Books read, late January

[mrissa]

 

Stephanie Burgis, Enchanting the Fae Queen. I always love Steph's writing, and this was a fun book when I needed a fun book. This one felt weighted on the romance side of the romance/fantasy balance early in the book, but the fantasy plot did come roaring back in the last third. I wonder how much that reaction is objective and how much it's that it's an "enemies to lovers" plot, which is a trope that's always a hard sell for me. Looking forward to the third one.

Sophie Burnham, Bloodtide. Book two in its series, please do not start here as a lot of the emotional weight starts with book one in this series, but if you were having fun with this science fiction against empire, here's more, and there's natural disaster and community uprising and good stuff.

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Reread. Okay but! This is not the Tenniel illustrations, which my godmother gave me when I was small. This is the Tove Jansson illustrations, which I had never seen before, and they're delightful and very Jansson.

Steph Cherrywell, Unboxing Libby. This is a delightful older MG book about a bunch of young humaniform robots on Mars on a voyage of self-discovery opposed to the corporate bullshit that brought them there. I hope Cherrywell does more unique fun books like this.

John Chu, The Subtle Art of Folding Space. Discussed elsewhere.

Samuel K. Cohn Jr., trans., Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe. A sourcebook of a lot of translated primary sources about uprisings, rebellions, and protests in mostly Italy and France in this era. (When he says "north of the Alps," he means "the region of France that is north of where you would draw the latitude line for the Alps," alas, but still interesting for itself.) Useful if you're super-interested in popular uprisings, which guess who is.

Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and Anarchy and Old Dogs. Rereads. Sometimes you look up and it's been twenty years since a series you like started, and you haven't reread the beginning of it since then. I say "series you like," but what happened here is that I liked the beginning a lot and have sort of grown less interested in the later volumes, so I was worried that it was a case of "my standards went up and his stayed the same." It was not! The first volumes are still quite good, nothing else quite like them. They're historical magical realist murder mysteries set in 1970s Laos, and the setting is a large part of the focus of the books. I firmly believe, as of this reread, that they are marketed as mysteries primarily because that's the subgenre that knew how to market comparatively short series novels with an atypical setting, because the mystery structure is not at all traditional. Some elements are not handled as we'd handle them now, but so far I am feeling that the characters whose identities might be handled differently now are being treated with respect by the narrative if not by the people around them. I can't think of another series that has as good a character with Downs as Mr. Geung. I love him so much. He gets to have his own strengths, interests, sense of humor, agency. Sometimes the people around him call him the r-word or underestimate him, and they are always proven wrong. Similarly, in the fourth book we meet Auntie Bpoo, a trans woman who is joyfully, passionately herself and who does not attempt to pass as cis. I love Auntie Bpoo. The language used to introduce her is not what we would use now, and the protagonist--who was born in the early 1900s and is 73 years old in the book--initially underestimates her, but he very quickly learns that this is very, very wrong--and yet just as Mr. Geung never becomes a cloying angel, Auntie Bpoo is allowed to keep some of her rough edges--she's a person, not a sanitized trans icon. However--even with those caveats, not everyone will want to read ableist slurs, misgendering, etc., so judge accordingly whether that's something you want to go through. I'm going to keep on with this series until I hit the point where I'm no longer enjoying it; we'll see where that is.

Dominique Dickey, Redundancies and Potentials. Kindle. Extremely, extremely full of killing. Oh so much killing. Who knew that time travel was in place for the killing? There ends up being emotional weight to it in ways that I find interesting given that I've been watching the James Bond movies that are the exact opposite (zero time travel, zero emotional weight, still tons of killing). Interesting stuff.

Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles, and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Vol. 1: The Superpowers. This felt to me like they were afraid they wouldn't get to do as much series as they had plot, and so everything sort of got jammed in on top of each other. The extremely personal take on Mutually Assured Destruction was interesting--but also this is a comic about MAD, so if you're not up for very visceral potential of destroying the world today, maybe save it for later.

Lisa Goldstein, Ivory Apples. Reread. Goldstein definitely knows how to write a sentence, so this was a smooth read that ultimately did not hang together on the reread for me. There are too many places where someone's motivations, especially the villain's, are based on "somehow they got the feeling that xyz" which then turn out to be correct for no particular reason, and I think what the muses are doing as metaphors for creative work simply don't end up working for me when pressed into service for an entire book's worth of material. A lot of the individual chapters are vivid, but the ending just isn't enough for me, alas.

Theodora Goss, Letters from an Imaginary Country. Lots of familiar favorites in this collection as well as some new things, demonstrating once again the breadth of what the field is publishing and of what even a fairly focused author (Goss loves ethereal fairytale-type fantasy) can manage to do.

Rachel Hewitt, Map of Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey. This is about the first surveys of Britain and how the departments involved with them developed, what early technology and staff were used, etc. It's this year's gift to myself for my grandfather's birthday (he worked for a time as a surveyor as a young man) and was, I feel, entirely a success on that front, especially because I like maps and mapping and how people's thinking about them has evolved very much myself.

Jessica Lopez Lyman, Placekeepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities. It's the nature of this kind of study to overgeneralize and make overemphatic statements in places, and this does probably less of that than most local/contemporary ethnography. It also gave me lots of interesting case studies of a part of my home that's less familiar to me and some things neighbors are getting up to, bracing to read in this time. This isn't all of what we're fighting for, but it's sure what we're fighting for.

Abir Mukherjee, The Burning Grounds. Latest in its mystery series of 1920s Calcutta, exciting and fun, jumps the characters down the line a few years from previous volumes but still probably better if read as part of the series than a stand-alone. Hope he does more.

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Fencing Master. Much swash very buckle wow.

Teresa Mason Pierre, ed., As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories. Read this for book club, and there was an interesting pattern of lack of character agency in most of these stories, which is not my favorite thing. Some stories still a good time, lots of interesting discussion in book club.

Randy Ribay, The Awakening of Roku. Not as strong as the first book in its series, and I felt like it needed another editing pass (sometimes on the sentence level--we've seen Ribay do better than this in the previous book). A fun adventure, but if the Avatar tie-in novelizations had started with this one I'd have shrugged and stopped here. I think in some ways maybe letting Roku off the hook even when it hopes not to be.

Madeleine Robins, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner. Rereads. When I read the fourth one in this series in the previous fortnight, I remembered how much I liked it, so I went back and reread the whole thing. Yep, still liked it. I think most of them are actually written to be reasonable entry points to the series, so if you're in the market for a slightly-alternate Regency period set of murder mysteries, whatever you can grab here will work pretty well.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. This was good enough that I read the whole 600 pages, and yet I did not end up with a favorite poem, I didn't end up vibing with any particular era of her work, and there were some that made me sigh and roll my eyes and go, oh, right, that period. I don't know why not! I can't say, for example, that long, wordy, referential, somewhat-political poems of the 1930s are not my jam--I'm a fan of W.H. Auden. But for whatever reason, the rhythms of Rukeyser's language never caught me up. Well. Now I know.

Melissa Sevigny, Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest. Goes back to the Spanish for discussion of what water there is and what water people hoped there would be and what terrible decisions they made around those two things. And a few non-terrible decisions! But. Oof. Interesting stuff, always there for the water, not at all how water works where I am so I can see why the Spanish made some mistakes, and yet, oof.

D.E. Stevenson, Kate Hardy. Kindle. I was expecting this to twist more than it did, because Stevenson sometimes does, and it's better when she does, and also because my Kindle copy had a lot of additional material in the back, biographical sketch and list of other books and so on, so it looked like there was room for more to happen, and then boom, nope, fairly standard happy ending. It was reasonably fun to read but not one of her deeper or more interesting works.

T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose. I had picked up several references to this from the ether, but I don't think I actually had a chance to read it when I was small. I'm wondering what it was about the mid-20th century that got us the Borrowers and the Littles and this. Anyway it was cleverly done and reasonably warm and very much of its era, and I'm glad I read it for myself instead of just picking up hints here and there.

Comments

[sovay]

The first volumes are still quite good, nothing else quite like them. They're historical magical realist murder mysteries set in 1970s Laos, and the setting is a large part of the focus of the books.

I had never run across this series. I will check it out.

But for whatever reason, the rhythms of Rukeyser's language never caught me up. Well. Now I know.

You will have read it in a Collected Poems, but the one that always stuck with me was "Myth" (1973), which is hardly poetry at all. It reminds me of Le Guin.

T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose.

I grew up on this one because there was a first edition belonging to my mother's childhood in the house and I never met anyone else who had heard of it until I was an adult when the NYRB handily reprinted it. I remain really fond of it.

[edit] I think in some ways maybe letting Roku off the hook even when it hopes not to be.

How so? My total indifference to spoilers continues.