redbird | Entries tagged with books: science fiction

I am still partway through Darnton's The Revolutionary Temper, about Paris in the half century before the French Revolution. I do want to go back to it, but I needed to sync my kindle to put other books on it before going to Montreal.

Books finished last month:

Penric and the Bandit, by Lois McMaster Bujold: the latest Penric and Desdemona story, which I liked. The bandit is the main viewpoint character, and this book doesn't (imho) depend as much on familiarity with the series as some of the previous stories do.

Perfect Accord, by Celia Lake: another of her fantasy historical romances set in Albion. The non-romance part of the plot involves an illegal conspiracy, and it's not entirely clear who they're conspiring against, and some of the conspirators don't seem to know either. The heroine of this one and her gay male best friend agreed, at 13, to get married if they reach the age when their families are pressuring them to marry, and neither of them has found someone they prefer.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by Peter Beagle: novella about a dragon-hunter/exterminator, who would like to be almost anything else; a princess whose parents are hoping she will like one of the many princes who keep turning up; and the first prince she does like, who was wandering around as part of avoiding his parents plans for him. Good.

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow, a queer Jewish sf romance, set on a satellite of Pluto, with some references to Brooklyn. I think Ruthanna recommended this one.

I read both of those while visiting

rysmiel, and didn't make any notes,

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I haven't read a lot of books lately, and have both read short things online (blog posts and Discord conversations and news stories) and played little games online, like Quordle and Metazooa and Infinite Craft). I have been advised to step away from my computer screen at least an hour before bedtime, but on the days I do that, am as likely to pick up a puzzle book as to read either a hardcopy book or on my kindle. But I finished a book about books last night, so here's a Wednesday reading post. I liked both these books:

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer, is a novel that I think started as a series of related stories about Beck, a girl growing up on a "seastead," a group of artificial islands outside any government's borders. She lives with her father, who is powerful within the not-called-a-government structure of their seastead. Along with going to school, Beck earns some spending money by finding things for people, like brown shoelaces or a pair of size 9 black sandals: an unofficial barter system for things people brought with them from the mainland and discovered they could do without. The book is narrated by Beck, which I think works well for world-building, as she figures out more of what's going on under the surface. Starting with those small-scale errands, Beck gradually discovers more about the seastead, angering her father in the process: he is definitely the sort of Libertarian who might say "the government doesn't own the children, the parents own the children," and sees no need to explain the orders he's giving to his teenaged daughter.

I'm going to cheat here, and quote from Naomi's annual guide to "gifts for people you hate": The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading).

Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo, is broader than the subtitle implies. This is a history of books, and paper, and of reading and kibraries and bookstores, with some discussion of modern and contemporary librarians and censorship. It's also part memoir. The "ancient world" here is mostly Europe, the Middle East, and the parts of Asia that Alexander the Great conquered. One of the things Vallejo is interested in is how shared literature helped create and maintain a culture in Hellenistic times, and afterwards. Vallejo discusses the long hard work of keeping books alive when they had to be recopied every couple of hundred years, and the difficult decisions librarians faced, of which of their books were worth the time and effort for that sort of preservation. Vallejo also talks about the spread of literacy, and who was allowed or required to read: in ancient Rome, enslaved people were expected to read aloud to their owners, because the Romans believed that reading, unlike listening, put the reader under the author's control.

[My ebook of the Vallejo is badly overdue, and now that I've finished it I can sync my kindle and go on to something else.]

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Since the middle of December:

Bookshops and Bonedust, by Travis Baldree: This is a prequel, I guess, to Legends and Lattes. I liked it, and there was something pleasantly recursive about getting caught up in a book that is significantly about other people being caught up in books (people who think of reading as something that other people do). (If you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this one either.)

Paladin's Faith, by T. Kingfisher. This is billed as "book four of the saint of steel," with an interesting plot about industrial espionage/sabotage along with the demon-hunting and (how) will these two characters wind up together. I liked it, and think it's at least as good as the previous volumes in the series. There's room for three more books, at one per paladin. I'd like a story that's more about the Temple of the White Rat, Zale and Bishop Beartongue, and/or the gnoles, but I'm not sure a romance structure would work for those.

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer: Beck is a teenager living with her father on a seastead, i.e., a group of offshore platforms and converted ships that has somehow managed not to be part of any country. The story starts with some odd discoveries Beck makes while finding random-seeming things someone wants enough to pay or trade for, like size nine black sandals, and the stakes get higher as the story goes on. The people who run the seastead call themselves libertarians, but Beck's father gives arbitrary-seeming orders and expects her to obey, and these are the sort of libertarians who are happy to have most of the scutwork done by indentured servants. [I think this is a fix-up of a series of stories that were originally published separately.]

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I don't seem to have done one of these since the middle of July. So:

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older, is a very good sf/mystery/romance novel. It's set on Jupiter after humans have made Earth uninhabitable. They're living on small platforms attached to rails at a distance from the planet that humans can handle, while they work on figuring out how to restore a livable ecology on Earth. They call their refuge/temporary home Giant, but the moons have their current names. The romance part is, the narrator's ex-lover asks her to work together on a mystery, and they have to figure out whether it's possible for t-hem to be lovers, or even good friends, again. The main plot arc is the mystery, plus gradually-revealed and well-done world-building.

The Wizard's Butler, by Nathan Lowell, is a pleasant low-stakes mystery; the title character has no experience as a butler and hadn't even thought about that as a possible job; he's hired on the basis of his experience as an army medic, after being fired from a job as a paramedic.

he Public Library, a Photographic Essay, by Robert Dawson, The Dawson book has photos of lots of different libraries, with text describing them, and some essays by other people. The photo captions were too small for me to read comfortably, but I enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading the larger-print written material. I think I found this while looking for "a book about libraries" for the Boston Public Library summer reading bingo card.

The Shoemaker's Wife and Old as the Hills, are both set in the author's Albion historical fantasy world. The Shoemaker's Wife is a romance set shortly after World War I, and the male protagonist is a just-demobilized soldier. He and his wife are both trying to find their way in peacetime, and with each other, after meetiong and marrying quickly during the war. Old as the Hills is set in 1939-40, and the war is important to the plot. Much of this book is about an attempt to use a magical transport network to rescue European Jews, while other people are working to stop the Germans from invading via the same portals.

The Appeal is an odd epistolary mystery story that didn't work for me, with rounds of "here are some more hints" from a lawyer to two trainees.

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Mostly just another list, with some notes copied from my "booklog" file.

Lake, Celia, Winter's Charms. Three winter-themed novellas connected to some of her novels. I particularly liked the one about how Seth, Dilly, and Golshan became a triad (after Seth and Dilly were married, and also after Golshan was seriously wounded in the War).

Rather, Lina, Sisters of the Vast Black. Weird sf, with living spaceships, some of them convents, one of which is named Our Lady of Infinite Constellations, and vaguely hand-waved FTL. This is set a few decades after a very destructive war that left behind extremely nasty plagues. I enjoyed the story, but it is vastly implausible, and not just because it involves faster-than-light travel. This is the first in a loose series, but I didn't like it enough to look for the next one.

Christie, Agatha, After the Funeral and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Murder mysteries about Hercule Poirot, well constructed but ( spoiler )

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape A Dragon's Breath. A very good fantasy novel set in a somewhat alternate-history 19th century New England, with dragons. The viewpoint character is a member of the Wampanoag tribe, as is the author, and a significant part of the plot is driven by settler prejudices against the Indigenous inhabitants of the area. First in a trilogy, and I definitely want to read the next book.

Hogan, Linda, The Radiant Lives of Animals. A mix of poetry and natural history, hard to describe but I liked it. I think someone recommended this to me, but I don't remember who.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. An oddly constructed novel about time travel and pandemics.

Dimaline, Cherie, Venco. This is a fantasy novel about a poor Metis woman from Toronto who finds a spoon, which connects her to women who are working against a deadline to assemhle a coven, and about her relationship with her grandmother. I liked this, and not just because it takes it takes older women seriously.

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Mostly a list, again:

Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki. This is excellent, and is both definitely science fiction and definitely fantasy, and much of it takes place at a video arcade donut shop.

Forged in Combat, by Celia Lake

Perchance, by yojfull on Archive of Our Own. Original work (meaning not fanfic), which I found because I liked the author's InCryptid/Saint of Steel crossover story.

Third Girl, by Agatha Christie. A Poirot novel, with (again) questions of who some of the characters really are, plus a very 1960s-square atttitude toward drug use and then-contemporary fashion and art.

A Frame for Murder, by Imogen Plimp. another random cozy mystery from BookBuB. The romance is, fortunately, only a minor part of this, and the plot kept moving. It was good enough to finish, but I'm not going to look for more of the series. The bits about food seem shoved in, somehow.

sabotabby asked what I thought about Everything for Everyone (from the previous book post). I had hoped to write something thoughtful, but instead, I'm copying this from my booklog file:

post-dystopian SF, about the battles and work to build a communist future on the ruins of, well, everything, with world-building, both in the science fiction criticism sense and literally people talking about (re)building the world, working to restore the biosphere, education, and so on.

This is set about 50 years into the future, with voices including old people who were born before and lived through and helped create the transition, and talking about what they did and the friends and family they lost, and others who remember the worst times but not the world before, the world that included universities and airline travel as well as the horrors of late stage capitalism.

Family as a verb, a choice, some of it by people who needed to do that to have any family at all, having lost parents, siblings, other kin to war and detention camps and hunger and disease. // Characters talking about the ongoing work to make a better world, and also about the trauma. The "oral history" quilt format includes the "interviewers" being told "ask about something else" when they touch on painful topics.

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I wasn't feeling well for several days, and it was a kind of not-well that meant I was more comfortable in my recliner than in a desk or dining room chair, so I spent a lot of time reading. [No medical advice please: I'm feeling quite a bit better, and also have an appointment with my doctor on Thursday.]

Books I've finished since my last post:

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson: This is a mystery/science fiction novel, and the viewpoint character works as a translator for an extraterrestrial cultural attache in Manhattan. ( Read more... )

The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors have taken on a very large project, which they realize, having started with the question "what was the origin of inequality?" and then decided that it was the wrong question, in two or three different directions.

( Read more... )

Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie ( mild spoiler )

A Case of Murder in Mayfair, by Clara Benson, is a light (though neither funny nor "cozy") mystery set in 1920s London. It's part of a loose series, but I don't think it matters whether you read them in order. (So far, I've read volumes 1, 3, and 2, in that order.)

All that Remains, by Sue Black ( Read more... )

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: a weirdly multilayered fantasy story about fiction and fictional characters interacting with real people, and influencing them, often via weird doors into and out of the secondary world (?) of the Starless Sea. It's very good, and I was well into it before I noticed that the book is told in the historical present, with only a few "here is a story being told within the story" sections in past tense.

A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian: an f/f romance novella, set in the late 19th century. One woman is a "companion" to a rich woman who took her in after her brute of a father threw her out, and who is trying to figure out what she's doing and what her patron wants her to do. The other is the patron's maid, who has managed to move from small-scale crime to a legal job that pays better as well as being safer. "Together, they commit crimes."

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Not much more than a list, this time:

Recent reading:

A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys -- This is an excellent first-contact novel set a few decades in our future, on an Earth dealing with and trying to remediate climate change. The narrator found the alien spaceship because it was her turn to go out in the rain and check on the local environment sensors. Not expecting anything unusual or dangerous, she brings the baby she's nursing, which the aliens think is normal and proper for someone greeting visitors. I liked this a lot.

Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie -- an early Hercule Poirot mystery. I found the narrator somewhat annoying, as I'm oretty sure the author intended.

The Sybil in Her Grave, by Sarah Caudwell -- reread

Currently reading:

Front Page Murder, by Joyce St. Anthony -- mystery set during World War II, reading on the kindle

A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts, by Joseph M. Bagley -- what it says on the tin. I'm enjoying this so far, having just finished Part 1, "Shawmut, the Time Before Boston." I'm reading this as an ebook on my desktop computer, which has the advantage that I can see the images clearly.

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Apparently I haven't done one of these in two months. So:

Books I hadn't read before:

Paladin's Strength, by T. Kingfisher -- sequel to Paladin's Grace, another romance novel involving a (different) paladin of a recently-dead god

A Prayer for the Crown-shy, by Becky Chambers -- sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, further low-key adventures of a monk and their robot friend. This has the same gentle tone as most of Chambers' books, and it's about friendship

Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston -- her first published novel, set in an alternate and much better 2020 than the one we got. Not bad, but if I'd read this first I might not have tried One Last Stop, which is a lot better.

The Missing Page, by Cat Sebastian -- sequel to "Hither, Page". At the end of this book, Leo and James are more settled emotionally, and talking about a future (in terms of "let's go to the seashore in a few months")

The Will and the Deed, by Ellis Peters -- a mystery novel, revolving around the estate and will of an opera singer who dies of natural causes at the beginning of the book. Not bad, very different from her Brother Cadfael books.

Fool's Gold, by Celia Lake -- another romance set in her England-with-magic Albion in the 1920s. I continue to enjoy these

Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach, by Nnm (an AO3 pseudonym) -- Good Omens fanfic, about what happens when a demon walks into the office of a psychologist who specializes in treating people with PTSD. Someone mentioned this online, and I had a vague "maybe I'll reread it"--and apparently there are several different fanfics with this premise. Long, and I enjoyed it; if that description appeals, you might like it.

Beguilement and Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold, the first two of her Sharing Knife books -- a romance in which both people are dealing with "you can't do that" first internally and then from their families, for reasons that are mostly "s/he's from a very different culture." It's \set in what feels like a fantasy far future of our world.

Vagina Obscura: an anatomical voyage, by Rachel E. Gross -- nonfiction, about women and different aspects of the (mostly cisgender) female body and reproductive system. "Vagina" here stands in for the vulva, womb, internal clitoris, and connected body parts. Gross talks about women's bodies, and knowledge of and beliefs about those bodies, now and in the past. The author notes that "female" is doing a lot of work here, and that categories are fuzzy. There's a lot here about the clitoris, and a chapter about some of the things ovaries do that aren't connected to reproduction. The book is relatively brief and the tone is mostly light, which includes footnotes like "Wait, what?" (on some of the weirder and/or more harmful things people have said, thought, and done. There are eight chapters, each focused on a different part of the body. Chapter 8 is titled "Beauty (Neovagina)" and gives some history of gender affirmation surgery as well as talking about the present and recent past.

My reading continues to be mostly mystery and/or romance.

Currently reading: Spirals in Time, by Helen Scales: non-fiction about seashells, some of the many different animals that have shells, and some of the things humans have used shells for.

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brief and likely incomplete, because the computer I usually track this on is still in a box:

New (to me): Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead

reread: Pat Wrede, Calling on Dragons; Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky;

currently rereading: Eleanor Arnason, _A Woman of the Iron People_; Pratchett, _Interesting Times_.

This is based heavily on what I had handy on the kindle, either owned or current from the library. (The Delany is from a three-novel ebook, and I started it while sitting in the ER having my heart monitored recently);

adrian_turtle had a paperback of Interesting Times in reach last night while I was in her room staying away from the A/C installer.

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The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. This book is the first set in her fantasy world of the Five Gods, and I read it after (almost all of) the Penric novellas, which were published later. Excellent, and the "curse" is plausibly interesting, and feels more believable than some family/hereditary curses in fiction (including myth). On

rysmiel's recommendation, I am now reading the sequel, Paladin of Souls.

The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny. This is the most recent Inspector Gamache mystery. It's very good, but I'm not sure I would recommend reading it yet. It's very much about the pandemic, and some of people's worse reactions to it, including the line from "underlying conditions" to people advocating eugenics. (This clearly isn't the author's viewpoint, nor that of the ongoing sympathetic characters.) It's excellent, both as a mystery novel and an attempt to think and talk about current and recent events, which means it was somewhat difficult, emotionally. Content warnings also for references to past psychiatric abuse and CIA mind control experiments.

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Wednesday reading isn't even going to pretend to write reviews. Just, here are some books I finished reading (or rereading) since the last time I made one of these posts.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (novella length, but published separately, not connected to her Wayfarers books.

Destination Unknown, by Agatha Christie

Homicide Trinity; Gambit; Family Affair; A Right to Die; Three Witnesses; and Three Doors to Death, by Rex Stout. That's three novels, and three books of three novellas each, mostly rereads. I'm fairly sure I'd remember if I'd read Family Affair before, though it's also true that a novel involving Watergate might not have struck me as strongly before the Trump administration.

Georgette Heyer, The Incomplete Clue, a mystery novel, with bits of romance lurking around the edges. One of the (emotionally) easy books someone recommended on Discord. I might read more of her mysteries, but this does not incline me toward the Regency romances.

The Last Resort, by Alison Lurie

Life in a Medieval City, by Frances Giles (nonfiction, what it says on the tin, and very well done)

Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots

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I haven't been reading much that feels like it belongs here (examples of things that don't: news articles, email). So, for the last couple of months, a list with some comments:

Goblin Fruit, by Celia Lake: a sequel, sort of, to Outcrossing: magic/alt history romance in 1920s England, with a detective story. One of the main characters in Outcrossing appears in the background of this. (I got the first one free; this was $2.95 on Amazon, which is reasonable, but I may wait before getting any more, because I have a lot else available compared to how much I'm reading.

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. This was a reread of an odd, farcical Star Trek novel. It was light and pleasant, but I remember it being funnier the last time I read it.

The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison: a fun, somewhat weird spin-off of the Sherlock Holmes universe, with angels and steampunk-ish automata; the role of Sherlock Holmes in these adventures is played by a literal angel, and his Watson is Dr. Doyle, who came home from Afghanistan with a partly-metaphysical wound. I don't remember the original Doyle stories well enough to know how close she stays to those, for the episodes that clearly started there, like the one about the Hound of the Baskervilles. (The afterword says the book started as wingfic of the Sherlock TV series.)

A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, has dense worldbuilding, and an engaging narrator/protagonist, and is as good as everyone has been telling me.

Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh: fantasy, with a background including a seriously bad love relationship, about a man who is more than 400 uears old and guardian of a woodland, and what happens when a new landowner shows up, with questions. This is good, and I'm not sure how to describe it, but it seems worth noting that one of the important characters is a middle-aged woman, treated sympathetically. (This is fantasy in a fairy-tale sense, rather than high fantasy or a "secondary world" like Elizabeth Lynn's Arun or Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

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Apparently I haven't done a reading post in a couple of months. So, briefly:

Relatively recent reading:

Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interviews: This isn't quite what it says on the tin: one of these goes back to when she was working on Always Coming Home, though the last one in the collection appeared after her death. It's somewhat repetitive, more in the introductory matter that was published with each interview than in the interviews themselves, in part because Le Guin made it clear that she didn't want to answer the same questions over and over. I'm fairly sure the collection also included some things I hadn't known. I can't really recommend the collection as a whole, though people who are interested in Le Guin's life and work might want to read just the actual last interview here.

The Halcyon Fairy Book, by Ursula Vernon. In the first half of this, Ursula Vernon reads and comments entertainingly on some odd fairy tales, pointing out the funny, absurd, or just plain incomprehensible bits as well as comparing versions of things. [These started on Twitter, I think.] The second half is a reprint of her short collection Toad Words, which I had already read.

Arsenic in the Azaleas, by Dale Meyer. This is a cozy mystery, of the "woman relocating to a small town after divorce or other life disruption" subgenre. I got it as a free ebook (via BookBub), and enjoyed it enough to finish it, though a copy editor might have helped tidy some inconsistencies about what the viewpoint character knows/has experience with in terms of gardening. (I also worry about the family who brought her up to be incompetent with anything to do with cooking.) First in a series of several about the amateur detective in question.

Catfishing on Catnet, by Naomi Kritzer. This is a very good near-future YA novel about a teenager and her online friends, including the AI that runs her online home. The narration switches viewpoint, mostly Steph (human) and the AI (who uses the handle CheshireCat on Catnet). Steph has never lived in the same place for long, because her mother is terrified of Steph's father finding them; the story starts as they move to yet another obscure town. A very good sequel to "Cat Pictures, Please"--the AI narrator of that story has set up the social network where payment is in cat pictures instead of money.

Wilding: Returning Nature to our Farm, by Isabella Tree. About twenty years ago, Tree and her husband gave up on conventional farming, because they were going broke. Instead, they let the hedgerows and weeds grow as they would, and slowly introduced ponies, pigs, and other livestock that seemed appropriate to the landscape. They tracked the appearance/return of locally rare, or sometimes UK-rare, animal species. Tree compares the common idea of a closed-canopy forest as the natural and/or inevitable climax ecosystem to a medieval (or earlier) mixed woodland with brambles and hedgerows, which lets new oaks establish themselves in the woods. Tree argues that ecological succession is an oversimplification if not myth.

This is definitely a case of "believe the bird, not the bird book," as various birds and insects that were considered to only live/breed in woodlands turned up in their meadows and hedgerows. Stepping back from turtle doves and individual oak trees, Tree talks about how de-canalizing the bit of river on their land reduced flooding downstream. Someone recommended this book to me, and they were right.

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Here's what I read in the last few weeks. I had expected to do more reading on the trip to England, but so it goes.

On the Steel Breeze and Poseidon's Wake, by Alastair Reynolds. These are the second and third books of a trilogy (after Blue Remembered Earth) but I think could be read separately. They're about several generations of human exploration and settlement of the outer solar system and then the planets of some (relatively) nearby stars, based on a couple of (completely handwaved) physics breakthroughs. The human characters also interact with several machine intelligences--"artificial" suggests more deliberate intent on the part of the humans who created them. Stronger recommendation if the idea of elephants in Space appeals to you.

"This is How You Lose the Time War," by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This was recommended by lots of people, and I liked it a lot, despite, or perhaps because of, the sparseness of the characterization.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. This book grew out of a blog post with the same title; Eddo-Lodge talks about the frustration of being asked to explain the same things over and over, by people who didn't seem to take in what she told them, and of being asked to center white people's emotions when discussing racism.

As the author notes, the book is addressed mostly to people of color, but the nature of publishing meant she had to talk to some white people about race to get the book out there. I knew a lot of the ideas here -- though, as a white person who hopes to improve things, it's worth me seeing them again. I highlighted quite a bit in reading this on the kindle. The context and specifics are very British, and she talks about the fact that what she learned about civil rights an black history, in Britain, was almost entirely about the US, not about the history of the slave trade in England, or racist treatment of people of color in Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm glad I read this, and recommend it, especially to people in the UK.

*Minor Mage," by T. Kingfisher. The "minor mage" of the title is a 12-year-old boy who only knows three spells. However, he's the only mage his village has, so when the village is hit by a drought they send him off to bring back the rain. There's a good mix of adventure, humor, and people actually talking to each other; some of the humor comes from the boy's familiar, a sarcastic armadillo. This is a short book--tkingfisher notes in an afterword that she thinks it's a children's book, but none of the editors she showed it to agreed with her. ("T. Kingfisher" is Ursula Vernon's pen name for adult and YA books.)

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Between the bus trip to and from Montreal, and time spent reading while I was visiting rysmiel, I finished six or seven books in the last week, including one reread.

So:

Periodic Tales: A cultural history of the elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams: This is basically what it says on the tin, through a personal as well as British lens. This is I think best read as a series of interesting anecdotes, though I went "wait a minute" on enough things, from osmium being "the densest thing known" [me: what about neutronium?] to the claim (in the section on calcium) that the White House was so named for being whitewashed (in the section on calcium) that I would double-check any facts in here before quoting them.

Clockwork Boys (Clocktaur Wars book 1) and The Wonder Engine (Clocktaur Wars book 2), by tkingfisher (This is why it's "six or seven" books: the two parts are novella-length, and book 2 picks up immediately after the end of book 1.) I liked this a lot: it's a fantasy about a kingdom being invaded/ravaged by some magical(?) creatures, and the unlikely group sent in search of some, any, defense after a more plausible group vanished. Demon tattoos enforcing the group's obedience, if not loyalty. The group leader, Slate (a forger who was convicted of treason) recruits someone by asking if he'd like to go on a suicide mission. The story also includes attack tattoos--aimed at the wearers. Also gnoles, and I don't remember which other Kingfisher book they were in.

Unthinkable, by Helen Thomson: Thomson writes about a variety of people with unusual brains as ways of talking about the human mind and brain more generally. The examples include a woman who is always lost, a man with impressively good memory of his past, a man whose schizophrenia makes him believe he is a tiger, people who believe themselves to be dead, and a color-blind man with the kind of synesthesia that sees letters in different colors, whose brain sees colors his eyes cannot. The individual sections were interesting, but it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts; on the other hand, that may depend on how much the reader already knows.

Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: a second collection of Chiang's sf and fantasy stories. I liked it, though there's nothing here as memorable as "Story of Your Life" (which is a pretty high standard of comparison).

Hawk, by Stephen Brust: another Taltos book, a bit more about relationships (and wanting some sort of connection) than some of the previous, as Vlad tries a complicated plan to get the Jhereg to leave him alone.

Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett: reread of a Discworld novel, which I enjoyed.

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Recent reading:

"Rogue Protocol," by Martha Wells. This is the third of the Murderbot novellas. Like the first two, it's good--I enjoyed the fast-moving plot, Murderbot's narrative voice, and the bits of world-building. Murderbot's viewpoint and goals change by the end of this novella, because of what it sees and experiences here. I finished this and immediately asked the library for the next one, which I got yesterday; it's next on my reading list.

That Ain't Witchcraft, by Seanan McGuire. Another InCryptid novel, an immediate sequel to *Tricks for Free"; ( spoilers for both books )

In between the plotting, we learn more about Annie's half-human, half-cryptid boyfriend now that they're in the same place long enough to have some time to talk.

I didn't like this as much as the earlier books in the series. This might be because McGuire is running out of ideas/steam on this universe; random variation, in the books or my mood; or that I don't like Annie-as-narrator as much as I did the books about her older siblings. A note at the end of the book says that the next book will put Sarah (their cuckoo cousin) at center stage; my reaction to that was that I miss Verity's narrative voice. Or maybe the problem is the lack of Aislin mice. If you liked the previous InCryptid books this is worth reading, I think, but I wouldn't start here.

"The Measure of a Monster," by Seanan McGuire: this novella is included as a bonus with That Ain't Witchcraft; it's about Alex Price (Verity and Annie's older brother) and his partner going to the rescue after a large number of children are kidnapped from the nearby gorgon community. It includes a bit more about cousin Sarah and her recovery from the mental damage of saving Verity a few books back. The story is set during That Ain't Witchcraft, and Alex is pleased to get even a tiny scrap of news about Annie beyond the inference that she's alive because their dead aunt Mary would let the family know if she died.

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Recent reading:

Rex Stout, And Four to Go. I thought I'd read all the Nero Wolfe books, but I think this one was new to me. It's a collection of four novellas, none of them impressive. "Easter Parade" does odd things with Wolfe's orchid obsession, and contains some anti-Asian racism, what feels like a mix of Wolfe (and the author) being aware of how that racism affected a Chinese-American woman, and Archie's literal and straightforward use of "inscrutable." (Authors aren't responsible for the opinions of their characters, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether they share them.) An character's actions being with both Wolfe telling one character that he understands that she knew the police wouldn. There's one ("Fourth of July Picnic") that's more Wolfe-tricks-the-killer than usual one where he and Archie Goodwin figure out who did it, but learn the motive in Wolfe's usual meeting of all the suspects. "Christmas Party" is layers of deceit, including Goodwin and Wolfe lying to each other, but didn't quite work for me.

Steven Brust, Vallista. This is the fifteenth of the Vlad Taltos/Jhereg books, and not a good starting point—a lot of it assumes the reader knows who people are, and what happened in many of the previous books. The story starts when Devera finds Vlad and says something like "Uncle Vlad, help me" before vanishing, leaving him trying to figure out what's going on, how, and why, in a building that makes Escher's "Relativity" seem straightforward. (Slightly grumpy spoilers here: ( Read more... )

Brust has said there will be 17 of these, which leaves two after this, and I'm not sure where he's going to take it from here (which I think is a good sign).

Current reading:

The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
So Far So Good, by Ursula Le Guin

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Books finished relatively recently:

Tove Jansson: Fair Play and Finn Family Moomintroll. These two have little in common except that in each book, each chapter is a different episode, and that they're both about people who like each other. Jansson is best-known, at least outside Finland, for the Moomin series of children's books. I thought I'd read all of them when I asked the library for Finn Family Moomintroll, but there are things in there I think I'd remember if I'd read it before, including the Hobgoblin's Hat, and Too and Ticky showing up and becoming part of the household. Fair Play is an adult novel, or series of stories, about two women, an artist and a writer, who live separately but in the same building, and ongoing events in their relationship. (It's at least somewhat autobiographical, and was written long enough ago that it could be read as a platonic friendship, absent the known context, which includes that the "about the author" on all her books falselu said she lived alone, rather than mentioning her long-term partner.) I'd recommend both of these, if you're at all open to both mimetic fiction and playful fantasy about non-human characters.

Marjorie Allingham: Look to the Lady and Policemen at the Funeral. This is two-thirds of a kindle "box set" of Allingham's Albert Campion stories. Look to the Lady is plot-driven rather than character-driven; not so much that it feels as though the characters are moving around to fit the needs of the plot, as that they're somewhat flat. Policemen at the Funeral is weird, in ways that I think would be spoilers even to hint at, so have a cut: ( Read more... )

Alma Fritchley: Chicken Run. This was recommended by

rachelmanija and is, as she said, a cozy lesbian mystery about a chicken farmer, set in England a couple of decades ago. It's at least as much about shifting relationships as about the mystery, and the pacing of the plot is weird in terms of that genre. I enjoyed this enough that I have a sequel waiting for me at the Somerville Library.

Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky. This one is weird, and I'm not sure I'd say I liked it. The first part of the book is emotionally difficult, parallel/intertwined stories of two children/teens who are being abused by their parents and school systems. There's witchcraft and science/technology, the latter with a sort of hacker ethos, and a character who I'm fairly sure is based on Elon Musk, with the riches and intelligence and egocentricity. It's hard to really like either group or their cavalier way with everyone else's future, even realizing that they're dealing with a series of escalating natural disasters.

Currently reading:

Nick Lane: Life Ascending: the ten great inventions of evolution. Bits I've enjoyed so far include the discussion of how the DNA-->amino acid coding isn't random, and the explanation of how the two photosystems that make up oxygenic photosynthesis work, and how such an odd-seeming thing could have evolved.

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I haven't finished a lot of books recently--I get stuck in the middle of things, or go read another online thing, mostly nonfiction. However, the kindle helps some, so:

I read Falling in Love with Hominids, by Nalo Hopkinson, last week. Here's what I jotted down at the time:

This is a short story collection, with an introduction, plus brief introductions to each story. Nalo notes that the stories were written over more than a decade, and aren't particularly connected. Some of the narrative voices are using various Caribbean English dialects; others are more standard US/Canadian. The collection starts with a zombie apocalypse story, in which fighting the zombies only buys the children time (and manages a more positive ending than that suggests). The other pieces include a good Bordertown story; I am displeased but not surprised that both she and the editors got pushback from white fans who said it "didn't feel like a Bordertown story" because it was mostly about non-white characters, both human and elven.

I bought a humble bundle of ebooks mostly to get this. (Yes, the title is a homage to Cordwainer Smith.)

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

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reading catch-up post

catch-up reading post

Thursday reading is overdue

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Wednesday reading

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Wednesday reading conveniently finished a book around dinner-time

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