Books read, early January

[mrissa]

 

C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, Defiance. This is the latest atevi novel. Don't start here, seriously, oh my goodness, do not start here, when you have to stop and count how many trilogies this is it is way too deep in the series to start here. There's a lot of backstory piled up here and meaningful to the story. The set pieces are exciting and fun, the politics are moving along, it is very much not its own thing but rather a chunk of larger story. If you like that ongoing story, here's some more.

Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789. Darnton does a really fascinating, thorough job of tracing where Parisians of the pre-Revolutionary period were getting their ideas about the world, from formal and informal sources, local to international. Very cool as a window on worldviews before they solidified into our expectations, as well as this period of history in specific.

Emily J. Edwards, Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man. A mystery novel set in 1950, full of slang and clothes, short and zippy.

Margrét Helgadóttir, ed., Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction. Dang, if it weren't for the Finns this would be a very grim lot. Sit with that for a moment if you will.

Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman's Road, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power. Rereads. This was for book club, and there are so many things I like about this series...and I ended up putting a PostIt note in the first book to say not to read it again, because it's very clearly not a thing Rosemary would do that way now (she has in fact said so), and...it makes me enjoy the other books less to watch the same characters enthusiastic about torture as a method of gaining reliable information, in a way that is supported by the narrative. The books are otherwise quite good at allowing characters to be wrong and find out their errors in ways that fiction is not always great at, and I enjoyed talking about how it all unfolded in book club. It remains one of the hardest series to pitch without spoilers.

Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity. This was brief and pithy, a reflection on how we categorize who counts in which groups and what we take from our roots.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Warrior of the Wind. A sequel and very reliant on the events of the first one for its weight, but interesting once you've enjoyed that first one.

Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships. Lots of good descriptions of weather and sailing, interesting in a genre we don't get much of these days.

Christopher Rowe, The Navigating Fox. A very different--very fictional--meditation on roots and identity and belonging and loyalty. The fox and navigation in the title are not metaphorical.

Nisi Shawl, Kinning. Discussed elsewhere.

Georgia Summers, City of Stardust. Discussed elsewhere.

Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I. Does what it says on the tin, and these are good details for us not to take for granted in the present world. I think especially if we're reading a lot of fiction where evil is required to make sense, it's good to be reminded that neither good nor evil is required to do so in the real world.

Susan Wels, An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder. Nineteenth-century America was very, very small and also folded funny, so the Oneida Community had cousins in all sorts of places. This was brief and written rather vividly; the title by no means gives too expressive a sense of how sensationalist it intends to be.

Laura Zimmerman, Just Do This One Thing For Me. A really well-written YA novel that deals with difficult themes of child neglect without veering into "problem novel" territory. It is particularly outstanding in its loving and accurate portrayal of the protagonist's eight-year-old brother. It also is quite good at small town Wisconsin life. Some readers will not want to read it because it's too well done for its topic--a group of one grade school kid and two teens without reasonable adult supervision will be hard for some adult readers--but the characterization and writing is absolutely top-notch if that's a topic you can cope with.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I've never seen the phrase "Nineteenth-century America was ... folded funny" before, but that exactly encapsulates the concept. Thank you.

[sartorias]

I never made it past the first Steerwwoman book due to the portage's casual killing/torturing, esp of kids; and the "big surprise" was predictable from the gitgo as it had been used so much in the previous decade. I've been puzzled by the enthusiasm in a particular group especially, but then I usually just chalk it up to my tin ear.

Seeing your note here is the FIRST TIME I've seen anyone blink at that one element.

[anne]

I had a friend whose however-many-greats-grandmother and -father were in the Oneida community! All I retain of her family stories is that they weren't supposed to have favorite partners, but they did. I think it was an open secret? And when the community broke up, most people married their favorites.

And Robert Darnton is doing a zoom talk with the Old North Foundation on the 24th (donate what you can), if anybody wants a link. (I read his book about the Paris cat massacre in my 18th century lit class. My worlds are colliding.)

[mrissa]

This book talks about that, and about the week before they were closing down their relationships. It gets prurient.

[anne]

Sigh. It wasn't, when she told it.

[aamcnamara]

I went "wait the atevi novels are co-written now?" and then I went and looked some things up and now I know C. J. Cherryh is queer, which I somehow had not known (or remembered? maybe?), and writes books with her spouse, so that's lovely.

[rushthatspeaks]

Fair about that one element. As a series, it has one of the bigger quality jumps I've ever seen, to the point where I am considering finding someone who hasn't read them who is willing to start at book two to tell me whether that's a thing a person can do. I've read books two onward repeatedly; I've read book one once.

[sartorias]

I'd be real interested in such an experiment, as I bounced pretty hard off book one back in the day. There are other books that made big leaps-- THE THIEF series comes to mind, by Megan Whalen Turner.

[rachelmanija]

Same for me. I was unimpressed with book one and only continued the series after multiple people said it got better.