Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.

The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what’s become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who’s going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the “Seven Wonders,” and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say “basically” because it’s deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it’s one of them.)

I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who’s responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there’s a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation — for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.

Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.

I did come around to liking him, don’t worry. But when your protagonist’s firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he’ll never have to attend an event like this one again, it’s hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he’s less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.

The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for “vivid” rather than “realistic.” It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one’s a desert! this one’s a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn’t have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.

Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked — but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don’t look for deep exploration of what that’s going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren’t put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!

A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I’m not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not — I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people’s conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you’ve read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven’t read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.

The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I’ve known about Holland’s historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they’re occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It’s good, though, and I’ll certainly look up more of Holland’s work.

A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur’s Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn’t work as well for me as the others I’ve read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.

Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea’s worst royalty; in this case, that’s Yeonsangun, during the period when he’s become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who’s targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.

The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn’t hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that’s . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it’s hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who’s targeting royal officials — until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I’d been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he’s doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot — which takes up a significant portion of the book — was “meh.”

I recommend Hur’s books overall, but I wouldn’t start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.

The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I’d forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn’t quite hook me (the emphasis on “I’m not a nice person”), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN’T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.

Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.

This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that’s still very much present. Some of them I’d read before, like “The Dybbuk in Love” and “The Trinitite Golem,” but many were new to me. There’s a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn’t have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn’t catch on my own, as I’m sure there were some.

The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to — and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.

These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you’re here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the “Dies Irae” at them until half of them slink away in shame.

Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.

It must be admitted up front that I’m always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they’re assassins for a good cause. In this case, the “Museum” — that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to — was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y’know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.

However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.

Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn’t always get along despite generally being friends.

But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of “get revenge at last for all the sexism you’ve battled throughout your career,” that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that — because they’ve largely been offstage — I didn’t much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to “I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum” and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act — wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who’d had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry — I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn’t quite get either.

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher, narr. Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. This is the first of Kingfisher’s novels I’ve read (well, listened to), and I had a bit of tonal whiplash. On the one hand, there is some really awful stuff that happens here; on the other hand, the rest of the book feels almost . . . cozy? Like, by and large this is a story about people realizing a character is being abused and going to great lengths to show her kindness and help her escape her abuser. But also, abuse — along with brutal murder and various other things. I wonder if I would have found it less whiplash-y on the page than in audio, where the narrators’ voice wouldn’t have been setting a particular mood. I also suspect I was not well-served by knowing the folktale that ostensibly underlies this story; in truth, the novel bears very little resemblance to that tale, and expecting more caused me to wildly misread one character until fairly late in the game.

The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues, Beth Lincoln. Sequel to A Dictionary of Scoundrels, which I noted at the time felt like it had reached a good conclusion and didn’t really need a sequel (though I would read more about the Swifts at other points in time, maybe). Turns out, Lincoln had a good answer to that! This book takes Shenanigan Swift and various other relatives across the Channel into France, there to deal with their distant — and deeply estranged — cousins, the Martinets. This book is every bit as bonkers as its predecessor, but it introduces enough sorts of new bonker-dom to not feel like it’s treading water. And there is more fun with language, which is absolutely part of what I’m here for. I hope there will be a third book, and more after that!

Buddhist Folk Tales, Kevin Walker. This was an odd collection. The author is apparently a professional storyteller who converted to Buddhism, so this mixes both actual traditional stories (many of them from the Jataka tales) with others he’s made up — or in one case, a story made up by students of his, used with permission. Mostly it left me feeling like I should get a straight-up collection of Jataka tales, as I didn’t find this book all that satisfying.

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul, Eleanor Herman. Do not read this if you are easily nauseated by descriptions of gross things. If you can tolerate those, however, it’s fascinating.

Although the title references poison, and Herman does spend a little time talking about deliberate attempts to off people with various toxins, the focus of this book is really in the subtitle: Herman’s thesis is that people in the late medieval and early modern period had WAY more to fear from their environment than from any would-be murderers. Poor sanitation, contaminated food, and so, so much lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony, sulfur, etc. basically guaranteed that any person of wealth — the same people who feared poisoning — had a lot of ways to fall suddenly and suspiciously ill. And when medical science isn’t yet advanced enough to distinguish the cause of your stomach pains or difficulty breathing, it’s easy to declare you’ve been poisoned.

The central part of the book delves into that in depth, because it’s a series of case studies about historical individuals who were rumored to have been killed by poison. Herman gives the background on the individual and looks at the contemporary accounts of their symptoms and demise, then turns to modern analyses of the evidence (including, where applicable, forensic examination of their remains) to give a verdict on their most likely cause of death — which occasionally was indeed a massive and likely deliberate dose of poison! This was my favorite part of the text, but also rather hard reading, because most of the people under discussion did not have an easy passing. (For my own curiosity, I also did some side research on whether they could have been saved with the medicine of the time, had anyone known what was really going on. Most of the time, the answer was no.) Then it closes with a brief discussion of poison use in our own era, especially the extensive Russian efforts to develop exotic and unprovable means of murder.

Vespertine, Margaret Rogerson. I really enjoyed Rogerson’s novel An Enchantment of Ravens, which is unrelated to this book. This is a world where, following a cataclysm a long time ago, the dead don’t rest easy unless they are given proper rites; to ensure that — and to deal with spirits that escape the net — there is a religious order dedicated to handling their ghosts. Furthermore, some of those spirits get bound into artifacts so their powers can be used by priests and nuns for the defense of the realm.

I don’t mean it as a sideswipe when I say this reads a lot like the fantasy sibling of Ninefox Gambit. When a massive wave of malevolent spirits threatens the countryside, the main character, a novice named Artemisia, inadvertently finds herself wielding a high relic: an artifact that contains the most powerful type of spirit, so strong that it actually possesses her. Since she never got trained in how to do this, she doesn’t know how to banish it back into the relic, so she’s going through the story in an uneasy alliance with an entity that will happily take over her body and use her to murder everybody in sight.

The ISFDB lists Vespertine as the first (and so far only) book in a series, but it works well enough as a standalone. If there do wind up being sequels, though, I’ll happily read them; this was an engaging story in an interesting world.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Tabitha Stanmore, narr. Anna Wilson-Jones. I liked this one enough that after listening to it in audiobook from the library, I turned around and bought myself a physical copy.

Stanmore is explicitly pushing back against the internet view of medieval and early modern magic, i.e. “female witches keeping alive ancient traditions get persecuted by the mean men in the Church.” Citing tons of historical case evidence, Stanmore shows that people at the time — particularly in England, though she does touch on other parts of Europe occasionally — absolutely distinguished between witches (bad, and of either gender) and cunning folk (good, and of either gender, though over time there is a drift towards men), and they made regular use of the latter. Service magicians, as Stanmore terms them, filled a number of needs in society; when they show up in court records, it’s because they had a disappointed client suing them for fraud, or they strayed too far into dangerous territory (e.g. trying to curse someone to death).

So yeah, if you saw that post going around Tumblr about priests doing “wizard shit” and telling their superiors they keep trying to explain to their flocks that it isn’t real but everybody expects them to do wizard shit, this is basically That: The Book. But very well-supported with citations.

The Lies We Conjure, Sarah Henning. I am not generally an eager audience for the genre of Rich People Behaving Badly, even when it’s the fantasy variant thereof. The premise of this one, however, was interesting: a pair of sisters get hired by a rich old woman to masquerade as her granddaughters for a night at a family reunion. It’s only after someone’s been murdered and the estate has been locked down that the sisters realize literally everybody else there is a witch and assumes they are, too — and that odds are very good they’ll be killed if this secret cabal of powerful people learns they’ve been infiltrated by outsiders.

Over the course of the next several days, as they get sent on a both a murder investigation and a kind of magical scavenger hunt to figure out who will be the next leader of the witches, there are of course tons of ugly familial secrets that come tumbling out. I was slightly disappointed that the sisters don’t have to dance harder to convince everybody they’re who they claim to be — the witches assume early on that the girls’ memories have been magically manipulated to make them forget what they used to know — but that would have required them to be master con artists rather than two teenagers who happen to look enough like the old lady’s granddaughters to pass muster, so I’ll cut it some slack. This had interesting characters and good tensions between them, and I enjoyed it.

The Serpent Called Mercy, Roanne Lau. This does the thing I really like, where there’s a ton of worldbuilding that isn’t strictly needed to make the plot go, but it makes the setting feel more three-dimensional and lived in. The core of the plot focuses on gladiatorial-style battles between “conquessors” and magical beasts brought in from outside the city, and a pair of poverty-stricken friends (who do NOT wind up in a romance together!) who decide to risk their lives in the arena in the hopes of winning enough money to raise their status in a highly unequal society. But around that there’s all kinds of other stuff, like the religion one of them practices very devoutly, and the backstory of how their ancestors came to live in that area, and the weird magical powers people can sometimes access for a very brief time — there used to be other magic, but their ancestors lost it when they migrated — and so on and so forth.

Much like Vespertine, this tells a complete story. Here, however, there is an obvious dangling thread for sequels, in the form of a notorious thief whose exploits against the wealthy keep being mentioned in passing, so I suspect there may be at least one more book, sales permitting.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, Nicola Clark. As Marissa Lingen noted in her review (which is where I heard of this book), by “Tudor queens” what we actually mean is “queens of Henry VIII.” But I guess “Henrician queens” would not be as catchy.

That’s not a slam on the book overall, though. Much of the reason Clark takes this period as her focus is that Henry VIII’s serial matrimony — often to an attendant of a previous queen — made this an unusually tumultuous time to be a lady-in-waiting. Not only are the royal households repeatedly being dissolved and reconstituted, but the intrigues surrounding the behavior of certain queens and the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow meant there were opportunities both to advance your family’s interests at court, and to get you and your family in a great deal of trouble. And what does “loyalty” mean when you’ve sworn your oath of service to a woman who is now out of favor with the king you also serve? Some ladies-in-waiting stayed fiercely faithful to their mistresses; others dropped them like a hot iron. Throughout the book, Clark is very clear that being a lady-in-waiting didn’t mean you were a piece of furniture: they were an essential part of the machinery of court as well as active political agents in their own right, albeit ones whose actions were constrained by the sexism of the time. Very much recommended for anybody who would like a look at that court machinery, insofar as we can reconstruct the smaller pieces from the documents that survive.

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan. Sequel and conclusion to the Radiant Emperor duology, which presents an alternate version of the transition from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty to the Han-led Ming one.

There is not enough therapy in the world for some of these characters. Two of them are basically powered by rage and self-loathing; another has replaced that with howling amounts of dissociation. Even the most functional character here (the protagonist) still has a nigh-terminal case of “it’s impossible for this not to happen when I want it so much.” If you want a front-row seat to trauma playing out, here ya go. I think it’s very well done overall, though after a time I started wishing that each individual instance of watching somebody spiral down into their own personal hell was just slightly less in-depth, as the amount of time spent marinating in those was quite large. But for all of that darkness — and boy howdy is there a lot of it — things actually turn out pretty well. Not for everybody, of course, but the fear I had at the end of the first book did not materialize. This is ultimately an alternate history, so even though you still end up with a Zhu Yuanzhang founding a Ming dynasty, it’s not the same Zhu Yuanzhang, and so there is every reason to believe it might have all the good features of the actual Hongwu Emperor’s reign, with less in the way of murderous purges.

When Among Crows, Veronica Roth, narr. Helen Laser, James Fouhey, and Tim Campbell. Probably a novella, based on the audio length. Contemporary, Chicago-set fantasy focusing primarily on creatures from Polish folklore, but not exclusively; there’s mention made in here of . . . I may not be remembering the name correctly, but I think it was the O’Conner-Vasquezes, a blended banshee/llorona family, which was a nice touch. This plays out over the course of just a few days, but it does a good job of packing enough intensity into the events that I believe in the relationships that get built along the way, as a visitor from Poland strikes a bargain to get help in seeking out the witch Baba Jaga. As seems to be a theme with this month’s titles, this works perfectly well as a standalone, but there’s a sequel coming later this year.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks. I’ve seen a couple of books lately that center on train journeys, so I guess that’s having a Moment right now, but by and large this is a very different setup from a lot of the novels out there, which is part of what drew me to it. It’s the late nineteenth century, I think (I forget the exact year), and it’s years since Siberia suddenly and inexplicably became overrun with . . . something. Some kind of strangeness dangerous enough that the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was an even bigger undertaking than it was in reality, and now passengers are cautioned not to spend too much time looking out the windows, as even seeing what’s out there can have odd effects on the mind.

The novel is entirely the story of a single journey, from start to finish (with a little bit before and after). There are a few moments in here which edge toward horror, but the number one word I’d use to describe it is tense. As in, one night I took a break from reading it because there were so many things poised to go disastrously wrong, and I didn’t know which one was going to blow up first. The ending is not a downer, though, and the narrative even has some sympathy toward characters who honestly brought their fates upon themselves. So long as you don’t mind never actually getting an explanation for what happened to Siberia — that is not a question this book has any interest in answering — it’s very well-done. The only reason I didn’t inhale the whole thing faster was that my nerves couldn’t take it.

I’m baaaaaaack!

I know I started posting again about my reading last month, but, like, this month I’m really back. As in, I am finally reading fiction again, not because there’s a book club meeting I want to go to, not because I owe a blurb, but because I felt like it. And I’m reading a lot. Still a surprising amount of nonfiction mixed in there — I would have expected myself to go off that for a while — but this feels more like what I’m used to.

Sea Beyond 1 My own work doesn’t count. Though I’ll note that part of the reason for the pivot toward reading, away from the video games I’ve been playing so much, is because I was putting in long hours at the computer on revision and didn’t want to stay there when leisure time started.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, Mark Forsyth. First of the two books that sparked this post the other day; this is the one I particularly praised for drawing its examples from modern song lyrics as well as classics like Shakespeare and the Bible. It also does something that I liked at first, which (unfortunately) got a little grating as I went along: basically every chapter ends with him saying something like, “that quote is also an example of [next figure of speech]” or “if the author had said XYZ instead, it would have been [next figure of speech].” It was a nice segue the first few times, but it became a bit too much over time. Then again, if I read the book more slowly, spacing out those transitions would probably have helped. Regardless, I highly recommend this if you want to know more about the tricks of rhetoric!

The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, ill. Zenchu Sato. I haven’t yet gotten around to monasticism in my Patreon essays, but research for The Sea Beyond made me realize just how much my knowledge of the subject is specifically Catholic-inflected. This is the first of three books I wound up reading this month on Buddhist monasticism, and it makes for an interesting contrast with how “Zen” is conceived of in the popular Western consciousness — it’s not all serenity and enlightenment! In particular, the image of monks being forcibly dragged to meetings with their teachers is rather at odds with the quiet, dignified image we have of such matters. This book also helped me better understand the role koans play in Zen teaching (which itself is not a monastic thing, of course, but still interesting in its own right).

Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, trans. David Bowles. I have another collection of Aztec poetry I read a while back, by Miguel León-Portilla, but that one’s more focused on literal translation of the surviving corpus, whereas here Bowles explicitly tries to make his translations read like poetry. It’s useful to have both! Though worth noting that Bowles was making free aesthetic decisions about how to shape his poems; we don’t really know what the underlying principles of Nahuatl poetry were, other than that they were often sung. So these are not translated “in the same form,” but rather are transposed to meters and such that Bowles thought would create a suitable effect. Very glad to have both this and León-Portilla’s work on my shelf together.

On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Kate Marsden. Picked this one up semi-randomly because Marissa Lingen posted about reading it, and for starters, just look at that title. How can you resist? (Probably many of you can resist just fine. I, clearly, did not.)

This is a late 19th-century account of a nurse who went deep into Siberia on an ostensible quest to find an herb used there to treat leprosy, reputedly with efficacious results. But it’s a weird book because the herb gets forgotten more or less immediately; mostly it’s an account of how she got people to fund her expedition, the trials and travails she faced along the way, and the horrendous conditions under which most lepers in Siberia at the time were forced to live, which she agitated to improve with the construction of dedicated hospitals. (Plus some side strands about things like her evangelizing to criminals in prison, because she also kinda sorta wound up inspecting jails from a health-and-sanitation perspective.) Ultimately, what this book was really meant to do was to silence her detractors who thought she’d just gone off on a pleasure jaunt in Russia and surely did not do the things she’d claimed. Since there were apparently memorials in her honor erected later on in Siberia, and this book quotes extensively from the letters and reports of people she dealt with about what she was doing, I think it’s fair to say her detractors were full of hot air. (Also full of homophobia: Wikipedia tells me there were accusations later on, which, because of the mores or the time, significantly tarnished her legacy at home.)

Anyway, I mostly picked this up because I thought it would be useful and interesting to read about how travel at the time was effected. And I was not wrong! Yeesh, what a difference a train makes to a place like Siberia.

Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home From the South Seas, Śramana Yijing, trans. Li Rongxi. Hah, so, um, yeah. I’m fairly certain that when I bought this book, as part of my “let’s learn something about Buddhist monasticism” bender, I didn’t read the description in much depth. In contrast with the Zen book, written in the twentieth century, this one is from . . . the seventh. It is literally just a translation of a Chinese monk’s writings home from India, which can be summed up as “guys, we’re doing Buddhism wrong.”

Which, I mean — that’s kind of fascinating in its own right! At least if you’re the type of nerd I am. You learn things about how Buddhist concepts got adapted — and in some cases, warped — in translation from India to China, accommodating stuff like a different climate (clothing that’s fine in the tropics will kill you with hypothermia in a more northern winter) and different cultural expectations. But also, um, this is full of things like very precise instructions on how you’re supposed to filter water before you drink it so as to avoid killing any insects. It gets nitty-gritty, is what I’m saying. And that is probably not something most of us feel deeply compelled to read about.

Mexican Bestiary/Bestiario Mexicano, David Bowles. A short, bilingual work on supernatural creatures of Mexico, by the same author as the translations above. As a matter of personal taste, I would have liked this to focus a bit less on modern cryptids and more on traditional material, but it’s still a nice addition to my library.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, Valerie Hansen. I enjoyed this book, but I also ranted about it at some length to my patrons in the monthly New Worlds book review.

The heart of my issue is that, while I recognize that popular nonfiction benefits from having a hook — in this case, the idea that globalization really “began” around the year 1000, i.e. when the (brief) Norse contact with North America meant that for the first time, trade networks formed a daisy-chain of (potential) contact around the globe — I would have preferred Hansen to simply write more broadly about long-distance networks before the early modern period, instead of going for the gimmicky premise. Reading this book, it was blatantly obvious that the date 1000 C.E. comes with error bars of several centuries to either side, rather than being an actual turning point I found persuasive.

Whereas, had this been broader in focus, it could have been organized with an eye toward what gets transmitted over long distances, and what factors shape the answer to that question: when and why is it raw materials like metals, when and why is it religious ideas, when and why is it slaves. Hansen might also not have wound up in what felt to me like a weird middle ground, where the book neither really explores the historical specificity of a given place and time in depth, nor doesn’t explore it — you get these random blobs of detail here and there, which mostly made me want the book to either be longer and do more of that, or shorter and do less.

Interesting reading in that it covered areas and eras I frankly know very little about, but I kind of want that other book I imagined instead.

Discipline & Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Michael Lempert. Third book of my “let’s read about non-Christian monasticism” binge. This one wound up being slightly off-topic from what I expected, but in ways that are differently useful.

The focus here is on Tibetan Geluk (or Gelug) monasteries that have been . . . transplanted? re-founded? whatever verb you pick has implications . . . in India, and how traditional life there butts up against modern politics around Tibetan sovereignty. Lempert’s thesis is that the Dalai Lama, in order to gain necessary Western support, has promoted a certain image of Tibetan Buddhism, while the religion as it’s practiced in the monasteries Lempert looked at doesn’t entirely fit that image. “Violence” here is meant in a more diffuse sense than I originally thought, though, as it encompasses things like very confrontational (and deliberately asymmetrical) debate practices as well as physical discipline of monks.

Tibetan politics are another thing I’m woefully ignorant of, so this was as beneficial in teaching me something about what’s been going on in that whole corner of the world as it was in telling me anything about Tibetan Buddhist monasticism. Though it was that latter, too.

The Palace of the Dragon King, Matthew Meyer. Fifth of his yōkai books, illustrated as usual with his own art. The focus this time is generally on water, culminating in a look at the idea of the Dragon King of the sea and his court.

Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, Arthur Quinn. This was the other rhetoric book I read recently. Older and shorter than The Elements of Eloquence, with much more of a focus on older examples of the figures, I still found it very entertaining. It also groups the figures according to their nature much more than Forsyth’s book does, which I liked.

The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. Illustrated short story Clarke was commissioned to write. Being a short story, naturally it’s very slight; the illustrations do not really a whole book make. I ultimately found it not all that compelling, though I like and agree with Clarke’s point that honestly, saints might very well come across as weird rather than plaster figures of piety.

Mother of Rome, Lauren J.A. Bear. Historical fantasy novel about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, the first of whom is the legendary founder of Rome. Although I wasn’t a fan of how much it relied on long, italicized flashback scenes, I did like the book overall; in particular, the key maneuver it uses to keep Rhea involved in the plot throughout made a lot of sense to me. I also like that — spoiler, but one I think is worth spoiling, since otherwise certain readers who might enjoy this would otherwise be put off — it denies the interpretation where the god Mars raped her, and instead has Rhea being an active and enthusiastic agent in getting pregnant. Fair warning, though; there is still a lot of violence against women here, including some perpetuated by other women. Utopian “back in the Good Old Days of matriarchal paganism” this is not.

Sound the Gong, Joan He. Second half of the Kingdom of Three duology, which gender-flips and eventually presents a very alternate version of The Romance of Three Kingdoms.

I say “second half of the duology,” but really, it’s the second half of a book published in two volumes. As in, this one literally starts with Chapter 26 (or whatever the actual number was). Enough time had passed since I read the first one that I really could have used more of an on-ramp to get me back up to speed — for pity’s sake, at least a recap at the front! — but I enjoy the duology enough that I persevered and was soon right back in the swing of things. He does not pull punches on the consequences of her premise; be prepared for scads of betrayal and some really gruesome murder. (Her afterword points you at a bonus story on her website if you need some healing afterward.)

. . . oh, and yeah, ostensibly the main characters here are, like, teenagers. It’s the Six of Crows thing where you just ignore that and the rest of the text reads just fine with you imagining them as grown adults instead. This does not read as trope-y YA, in large part because, well, look at the source material.

Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. First book of a duology, though I didn’t know that when I picked it up, and I think this one arrives at a reasonably acceptable stopping point.

I also think this must have read very differently when it first came out. The starting premise is that, in the face of multiple waves of a deadly flu pandemic sweeping the globe (. . . yeah), the U.S. decided to build first one, then two walls to close off the border with Mexico (. . . yyyyyyyeah). The eponymous town of Santa Olivia is one of the ones caught in the fifty-mile zone between the walls; everyone who chose not to abandon their home was informed they henceforth lived in the military installation of Outpost 12. Oh, and they’re no longer U.S. citizens.

Yeah.

Now, if I stop and look at this through a rational lens, I suspect the setup falls apart. There is zero mention made of agriculture or really any other productive industry in the former Santa Olivia; basically every job there is a service job, whether that’s directly serving the military (running restaurants and bars, prostitution) or serving the other residents of this Outpost. Even allowing for the worldbuilding details about lots of stuff not being available anymore or not getting replaced when it breaks down, the only plausible explanation is that Outpost is wholly dependent on the U.S. for, uh, absolutely everything, to support a community that is way more than what’s needed to maintain the military base. While also pouring effort into making sure nobody ever gets out of Outpost to tell the world what’s going on there. For decades on end. I’m not sure I actually believe that over just forcibly relocating everybody.

But those were post-book thoughts, and while I was reading the book, Carey did a good job of creating a tense and plausible atmosphere. One which had much, much less to do with what’s described in the cover copy than I thought: while it’s true that the main character, Loup, teams up with some friends to do vigilante things as the town’s eponymous saint, Santa Olivia, that’s a surprisingly small portion of the book. Much of the rest has to do with the monthly boxing challenges organized by the commander of the base, who 1) really really loves watching boxing matches and 2) has promised that if any Outposter manages to beat whichever army champion he puts them up against, they and one other person will get a ticket out of there, back into the U.S. I, uh, don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this offer turns out to be less than honest and fair. Really, my thought while reading this was “did Carey take up boxing and then write this book?” It very much has the feel of an author building a story around their new hobby. I don’t mean that as a criticism, though; I liked the detail on that front, and I think she did a good job of building some interesting twists into the plot.

Not sure if I’ll read the second book, though. Based on the cover copy, it sounds like it would be very different in a lot of respects, and I’m not sure I’m that interested in where that goes.

Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao. Sequel to Iron Widow, but this is not a duology. Whether it will be a trilogy or more, I don’t know, but this is most definitely not the end.

Kinda hard to talk about this one given how much it builds on key elements from the end of the previous book. The best I can do is to say that I did not expect the mecha + kaiju + primal scream against the patriarchy blend of Iron Widow to expand to include, uh, <checks notes> a communist revolution? But it does, and Zhao goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of that than I usually see in fiction — without landing simplistically on a “yay, good!” or “boo, bad!” result. If there’s a way to pursue the good ideals of such a revolution without falling into excess and cruelty, the characters do not find it here, but boy howdy do they try. I also thought the relationship between Zetian and a certain new character (the one introduced at the end of the first book) was excellently complicated, with all kinds of admirable and horrifying elements blended together until there’s no separating them anymore.

Once again, the ending majorly shakes things up, though it takes a bit more time in the shaking and so avoids the worst of Iron Widow‘s feeling of the wheels coming off the car as it screeches across the finish line. Warning for a lot of gender-based violence as well as regular violence, though — which, come to think of it, also applies to Santa Olivia. Between these two and Mother of Rome, plus Sound the Gong‘s very non-gendered violence, I did not have a lighthearted month for fiction . . .

Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. Pretty sure I’ve read this before, but if so, it was roughly twenty years ago. And this book wasn’t new then (it was originally published in 1969), so yeah, I could probably be reading something more recent. But it was on my shelf, and I was not wrong in remembering that it’s quite readable, and I have several different story ideas rattling around my head that would benefit from being firmly seated in actual medieval life rather than the watered-down, microwaved, fourth-generation photocopy that infests popular media, so I read it. They use Troyes in France as their focal city, but there are also comments in here about how things are in Italy or England around the same time (1250), and for the purposes of writing in a secondary world, that’s enough for me.

It’s been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.

As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn’t talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.

But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I’ll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I’m actually reading some other stuff.

Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it’s over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy’s writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.

Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer’s Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.

Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was “it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it”). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won’t be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.

Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I’m not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You’re fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly’s life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled — in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don’t really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea — I’ve never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I’m curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of “ask a friend” rather than reading the rest of the series myself.

Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she’d like to read my novel about translation.

This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it’s making sweeping generalizations about “Eastern” and “Western” storytelling, and that it’s deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that’s an unexamined default. It’s a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it’s not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!

Temporarily redacting some of what I read in March, so this is a shorter post than usual.

Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do — which connects it a bit with Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don’t have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other’s behavior.

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn’t all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia’s “Spear Carrier” — certainly not the only one I liked, but I’m writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that’s the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.

The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter — humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the ’50s — means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it’s less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I’ve read in quite some time.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I’ve been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length — and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!

An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there’s a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she’s feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there’s one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.

Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine & the Diaspora, ed. Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko. Anthology Kickstarted last year. I’m trying to read more anthologies in general, because I keep adding them to my wishlist and sometimes my bookshelf, but it’s a bit hard; I would almost always rather pick up a novel.

This one is broad in tone, because its theme is (obviously) a particular community rather than a topic or even a genre. As with The Way Spring Arrives, you get everything from epic fantasy to literary contemporary fantasy to surrealist SF to horror, based on whatever it is the author in question likes to write. Naturally, that meant I didn’t wind up enjoying all the stories, because some of them are just not my type of thing. But sometimes it’s nice to get a broad cross-section.

Network Effect, Martha Wells. Murderbot does a novel! I was enjoying the novellas, but it was nice to get a more substantial plot to sink my teeth into, with more stages along the way. Very happy to see a certain character return, and I legit laughed at “Anybody who thinks machine intelligences don’t feel emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.” And as much as I like Mensah, I was glad the plot didn’t feature her; she’s got her rhythm now with everybody’s favorite rogue SecUnit, and in a lot of ways it’s more interesting to make Murderbot deal with people it doesn’t remotely have that rapport with (yet).

This book did also deliver more of what I was commenting on before, with regard to the remnants. Oddly, though, I still feel a little unsatisfied there — not sure if it’s just me, or what. That aspect still strikes me a bit like a Macguffin to make the real story go, and I don’t know if it will stay there or eventually rear its head to be the actual focus of the narrative or not.

(Side note: I always find it pleasing when I think “I wonder if this story will ever do X” and then five minutes/fifty pages later, X happens. In this case, it was the whole business with Three. I am pleased by this kind of thing because it means I’m on the correct wavelength for the story, foreseeing what might happen without either waiting too long for a development or being disappointed because I can see a cool possibility the author appears to be ignoring.)

The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein. Thus do I join the ranks of those waiting for this series to be finished! Not to mention poring over the bits and pieces Kirstein has shared from books five and six over the years/deleted scenes from earlier volumes/etc. in an attempt to divine something from their entrails. I know a lot of readers these days are extremely cynical about starting to read a series that isn’t yet complete (which is bad for the chances of many series ever being completed), and it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that this one was published in 2004, with nothing else released yet. But 1) keeping the torch alive through recruiting new readers improves the odds that Kirstein will be able to spare the time from paying the bills to finish the last two books and 2) as I said in a discussion with a friend about my Wheel of Time fannish days, some stories are actually very rewarding to read while they’re incomplete, because they leave you time and space for speculation.

This particular volume does seem to raise more questions than it answers, most of which I can’t really say anything about here other than obliquely, e.g. “wtf was it that Kieran saw.” I joined a Steerswoman fan Discord after finishing this, and at least nobody else seems to have a solid answer, either? Though there is much theorizing, about that and other things. Which really is one of the great delights about this series, and why I find myself being much more spoiler-averse in talking about it to friends than I normally am: I have enjoyed piecing together the clues to date, and I don’t want to rob anybody else of that experience. Especially since “gather evidence and theorize about it” is kinda what steerswomen are for.

1602, Neil Gaiman, ill. Andy Kubert, col. Richard Isanove. We’ve been watching Marvel’s What If? show, and the “1602” episode reminded me that Gaiman once did a comics miniseries by that name (and of similar, though not remotely identical, plot). Being a nerd for that period of history, of course I was interested in picking it up.

It’s . . . okay? Admittedly, I’m coming into this not from a comics background; most of these characters I know from various movies. But also, this struck me as way too overstuffed — more than two dozen superheroes crammed into eight issues, like Gaiman felt he had to get as many fan favorites in there as possible. I would have preferred fewer characters and more time spent exploring each, so we get to enjoy seeing how their particular powers and personality manifest in this era. I also would have preferred it to be its own, freestanding thing, rather than having it explicitly tie back into the Marvel multiverse and the main canon; it would have been great to have a Captain America who was actually Native American. Ah well.

Riding the Trail of Tears, Blake M. Hausman. So, imagine that the old Oregon Trail game was a virtual reality simulation. Except that instead of being (implied white) pioneers heading off to colonize other lands, all players/customers are Cherokee Indians being forcibly removed west. And in addition to perils like dysentery, you also have to concern yourself with being murdered by soldiers. (But don’t worry! When you die, you get to go talk to the Wise Old Medicine Man, who is programmed to spout exactly the kind of New Age-y platitudes you want to hear.)

I really liked this book for a while. The first chapter was disorienting, but in a way that I trusted would make sense later, once the story looped back to focus on the narrator and what’s going on there. After that, you follow one of the simulation’s tour guides, Tallulah Wilson (one-quarter Cherokee), as she takes yet another group through the Trail of Tears — only for things to start going very, very wrong. That part was great: kind of horrifying (their tour is for some reason operating at a higher severity level than the customers signed up for), very full of tension, and also dropping all kinds of historical information along the way that, surprise surprise, my classes as a kid never mentioned.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last. One of the tourists gets separated from the group — not just separated in the simulation of the Trail of Tears, but off somewhere else entirely in the VR system — and her alternating chapters are full of characters having the sort of frustrating conversations where the other people aren’t explaining anything and mostly everybody is talking past each other, the teeth of the gears constantly slipping and grinding. And then once the book moves into its final act, it basically opts to go full lit-fic rather than spec-fic, with more cryptic/elliptical conversations, a focus entirely on Tallulah’s personal transformation rather than the question of what is going on with the simulation, and only the most fleeting of nods back toward that first chapter and the narrator presented there, so that all of that winds up feeling like a metaphor rather than the actual genre content I expected it to be. Even the Homeland Security agents who get mentioned time and time again (because people think the stuff going wrong might be the work of terrorists) end up not really mattering, their questioning of Tallulah afterward essentially irrelevant to the conclusion.

So, very disappointing to me in the end. Possibly more interesting to those who like lit-fic better, who don’t mind the stylistic quirks here and the way the genre elements are more set dressing than actual content. Me, I would have enjoyed a book that kept following the Trail of Tears, fleshing out a history I don’t know well at all, exploring the decisions made in coding this experience for capitalist consumption, and answering more of my questions about the ghosts in the machine.

Hideki Smith, Demon Queller, A.J. Hartley with Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley. A fracking endeavor in North Carolina inadvertently releases Japanese monsters; the story is partly about how a pair of half-Japanese siblings deal with the issue, and partly about why exactly there are Japanese monsters in the North Carolina mountains in the first place.

The plot, for the most part, is ordinary enough, in terms of the tropes and so forth you expect out of this type of contemporary fantasy; what made me enjoy this one was the characters. Caleb and Emily (aka Hideki and Kazuko, though they never use those names) have been raised by an aggressively assimilationist nisei mother and a mild-mannered English father in a dying rural town where their immigrant grandmother is the only other Asian person in sight. The reason Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley are co-credited with A.J. Hartley on this book is that the latter is writing from secondhand experience; his Japanese wife and mixed-race kid don’t have it as bad as the Smith family, thanks in part to living in a more cosmopolitan area, but Hartley is definitely trying to represent their perspective here, with their input.

But it isn’t all racism and suffering, either. I actively enjoyed the sibling relationship between Caleb and the slightly older Emily, which strikes an excellent balance of plausible bickering over love, support, and entertaining banter. Caleb’s almost total ignorance of everything Japanese is laid against Emily’s stealth investigations in that direction, sneaking behind their mother’s back to stay in touch with the heritage — and the grandmother — the mom is so determined to cut all ties with (for reasons that, yes, tie into the story). The cast of supporting characters is relatively small, in part because this is so short, but there’s a foundation there for more in the future; this book wraps up its own plot while leaving the door open for future adventures.

Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent. Nonfiction that wasn’t quite what I expected it to be — not necessarily a bad thing. Although Vincent starts out by discussing things like where we get our oldest units of measurement from, how they were maintained, and what happened when you got different competing units within nominally the same country, he’s equally or more interested in the political side of how those measurements get used. As a result, many of the chapters are about things like the attempts to measure people (the guy who invented the first IQ test actively didn’t want it being used the way we’ve wound up using it! he was trying to identify and then help students who had trouble in the classroom!), land (the surveying of the U.S. and how that was used to further the colonial project to oust indigenous tribes), and the various statistics we track about ourselves now, through devices like smartwatches. There’s an entire chapter on metricization, why it’s never fully happened in the U.S. — though we use metric here in more ways than you may realize, e.g. as the means by which we define our yards and gallons and so forth — and why some people in the U.K. are still trying to roll it back.

So ultimately, the focus is pretty heavily on the role measurement plays in our lives and our politics, with a slightly lesser proportion of attention to the creation of the measures themselves. I read it pretty quickly but didn’t find it super engaging overall; as far as “readable nonfiction” goes, I’d place this in the middle of the pack.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett. I kept hearing about this book in the context of comparisons to the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and, well. Female scholar in the nineteenth century travels the world to study dragons, told in the form of a memoir; female scholar in the early twentieth century travels the world to study faeries, told in the form of diary entries. Yeah, I can’t say the comparison isn’t apt.

This was enjoyable, though possibly the similarities made me read critically in ways I might not have otherwise. For example, I didn’t feel this leveraged the diary format as effectively as it could have; there were places where it seemed to be forgotten or missed opportunities to play with the way time and event interact in that setup. The academic world as presented also felt a little out of period (not to mention gets multiple things about Cambridge profoundly wrong). It did a good job of evoking its environment, though, and I liked several aspects of how the fae were presented. I’m not sure if I’ll read the second, because I kept quibbling with it so much as I read, but this isn’t a case where I regret how I spent my time.

Summerland, Hannu Rajaniemi. 1930s espionage between Britain and the Soviet Union over the Spanish Civil War, with the added twist that an afterlife has been confirmed to exist — the Summerland — and so the spying is conducted across the borders between life and death. As the tag line goes, how do you deal with a spy who’s already dead?

I liked this pretty well up until the ending. A female SIS agent finds out from a Russian defector that there is a double agent in her organization’s ranks; in contrast with many stories that have that setup, she’s told outright who the mole is, and so the challenge is not to identify him. Instead she has to figure out how to stop him when he’s politically very well protected. Meanwhile, you also get the mole’s side of the story, showing why he went over to the other side. (Er, the Soviets, I mean. But also the Other Side, because he’s dead.) There’s lots of great detail around the period and the premise.

Where it fell down a bit for me was the conclusion. Information comes to light that changes the playing field quite a bit; that part was great, as I am a sucker for complex realignments of loyalties. But the information itself is kind of an enormous bombshell that just . . . doesn’t get dealt with in this book. Or ever, I think, since as far as I know, Summerland is a standalone. I recognize that following up on this element would send the story in a very different direction from the espionage games it started with, but its insertion wound up feeling a bit like something enormous was needed to make the ending fall out in a certain fashion, and the consequences were left by the wayside. Still enjoyable overall, but it didn’t quite stick the landing.

Suffer the Little Children, Ann Swinfen. I am now halfway through this historical series, and while this one is more successful than The Portuguese Affair — once again, it makes the intelligent choice to focus largely on events in a historical context, rather than historical events so large the protagonist is only a spectator — it’s a structural mess. The title refers to the book’s major focus on the problem of orphans and abused children in Elizabethan London, with lots of smaller strands having to do with Kit looking for ways to help them; that part was fine. Then there’s a major plot about a rich five-year-old heiress being kidnapped for ransom, in which the kidnapper appears to be a bit of an idiot and also some of the street children play an excessively convenient role (they just happen to be in the right place at the right time to do something pivotal).

And then oh, btw, there’s an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth that has nothing whatsoever to do with the kid-related stuff, which gets mentioned at the start and then almost completely forgotten until the last 10% or so of the book. (At which point the identity of the assassin becomes screamingly obvious to the reader.) The only element vaguely stitching these two things together is the continued presence of Burbage’s theatre company, because they’re invited to perform at the Twelfth Night festivities where the assassination attempt will occur, and they help out with some of the kid stuff.

I’m still reading this series for the same reason I read Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mysteries, which is that I enjoy the exploration of the period setting. She does her research and brings interesting nuggets of it into her stories. But much more than that other series, this one really does feel like three separate things awkwardly grafted together: why is a physician deeply involved in code-breaking and espionage and also theatre people keep showing up in the story even though they’re not really relevant? (Those latter two could fit together more smoothly if Swinfen were more willing to make use of Marlowe, but in his brief appearances here he’s presented as a thoroughly dislikable and anti-Semitic jerk, and since Kit is a Portuguese crypto-Jew of confused religious sentiment . . .) It might have worked better to choose two out of three, or to write multiple series in this time period.

System Collapse, Martha Wells. With this, I have run out of Murderbot to read. (Yes, I’ve tracked down the short stories.) I didn’t expect this one to be such a close continuation of Network Effect; the latter ends in a fashion that made me expect new adventures somewhere else. I don’t really mind, because the conflict here is genuinely a different one than in the previous book, despite being in the same place and involving the same situation; the hunt for the other installation was nicely tense, and then the revelation of what problem has to be solved was a good twist away from what you were being primed to expect.

In a way, though, I think I’m glad to be pausing for a while here. Although I’ve spaced the material out a bit, I did read the whole series in about two months, and I think I’m hitting the point at which I’m overdosing on the flavor. I was really hoping to see something here that, in hindsight, was unlikely to happen because it’s at odds with the series’ tone: for all the combat that happens in these books, I’ve realized I find them emotionally cozy. The stakes in that regard are things like “will Murderbot learn to accept other people caring about it.” So when I realized I was mentally rooting for the story to go harder on that front, it felt like a signal that I’ve had enough of this series for the time being, and am in a mood for something different that will put its main characters through more of a wringer. I’ll be happy to return here when there’s more!

Artificial Condition, Martha Wells. Choo-choo, the Murderbot train keeps rolling!

I found the beginning of this one slightly rocky, in terms of trying to orient the reader in a world that basically didn’t show up within the constrained space of All Systems Red. I was also unsure how I would feel about the story, given that I enjoyed the character interactions in the first novella, but all of those characters had now left the stage. Fortunately, soon there was ART! And Murderbot’s difficulties in figuring out how to navigate the broader world without getting caught or giving away its identity as a rogue SecUnit were engaging enough after those slightly stiff opening pages. I had to tell myself I shouldn’t read the next one immediately after, because I know I like series better with a bit of breathing room between installments.

Bartholomew Fair, Ann Swinfen. Since I had a less than enthusiastic reaction to the previous book in this series, I was relieved to find this one much better. It helps that, unlike the passive tour of the failures of the Counter-Armada in The Portuguese Affair, this volume weaves its own, fictional plot around and through the historical event at its core (the protest at Bartholomew Fair by a group of demobbed soldiers demanding some kind of pay for their work and pensions for the many many widows and orphans left behind by the Counter-Armada’s failure). Because of that fictional plot, Swinfen has a lot more room here for Kit to protag instead of just watching events go down. I hope later books in the series are more in this vein, because I’ll quite enjoy them if they are.

Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. So I didn’t read it immediately after: I read it a day or two later, however long it took me to get through Bartholomew Fair. 😛

I do wish these novellas had less generic titles; it means I have to work to remember which volume is which, even though I’m enjoying all their plots. This is another one where I think I crave just a bit more context and breathing room; all the stuff about what GreyCris is going for (and willing to kill to hide) feels more Macguffin-y than I think it has to, just because there’s no space in the novella to get into why that stuff matters. Possibly Network Effect will satisfy me in that regard; we’ll see when I get there. The action, however, is very enjoyable, and it landed squarely on the button of a trope I enjoy when Murderbot had to throw all stealth and caution out the window and reveal its capabilities as a SecUnit because the alternative was letting people die.

Moonwise, Greer Ilene Gilman. It has been a long time since a book made me feel this stupid.

As you can tell by these posts, I read fairly fast, and it’s rare for me to feel like I’m having difficulty with anything. (Uninterested, yes; incapable of processing the words on the page, no.) The writing here, however, nearly defeated me. It is intensely poetic; the language is dialed up to 11 basically all the time, except when it goes to 13. There were places where I genuinely had trouble figuring out what was even going on, because I was getting so lost in the weeds of the words.

But, well. I’m stubborn, and I didn’t like the idea of conceding defeat, of accepting that I’m just not smart enough to figure out this book that other people have loved so deeply. And I had this feeling that I would adore the story and the world of Cloud if only I could comprehend what I was reading — I read the interview with Gilman in Uncanny, and everything she was saying there sounded amazing. So, aided by determination and this quasi-dictionary by Michael Swanwick, I persevered.

And it got better, or I did. Or both. I think it was a combination of three things: this assistance of Swanwick’s piece, me just getting used to the language over time, and me getting past the part of the novel where Ariane is trying find a way into Cloud. Gilman says in the interview that Ariane attempting all kinds of different rituals to effect passage “simply shadows my frustrations as a novice writer, trying to go on,” and I kinda suspect that bleeds through into the writing during that section. It was by far the hardest section for me to parse. Once she met the tinker . . . well, it didn’t become easy, but I no longer felt like I was beating my head against a gorgeous and impenetrable wall.

Once past that wall: yes, this is kind of amazing, and mythic in ways I think very few writers achieve. It makes me reflect on the idea that magic systems must have rules, and my conviction that they don’t need mechanics so much as an underlying symbolic logic. That logic is absolutely here, just of a sort that defies your rational, “to do X you need Y and Z” approach seen in so much fantasy worldbuilding. Things work when it is right that they should do so, when the key fits the metaphorical lock.

I have Cloud and Ashes on my shelf, and actually tried to read that one before Moonwise, but I bounced straight off “Jack Daw’s Pack” because of the language thing. Now that I’m a little better oriented and versed in the language and stylistic mode of this world, I may try it again and see if I have more success.

Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, Marcelin Defourneaux, trans. Newton Branch. This book is from the ’60s, so not what you’d call super up to date; however, it’s also the only “daily life” kind of book I’ve found for this place and period — if you know of others, I would welcome titles!

Age aside, it does something I find fascinating: the first chapter is written as if from the perspective of a contemporary traveler, complete with all the unapologetic prejudice that brings. Defourneaux backs off from that after the opening chapter in favor of your more typical attempt at modern objectivity, but I actually found the fictionalized perspective really interesting when placed alongside the later chapters . . . especially since I wanted those later chapters to go into more depth and detail. This is thin compared to, say, a Liza Picard London book (but then, I’m a Picard fangirl). Still and all, it did what I wanted, which is to give me some sense of how Spain in this era differed from the areas I know better, like England.

A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias Buckell. Novella or short novel, I’m not sure which, in a setting that . . . well, some of what I would say is a spoiler, and some of it is left a bit unresolved even once you reach the end of the book. Let’s just say that at multiple points along the way, the story likes to change the game.

Anyway, this has a great tag line: “You shall not suffer a librarian to live.” Books and writing are taboo, seen as foul magic and ascribed all kinds of incredible, malevolent power — so, naturally, the very first thing that happens is that a traveler is caught with a book. This leads to many changes in the life of the protagonist and destabilizes the city she lives in, leading to a journey across a wasteland toward many discoveries. I think the idea here could have supported a longer, more detailed novel; I enjoyed it in its existing form, but there were a couple of emotional beats that would have come through more strongly for me if they’d had a little more space to develop, both in terms of time elapsed and pages spent exploring them.

Bridezilla, Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau. Alyc and I recently did a podcast on collaboration with Kathy and Kurt, so in preparation for that, we swapped novels.

I didn’t expect to read the entirety of this, because it’s not my usual fare: a fast-paced contemporary fantasy about a town where brides-to-be have started turning into literal kaiju when they snap under the pressure of the wedding-industrial complex. Having aimed to read fifty pages for the podcast, though, I found that zipping by in no time at all, and so I wound up inhaling the whole thing in about a day. It’s definitely the type of story that has a “just roll with it” element — why does nobody outside Appleville seem to be investigating this Bridezilla phenomenon? Don’t ask, because that’s not the point. If you’re in the mood for some commentary on patriarchy by way of kaiju, logistics like that will only slow the story down.

Exit Strategy, Martha Wells. A longer gap this time because I had only ordered #2 and #3 before, and had to wait for the next volumes to arrive!

This is the culmination of an arc within the series, with all the payoff that implies. It’s very pleasing to get Mensah and some of the Preservation people back on stage — Mensah especially, because I really like her interactions with Murderbot. (I also read the Tor.com short story from her perspective, after I finished this novella. It was pleasant, but also admittedly felt more like a nice piece of fanfic than a proper short story.)

This one pulls off something not all such works do, which is to have its back half be nearly non-stop action without making me feel like I just want a breather from it all. I think it benefits from being a novella and part of a series — novels that try to maintain this pacing for too long tend to exhaust me — but also, it doesn’t neglect character moments along the way, like how Mensah works with Murderbot to get off the station. The recovery period at the end was also interestingly done.

Dust Up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) Second of this series of “what if British boarding school books, but on Mars”; I don’t think you need to have read the first to enjoy it, though Three Twins at the Crater School does establish who some of the key players are. As per usual, this is more about episodes in the lives of the characters than a central arc plot.

For me, these fit into a pleasant niche of feeling cozy without becoming completely toothless. There’s conflict; it’s just not world-ending or generally driven by somebody being a villain. There are no abusive teachers or Mean Girl cliques. Instead, the students want to misbehave, the teachers want to stop them, the students know they’ll probably face consequences but are often prepared to accept that as the price of having fun, and the teachers want the girls to show independence of spirit even as they try to prevent that independence from causing problems. Meanwhile, you also have alien encounters and a massive dust storm that pens the members of the Crater School inside for an extended period of time. This is very much not your Scientifically Accurate Mars; it is instead Pulp Mars, and delightful for being so.

Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. I know this was published after Network Effect, but since it takes place before, I decided to read it first. (For those of you who read them in the opposite order, I’m curious what you thought of them being out of sequence.)

Murderbot does a murder mystery! The need to investigate by more mundane routes than just hacking all the systems within reach created a useful and plausible obstacle, and although I suspected the answer to the plot a little before it was revealed, that didn’t make the result disappointing. I like reluctant allies, and I loved the mass organization of bots at the climax. The method of rescue was great, too, with the reminder that SecUnits — for all their combat capability — aren’t actually made to fight; they’re made to protect their clients. If they can solve problems without killing people, great, let’s do that.

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Robert Bringhurst. This goes back and forth between segments of Haida literature and discussions of same, with digressions into history, anthropology, and the situation at the time of the collection of these stories and poems, which happened right at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. I really like the fact that Bringhurst never loses sight of the fact that specific people told these stories, and a specific man recorded them; none of this is the timeless, universal product of a culture en masse (which nothing ever is anyway, but you don’t always have the evidence to see more clearly than that).

It does make for hard going in places, because Bringhurst repeatedly reminds you that when Swanton went to Haida Gwaii to record these stories — or rather, to do a lot of anthropological work which he mostly neglected because he went all-in on the stories instead — the people there were being hit extremely hard by the effects of colonialism, with their population having suffered a catastrophic decline and many of their ways of life being pressured out of existence. I also kind of wanted to rip my hair out when Bringhurst contrasted Swanton’s excellent-for-the-time methods with all the ethnologists who only ever published summaries of the texts they had recorded, even when their notes included more detailed transcripts of what the storyteller actually said (and not all of them bothered with that in the first place). It really drives home how much we lost — and I do mean we, because I do think that the extinction of so many stories is a loss to humanity as a whole, not just the communities who told those tales.

The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal. Been meaning to read this for an age, but I’m in a mood for SF much more rarely than for fantasy. (Disclaimer: the author is a friend.)

It starts off with a hell of a bang: a meteorite strike that not only causes unthinkably massive destruction across the eastern seaboard of the U.S. (and ancillary damage elsewhere, from tsunamis and the like), but in the longer term — fifty years, give or take — is likely to cause an extinction event, due to the effect it has on the global climate. As a result, the race is on to colonize other parts of the solar system before Earth can no longer support human life . . . but since that meteorite strike happens in the 1950s, the hurdles in the path of that goal include not only technological limitations, but howling levels of racism and sexism, plus a reluctance to believe it will really be that bad and are we sure it isn’t all some secret commie plot?

So yeah, it shares a lot in common with the T.V. show For All Mankind. There are differences, though: much more of a ticking clock (this isn’t just about beating the Soviets; it’s about saving the species), less focus on queerness and more on mental health (the narrator, Elma, suffers from anxiety), etc. By dint of being a book instead of a show, it can also drop you much more deeply into the science and the technical skills involved in things like piloting, which is great if you’re me and devour that kind of verisimilitude even when you don’t know what the words mean. The narrative significance always comes through, and that’s the important part.

The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein. Whoof, we’re reaching the part of the series where it gets hard for me to talk about things without spoilers. Which I personally tend not to mind — I always say that if ruining the surprise ruins the story, then it never had much going for it in the first place — but 1) that doesn’t mean I want to impose spoilers on other people and 2) given that part of the pleasure here is piecing together the information you’re given, steerswoman-style, to figure out what’s going on, it would be a shame to wreck that unnecessarily.

But I can say that I was delighted to have a previous theory of mine confirmed (I correctly explained why a certain thing happened), and I was asking some relevant questions before the answers were provided, though I didn’t twig to everything right away — ironically, in part because I had an existing theory in my head that took me too long to let go of. Bad steerswoman-reader, no biscuit. Parts of this dragged a little for me, because it’s harder to interest me in a stretch of narrative where the protagonist is completely alone, but after that it picked up again. The real problem here is that I’ve got only one book left before I join the ranks of fans desperately hoping Kirstein will manage to finish the series one of these days . . .

Dark Woods, Deep Water, Jelena Dunato. Standalone fantasy inspired by Slavic mythology, though very loosely so.

This book is rather badly served by its cover copy, I fear. I went into it expecting the bulk of the narrative would take place at the creepy castle where guests are sacrificed to an ominous goddess; instead you don’t get there until maybe halfway through, and one of the three characters billed as being among those guests doesn’t arrive until more like the three-quarter mark. What surrounds the folkloric bit is a good deal more mundanely political — which I don’t means as a pejorative, though ultimately I wanted that stuff to be interwoven a bit more completely with the folkloric parts (especially since there was at least one bit of apparent connection that got dropped).

I did still enjoy it, mind you! And the creepy castle is very suitably creepy. I just thought I’d get more of that than I did, and I might have enjoyed the whole more had I been more appropriately cued as to what to expect.

A Lily Among Thorns, Rose Lerner. I’ve enjoyed Regency-era spy romances before, and this one’s been on my wishlist for . . . I don’t even know how long. Probably a decade or more. Compared to some of the others I’ve read, it tilts more heavily toward the “romance” side than the “spy” side; it tended to be three or four scenes of emotional bonding to one scene of intrigue, which brings us back around to why I read very little genre romance: I would care more about the emotional bonding if there were more non-romantic plot interspersed.

The plot, however, is enjoyable, even if thinner than I would prefer. It’s got more sympathy for its villains than I expected, and a very clear-eyed awareness of just how badly a woman back then could be screwed over by the law and patriarchy, no matter how secure she has tried to make herself. The hero also has an unconventional profession, being a high-end tailor whose knowledge of chemistry makes him excellent at matching dyes; he is very clothing-focused in some entertaining ways. (One of my favorite moments in here comes when he sees the heroine disguised as a man: she thinks for a moment that he’s horrified by her cross-dressing, only to realize he’s offended that whoever made the clothing for her didn’t tailor it better to help with the disguise.) I’m not sure I was wowed enough to seek out more of Lerner’s books, but this one made for a pleasant evening or two.

Nightborn: A Coldfire Prequel, C.S. Friedman. As the subtitle suggests, this is a precursor to Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy, which I read and really enjoyed many years ago. I’ve forgotten quite a lot about those books, but that’s fine; this takes place centuries before the series, when the colonists first arrived on Erna.

With a book like this, of course, some of its key events are going to be a foregone conclusion. Therefore, at least for a reader like me — someone who knows what that conclusion is — it lives or dies by its ability to make the journey there interesting in its own right. (Yes, Star Wars prequels, I am looking at you.) I know why the seedship’s computer spent ninety years analyzing Erna before deciding to wake the colonists up from stasis; I know what they’re ultimately going to have to do about it. So the real question is: will the book make me care?

Yes, mostly. Not everything here worked for me; specifically, I didn’t care much for the extended italicized flashbacks. I imagine they’re mean to flesh out the colonists, showing their reasons for getting on a ship in the full knowledge that they’ll never see Earth again, but it felt a little awkward. (If I’m being honest, it also felt like they were meant to flesh out the book: even with them included, this is quite a short novel, and the last section turned out to be a separate novelette? short story? that Friedman wrote some years ago, which takes place six hundred years later and has to do with Tarrant, from the trilogy.) But when the characters burble about how hey, in a few days time there will be four minutes when the sun and the Core and all three moons have set and they’re going to have their first bit of actualfax true night won’t it be neat, I’m over here looking like that Edvard Munch painting — which is exactly the effect I want from something like this. And I also had a good moment of waitasec, why does your name look faintly familiar . . . OH.

The one thing I wonder about — and if anybody has read both Nightborn and the trilogy and remembers the latter better than I do, please chime in — is whether there are discrepancies between what happens here and what the trilogy says happened back then, or whether my recall has simply slipped. I actually hope the discrepancies are real! Enough time passes between colonization and Damien’s day that it would be entirely realistic for the historical record to have drifted a bit away from the truth. And that, if it indeed happened, opens up space for Friedman to not simply follow the sheet music, but to riff in ways that allow for a bit of surprise here.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 2, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Second of five volumes in the not-a-series that was adapted to TV as The Untamed — I say not-a-series because the webnovel really was written as one continuous thing, not narratively divided up into five volumes, and boy howdy does that show even more here than it does with The Lord of the Rings.

Because I watched the show before reading this, I’m having a lot of thoughts about adaptation. In particular, there are two major sections in here that I think feel much more integrated to me because of how the novel approaches them; the combination of the interiority prose can bring to the table (you’re witnessing these events through the eyes of the protagonist) and where they fall in the sequence of the story makes both sections much more successful for me than they were on the screen. Which is going to have knock-on benefits for how I feel at the end, I suspect, since a thing that felt to me kind of like it came out of left field and didn’t have much to do with anything else has now been seeded much more firmly, much earlier on.

(I think. It’s been years since I watched the show, so I can’t 100% swear to how everything was sequenced there; I just remember that it was very different.)

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, Foz Meadows. Queer political fantasy, where one of the protagonists gets shipped off into an arranged political marriage — but not with the woman he was intended to marry, because the foreign envoy, having realized he’s gay, swaps in that woman’s brother instead. Intrigue ensues.

I do like much of the worldbuilding here, which attends to differences of language, gender, and law. If I have a quibble, it’s that Tithena gets to enjoy a fairly uncomplicated status as The Good Country: unlike Ralia, it’s not sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or appalled by the notion of more than two genders. It has an aristocracy, but they don’t reserve the use of magic to themselves the way the nobles of Ralia do, and there doesn’t seem to be much class oppression in general. There’s a small amount of ableism, but heck, even Tithenai food is better. It’s not a pure paradise by any means, but its issues seem to be individual rather than systemic, rooted in specific personalities making bad or selfish choices . . . at least so far. I’ll be interested to see whether the sequel complicates that picture, since my preference tends to be for settings where there isn’t clearly one place that has made all the right cultural choices.

That’s a quibble, though, rather than a dealbreaker for me. I liked the character work in here a lot, and the way this handles trauma — which, fair warning, is very much front-loaded in the plot, so that time can be spent on the recovery process. (The book itself warns you of this, in a prefatory note.) There is recovery, though, because this is ultimately romantic fantasy, not a grimdark slog, and I am very much here for that.

Elfquest: Shards
Elfquest: Legacy
Elfquest: Huntress
Elfquest: The Wild Hunt Rereads all, picked up as canon review for my Yuletide fic. I’m not attempting to list authors/artists/etc. because this is well into the part of the series where Wendy Pini was no longer doing everything herself, and so who’s involved depends on which issue you’re looking at (and isn’t always apparent in the first place, because of how the collections are put together).

I remember not being as engaged with this later stuff, and going back through it now, that opinion stands. I generally don’t like the art as well, nor do I think it’s as high quality as it was earlier in the series; in particular, many of the artists don’t share Pini’s knack for making characters recognizable even when they’re tiny silhouettes in the background, and also there are time where I feel like the flow of the dialogue bubbles (or even their placement) is much less clear than it could be. If I am noticing those things, as someone who rarely reads comics and has never attempted to write or draw one of her own, then I suspect the flaws are non-trivial.

Story-wise, it reminds me of certain TV series after the original showrunner stepped back from close involvement: the plot concept is mostly fine, but the execution doesn’t hit as hard as I think it could have. And I get a little weary of how from here on out, practically every problem in the World of Two Moons ends up being the work of Winnowill, the Djuns, or both. I’m more interested in the smaller-scale stuff, the interpersonal conflicts where there’s not so much of an obvious villain. The issue where Cutter and Rayek work out their problems remains a favorite for me, even if the art style there plays less well in my collection’s greyscale rendition; the narrative logic behind it is strong enough on its own.

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri. I love this kind of worldbuilding, where it’s less Fantasy India and more that India is the clay from which the secondary world is constructed. Not that I don’t enjoy the former as well (y’all know me), but this frees up an author to imagine whole new concepts of religion and government and so on: the temple children of the Hirana, the names given to the followers of the nameless god, the mothers of flame, and so forth. There’s some really interesting ideas in here, including some that remain intriguingly ambiguous as of the end of the first book — I’m thinking particularly of the relationship of the yaksa to the rest of the world.

If I have a complaint, it’s that here and there I felt this could have been a little tighter. Not in the way I think that comment is often meant, when said by readers who want “extraneous” (usually character-building) material to be pared away until it’s nothing but the plot, ma’am; rather that the most minor stratum of viewpoint characters wound up feeling to me like they didn’t deliver enough meat to be worth the diversion from the protagonists of more central significance. This definitely needed its major perspectives, though, to adequately show the forces at play here — it would have been much weaker if it had gone the semi-conventional route of limiting itself to the two main heroines.

Definitely interested in the second, though I probably won’t read it right away. (These days I’ve found I enjoy series better if I space their installments out a bit, rather than binging it all in one go.)

The Portuguese Affair, Ann Swinfen. Criminy, was this the wrong book to take with me to read over Christmas.

Like the previous book in the series, it felt in places like this was too much Your Tour of Sixteenth-Century History, with the protagonist there simply to observe stuff happening. This time, however, the tour covered the counter-armada England sent after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which was supposed to destroy what remained of the Spanish fleet, put a claimant back on the Spanish-usurped throne of Portugal, and for a stretch goal, take over the Spanish control of the Azores. It failed at all three, and something like three-quarters of the pathetically terrible army assembled for these tasks died (often of dysentery, cholera, or starvation) before the survivors managed to limp back home. So for much of this book, you’re watching the English commanders botch every job they were given, while the protagonist has no ability to influence their decisions.

Nor do her own activities go much better! She also has three goals, and of those, she succeeds at one, has the second fail in basically the worst way possible, and never even gets a chance to try at the third. Then, as icing on the cake, the book ends on the cliffhanger of something else clearly having gone wrong, but you don’t get to find out what until book four. Which I have ordered, and will read . . . but I’m definitely not enjoying this as much as I did Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mysteries, and given that this series is nine books long, it’s possible I will nope out before the end.

All Systems Red, Martha Wells. Yes, I have finally hopped aboard the Murderbot train. And yes, it feels ironic that a series titled “The Murderbot Diaries” should operate as a pick-me-up after the previous title, but, well, here we are. Murderbot is indeed as charming as I’ve been told, and while the resolution to the mystery here felt a little unsatisfying (hinging as it does on setting details that the constrained space of a novella gave no room to provide before the reveal), that was never the selling point anyway. I have bought the next two and await their arrival.

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley. Non-fantastical Anishinaabe mystery; YA, but with little of the “YA feel” that I’ve started to get burned out on — in part because of how it leans into its cultural milieu, creating different social dynamics than the ones I see in so many other YA novels. (By “cultural milieu” I’m pretty sure I mean hockey as much as I mean Anishinaabe traditions.)

It takes a while for the mystery to get rolling, though — longer than I expected, and because I’m a philistine who kinda needs some sort of genre content, fantastical or otherwise, to hook my interest, I was a little iffy on this until that finally kicked into gear. I stayed in part because I very much appreciated one particular male character being really good at respect and compassion and basically just being the poster-boy for non-toxic masculinity, plus I liked the view into Anishinaabe society.

Both of those things continue to be selling points even after the mystery gets started, and the other thing that gives this novel an unusual shape is that the protagonist, Daunis, has very culturally-rooted reasons to be leery of trusting law enforcement of any stripe. She’s not rabidly against those institutions, but she’s very aware that their priorities are not the same as hers, and she spends much of the novel trying to navigate that tension — as well as maintaining her involvement with personal aspects of her life, rather than ditching them the moment the plot shows up. This fits very well with the novel’s overall emphasis on community, and paid off in two very different, but equally fabulous, scenes involving her tribal Elders. (The one with the affidavits and the one on the ferry, for anybody who’s read this.)

There’s a sequel of sorts, but in this case I’m glad to see that instead of being the further adventures of Daunis, instead it centers on her twin nieces who have a side role in this book. Since this one is set retrospectively in 2004 — sorry, but I can’t make myself call it historical fiction; my brain throws a rod when I try — the next can leap forward ten years or so to when the nieces are teenagers. The sample chapter at the back makes it clear that Daunis will be appearing in it as their cool twenty-something auntie, and I’m hoping it might throw me a bone re: something that was left appropriately unresolved here but dammit I want some later closure for it.

The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas. Gothic fantasy set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence. Beatriz marries Don Rodolfo and moves to his hacienda hoping that this will provide security for herself and her mother after the death of her father, but the house turns out to be . . . if I say “haunted” that implies there’s a ghost in it, when the problem is in fact far more pervasive than that. (Cañas explicitly cites The Haunting of Hill House as an inspiration.)

I was drawn to this far more for the historical context than the Gothic-ness of it, which I’m personally less interested in; the result is that I can’t say for sure if the pacing in the middle was boggy or if it was just me not being quite the right audience for the material. I do wish Andrés’ thread of the narrative had felt a little more integrated with Beatriz’s — it jumps around in time a lot, and doesn’t have quite the “puzzle pieces falling into place” feeling I want when it’s showing us material from years ago — and that Juana hadn’t basically left the stage for so long a span, as I didn’t feel as engaged with either of those characters as I wanted to. Ultimately I don’t regret reading this, but I’m not sure if I’m inspired to seek out more — at least, not if future novels are also Gothic.

In November of last year, seeing how many novels by Native American authors had piled up on my wish lists, I decided to spend the entire month reading only those. It was an interesting experience, giving me the chance to see patterns that might otherwise have slipped past me, but I said at the end that I was unlikely to repeat the experiment — in part because it meant saving up those authors for a concentrated binge, rather than just reading them whenever.

And indeed, since then I’ve been reading them whenever. But as November drew close this year, I realized my wish lists also contained quite a lot of nonfiction about Native American subjects. Given that I’ve been craving nonfiction a bit, I decided it was reasonable to binge that instead.

It’s wound up a smaller binge than I originally envisioned, because I maaaaay have also been lured in by Baldur’s Gate 3 this month. >_> But still, it’s given me the impetus to read some things that have been languishing for a while, and that’s good. Let’s get to it!

Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles, Beth Pickens. Rather obviously not part of this month’s theme; it’s just that the audiobook hold came in right at the start of the month. It also comes with an asterisk, in that I skimmed parts of this — yes, even though it was an audiobook. I skipped ahead in sections where what she was saying was either very familiar or not really applicable to me, and I bypassed a good portion of one chapter entirely. Still, I’m reporting on it because it may be of use to others.

This is not, as I’d hoped, a book about “creative hurdles” in the sense of things like burnout. Instead Pickens, who is a job counselor working specifically artists, is addressing people — especially people with some variety of marginalized identity — who are facing difficulties of other varieties. She talks about how to make time for your art, how to approach the question of money, imposter syndrome, arting about personally traumatic subjects, engaging with your artistic community, and so forth. Being Jewish, she speaks approvingly of having some kind of Sabbath day where you don’t do work (even if it’s hard to get time for your art in the first place), and I also liked her suggestion of choosing one day each month that is allocated for personal administration, i.e. this is when you do things like schedule doctor’s appointments. The most valuable bit in here for me was probably the part where she talks about why artists have trouble being as productive as they want during retreats and residencies, and what techniques you can use to ease yourself more effectively into those situations.

So, yeah: ultimately not what I thought it would be, and not as much use to me as I’d hoped, but possibly exactly what others may need!

Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla. There’s not a ton of actual poetry in here because we don’t have a ton of surviving indigenous documents from the pre-contact and peri-contact periods. But this is still a reasonably substantial book because León-Portilla is interested in giving you more than just the bare bones: after an introduction in which he talks about things like what our documentary sources are and how sure we can be that the poems attributed to specific individuals are actually their work, each subsequent chapter gives you as detailed a biographical sketch as possible about the poet and an analysis of their work, before delivering the poem(s), first in Nahuatl, then in English. The poets are grouped regionally, too, e.g. those from Texcoco and its environs, then Tenochtitlan, etc. There’s only one female poet because of the vagaries of what’s survived that has specific attribution (as opposed to “by a woman from Tlaxcala”), but León-Portilla is clear that there are plenty of references to women as poets, even if their work doesn’t survive.

The poems themselves . . . well. I won’t say I find most of them amazing, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way of that. Poetry of any kind is hard to translate in ways that preserve its effect; it gets harder when the surviving manuscripts don’t actually give you line breaks or any discussion of Nahuatl poetic aesthetics, such that the translator also has to guess at how to approach them even in the original. Lots of stuff in here feels like a non sequitur from the previous line, though León-Portilla’s prefatory notes do what they can to smooth out the context, e.g. glossing who a particular named individual is or the fact that people from a certain town were reputed to be drunkards. But the main effect you get from this, whether you like the poetry or not, is a sense that the Mexica and their neighbors were not simply All About War (let alone All About Human Sacrifice): they valued poetry, they had melancholy things to say about how transitory everything in this world is, their rulers (many of the poems are attributable to rulers) sometimes wished they could just be left to enjoy the aesthetic life instead.

Central American Mythology: Captivating Myths of Gods, Goddesses and Legendary Creatures of Ancient Mexico and Central America, Matt Clayton. I almost decided not to buy this book when I saw how short it was: only forty-three pages, and it turns out to be forty-three pages of not very small font and margins, either. But I went ahead and got it anyway because crucially, “Central American mythology” here does not mean “Aztec and Mayan mythology.” He has separate books for those groups — one per; they’re not even lumped together — while this is about other Central American peoples, ones in Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and a few from Mexico that are not the usual Triple Alliance-adjacent suspects. I would still love something meatier than forty-three pages, but as with the Peruvian book I read last month, however slight this is, it’s more than I had before.

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Keith H. Basso. We read the titular article (of four) from this book back when I was in graduate school, and the most succinct praise I can give it is to say I still remembered it nigh on twenty years later, with enough warmth that I sought the book itself out. (In fact, this title was Reason Number One I decided to focus on non-fiction regarding Native American topics this month.)

It’s a little tough to be concise in summarizing what Basso is getting at here, because it’s something very different from what many of us are used to. The Western Apache of Cibecue and its environs have a very high density of place-names, some of which are descriptive of the landscape itself, others of which commemorate specific events (my favorite of the latter is, and I’m not making this up, “Shades of Shit”). Furthermore, these place-names all have one or more associated narratives, which do things to record tribal history and cultural values. And this all feeds into how the Western Apache think about history and the landscape around them, and how they leverage those things for use in daily life, offering oblique reproof to someone who’s behaving badly by telling a particular (place-associated) story or congratulating them on having finally returned from a place that evokes their errors. Furthermore, because all of these things are linked with specific locations, any time the individual passes by there they’ll be reminded of the lesson, or they can visualize it and the story in their mind’s eye, and all of this leads to the Apache talking about places as spots from which you can “drink” wisdom like water, or saying things about a particular mountain “stalking” them, i.e. serving as a constant prod to behave well.

Me, I find this fascinating, especially since one of the things Basso discusses in passing is how disconnected from place the modern world tends to make many of us. I’m curious what things are like in Cibecue now, since this book is several decades old — though Basso mentions at the end that the fieldwork behind it was conducted decades before the book was finished, and he notes the evolution of this tradition over time, e.g. the coining of new place-names and the adaptation of usage to things like newer housing developments. It’s a welcome reminder that culture doesn’t have to stay fossilized in past forms for the heart of it to survive. Parts of this book get moderately academic in tone, but if you can digest those or are willing to skim past them, I think the parts that document how this practice is conducted (and how Basso came to understand it) are very readable for a non-anthropological audience.

Cahokia and the North American Worlds, Sarah E. Baires. Another extremely short book, but unlike the mythology one above, this one is densely academic: its sixty-two pages are followed by a full twenty-five pages of bibliography. It is, in fact, just a longish academic article published under separate cover — and when I realized what I had picked up, I honestly probably should have bailed. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have even read in graduate school unless I were writing a paper on the subject, especially since I wouldn’t call this particularly well-written on the level of prose and aesthetics. (It fared quite poorly on the heels of reading Basso’s book.)

But, well, I’m bloody-minded, and I persevered. So it was kind of a blast from my own archaeology-studying past, coupled with “huh, so that’s where academic jargon has gone in the last fifteen years.” Despite not liking it very much, I may hang onto it on the vague notion that it would be useful for the alternate history I will probably never write. At less than a hundred pages even with the bibliography, it isn’t like it takes up much real estate on the bookshelf.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon. This is, at its heart, the ecological study the title implies: a look at how the flora and fauna and natural phenomena like flooding changed during the period of colonization in New England. But (in part because precise documentation is thin), in order to get at those aspects, Cronon has to look far more broadly, at things ranging from the political effects of disease on Native American communities to the concepts of property used by the different societies — I particularly liked his note on the latter that to say the Indians had no concept of private property as the English did is to misrepresent English notions of property almost as badly as Indian ones.

It does make for something of a bleak read, though. Because even if you took the racism out of the picture, the Christian assumption that humans were meant to “improve” and master the land and if you didn’t do that in ways the English recognized it then you clearly had no ownership, even the greed that drove them to despoil the region at a truly astonishing rate . . . it would be really, really tough to make even the benevolent establishment of an English colony be non-destructive to what was there before. Not only the diseases they brought, but the invasive species that rode along in the fodder for their livestock and emerged in their dung, the lack of defenses by local plants to the kind of intensive grazing brought on by cattle instead of deer, the ways in which trying to make the landscape support the English agricultural/pastoral lifestyle meant transforming said landscape in ways that had knock-on effects: all of these and more were inevitably going to change things, and thereby change the lives of the indigenous people whose lives were built around what had been before.

But also the racism and the religious ethnocentrism and the greed. I’m never going to look at clapboard architecture again without remembering that style of architecture is born out of the flagrantly wasteful use of New England forests, as if they would never run out.

The Warden, Daniel M. Ford. Took a break from the nonfiction for this one, because it was sent to me for blurbing and the deadline was December 1st.

This is a very D&D-ish fantasy without quite feeling like an RPG. There are elves and dwarves and gnomes and orcs; there are wizards trained in sub-schools like Abjuration and Evocation and Necromancy. There are not spell slots (thank god; the one Forgotten Realms novel I read that had a wizard protagonist had to lurch painfully around how to discuss that in an in-world fashion), but spells do exist in numerical rders, the higher the order the harder the spell, and casting too many orders of spells in one day is very tiring. So: a distinct D&D flavor.

But it’s livened up by a good sense of humor and more attempt than I see in most novels of this type to pay attention to realism and logistics. The heroine, Aelis, despite being from a wealthy noble family, upon graduation from her wizard school to a godforsaken rural village on the edge of the lands the central kingdoms are attempting to reclaim after losing them to an orcish invasion a generation ago. I like the way the history behind that is doled out here — no infodumps; just bits and pieces of information coming up when the characters would naturally think about or discuss them — and I wonder if the series will eventually give information on why the orcs invaded, since that kind of thing is usually driven by disaster or other invaders back wherever used to be home. Given that orcs are conspicuously treated as not being the bestial savages of traditional D&D fiction and Ford is clearly interested in asking those kinds of questions, I suspect the answer is yes.

We’ll probably also find out whether (as I expect) the deeper underlayer behind the problems Aelis encounters is tied with a certain enemy closer to home . . . but that absolutely does not get answered in this book, which ends with far more of an honest-to-god cliffhanger than I’m used to seeing nowadays. I’m not going to say “don’t buy this until the next one is out” because I know that’s a good way to kill a series and sometimes a career, but do be aware you will close the covers on the exact opposite of a note of resolution.

Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind, N. Scott Momaday. At this point I was traveling, which put a dent in my ability to read the non-fiction I’d gathered for this month (most of which seems not to be available in ebook from my library, and I’d already paid for print copies). But my library system has a lot of Momaday’s works, and I liked the one I’d read last year (The Way to Rainy Mountain), so I used this to partially fill the gap.

It’s officially a poetry collection, though the lineated poems in here are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the prose poems, quite a few of which dance around in the fuzzy zone between that genre and flash fiction. All are very short — no more than a page, even in ebook being read on my phone — and often quite meditative. They also range all over in terms of content, with Momaday being just as apt to write about Billy the Kid or Beowulf or Bucephalus as, say, the last Sun Dance performed by his people, the Kiowa. I didn’t love all of them, but I’m seriously considering buying a copy of this for my shelf.

Laǩhóta: An Indigenous History, Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus. My knowledge of Native American communities is like 95% ethnographic and 5% historical, and that might be a generous estimate. So a book like this, which takes a particular group and focuses on significant people, events, and movements over a span of time, is very helpful.

Mind you, the first section of this is still pretty ethnographic, as it spends three chapters on describing traditional Laǩhóta life prior to forced settlement on the reservations. The next six chapters, though, which make up the bulk of the book, cover the history from initial contacts with white men through to the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The final four chapters then shift back to a more theme-organized focus to talk about twentieth- and twenty-first-century history, covering topics like relations with the federal government, language, spirituality, and more.

As you might expect, this does not always make for a cheery experience in reading. While I very much appreciate the authors’ attention to the concerns, desires, and agency of Laǩhóta individuals, rather than solely depicting them as the passive victims of white aggression — which includes acknowledging the extent to which the Laǩhóta themselves acted as expansionist aggressors against their neighbors such as the Crow and the Arikara — still, the trajectory here is distinctly downward for a good long while, before picking up again circa the 1960s with a re-embrace of tribal identity and traditions. I am rarely as interested in anybody’s twentieth- and twenty-first history as I am in older stuff, but the insight into the various and sometimes conflicting dynamics between movements was quite valuable.

The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems, N. Scott Momaday. Another poetry collection because I could get it in ebook. This is the inverse of the previous one, in that it is mostly lineated poetry with the occasional bit of prose interspersed; it is also substantially longer — though still, because poetry, not all that long of a book. Oddly, the slowest part for me to get through was the cycle of one hundred haiku (or senryu or zappai or whatever; I’m not interested in getting hung up on precise terminology) about midway through the book, because however short they were individually, zooming through them all together felt like it would be doing them a disservice. I didn’t notice any overlap between this and the other collection, though, so if you decide you like or are interested in Momaday’s poetry, you can pick up both of these without concern for repetition.

Noting here for posterity: in October I started reading the Shahnameh. I mention this because my edition (which isn’t even complete!) is nine hundred and sixty-two pages long. I will still be reading it next month. I will still be reading it next year. I will always be reading the Shahnameh. I will always have been reading the Shahnameh. O_O

But on to the things I finished this past month . . .

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Pursuant to yesterday’s post (which I’ll be following up on later), I tried to take some time off in September. Result: I read a lot, though some of these are quite short.

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The Truth of the Aleke, Moses Ose Utomi.

I actually read this last month, but forgot to note it then.

This was sent to me for blurbing, because I read, loved, and happily blurbed Utomi’s previous novella, The Lies of the Ajungo. As the titles imply, this is a connected story — I guess it’s fair to call it a sequel, but Lies was such a beautifully paced and self-contained story, and this isn’t attempting to continue on with the same character or anything as simple as that. Its vibe is a bit different, too, less mythic in tone. If you’ve read the first novella you’ll be looking for the irony in the title of this one, and it’s there . . . but it’s not quite the same irony as before, which is good. My only problem now is figuring out what to say for my blurb, which I swear to god is harder than writing an actual story.

A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, Beth Cato.

Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers’ Group, and have heard her talking for some time about her “foodie musketeer” book.

This is an alternate version of our world, focused on France (here called Verdania), but with one of its protagonists hailing from essentially an independent Normandy. The central concept is that there are supernatural creatures whose body parts, if suitably prepared, have a wide variety of magical effects. Suitable preparation, however, requires Chefs, who get a capital letter because it’s an inborn ability, bestowed on human beings by one of the five Gods they worship. Gyst is an interesting deity; he’s the God of mysteries — which also makes him the god of things like fermentation and decay, because those processes are mysterious and caused by things humans can’t see. And because I am the sort of nerd who will glom onto religious stuff in books and how it gets integrated into the rest of society, I loved little touches like death being referred to as the moment when all a person’s mysteries will be resolved.

But because the work Chefs do is so valuable, they’re all supposed to work in the service of the government. One of the protagonists here is a rogue Chef who ran away from that life and has been surviving in the shadows ever since — along with her grandmother, who may be riddled with dementia but is still a fabulous character I hope will reappear in the sequel. The other is a foreign princess being married into the royal family of Verdania, who finds herself in a rather larger political bind than is usual for protagonist princesses headed into a diplomatic marriage. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling the plot, I think, but I will note (for those of you who have read this one) that I really liked the direction the story went in once the Coterie came onstage.

The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Seb Falk.

Not to be confused with The Bright Ages, a different recent medieval history book that aims to rehabilitate the image of the Middle Ages (and which I believe has come under fire in the field for failing to acknowledge the work done by previous scholars, particularly POC scholars).

This one is more narrowly focused than The Bright Ages, in ways that definitely bring it more into line with what I’m accustomed to reading. Its focus is, as the subtitle suggests, on science, but I’d say within that it tends to focus particularly on astronomy. Not just because it plays nicely with the title, I suspect, but because astronomy is a field where we can see things we recognize as “science” going on. Falk makes the point at the outset that we do the period a disservice by insisting on too narrow a definition of that term; medieval people may not have spent much time practicing the scientific method, with its hypotheses and controlled variables and so forth, but they were interested in understanding the world around them — even when they would have framed the reasons for and assumptions behind their understanding as religious ones. They spent a great deal of time observing the heavens, constructing ever-more elaborate devices to perform astronomical calculations, and wrestling with theories that could address the anomalies that kept sending their calculations awry over time. That’s important groundwork for what came after, as is the work they did in other fields, even if it’s not experimental science per se.

I enjoyed this one enough that, after reading it in ebook while traveling, I went ahead and bought a paper copy. The ebook isn’t bad, but the nature of the medium and the fact that I read on my phone (no tablet) meant that I wasn’t able to see the diagrams nearly as well as I wanted to. And the odds that I’ll want to understand an astrolabe or an equatorium well enough to write about it in a story at some point seem reasonably high to me, and this book did a lucid enough job of explaining those things that I’d like to have it on my shelf.

The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein.

This book not infrequently crops up alongside the Memoirs of Lady Trent in discussions about novels that are focused on scholarship. When a friend recommended it in passing one afternoon, I decided to finally get off my duff and pick it up. (Brief pause to appreciate the way that modern ebooks and POD make it easier to acquire older titles like this one; it’s clearly a reprint edition, made much more recently than the original publication of 1989.)

(Also, man did I want the timing to support my theory that The Steerswoman influenced Robert Jordan, because there are some ways in which the steerswomen really, really remind me of Aes Sedai. Alas, unless Jordan read it in manuscript, that’s 100% impossible: Kirstein’s book came out less than six months before The Eye of the World.)

Reading this was a bit of a throwback, in terms of what the world feels like and how it’s presented to the reader. The book not infrequently felt a touch thin, especially since Kirstein often skips freely over intervening material, some of which I’d normally expect to see played out on the page. But it did grow on me in its central concept, which is that steerswomen — and the very occasional steersman — seek to record and understand a world that, you gradually realize, is probably ours or something very much like ours post-apocalypse. As of finishing this first volume, I’m genuinely unsure whether there’s anything in it I’d call actual magic: most if not all of the physical effects can be explained by science and technology no longer understood, leaving (perhaps) only one blatant display of what sure seems like mind-magic. But figuring out what’s going on under the surface is part of the pleasure here, as I began piecing together the hints strewn through the text.

Rowan, the titular steerswoman, is also an interesting character — a phrase I use in a slightly different sense than usual. It’s less that I find her emotionally compelling — the aforementioned thinness comes into play there — and more that she doesn’t work like most characters I’m used to seeing on the page. She’s overtly analytical, and what’s more, her analysis is often laid out for you. There’s one striking section where she basically thinks through a situation and says, A or B, C or D, E or F, G or H; H would fail to match the situation, so it must be G; since G, only E makes sense; since E, it must be D; and therefore A. In other words, she logics her way through a significant crux in the plot, in a way I rarely see supposedly “logic-driven” characters actually do. And her willingness to solve problems by being open and cooperative, because that’s the steerswomen’s ethos, made for a really nice change of pace.

Uncommon Charm, Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver.

A cute little novella set in an alternate fantasy 1920s, which served as a stark reminder of how workmanlike the prose is in a lot of what I read. The sentences here aren’t lush or ornate; they just have voice, right from the get-go. You could not substitute a page of this into someone else’s book and swap the names out with no one the wiser.

Plot-wise, it was both delightful and odd. It starts off with Julia, the daughter of a famous sorceress mother who’s just taken a young Jewish man in to be his protege. The young man, Simon, can see ghosts, while Julia’s general attitude toward magic is “I can’t do it and that’s fine because I’m not especially interested.” It’s hard to say much about where that plot goes without spoiling anything, but it’s not where I expected: mainly the story is interested in having the characters learn some truths, and when that’s done, so is the story. No particular confrontations or dramatic changes of status quo, just “and now you know.” Which makes it a much quieter story than the voice and premise made me expect, but not in a bad way. I very much loved Julia’s mother’s approach to magic — which she at least sees as highly personalized and subjective — and her conversations with Simon about what his magic means to him, especially within the context of his Jewish faith.

I have no idea whether Bergslien and Weaver intend more with these characters or this world, but I would read it if they do.

The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, Beth Lincoln, ill. Claire Powell.

This was delightful. Sonya Taaffe recommended it with the comparison “Edward Gorey does The Westing Game,” and I was basically sold on the spot; I cannot say she was wrong. Everyone in the Swift family is named with a random selection from the Dictionary, and this name is believed to be the kid’s destiny: you cannot help your name. Shenanigan Swift certainly lives up to hers, both before and after somebody pushes Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude down the stairs during a rare family reunion, but she also bucks the trend in some key ways, as do other characters. The other members of the Swift family (and a very small number of outsiders) are all highly vivid and rarely naturalistic, but that latter is hardly a problem; if you’re here for “Edward Gorey does The Westing Game,” then realism is probably not what you’re looking for. I often find middle grade novels a little too thin for my taste, but this one works precisely because it’s not trying to play the same type of game as most adult books.

Once again, no idea whether Lincoln intends more with this setting or these characters. I would certainly read more, though I’m not sure a direct sequel would work; the note it ends on is the right kind of unresolved, and continuing on might wreck that. Not to mention that Shenanigan’s character arc doesn’t feel like it needs more after what we’ve already seen. But different members of the Swift family at different points in time? I would absolutely be there for that. (This seems to be twentieth-century but possibly the first half thereof, since there are neither cell phones nor computers to be seen.)

Quintessence, David Walton.

Alternate Tudor history of a sort that reminds me of Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters: the world genuinely is flat, the sun gets bigger as you get closer to the edge because the celestial mechanics mean you’re also getting closer to the sun as it sets, and the principles ideas of alchemy work, though nobody’s actually turning lead into gold. This is also an alternate history that does something I’d ordinarily be a bit chary of: there are no Native Americans of any kind on the island that lies at the western edge of the world (an island which is definitely not North or South America). On the one hand, erasure of that kind isn’t great; on the other hand, the sentient inhabitants of the island are also 100% operating on magical biology that is not that of human beings, so trying to present them as being more closely analogous to indigenous Americans would feel weird in a different way. For me it felt all right because the entire setup of the world had been rewritten on such a fundamental level, but others’ mileage may vary.

Anyway, the story. It starts off with a bang, as a ship returns from the fabled island of Horizon laden with wondrous treasures . . . but the few surviving crew drop dead shortly after arrival, their internal organs are full of sand and salt, and the “treasures” are likewise just rocks, water, and so forth. A new expedition gets mounted to, among other things, confirm the theory that these substances transformed when they got too far away from the abundant quintessence found in Horizon.

The pacing and balance of attention here felt slightly peculiar to me — not in a deal-breaking way, but certainly an odd one. For one thing, a lot of the scenes are very short — barely a page, or less than — and it doesn’t skip over the time gaps between events as gracefully as it might. For another, it takes something like a quarter of the book for the expedition to set out, with that quarter being spent on developing the politics at home in England, where Edward VI is about to kick the bucket and Mary is waiting in the wings. On the one hand it sets up why the expedition carries a bunch of Protestant settlers fleeing Mary’s persecution, and some later developments around a Spanish ship, but on the other hand it feels like a lot of time spent on what’s being left behind, rather than where they’re going. In fact, you’re more than halfway through the book before they get to Horizon, and the journey definitely felt like it could have been compressed, with the full nuances of how the captain manages (or fails to manage) the challenges during the voyage ultimately not important enough to merit the amount of attention they got. In some ways I think the pacing has to do with the fact that this book has a sequel, Quintessence Sky, but the end of this volume felt like enough of a reasonable ending that I don’t quite feel compelled to read onward.

And my mild frustration with the pacing is because in the end, I was here for the stuff in Horizon — and I enjoyed that part! The colonists figuring out the special abilities of the different organisms they find there and forming their own equivalent to the Royal Society (a bit precociously; the real Royal Society wasn’t founded until the next century) to investigate the source and uses of those abilities was honestly great. I could have done with much more exploration of what the colonists dub the “manticores,” too. I wanted more of that, less of the other stuff — and the second book might deliver it, but the blurb left me a bit too “meh” to really want to pick it up. Alas.

Adirondack Almanac: A Guide to the Natural Year, Tom Kalinowski, ill. Sheri Amsel.

Nothing in this book says explicitly that it’s mimicking Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, but the title and the material certainly imply it. Kalinowski goes month by month through the year, telling you what interesting things are going on in the natural world of the Adirondacks — mostly the animal/insect world, much less the plants, though they show up in the context of animal behavior and occasionally as bits of descriptive detail salted in here and there. He can’t remain rigidly chronological without distorting the flow of the material; any given section may make reference to what the robins or the blackflies or the shrews were doing a month or two earlier, or what they’ll be doing a month or two from now. But he manages to keep a good enough focus on the activity of that month that it doesn’t feel scattershot at all.

This kind of book is a godsend for me if I ever need to write an extended bit set in that kind of environment, because of the focus not only on what exists in a given ecosystem, but what it’s doing at any given time. Which critters are breeding, which ones have young, who’s going into torpor, who’s relaxing the defense of their territory or ramping it up because that can change over the course of the year. If anybody happens to know of more like this and Sand County Almanac, please let me know, because I’d love to collect more.

The Long, Long Life of Trees, Fiona Stafford.

British trees! With occasional nods to their cousins in other parts of the world, but Britain is very much the center of attention here. Which is exactly what I wanted, because I have a verrrrry nascent notion for a story that would lean into the folklore of trees in England. Stafford only intermittently talks about the folklore side, but it’s present enough to make this useful to me — especially since she’s fairly scrupulous about noting which trees, despite being ubiquitous in England, are actually newer imports. (For the purposes of my story, that will matter.) Sycamores are a recent arrival, for example, and so are the sweet varieties of apple — well, for values of “recent” that equate to “Roman.” There’s a decent amount of illustration in here, as she talks about the attention paid to certain trees by artists, though for some trees I could have done with more examples that show the full thing, rather than just detail shots.

I’ve got another British book on the subject, too, and though I won’t be reading it in the immediate future — there’s only so much tree-focused reading I can absorb at a time — I’ll be interested to see how the two compare.

Aboriginal Legends: Animal Tales, A.W. Reed.

A companion book of sorts to one I posted about a few months ago, Aboriginal Tales of Australia. The titles are no real guide to what to expect in each book; many of the stories in that latter are about animals, because — presuming this is a representative sample of Aboriginal storytelling — a lot of their stories thoroughly blur the line between “about animals” and “about people,” because the animals are generally behaving in extremely people-like ways. (Also, I think one of the stories in here was also in the other book, though I’d have to go searching through to compare.)

But still, I like reading collections of this sort from a broad range of places, and it’s even better when I have more than one, even when they’re by the same author. I wouldn’t call this riveting reading from a modern fiction standpoint — most actual folklore isn’t — but it’s interesting from the perspective of getting a feel for a different environment and a different society living within it. I wish this book had a glossary like the other did, however flawed it may have been; many of the objects/animals/plants mentioned here are unfamiliar to me, and I wasn’t able to find all of them online, at least not with a casual search.

The Surviving Sky, Kritika H. Rao.

This book basically had me at the back cover, because it said one of the protagonists is an archaeologist.

Bad news first: Ahilya is not an archaeologist. I have no flipping clue why she’s called one, not just in the cover copy but throughout the book; she in no way, shape, or form studies human society through its material culture. She excavates no sites — in fact, even the cover copy had me wondering how she could, when the central concept here is that the ground is so badly shredded by frequent storms called “earthrages” that nobody can live on it anymore and must resort to flying cities instead. She studies no artifacts — those wouldn’t really survive, either. The closest she comes to archaeology is reading some old histories and theorizing about the distant past. What she she actually does with most of her research time is tag creatures in the jungle with trackers because she wants to figure out how they manage to survive the earthrages, and that, my friends, is what we might call a field biologist.

The good news is, I’m perfectly happy to read about a field biologist! (So long as I metaphorically plug my ears every time her work is called “archaeology.”) And this is genuinely an interesting novel otherwise. For one thing, it does a thing even adult SF/F rarely touches on, which is to write about a married couple; rather than the usual familiar arc of “character meets character, attraction blossoms, HEA,” we start with a husband and wife who are badly estranged from one another and whose path back to marital harmony is so much two steps forward, one point nine steps back that they’ve only just kind of sort of arrived by the end of the book. (This is the start of a series, of what length I don’t know — but I should mention that it ends on a reasonably satisfying note. Not a fully resolved one, to be sure, but if you’re okay with the sort of ambiguous closure where the characters have to decide what to do with themselves now, it works.)

It is also, especially by the end, kind of balls-to-the-wall with its sheer ideas in a way I’ve found in relatively few novels lately. In one sense I think it’s easy to see where the story is going; any time you pick up a novel where the party line is “here is the way the world must be because our history and our theories tell us XYZ,” you can pretty much guess what’s going to turn out to be not true. But the way in which it turns out to be not true . . . that’s a different matter. I did not anticipate where this book ended up.

Partly that’s because frankly, the whole structure of metaphysics around trajection never quite popped into clarity for me. But since that’s a complaint I’ve also seen about the Rook and Rose series, I feel obliged to say that I stand by my feelings when it’s my own book getting that response, which is: do you really have to understand it all? Is explaining that the main thing the story is trying to do, or can you let it slide and focus on the characters and the plot instead? I don’t have to be able to write you a clear rundown of trajection and the Resonance and the Moment and the Deepness and stars and ragas and architects’ sort-of tattoos; I devoured the book without ever arriving at that point. If you’re someone who does feel the need for that clarity, this might well be a frustrating read, but I can vouch for the story being enjoyable without that.

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman.

I didn’t expect to have another book to report on from August. Then my flight to DragonCon in Atlanta got delayed for three hours, and I blew through this while trying to keep myself occupied.

It turns out not to be quite the book I expected. The subtitle and my very vague memory of wherever I saw it recommended made me think it was on how radical ideas get developed, but Beckerman’s central thesis is actually quite different. He’s interested in the incubation period of revolutionary change — the stretch of time in which those ideas get developed, tested, and modified, before they burst fully onto the stage — and argues that this period is necessary for successful revolutions, whether political or ideological. Which is important because the secondary thesis of this book is that social media, at least in certain forms, is actually detrimental to that incubation, and leads to revolutions dying before they can really get traction.

As such, the book exists in two informal halves. The chapters in the first half look at seventeenth-century Europe (early scientific revolution), nineteenth-century Britain (Chartism and the pursuit of universal suffrage), early twentieth-century Italy (the Futurists), 1940s West Africa (independence movements), 1960s Soviet Russia (political dissidents), and the 1990s U.S. (riot grrrls) to study the kinds of networks and tactics those groups developed in pursuit of their goals: respectively, letter-writing, mass petitions, manifestos, newspapers, samizdat, and zines. Then there’s an interlude titled “Cyberspace,” which steps sideways to discuss the WELL, an early internet community, to make the point that nostalgic reminiscences over the birth of the internet often gloss over how active moderation and community management have always been required to keep the place functioning nicely. After that the attention turns to Tahrir Square in 2011 and the Arab Spring more generally, Charlottesville in 2017 and the neo-Nazi movement, the U.S. in 2020 and doctors in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and Minneapolis in 2020 and Black Lives Matter.

The inflection point around the internet matters, though this isn’t simplistically “the internet is bad!” or “the internet is solely to blame!” The Riot Grrrls trend and its associated feminism, Beckerman argues, died young because the spotlight shone in it too soon: what started out with teens and women working with glue sticks and photocopiers suddenly became the focus of magazine articles and interviews, which broke the discourse that was happening between people in what had up until then been an informal movement born out of personal pain. After that, though . . . the effect Facebook and Twitter had on the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, was to push for bold demonstrations that stood on a foundation of emotion and nothing else, because the activists involved in those things had developed no deeper solidarity, no systems for further organization, no strategy for the future. Circumstances bum-rushed them into what looked like success, but the only people remotely prepared for the next steps were the Muslim Brotherhood, and even they wound up getting stomped by the army reasserting power.

Which is not to say there’s no way for the internet to be of use. The Charlottesville chapter is particularly chilling, as it shows how the alt-right was able to use the more closed chambers of Discord to do exactly the kind of work Beckerman argues is necessary, workshopping their ideas and messaging and upcoming actions before debuting those things on the public stage — but Beckerman points out that just because we currently associate that kind of seclusion and secrecy with bad actors doesn’t mean it can’t also be turned to good ends. That’s the message of the final two chapters, where he shows coalitions of doctors using private email groups to discuss what they did and didn’t know about COVID-19 and how to present plans to government officials, and Black activists retreating off the generalized outrage machine of public Twitter to plan the kind of ground-up, local action that can potentially produce actual results in specific communities.

I’ve gone on at greater length than I meant to, but it’s because I think there’s a lot to chew on here for people who are tired of Facebook- and Twitter-style social media where the goal is to amass followers and likes rather than concrete change. It also reminded me in many ways of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which shares the general thesis that such services are actively fragmenting our ability to take meaningful action. As the exodus (X-odus?) from the Service Formerly Known as Twitter continues and we disperse across half a dozen competing networks, it’s worth thinking about what kind of behavior those networks encourage and discourage, and where we should be spending our time if we want to make a difference with the problems we’re currently facing.

Siren Queen, Nghi Vo. This one is likely of interest to several people I know: Chinese-American history, pre-Code Hollywood, queerness, and fae. Luli Wei is determined to make a career for herself in film, and to do it without falling into certain stereotypical roles — but this is an openly magical version of history where the studio system genuinely does have a supernatural hold on its performers, actors can take long-term damage from the cameras, and “becoming a star” means literally acquiring your very own gleaming spot in the sky, which will persist for as long as people remember and watch your movies.

The supernatural element here, though out in the open, it also largely oblique: at no point does Vo stop and explain it all to you. It actually took me a while to be certain “fae” was even the right word to attach to it, and it’s probably not the whole story anyway (there are references to people making deals with devils at crossroads), but there are enough mentions of the role iron plays, plus a truncated “Tam Lin” in the middle for a secondary character, that it feels more appropriate than any alternative. I mostly liked that obliqueness; it was nice not to have the studio system fall into some kind of clear-cut Seelie/Unseelie structure, not to have the standard parade of familiar types (I think the only creatures that get named directly are “fox girls” in China and a skogsrå from Sweden), etc. There were a few places where I did crave a little more clarity, just so I could properly understand all the dangers of Luli’s world, but those weren’t terribly load-bearing. The ending did not play out in any of the ways I expected, but it played out very well.

On Spec #123 Selling a story to On Spec means you get a one-year subscription! This isn’t the issue I’m in, so I feel free to comment on it. Per my decision last month about anthologies, I didn’t finish reading absolutely everything in here, but I very much liked Kajetan Kwiatkowski’s “Immaculate Deception,” about a jumping spider sent to infiltrate a colony of weaver ants, who finds something very unexpected there — the worldbuilding and the evocation of insect life was very striking. Also enjoyed Lindsey Duncan’s “Not With a Whimper,” a flash piece with a lovely ending — hard to say much without just recounting the whole thing.

Advent, James Treadwell. This was an interesting study in me enjoying things I’m normally less interested in, while being uninterested in things I normally enjoy.

The Publishers Weekly review quoted on the back compares this to Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, and I see where it’s coming from, even if it ended up not working that way for me. Through roughly the first half of the book, this managed to get me really invested in the narrative of Gavin — who has seen odd things his whole life, and has learned not to tell anyone about them, especially not his emotionally abusive father — going out to Cornwall and encountering some people he can actually talk to about those things, just nice, quiet, bonding conversations I found surprisingly engaging. At the same time, the book walks backwards through a series of flashbacks set in the sixteenth century, and despite my love for historical fiction, I honestly found those to be less than welcome interruptions to the rest of the story.

The latter half . . . well, if I’d known this is the start of a series before I hit the last thirty pages, I would have at least had a different frame of reference in which to react to the fact that the secondary characters I enjoyed the most fell out of the story more or less completely, while ones I found less interesting moved to the forefront. (Horace does not deserve what he goes through here, but not gonna lie, it’s hard for me to look forward to more scenes from the kid whose primary emotional flavor is “resentment.”) It was telling to me that my reading pace slowed significantly as I went along, after devouring the first half in fairly short order. I’m guessing that most of the people I liked will return more in the second book, but I probably won’t find out for sure; my interest waned enough by the conclusion that, despite finding the stinger with Jen and Ma’chinu’ch interesting, I don’t think I care enough to pick up the sequel.

(I did like Corbo, though. Yes yes.)

Mummy, Caroline B. Cooney. Caroline B. Cooney is one of those names I recognize from back in my childhood or teenaged years. I don’t actually know if I ever read any of her work back then, though; she might just be one I saw on the shelf often enough that the name stuck in my memory.

So why did I pick this book up now, well after the point at which I’m its target audience? Because Rachel Manija Brown posted about it a little while ago, and basically had me at “heist with questions about the ethical treatment of ancient human remains.” The protagonist here is a smart, well-behaved girl who has dreamed basically all her life of Doing Crime, and gets the chance when the plan for a senior prank leads a few of her fellow students to suggest they steal the mummy from a local museum. But Emlyn has a number of reservations about the whole plan, starting with her feeling that her fellow thieves are not planning the heist nearly well enough, and taking a sharp turn when Emlyn gets her hands on the mummy and immediately starts to think about what it means for her to be hauling around the fragile remains of, y’know, an actual human being.

The book is a short one, and ambiguously fantastical: Emlyn has visions of the Egyptian past that might just be her imagination, but are presented vividly enough that they carry a whiff of magic.. In places it feels ever so slightly peculiar — the references to technology make me wonder if Cooney originally drafted this earlier than its publication date of 2000, because they come across as slightly off for the time. That doesn’t really damage the book itself, though, which winds up hinging on that question of what’s the ethical thing to do with this mummy. I blew through this in less than a day while on vacation, and have no regrets about my reading choices.

Flower and Thorn, Rati Mehotra. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers’ Group, and uh may have emailed her out of nowhere to bat my eyelashes and ask for an ARC of this book.

This is an alternate history where a certain region of India, the Rann, is renowned for producing several types of magical flower. The protagonist, Irinya, is a flower-hunter, and largely happy making her excursions into the salt desert after the precious blooms there, but when an incredibly rare flower is found — one with the potential to turn the tide of the colonial war against the Portuguese — she gets hauled out of that life to wrestle with much larger-scale politics.

As alternate histories goes, this one struck me as different from most. Although at least one historical character is mentioned in passing here (the Portuguese adventurer Francisco de Almeida) — possibly more, but my knowledge of Indian history is too thin to say for sure — it’s much less concerned with specific people or specific events than a specific *place*. The Rann is a real place, with (as far as I can tell) more or less the ecology and resulting human culture that existed in the real world at that time, and it gets evoked quite vividly here, in ways I really enjoyed. (Minus, of course, the magical flower part.) I also liked the handling of the different villains, who have a welcome degree of depth and evoked sympathy from me at different points in time. Even for the guy whose priorities are in the wrong place, I can at least see why he’s taking that approach, even if it’s short-sighted.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. A couple of the books I read recently (How Fiction Works and Maps of the Imagination) mentioned Borges, which reminded me that I’ve never actually ready any of his fiction. Since we have had a collection of his work on our shelf for years, this was easily remedied . . . though I’m not sure if the approach I took was a great idea, a terrible idea, or both at once. For Reasons, there was a day when I needed to stay up until about 5 a.m. — bear in mind that I normally go to bed at 3 a.m., so this isn’t as heinous as it sounds — and so, having finished the book I was reading at the time (not Flower and Thorn; I started reading the Borges back in June and just didn’t finish until July), I picked this one up and started reading. At about 2 a.m.

It took me a while to get through the whole collection because this definitely isn’t the kind of fiction one binges — at least not for values of “one” that are “me,” though the experience of some of you may differ. I’d classify most of it as interesting rather than moving; Borges’ self-admitted tendency to kind of write the Cliff Notes of his ideas rather than fleshing them out in full meant they often felt quite distancing. (One of the few exceptions was “The Secret Miracle,” which is bleak as hell but really got me in a good way.) And, well, it was round about “The Library of Babel” where I consciously noticed just how thoroughly absent women are from most of his fiction: the narrator mentions having been born in the library, but speaks only of men living there, so apparently in the world of Borges’ imagination, women aren’t even needed for reproduction. (There is one story here with a female protagonist, “Emma Zunz,” but that’s it for not just this collection but his work as a whole, according to Wikipedia.) Still and all: the ideas are often interesting, and heck yeah I can see how he’s influenced certain fantasy writers. I mean, he’s managed to influence me, in that I realized after reading this that I could take the concept for a novel trilogy I will almost certainly never write and condense its key elements down to a short story in the form of a character’s testimony. So if nothing else, I got that out of this experiment!

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs. Nonfiction about the writer’s personal experiences with encountering different animals — one chapter per animal. He says in the introduction that his ideal is for people to pick the book up and read a chapter at random here and there, but that if you must read straight through, then he hopes you’ll at least take breaks along the way, sipping rather than gulping. Sir, I wound up reading your book in small chunks because I had to calm my heart rate; the Carnivora section in particular (but also some later chapters) had me wondering how the hell you survived to write this book. Like, oh, the chapter where you were playing your usual trick on your friend by stalking him through the brush and you were about three seconds away from charging forward to leap on him in a surprise attack when you heard him calling from somewhere else and realized that for the last several minutes you’d been stalking a jaguar instead. O_O

Childs writes very vividly, though. He’s excellent at evoking not just the animals, but the physical experience of being in the wild environments where they’re found and the psychological experience of coming into close contact with them. There’s some very poetic writing in here, which I valued because this book is part of my ongoing quest to improve my ability to write about nature. (My real goal is less “make good sentences” than “get to a point where acquiring the content for said sentences doesn’t involve half an hour of research first,” but that may be a pipe dream.) I highly recommend it to anybody for whom nature writing and animals and so forth appeals.

Oh, and I ended up writing a poem based on a detail Chlids mentions in here, so this is another fruitful piece of reading for this month!

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose. YA fantasy from a Seaconke Wampanoag author, set in an alternate nineteenth-century North America. The alternate history here fascinated me, because of the linguistic game Blackgoose plays: early references to things like “anglereckoning” and “erelore” made me realize this seems to be, essentially, a world where the Roman Empire never became dominant in Europe, and so the colonization of the eastern seaboard was heavily Germanic in nature, and possibly stemmed from the Norse excursions acquiring more of a permanent foothold than they did in our history. Ergo, instead of geometry you have anglereckoning, and instead of history you have erelore. (Though there are a few places where Latinate names remain, e.g. “Saturday” and “January.” As much as I would have loved to see those changed, too, I’m sympathetic to the fact that the more you change basic details out from under the reader, the harder it will be for them to find their way in the story.)

As for the story itself, it concerns a Masquisit girl who winds up bonding with a newly-hatched Nampeshiwe, an indigenous type of dragon that hasn’t been seen in colonized territory for a very long time. Since the laws of the colonizers require all such dragons and their riders to be trained at official dragon academies, Anequs has to go off to boarding school — despite the fact that many people don’t want any “nacky” (indigenous) dragon-riders at all.

I liked this book, but I wanted it to dig in deeper on some of the emotional beats. Anequs’ culture shock, for example, mostly registered on me as being an intellectual thing: she doesn’t understand or disagrees with many aspects of Anglish life, but I never really got that visceral feeling of being in an alien place, where all your familiar touchstones are gone and people are all too ready to sneer at you for anything you do that doesn’t fit the accepted mold. Some of the peak bits here flew by very fast — as in, the climax was about two pages? So it didn’t get its claws as deeply into me as I would have hoped, but I’m still interested in reading the rest of the series.

Maria, Maria: & Other Stories, Marytza K. Rubio. Short story collection that I grabbed in ebook from the library when the other novel I’d brought with me on vacation turned out to be not quite to my taste. I’m not entirely sure this collection was quite to my taste, either, but short stories turned out to be the right speed for that stretch of time, where I could dip in and out more easily than with a novel.

These stories skew distinctly literary and in some places experimental. Some of the latter worked surprisingly well for me; in this camp I’d count “Art Show,” a story which is presented basically as the plaques accompanying an exhibit of artwork — complete with actual images (several of the stories in here have some form of illustration). I was less enthused by “Paint by Numbers,” which gives you a numbered diagram and then a sentence or so for each region of the image, emphasizing a color word in the text. They do overall add up to a narrative, but because the text is so terse, it didn’t win me over. The tone is often pretty bleak, too; several bits have a whiff of post-climate-apocalypse to them — or more than a whiff — which is not a mode I’m a great audience for.

Still and all: I may not have loved this, but I enjoyed it enough that I was always willing to try the next story, even if I hadn’t enjoyed the previous. Those with a better fondness than I have for literary-toned short stories and experimental formats might really like it.

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, K.C. Davis. I didn’t actually read this in its entirety — there were quite a few sections I skimmed — but I’m reporting on it anyway because others might find it of use. Davis is writing particularly for those who, for reasons of disability, executive dysfunction, or other factors, have a particularly hard time keeping their house tidy. The core message is to decouple your thinking about domestic labor and self-care from morality: you’re not lazy or lacking in virtue if your house is a mess, and if you stop beating yourself up with that mentality, you open up the door to approaches that you might find vastly more sustainable. For example, after spending way too long in a cycle where her clean laundry would sit in a pile in the laundry room waiting to be folded, she realized that it actually didn’t matter if most of the items in the pile got wrinkled — so why not hang up the few where it matters, and just sort the rest into baskets? Less guilt, more actual progress (the laundry at least got sorted), and more energy for dealing with other things. She also advocates thinking of some tasks in terms of them being a kindness to your future self . . . and recognizing that sometimes, being kind to your present self will need to take priority instead. I’m not in the core audience for her message, but I found parts of it very eye-opening all the same.

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, Ann Swinfen. I enjoyed Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mystery series enough to pick up this, the first book of an Elizabethan spy series. It’s less cozy than the other; for starters, the central conflict of the one is the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the throne, which is not a bit of history in which anybody comes off well. The protagonist is working for Walsingham, and the narrative doesn’t shy away from the fact that he blatantly entrapped Mary, to the point of having a post-script forged onto one of her letters to the conspirators.

Having said that, this still has the general vibe of being interested in the time period and what life was like during it. I think Christoval’s/Kit’s life meshes a little less well with the plot than Nicholas’ in the medieval series; where Nicholas comes across as an ordinary guy living an ordinary life with the mystery plots happening around the edges, Kit’s time is more overtly bifurcated between work as a physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and recruitment as a code-breaker in Walsingham’s service. But Kit is also — and here I’m not spoiling anything that doesn’t come out in the first two chapters or so — a Portuguese Marrano, i.e. a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity but keeping faith in secret, and furthermore is actually Caterina Alvarez. So that whole “secret world” thing contains many layers, referring to the espionage, the religious persecution, and the cross-dressing. I’ll be interested to see how those latter parts develop over time, as there’s an antagonist who knows her secrets, plus (of course) a love interest who doesn’t know. Me, I’m sitting over here remembering that Walsingham historically said it was infamous to use women agents, and wondering if he’ll ever find out; learning the answer to that might be enough to keep me reading all on its own.

The conclusion of this volume is a bit loose, since honestly the resolution of the Babington Plot involved a lot of people running around after different targets, and Swinfen doesn’t go the route of engineering a pivotal role at a vital moment for Kit. But I don’t particularly mind; I’m here for the details of Elizabethan cryptography and medicine.

City of Miracles, Robert Jackson Bennett. I have not been doing myself any favors by letting years elapse between me reading the various installments of the Divine Cities trilogy, but at least it’s one that can survive such gaps; while each book references earlier events as backstory, it’s not attempting to do a narrative so temporally close-knit that you have real problems if you don’t remember what’s happened.

Apart from that . . . I was reminded very powerfully of the difference it makes, whether you’ve read an author’s work before or not. See, the back cover copy on this one starts out by saying, “Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing.” And that, my friends, is not a character I felt terribly compelled to read about. But I liked the earlier volumes in this series, so I gave Bennett the benefit of the doubt. And I kept giving him that even as I read the first few chapters and yep, here is Sigrud being exactly the kind of person the cover copy suggested he would be: grim, scarred, not at all reluctant to kill people and blow shit up (repeatedly), dragging the weight of his past around with him, etc.

That benefit of the doubt meant I got far enough into the book to hit the the point where the story said, Yeah. Those things you don’t much like about Sigrud? We’re gonna talk about those. In fact, talking about those is what I am here to do.

With another author — one whose books I hadn’t read and enjoyed before — I might not have continued, because I would not have had the built-up trust that this road was going to lead me somewhere good in the end. And the thing is, you generally can’t do an effective job of telling the type of story City of Miracles does without spending a solid chunk of time developing the thing it’s going to critique. But of course the problem with that is, the reader has to spend that solid chunk of time hanging out with the thing they want critiqued, waiting for that moment to arrive. Which requires trust in the author, or else trust that whoever recommended the book to you knows that the payoff is one you’ll like. (And sometimes, even with that, the investment is too large or long-term to make the payoff worth it.)

Fortunately, though, this book did have other aspects I was enjoying. Like an antagonist who is both terrifying and kind of sympathetic, and metaphysics I find interesting. So I kept reading, and I’m glad I did.

Inkheart, Cornelia Funke, trans. Anthea Bell. I’ve seen the film of this several times and really enjoyed it, so I decided to read the book, with an eye toward continuing on to the rest of the series once I knew the differences. Turns out that until the very end, the differences are pretty minimal! I think the screenwriter did a good job of streamlining the book plot without losing its general substance, e.g. having everyone taken to Capricorn’s stronghold together rather than Mo being taken and later followed by Meggie, Elinor, and Dustfinger. I’m not certain if I’ll continue on as planned, though; while I’m very much on board with the basic premise here (a profound love for books and storytelling, and then magic based around being able to pull things from books into reality), I’m not sure I’m quite in love enough with the characters to read onward.

The Black God’s Drums, P. Djèlí Clark. Novella that tragically seems to be a stand-alone, at least thus far. It takes place in an alternate history where the U.S. Civil War dragged on for eight years before ending in a stalemate treaty that left the city of New Orleans independent of either Union or Confederacy, and furthermore Haiti’s independence was won in part through the deployment of the titular weapon, a cannon that summoned devastating storms (whose aftermath still threatens to drown New Orleans on the regular).

The novella stands on its own just fine, but it also feels a bit like the setup for something. The main character, who prefers to go by the name of Creeper, bears the orisha Oya within her; she has to team up with an airship captain who bears Oya’s sister-wife Oshun, in order to stop a disaster. I would happily read more about what happens afterward, especially since I loved Clark’s attention to detail in the dialects of the different characters.

The Great Gods, Daniel Keys Moran. He’s moving forward with his series at last! In fact, glancing at the previews I can see on his Patreon, there are quite a few things coming down the pipeline.

This is still a Continuing Time book, but it doesn’t (heh) continue with the narrative we’ve had so far; instead it steps about a thousand years into the future to focus on a character who . . . okay, this gets into the weird structure of the series as a whole, the almost frame story where Emerald Eyes starts off with the Name Storyteller being chased by Camber Tremodian through time etc. Well, it’s time to talk about Camber! Honestly, the biggest effect for me here was a desire to go back and re-read earlier books in the series to see what’s been said before about various things popping up here: most notably, Camber, the Name Storyteller, and the Great Gods of the Zaradin Church. This is clearly a massive tapestry of narrative Moran has had in his head for probably most of his life, and while I have no doubt that new ideas have come in or existing ideas have been tweaked (this book has a lot more acknowledgement of genderqueerness than I remember from earlier volumes), I also fully believe that some sizable percentage of what I just read is building out concepts Moran had in mind back when Emerald Eyes got published decades ago.

As for the book itself? Well, Camber’s no Trent, which is to say this book has less a sense of humor than The Long Run or The A.I. War. There’s much more a feeling of weighty pieces of history moving into place; I’d put it more into a bucket with books like Dune or maybe Foundation (I’ve only seen the TV series of the latter). It still has the same overall style, though, which is to say you’re either on board with the infodumps or you’re not, and if you’ve been following the Continuing Time since the original books, you already know you are. If not . . . I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, I don’t think. But I will definitely read more.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie, Śivadāsa, trans. Chandra Rajan. More classic Sanskrit literature! Though I really ought to prioritize reading a better version of the Ramayana over less well-known works like this. (I’m open to suggestions; the only one I’ve read is William Buck’s heavily abridged rendition.)

This one, sometimes called the Vetala Tales — Rajan chose to analogize the vetala to a genie in his translation — comes with a stonking 68 pages of introduction for a 181-page text (plus another fifty pages or so for some selections from the Jambhaladatta version). It’s less an introduction than a whole academic article. But I didn’t mind, because it honestly helps to draw out tones and elements that get glossed over in the actual text, like just what picture is being painted by the frame story, and the creepy mood that’s easy to forget as you read along.

The structure here is that King Vikramaditya agrees, for Reasons, to go fetch a corpse that’s hanging in a tree and bring it to a spot in the burning grounds where an ascetic (who is Not a Good Man) is going to conduct a ritual with it. The ascetic tells him not to speak or the corpse will return to the tree, but the vetala that’s possessing the corpse keeps telling Vikramaditya stories and then posing moral questions at the end. So the five-and-twenty tales of the title are the king’s trips back and forth to the tree, until at last he has no answer to one of the questions and remains silent, at which point the vetala — impressed by the moral wisdom Vikramaditya has shown — instructs him in how to defeat the evil ascetic.

It’s a very cool structure, and some of the tales are pretty enjoyable in their own right, though (as per usual for a lot of ancient literature, not just Sanskrit) there is some hair-tearing misogyny tossed in: Vikramaditya makes the jaw-dropping claim not just that women are worse than men, but that “men are rarely guilty of serious wrongdoing.” Does make it a little tough to imagine him as the exemplar of moral wisdom and righteousness he’s supposed to be . . . (This is the same king who features in the Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne.)

Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, ed. Matthew Bright. I found myself reflecting recently that I put down a lot of books which fail to hook me in a reasonable time, and I also stop reading short stories for the same reason. So why, exactly, do I feel compelled to read anthologies cover-to-cover, regardless of what I think of any given story? Because I can’t count it as a “book read” if I’ve skipped anything? Yet I’ve reported on nonfiction where I didn’t read the whole book — see the first item in this month’s post. So why not anthologies?

Yes, that’s a long lead-in to say I didn’t read every story in this anthology, though I did read the majority of them. (My hope is that taking this approach will encourage me to pick up more anthologies.) This one is as it says on the tin, steampunk + Egypt — specifically things related to ancient Egypt, though many of the stories here are set much later in history, and also not all of them take place in Egypt. Several are related to existing series by the author in question; unsurprisingly, some of those work better for readers who don’t know the existing series than others.

I have to admit I reflexively side-eye any piece in an anthology that’s written by the editor, but in this case, Matthew Bright’s “Antonia and Cleopatra” was one of my favorite stories. I also really enjoyed Chaz Brenchley’s “Thermodynamics; and/or The Remittance Men” (full disclosure: Chaz is a friend), Rob Duncan’s “The Museum of Unlikely Survivors,” and K. Tempest Bradford’s “The Copper Scarab.” The theme here leads to a certain amount of motif repetition across the stories — e.g. a whole swarm of clockwork scarabs — but all four of those stories managed to give a very different mood, and all delighted me in different ways.

Also, a special shout-out to whoever at Inkspiral Design did the splash-page “cover” illustrations for each story. I’m sure that made the anthology more expensive to produce, but it added a ton of flavor to the overall effect.

Poems, Diana Wynne Jones, ed. Isobel Armstrong. In my defense, when I spent a year on my Diana Wynne Jones project, re-reading all of her work (and catching the few bits I hadn’t read before) in memorial for her passing, this collection of her poetry hadn’t yet been published.

As her sister Isobel (who served as editor) notes in the introduction, the poetry is for the most part not much like her novels. It seems to have arisen from a different impulse; she apparently wrote most of it in the periods of depression that inevitably followed on finishing a book. None of it has rocketed to the top of my short list of poems that deeply move me, but I did enjoy reading it — for one thing, she and I seem to have shared a love of form, despite it being somewhat out of fashion these days. I think I was most struck by the paired villanelle and sestina that were clearly her taking two runs at “The Song of Amergin,” and specifically Robert Graves’ rendition thereof. As someone shopping around my own poem based on the same inspiration, it was profoundly interesting to see what she did with it, especially with the two versions to compare.

The Art of Prophecy, Wesley Chu. Over and over again it happens: I’ll go through a period where I bounce off a lot of books and start wondering if I’m just not giving them enough of a chance, and then I pick up something where I don’t have to give it a chance, because it hooks me right from the get-go. Oh, right, books can do that, can’t they?

This is the start of a wuxia take on the “prophecied hero” subgenre of epic fantasy, which wastes very little time in turning that trope on its head. Ling Taishi, semi-retired war artist and grumpy old lady, gets sent to see how things are coming along with the Prophecied Hero and his training to fulfill his destiny and kill the Eternal Khan, and finds the answer is . . . not good. Things get worse from there. But they get worse with enough humor laced through to entertain me; I’m finding more and more that I actively crave that in the books I read. Not that they need to be snarky throughout — in fact, authors who lean too hard on snark often lose me — but jeez, let your characters crack a joke occasionally, or recognize the ridiculousness of the situation they’ve ended up in.

Chu does something structural here that I really appreciated, too. Lots of epic fantasies learned the wrong lesson from Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin; they give you one chapter of Character A, then one chapter of Character B somewhere else and dealing with some other plot, then one chapter of Character C . . . by the time you get back to A, you’ve forgotten what they’re doing and why you ever cared. Chu instead gives you two chapters of Taishi and Jian, then cuts away for one chapter of obviously relevant action elsewhere, then two more chapters of Taishi and Jian, then a chapter of the other significant protagonist following up on what happened in the previous break, etc. It did a lot to keep my interest strong, rather than fragmenting the narrative every which way right out of the gate. Eventually it cuts back and forth more frequently, and in places I wish it hadn’t; it would have been stronger for me if e.g. I got two chapters of stuff with Jian before shifting focus, especially when the timing of the different chapters isn’t closely pegged.

I also did have the problem later on that I just didn’t find one of the viewpoint characters terribly interesting. Villain pov rarely works for me, and while I see why it was necessary here to keep certain things from coming inexplicably out of left field, I just didn’t care as much about Qisami. Which became a problem when, toward the end of the novel, her chapters got more frequent, and the narrative executed a maneuver that makes me think I’ll be expected to care about her as the series goes forward. This went hand-in-hand with the back third of the novel feeling overstuffed: certain things (e.g. the exodus from Jiayi) were way too large for the extent to which they got shoved into the backdrop, and there were so many competing agendas, changes of plan, and betrayals as everybody started gunning for the same target that I wound up losing my feeling of momentum. Not fatally — I’ll still be happy to read onward — but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the more focused beginning.

As a side note, the map in my copy is very pretty and borderline useless. Locations that feature critically in the story, like Jiayi or Caobiu or the Grass Sea, don’t get labeled, while locations that are mentioned in passing maybe once are prominently marked for your convenience. But there’s some very cool worldbuilding, including of the landscape: the Grass Sea isn’t a poetic term for a steppe, but rather a wholly fantastical environment of towering grasses (bamboo? something else?) that form a traversable but not entirely solid mat above actual water. I’ll be interested to see whether that gets explored more in future books!

Aboriginal Tales of Australia, A.W. Reed. My family members know that I like collections of folklore from around the world, so when my parents went on a big trip to Australia and New Zealand, they brought back several books, of which this is the first. It was originally published in the ’80s, so the introduction is not quite up to current standards in terms of how it discusses Aboriginal Australian culture, but the stories themselves are fine and often entertaining. In particular, several of them are nice antidotes to any assumption that all traditional folklore features women only as passive objects or manipulative villains.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi. This book went onto my wishlist when I was on a cartography-related binge, but it turns out to only partly be about maps. It is also, or rather more, about writing, with cartography as its central metaphor. I found the analogy between them more strained at certain times than others, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say I found it more shallow at certain times than others: “maps have blank spaces and details they leave out, and so do stories! There are conventions to how we create and read maps, and the same goes for fiction!” Etc. Like How Fiction Works from last month’s reading (and it’s worth noting that James Wood gets quoted in here), this book is far more interested in high modern and postmodern fiction than any other sort, and makes a drive-by shooting at video games along the way. But if you want a more philosophically-oriented “book about writing,” you could do worse than this one — and since it gave me a really interesting idea for how to handle the map in a possible future novel project, I can’t really complain about the time I spent reading it.

Crowned: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales From the Diaspora, Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. This is as much an art book as it is a story collection. Each tale is illustrated with photo shoots of Black children dressed up in some amazingly rococo costumes, mixing elements of modern, fantastical, and traditional African styles. I covet some of the jewelry, and the face and body painting is excellent!

The stories themselves are divided into three categories. The first includes the usual Disney suspects, heavily modified; many of the characters have new names drawn from African and African-American sources, and the plots are freely rewritten to suit modern sensibilities. I was less interested in those, though I can understand why parents might want versions they can read to their kids that don’t close said kids out of the narrative. The second category is why I acquired the book; I have relatively little in the way of African- or African-American-derived folklore in my library, so that plus the art was very tempting. (No idea if those tales are as heavily modded, since I’m less familiar with the sources — though I did notice all of John Henry’s fellow railroad workers stepping up to assist him, turning it into a parable about community and worker solidarity.) The third category, which I didn’t realize would be in here, consists of modern tales with something of a folkloric sensibility.

The stories are all brief — I read this whole book in maybe an hour or two — i.e. suited to being read out loud to small children. Even reading silently, I noticed that there’s a lot of internal rhyme and such worked into the prose, which I appreciated; I feel like many fairy tale collections, even those intended for bedtime reading, forget that there’s a special art to oral narration, one that gains from leaning on the sonic aesthetics of the language.

The authors have a previous book, Glory, which appears to be similar on the photography front, with the content focused more explicitly on Black beauty and self-image. I’m genuinely tempted to get that one just for the art!

For a month in which I spent the first few weeks convinced I wouldn’t read many books, this list sure wound up long. Though it’s somewhat artificially inflated by five graphic novels, which don’t take much time to read.

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The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, Daniel James Brown, narr. Michael Prichard. This is a splendid book about a dreadful topic — and by that, I don’t even just mean what happened to the Donner Party after they got trapped in the Sierra Nevada. Forty percent of this book elapses before you get there, and that forty percent establishes very clearly just how awful an experience the western migration was even when it went well. Brown says at the outset that part of his goal here is to humanize the settlers who went to Oregon and California, getting past the stoic photographs and sanitized depictions, and I think he succeeds excellently.

At the political along with the personal. Like, I knew Hastings was basically a liar, promoting his “cutoff” that turned out to be vastly worse than the established route, but I’m not sure I’d ever seen that put into context of the growing conflicts between the U.S. and Mexico, with Polk wanting a war and Hastings wanting to funnel white settlers to California instead of Oregon so they could take it over. Brown is also excellent about scrupulously noting the presence and actions of people of color, whether that’s not letting you forget that there were enslaved Blacks at work in the background at certain trail stops, laying out cold hard numbers for the number of white travelers killed by Indian war parties vs. vastly higher the number of Indians slaughtered by xenophobic white travelers, or doing his best (given the absence of their perspective in the record) to acknowledge the cultural background and possible thoughts of Luis and Salvador, the two Miwoks who got caught up in the disaster. He’s also very attentive to the lives of the pioneer women, including a frank and detailed discussion of the methods of contraception and abortion used on the trail.

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Much less to report this month. Less reading overall, as I was very busy writing, but also I bounced off a good half-dozen books that either just didn’t hook me or were picked up for research and proved not to be nearly as useful as I’d hoped.

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators, ed. Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, trans. various, narr. Katharine Chin. Anthologies like this are really great samplers of work you may not have encountered or, in this case, may not even have much access to. This one ranges all across the genre spectrum, from cultivation fantasy to nearly encyclopedia-style SF, with some time travel and some very understated contemporary fantasy and so on and so forth. Interspersed with these are essays on related topics, largely focused on the history of Chinese science fiction (and the roles of e.g. female authors or the webnovel format in that history) or else on the challenges and choices of translation. Scattering them throughout is probably a good move from the standpoint of convincing more people to read/listen to them — grouped together at the front or the back, there might be more temptation to skip — but it did give me a bit of mental whiplash, since I was listening to the audiobook in situations where I didn’t want to pause it and go do something else while waiting for my brain to shift from fiction mode to nonfiction mode. I may very well pick this up in print, in part because it would help me to see in written form the names that went speeding by in audio. (Novels at least give you a while to familiarize yourself with the names; short fiction — even long-ish stories/novelettes, which many of these are — much less so.)

Digging Up the Past, Leonard Woolley. Eheheheheeeee. This is probably not so funny if you weren’t an archaeology major, but whee, blast from the past! Woolley originally published this book in 1930, though this is a later, updated edition. I read it because I have two separate story ideas that would both involve archaeology of roughly this era, and my god, Woolley delivered exactly what I needed to my door — and some things I didn’t know I needed.

For the former, I specifically mean details on how digs of the era were run, when it was common to have huge numbers of relatively unskilled laborers on site. Woolley goes into everything from how those laborers are organized into small gangs and compensated for what they find to how to decide where to dig (in an era where you didn’t have things like magnetometry to guide your decisions). He also scatters about all kinds of anecdotal gems of the sort I totally want to work into one of these stories if I can. And it’s a salutary reminder to me of how the culture-historians thought in the days when the only way you could get absolute dating was if a date was literally written on some artifact you found, i.e. before the advent of carbon dating.

. . . and then there are the bits you cringe at. Like the whiffs of racism coming off half the things Woolley says about Arab workmen, or — very different flavor of cringe — when he opines that honestly, it would be a great loss to art but no loss to archaeology if a museum were to collapse into rubble, because by that point archaeologists have extracted all the information they can and the artifact is now superfluous. Hahahahah no, sir, not in the slightest. Please tell me you never threw anything out on those grounds.

Return of the Trickster, Eden Robinson. Finale of its trilogy; my thoughts on the first book and the second book

This one, oof. It very nearly reads as one ongoing narrative climax, with stuff blowing up from page one. And it gets extremely dark, with Quite a Lot of Gruesome Torture. After going through that, I wanted way more than two measly pages of denouement — especially when said denouement is just a flat summary of what happens to the various characters afterward. If somebody is about to spend the next year in trauma therapy, it would be nice to give them — and the reader! — a gentler off-ramp than “okay, all the murdering is done now; you’re free to go.” This felt a lot more brutal than the earlier books (and to be clear, they were often not nice). I’m not sorry I read it, but if this had been the tone from the start, I probably would not have read the whole series.

Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie Mallowan. Yes, that Agatha Christie — presumably the “Mallowan” was included here to help advertise to her readers that this was not one of her mystery novels.

Instead it’s her account of going with her archaeologist husband to Syria from 1935 to 1937, where they excavated several prehistoric tells (well, her husband excavated; she assisted with finds and apparently was writing a novel for at least part of that time). Parts of it are hilarious; parts are, to no one’s surprise, mildly to cringingly racist; there is one utterly inexcusable comment about the Armenian genocide. It is very full of useful details about life on a dig of that sort, and also of travel in that period — less the logistics (though some of that) and more the lived experience, about everything from obtaining clothes for the trip to sharing a very luggage-filled train compartment with someone you share absolutely no language with to realizing you’ve worn your shoes down unevenly because you’re always circling a tell in the same direction while looking for surface finds. It’s less useful on the archaeology front than the Woolley book was — which is unsurprising as Christie was not an archaeologist — but that’s fine; I need both things.

Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon, Eric H. Cline. Modern book this time, but focused on the same general period. Cline’s subject is the “Chicago excavators,” i.e. the rolling series of archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute — renamed just yesterday, now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa — who worked at the tell of Megiddo (a.k.a. Har Megiddo, a.k.a. Armageddon) from 1925 until World War II: both the work they did and what it uncovered, and the parade of personality conflicts and other bits of social drama that drove a fair bit of the turnover in staff during that time.

Tell excavation is fascinating! Well, it is if you’re me. A tell is an artificial mound built up, not deliberately, but through centuries and millennia of occupation, depositing strata like a layer cake. The Chicago excavators spent years methodically stripping one entire layer after another off Megiddo — which is so not how anybody would do it now — before finally switching to trenches that cut cross-sections through the mound. Tragically, neither of my two story ideas involve a tell, so I can’t really make use of that aspect in my fiction, but it was fun to read about. As for the personality conflicts, hoo boy. I mean, it’s sort of inevitable when you have people living in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of peers to talk to (unsurprisingly, they didn’t socialize much with their Egyptian and Palestinian workers), but even so. I got a ton of valuable information off this about dig management (and mismanagement), which I will absolutely put to use.

Worrals Carries On, W.E. Johns. Second of its series, fiction from the 1940s about a female W.A.A.F. pilot in World War II. These are delightful little snack books: I demolished this one in about two hours, I think, and it was exactly the sort of easy and exciting read I wanted. Once again, Worrals uncovers a Nazi spy, but this time she winds up staging the evacuation of some trapped British military personnel from France. The titles for these books are largely so bland that I can already tell I’m likely to have difficulty remembering which is which, but my mnemonic for this one is that the rescuees are her carry-on baggage for the flight home!

Brain Games for Blocked Writers: 81 Tips to Get You Unstuck, Yoon Ha Lee. A short book that’s exactly what it says, a set of (brief) suggestions or exercises that might help jar your brain loose when you’re stuck on the book you’re currently writing. Some of them are about plotting, others about brainstorming on your characters or your worldbuilding; they’re deliberately intended to be zany and off-the-wall rather than the systematic approaches another book might suggest, specifically for people who maybe don’t have much luck with being systematic. Many of them include personal anecdotes leading up to the suggestion itself, which gives it all a conversational tone. Whether or not I will ever try any of the exercises, who knows, but it was fun to read. And I get mentioned in it, which was an unexpected surprise!

(Confidential to Yoon: I almost didn’t use that Battletech track, precisely because it comes from so very much the wrong genre! But I was having trouble finding something with the right mood and contour for the scene in question . . .)