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 . . .)

More Japan — but not quiiiite All Japan, All the Time . . .

The Sword Makes the Man: Weapons and the Construction of Social Identity in Viking Age Scandinavia, written by me, age 21. No, really. Traditionally my own work doesn’t count, but I say that in the context of reading through my novels for the purpose of revision and copy-editing and the like. This? This was me re-reading my college thesis. FOR RESEARCH. I was revising The Waking of Angantyr, and I needed to check the average length of a Viking Age sword, and . . . well, the easiest way to do that was roll two feet to my right and pull this off the shelf. And then I wound up reading the whole thing, because I was curious, and because it was sort of usefully feeding my brain even though I’m in the editorial revisions stage on that novel, not drafting. The setting wound up sprouting a small addition as a result. I regret nothing, except maybe a few bits of this thesis that I would write differently now.

The Waking of Angantyr My own work doesn’t count. 😛

Yurei Attack!: The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide, Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, ill. Shinkichi. This is a kind of breezy, pop-culture book, copiously illustrated with both historical paintings/woodblock prints/etc. and modern images. I tend to roll my eyes at the bits about “how to survive if you find yourself dealing with this ghost or haunted situation,” but the information itself is pretty solid, and this contained multiple stories I hadn’t read about before.

Automatic Eve, Rokuro Inui. I almost quit out of this book early on. It starts off with a samurai enamored of a courtesan he knows is in love with another man; his solution, when he comes into a lot of money, is to use some of the money to buy her freedom (good for him) hire a famed maker of automata to craft a perfect replica of her that he can keep for himself (ew). Since this is not a scenario I particularly enjoy reading . . . fortunately, right when I was on the verge of putting it down, the plot turned in an unexpected direction.

And kept turning, too. The early parts of this are almost a mosaic novel, held together only by encounters with the automaton crafter and the titular Eve, herself (of course) a construct. The threads start to pull together more as you go along, though. I mostly liked the result, and the idea (rot-13’d for thematic spoilers) that jung tvirf nhgbzngn fbhyf vf gur rzbgvba naq pner bgure crbcyr srry gbjneq gurz. However, I could have done without the male gaze-y parts, especially when not one but two automata apparently awaken from their inert, lifeless state because n thl fgnegf tebcvat gurve oernfgf. So overall, a mixed bag.

Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo, Miyuki Miyabe, trans. Daniel Huddleston. This was loaned to me by my sister, and turned out to be very apropos for what I’m working on right now. It’s a collection of spooky historical tales, some tilted more in a horror direction, others more toward mystery, many of them ending on a deliberately unresolved note. They’re all set in the Edo period, but apart from a few glancing mentions, they’re not remotely about samurai; instead these are glimpses into the lives of ordinary townsfolk. I think every single story has to do with some kind of business, often wholesale, that’s large enough to hire apprentices, with recurrent attention to questions like how employment agents supply workers to those businesses and what happens when the company is inherited by the next generation. (Often the answer is “nothing good,” but not all of the younger generation in here are dissolute assholes.)

My sister hasn’t actually read this book, but said she bought it because she read and liked something else of Miyabe’s; on the basis of this one, I might well track down other work of hers.

The Tale of Genji: Scenes From the World’s First Novel, Murasaki Shikibu, trans. H. Mack Horton, ill. Miyata Masayuki. I haven’t actually read The Tale of Genji yet, which I should remedy one of these days. But I’ve absorbed some of its key bits by osmosis, and it’s honestly helpful to read something this (which amounts to the Cliff Notes of the story; I don’t know who actually wrote the chapter summaries that are the main text) before diving into the whole thing.

The illustrations are distributed one per chapter, and some of them are extremely striking! Miyata’s work is kiri-e, i.e. layered paper cutouts; it’s hard to find good images from this specific book online, but this is one I quite liked (and this appears to show the actual paper from an image, rather than just a scan of the whole). I only wish that the printing didn’t mean that many of these illustrations cross the gutter of the book — it’s clear there was some effort made to place the gutter in a minimally disruptive place, but still, they lessen the impact of the art.

Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, narr. Darrell Dennis. Non-fantastical mystery set among the Lakota on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Things I really liked here: the multiplicity of attitudes among the characters toward their Native identity and the politics around same (not just externally but internally, as this digs into the “authenticity policing” within the community and other such matters); the fact that this is not actually a murder mystery, being more about an investigation into drug trafficking on the reservation.

Things I did not like so much: the protagonist. The author’s note afterward comments on unofficial “enforcers” who step in on the reservations in situations where the tribal and federal police either cannot or — all too often — will not act, and I get why such a thing exists. But the first thing you see the protagonist do is beat up a fat pedophile until the guy’s teeth are literally scattered across the pavement; later he tortures somebody for information, then kills someone else in a truly gruesome fashion. (The overall context is self-defense, but the killing blow is not.) I liked Virgil best when he was doing things other than his job.

The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society, Pierre François Souyri, trans. Kathe Roth. I was initially a bit apprehensive of this, because the introduction felt like Souyri was trying to push the parallels between medieval Japanese and medieval European society while downplaying Japan’s similarity to other Asian nations. However, that was basically confined to the introduction.

The rest of the book was far more useful! It gives a very brief overview of the events leading into the Kamakura period and through to the end of the Sengoku, but tilted much more heavily toward the earlier parts than that last bit. (Which puts it in sharp contrast to other things I’ve read.) I doubt the overview would be enough for somebody not already somewhat familiar with those eras, but they were enough to blow some of the dust off my memory. Having established the context, he then spends most of his time talking about how society changed — and not just, say, the rise of the warrior class or the decline of the court aristocracy, but what we can piece together about the lives of the peasants in the fields, wandering entertainers, and so forth. This is the first thing I’ve read that makes me feel like I have any real grasp of the political/economic structure out in the countryside, much less a sense of ordinary lower-class society and the ways in which they organized themselves to resist the domination of the elites. Taht latter is kind of fascinating stuff, often religious in foundation and, in its own way, as oppressive as anything that came from above — peasants maintained their solidarity by e.g. burning down houses and murdering whole families, children included, if somebody broke ranks.

Anyway, by the time I put this down, I had a vastly clearer image of Kamakura- and Muromachi-era Japan than I did before, which fills a significant gap in my knowledge.

The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari, trans. Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler. This is more often called The Tales of Ise in English, but Mostow and Tyler argue that unlike other “X monogatari” works, this is more like “that collection of tales that includes a few about the Ise Priestess.” The actual connecting thread is the Heian aristocrat Ariwara no Narihira, assumed to be the man referred to in the anecdotes, though he’s only named explicitly in a few. The anecdotes themselves are very brief, largely consisting of some frame context around one or more poems, often exchanged between Narihira and one of his many, many lovers.

What made this really interesting to me was less the text itself — which is only thinly narrative and hinges primarily upon your ability to appreciate the poetry, a harder task in translation than in the original — and more the extensive notes Mostow and Tyler supply. Heian-era literature like this was pretty impenetrable even to later Japanese readers, so there’s centuries of accreted commentary, with scholars imposing different interpretations on the narrative and the poems; the notes give an overview of that commentary and position Mostow and Tyler’s own translation choices within that context. After a while you start to build up a sense of the different commentators and the strands they represent . . . with occasional drive-by bombings when Mostow and Tyler decide to mention the whack-ass tantric interpretive tradition in which the entire thing is akshually about the secret religious teachings Narihira imparted to Heian Japan via, yes, sex.

Yeah.

Before Heike and After: Hōgen, Heiji, Jōkyūki, trans. Royall Tyler. Speaking of building up a sense of a translator/commentator . . . between the previous book and this one, I’ve decided I like Tyler’s work. He’s not afraid to let a bit of his personality and opinions show through in his commentary, and his translation is much less stiff and mannered than you might expect. In one place here he translates the epithets of some of the warriors in a fashion that wouldn’t have been out of place on the American frontier, but the prize really comes with the bit he footnotes by saying, “The poem relies on word plays impossible to translate and all but hopeless to explain. I have tried to convey their spirit instead.” Said footnote is attached to the following:

     Poor Masakado
got that old noggin of his
     neatly lifted off
by a vorpal snicker-snack
from Tawara Tōda’s sword.

As for the book itself, this is a collation and translation of three different monogatari that come before (the first two) or after (the third) the much more famous Heike monogatari, in much the same way that various other Greek texts supply the lead-in to and fall-out from the Iliad. Have I read the Heike? No, no I have not. But I’ve absorbed the gist of it through sheer osmosis, and look, I’m the woman who watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead before she’d ever read or seen Hamlet, so it’s kind of par for the course with me.

All three of these monogatari concern outbreaks of armed violence in and around the capital, though they vary in how much of the text is spent on that part. Without in any way downplaying the cultural specificity . . . man, I’ve read the Mahabharata, and I’ve read the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and I gotta say that there’s a level on which these ancient war stories tend to look a lot alike. So-and-so gathered this many men, and here is how they were armed and armored! This guy was super-amazing and performed the following improbable feats when he was a small child! Behold as they proclaim themselves and/or their lineages and/or their deeds before engaging in what read like one-on-one duels even though this is probably not how actual wars got conducted because what the heck are all the other people on that battlefield doing! Not gonna lie, my eyes glaze over after reading too much of that in one go. I was more engaged by the parts that weren’t the battles, even when those were horrible (e.g. the extended narration of how one guy’s four young sons were taken out into the forest and beheaded for their father’s crimes).

Still and all, I got utility out of this, including some details relevant to a short story draft I’m shopping around, which I should work into the text because they’re just too perfect. And I do like Tyler’s translation, even when what’s being translated makes my eyes glaze over.

White Cranes Castle, Geraldine Harris. I only recently learned that Geraldine Harris had published another novel besides the Seven Citadels series. I didn’t realize, when I ordered it, that it was going to fit into my current theme of reading a bunch about Japan, but I should have; Himeji-jō, a very famous castle I have visited, is often nicknamed “White Egret Castle” or “White Heron Castle” because of its graceful beauty.

This is set in an expy of Japan, and given what I read right afterward, I think I can straight-up see how Harris probably read Morris’ work (which would have been pretty new when this was published) and was immediately inspired by the chewy little details of a different culture. The ending, however, is very Harris, if I’m allowed to make a comparison on the basis of her only other novel-length work: it very much eschews the conventional sense of resolution, this time with a side order of a really elliptical battle of wits between the protagonist and a dragon. I almost think it could have been a short story; the book is very brief, and it hops, skips, and jumps through the protagonist’s childhood rapidly enough that I felt I was told about more than sold on his relationship with his lord’s son and heir. So if that had all just been taken as a given and the whole story had been the confrontation with the dragon, it’s entirely possible that would have worked.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Sei Shōnagon, trans. Ivan Morris, ill. Jasper Deane. Holy shit, y’all, I do not think I have ever in my life read something that leaked classism out its pores quite as rampantly as this text does.

Mostly the things I’ve read that wholeheartedly buy into the class division simply ignore the lower ranks, but not Sei Shōnagon; no, she’s here to tell you that one of the unsuitable things in the world is snow on the houses of the common folk, especially when moonlight shines upon it. (Morris helpfully clarifies that this is because “such beauty is wasted on hoi polloi and inappropriate to their gross nature.”) I actively wanted to slap her when she and the other ladies laugh merrily at and play a nasty trick on a peasant who comes to beg for help after his house burned down. And yet, at the same time, there are places where a sense of recognition and empathy comes through, when Shōnagon delights in or complains about something that is still so very true today, a thousand years later. I can see how this continues to resonate, despite the gap in both time and (one hopes) sense of social division.

(The edition I read was the one put out by the Folio Society, and the binding is GORGEOUS. I was less enamored of Dean’s illustrations, though, which are trying to be Ink Paintings But Modern in a way that didn’t do much for me.)

Yūrei: The Japanese Ghost, Zack Davisson. This touches on a number of the same ghost stories as the Yoda and Alt book from earlier this month, but rather than simply being a catalogue of interesting tales, this book attempts to dig deeper into the role ghosts play in Japanese culture, from ancient times (insofar as we can reconstruct what Japanese beliefs looked like before Buddhism reached the country) up to modern cinematic adaptations. I think my favorite aspect was the glimpse into the world of kabuki theatre and the ways in which the stage pushed the boundaries on special effects and gore. One of these days I should find a good book on the history of Japanese theatre, instead of just picking up shreds and bits on the fringes of other things I read — though the performing arts being what they are, I really need to see some actual stage productions, too, not just read about them.

Ninja Attack!: True Tales of Assassins, Samurai, and Outlaws, Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, ill. Yutaka Kondo. The authors referenced this book in the one on yūrei, specifically in the context of the “walking maidens” corps of female spies Takeda Shingen maintained, which convinced me to pick it up. Although the title is obviously going for recognition factor and pithy phrasing, this is more broadly a book about espionage, assassination, unconventional warfare, and even sleight-of-hand techniques, plus how those things have lived on in modern media. Like the other two books by Yoda and Alt, this has a generally pop-culture tone, sprinkled with nuggets of really solid and useful information . . . at least if you’re me and find it really useful to know e.g. how high-calorie travel rations were made.

. . . and here ends my binge of Reading About Japan, which was like 25% research for the current book and 75% “I’ve built up such a backlog, I should use this as an excuse to chisel that down.” There’s one more book I wanted to read and didn’t get to; while there was time for me to pick it up and maybe even finish it before the end of February, my brain said NO I DON’T WANT TO and that’s how I know I’m done reading about Japan for the moment. (I also finally acquired a translation of Heiki monogatari, but wow, no, that is way more pages than I want to tackle at the moment.)

The Watcher by the Threshold, John Buchan. A very slim short fiction collection from a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Scottish author better known for his WWI adventure novels. I saw someone mention this in the context of British folklore, which of course piqued my interest, so I picked up a modern reprint (the stories being now in the public domain).

The first story in here, “No-Man’s-Land,” and to a lesser extent the titular story and “The Outgoing of the Tide,” reminded me a bit of Lovecraft, especially with the found documents/frame story approach to the narratives. Here, though, the source of horror is not the scary dark-skinned Other, but rather the past. The things our ancient forebears used to know and do, and the possibility of those hideous rites surviving or resurfacing into the present day. Other stories — specifically “The Far Islands” and “The Rime of True Thomas” (which was not, as I expected, a retelling of “Thomas the Rhymer”) — had more an echo of Dunsany about them. Nearly all of them are slow to start, spending a lot of time on establishing the central character and the landscape before getting into the plot proper, but as long as you’re willing to tolerate that, they’re often very good at building atmosphere. I don’t know that I’m compelling to seek out more of Buchan’s fiction, especially because he’s unfortunately fond of “phonetically” spelling out Scottish dialect, but I don’t regret reading this.

Much of this month’s reading was All Japan, All the Time, as I got started on the draft of The Market of 100 Fortunes (my third Legend of the Five Rings novel). Some of that was direct research; some was just me getting my head back into the correct cultural gear; some was me figuring, well, I’ve got a bunch of Japan-related books that have been piling up on my lists, so why not use this as an impetus to read some of them.

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Yoon Ha Lee has mentioned this quartet of books several times over the years, reminding me that I loved them as a kid and prompting me to re-acquire the series to see if it holds up. (The four volumes are Prince of the Godborn, Children of the Wind, The Dead Kingdom, and The Seventh Gate.) My recollection, at a distance of nearly thirty years, was that it had amazing worldbuilding and an ending that kid!me had a “Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?” reaction to, but which I suspected was actually amazing in ways I didn’t properly appreciate at the time.

Reader, I did not misremember.

Plot summary first: the declining empire of Galkis is under threat from without and from within, and their only hope is for someone to go on a quest to free their prophecied Savior from a prison whose seven keys are in the keeping of seven sorcerers (well, five sorcerers and two sorceresses). This is 100% unabashed Plot Coupon territory, a reason for Prince Kerish-lo-Taan, his half-brother Forollkin, and the companions they pick up along the way to roam through nearly the entire map collecting inventory items until they have the full set . . . but two things significantly mitigate the cheesiness and predictability of that plot. The first is just what it means in practice for them to be obtaining those keys, and the second is how it all resolves in the end, which is not at all what you might expect (hence kid!me’s reaction).

Before I get to that, though, the worldbuilding. When I bought copies of the books, they were shockingly short; the longest is still less than 250 pages. How much setting richness, I wondered, could possibly be squeezed into such a small space?

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Quite a few of the books I read in December were either novellas or novels so short their actual word count might be in the novella range — in a few cases, even shorter than that . . . but even with that having been said, I read a metric ton last month. And bounced off nearly half as many books in their first fifty pages or so, which at least had the salutary effect of clearing out my wishlists a tiny bit. (This was made easier by library ebooks, especially while I was in Massachusetts for the holidays.) If I could keep this up, in a year my wishlists might be of a reasonable length!

. . . I am not going to be able to keep this up for an entire year.

BTW, a question for you all: the last few months I’ve been writing longer bits for each book. On the one hand, that seems good; on the other hand, I’m halfway to novelette territory with this post. Is it too much, do you think, or do you like the increased detail? Lemme know — I want these to be useful to other people as well as myself.

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In November 2020, I randomly decided that I would try to prioritize reading Native American authors that month. This year, seeing the number of books by such authors that had piled up on my shelf and on my wishlists, I decided to go ahead and fully devote the month to that focus.

Now, there are flaws in this approach, and I know it. Why, for example, should I cordon such authors off in a specific month? The answer to that is (of course) not to cordon; this year I did actively choose to hold off on a couple of the books because I knew I was going to approach November this way, but in the future I’m not likely to do that. There are also merits to the approach, though: by taking in such fiction and non-fiction in a concentrated dose, I see patterns and themes and gaps in ways that would elude me if the material were more spread out. Case in point, I noticed that I have quite a lot of Anishinaabe authors here, with smaller clusters elsewhere, but there are whole swaths (like the Plains) that are relatively untouched.

So my verdict on the experiment as a whole is that I think it was interesting to do, but I don’t think I’d try to repeat it on a yearly basis. Unless, maybe, I wind up with such a backlog again that another focused push makes sense. 🙂

On to the books themselves!

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This list looks way more impressive than it really is; many of the things I read this month were novella-length or shorter. But still, it feels gratifying!

Half World, Hiromi Goto. The premise of this one is pretty standard: a teenage girl who suffers from isolation at school discovers her mother and unknown father actually come from a magical realm — in this case, Half World, midway between the realms of Flesh and Spirit — and she is destined to save it. The execution of that premise, however, very much lifts it out of the stereotypes of its own plot. Half World used to be part of a cycle between the realms that kept the worlds in balance, but since that cycle was broken, the people there are trapped in reliving the nightmares of their own deaths. The way Melanie resolves that issue is very well-done, as are the characters who help her along the way — often in their own ways, not the ones Melanie expects or wants.

A Thousand Li: The Second Sect, Tao Wong. Fifth book in this cultivation series, with the protagonist struggling to recover from the metaphysical wounds he took in the previous volume. That aspect of the story pinged hard on the disability radar for me: on the one hand this is a cure narrative, since Wu Ying does succeed in fully recovering, but on the other hand, the way he gets there strongly resembles the “radical acceptance” mentality I’ve seen advocated by many disability activists. I quite liked that element and how it was handled here.

As the Tide Came Flowing In, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend. I said to her, and will repeat here, that I’m not sure I will ever know and love any single thing as deeply as she knows and loves the sea. That’s the thematic thread binding together the poetic and fictional contents of this tiny little collection, and it’s lovely.

The Best Thing You Can Steal, Simon R. Green. Novella or short novel, urban fantasy heist. It was . . . okay, I guess? I was a little disappointed because the cover copy promised that the protagonist “specializes in stealing the kind of things that can’t normally be stolen. Like a ghost’s clothes, or a photo from a country that never existed. He even stole his current identity.” But what he aims to steal here is a magical artifact, which — magical-ness aside — is a perfectly ordinary target.

The Dybbuk in Love, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is still a friend. 😛 This is an older piece, maybe novelette in length?, that looks at the usual kind of dybbuk story from a different angle. Lovely again, just not about the sea this time.

For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History, Sarah Rose. I knew this was a thing, but this book made it clear in a way I’d never quite grokked just how Big Business tea was in the nineteenth century, and why it was worth a massive effort to steal tea seeds, living tea plants, and (not steal but hire, albeit for shit wages) people who knew what to do with them. I appreciate that Rose did her absolute best, within the confines of the historical record we have, to take into account the perspectives and motivations of the Chinese people Robert Fortune was dealing with; what Fortune saw as betrayal by men he’d hired to assist him was probably just them pursuing their own interests in a perfectly rational way.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, narr. Jim Meskimen. It took me a surprisingly long time for me to get my brain to accept what it was listening to, i.e. just what it says on the tin: a history. So much of what I read these days is more narrowly topic-focused that I kept expecting a more central thread than this book really has. To the extent that there is such a thing, it’s that the so-called Dark Ages were “brighter” than popular narrative would have you believe, but I have to admit, the authors’ attempt to rebrand that period as “the Bright Ages” kept inducing a “stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” reaction in me. (Especially whenever they swung from “the period was bright because there was so much diversity and curiosity!” to “but uh sometimes the brightness was from the fires of sacked cities!”) I did, however, very much appreciate their determined persistence in paying attention to the presence and experiences of women and minorities, and in calling out oppressive structures like slavery wherever they appear.

The Holver Alley Crew, Marshall Ryan Maresca. Another in Maresca’s Maradaine mega-series, which is akin to the MCU in having multiple narrative strands that sometimes run independently and sometimes bounce off each other. This one follows a group of criminals who seek money and justice, in variable order, after someone arranges for their street to burn down. I really like the older woman who operates as one of the bigger local crime bosses — she’s just the right amounts of ruthless and sympathetic.

The Feast, Randy Lee Eickhoff. Another in his set (I have two more to go) of Old Irish literature translation/retelling/whatevers, this one of Fled Bricriu. Oh my god the unwillingness of the central characters to accept as valid the results of any contest that doesn’t result in them winning — over and over and OVER again. That part’s on the ancient Irish storytellers, not Eickhoff; the part that is on him is a style of writing that I’ve seen Rachel Manija Brown mock as “she breasted boobily down the stairs.” I get that he’s trying to represent the earthiness of Old Irish literature, but my dude, this is not the way to do it: I have never once in my life seen a woman’s breasts twitch in indignation.

The Spirit Rebellion, Rachel Aaron. Second of the Eli Monpress series (I have the first three in an omnibus, but I’m counting them separately for tracking and blogging purposes). The metaphysics that give basically everything a spirit do raise some unanswered questions about how food, clothing, housing, and so forth work in this society, but you know, I’m willing to let that go in exchange for sentences about how a dangerous spirit leaves in its wake “the terrified silence of traumatized crates.” And the personification of objects pays off delightfully at the climax.

Tiger Honor, Yoon Ha Lee. Second of his Thousand Worlds MG space fantasy series; it doesn’t require reading the first book, since this one has a different protagonist, but it probably carries more impact if you’ve seen what’s treated as backstory here play out in full. I loved watching Sebin struggle with the tension between family obligation, organizational duty, and their own sense of what’s right. This series remains, along with Hernandez’ Sal and Gabi books, my favorite stuff by far from the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.

Heaven Official’s Blessing, Vol. 3, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I really wish the company putting these out went more for “narrative shape” in choosing where to put the boundaries between volumes, rather than “more or less consistent page count.” This one opens up in the middle of a flashback I’d forgotten was underway, and you spend like half the book there before flashing back to the present day. I did, however, really like the Blessing Festival and the lantern contest. And although I usually find the modern, colloquial tone often used in the translation rather jarring, it paid off entertainingly when it mentioned the plays about Hua Cheng usually being titled things like “The Red Demon Torched the Temples of Thirty-Three Gods and the Heavens Could Do Fuck-All About It, or Crimson Rain Sought Flower Strung Up the Martial and Civil Gods and Slapped Them Around With But One Hand.”

The Fox’s Wedding, Matthew Meyer This is the guy behind yokai.com, who periodically puts out collections of yōkai folklore complete with his own woodblock-style art. I backed this fourth collection through Kickstarter, but it’s also available for purchase, and I highly recommend his books if you’re interested in the topic.

Mazirian the Magician, Jack Vance. A.K.A. the book more commonly known as The Dying Earth. I don’t know why Mazirian the Magician was apparently Vance’s preferred title; that’s the name of one of the stories in here, but Mazirian is not an ongoing character or anything. Anyway, this is a classic that famously inspired the “prepared spellcasting” approach seen in Dungeons & Dragons; with that context, it’s kind of hilarious to see how a supremely powerful wizard might be able to prepare as many as FIVE SPELLS. Gasp! Awe! (But their spells appear to be significantly more flexible than D&D examples, and also of course Vance could arrange for them to memorize ones that would actually be useful in the plot.)

What I found particularly interesting here was the female characters. They’re . . . not great by modern standards, but they’re significantly better than I expected them to be? I particularly noted, and enjoyed, the multiple instances where a male character gets the hots for a female one, pursues her in a kind of rapey way, and then gets straight-up murdered by or at least via the actions of his ostensible target. So their behavior, while not great, is also clearly not rewarded. (Really, almost nobody here is a good person. But there’s plenty of room for me to at least imagine some good interiority and agency for most of the women.)

Where Dreams Descend, Janella Angeles, narr. Imani Jade Powers and Steve West. I didn’t finish this one, but it’s not a DNF in the sense the internet tends to use that term; I would have gone to the end if I hadn’t been forced to return the audiobook to the library. However, I don’t think I care quite enough to check it out again later. Since I got more than three-quarters of the way through, though, I decided to go ahead and include it in this post. (Most of the time, the books I don’t finish get dropped very early on, and I don’t blog about those.)

There was a lot of really intriguing material in this one. Unfortunately — and this is why I’m not going to check it out again — by the three-quarters mark, it was very clear that much of that material wasn’t really going to go anywhere until the second book of the duology. The maybe-curse on Glorian, the city’s history with its four founding houses, the possibility of secret magic there, Hellfire House and what it’s doing out in the forest, Demarco’s ostensible purpose in having come to Glorian (a purpose he seems to largely neglect), Jack’s true nature, the Conquering Circus, the sealing of the city gates, even whatever it is that’s vanishing or striking down Kallia’s competitors . . . all of that would flicker up periodically to remind me it was there, but in the meanwhile the book spent vastly more time and attention on the relationship between Kallia and Demarco, the intermittent appearances of Jack, and the playing-out of the competition, complete with a lot of instances of the judges being sexist asshats. None of which was badly done, I’d say — the competition managed to avoid the “Hunger Games clone” feel a lot of contest-focused YA novels give off, and right before my stopping point the book suddenly introduced the possibility that there’s an active conspiracy or curse against female magicians — but I got tired of waiting for all those other things to get the attention I felt they deserved. Even if they surge into prominence in the last quarter, rather than waiting for book two, it would feel like too little, too late. Which is a pity, because they did seem interesting! (If anybody has read this and/or its sequel, I am not averse to spoilers in the comments; I’d love to know what other people thought.)

The narration of the audiobook was good, though; Powers did an excellent job of differentiating the characters. West only narrates a few very brief sections about Jack, which were fine.

The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1, Neil Gaiman. This volume covers the material contained in the Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, and Dream Country collections, i.e. what was in the first season of the TV show (plus some bits that weren’t, like the issues “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Façade”). I re-read it after watching the show, and I have to say, my overall reaction is that not only is the adaptation fairly good, I genuinely think it improves on the comic in places (particularly by connecting the Corinthian to Rose’s plot, and also what it did with Gault). But I was, admittedly, never a die-hard fan of The Sandman; I came to it late, never liked a lot of the art, and vastly preferred the parts of it that weren’t quite so ’90s horror-flavored.

Hand of the Trickster, Mike Reeves-McMillan. A novella bundled with some short fiction to make for a more substantial book. The novella is a fantasy heist with a protagonist who serves a trickster god; the worldbuilding around how the various deities work and fit together was quite interesting.

The Game of 100 Candles My own work doesn’t count. But hey, now I can finally talk about it publicly, instead of being coy!

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig. I think I would have loved a less sorrow-focused version of this, with invented words for a broader range of emotions; not everything in here is about sadness, but a decent percentage is various forms of anxiety or existential angst. As it stands, I wound up mostly reading this in small doses, between other books — I think it’s better-suited to that approach than to mainlining the whole thing in one go.

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, narr. by the author. The author is an American mortician who has a lot of problems with how the U.S. funeral industry has changed the way we handle death. The bulk of the book involves her traveling to other parts of the world, or to places in the U.S. with unusual setups (like open-air pyres or human composting), to see how they deal with both the body and the bereaved, reflecting on the huge variety of responses and what needs they serve — or don’t serve. It cemented my feeling that I don’t want anybody spending thousands of dollars on a coffin for me and showed me some of the issues around cremation, too; I honestly like the idea of a natural burial or even composting, if that’s a viable option by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. (California, where I live, just legalized the practice.) The book is — naturally — a little gross here and there, because decay is a gross process, but it’s also deeply compassionate and also funny, and Doughty narrated the audiobook well.

The Airship: Its Design, History, Operation, and Future, Christopher Sprigg. It is sometimes hilarious to read old books about technology. This one is from 1931, and it is chock full of fantastic and accessible details about how airships work and the kinds of problems they can run into, and then it closes with a discussion of the future of airships that basically boils down to 1) pressure airships will soon be extinct (Reader, “pressure airship” = “blimp” and they are still around), 2) rigid airships will totally be the long-distance air transport of the future (this was six years before the Hindenburg disaster), and 3) literally nine pages laying out the logic for why airplanes almost certainly can’t ever be viable for transoceanic commercial travel. (Among other things, he mocks the predictions that because airplane speed has been improving rapidly as of 1931, by 1950 a plane will be able to go 700 mph. Reader, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier — 767 mph — in 1947.) Obviously none of us are great at anticipating unforeseen developments in technology, by dint of them being unforeseen, but . . . still. His certainty is breathtaking to behold.

Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, narr. Adam Sims. I was a bit leery of this book at the outset, because I think there’s a lot of value in challenging the idea that the best thing we can possibly do is become more productive, i.e. better little hamsters running on the wheel of capitalism. Fortunately, it turns out that Pang is far more concerned with “work” in the sense of “doing things that give our lives meaning,” and deeply critical of the way capitalism often actively hinders that, by valorizing busy-ness and overwork instead of giving us the time we need to reflect and deepen our understanding of the world. He discusses the value of things like shorter periods of work, daily naps, exercise (especially challenging exercise), hobbies (especially challenging hobbies), vacations, sabbaticals, and more; my one real gripe is that he really beats the drum of “it is best to wake up super-early and do your work right away!” That idea isn’t without merit — I readily grant that my late-night habits mean I don’t get the mental benefits of doing my work and then relaxing in ways that give my brain a chance to mull over what I just did — but he lumps that in with “deadline-motivated binges” and “waiting for inspiration to strike” in ways I somewhat resented, because that is not actually me. Apart from that, I slightly wish I’d read this in print instead of listening in audiobook only because in places I felt like he was bludgeoning me with more examples of his point than I really needed, but the audiobook was still good.

The Spirit Thief, Rachel Aaron. First of the Eli Monpress series. I’ve seen this talked about as a heist novel, but while it starts out with a bit of that, the main plot is really something quite different. The magic here led to some great narrative moments: literally everything has a spirit in it, there are different ways of getting them to work with you (e.g. forcible enslavement vs. voluntary contracts), and Eli works magic by . . . basically just making friends with everything in his surroundings, much to the bafflement of wizards who are busy going “but — but — you can’t just — you’re telling me the door/tree/rock/whatever just decided to do you a favor?” There are clear indications of a deeper plot, and since I read this as part of a three-book omnibus, I will have plenty of opportunity to find out more.

Eastern Heretics: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore, ed. Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi-Sheng. After having enjoyed Ng’s collection Lion City, I hunted out this anthology — the title should make it obvious as to why! Alas, it was somewhat less congenial to me, as many of the stories were quite short and a lot of them were more literary in tone than I prefer. But I appreciated that it ranges all across Asia, including the western parts thereof, and there were some stories I very much enjoyed, chief among them Jason Erik Lundberg’s “Always a Risk,” which closes out the volume. That one retells the Chinese legend of the White Snake in a setting that’s . . . I dunno how to even describe it. Some kind of magical post-apocalyptic something or other that was very vivid and engaging.

If you do track down this anthology (which may be hard, depending on where you live; I had to order my copy from Singapore), be warned that the first story is kind of Trigger Warnings Ahoy, with the main character dreaming about the sexual assault of her children literally in the second sentence of the story. Me, I would not have had that be the first piece presented to the reader — not when the rest of the table of contents isn’t all of a similar tone — but here we are.

Eric, Terry Pratchett. Someone on my Discord mentioned Pratchett and thereby reminded me that there is still quite a lot of Discworld I haven’t read. This is not the best example thereof; having originally been an illustrated book, it’s very short, and there’s less meat on the bone than in some other installments. Still entertaining, though.

I missed reporting on July, didn’t I?

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A bit belated on account of me being on vacation; a bit short on account of June being the month of Revise All the Books.

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Quite a lot of reading. There will be less for June, because 1) book revisions and 2) I am playing video games more for relaxation, rather than reading (for reasons, see Point 1).

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