” doing x, y, or z and a particular demographic of Americans doing x, y, or z. Oh, but don’t believe They Might Be Giants: Martin Van Buren was in no sense an abolitionist. I don’t know why they said that. Scansion is no excuse. (James K. Polk did a bunch of the stuff in the song. But Van Buren, no.)

Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. If you already know a bit about 19th century French art–which apparently I do–this will not be very edifying. If not, it covers the lead-in to Impressionism, which is an interesting bit of art history. I had hoped it would be a bit deeper, though.

Alethea Kontis, Hero. Yep, it’s settled: I will keep reading these fairy-tale mashups as long as Alethea wants to keep writing them. The Woodcutter family is fun.

Eve LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother. I did not actually need to despise Bronson Alcott more than I previously did, and yet oh. OH. WHAT AN UTTER HEEL. Most things written about him are written by people who sympathize with him at least enough to write about him. LaPlante, on the other hand, was writing about the wife he mistreated. Abba Alcott was a fascinating person, influential and connected in her own right, and despite the angrification at Bronson, this was a really cool book.

George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, eds., Dangerous Women. Discussed elsewhere.

Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavor. I should not have liked this book. It was in several key ways eye-rollingly awful. It’s a prequel to Frankenstein, and it’s from the perspective of a teenage Victor, who is not, it turns out, improved by pubescent thinking. And there are bits and pieces of shout-outs to the original that fall completely flat. And nonetheless I found myself continuing with reading it, enjoying it, and even planning to read the sequel. Go figure.

Emily Pohl-Weary, Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl. This ended abruptly, like the first two-thirds of a novel, and also the plot followed pretty standard werewolf narratives, so…the title felt particularly unfortunate. I enjoyed reading it, though, and it looks to me like a promising sign about Pohl-Weary’s later work.

Ruth Rendell, No Man’s Nightingale. Latest Wexford mystery, and I really like how the retired Inspector continues to age, how he has different strengths and weaknesses than the younger characters. I would not recommend starting here, though, as most libraries will have some earlier volumes that will give more context to the characters.

Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Gene Luen Yang, Boxers and Saints. A pair of graphic novels about the Boxer Rebellion, from opposing and overlapping Chinese perspectives. The sort of thing I look at and think, “When I was my godkids’ age, they just plain didn’t have anything like this.” Neither of the two comes first; they are companions rather than one a sequel.

Roger Zelazny, A Dark Traveling. Novelette. If you’re in the mood for Zelazny and not so much for First Person Asshole, this fits the bill admirably. Teenage cross-world traveling with enough mythical/legendary elements to fill an entire trilogy of modern urban fantasy/paranormal romance; very much a precursor to that sort of thing.