Son of a Trickster, Eden Robinson. I can’t remember where I saw this recommended, but it’s got an excellent strapline in its cover copy: “A compelling coming-of-age novel in which everyday teen existence crashes up against indigenous beliefs, crazy family dynamics and cannibalistic river otters . . .” Having said that, man did it take its time getting to the cannibalistic river otters. For a very large percentage of this book, it’s just about the main character trying to stay afloat amid a giant pile of incredibly dysfunctional people, struggling with his own alcoholism, and so forth, while a lot of those dysfunctional people take advantage of him. Once the magic stuff really came to the fore, though, I enjoyed it enough that the sequel is on its way to me.

Digger, Volume 1, Ursula Vernon.
Digger, Volume 2, Ursula Vernon. (Not actually read back-to-back, but I might as well write them up that way.) Wow am I late to this particular party — but it is so worth showing up for. I also understand why, although multiple people I know had raved about Digger, it’s hard to pitch in a way that explains why you ought to read it; anything with starts that “so the main character is a wombat” is already in eyebrow-raising territory. But the wombat is awesome! So is the hyena! And the shadowling thingy that might or might not be a demon! I have confirmed that not only am I not the first person to think Digger is a lot like a friend of mine, said friend has decided that’s one of the nicest compliments she’s ever received. Digger’s pragmatism and face-palming (face-pawing?) are great. I read the first volume, liked it enough to order the second, read the second, and promptly ordered the remainder of the series. Expect that to show up in a future booklog, and not very long from now, either.

Heroine’s Journey, Sarah Kuhn. Third of an urban fantasy series about Asian-American superheroines in San Francisco. I have to take these in smallish doses, because part of the brand here involves the characters screwing up for a long time before they sort themselves out, which can be frustrating to me even if I know they will sort it out eventually. And I was particularly uninclined to be patient with Bea’s kind of screwing up, which features her trying to prove how mature she is in some pretty immature ways. But I am glad to report that the story, in the long run, does not agree with her opinion that the ways she’s using her mind-control powers are totally fine — my tolerance for that sort of thing has declined sharply over time. It also made me tear up with some of the stuff about grief and the ways Bea and her sister Evie have or have not been dealing with the loss of their mother. (Not a spoiler; their mother is gone before the series begins.)

Stepsister, Jennifer Donnelly. I’ve read enough fairy-tale-based things now that I’m rather jaded about them; it takes something significant to make me invest in a new one now. This? Succeeds in spades. Partly because Donnelly clearly knows that it isn’t enough to say “I’ve got a new spin on this story” — because honey, at this point I’m not sure there are new spins. You’ve got to bring something else. In this case, that’s a contest between the personification of Chance and the eldest personification of Fate, about whether he’ll manage to change the fate of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, post-tale. That plus a somewhat creepy faerie queen breathes some much-needed life into a story I’ve seen done dozens of ways, and makes good room for some meditations on what one’s “heart” might be (hint: it isn’t always charity, kindness, and goodness). And the narration is strong, too. If you like fairy-tale stories but seem to be tired of all of them these days, this one might jar you out of that rut.

The Never-Tilting World, Rin Chupeco. Does anybody remember a . . . miniseries, I think it was, or maybe just a special, on TV something like twenty-plus years ago, about a world where it was always daylight on one side and always night on the other? I remember nothing else about it beyond that, but the memory made me interested in this book, which has a similar premise. Do not look for solid worldbuilding here, not of the practical sort: there’s a nod toward it being hard to survive in the seventeen years since a mysterious cataclysm caused the world to stop turning, whether you’re on the day side or the night side, but somehow there are still cities (two of them, one per side) that manage to stay fed and produce things like books even though the world outside their walls seems to consist entirely of monster-haunted wilderness and some nomads straight out of Mad Max. On the other hand, I really liked the Avatar-esque spin on magic, where you get different variants depending on what element you channel and what type of gate you channel it through (so that a Starmaker, for example, channels air patterns through a fire gate to make light). And there’s some intriguing mythological worldbuilding verrrrrry vaguely based on Inanna’s descent into the underworld, with twin goddesses and some kind of ritual whose failure caused that cataclysm. I wound up feeling odd about the pacing and characterization, which somehow seemed to spend a lot of words without developing the things I wanted to see developed, but I’m also still intrigued by the unanswered questions about what went wrong. There’s a sequel (and I think this is intended to be a duology), which I . . . may read? We’ll see if this sticks with me well enough to prompt that. The book also has a central f/f relationship, for those of you looking for that kind of thing.

Elfquest: The Final Quest, Volume 1, Wendy and Richard Pini.
Elfquest: The Final Quest, Volume 2, Wendy and Richard Pini. I’m finally catching up on this arc, very late. I’ve read Volume 1 before — possibly twice — and I couldn’t remember anything about it; re-reading it now, I can see part of the reason why. A big focus of this part of the story is on how there are so many different groups of elves in so many different places, and the question of how (if at all) their various ways can be reconciled . . . but the result is that the first half of Volume 1 hops around a lot, making it feel rather unfocused. Even once it starts to gain more momentum, I think it’s choppier than Pini’s storytelling of yore — though admittedly my ability to follow through isn’t helped by the fact that I never knew the later material as well, so I’m constantly going “whose kid is that? Where did they find that guy? How did they get over there, again?”

The story finds its footing much better in Volume 2, where it starts to focus on that big question of ways of life. I’m honestly interested to see how the story addresses that, since as presented, it’s kind of unanswerable: it’s fine to say that people can choose Way A or Way B as they please, but that starts to unravel when, say, two people who have been married for centuries are leaning in different directions, and it’s pulling them apart. You can’t just say, well, he should accept that she’s changed, when what she wants is making him miserable, what he wants is making her miserable, and they both love each other too much to just shake hands and go their separate ways. I don’t know how that’s going to be resolved.

I also don’t know what’s going to happen with the odd strand that started to crop up toward the end of the second volume, with some characters expressing views that I . . . suspect I’m meant to find sketchy. There was a particular bit with one character revealing something big to another, in a context where I was sitting there thinking, “I assume I’m supposed to find this cool, but it’s actually, uh, kind of weird, and I’m not sure I’m very on board with it.” Then I got to the end of that scene, and the character getting that revelation responded by running screaming into the hills. Like, literally. So now I’m pretty sure I am in fact meant to be dubious of some of the stuff going on here. As with Digger, the remaining volumes are on their way to me!

Transgressions of Power, Juliette Wade. Second in the Broken Trust series, and not that I expect anybody to notice this, but the first book (Mazes of Power) has not appeared in my logs. There’s a story there, heh.

Juliette is a friend, and the only reason I hadn’t read Mazes of Power immediately after acquiring it last year was that I had zero cope for a dystopian story like this one in 2020. But then I was asked to blurb the second book, so I thought, self, let’s just go ahead and read them both. Except I started running out of time, and I didn’t want to let that hurdle mean I let Juliette down, so . . . I just dove in and started reading Transgressions. Which I do not generally recommend! The setting is beautifully complex, and if you skip the introduction as I did, you will be madly dog-paddling in an attempt to stay afloat! But as I said to Juliet, the fact that the story sucked me right in even though I had no idea who any of these people were and was busy doing the aforementioned dog-paddling is a testament to how good it is. The plot is a slow build, but boy is it satisfying when it lands (and I have never seen the signing of a bureaucratic form look as heroic as it does in this book). The caste-structured society of this world has some impressively creepy aspects — the people who serve as bodyguards are always referred to as a possession of their masters, e.g. “Nekantor’s Dexelin” or “my Dexelin” — and also some very cool cultural differences in the various layers.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher Paolini. Paolini is, of course, the guy known for the Inheritance Cycle, beginning with Eragon. This? Is a very different type of book, being interstellar science fiction that starts out wearing its homage to Alien on its sleeve, then takes that opening in entirely new directions. Directions I liked quite a lot, once I got past the body horror of the beginning (a horror which includes being a woman dealing with a doctor who refuses to listen to anything you have to say or respect your bodily autonomy — that got me so much harder than the alien stuff because it happens all the time). I read it in ebook, so I can’t quite measure how massive of a brick the book is, but let’s just say it’s huge and that didn’t stop me from hoovering it up in the space of a few days. It’s also a stand-alone volume, though with a setting that’s open to telling lots of other stories.

Tangleroot Palace, Marjorie Liu. Read for blurbing purposes (this has been a lot of my reading lately, you might notice). A small short story collection from Tachyon, ranging through fairy tales to superheroes to a post-apocalyptic setting, often with queer content. I saw the twist coming a mile off in the title story, but not in a way that wrecked its appeal; I think most kinds of story can survive that, as long as they’re well-written.

Wench, Maxine Kaplan. MG or YA book (I’m not quite sure of its categorization), read for review. Full reaction here; short form is that I found it disappointing. Its tone never quite settled, and the most interesting bits got tossed in at the end, when there was no time left to develop them.

Witherward, Hannah Mathewson. Also read for blurbing purposes. The obvious comparison here is to V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series, with an alternate London existing alongside the real (Victorian-era) one. That London, the Witherward, is divided up among factions of magical people all existing in a peace so tenuous it barely deserves the name. The main character, Ilsa, has been living in Victorian London using her magic to get by, without realizing she’s originally from the Witherward; when she gets pulled across the boundary, she finds herself eyeball-deep in the politics there, with a great many people around her having secrets and conflicting agendas.

The Four Profound Weaves, R.B. Lemberg. Another Tachyon publication, but one that came out a while ago. This is either a novella or a short novel (not sure which) set in Lemberg’s Birdverse. It is intensely queer — both protagonists are trans, one from a culture where it’s entirely normal to use magic to adjust your body to fit your identity, one from a culture where that is not the case — and it’s very poetically written. There’s a lot of suffering here, a lot of loving people who maybe don’t love you back the way they should, because they’re afraid of change (a recurrent theme) or focused on the wrong things, but ultimately it’s a hopeful story, not a bleak one.

Three Twins at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. Also read for blurbing purposes! Chaz is also a friend, and he’s been writing the Crater School stories through his Patreon for a while now, but they’re going to be coming out from Wizard’s Tower, hence looking for blurbs. I have never read the Chalet School series this is openly inspired by (classic British girls’ boarding school stories); what I know of that genre comes via the descriptions of the Lowood House novels Millie reads in The Lives of Christopher Chant. I am given to understand they do not usually take place on Mars? 🙂 This is a delightful little book, and very unlike most of what I read these days. Although there are a couple of plots centering on the new arrivals to the school, they aren’t the kind of plots that drive the whole book. Nor are there any real villains apart from some offstage parents — no cruel teachers that make the students’ lives a misery. Mostly you’re spending time with the girls of the Crater School as they deal with each other and their prefects and the teachers and the weird aliens in the lake, and then every so often there’s a problem with the Russian spies up on Phobos or whatever. If you need a story where generally people are good-hearted despite their flaws, where strictness from authority is happening for understandable reasons even if the recipient doesn’t appreciate that fact, where somebody can invoke the importance of upholding the image of “a Crater School girl” and that’s a meaningful force on the characters, this is a very good place to find that.

Machinehood, S.B. Divya. Outside my usual reading, being near-future SF focused on AI and body modification and so forth, but Divya is a friend from the Codex Writers’ Group, and I’m making a significant effort to focus on new and upcoming releases right now (this one’s hitting the shelves March 2nd) due to concerns about books being lost in the pandemic chaos. And like Paolini’s book, this made for a diverting change of pace! It is definitely hella dystopian, with weak AI and bots having supplanted enough of the human workforce that the latter subsists on a lot of meaningless crappy gig jobs, constantly scrabbling for enough work to stay afloat — and downing all manner of pills to help them do those jobs, which in some cases has some pretty bad effects — though the most dystopian part of it for me might have been the sort of influencer/up-vote side of things, where even being a bodyguard is a performance art for the ubiquitous cameras, and at one point a woman about to have sex with her partner thinks about how they didn’t put on makeup or dress up for foreplay and so they won’t get a lot of tips. But what I really liked here is that most chapters begin with a quote from the manifesto of the Machinehood, the group attacking everybody . . . and that manifesto makes a lot of good points. Divya does a very good job of counterpoising their ideology against their actions, so that it doesn’t sort into a clear-cut situation of “these people are bad, the end.”

I am behind again! But at least I’m posting about December before January is over.

Kingdom of Copper, S.A. Chakraborty. Second of the Daevabad trilogy. I’m enjoying these well enough, but there was a moment in here that made me realize what’s generally lacking: a sense of humor. It’s got a scene where some characters wind up shoved together with all the awful conflicts between them coming out with teeth bared, and then in the middle of that one of them says they need to get out of there before somebody realizes they’re plotting conspiracy in a janitorial closet, and I thought, yes. I want more of that. It doesn’t negate the pain they’re all feeling and inflicting; in fact, that kind of thing usually makes the dramatic stuff hit harder for me. When it’s nothing but tension and bleakness and bad things happening without anybody managing to find a note of levity, I just don’t engage as deeply.

RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant, E.C. Myers, illus. Violet Tobacco. I know nothing about RWBY, but I saw this mentioned and the folklorist in me was intrigued. It’s a pretty little book, and the material in it ranges across a couple of folkloric genres, some more successfully than others; it can actually be very hard to write realistic folklore, because that stuff just doesn’t operate like modern fiction. (It’s entirely possible that “realistic folklore” is neither the target Myers was trying to hit, nor a desirable target to aim for in the first place.) It didn’t quite scratch that itch for me, though, and since I know nothing about RWBY, I’m not inclined to hold onto this.

These Violent Delights, Chloe Gong. This reminds me of Angel of the Crows in one specific respect: I think I would have liked it even better if it had let go of its source material and just focused on the original stuff it was doing. In this case the source material is Romeo and Juliet, but only very distantly; Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai met years ago, had a relationship and fell out and now consider themselves bitter enemies, and so their names and Benedikt and Marshall Seo and Rosalind Lang and Juliette having a nurse who died years ago were mostly just distractions in a story about a weird monster and a war between Chinese and Russian gangs in 1920s Shanghai. The one place where it felt like the Shakespeare plot really played a role, I got pulled out of the story by thinking “ah, here we have a piece of actual Shakespeare plot!” Without that . . . I liked the historical setting, the complex politics of a city being carved up by various European interests and the rise of Chinese Communism and the ambiguous role of gangs, and I cared a lot more about that than I did about the minor Shakespearean elements. I could have done with more meaningful progress on the plot, which involves a strange magical effect causing people to tear their own throats out, as that felt like it was treading water for long stretches of the book. And Juliette was a little too persistently angry at everybody around her and determined to prove she was hard and heartless; more dynamics there would have been welcome. So overall, a mixed bag.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes (with Joe Layden). This was a Christmas present that’s been on my list for years, and having finally received it, I found myself apprehensive to open it. This movie was so formative for me and I love it so much, any “behind the scenes” account risked poking my heart in some very vulnerable spots. But the book is an utter delight, y’all. For starters, the people involved genuinely loved what they were doing and got along amazingly well: although the bulk of this is written from Elwes’ perspective (who knows how much of it is his words, vs. being ghostwritten by Layden), there are sidebars from a bunch of other people, and they consistently praise each other and talk about what a great experience filming this movie was. Not that nothing ever went wrong — Wallace Shawn was so convinced that Rob Reiner regretted casting him and was about to fire him that he apparently fretted himself into hives, and Elwes is 100% frank about how he was a twenty-three-year-old idiot who broke his toe goofing around on set and nearly screwed over the entire production — but the love truly shines through. And my household can attest that various bits had me cracking up throughout.

The Light of the Midnight Stars, Rena Rossner. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. Gorgeous and melancholy historical fantasy about three Jewish sisters in fourteenth-century Eastern Europe, blending some historical personages with folktales. This is not a cheerful story in any respect, but it’s beautifully written and notably queer, both of which I know are aspects that would be of interest to several people who read my blog.

Hall of Smoke, H.M. Long. (Disclosure: I was sent this book for blurbing purposes, though I didn’t manage to read it in time for that.) This is a single-volume epic fantasy that does some interesting things on the level of its cosmological worldbuilding, with layers of “what constitutes a god” and so forth that I can’t talk much about without spoiling things. I really enjoyed that aspect, but it took me a while to get into the story itself, simply for a structural reason: the plot setup means that for a very large chunk of the book, the only character you get real continuity with is the protagonist, and in a more distant sense, her goddess. Later on some of the characters you met in the early part come back, but there was a long stretch where there weren’t really any ongoing relationships (in any sense, not just the romantic) being explored and developed. It turns out that’s a major part of how I attach to a story, so it was a little frustrating that every time I started to get invested in a particular place and set of people, they went away and got replaced by other places and other people. The momentum very much picked up for me once that changed.

Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger. I made an effort to tilt my reading in the direction of indigenous North American authors for November, aided and abetted by two recent releases I was really looking forward to. This is the first, from a Lipan Apache author, and IT’S SET IN TEXAS, Y’ALL. Admittedly in fictional towns, so that there wasn’t any specific recognition of place for me, but still! Texas! Ahem. More broadly, this is set in a world where magic is known, and there are some really well-done answers to how different kinds of supernatural stuff collide: European stories are talked about like an invasive species, with the indigenous monsters of the plains being driven out by monotonous fields of corn with haunted scarecrows in them. (And I loved a certain moment about vampires and what it means for them to enter someone’s home. If you’ve read the book, you know what I mean.) The antagonist setup was interestingly creepy, too. Very much recommended.

Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse. And this is the second of those releases. Epic fantasy, but first in a series, in a setting that draws on both Mesoamerica and the Tewa, from an author who’s Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and Black. I found one of the protagonists a little frustrating because she is an amazingly bad leader — seriously, she tries to implement some major changes to her organization with no discernible base of political support, and then seems surprised when that goes poorly — and I wish one of the characters had been introduced sooner and developed more, because he appears to be much more central to the story than his page time would suggest. But I very much like the setting, both in its source material and its inventions, and I like the other main characters, so I will definitely read on when the next volume arrives.

The Dead Go to Seattle, Vivian Faith Prescott. Recommended to me online when I said I was looking for fantasy from indigenous authors. This is a collection of short stories centered on the community of Wrangell, which is a mix of Tlingit, Scandinavian, and other groups. The overall tone is more literary than my usual fare (let’s face it, I tend more toward things like Black Sun), but I liked the way it slid between different modes of storytelling and also different time periods — it is very much wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff in places.

The Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk. Secondary-world Regency-styled fantasy with a premise that is very standard, which Polk then proceeds to execute in a much more interesting fashion. We’ve seen many stories with a setup where the heroine has to choose between marrying well to support her family, and chasing her true desire . . . but Polk skews that by giving her a potential husband who is handsome, accomplished, intelligent, wealthy, respectful of the heroine, and in love with her. So what’s on the other side of that stacked deck? What the heroine wants is magic, and the worldbuilding here is very deliberately crafted such that even a respectful husband who supports her dreams would mean she can’t achieve the goal she’s been aiming for her whole life. There was one spot where it started to feel to me like the magic system was a little too precisely machined so as to block off possible avenues of cake having + eating, but that didn’t stop this from being the first book in quite a while to make me stay up past even my egregiously late bedtime because I didn’t want to put it down. In the end, I think my only real complaint is that the grimoires wound up almost being macguffins. I half-expected there to be important answers and solutions hidden within their pages, but all the characters really used them for was that one ritual they wanted to carry out, and then the actual resolution of the “how do you have your cake and eat it, too?” question got resolved very much offstage. If this book had explored that aspect of things as thoroughly as the other elements, it would have been an absolute knockout.

The Radiant Lives of Animals, Linda Hogan. Nonfiction and poetry from a Chickasaw author, very much focused on nature and our relationship with it — which, hey, is a thing I’ve been trying to improve in my own writing! So this was quite relevant to my interests. It’s short and beautifully written, and illustrated with lovely stylized pen-and-ink imagery throughout.

Race to the Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse. I’ve gotten behind on the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, so this seemed like a good time to pick up a different Roanhorse title. This one explores Navajo mythology, and I really liked the communal aspect of it: not just the fact that the heroine goes on her adventure with several other people in tow, but that the Monsterslayer thing is part of a distinct tradition that plays a major role in how the story unfolds. I don’t know if there will be more, but I would gladly read a sequel.

If I manage to post about November in a timely fashion, I will finally be caught up! (For now.)

A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope, ed. Patrice Caldwell. Caldwell says in her introduction that “Though some of these stories contain sorrow, they ultimately are full of hope;” I found the balance to be tipped a bit more toward darkness than that led me to expect. Not a bad thing; just an observation. My favorite here was probably “Tender-Headed,” by Danny Lore, which is all about hairdressing — a very political crux, but that’s left implied, while the focus of the narrative is very much on the personal. And I’m a sucker for stories that connect magic with the everyday mundane in this kind of fashion.

The Silence of Bones, June Hur. YA historical fiction (no fantasy) set in Joseon Korea. The main character is a damo, a “police servant” responsible for examining the dead bodies of female victims and other tasks her male Confucian superiors can’t perform. She’s looking for her missing older brother, and all of this is paired with the persecution of Christians in that time period. The ending could be a setup for further adventures, which I would happily read, but the book appears to be a stand-alone (and works just fine that way). I definitely want to look for more of Hur’s work, though, since it looks like her novels are all set in different periods of Korean history.

Paris, 1200, John W. Baldwin. This was not as much of a “daily life” book as I was hoping for. Baldwin says up front that it can’t be, because we have very little evidence about what the life of an average person was like in that period, compared with a century or so later . . . but when your windows into French life at the turn of that century are the King of France and a very influential churchman, you’re really not getting anywhere near most people’s lived experience. I found the book dry in places, but if you want a better understanding of the church and state of the period — especially things like the transition from a peripatetic kingship with very little governmental structure to something more settled and bureaucratic — it’s useful for that.

Harukor: An Ainu Woman’s Tale, Honda Katsuichi, trans. Kyoko Selden. I’ve had this book on my shelf for years and only just now got around to reading it. It’s fascinating! The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, ethnically and linguistically distinct from their southern neighbors. This book is layered: the core of it is a historical fiction narrative about an Ainu woman a few centuries ago, followed by a brief narrative of her son during a period of turmoil (meant to be continued in a second book; I don’t know what the publication status of that one is), and prefaced by an ethnographic section by Honda giving both ethnographic and archaeological information on traditional Ainu life. Then Selden’s introduction puts Honda’s work in context, explaining for Anglophone audiences the oppression of the Ainu by mainland Japanese and how Honda is deliberately focusing on the celebration of Ainu culture as a way of awakening support for them among his own people. The thing I found most interesting is that Ainu oral tales are traditionally recited in the first person, which is why the fictional narrative that makes up the bulk of this book is likewise first-person (otherwise I would have found that an odd stylistic choice for someone who is not Ainu himself).

Persian Myths, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis. An extremely short and broad overview of everything from the titular myths to more recent epics and legends. I noticed it on the shelf, thought, “I don’t believe I’ve ever actually read that,” and polished it off in a night. Not remotely in-depth, but there are worse Cliff Notes out there, even if this book is fairly old.

Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, trans. N.J. Dawood. My immediate reasons for reading this lie at the beginning of a long and winding road involving a short story collection and me having slight OCD tendencies, but it’s also good to get myself past the baseline familiarity bestowed by cultural osmosis and into some more specific tales. Even though this is just a selection of the tales, boy howdy can you see some patterns emerging. That’s generally how folklore works, though.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang. Novella that pairs up Little Red Riding Hood and Hou Yi, both of them middle-aged and the latter as a woman, and makes them both deal with the pasts they’ve left behind. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that I was very pleased to see the narrative swerve at the very end rather than stopping with the trajectory it was on — that made for a lovely surprise.

Night Parade of 100 Demons my own work doesn’t count.

Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, But Verify, Rose Mary Sheldon. The subtitle isn’t just a funny line; the author makes the point that augury was an early form of intelligence work, trying to get information on what might happen. Her focus here lands largely though not entirely on military intelligence (in part because she’s a colonel and a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, but also because that’s what we have the most evidence of). My main takeaway from this book is omgwtfbbq how did the Roman Republic manage to accomplish anything with that lack of organization — and there are some points on which the Empire wasn’t a lot better. Like, they were shockingly content to rely on other people to tell them when an invading force was headed their way. Sheldon also isn’t afraid to throw shade where it’s deserved; during her discussion of Caesar’s howling failures of intelligence-gathering during his lackluster attempts at Britain, she says that “more than half of his own campaigns were consumed in extricating himself from the results of his own mistakes. To spend over half a war extricating oneself from difficulties created by the enemy may or may not be good generalship; but to have to do so as a consequence of one’s own mistakes is incontestably bad generalship, even when the extrications are brilliant.” It got a bit too far into the weeds at the end, when it looked at the topic of signaling; I got the point about how defensive installations like Hadrian’s Wall were set up more to monitor and pass information on approaching forces than to stop them outright, and didn’t really need the in-depth analysis of why X fort on the limes in Germany was put in this particular location because it made for a better transmission chain. But it was interesting reading apart from that, and has led to an unexpected draft of a short story inspired by the clades Variana.

Trail of Shadows, D.G. Laderoute. Another Legend of the Five Rings clan novella, this one focusing on the Crab. I usually find the Crab relatively uninteresting, because their schtick is holding the line against the monsters of the Shsadowlands, but this one engaged me more . . . in part because the main character makes some excellent points about how his clan maybe valorizes holding the line too much. There’s a strong hint here of “adapt or die.” The narrative also goes into the Shinomen Mori instead of the Shadowlands, and I find weird mystical forests much more intriguing than a straight monster war. I particularly liked how the central conflict got resolved.

Still catching up (or at least trying not to fall more behind) . . . short list for this month because a large chunk of it was taken up by revisions on the second Rook and Rose book.

the second Rook and Rose book Doesn’t really count, even though I read through the whole thing. 🙂

A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman. This was an interesting but uneven book for me, and one that never quite fit into any particular category in my head. Ackerman is sometimes writing interesting explanations of how our brains process sensory information, and sometimes writing scattershot surveys of our culture around the different senses, and sometimes doing deep dives into random sub-topics of that, and there were places where I knew enough on the subject to say she was wrong about a particular thing, which made me give more of a side-eye to some of her other claims. But it’s also very lushly sensuous, in the strict sense of that term, so useful reading in some ways from a craft perspective.

The Last Uncharted Sky, Curtis Craddock. Third of the Risen Kingdoms trilogy. I went into this with slightly wrong expectations: the characters are sent off in search of a major craton (sky continent) that’s uninhabited — not a New World analogue; that one’s already been found and mentioned as part of the ongoing political game — more like finding Atlantis, in that it’s thought to be the location of something that might or might not be mythical. From that premise, I expected some amount of time spent getting there and then a fair bit spent exploring the place and looking for the possibly-mythical thing. Instead the book is 95% “getting to the craton” and 5% “dealing with stuff on the craton.” Which doesn’t make it bad; it just meant it didn’t scratch my itch for fun exploration. On the other hand, some fascinating exploration of how a few of the sorceries work, Seelenjager and Fenice most particularly. This might be the end of this series, but I would totally read more in this setting.

A Parliament of Bodies, Marshall Ryan Maresca. Also third of its trilogy, and also a book I went into with the wrong expectations. I knew Maresca had written or was writing other series in this setting, and it was clear from early on in this novel that there was overlap between them; Welling makes passing reference to some recent events I hadn’t seen happen which involved a character I recognized as being the protagonist of (I think) the first Maradaine trilogy, and I had a feeling two newly-introduced people were being set up for/had been ported in from one of the other trilogies. But it turns out Maresca is actually doing something more akin to an MCU-scale undertaking: this novel does not resolve its plot, nor the underlying metaplot, because all four series are coming together in a grand showdown in a different book. It’s an impressive narrative feat, but I have to admit it was somewhat jarring when I didn’t know it was coming.

Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Nadine Akkerman. You know how sometimes people talk about women being “written out of history”? Akkerman demonstrates that more literally than I would have thought possible. The general point of this book is that women were up to their eyeballs in spying during the English Civil War, on both the Parlimentarian and Royalist sides . . . and in the former case, you can look at the draft versions of the council minutes where they record X sum being paid to Mrs. So-and-so for intelligence work, then compare it against the finished copy of those minutes and see that same woman being paid for “nursing.” Not as a way of protecting their assets against the enemy, either; it had more to do with women’s information being seen as less reliable than men’s, and Thurloe (the Parlimentarian spymaster) protecting his credibility by concealing those sources. There’s also a lot of class bound up in it, too: Royalists were more willing to credit their women, but their women also tended to be ladies of quality, while Parlimentarian spies were more often common-born. So anyway, this is a fascinating survey of specific women and what they did, the dynamics of espionage and credibility in the seventeenth-century, and some specific techniques for how stuff got done.

(Irritatingly, I now realize I committed some historical errors in my references to the Sealed Knot and Lady Dysart’s involvement with same during Part III of In Ashes Lie. I can be forgiven the ones that I couldn’t have known about because the relevant information wasn’t published until a decade after I wrote the book, but for crying out loud, I should have noticed that Lady Dysart’s father was dead by then. Grumble mutter hrmph.)

Continuing the process of catching up . . .

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, ed. Nisi Shawl. A short story collection from last year that ranges all over the SF/F map, providing all kinds of tasty variety. I think my favorite was “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations,” by Minsoo Kang; it’s not a very conventional short story, being more of a fictional historical commentary, but it’s a great look at the role of translators in diplomacy and how they can influence politics — which then closes out with an appended note wherein someone else chides the historian for neglecting the the perspective of the female character in that history.

Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison. How you feel about this book will depend heavily on how overdosed you feel on Sherlock Holmes, because the author’s note at the end straight-up admits that the novel began as Sherlock wingfic — that is to say, fanfic where one of the characters has wings. But although the plot largely consists of bits of Holmes canon stapled together in sequence, there’s been real work done here on the worldbuilding, creating a nineteenth century with “angels” who are the spirits of public buildings. Crow, the Sherlock replacement, is an anomaly among his fellow angels: he has no habitation, yet he’s somehow avoided falling back into the ranks of the Nameless, the undifferentiated masses of angels with no home. There are other changes as well, some of them specifically doing what they can to file the racism off of the source material, but I found the most interesting part of it by far to be the new supernatural elements and the story built around those. I would happily have read a novel merely set in this alternate history with no Holmesiana to it at all.

A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, Curtis Craddock. Second of the Risen Kingdoms trilogy, which I posted about before. I continue to really enjoy multiple aspects of this: the highly quotable lines that crop up from time to time, the rich worldbuilding (which begins exploring some of the other sorceries in this world, and also addresses the issue of bloodshadows seeming to be the most horrible form of sorcery by showing they can be used for something other than evil — it’s just that most of the nobility don’t bother), and the real complexity of the intrigue. I particularly appreciate the Grand Leon as an example of realpolitik: he’s genuinely reform-minded in some good ways, but that doesn’t make him nice. You know how some middle books of a trilogy feel like they’re either treading water or rehashing the first plot in a new form? This is definitely not one of those.

The Unstrung Harp, Edward Gorey. The traditional re-read, performed upon completion of a novel draft.

Star Daughter, Shveta Thakrar. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) Speaking of openly being inspired by something . . . what if you took Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and made it totally Indian? But while that may have been the starting point here, it isn’t where the story ends. Sheetal is the daughter of a star who lived with her family for many years before returning to the sky; since then Sheetal has been trying to hide her supernatural heritage. Of course that doesn’t work, and so much of the novel takes place in the realm of the stars, where she has to navigate the politics of the different astral houses and the question of how they should relate to the mortals they’re supposed to inspire. There’s one bit where a thing gets suggested which seems on the surface like it ought to be great . . . only when you look closer, it really isn’t. And I was very glad to see the story come back to that and say, “yeah, no, there are some serious problems with this.”

Scarlet Odyssey, C.T. Rwizi. African-derived fantasy that, unlike most such things I’ve read, very much draws its inspiration from South Africa. I enjoyed a lot about this, but found the pacing off: there’s a much bigger metaplot underlying the starting plot, and I either wanted that to come more meaningfully into play here, or to be held in reserve until much later. The cover copy focuses on how Salo’s queen sends him to a distant city to gather important information — but the book ends with him arriving in that city. In the meanwhile, you get a long segment of him before he leaves (which is fine, I enjoyed that part), a long journey to the city, and sections from other points of view, primarily a young woman in the city and one seemingly-disconnected thing whose connection I guessed at before it was revealed. Because of that, when I got to the end of the book, I didn’t really feel like anything in particular had been resolved or achieved; it had just been set up to do the real stuff later. So: not bad, and there was a lot I genuinely liked, but my feeling of momentum and anticipation faded as I got toward the end, rather than building.

Across the Burning Sands, Daniel Lovat Clark. One of the Legend of the Five Rings novellas, this one taking some Unicorn Clan characters out of their territory and into a neighboring land. Given how much Rokugan has usually been depicted as an ethnocentric and insular land, it’s honestly refreshing to see Rokugani characters in a place where everybody’s basically going, “Rokugan what? Yeah, not impressed.”

Girl, Serpent, Thorn, Melissa Bashardoust. This is probably one of the most engaging YA novels I’ve read in a while. It’s heavily inspired by Persian folklore, and it digs incredibly well into some difficult emotional issues. So many books shy back from letting there be serious bad consequences to their protagonists’ actions, or framing those actions as genuinely their fault; well, here the heroine knows she shouldn’t do a thing, and she does it anyway for bad reasons, and horrible shit happens as a result, and she has to figure out how to deal with that. (Also, if you’re looking for queer representation, this has that, too.)

Worlds Imagined: The Maps of Imaginary Places Collection. A very brief catalogue from an exhibition at Cushing Library at Texas A&M, sent to me by my archivist there. This isn’t just the usual suspects for fantasy maps (e.g. Middle-Earth), and I really enjoyed seeing the broad variety of types represented.

I am way behind on this, and yes, I know August and September are also over, but if I try to do everything at once it will be such a dauntingly huge post that I won’t write it. So let’s catch up on July first.

(more…)

(And also one I missed in my writeup from May.)

Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, Henry Lien. Middle-grade fantasy novel about a girl whose life dream is to become a champion of wulin, i.e. martial arts figure skating. This has great details about skating; because it’s done on a surface called “pearl” (whose creation is a closely guarded secret) rather than on ice, and the entire city that houses the wulin academy is built of pearl, basically everything Peasprout does is about skating. There was a fair bit of me wanting to smack her for being obtuse and arrogant — she sees practically everybody else around her as either irrelevant or The Competition — but she’s generally obtuse and arrogant in a way that’s believable for her age, even if I was a little annoyed at how she latched onto a certain explanation for something and basically paid no attention to the utter lack of evidence to support that explanation. And this dug surprisingly deep into the international politics of Peasprout’s country versus the one she’s in, as well as some gender identity stuff. Highly recommended, want the next book now.

An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock. Look, it’s got masks (well, masques) and mirrors in the title, plus it takes place in a sky world. As one of the authors of both The Mask of Mirrors and Born to the Blade, this naturally caught my eye. 🙂 It’s a very engaging secondary-world political fantasy with a bit of the feel of eighteenth-century Europe — there are musketeers — but some creepy as hell worldbuilding around how the various nations have ruling bloodlines descended from ancient saints, each of them possessing a particular type of magic (which they, uh, very rarely use for anything good). The main character does not carry the magic of her bloodline, plus she was born with a deformed hand, so she’s an outcast who winds up being thrust into the middle of some very complex intrigue. I’m looking forward to reading the second one of this series, too.

The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty. Technically this is historical fantasy, as it starts in Cairo (which made me think of Clark’s upcoming A Master of Djinn), but the bulk of it is set within djinn society, so it reads more like a secondary-world fantasy. What’s interesting to me here is that . . . all the factions kind of seem like assholes? There’s no clear setup as to who you’re supposed to be cheering on. The shafit lead the pack, because they’re the oppressed underclass of djinn/human hybrids, but they are not simplistically good and pure. This is not a story where I can see what the desired ending looks like — which, in a running theme here, means I’m eager to read the next one.

David Mogo, Godhunter, Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Post-apocalyptic urban fantasy set in Nigeria (and by a Nigerian writer). Here’s what you should know, that I didn’t know going into this: it’s really three novellas. Connected ones, to be sure, but a third of the way into the book I was thinking, “man, this reads a lot like a climactic confrontation — what is the rest of this book going to look like?” The answer was that it was going to have new plots and new enemies to fight. In fairness, the book does signal the divisions with splash pages; however, since the first novella is titled “Godhunter” and the book is David Mogo, Godhunter, the significance of that didn’t register on me until I turned a page and saw another splash page saying “Firebringer.”

Anyway, regarding the story itself: the West African gods have fallen to earth and really screwed over things in Nigeria (unclear what’s happening in the rest of the world; the story is understandably not concerned with that). The half-divine main character makes a very marginal living dealing with some of the resulting problems, and gets drawn into the bigger struggle behind the whole situation. It reads a lot like Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series in terms of its breakneck pace and the general feeling that people are just barely hanging in there. For reasons of personal taste, I think the thing I’m most interested in reading is what happens after this novel; certain things change, and the consequences of that are the sort of thing I really dig. I’m not sure if Okungbowa is planning a sequel, though.

(As a side note, I appreciate that he seems to have genderflipped a couple of deities along with leaning into the gender ambiguity of another one. There are women in this story, and while I would have liked to see more done with them, that’s true of all characters in a book with this kind of pacing.)

Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar, Robert Lebling. Nonfiction book, recommended by Ali A. Olomi, a professor who’s posted some really fascinating threads about jinn and other aspects of Muslim folklore (a term I use in the academic sense of “traditional beliefs and practices”). It’s as sweepingly comprehensive as the title implies; by far the longest chapter in here goes through a series of different countries or regions and talks about what jinn belief looks like here as opposed to there. Because of the other things I’ve read, what was fascinating was seeing the places where it echoed European faerie beliefs, or Japanese yokai beliefs, etc., without being quite the same as any other thing. I’d love to find comparable books about other regions and traditions.

Everyday Life in Early Imperial China During the Han Period 202 BC-AD 220, Michael Loewe. Continuing my tour through different periods of China’s history. This is a very slender book — barely two hundred pages — and dates back to the sixties, so it’s not nearly as in-depth or up-to-date as I would like, but after reading books about the Tang and Southern Song Dynasties, it’s still useful to go back and look at the roots of a lot of things that grew and flowered in later eras.

Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, Catherine M. Andronik. I went into this having read an Amazon review that pointed out a number of factual inaccuracies, so I don’t necessarily recommend it. Having said that, it did what I needed it to do, which was to give me enough of a sense of the social connections and relationships between the major Romantic poets that I could write a short story which depends on the premise of “the major Romantic poets all knew about X thing whose dissemination ultimately traces back to Wordsworth.” It also did what I wasn’t looking for it to do, which was to convince me that what I needed to do to turn my concept into an actual story was to pick one of the women around the Romantic poets to be the central character. For that I will forgive it the breezy tone, which was occasionally a little much, and also the factual inaccuracies. (Don’t worry, I’ve been checking my actual concrete facts against the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)

The Raven’s Tale, Cat Winters. YA fantasy novel about the young Edgar Allan Poe. The cover copy does not adequately advertise that this is very minorly an alternate history; it took me a while to realize that when the characters talked about muses, they all recognized and accepted that one’s muse is an actual supernatural creature, which can be fostered and led to evolve or stifled or outright killed. The novel is about Poe’s struggle with the fact that his muse is a morbid, Gothic creature he (of course) names Lenore, which he fears will drive other people away and make it impossible to succeed in life. It’s scrupulously researched — the author dug down to the level of reading old bills from Poe’s life — and I put up with and even sometimes enjoyed the absolutely over-the-top melodrama of Lenore and her interactions with Poe, because frankly, if you’re not being melodramatic and over-the-top with this topic, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Fiyah #13
Fiyah #14 I haven’t read nearly as much in electronic format since my tablet died; my phone is much less congenial for such things. Which means I’ve gotten behind on this magazine — but, uh, it exists specifically to publish black writers, and hey, that’s a thing I want to be reading more of now. One of the stories in #13 (“The Transition of Osoosi” by Ozzie M. Gartrell) was painfully on-topic, with police brutality and a trans character running into trouble because of their gender identity, plus an overall setting where True Americans and Citizen Americans are groups with markedly different legal rights. I enjoyed it despite the flinch of “look, I’m reading in part to escape current events;” I also enjoyed “Roots on Ya” by L.H. Moore, historical fiction with a really engaging voice.

I didn’t have a lot of time for reading during March and April because I was so busy finishing the draft of Night Parade. But my household placed several large orders with various bookstores, and since May began, I’ve been plowing through things at a good clip. So here’s a big catch-up post.

Beauty Like the Night, Joanna Bourne. I was delighted to see a new book in this series (the one romance series I’ve ever really gotten attached to). Unfortunately, this one didn’t really work for me; I’d put it down with the second book as very much the weak installments in the series. It says something that at this point, a couple of months on, I can’t even tell you what didn’t work about it for me — the whole thing basically faded out of my head the moment I was done with it.

The Fires Beneath the Sea, Lydia Millet. Hey, do you like Madeleine L’Engle? Lydia Millet clearly does. Which isn’t a bad thing, and points to her for real creepiness with the Pouring Man . . . but yeah, it reads a lot like L’Engle, so if that’s not what you’re looking for, this probably isn’t the book you want.

Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, Jacques Gernet. The English translation of this book was published in 1962, so . . . it’s a little dated. (Dear M. Gernet: I suppose sweeping positive generalizations about The Character of the Chinese People are better than sweeping negative ones, but still, not so great.) However, I very much appreciate that Gernet goes out of his way to situate his details in their historical period: he will not only say “this is how they did it in Song times,” but also “this is how that’s different from what they did in Tang times.” For somebody like me, who’s still working on getting a good sense of the change between one historical period and the next, that’s valuable.

Ancient Magic: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Supernatural in Greece and Rome, Philip Matyszak. The tone of this book is very breezy and pop-culture, but on the other hand its citations are all from primary sources, so it isn’t the kind of book that’s just rehashing warmed-over New Age interpretations of the past. And serious props to Matyszak for pointing out that a certain class of “love magic” is identical in form and intent to cursing, and if it had worked, would be straight-up magical roofies. It’s one thing to pray to a god that you hope so-and-so might notice you and smile, but quite another to ask the god to make it so that person has no choice but to crawl to your feet and submit.

Lent, Jo Walton. I made the mistake of glancing at the Afterword when I was only partway through the book, whereupon I chanced to see a line that spoiled the big reveal of this book. That didn’t ruin it by any means — Walton’s too good of an author to have her books ruined because you know where they’re going — but I do wish I’d hit that reveal fresh. Anyway, historical fantasy about Savonarola, very steeped in Catholic theology and the politics of its time period. I quite enjoyed it.

A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark. Read for blurbing, and not coming out until (I think) 2021, so it was sent well in advance of publication and I don’t even think you can pre-order it yet. But it riffs off Clark’s short fiction set in an alternate history fantastical Cairo, with interesting worldbuilding around how supernatural creatures fit into everything, and plenty of attention to the diversity of religion and culture within Cairo itself. There came a point where I saw the answer to the mystery, well in advance of the characters figuring it out, but that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride there.

By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends, Emilie Demant Hatt, trans. Barbara Sjoholm. Recommended ages ago by Marissa Lingen. Stories collected in the early part of the twentieth century by a woman whose methods anticipated a lot of the advancements in anthropological fieldwork that wouldn’t become widespread for some decades afterward — though still not perfect in some ways, as it was the decision of the translator to include the names of the individual storytellers where known, drawn from Demant Hatt’s notes. (Demant Hatt herself mostly only named off the region of collection in the original publications.) These of course read very much like folktales rather than modern short stories, but if you like that kind of thing, this is a good one.

The Unkindness of Ravens, Abra Staffin-Wiebe. Epic fantasy novella in a setting with some distinctly African-derived elements. I’m not sure if it’s me as a reader, the genre collectively as writers, or a bit of both, but I keep feeling with novellas like their pacing is frequently off? That length is having a resurgence right now, but it seems like that means in part that we’re having to re-invent the best ways to structure them. I liked the ending of this one, but the beginning felt to me more like it was paced for a novel, and then when it got rolling faster it went a little too fast. This is the first in a series, so there’s more to come, but the shape of this installment felt a little lopsided.

Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg. Supernatural noir from the seventies that was made into a film whose voodoo elements eventually inspired Jane Jenson to create Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I enjoyed some of the prose quite a bit, and it did a decent job of making its non-white characters meaningful agents in the plot — Epiphany in particular, who is both quick-thinking and much better educated than the protagonist — though the visual descriptions of them fell into many of the usual traps (and the protagonist definitely objectifies women’s bodies in some uncomfortable ways). When all’s said and done, though, the ending is bleak, which is not really my thing.

Chaucer’s People, Liza Picard. I recently discovered that there is one nonfiction author for whom I’m enough of a fan that I will squeal in delight, “oooh, she’s got a new book out!” Picard was an invaluable resource for me when I was writing the Onyx Court, because she has books about daily life in London during every century from the sixteenth through the nineteenth; well, now she’s added the late fourteenth century. This one is a little different because she uses the characters of The Canterbury Tales to structure it, grouping them into “Country Life,” “City Life,” “Religious Life,” and “The Armed Services,” and discussing topics that would be relevant to each character — so that, for example, the Wife of Bath’s chapter talks about both the wool trade and religious pilgrimages (because the Wife of Bath has been on many). In a few instances this leads to some unfortunate repetition, e.g. the Merchant’s chapter repeats the previous information on the wool trade, and you get reminded something like four times that the Black Death had recently decimated Europe’s population. It’s also less strictly focused on London, and more on English life in general. But I still love Picard’s books and find them incredibly useful as well as entertaining. (I wonder if I could bribe her to write one on Roman London?)

Whispers of Shadow and Steel, Mari Murdock. Legend of the Five Rings clan novella, focusing on the Scorpion, i.e. the clan that specializes in secrets and blackmail and so forth. The main character of this, Yojiro, is referred to as “the Honest Scorpion,” because unlike everybody around him he really wants to be honorable, and since he’s investigating a mystery, this is very much the kind of setup where you have the honorable detective working within a corrupt system. I found some of the corruption to be over the top, but the way it all fell out was pretty satisfying — I’m used to thinking of Aramoro as basically just an asshole in the other L5R fictions, and while that’s not wrong, I liked seeing him be kind of a good Scorpion here. (Which is not the same thing as an honest one.)

The Fire Opal Mechanism, Fran Wilde. Second novella in a series where I haven’t read the first, but the plots are separate; they just share a setting. The beginning of this felt very Jo Walton-y to me, with a librarian trying to save books from the destructive movement sweeping the land. Some of the descriptions felt to me like they were operating on a different wavelength than my brain, though, which meant I had difficulty in places following quite what was going on.

Daily Life of the Aztecs, Jacques Soustelle. I’ve had this on my shelf for ages and thought I’d read it before; I picked it up now because I needed to refresh my memory on this time period and culture. But it shed little bits of excess paper from the binding as I read, in a way that strongly implied I’d never so much as opened it before, so . . . ? Like the Gernet above, this is an older book, but fairly well-done despite its dated aspects. Soustelle gets very specific about the history of the Triple Alliance and its leaders, which is good because I know more about the culture than about the actual events and people. And he does a really nice job of showing how the mismatch between Mexican and Spanish ideas of war meant that, despite being a highly militaristic society, the Aztecs were wildly unprepared for the war they wound up fighting.

A Bond Undone, Jin Yong, trans. Gigi Chang. Second book of the quartet that Legends of the Condor Heroes is being broken into for translation, read for review. The beginning was a bit of a slog, since nearly the first hundred of its five hundred pages are taken up with a rolling series of battles all in the space of the same twenty-four-hour period as the end of the first volume. But after that it picked up and started doing some richer things with the characters and their history — along with a notable amount of humor.

A Murder of Mages, Marshall Ryan Maresca. Set in a world the author has written in before, but it’s the first in a new series. Mostly that worked, though I felt like I was missing some context regarding Circle mages — what they’re for and how they operate — that might have been in the other books. That aside, this is a fun fantasy murder mystery, with a team-up between two characters I really liked (and no, not just because “fantasy cop” and “con artist” rang some Mask of Mirrors bells in my head). In particular, I appreciated that both of them had families who are important to the story: in Satrine’s case, a badly disabled husband and two teenaged daughters, and in Minox’s case, a giant clan of relatives who are all mostly in one branch of the police/military/etc. or another. Also, if you’re tired of inevitable romances between the two leads, there isn’t one here. Satrine is married, and there are indications that Minox might be gay, though it’s underplayed enough in the first volume that I’m not sure.

The Perfect Assassin, K.A. Doore. Epic fantasy with a Middle Eastern-inspired setting whose economy and politics are heavily based around water. The most frustrating thing about this book was that on page 68 the main character hears someone say a thing which is very relevant to the plot . . . and then proceeds to not remember that he heard that. Even when he’s trying to find the answer to a question for which that thing he heard is the answer. Even when he’s trying to figure out how two people could be connected and that thing he heard would explain it. 166 pages later, somebody repeats to him that thing he heard, and even then, he doesn’t remember it. I know this happens in real life, but when it happens in a book, with a character who is not forgetful or scatterbrained but rather highly intelligent and trained to be observant, it grates really badly — all the more so because I think the author could have cut that bit where the thing got said without any harm to the story whatsoever, and a great deal of benefit. I spent most of my time reading this being annoyed that the obvious answer was sitting right there, rather than enjoying the story as much as I might have otherwise.

I keep falling out of the habit of recording what I read, much less posting about it — the last such post covered my reading from August of last year. But I remember some of the things I’ve been reading, and an incomplete booklog is better than nothing, so.

A Golden Fury, Samantha Cohoe. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. Historical fantasy focused on alchemy, with a very interesting spin on the Philosopher’s Stone and what it really means. The beginning was fine, and then the story hit a point where it really took off for me — I inhaled quite a bit of it in the space of about a day. Ultimately I was left with a few questions about how the logic of it all hung together (there was an instance of someone being uber-selective about a thing for unclear reasons, to seemingly counterproductive result), but I enjoyed the overall tale a fair bit.

A Hero Born, Jin Yong. Read for review in the New York Journal of Books. This is the first in a projected four volumes translating the Chinese wuxia novel commonly known in English as Legend of the Condor Heroes, which I think might be compared to The Lord of the Rings in terms of both the author’s erudition and the popularity of the work. Reading it is kind of a fascinating experience, because I’m very accustomed to seeing the visual manifestation of these ideas, but have read relatively little of them in prose format. It is also not remotely paced like a modern Western fantasy novel — for example, one hundred and six pages into the story, one of the two main characters is finally born. A lot of page count is devoted to describing the characters’ various battles, which means the amount of actual incident is fairly small for the length of the book. But I’m very glad to get this translation, and hope to review the future volumes, too.

China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty, Charles Benn. I love this kind of book. Benn is no Liza Picard, but then again few people are, and as overviews of a specific (albeit long) period go, this one is both specific and comprehensive. It’s clear he’s drawing from a lot of primary sources, because there are all kinds of incredibly random details about various incidents that happened in various locations, of a sort you would only cite if you read something that said, yep, this definitely happened.

Heroine Complex, Sarah Kuhn. Second book of her series about Asian-American superheroines in San Francisco, this time focusing on the character of Aveda Jupiter, aka Annie Chang — and I put the names in that order on purpose, because much of Aveda’s problem is that she really, really would like to forget that she’s normal human Annie Chang underneath it all. It’s frustrating to watch her spending most of the book doubling down on her errors (hint: the way to repair your relationships with the people around you is not to recommit to pretending you have no squishy vulnerabilities and in fact have never even met such a thing), but it’s clearly in service to her eventually getting past that mistake.

Crown Duel, Sherwood Smith.
Court Duel, Sherwood Smith. Listing these two together because I read them in the Book View Cafe edition (which is also the Definitive Edition). I can see why it is both a duology and a unified story; although ultimately there’s a single struggle going on, the first half of that struggle is carried out in a very different fashion (more warfare-oriented) than the second half (more politics-oriented). Which is, among other things, a nice antidote to the idea that all you need is a good climactic battle to settle things: here that’s just the midpoint of the process of achieving change.

Order of the Stick: Dungeon Crawlin’ Fools, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: No Cure for the Paladin Blues, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: War and XPs, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Don’t Split the Party, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: The Origin of PCs, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tails, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Good Deeds Gone Unpunished, Rich Burlew. Re-reads for all but the final title listed here. I spent much of late November and early December mainlining the collections of The Order of the Stick for my Yuletide story, but it also served as a good refresher before Burlew launches into the final arc of the series. I, uh, had pretty much forgotten Blood Runs in the Family. Like, to the scale of “they went to the desert? For a whole book? Ohhhhhh, right — yeah, the stuff with Gerard Draketooth.” Not because it wasn’t memorable, but because it was so long ago that I read it. Given the incredible gut-punch that volume delivers to one of the characters, I’m a little embarrassed that is slipped my mind.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, H.G. Parry. Read for blurbing purposes. This is the first half of a historical fantasy duology set in the late eighteenth century, and it manages to pack both the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in, while also covering what was happening in Britain at the same time, because those things are very interconnected. I felt like the Haitian end got a little short-changed here, maybe in part because of viewpoint choices: the British and French ends follow some very famous individuals like Pitt the Younger, William Wilberforce, and Robespierre, but the Haitian end doesn’t follow (say) Toussaint L’Ouverture. Instead our viewpoint there is a female character who is, so far as my research has been able to turn up, invented for the story — and while she interacts with Toussaint et alii, it makes for a different, and more distant, angle on the events. But I also have the feeling we’ll see more of Haiti in the second half of the duology. Meanwhile, Parry does an excellent job of making the historical figures feel like real people rather than animated wax models. And it’s no small achievement, packing fifteen years of history into a single novel.

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton. Re-read for research purposes, because I’m noodling around with an idea that would have some of the “trapped on a dangerous island and there’s a ticking clock for getting to safety” feel to it. I last read this when it came out, soooo, like thirty years ago? Criminy. The concept remains an excellent one, but the book version spends much more time on build-up than I remembered, with lots of one-off looks at the situation through the eyes of various minor characters. I had also (mercifully) forgotten how badly it did by its female characters: Ellie Sattler’s face-off with the velociraptors is good, but I could have done without every male character ogling or commenting on her legs, and Lexie basically does nothing but cause problems or make existing ones worse. Dennis Nedry is also pretty much the walking stereotype of the fat, greedy, computer nerd slob — and unfortunately, while I remember the film doing better by the women, I don’t believe they changed him at all.

Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat. Speaking of not being Liza Picard . . . it took me ages to get through this book, even though I love daily-life stuff, and at first I thought it was because Nemet-Nejat’s writing is very dry and factual, with little to no authorial personality coloring anything (apart from mentioning one artistic motif being repeated “ad nauseam”). Then I thought it was because it’s covering such a huge span of time. But while both of those things are part of it, ultimately I think the problem is that nothing here flows: a paragraph will start off with a line about X, but then the rest of the paragraph has to do with Q instead, and then the next paragraph is about V. So all the information in it winds up feeling disjointed, which makes it hard to maintain momentum while reading it.

Kingdom of Souls, Rena Barron. I liked the setting and concept of this one (which are based heavily on African inspirations, and I think specifically West African), especially the part where it avoids simplistically saying “Group A good, Group B bad.” But I had flow issues here, too — things like certain bits of exposition feeling like they arrived in the wrong place, or revelations at the end being insufficiently set up, or the narrative spending lots of time on interstitial bits and then very little on climactic moments. I also realized three-quarters of the way through that the protagonist had accomplished almost nothing meaningful: most of the things she attempts to do fail, and the ones that succeed rarely seem to have any significant effect on the trajectory of the plot. It’s possible to write a story that specifically explores helplessness or constraints on agency, but it didn’t feel to me like this was trying to be that story; it just felt like the gears never quite meshed.

Emerald Empire. This is the fifth-edition setting book for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Most of its content is already familiar to me (through my familiarity with fourth ed), but I decided I should read it properly to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the places where the new owner of the game has changed things. Most of those places have to do with the spiritual and religious side of Rokugan — toning it down from the “everything is Tainted and shugenja are basically wizards” feeling AEG fell into and instead making things more nuanced, subtle, and integrated with the rest of daily life. Which I appreciate.

Dawning in the East, Future Affairs Administration. I wasn’t able to figure out who edited this; it’s a small anthology produced by an organization that promotes Chinese science fiction and the translation thereof, which FAA people were giving out at the San Jose Worldcon. The first story in it, “The Right to Be Invisible” by Han Song, is translated by Ken Liu, and based on this plus what I’ve heard about Cixin Liu’s work makes me fairly confident in saying that I don’t remotely share Ken’s taste in Chinese SF. It reads very much like the type of Golden Age work where the idea is king and characters are barely-sketched vehicles for conveying the idea to the reader in the most direct way possible. The second story, “Universal Cigarettes” by Teng Ye (translated by Yang Yuzhi), was similar, though with a twist at the end that I didn’t see coming. Which altogether made me think that’s the general tone of Chinese SF right now in general — but as I read further, the anthology showcased some other styles, ranging from the nigh-impenetrably philosophical (“The Wall of Echoes” by Yuan Dip Terra, also translated by Yang Yuzhi) to the historical (“Furnace Transmutation” by Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu) to a piece with fascinating worldbuilding set in a universe that functions like an LC oscillating circuit (“Summer of the Spiral, Winter of the Poles” by Wang Teng, translated by Nick Stember, which made me wish I remembered my E&M from physics better). I quite liked that last one, which balances character nicely against the concept of the setting, as well as the “The Incomplete Truth” by Sung Wanglu (translated by Elizabeth Hanlon), which is also idea-driven but not in a way that neglects character. My two favorites were probably “The Eyes of Heaven” by Wan Xiang (no translator listed — not sure if he did it himself, or if it was originally written in English), which is on the borderline with fantasy with a character who can see where bombs are going to fall, and “Funeral” by Hao He (translated by R. Orion Martin). That last one confused me initially because it took a moment to realize that all of the scenes, which are written in first person, are all from the perspectives of different characters at the same event. Once I figured that out, though, I enjoyed the unfolding of different layers and their intrigues and counter-intrigues.

Legionary: The Roman Soldier’s Manual, Philip Matyszak. Like the slaveholder’s manual I read last month but much less depressing, this is written as advice to a would-be legionnaire, using that as a framework to explain recruitment, training, equipment, tactics, retirement, and more. As a brief but detail-packed overview of the Roman military in the early imperial period, I recommend it. Comes complete with both sketches and photos of re-enactors to give you the visual element.

Uncanny, Issue #29 I’m in this, and in cases like that I generally don’t say much. But: Uncanny! Continues to be great!

Apparition, Issue #7: Retribution I got sent this for free, I think as an apology from the editors: I’d submitted a piece to them for this issue which ultimately got rejected, but the rejection came in the form of a long, gushing email about how much they’d liked my story, and if they could have bought even one more story, mine would have been it. I’ll say that for a theme like that, it’s a much less depressing issue than it might have been; they did a good job of assembling a variety of stories that put different spins on the concept of retribution.

The Seven Principles of Mastery: Part One of the Swordsman’s Quick Guide Series, Guy Windsor.
Choosing a Sword: Part Two of the Swordsman’s Quick Guide Series, Guy Windsor.

I’m grouping these together because when Windsor says “Quick Guide,” he means it; they’re both extremely brief. I can’t remember how I got on this guy’s mailing list, but he does YouTube videos and ebooks about historical swordsmanship, which is useful for research. The Seven Principles of Mastery is about dedicating yourself to your practice in a mindful way, and Choosing a Sword is a brief overview of different types of blade, including advice on where to buy things. Both are about the length of a short story, but he has other, longer ebooks as well, which I have not yet read.

The Moon and the Sun, Vonda McIntyre. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, and regret not having done so before Vonda passed away. It’s a beautifully written alternate history set in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, where the one significant change is that merpeople exist, and eating the right part of their flesh is supposed to grant immortality. The “sea monster” is fascinatingly alien, but in a way, not more so than the French court; Vonda absolutely nailed the hothouse atmosphere of a place like that, the significance attached to even tiny gestures or mistakes, and the way in which favors and gifts are the currency fueling the social and political economy of the court. Also the sexism, which rears its head in screamingly frustrating ways. The pacing of the ending felt slightly odd to me, but apart from that I loved this.

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki. I would not expect a novel about a modern Japanese-American woman finding the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl washed up on the shore of the island where she lives to remind me so much of a alternate-historical speculative fiction novel about a fifteenth-century female mercenary captain in Burgundy, but Mary Gentle’s Ash is about the only thing I can compare this to. It does fascinating things mashing up quantum physics with the Zen philosophy of the thirteenth-century Buddhist priest Dōgen. It also functions as a guided tour of many depressing things, from kamikaze pilots to 9/11 to the Tōhoku tsunami to school bullying of the sort that drives kids to suicide, but in the end it doesn’t crush your soul. And it features a Buddhist nun character who is truly excellent.

As a side note, I’m not sure where the line between autobiography and fiction lands in this book. One of the characters is named Ruth, and is a writer, and lives on a remote island in Canada, and has a husband named Oliver who works in environmental design, all of which is true of the author as well.

Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Read for review in the New York Journal of Books. Historical fantasy set in 1920s Mexico, with a young woman who inadvertently frees one of the gods of death after he was betrayed and imprisoned by his brother. Some things about it didn’t entirely work form me — foremost among them the omniscient pov, which gives Moreno-Garcia the freedom to fill in lots of historical information but also keeps you at arms-length from the characters on many occasions — but it pulled together very well in the end, and I love enough things about the concept and setting that overall I give it a thumbs-up.

The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage, Frederick P. Hitz. This is adapted from a seminar the author teaches every year, where he juxtaposes real history about espionage against the fiction we’ve written about it. Early on he makes a very good point distinguishing espionage — using Kim Philby’s definition of the collection of “secret information from foreign countries by illegal means” — from covert action, and pointing out how problems arise when those two paradigms collide. He doesn’t go as much into depth as I might have liked (it’s a very short book), and the focus is very much on twentieth-century history, but the discussion of personalities and tactics and so forth is still a pretty decent overview. Hitz’ main takeaway is that fiction is honestly much less bizarre and inventive than real espionage, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. 😛

The Glass Town Game, Catherynne M. Valente. Historical fiction about the Brontë siblings and the fantasy world they invented when they were children, which they wind up entering. It reads like a mashup of Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making with Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy: much the same kind of whimsy as in the Fairyland series, including a far better class of punning mentality than you get in, say, Xanth, but layered with the problems of encountering a thing you thought you had invented that doesn’t behave in quite the way you meant for it to. Branwell, I should warn you, comes off as a near-total ass in this — but he’s a near-total ass in ways that feel very much like Toxic Masculinity, Victorian Edition. Also, Valente apologizes in the afterword for her treatment of Jane Austen, which I guess is rooted in Charlotte Brontë’s opinion on the matter.

Heart of Brass, Felicity Banks. This one went onto my to-read list because there’s shockingly little fantasy set in Australia, either modern or historical. It is thoroughly magical steampunk in genre; the heart of brass is literal, and is inside the heroine’s body. Unfortunately, while I’m happy to go along with that magical conceit (there’s some interesting stuff here about the personalities different kinds of metal have, and the benefits they confer on people who touch them), I omgwtfbbq did not go along with the fact that the heroine’s father put the mechanical heart in her when she was nine years old — not to save her life because her organic heart had some kind of defect, but just because the two of them thought it would be a cool experiment. Since there is massive prejudice against that kind of experimentation and the heroine repeatedly has to cope with either the social dangers of people finding out about it or the mechanical dangers of keeping her heart fueled and repaired (one of the first things that happens in the story is that a valve breaks and nearly kills her), it is really difficult for me to buy that as something you would do to a nine-year-old girl whose organic heart is working quite fine, thank you. Even if she wants you to, because cool experiment. I also had increasingly severe problems with the pacing as I went along; stuff happens much too quickly, over and over again, especially with regard to characters trusting each other or having changes of heart or declaring Eternal Vendetta Forever on the basis of very little provocation. And the end of the book turns out to involve a noteworthy event from Australian history — but from the novel, you would think it burst up out of nowhere, without any mention of the months of lead-up and all the organizational work that various people were doing. So in the end, I found it more frustrating than satisfying.

I’ve fallen out of not only posting about my reading here, but (for a while) even logging it. So this is what I’ve read in the last three or so months, minus whatever I’ve forgotten.

It’s very nonfiction-heavy. I went on a kick of that recently, in part because I realized . . . when I was in college and graduate school, my classes regularly exposed me to a motley assortment of cultures and time periods, based either on what sounded interesting to me when I was picking my schedule, or what happened to be the professor’s area of specialty in the case of the more generalized requirements. But as I finished up my coursework, I began writing the Onyx Court books — my home Ph.D. in English history — followed by the Memoirs, which weren’t as narrowly focused, but were still purpose-driven. Isabella’s going to Polynesia; I’m going to read about Polynesia. Now she’s going to the Middle East; I’m going to read about the Middle East. I only read about things I needed to know, not things I didn’t need but might unexpectedly make use of four years from now when an idea pops into my head.

I need the grab-bag approach. It’s a necessary part of building the mental compost heap from which new stories sprout. So lately I’ve been pulling random books off the shelf, deliberately ricocheting around just to get some fresh material into my brain.

(more…)

After February’s enormous binge, I read much less in March.

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Cory Pietsch. You pretty much can’t be a gamer these days without having at least heard of The Adventure Zone, but I have no good space in my life for listening to podcasts. An episode here and there, sure, but not hundreds of them. So friends recommended I try the graphic novels they’ve started putting out, which also have the benefit of condensing the story — I know from my days studying RPGs in grad school just how diffuse and wandering things can be during actual play. I wasn’t impressed by the first half of this volume, which felt more or less like a typical D&D adventuring party (all male, though one of them is gay) doing the adventuring thing and failing to take anything seriously. It picked up more in the second half, though, and got interesting right at the end, when the characters get introduced to what looks like the real plot. (And, encouragingly, the improvement in the story coincides with female characters showing up.) I’m definitely willing to give the second volume a shot, as I understand the challenge of getting an episodic story moving properly in its first installment — especially one based on the hot mess that is most RPG narratives.

The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson. Read for review with the New York Journal of Books. I loved the setting of this one — at the tail end of the Reconquista, from the perspective of characters in the last Muslim state in Spain just as it falls to Ferdinand and Isabella — and the handling of religion, with multiple levels of piety from characters on both sides of that conflict and an antagonist who genuinely believes that it’s more compassionate to torture someone into converting than to let them burn in hell. The plot didn’t work as well for me, though. The central conceit of magical maps wound up being much less central than the cover copy led me to expect, and the whole business with the Bird King’s island felt to me like the kind of thing where either the elliptical approach is going to click for you and be amazing, or it’s going to fail to cohere much at all. For me it was the latter, especially when a threat reared up out of nowhere essentially saying “Remember me, from two hundred pages ago?” To which my answer was, “not really.” Not a bad book overall, but it didn’t hang together the way I was hoping.

Unraveling, Karen Lord. Also read for review with the New York Journal of Books. Speaking of things that are weird and elliptical . . . but in this case it worked for me. Several of the characters are not human (or at least mostly not) and don’t interact with time the way we do; much of the plot takes place in what amounts to a series of dreams or visions of what might happen. It’s a sequel to Redemption in Indigo, which I didn’t realize until after I was on a plane to Florida with Unraveling but not Redemption in Indigo in my bag; based on that, I can say that Unraveling works even without knowledge of the prior book, though it might read less weirdly with. And now I should go get Redemption in Indigo off my shelf, where it’s been sitting for far too long, waiting for me to read it.

A Cathedral of Myth and Bone: Stories, Kat Howard. Freebie book at ICFA, read on the plane home. As the title suggests, a large percentage of these stories riff off folklore in some fashion, and specifically off northern European folklore. The other running theme in them is Women Done Wrong By Men, which will probably speak deeply to some readers, but I am not one of them. The stories that wandered in a more New Weird/surrealist direction often didn’t click for me, but on the other hand I really enjoyed “Once, Future” (novelette at least, quite possibly novella-length), with a group of college students whose class assignment causes them to begin incarnating Arthurian legend, and also “The Calendar of Saints,” set in an alternate history where figures like Galileo are saints of the church, and following a female duelist who winds up at the center of a challenge to the holy Laws of Science.

This was an extremely reading-ful month.

(more…)

Sekrit Projekt R&R My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count. Not even when it’s my second read-through in as many months.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. Re-read, if I can call it that when I don’t think I’ve read this since I was twelve. I was trying to remember Scrooge’s dismissive description of Marley’s ghost, and wound up deciding to read the whole thing — starting before Christmas, but I got interrupted and didn’t finish until early January. I’m struck, as a recent article which I have now lost pointed out, by how non-religious the book is: yes, Christmas, and there are some passing references, but this is very much the Victorian “social gospel” rather than anything overtly Christian.

Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane. Second book in the Young Wizards series, and it’s been fun to see people’s expressions when I tell them the protagonists spend most of the book as whales. 😀 Beautifully-done observations of different whale types; I can’t judge the accuracy, because I don’t know enough to do so, but they stood out as very vivid. And oh, the shark. I told my sister, who adores sharks, that it’s the best shark character I’ve ever seen — not in the “cute and cuddly cartoon animal” way, but the cold and yet necessary killer.

By Fire Above, Robyn Bennis. Sequel to The Guns Above. Her airships continue to be flying deathtraps, and I wanted to rip my hair out when the characters have to follow absolutely moronic orders because that’s the way the military works. But after a slow-ish start involving social politics, we get insurrections in an occupied city, and clever aerial maneuvering winning the day, both of which are fabulous. This book gets pretty dark — some characters make horrifying yet necessary decisions, and some turn out to be kind of awful people — but not unrelentingly so; the plot drags you down and down but then back up again at the end. And there is also still quite a bit of humor.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, Ryan North. The conceit of this book is that it purports to be a repair manual for a time travel machine, only the manual says “sorry, you can’t actually repair this, so instead we’ll tell you how to re-invent a lot of basic technologies so life can at least suck less in whatever time period you’ve been stranded in.” The tone is overall hilarious, in a voice that reminds me a lot of John Scalzi’s blogging, though the puns that subtitle nearly every chapter started to wear thin after a while. It’s chock-full of interesting trivia (like every avocado you’ve ever eaten descending from a single tree with a backstory that genuinely makes you ask “are you sure time travelers weren’t involved?”), and makes it clear both how many technological advancements were more a matter of figuring out the relevant ideas rather than having the material capacity to create them, and how often things got invented and then either forgotten or not used for their real potential.

Having said that, although its explanations of how to build everything from a simple smelter to a battery using basic technology are remarkably concise, don’t try to hold this book to too high of a standard: yes, it sort of tells you how to build these things, but successfully building them would require a lot more instruction than this book provides, or else a lot of trial and error. Also, while I’m sure everybody who reads this has a list of technologies North didn’t include and should have, I’ve got to REALLY side-eye the lack of looms. He tells you how to build an efficient spinning wheel, then blithely says this will help you make “thread, which you can sew into clothing!” Uh, no, dude — there’s kind of a vital step in the middle there that you just waltzed straight past. That’s the one thing I truly feel he should have included, and didn’t.

Kingmaker: Stolen Land, Tim Hitchcock, and Kingmaker: Rivers Run Red, Rob McCreary. Two modules in the Kingmaker adventure path for Pathfinder, which are pre-written materials for running an RPG campaign. I read these two because I wanted to know what a Pathfinder module actually provides to a GM, and since we already played through these two in a campaign, I wasn’t going to spoil myself for anything (I skipped the “campaign outline” in the first one) and could also compare it against my actual experience of it in play.

On the whole . . . eh? I admit I want more interconnectedness, instead of a main plotline and then a bunch of random side quests, but I also recognize that’s not what these set out to provide. Mainly I’m grateful to my GM for noping right out of the NPC backstory where the guy is in exile because his lover falsely accused him of rape when her husband found out about the affair, because that’s some straight-up bullshit. There’s more other bits of incidental sexism along the way that grated, too, like the “flirty” female NPC described in a single sidebar who offers a cloak of resistance +1 and a “kiss . . . or possibly more” in exchange for completing a quest. (Also one bit of stealth gay — a dead male bandit who told “his lover” about a cache of treasure, but said lover died in “his attempt” to retrieve it — for what little that’s worth.) But I straight-up loathed the fiction being told in installments across the modules. In the first installment, written by James L. Sutter, the protagonist is an arrogant and unlikeable asshole who evaluates the few female characters on their attractiveness and probability of him getting them into bed, and then the story goes out of its way to reinforce how fat and gross and disgusting the villain is. The second installment, written by Richard Pett, almost manages to be funny with its militant convent of Iomedae — with nuns holding titles like the Mistress of Improvised Combat Using Common Kitchen Utensils — except that a) they take a “sworn oath of chastity and violence toward men” and “horribly punish any man who dares touch them, think impure thoughts about them, or look at them. They don’t even have candles in the convent — too phallic,” b) they are insanely and pointlessly abusive toward their novices (including, of course, our cross-dressing male “heroes”), and c) at the end of the story it comes out that they’re too stupid to realize the male kobold they randomly decided is “the embodiment of purity and goodness” and is therefore allowed to stay in the convent is systematically robbing them blind. Plus half a dozen innocent people get murdered by assassins chasing the main characters, which I guess we’re supposed to think is funny? Because the idiot protagonist thinks they’re all dropping randomly dead of heart attacks?

If I wind up reading through the later modules in the path, I’m not even going to bother looking at the fiction.

High Wizardry, Diane Duane. Third in the series, and it turns out I’m not reading the updated versions, going by the DOS prompt on the Apple IIIc Dairine is using, which means I’ll probably want to pick up something other than the library ebook for A Wizard Alone — I believe that’s the one with the autistic character. I feel like I started to slightly lose the thread of what was going on metaphysically toward the end, probably because I was reading too fast; I’m also a little surprised Dairine didn’t take some harder lumps for her flaws and mistakes along the way. (I actually expected, based on early stuff, that the Lone Power would manage to temporarily fool or sway her, and Nita and Kit would have to give her a wake-up call.) But still: very good reading.

A Wizard Abroad, Diane Duane. Fourth in the series, and I see why people generally say this one is weaker. It gets off to a slow start, its exposition thuds down in somewhat less digestible blocks than usual, and in the end Nita and Kit are just kind of along for the ride; they’re not the linchpin of resolving the conflict, and the role Nita plays in facilitating that resolution isn’t all that compelling, because the buildup to it didn’t really hook me. (It felt like anybody else could have yelled “Do it!” and that would have been just as effective.) On the other hand, as somebody who’s actually familiar with the Lebor Gabála, I like seeing a story that doesn’t just deal with Irish mythology on a surface level but gets down into the guts of it, and I liked the overall feel of what Duane was doing with the Sidhe etc, and the Powers loving Ireland too much to leave it alone the way they did with other parts of the world.

Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, A. Zee. More research on Chinese food. Zee’s approach to talking about language kind of grated; I recognize that he’s trying to counteract the Anglophone “ermahgerd, Chinese is impossible to learn!” way of thinking, but I kept reading his “see how much you’ve already learned! It’s so easy!” comments in the kind of voice one uses towards a toddler. (Especially when he burbles happily about “see, if you know the water radical, you can tell these characters have something to do with water — isn’t this easy?” and then later on just kind of mutters “oh, ignore that water radical, it’s only there for phonetic purposes” and sweeps it under the rug.) But there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about food and folklore and culture, and I liked it best when it got away from trying to persuade me I could totes learn Chinese and instead dove into poems and drinking games and the like.

The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon. Read for blurbing purposes, and my copy was provided by the editor; it’ll be out in February. This is epic fantasy; if I attempted to summarize its plot it would sound dreadfully cliche. (An ancient evil dragon called the Nameless One is breaking free after a thousand years of imprisonment, and people must band together to defeat it.) But when you look at the actual story, it doesn’t read like that at all — for reasons that have a great deal to do with the worldbuilding, which I adored. The two main locations are clearly based on England and Japan circa what in Europe was the Renaissance and in Japan was the Tokugawa Era (closed-country policy and all), but there’s more going on with Inys and Seiiki than a mere name swap; among other things, Shannon does a brilliant job of coming up with a religion for Inys and its neighbors that feels believably European without being any form of Christianity. She also does something I love, which is create a situation where lots of people think they have the truth of what happened in the past, and none of them are entirely right — or entirely wrong. I felt the second half rushed a bit, losing the fine attention to detail that I’d been admiring so much in the first half, but it’s still excellent reading. A review will be going up at the New York Journal of Books closer to the pub date.

The Queen of Swords, R.S. Belcher. Read for the NYJB; full review is here, since I was reviewing for the paperback publication date, and the hardcover came out a while ago. I didn’t actually realize, when I requested this one from the queue, that it was the third in a series; I haven’t read the first two, which almost certainly colored my reactions here.

In the Vanishers’ Palace, Aliette de Bodard. A very, very loose novella-length retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” in a post-apocalyptic world where the Beast is a female dragon — of the Asian rather than European variety. The worldbuilding here is incredibly dense, enough so that I actually wound up disoriented from time to time; the Vanishers and their relationship to the world, and the nature of what they left behind when they vanished, is complicated enough that I could have used a lot more time to explore it.

The Phoenix and the Carpet, E. Nesbit. I can’t remember anymore where this title came up, but it made me think “huh, I’ve never read that much Nesbit,” so I picked it up in Gutenberg ebook. Reasonably enjoyable, but I’m honestly a bad audience for a story in which kids screw things up constantly because they’re kids and don’t realize how terrible their ideas are; I wind up getting frustrated at them. Some amount of that, I can cope with, but this book is basically a series of that happening over and over again, which meant that I went “argh!” a lot. But Nesbit’s writing is charming nonetheless.

The Storm Runner, J. C. Cervantes. Second book from the “Rick Riordan Presents” imprint, which is basically “Rick Riordan uses his name to help promote authors of color telling stories like the ones he tells, about their own mythologies.” I was very much looking forward to this one because Mesoamerica is one of my random nerderies, and I loved when it got past the kind of standard-issue Rick Riordan “kid finds out he’s half-divine” setup and into the guts of Maya myth. (White Sparkstriker: not high on the list of mythological figures you hear about if you haven’t gone diving into the Popol Vuh.) But overall, it’s a bit like the Nesbit above; I’m not the best audience for a middle-grade book, and occasionally found myself impatient with the middle-grade-ness of it. I had the same feeling about Aru Shah and the End of Time, the first book from the imprint. On the other hand, the list of upcoming titles is essentially a giant pile of catnip for me, so middle-grade-ness notwithstanding, I’m likely to go on reading these.

Sekrit Projekt R&R My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count. Even when half the book in question was written by Alyc.

The A.I. War, Daniel Keys Moran. I may very well write a whole blog post about these books later, because reading this reminded me how much I enjoy the series, despite its unfinished and pretty much guaranteed never to be finished state. This one came out in (I think) 2011, and I bought the ebook at the time, started reading it, and . . . I don’t know. Got interrupted somehow, and I’m not sure why it took me this many years to get back to it, because once I picked it up again I devoured it in a couple of days. Moran reminds me somewhat of Neal Stephenson in that I could not in good conscience recommend that any writing student of mine imitate some of his techniques, but they work, even though they shouldn’t. And I really appreciate that Trent goes out of his way to save the lives even of the people who are trying really hard to kill him, and that he keeps his sense of humor no matter what’s going on.

Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, ed. N.X. Sharps and Alana Abbott. My own work doesn’t count, but that’s only one story in this volume. Kaiju! Smashing things! Or sometimes not! Unsurprisingly, my favorite stories in this one were the ones that got the furthest away from the mode of “giant monsters are destroying things and people must defeat them.” But all of them have giant monsters of one sort or another, because that’s the point.

The Land of the Five Flavors, Thomas O. Höllmann, trans. Karen Margolis. File this one firmly under the header “very broad overview of the history of Chinese cuisine” — it’s only about a hundred and fifty pages long. But overviews have their place, and I found this one extremely useful for research purposes, as it covered everything from ingredients to implements to cooking techniques to restaurants. The one place where I felt like the overview-ness became a bug rather than a feature was when it came to the twentieth century; the upheavals from both technological and political change are huge enough that they really can’t be lumped in with the previous two thousand years, and trying to do so means the text skips like a rock off of some things that even I, with my extremely marginal knowledge of modern Chinese history, can tell needed way more unpacking than that. Everywhere else the summary nature felt like a good orientation, but not there.

It Happened at the Ball, ed. Sherwood Smith. Ditto above re: having story in here, except replace “kaiju” with “dancing.” (Er. Not that dancing is destroying things and people must defeat it. You know what I mean.) Lots of historical fiction in here, because the theme of the anthology is balls or other events that feature dancing, but not all of it is historical, and some of the dancing is more alluded to than shown. Which is good, because I tend to glaze over at anthologies where the theme is so narrow, and/or authors observe it so narrowly, that every story winds up feeling the same.