Novel Gazing Redux

John Allison and Lissa Treiman, Giant Days. A slice-of-life comic set among new university students in the UK. People sorting out their personal issues on a number of fronts. Charming enough that I kept going but not enough that I will seek out a sequel; it’s not really my genre-combo.

Walter Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. About the extinction event from the front lines of figuring it out. Nerds probably know all this stuff, so the value in this is either introductory or hearing it from the source. Alvarez is a little bit of a dinosaur himself in spots.

Marie Brennan, In the Labyrinth of Drakes. Discussed elsewhere.

Margaret Creighton, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle. Fascinating stuff, emotionally wrenching, particularly in the intersection of these groups. White ladies of the time: not always filled with understanding of their fellow humans’ experiences, it turns out, particularly when propaganda they were exposed to at the time focused on the potential threat to them rather than the actual danger, injury, and loss experienced by Black people on a daily basis. The immigrant experience focused on here was German and Irish, in case that’s relevant to people’s interest level. Goes into the post-Civil War shaping of the Gettysburg story also.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. I would be fascinated to see how this book would be different if it was written today, but it’s still fascinating to have a look at how differently the two groups regarded land management, settlement, and sustenance/sustainability in the same area in the same period. Highly recommended, especially for speculative fiction writers who are thinking about cultural differences.

Michael J. DeLuca, Jason S. Ridler, Scott H. Andrews, Erin Hoffman, and Justin Howe, The Homeless Moon. A chapbook put together by five friends. That is, five friends of each other; I only know two of them. My favorite stories were DeLuca’s and Hoffman’s, playing most directly with personal relationships, but it’s a fascinating project, and I’m glad they did more together.

Diane Duane, Games Wizards Play. Argh. ARGH. This is book ten in an ongoing series. Definitely do not read it if you haven’t read the other nine. If you have…well, look. One of the pleasures of book ten in an ongoing series is spending more time with the characters you like, and I feel like GWP fails on that front. Duane has spent nine books establishing Kit and Nita as people who don’t care that much about what Kids At School think, people who have lives ranging around the universe doing cool stuff and having lots of teenage peers outside Kids At School. Now that they are dating, nearly the entirety of their dating relationship for this volume is obsessing about whether Kids At School think they are definitely having sex or definitely not. (They are definitely not. But this is far less important, apparently, than what people who are not characters in this or any other book think about whether they are or not.) They go on and on for pages and pages about how stupid these jerks are and how annoying it is. I agree. It is annoying. SO SHUT UP ABOUT IT. Think about what you want and what the other person wants. If you have to, think about the people you actually interact with. But for heaven’s sake leave off about Sir Not Appearing In This Volume because I could not possibly care less. And speaking of things I could not possibly care less about: wizard’s tournaments that have never been mentioned before this volume. Yawn. Jerkface young wizards who are supposed to be mentored for such tournaments because the Powers That Be say so: oh, is that the time? YAWN. Sometimes the Powers That Be are getting awfully darn convenient in this series. Why should I care about this stupid character? THE POWERS WANT YOU TO. WELL I DON’T. So there is a little charming bit with planets. And there is some cultural iffiness. And there is the increasing problem of the time slippage of when exactly these books take place, having started in 1982, taken about four years, and are now set in 2016, which is not helped when the author herself is not hitting her marks on setting them in 2016 but is trying. And…gosh I hope she recovers from this one. Because I really do like this series and think it has good things yet to do if only it gets there. But YUCK.

Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. This is an overview sort of book, and I read it after the climate change-related book below. I do not recommend that ordering. But if you don’t know a lot about the climate shift in that period and all the things that went into it–and came out of it–this is a good short summary sort of book. Or if you just want to refresh your brain in that direction, which was more my case.

Mark Forsyth, The Horologican: A Day’s Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language. “Lost” is really an overstatement. Most of them were mildly obscure at best. But Forsyth has an entertaining enough set of stories to tell. It was a fast read, occasionally too centered on his own cultural experience to the point of making sweeping pronouncements. If you can cope with that, it’ll stay fun. If that makes you wince too often, it won’t.

Faith Erin Hicks, The Nameless City. Discussed elsewhere.

Kelly Link, Get in Trouble. I went to write my thoughts on this book right after the Pulitzer Prize committee wrote theirs. Um. So I liked it too, it turns out. I liked it first? No, probably not. I feel like there is more of a YA shift here, but I haven’t read the intervening collections yet–they’re on my list–between this and Magic for Beginners–so I may just be late to the party. Anyway I approve of the teenward shift, of the awkward and hidden things in young people and the awkward and hidden things in the world finding their way toward each other in Link’s work.

David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health. The section on symbiogenesis was really interesting. The rest…puts soil development and microbiome development together in interesting ways I guess but none of it is earth-shattering. Montgomery’s book on dirt is better. This meanders around food and cancer and all sorts of stuff that seems like it should be more interesting than it is, probably because this is highly popularized and not very deep. (Symbiogenesis, though! Let’s have more on that.)

Steven Ozment, The Burgermeister’s Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town. Sexual virtue and politics and lawsuits and female agency in the courts. Ozment is always so good at microhistory. He is my favorite historian of Germany.

Robert W. Patch, Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Another book about agency in court systems where it tends to be discounted, and also what happens when that agency is undercut. In this case it’s indigenous people, including women but not limited thereto, whose agency is examined. Still, an interesting commonality with the Ozment that I didn’t expect. This is very very case-study based, giving the names of every single person involved.

Jeffrey Quilter, The Moche of Ancient Peru: Media and Messages. Lots of pictures of Moche pottery. This is the least obscene set of Moche pottery I have ever seen in my life. I don’t mean that as a criticism per se–there are some pieces like one of the llama ones that are really quite lovely. But I raised an eyebrow at how selectively non-obscene it was.

William Rosen, The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century. This is a much deeper, more thorough, and more interesting exploration of the effects of climate change on a period of history. It’s also remarkably cheerful considering the title. The famine doesn’t come until well over halfway into the book, and there’s lots of squabbling over the throne of Scotland and various other upbeat topics. Um. I think the person who writes this sort of book must be a person very much like myself in some regards? might be why I can find it so chipper? But really it’s not a gloomy book at all, it races right along through rains and Viking raids and other things that make a person happy.

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude. A set of essays from the very end of Sacks’s prolific life. Not offensive in any way–cheering, in fact–but probably only of great importance to the Sacks completist.

Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth, eds., The Cultural Construction of Norden. A very curious set of essays about how the modern Norden countries (that is, Scandinavia plus Finland and Iceland) got to where it is, culturally. It makes several very weird assumptions, such as not talking about immigration or emigration. So…no Turks, no Finns-in-Sweden, no anybody, right then. Also the Haugean movement and similar movements are described as though their remains in Norway (or the rest of the Norden region) settled into their current form without any influence from bleeding their radical elements off into the US and Canada. As if by magic. So…I ended up eyebrowing at this book a lot more than I was enlightened by it, and I wouldn’t end up recommending it.

Review copy provided by the author. Full disclosure: she is also a personal friend.

I don’t see any reason that you wouldn’t want to go back and read all the books in this series. A Natural History of Dragons is the first one, and it’s a good one, so: you can start there! It’s fine! But while I am usually a fan of reading things in their proper order, now that I’m an adult and live in a state with good libraries and mostly can, and while there are elements from this book that carry over from the previous ones, I think that actually it would be a perfectly reasonable book to read if you don’t have the others to hand to start with.

So. In case you weren’t with us for the previous three books: this is a quasi-Victorian lady who is a dragon naturalist, traveling the world having adventures and making thrilling discoveries about Dragons: How Do They (And Their Biology) Work. There are also discoveries about related species, about archaeology, about various cultures of her world, unwanted forays into human politics that Isabella (Lady Trent) finds annoying…but mostly there is dragon naturalism. Lots and lots of dragon naturalism.

(I was going to say that this is not to be confused with dragon naturism but I don’t recall a single one of the dragons wearing pants, so you know what? Knock yourself out, dragon naturism too.)

This one is a desert setting, with Isabella teaming up with locals to figure out dragon breeding in captivity if in fact it can be figured out at all. Gossip from at home and abroad plagues her and must be…dealt with. She is set upon by foreign spies and difficulties with logistics. Will she prevail? Well. Sorta. That’s the book, right there. There’s one more left to go, and I think there was snow foreshadowing for it in this one. At least I hope so….

Please consider using our link to buy In the Labyrinth of Drakes from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is a graphic novel that I think should be reasonably entertaining for anyone who likes its type of story from age about 7 or 8 up. It has fighter training and moments of violence, but not more than you would see on, say, Avatar: The Last Airbender–it’s not a graphic graphic novel, if that makes any sense. Nobody is having smoochy time. The main characters are kids, but their concerns aren’t trivial or mired in the kind of jokes that a friend of mine used to call “sixth grade fart poop penis jokes,” where the entire punchline is that body parts and functions exist. So basically I don’t see an upper age limit on the appeal to this book.

Older readers will spot that the multicultural city of the title is drawing many of its visual elements from East Asian cultures, but I don’t think that the mishmash should be any kind of detriment to enjoyment–rather the opposite. The two young main characters, Kai and Rat, are from different cultures within the city, very different backgrounds and lives, and while the arc of their friendship won’t be a new one to anyone much over 7, it’s a classic for a reason. They have things to learn from each other and things to share as equals.

And contrary to my initial fears from the first few pages, there are not interminable training sequences–just enough to whet the appetites of fantasy fans who like that sort of thing. Whew.

This is the first in a series, but it’s also a self-contained story, so people like myself who prefer an actual ending will not be frustrated by a complete “to be continued…” cliffhanger. Cheerfully recommended; good fun.

Please consider using our link to buy The Nameless City from Amazon.

Albert Goldbarth, Arts and Sciences. Reread. My standards for how a poet engages with the sciences are much higher than they were in my early twenties, and I just consistently am not finding that Goldbarth has much to say to me just because he has some things to say about science. Which is a shame.

Madeleine L’Engle, The Weather of the Heart. Reread. This was another not entirely successful reread of something I read in my early twenties. Not only the forms of these poems but also their content are highly formalized, and knowing a bit more about Madeleine L’Engle’s life from outside sources made me wince in several spots. Still a better idea than reading news articles about Donald Trump over breakfast, though.

James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Colonial Society. This goes through chapter by chapter discussing the different types of person in the colonial Spanish part of Peruvian society in this period (as opposed to the colonized indigenous part–though indigenous persons were discussed inasmuch as they engaged with the colonizers’ society/culture). Notaries, shoemakers, etc.: what part of Spain were they from, what was their role, did they stick around long-term, etc. Very useful sourcebook if you’re interested in the period, probably not very good as an overview or first source on it.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal to Noise. I wanted to like this more than I did: an old record player and teenagers making mixtape-style magic. But in the end I felt like the parallel timelines didn’t line up very well, their relative weighting and pacing didn’t work very well for me. Still an author I will continue to read, because it was not a catastrophic failure.

Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. This was her first collection, and I’m glad I read Vampires in the Lemon Groves first instead, because she’s gotten better. Also this contains several pieces that are either related to Swamplandia! or dry runs for it, and I felt that Swamplandia! did what it needed to do as a self-contained thing, and these pieces didn’t really improve anything. However, there were several of the unrelated pieces–the one with the minotaur, the title piece–that delighted me, and I don’t necessarily assume that’ll happen at all in a short story collection, so me, I’m sticking with this Karen Russell idea.

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories. A four-part reflection of love and family and war and being broken and monstrous. I loved this. I liked it so much better than A Stranger in Olondria, which I also liked. I liked how the pieces doubled back on themselves and reflected the earlier parts differently. I liked how the characters were sometimes prickly and difficult. It was just what I wanted when I picked it up.

Thomas Siddell, Gunnerkrigg Court Volume 4: Materia. I don’t read this comic online because it doesn’t move fast enough for me to read one page every few days, so instead I read the collected volumes. Which, in this case, still did not move fast enough. I’m interested in what it’s doing overall, but the demands of art are hard, I guess, and we’re not giving up on those grounds.

Dana Simpson, Unicorns Vs. Goblins. Phoebe and Marigold go to music camp, among other things. That part I enjoyed; the goblin plot I felt was very brief, abrupt, under-handled, disappointing. I’m past expecting this to be “the new Calvin & Hobbes” and am letting it be its own thing; now I’m just wishing this volume was as good as Unicorn on a Roll.

Joyce Sutphen, Coming Back to the Body. Reread. Joyce was my intro creative writing prof in 1997, so returning to these poems is fascinating–many of them are strongly autobiographical, and I can still hear Joyce’s breathless voice reading them. They’re not my usual style of poetry, but I can see why she has met with the success she has (poet laureate of the state etc.).

Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn. A vivid and intense 1001 Nights retelling, very distinct from E.K. Johnston’s A Thousand Nights despite both featuring a strong romance and a strong female platonic relationship. The root story is not one that snagged me for possible retelling as a love story, so I’m fascinated to watch very different people make it work, and I’ll be even more interested to see what Ahdieh does branching out into more of her own stories with the sequel.

Thornton Burgess, The Adventures of Old Man Coyote. We all have gaps in how we read the children’s classics as kids, and Burgess was one of mine–when talking to a friend about his childhood reading and Little, Big, it became clear to me that I’d read a character in the latter as a type when he was far more particular than that. Burgess is very much of a different era of children’s literature–gender issues so marked that there was only one (grandmother) female character in the entire animal village, didacticism not only marked but set aside in little poems–and yet it was a breezy little read, and I could see why decades of kids learning to read were proud of getting through the different animals’ adventures.

Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern. Strange combination of highly personal and highly intellectualized/meta poems in a very small volume. While I could see that what he was doing was very good, none of it touched me very particularly, in the strange way that poems either do or do not. However, it was a thing that I read over breakfast instead of articles about Donald Trump, and this is a life choice I cannot help but recommend.

Neil Kent, The Triumph of Light and Nature: Nordic Art, 1740-1940. Lots of pictures, some of them unfamiliar and interesting. I am still puzzling over Willumsen’s Jotunheim. Particularly the decapitation. I was interested in this before planning my trip to Sweden and Finland, but I made it a priority to read in case there was anything I’d want to make a point of seeing.

Hilary McKay, Binny in Secret. This is one of the good McKays, by which I mean that it made me giggle out loud in several spots and it also tackled genuinely dark and difficult topics. And yet it wasn’t one of the best McKays, by which I mean that I don’t think it really held together in the end. The dark and difficult topics were brought up with a “lady or the tiger” sort of ending: unresolved, left to the reader, in a way that I found to be a copout, and also one of the middling-difficult topics (the relationship between the two girls) was really glossed over in a way that was far less sensitive than I usually expect of McKay. Also the characters were more remembered from Binny for Short than completely drawn in. So: I’m glad I read it, I will want my own copy (this was the library’s), but it’s not going to be one of my top recommendations. More on a par with Indigo’s Star than the really good ones.

Jonathan Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. A fascinating look at an essayist at the end of an era, his family and how he portrayed them. Spence is really good at this kind of microhistory, the sort of stuff for China that Steven Ozment does for Germany. Always a pleasure.

Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree. Oh, I loved this. Loved. It’s a novel about Jonathan Edwards–you know, the preacher of “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” that Jonathan Edwards–and his household and neighbors and their world. And Stinson really digs into the fundamental weirdness of colonial Massachusetts, religiously and interpersonally, and yet sticks with their fundamental humanity, in ways that are so compelling. It’s rare and wonderful to get a great historical novel that isn’t focused on either war or a single arc of romance, that gets all the gritty details of householding right and puts them in the context of different characters’ concerns with their larger universes. Preaching from insects, different slaves’ perspective on joining their owners’ church, nephews finding their way in the world their uncle shapes with his preaching but does not control…oh, so many good bits.

Wislawa Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand. Reread. Perhaps it’s an aspect of reading in translation, but while nothing shot lightning through me, nothing made me go leaping through the house looking for my phone or my computer to write to someone about a particular line, a particular poem, the entire experience of this was satisfying, like being in very good and thoughtful hands, like a satisfying conversation.

Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Fascinating study of how people interact with the ideas of magic and evil and money when the money/wage component is comparatively new to how they deal with work. Lots of really interesting anecdote, lots of really dense and chewy analysis. Good fodder for fantasy writers, probably worthwhile for others as well.

Lavie Tidhar, ed., The Apex Book of World SF Volume 3. Like Volume 2, this was an extremely varied collection in tone, subject, author origin, and more; I expect that Tidhar had to work quite hard to get such a variety of stories. The ones that stood out for me in the most positive ways were Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Fadzlishah Johanabas’s “Act of Faith,” and Amal El-Mohtar’s “To Follow the Waves.”