Books read, early June

Adam Regn Arvidson, Wild and Rare: Tracking Endangered Species in the Upper Midwest. This author went and had an in-person encounter with each of the species on the endangered species list in Minnesota and wrote about it. I LOVED THIS. I wish every state had a book like this. It gives a different context and perspective on your immediate habitat even if you're a person who thinks about conservation and habitat frequently and broadly. I think it would be very readable even for non-Minnesotans, but for Minnesotans, a must-read. Mussels, orchids, lynx, all sorts of things.

Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective. This is a short piece but stands under separate cover, so it gets a separate review. This is a female PoC Holmes-and-Watson in space, but the in space part is baked into the bones. There's no part of this that's just plunked down in space with no thought to implication, no part where the shift in culture and gender is not done with careful consideration. As a result, I found it to be far more charming and interesting than the versions in which the template is used too exactly without regard to worldbuilding and character context. If you like nontraditional minds as characters, this one's for you. No, I don't mean Holmes....

John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air and Web of Angels. Rereads. These are Mike's first two books, and I hadn't reread them since he died in 2006. What struck me this time about Web of Angels in particular was how emotionally and culturally Protestant it is. Possibly the most Protestant book I've ever read that was not about conversion theology. It's proto-cyberpunk, is what it is, it's cyberpunk before movement cyberpunk, and the aesthetic and tonal differences are fascinating.

Victoria Glendinning, Anthony Trollope. This is a fun biography of the author in question, talking about his relationships and their effects on his work, particularly his relationships with women including his mother and his niece. It made me want to read more Trollope, although he is the scariest author I read, so I will still probably not do more than one. But soon.

Justina Ireland, Dread Nation. I think it's worth looking at Deb Reese's commentary on a Native perspective on this book, including its endnotes. I see what Ireland was trying to do, and the parts of it that were away from the residential school were as interesting as a zombie novel ever gets for me, interesting enough that I was very glad to keep reading and see what she was doing with it. But I also see that there are some areas where wounds are still very, very fresh in some communities, so...this book simultaneously does an amazing job with prejudice and perception and power in its main characters' lives and has some caveats around it that I expect Ireland will be keeping in mind for future work, knowing how good this is and how good the work she's done elsewhere has been.

Sinclair McKay, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There. This is a "life of the Park" book mostly--a little bit about codebreaking, but mostly a book about how it was to live there, how it felt and who ate what and how it was to arrange lodgings--the sort of thing that a writer who wants that background will probably find valuable.

E. Nesbit, The Magic World. Reread. A set of Nesbit shorts, all aimed at kids and doing that Edwardian upper class thing where she's talking at kids but assumes a great many specifics about their background. Simultaneously there are a few pre-Soviet socialist moments that are fascinating in their British Edwardian details. But mostly it's a book where some small magic takes place and some child enjoys it or manages to squirm out from under it, often but not always with animal transformation and frustrating relatives.

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Jacob Chabot, et al, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: I Kissed A Squirrel and I Liked It. I'm sad that it's still necessary for some of these tropes about dating and what NOT to do to someone you're dating are necessary to mention--and really glad that comics are willing to mention them, and put them in the context of superpowered adventures. I raced through this.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. This was the last of Grandpa's books on my pile, and it took me forever to read--not mostly because of my awareness that it was the last, mostly because it is over a thousand pages of Nazis, and I kept needing to take breaks for my emotional well-being. Shirer was a journalist who had a front-row seat for a lot of things and could comment on the situation firsthand, which was particularly interesting in the early chapters (he did not have a front-row seat for the plot to assassinate Hitler, for example). This book is of its time, does not have all the context that we'd later have, but that's also where its value lies: you can see how much of this stuff was terrifyingly known immediately or soon thereafter, what it looked like while it was happening. I'm glad I read this. I'm glad I'm done reading it.

Martha Wells, Artificial Condition. The second Murderbot novella! Now featuring ART! I like ART so much. I continue to do the dance of Murderbot as it wends its way through frustrating human customs and societies and tries to figure out a place for itself. Looking forward to more unreservedly, highly recommended--I read this as a reward for finishing my own book draft.

Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

The first thing about this book is that it nails the voice. It's a 1930s British spy novel, and Rajaniemi gets that, down to the bones and, er, ectoplasm. It is intensely atmospheric; while the WWI of this book is not our WWI and the thirties that ensue are not our thirties, they have the same emotional heft, the same grit and shadow as ours. I like this a lot.

Second, what it has is follow-through on its worldbuilding. I watch a lot of procedurals with my workouts--no, a lot--no, really really a lot--and they quite often want to veer at least temporarily into an episode that has ghosts. But they don't want to think about the implications of the kind of ghosts they've chosen: how much they can observe the world of the living, how much they can interact with physical objects, what effects that would have on life in general and the setting of the procedural in specific. Because they don't want to write a ghost story, they want to write a procedural and do a little flirting on the side.

Hannu Rajaniemi wanted to write a ghost story. He wanted to think very, very hard about what all the implications would be if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that spirits could interact with our world in certain specified ways, that people could then build technologies and social structures around. And so there is a story with heart here, with very human characters doing very human things--but the world-building was just lovely, because it thought through surveillance and evidence in a world with ghosts, it thought through how you would go about building spy networks when death did not release your agents, and the story that ensued is a very emotionally complex human story with the speculative premise utterly essential.

I liked this a lot, and I recommend it highly.

Please consider using our link to buy Summerland from Amazon.

Books read, late June

It's panel prep season! A lot of my reading this fortnight was preparation either for Fourth Street or for Readercon. So: many rereads. And so little time for other things.

Edward Eager, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not?, The Time Garden, and The Well-Wishers. Rereads. The suck fairy had been at The Time Garden--there's barely a bit of it that isn't racially stereotyping and insensitive. Which makes me sad, because the general conceit of magic through varietals of thyme was cute and fun...but it made me aware that in my childhood I might not have encountered a character of Pacific Island heritage who was not portrayed as a cannibal, and that was pretty gross. (Nor was this the only example of racist portrayals in that book, nor was it Eager's only use of that trope--Magic by the Lake is the companion volume to The Time Garden, as the children in the two encounter each other in the same scene written from different perspectives.) I have a lot to say about Eager's relationship to Nesbit's works--that's the panel I'm preparing for--but here I will simply say that the difference between Nesbit doing her own thing and Eager looking back to try to do her thing looks pretty important to the result. The dubious magic pairing held up better (Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers)--the latter was in the "okay for its time" category regarding how coy it was about race while trying to take on the theme of desegregation in housing and education--doing that while carefully never using any words that might be race-markers and never letting the illustrator illustrate the Black characters is...pretty shaky ground. But at least the book came down on the side of "these people are people and we support that," I guess.

John M. Ford, From the End of the Twentieth Century and The Dragon Waiting. Rereads. The former is a brilliant and eclectic collection of short stories, essays, and poems. The latter...oh, oh, the latter. The Dragon Waiting holds up no matter how many times I reread it. It simultaneously does alternate history and does subtle meta things about alternate history and inevitability. It's got vampires and wizards and Richard III and a strong Byzantium and...stuff, it is full of stuff, it is entirely full of stuff, and every time I reread it there's something more I'd forgotten or hadn't fully apprehended. Highly, highly recommended.

Dorothy Heydt, The Witch of Syracuse. Kindle. This is a mosaic novel about a woman who is sometimes a physician and sometimes a witch. It's set in ancient Greece and does really well with its setting, historico-mythically. The heroine is engaging and fun, and the trials she runs into are interesting. Definitely enjoyed and would recommend. (Free! -ed)

E. Nesbit, Five Children and It. Reread. Actually held up substantially better than Eager despite being almost twice as old: Nesbit's children are flawed, forthright, stubborn little beasts having magic adventures, and it's still reasonably fun. She takes more care than her era really would have found proper to make sure she's not stereotyping Roma people (not perfectly successful at this--but better than not trying), and there are little pokes and jabs at the status quo in odd and charming places.

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Will Murray, Chris Schweitzer, et al. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Like I'm the Only Squirrel in the World and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Who Run the World? Squirrels!. These are just plain fun. Especially if you have no reverence for the other Marvel superheroes and enjoy seeing them skewered, mocked, and parodied. There is nut-eating as well as butt-kicking in these.

G. Willow Wilson et al, Ms. Marvel: Super Famous. I like Ms. Marvel a lot and enjoyed this comic, gentrification and all, but it suffered by being read in close proximity to the Squirrel Girl comics, because they took nearly identical paths to their young heroines' romantic lives. Ideally there will be more divergence in future. Meanwhile it was still reasonably fun to encounter Kamala's super adventures overlapping with her family stuff.