Novel Gazing Redux

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky. This is the latest of the Rivers of London series, with both Peter and Abigail getting point of view in alternating chapters. If you’re enjoying that series so far, rejoice, here’s another. And it’s up in Scotland, which was good for me because further north and may be good for you because variation in setting. Do I feel like this is one that moved the arc plot forward immensely? No, I really don’t, this is one where he wanted to let the characters do some things. And they did. Okay.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. The jarring thing about this book is that it reads exactly like the essays I’m reading about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. in New York Review of Books (and, to a lesser extent, London Review of Books) in terms of tone. Occasionally that’s comprehensible because some of those essays are still being written by Timothy Garton Ash. Sometimes it’s just a boggling moment of “oh gosh it’s been like that the whole time.”

Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. When you were a teenager, did you have a friend whose father insisted that everything of note had been invented by his own ethnicity? And would occasionally pop up while you and your friend were in the kitchen getting a snack to give you another example? I have seen this with Irish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Italian dads, and there may have been more I’m not remembering. Well, I don’t think Mr. Beckwith is actually Scythian (…some of the dads in question were not actually their thing either), but other than that, it’s just like that. And the thing is, he might be right about some of it. He certainly seems to be right that taking a contradictory and known hostile account as our main source about an entire culture is not a grand plan. It’s just that I feel like I want more information about whether, for example, the entire field of philosophy from Greece to China was actually invented by Scythians, whether most reputable scholars would agree with his theories that Lao Tzu and the Buddha were both meaningfully Scythian, etc. But gosh it sure was something to read.

Ingvild Bjerkeland, Beasts. One of the questions that arises with literature in translation is how unusual a particular shape of narrative is in its original. Because in English, this is a very, very standard post-apocalyptic narrative of two siblings’ survival. Is it similarly standard in Norwegian? I don’t know. Possibly I don’t know yet. Anyway, it was reasonably pleasant to read and short, if you’re looking for that sort of thing, but for me it doesn’t have a particularly fresh take on the tropes involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox. Kindle. Penric’s children are growing up. He’s not that thrilled. Having to deal with a possessed ox does not help matters. I wouldn’t start here, because I think it leans on having a sense of Penric and Desdemona from the previous volumes, which are luckily all still available.

Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore. Discussed elsewhere.

A.R. Capetta, Costumes for Time Travelers. This is a cozy that is actually cozy for me as a reader! Gosh. That rarely happens. I think part of the strength here is brevity: at 200 pages, it’s only trying to do some things, not everything, which gives me fewer loose…uh…threads. So to speak. But also Capetta is quite good at focusing my attention on the stuff they care about, which is a major skill in prose. And: time travelers! getting clothes from somewhere specific! Fun times! I will probably give this as a gift more than once this year.

P.F. Chisholm, A Clash of Spheres. This is a case where I am really frustrated not to have the next one RIGHT NOW, but I generally don’t do that (more on why in a minute). It’s very much more in the land of politics than of mystery per se, but a good Elizabethan era [Scottish/English] Border politics novel, much enjoyed, last line cliffhanger aaaaagh. (It is also book 8 in its series. Don’t start here. Chisholm expects that you will know various things about the characters and setting and care proportionately, and I’m glad she does, it works for me…but I’ve read all the preceding books. I recommend that.)

Emma Flint, Other Women. So…I’m part of the problem here. I know it. I talk a good game about how evil is largely extremely mundane and unglamorous, and how we really need to think about whether the way we portray villainy in fiction is fueling unproductive assumptions about some of our moral opponents being geniuses when some of them are in fact very venial, grubby, and straightforward. Well. This is a book with two narrators united by one man, and that man is one of the most banal villains in all of fiction. The only reason he can charm anyone is 1) extreme good looks, but as this is prose, you will have to be willing to imagine that yourself for it to work; 2) they are very very vulnerable. They are desperate. This is a book about the “extraneous” women of the 1920s, after the mass male casualty event that was the Great War, and how vulnerable such women could be, particularly with the gender norms and assumptions of the time. It is based on a true story. Its prose is reasonably well done. Also I did not enjoy reading it and do not recommend it, because “Look, isn’t he gross? but basically very mundane?” is not something I like spending a whole book with. So I continue to be part of the problem, and I continue to think about what to do about that, but in the meantime, meh, still not thrilled with this book.

Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal. Absolutely a straightforward book about democratic norms and practices in Senegal and how it is similar to and different from other countries in the region, how it is influenced by France and how not. Absolutely the book it’s claiming to be.

Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear. This is why I don’t put the next book in a series on my wish list until I’ve read the preceding one: because sometimes I will just be D-O-N-E after the mess an author makes of a book in a series I’ve previously enjoyed. This book was published less than a decade ago, which is far, far too recent for not one of the investigators to run into a person they have identified with one birth gender IDed as another gender and have nobody say, “Oh, well, what if they’re trans.” The response instead is not overtly transphobic but is kind of a disaster both in terms of handling of gender and in terms of the logistics of the actual murder mystery at hand. Not recommended, and it’s killed my interest in the rest of the series.

Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Definitely not what it says on the tin. This is instead an attempt to wade through and adjudicate the effects of a single outsized personality on the field of stream restoration. Which was sort of interesting as a case study, and it’s short, but also I was hoping for stream restoration. Oh well, I have another book to try for that.

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal: A Travelers’ Portrait. In this one, on the other hand, you’ll never guess what they did. That’s right: they sure did go to Portugal. This is a very weird book, a giant compendium of short accounts of British people who went to Portugal for various reasons (grouped by reason). I like Rose Macaulay a great deal better than the average person on the street, but this is not the good end of her prose, including paragraphs that stretched for more than three pages at a go. If you want to know things about Portugal, go elsewhere unless it’s super specific stuff about really obscure British travelers. If you’re a Rose Macaulay completist, come sit by me, and we can sigh in mild frustration over this book. If you’re not in either of those categories, this is definitely not for you.

Alastair Reynolds, The Dagger in Vichy. Kindle. This is tonally different from the other mid-far future stuff Reynolds has been doing, and I’m here for it; I like to see people branch out a bit. I don’t know whether he’s been reading some of the same historical mysteries as I have, but I ponder the question not because I feel like anything is derivative but because some of the same interesting ideas may have come into play. In any case, this is short and fun and I like it.

Nicole C. Rust, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders–And How We Can Change That. This is also short and fun and I like it. Okay, maybe brain disorders are not an entirely standard shape of fun. But Rust is very thoughtful about what hasn’t been working and what has/might, in this field, and her prose is very clear, and I recommend this if you’re at all interested.

Vikram Seth, The Humble Administrator’s Garden. Kindle. There’s a groundedness to these poems that I really like. They have a breadth of setting but a commonality in their human specificity.

Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Miss Plum and Miss Penny. I’m afraid the comedy of this light 20th century novel did not hit particularly well for me. It didn’t offend–there were not racial jokes, for example–but it was just sort of. Not hilarious. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman who takes in a younger woman in need, is rightfully much annoyed by her, and learns to appreciate her own life a lot more thereby. I’m not offended by this book. I just don’t have any particular reason to recommend it.

Sonia Sulaiman, ed., Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction. I really like that there is a wide variety of tone, emotion, speculative conceit, and relationship with Palestine here. As with most anthologies, some stories were more my jam than others, but I’m really glad this is here for me to find out.

Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman. A friend recently told me that this is the open pseudonym of Sarah Zettel, whose science fiction and fantasy I have enjoyed. This is one of her Regency mysteries–I understand she also writes romances under this name but I found the distinction to be clearly labeled, hurrah. Anyway this is just what you would want in a Regency mystery, good prose, froth and sharpness balanced, good times, glad there are more.

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128. Flooding and river course changes! Environmental devastation and famine! References to James C. Scott in the analysis of how the imperial government handled it! Absolutely this is my jam. It’s a very specific work, so I can’t say that everyone should read this, but I never say that anyway, people vary. But if you have an interest in Chinese environmental history, or in fact in environmental history in general, you’ll be pleased with this one.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I’d read–and very much liked–before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that’s not unexpected for any collection these days. What’s less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn’t hurt that Campbell’s sense of place and culture is a northern one–not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There’s death and transformation here–these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I’m so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

William Alexander and Wade Roush, eds., Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities. This is that rare thing, an anthology of MG SF. Even rarer, the authors in it are generally experienced at writing for children but were not giving us (or the kids) a pile of tie-in stories, rather doing SF that works as short stories. Count me in. There were several favorites here with new work–Fran Wilde and Carlos Hernandez stood out.

Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and Ink and Steel. Rereads. One of the strange things about having been in this business this long is that I can now have the entirely new experience of rereading something that a peer wrote twenty years ago, that I read when it was new. That’s basically what I’m doing with the Promethean Age series, and it’s fascinating to be able to see not just how a person might do some things differently but how my friend, specifically, definitely would. A person would not have someone’s female mage title be Maga in 2025 (ope); but I’ve been there the whole time for how my friend handles writing about trust and betrayal and other themes like the ones in this book, and…she wouldn’t do it the way she does now without having done it the way she did then. Looking forward to finishing the series reread when I’ve made a bit of a dent in my birthday books.

A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Reread. What’s interesting to me about the structure of all this on the reread is that Byatt sets it up for herself so she never has to make Frederica’s marriage work on the page. Frederica was married after the previous book, and by the time this one starts, the marriage is already absolutely ghastly. So we never have to live through the “oh, this is why she picked this guy, I see it now” moments. We can go with accounts, summaries…which are never the whole story. I also feel like it’s clearer to me on the reread that the level of domestic violence that had to be involved to be sure that the reader would take Frederica’s side was absolutely appalling. Which is not to say that level of domestic violence doesn’t happen, just…well. This is very well done, and I will want to reread it again but not often, oh lordy not often.

Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy. This sure is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.

Alexa Hagerty, Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Oh gosh, this was extremely well done, one of the best books I’ve read lately, and also of course harrowing. Of course. The title tells you what you’re getting–specifically, the author did forensic anthropology on mass gravesites in Guatemala and Argentina–you should not be surprised at what is in here. And indeed I was not, because shocked and surprised are not the same thing, especially not in 2025. I think the thing that I found notable, that I have been turning over and over in my head as a speculative fiction writer for the last several years and not finding solutions to, is that there were very clear examples of how the people who are wrong–who are very wrong, morally wrong, villains of history wrong–very often do not have a point where they change their minds and see that they are wrong. And I think that we are ill equipped for shameless wrongs, and I am probably going to be thinking about that for many years more.

Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands. This is the latest Benjamin January mystery, and it leans on the complexities of family structure (emotionally as well as socially) in Louisiana in the early 19th century when the different sides of the family were racially differentiated. Which is an interesting thing to do, and I am still enjoying this series twenty-some books on.

Kat Lehmann, No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird’s Song: A Haiku Memoir. There is a whole spectrum of how nitpicky you are about what does and does not make a haiku, and if you are (as I am) toward the nitpickier end of that spectrum, you will find that many of these things are not haiku. They are brief, fragile, fleeting, fascinating. Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether they’re exactly haiku. (Also sometimes it might.)

Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate. This is an East Asian-inflected Beauty and the Beast retelling wherein the Beast is a water dragon and Beauty is an art forger. That part was great, and I find Lim’s prose compulsively readable. What was less great for me is that it featured the trope that if someone is being mean and unpleasant it means that he secretly likes you and is doing it to protect you from something something who cares. BIG NOPE from me, people who are mean and act like they don’t like you probably do not like you and should not get to have sex with you. (There is not a great deal of actual sex here. This is a YA. But still, message remains the same.)

Molly Knox Ostertag, The Deep Dark. The twist was very telegraphed for me, and I’m not sure that the author stayed fully in control of the metaphor throughout, but it was a fun coming of age self-acceptance magic comic that I will probably give to a young person in my life.

Victor Pineiro, The Island of Forgotten Gods. Discussed elsewhere.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be. This is nonfiction (title could go either way!) about marine life and how it is adapting (or not) to climate change, and it was very cool and full of a wide range of sea creatures. I like sea creatures. Yay. Also Scales was very conscious of walking the line where she reported accurately but did not inculcate despair, which in climate writing is crucial.

Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. This is very short and pithy, and probably people who are not disabled and spend less time with other disabled people than I do need it more than I do, but also it was a fast read and well done, good to know that I have this as a resource to recommend. Also kudos to our librarians for putting it on the Disability Pride Month display, which is where I found it. Also kudos to our librarians for having a Disability Pride Month display in this year of 2025.

Jennie Erin Smith, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure. This specifically deals with the families in Colombia that have strong clear lines of genetic tendency toward Alzheimer’s: how they have suffered, how they have been involved in Alzheimer’s research, the ways in which that has not been handled very satisfactorily by people with more resources and power. Smith interacts with these families as individuals and groups, as real people, and it is a correspondingly difficult read, and also a correspondingly worthwhile one.

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, eds., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond. Kindle. This is a series of papers mostly about the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, with several that venture beyond that to historical parallels. It’s interesting stuff even if you aren’t someone who thinks about Rome all the time, definitely worth the time, and as with many of this type of collection, if you don’t find one paper particularly interesting, another will be along in a minute.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an unsubtly sweet book, an homage to Puerto Rico and its people and also a lovely depiction of being a second-culture kid. Nico is a budding filmmaker, desperate to win the approval of the most famous Puerto Rican in the world, filmmaker and musical writer Juan Miguel Baranda. (I said “unsubtly,” didn’t I?) He’s spending a glorious summer with his abuela and his two primos, looking forward to lazy days at abuela’s house, glorious snacks, and beach time.

But the three cousins have far more adventure than they bargained for when they encounter a chupacabra–and the rest of the legends of Puerto Rico are not far behind. Nico and his family have to figure out what the mysterious creatures and sublime beings are trying to tell them, before the island they love faces devastation again–this time possibly for good.

Sometimes Nico’s angst about his movie career and his parents’ relationship slows the pace of this middle grade fantasy, but cousins Nessi and Kira are always there to pick up the pace–and Pineiro succeeds in what Nico hopes to do, painting a portrait of the island he loves so that the rest of the world can see what he loves about it.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend.

Nera has been helping her father at the titular Station her whole life. Or…her whole life-ish thing. Because Nera has only ever been in the Station, so she only interacts with her father, the dead, and the dogs who guide the dead on their way through the Veil and keep them safe. (The dogs. OMG the dogs. So many good doggos in this book.) Charlie has just lost her sister, who is also her best friend, and her family is falling apart. On top of it all, she’s been seeing ghosts–but never the one she most wants to see.

But when Charlie finds the Station, she hopes for a chance to reverse what was lost. Nera is astonished–delighted–to meet another living person who can share at least some of her ghost experiences. But all is not well with the Station itself–dark forces threaten its peaceful work of helping spirits leave this world for what comes after. They want to shatter and rend. And the dark forces know all of Nera and Charlie’s most vulnerable points.

Like life, this book is so full of both grief and joy. Both are extremely well-drawn and intense–I started reading this book on an airplane and stopped almost immediately, because I could see that there would be moments of stronger emotion than I wanted to invite by myself in seat 16B. If you’ve suffered loss recently, time your reading of this book carefully, but I think it can be very healing. I think this is one of those rare books that can be enjoyed by many but will be desperately needed by some. There’s so much heart here, for other people and of course dogs, but also for places. Highly recommended.

A. S. Byatt, Still Life. Reread. I freely acknowledge that “4, 1, 2, 3” is an eccentric reread order for this series. (This is 2. Stay tuned for 3 in the next fortnight’s book list.) It’s also the one that, in my opinion, stands least well alone, mostly because of the ending. The ending is very cogent about the initial blurred, horrible phases of grief, but what it does not do is move through them to the next phases, to what happens after the first shock–which is an odd balancing for one book but fine for part of a larger story. I also find it fascinating that Byatt exists in this book as an authorial “I” in ways that she does not for the other books. “I wrote this word because of that,” she will say, and it seems that if the I is not Antonia, it’s someone quite close, it’s not anything near to a character and not really much like an in-book narrator. It’s just…our neighbor Antonia, who makes choices while writing, as one does, as we all do.

Linda Legarde Grover, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year. If you have a relative who is a person of goodwill but has been paying absolutely no attention to Native/First Nations culture, this might be a good thing to give them. It’s lots of very short (newspaper column or newsletter length) essays about personal memories and cultural memories through the turning of the year, nothing particularly deep and nothing that assumes that you know literally the first thing about Onigamiising (Duluth) or Ojibwe life or anything at all really. Not probably going to be very memorable if you do, but not offensive.

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting. Discussed elsewhere.

Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man, Midnight Fugue, and The Price of Butcher’s Meat. Rereads. And here we’re at the end of the series, and as always I wish there was more and am glad there’s this much. I don’t think I’ll need to return to The Price of Butcher’s Meat; the email format conceit (“this is a person who doesn’t use apostrophes, that means it’s informal!” Reg stop) does not improve with time, and the rest of the book isn’t really worth it to me. But the others are still quite solid mysteries, hurrah for Dalziel interiority.

Grady Hillhouse, Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment. I picked this up because it was already in the house, and because I’m writing a thing about a city planner, and I thought it might spark ideas. It did not: it’s very focused on the immediate 21st century American largely urban constructed environment. But what a neat book to be able to give a bright 10yo, or really anyone who can read full text but likes careful pictures of what there is and how it works.

Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison. Kindle. I found this to be a heartening read because Mitchison is clearly a person like us, someone who values art and human rights and a number of good things like that, a person who is doing the best she can in an internationally stressful time–and also she’s flat-out wrong a number of times in this book. A few times she’s morally wrong, several times she’s wrong in her predictions…and the Allies still won WWII and Mitchison herself still wrote a great many things worth reading. It is simultaneously a very friendly and domestic diary from someone Getting Through It All and a reminder that perfection is not required for progress.

Malka Older, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses. More Mossa and Pleiti mystery adventures. The two spend a large chunk of the book in different locations. Don’t start with this one, start with the first one, but also: events continue to ramify and unfold, hurrah events.

Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well With Others. The sequel to the previous “older women assassins attempting with not a great deal of success to be retired from killin’ folks” book, it has similar appeal. It could be that you’re ready to be done after one, which is valid, but if you weren’t, this is more of that, and reasonably enjoyable. There’s less of the dual timeline narrative here, about which I have mixed feelings: on the one hand it’s often good for authors to let go of that kind of device when it has served its purpose, and on the other I liked the contrast. Ah well.

Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking. Discussed elsewhere.

Tom Sancton, Sweet Land of Liberty: America in the Mind of the French Left, 1848-1871. This is not just about what people thought of the US at the time but also how they used images and references to it in their own internal propaganda, which is kind of cool. A lot of it was not particularly deep thought, and that is of itself interesting–in what ways do people react to large dramatic events for which they have limited context (but no small amount of possible personal use). If you like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing you’ll like. A few eccentric views of, for example, Susan B. Anthony, or the Buchanan presidency, but within the scope of what one would expect for a few lines from someone whose main expertise is not those things.

Leonie Swann, Big Bad Wool. This is the sequel to Three Bags Full, and it is another sheep-centered mystery novel that stays in semi-realistic sheep perspective (except in the places where it goes into goat perspective this time! there are goats!). If you had fun with the first one, this will also be fun; if not, probably start with the first one, because it does have references to prior events. I really appreciate the sheep having sheep-centered theories, it’s a good exercise in perspective.

Nghi Vo, A Mouthful of Dust. Discussed elsewhere.

Faith Wallis, ed., Medieval Medicine: A Reader. This is a compendium of translated documents from the period, with very small amounts of commentary between for context. If you want to know how to examine a patient’s urine or what humors linen enhances, this is the book for you. Also if you want a window into how people thought of bodies and health over this long and diverse period. I think it’s probably going to be more useful to have as a reference than to read straight through, but I did in fact read the whole thing this once (which I hope will help with my sense of what to check back on when using it as a reference).

Martha Wells, Queen Demon. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a bit like if The Book of Ash had a massively repeating time loop and was explicitly anti-fascist, and clocked in at almost exactly 300 pages.

So…not a lot like The Book of Ash actually. Ah well. It does have a scholar/historian, it does have examination of the legends of the past and how they serve the goals of the present. It does have complicated human relationships, and it does have about as much blood as something this full of swords should by rights have.

There’s a love story at the heart of this, possibly more than one depending on how you read it, but structurally it is definitely not a romance. It might be the older kind of romance, with knights fighting for their honor, with strange and wondrous events. Time loops certainly qualify, I should think. But the characters have a real tinge to them–they are explicitly not the stained glass icons some of them see from time to time in the text. If I had one complaint it could be my common one with time loops: that it’s hard to get the balance right so that repetition and change are harmonized in just the right way. But I’d still recommend the way Harrow is determined to examine how the stories we tell serve ends that may not be our own–and what we can do about that.