Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Books read, late May

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:51:14 GMT

Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. This book is thinking quite intensely about the points of commonality among kinds of coerced work in the US, particularly imprisoned labor, "workfare" programs, and the graduate student and student athlete labor associated with the American university. Hatton is being very careful about the ways in which these types of labor are dissimilar as well as similar, and there are lots of interesting thoughts on how this impacts the labor, the laborers, and the larger labor pool in which we exist.

Andrew Hiller, Hornytown Chutzpah. Discussed elsewhere.

Mark Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph that, among other things, goes into some detail about considering what meaning the "Bronze Age" has beyond the geographic region where it originated. Revising thoughts about trade and tool use based on new information about this era is pretty cool, the idea that the future is not arriving linearly anywhere is usefully exemplified here.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. Kindle. Rereads. The latter is an ongoing favorite I've read many times and find delightful; the former is my least favorite Moomin book, and there's a reason I haven't reread it since I was about 8. Basically it's Moominpappa Explores Mildly Toxic Masculinity. He pouts whenever he doesn't feel other people are centering and deferring to him enough; he stomps around making other people clear up after his messes; he is just generally an extremely unpleasant version of his previous self, and I hope I remember not to go back to this one again soon. Especially when November is always there. And the others.

Shay Kauwe, The Killing Spell. This is an own-voices post-climate-apocalypse fantasy whose use of languages is, I think, much closer to what many of my friends wanted in Rebecca Kuang's Babel. Its character is part of a complex family and community whose relationships with each other did not ever get oversimplified. I really enjoyed it and hope it gets attention, because frankly I don't think the title and cover are doing it any favors.

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. I sure hope that Keefe has a good therapist and personal life, because he so consistently writes about such awful people. And one of the things that makes him very good at what he does is that he doesn't get drawn into the "glamor" of horrible rich people. But oof. Criminals and Russian oligarchs in contemporary London, terrifying but interesting and well done.

Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. This is a single essay in a beautifully published edition. It was published as a book because this is a former poet laureate, not because it in any way counts as an entire book. It's a reasonable enough essay but I'm glad the library had it because it would have disappointed me to spend money on it only to find the number of blank/ornamental pages.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death of an Author, Fell Murder, Post After Post-Mortem, and These Names Make Clues. Kindle. Lorac continues to write quite good Golden Age puzzle mysteries. The one I thought succeeded least here was the last of them. When your pen name is openly known to be an acronym (this is an author who is secretly a lady named Carol!!!), and then you title the book These Names Make Clues...having the names literally as clues is not a good mysterious mystery premise.

Sujata Massey, The Star from Calcutta. The latest in this series, and I think it's flagging a little but still worth having. This time it's gone into early filmmaking in India for its setting, which is fun and interesting.

Jo Miles, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit. A really cool exploration of this fruit throughout its range in the US, which does not include where I am, so it's interesting but from one step over. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in how produce gets bred and marketed and/or local fruits, definitely of interest.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Frankly much more useful in terms of interesting and provocative/inspiring essay writing about creative work. Lots of writers should read this and think about it.

D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Kindle. I continue my slow-motion comparison of epics from different parts of the world. This one was somewhat defensive about its tradition--but a lot of writing down of oral epics does come out that way.

Emmet A. O'Brien, Both Your Houses and Ever Vexed With Storms. Discussed (both books, separately) elsewhere.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Daughter Who Remains. Kindle. Coming full circle in this series, and for heaven's sake don't start here; you'll know if you've read the rest of the series and want this conclusion, and if you do I think it'll be satisfying.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. No actual centaurs were harmed in this Renaissance Italy fantasy novel. It's the second in its series and worth reading the first if you think you might be interested; artists and powerful families and religious figures abound. It's non-fantastical except for a divine possession that might be literal or might be a really intense metaphor. I like this kind of big historical novel and would like to find more.

Rebecca Roanhorse, River of Bones and Other Stories. Oh gosh am I glad this exists. Several favorite things and also some new-to-me things, hurrah for having them collected, hurrah.

Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There. This is a reasonable collection but not one of her absolute barnstormers. If you like her essays previously, you'll probably like this; if not, probably try another thing first to find out.

Kory Stamper, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color--From Azure to Zinc Pink. I thought this was going to be about colors, pigments, and dyes, and it is not, it is about the Merriam-Webster 3rd edition dictionary and the people who figured out how to define colors in words to their particular standards. Stamper is a vivid prose stylist, and this was interesting and not terribly long.

D.E. Stevenson, The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces. Kindle. These two are marked third and fourth in a series, but I would call them third and vaguely-related. They're both light middlebrow midcentury novels, and I enjoyed both, but only one is really stand-alone.

Molly Tanzer, And Side By Side They Wander. Molly's deep knowledge and love of art history really shines through in this novella, and she sets up her characters to ring changes on her theme very skillfully. It's one of the many novella cases where I wanted more room for them to do so, but I don't read the ending as very open to a sequel? I could be wrong. It's marketed as a heist and then the focus is very much elsewhere, which was fine with me, but if what you're looking for today is center-of-genre heist fiction, maybe read something else and come back to this a different day.

Jessie L. Weston, trans., Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four lais rendered into English Prose. Kindle. Weston did a bunch of translations of Arthuriana and similar eras of heroic poetry, and this volume is four Breton examples. If you're interested in more examples of that, here are some. If you're not, I wouldn't recommend them as the place to start or as particularly good exemplars.

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Ever Vexed With Storms, by Emmet A. O'Brien

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:26:30 GMT

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

Zamyatin is a Recusant world. Its people have considered the advantages of membership in humanity's great interplanetary Hegemony and decided that oh gosh, no thank you, they're washing their collective hair that day. But there are dangers in the universe that do not play by the Hegemony's rules, so sometimes careful diplomacy with the Recusing worlds is required. Enter our heroine.

Corin Oshima is still outrunning the timewave resultant from altering the timeline around the horrible events of Rossem (before this series begins), but she is also dealing with the fallout from more recent events on Eisenhower (in Both Your Houses). Gangster Charlie Salamanca has gotten away, and in a world with extensive body modifications available, he could be anywhere--or anyone. But Corin can't focus on that right now. She's busy trying to make sure that neither Zamyatin nor its already-shaky relationship with the Hegemony is destroyed.

This series continues to be really excellent at its balance of thought and action. If you want space opera that considers the nature of the universe both morally and physically--now! with cool aliens!--this is the series for you. This is volume two, and I happen to know there's more to come. Yay.

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The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, by Jo Miles

Sun, 31 May 2026 17:33:55 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher, who is also my publisher, and Jo is a friend.

Ada is the heir not only to a duchy on another planet, but also a tradition of portal fantasy, beloved by many and written by her ancestor. She has spent her life striving for her stern, authoritarian grandfather's approval. The planet outside and its biological wonders have been last on her consideration list.

But when she runs into an old classmate who is trying desperately to get his botanical research in before the alien habitat is destroyed, she starts to question her assumptions about the planet outside--and about her ancestor's research for her beloved novels. What has she been missing all this time--and what did he miss generations ago? The richness of alien life is far beyond what she's seen before. Ada enters into a desperate race to convince her grandfather of the importance of beings beyond his assumptions and join in her classmate's efforts to find out more. If you love Narnia or rhizomes--or especially if you're like me and love both--this is for you.

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Both Your Houses, by Emmet A. O'Brien

Tue, 26 May 2026 14:22:19 GMT

Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend of decades standing.

This is the first book in a sweeping space opera series (Vega Victrix), but many readers will be relieved (may even throw parades or dance in the streets) to discover that this volume has an ending rather than merely stopping for a minute until the next one. Also, the second one will be out at the same time! More on that in a few days.

Corin Oshima is afraid of her past catching up with her--literally. After her horrible mission on Rossem, she traveled away at more than the speed of light. So when Rossem's history was altered, so was Corin's, and it's only a matter of time (again, literally) until the information wave traveling at the speed of light reaches her and obliterates her past, providing her with a new one--or, if she is too untethered to the current world, taking her out with it.

But she's not just sitting around waiting for time to make fools of us all. As all of us conscientious souls know, there's always work to do--and unfortunately there are always exploiters trying to spend their time treating people and lands as profit sources instead. Further complicating Corin's life are aliens who are rational but very much not human in their priorities, political complications among the human "Houses"...and the person she least wants to see in the universe right now. Even a well-educated and interestingly modified future human like Corin has her hands full!

I have read this entire series to date in draft and am thrilled to see that it's going to be available to the rest of the world so you all can talk to me about it. Highly recommended.

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Hornytown Chutzpah, by Andrew Hiller

Sat, 23 May 2026 18:00:27 GMT

Review copy provided by the author, who's a convention/online buddy.

Sometime in your life, you've probably met a smartass who always has a joke for every occasion--and then gradually realized that this person was genuinely kind. That they were not punching down, and mostly they weren't punching at all, instead focusing their jokes on wry incongruity or situation rather than mocking individual people. That there was a core of tenderness behind the wisecracking. If you know the kind of person I mean (let's be real: several of you are the kind of person I mean), you will understand Sol, the narrator of Hornytown Chutzpah pretty much right away. He's not just called Solomon the Wise Guy for a wry historical reference. He's definitely a wiseacre--but not as dumb as he might joke that he is. He's coping using a very specific kind humor--in this case, the instantiation of it that shows up in a lot of American Jewish culture.

And boy, does Sol have a lot to cope with. I knew I was hooked all the way when the guy who is enough of a smartass to earn the nickname Solomon the Wise Guy can be brought to action with a reference to tikun olam. Look, friends, I'm not Jewish, but I know that one. A call to repair the world? those are lyrics everyone can enjoy. And having it be a touchstone, a point that rings our hero like a bell? I'm in, I'm all in.

The Hornytown of the title is an incursion of Hell into the Washington, DC, area, complete with hellfire around it and sin-eating demons within (and sometimes without). It's run by a figure that will look unfortunately familiar, but rest assured that our hero is all-in against him. I was frankly worried by the title, because my interest in "city of people who would like to have a lot of sex" is pretty minimal, but it's not that kind of Hornytown at all. Whew. Is there chutzpah, though? There is chutzpah to spare. Which is a good thing, because the literally hellish nature of the problems Sol faces will require it.

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Books read, early May

Mon, 18 May 2026 21:31:35 GMT

Lois McMaster Bujold, Dark Sight Dare. Kindle. This is a very nice novella. It is not twisty, it is not startling, it is a very kind story about people doing their best with difficult circumstances. I don't think it's the best place to begin the series, but it's a pleasant addition thereto.

William Dalrymple, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. Kindle. It's a really useful and thoughtful book, but what it is not is uplifting. Great Game my arse. Anyway it's still worth knowing this stuff, it affects the modern world and remains interesting.

Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. Oh this was so good. Oh my goodness, this was so good. Again not with the uplifting, except that in some ways it was, that people's determination to free themselves and their families was actually pretty wonderful, and hearing the details of how they did it--this should be taught in more schools all over North America, this was absolutely great. Some people fled completely naked! They just got out, and reading about their communities and lives was really neat.

Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Kindle. I was on vacation! I'm so much fun to take on vacation! This is a book about the early AIDS epidemic in Haiti and featuring Haitians abroad, and it does actual math and science about how the Haitian people were far, far more sinned against than sinning here. Not fun times but useful to know--and Farmer wrote a new preface about dealing with new pandemics, alas that he should have to.

Margaret Frazer, Shakespeare's Mousetrap. Kindle. The supposed secret history of Titus Andronicus and its role in (fictional) actual murder; I think this is my least favorite of her shorts, and probably I should just stop reading them, completeness is not an unmixed virtue.

Sarah Gristwood, Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Kindle. Queens and princesses and what they did and where they went, not enough breadth in my opinion but still better than nothing.

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. Kindle. This is a book from about ten years ago, and it's heartbreaking how real and deadly these problems already were then, and how much worse now.

W.F. Kirby, The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country. Kindle. You can probably tell from the way this is titled that it is a quite old book. It maddeningly is not the Kalevipoeg but rather a sort of summary of the Kalevipoeg. Kirby blithely informs us that he has omitted many irrelevant passages, some of which might have been of great interest to me, but this is very much a beggars/choosers situation. It exists, I could read this much at least, welp.

E.C.R. Lorac, Murder in Vienna. Kindle. Golden Age puzzle-type mystery. I did not bond with any of the characters, but it rattled along reasonably well and I will keep reading this author.

Casey McQuiston, The Pairing. Kindle. I continue to explore the boundaries of what romance I might like, and the answer here is: eh. It was briskly written, it was amusing, it was fine on a train...and I continued to want the character relationships with other people to matter.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. Second book in her "Botticelli trilogy," historical fiction set during the Italian Renaissance. This is mostly not fantasy (no centaurs were harmed in the making of this book) except for the bit where someone might be possessed by a deity from antiquity. I think it will work better if you've read the first one, so you know what she's doing with her fictional central characters in the middle of all the real historical figures.

Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. I didn't set out to have a slavery theme in the nonfiction reading in this fortnight, but I found this in the Museum of Archaeology and History in Montreal and knew I wouldn't find it again readily. It was really good at nuance and variation in ways that were extremely informative.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle Married. Kindle. The second in its very light series, and don't start with this one; you'll enjoy the central characters more if you have the perspective on where they started. Short. Fun.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Monday Starts on Saturday. Kindle. A reread technicality: this is a very different, and much better, translation than the one I read a few decades ago. I feel like this is particularly crucial for speculative satire. Luckily for me, this edition translates the title as "starts" whereas the other translates it as "begins," so it will be easy to keep track of which one I want. Surreal and funny.

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys. Kindle. I read this because I trust Claire Tomalin as a biographer, not because I have a particularly keen interest in Pepys, and it did not disappoint. Her sense of context, her ability to be thoughtfully positive where possible without losing track of her subject's flaws--she's one of the best in the business, and this is an interesting book even if you're not completely fascinated with Pepys.

Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne. Kindle. The ending spelled itself out in such clear detail from the outset that I can't really say it's one of my favorite Trollopes, but it's not one of my least favorites either, as he wasn't notably bigoted in any particular direction--and in fact he seemed to be arguing for acceptance of "illegitimate" children as full members of society. It was a reasonable thing to read on a plane.

Vanessa Walters, The Lagos Wife. A thriller set in Nigeria among the foreign-born wives of wealthy Nigerians. While the twist ending wasn't my favorite, the multiplicity of cultural perspectives was exquisitely well-done and nuanced. I'll keep an eye out for anything else Walters chooses to do.

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I think that about covers it

Wed, 06 May 2026 14:35:15 GMT

Hello, friends. I've got something to show you

It's a book cover! In fact it is my book cover! Because...you can preorder my novella, A Dubious Clamor, directly from the publisher or from an assortment of bookstores of your choice! In ebook or hardcover editions! Isn't it pretty? Isn't it appropriate for the book?

Okay, so you can't know whether it's appropriate for the book yet. But you can trust Naomi Kritzer, friend and multi-award winner, who describes this book as, "No war but class war; also, harpies!" (She also says it's "delightful, unique, and frequently hilarious," in case you were wondering.) Some other awesome people describe it as things too! Wonderful people like authors Ruthanna Emrys and Davinia Evans and critic Paul Weimer! Do you want to know what those things are? You can see them on the pre-order page!

But wait! there's more. (You did the right voice in your head for that, right?) If you preorder, you can not only get this lovely novella (ooooh! aaaaah!), you can also get a really cool sticker of a skeptical sword! You can put this on your laptop, phone, water bottle, small child, or other sticker-bearing device! Be the envy of your friends and neighbors, or at least those of your friends and neighbors who are cool enough to like sword stickers. (As for the other kind, who cares what they think? You are a discerning individual who knows the value of sword stickers, and that's what matters.)

Don't go yet! There's still more. Sadly we currently live in the timeline that has class war but no harpies. (I have improved on this in the novella! Which you can read on September 15 if you preorder it now!) But do you know what our timeline does have? It has harpy eagles. Harpy eagles are so cool. And the lovely people at the World Wildlife Fund allow you to donate to support their habitat. Every person who preorders will be entered into a drawing (subject to sweepstakes laws in your jurisdiction) to win a harpy eagle plushie that also supports harpy eagles in real life! For each hundred pre-orders, we will add another harpy eagle plushie (and its attendant habitat support) to the drawing, so your odds of winning an awesome harpy eagle plushie to be your new cuddly pal and mascot will never be less than 1 in 100. Or you can pass it on to be the cuddly pal and mascot of someone else you know, that part is up to you. Similarly you can also preorder copies of the novella and not read them, if for some reason you're opposed to opinionated weaponry, fictional operetta, and cake in your reading life. I will warn you, there is much cake.

So here it is! Pre-order today! or also other days, that's fine too!

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Books read, late April

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:34:45 GMT

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

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Another first contact

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:24:55 GMT

I hope you're not tired of first contact stories, because I've gone and written another one. Apparently this is what's on my mind lately? Anyway here's Waiting for Them in Nature Futures, go, read, enjoy!

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Books read, early April

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:49:26 GMT

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. Reread. I'm going to be on the Plains of Abraham in May, and I would like to be able to know what I'm looking at. Also I really love this book. He's so good at the spots where different cultural assumptions clashed disastrously, and he managed to notice that that was happening between colonists and metropolitan British and between different Native tribes from very similar regions as well as between those groups with theoretically larger differences.

K.J. Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda. Kindle. I had to get a new ereader this month, and one of the up sides (down side: I just want to buy things once and have them work forever) is that this one accepts library books. So I went through my wishlist and found bunches of things that the library had in ebook but not in physical copy, hurrah. This was one of them. It was fun, it was...if you wanted the kind of action-y thing that The Prisoner of Zenda was but with modern sensibilities and LOTS of gay sex, this is that. It's not more than that, but it's also not less.

Peter Dickinson, Some Deaths Before Dying and The Tears of the Salamander. Kindle. Two very, very different books in genre terms--the former is a meditation on old age with a crime or two here or there, the latter is a kids' fantasy painted in generally bright colors. What they have in common--what a lot of Dickinson has as a common point--is the willingness to let some people just be rotten, to just go with that and have other people have to oppose it or work around it, and to know that it isn't necessarily the people they'd have expected would be. Neither will be a favorite but I'm glad I read both.

Nicci French, What Happened That Night. I feel like the subgenre of "college friends back together after at least a decade [in this case three], probably with some murder" is bigger now than it used to be, that in some ways it's taking the place of "high school reunion, probably with some murder." I have room for both, but I admit I prefer the college friends because of the element of being able to choose for yourself for the first time, and not always choosing wisely but understandably either way. I also feel like the college friend version tends to be more individual, less dealing in archetypes, both for the friends and for their college experience. I didn't find the very ending of this one particularly satisfying, but it also wasn't bad enough that I won't try more of French's work.

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief. Okay, so I did not expect to like Tennyson ever, and then my dad died and now I do like Tennyson, I'm as surprised as anyone really. But this sort of thing, where there is a person working in the arts and someone traces the influences of contemporary science on their work: I could read this kind of thing all day. Yes please.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death on the Oxford Road. Kindle. An older British mystery, with a really delightful older woman character who has muscular dystrophy and a history nursing in the Great War. Just the sort of thing I like when I'm in the mood for this sort of thing, will seek out more of her stuff.

Sarah Gold McBride, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. I was happy with how this book handled race and gender, but I was a little disappointed it didn't go into more detail about subcultural signaling with the infinite varieties of facial hair that were au courant at various times in the stated period, and I felt like there were a lot of questions where more comparison with what was going on in the outside world would have been illuminating. And it wasn't terribly long, so I felt like there was room for it. Ah well.

Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate: Poems. Sometimes I'm very glad to have encountered one thing before another, and this is one of those cases: I found Venice far more resonant than Distant Mandate for reasons I'd have to go through with a fine-toothed comb to figure out. Not sorry to have read either, but I'll likely return to the other one and not to this.

Solvejg Nitzke, The Elegance of Ferns: Portrait of a Botanical Marvel. This is very brief and lavishly illustrated--I went around the house singing "Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about ferrrrrns" for the whole time I was reading it, but luckily for my family that was not very long. (Nirvana joke, sorry, don't worry about it.) It's not what I'd call a deep dive, but if you have days in these parlous times when you could benefit from reading a nice quiet book about plants, complete with pretty pictures--and I know I do--then this is that.

Gin Phillips, Ruby Falls. There is a character in this called Ruby. She does not fall. It's just that that's what the place is called. If I was from the South I might have taken that for granted, but I'm not, so I wanted to warn you. Anyway it is about the Tennessee waterfall and all the adjacent underground caves and trails, and it is very, very claustrophobic and full of grim natural danger (underground caves are not safe, buddies!) as well as the more tiresome human kind. The plot hinges on one of the most obvious questions of identity that one would ever think to not mistake, and Phillips makes it clear that it is in character for the person who is an idiot to be an idiot, but...still an idiot plot in that sense. Luckily there is a lot more cave stuff to think about instead. Again willing to try more from this author, again not fabulously impressed by the ending.

Anthony Price, The Alamut Ambush, Colonel Butler's Wolf, October Men, Our Man in Camelot, Other Paths to Glory, War Game, The '44 Vintage, and Tomorrow's Ghost. Rereads. This is about half this series (not quite half), and I didn't read it all in one go like this the first time through. I have clear favorites and unfavorites, and there's a pattern to them: basically I think that Price is at his best when he's writing about British men, and the more he's trying to do something else the worse the book was. I'm not sorry to have reread The Alamut Ambush (not actually the better for exoticizing both Arab and Israeli characters approximately equally) and Our Man in Camelot (his Americans are SO BAD), but I also won't have any need to do it again, and Tomorrow's Ghost left a bad taste in my mouth (THIS is what you're doing with your first female protag in the series, Price? really?). On the other hand, Other Paths to Glory and War Game were really good at what they do. I didn't stop here because of lack of enthusiasm, I had library books intervening.

Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown. I'm not at all sure why this is a separate book, except that it had its own strong effect in 1938 and its author didn't do other things to collect with it? It's an epistolary short story about the breakdown of a friendship as one of its members is swallowed as an Aryan into the Nazi regime and the other stays safe as an American Jew. It is harrowing, and one can only imagine its effect at the time.

Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Kindle. I really like how she gives the political and cultural background for what these scientists were working around in getting to appropriate locations with useful equipment to measure the Transit of Venus in the mid-18th century. It was a good book to read in close proximity to Crucible of War, lots of stuff proximate to each other but not covered in both volumes. Also I find the early assumptions that each new method will work well and give great answers right away extremely touching. Science: it takes a minute, and you learn different stuff than you expected.

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A Long and Speaking Silence, by Nghi Vo

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:55:35 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Welllll, I bet Vo wishes this was less topical.

Given the time it takes to put a book through production, she was clearly thinking about refugees and their treatment with the cohort of us who knew that it was a crucial world political issue before the early months of 2026. But now here we are, and hey, look! A protagonist who is sensitive to and helping refugees without requiring them to be moral paragons! Everybody buy two copies and pass them around, its time has come.

I am not being sarcastic.

This is the latest in the Singing Hills Cycle, which is the chronicles of Cleric Chih and their memory hoopoe, Almost Brilliant. It is a perfectly good entry point to the series--you will smoothly and swiftly find out who these people are, what they're up to, and why you should care, and then you can circle back and read the others as you can find them. (They're still in print, but we live in parlous times etc.) And while the plight of refugees is not exactly an upbeat topic, the different volumes have different levels of harrowing, and this is definitely on the less-harrowing end, which often makes for a good starting point. (Again parlous times.) I'm glad this series is ongoing, and I'm glad this is the way it's going on.

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Wolves

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:35:12 GMT

New poem out today in Uncanny! I wrote The Truth About Wolves for my beloved younger godchild. I hope you enjoy it too.

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Books read, late March

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:15:28 GMT

George Abraham and Noor Hindi, eds., Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. Some poets in this new to me, some I'd read in their own collections. I think one of the benefits of a collection like this is that it's much harder for an uncareful reader to think "I guess I don't like Palestinian poetry" because there's so much variety of it, even the stuff that's focused on Being Palestinian as opposed to all the other things Palestinian poets write poems about.

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. Rereads. Ha. "Rereads." Probably the most reread books of my life after the first decade. I was just thinking that maybe this would be the reread when I got nothing new out of them except continued enjoyment and then I came upon the passage that made me cry about living in Minnesota in early 2026, thanks, Lloyd. (Seriously though thanks, sometimes we need the catharsis.)

Rebecca Boyd, Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes. Glad that a friend talked about this, because it does exactly the sort of thing I like where it talks about where the interior walls went in a typical building changing over time and what that meant socially and where people stored their hazelnuts and that. Material culture for the win.

Andre M. Carrington, ed., The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. A book club read, and I feel like reaction was not unified but more unified than a lot of the other books we've discussed--a lot more closer to "we all think this is a very good story," "nobody likes this story but we all respect it," etc. Still a lot that's worth discussing here.

Christopher de Hamel, The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts. Lavishly illustrated and focused on the people who have been focused on the manuscripts. If you're a person who thinks of yourself as having friends and kindred souls across spacetime, de Hamel is with you, and here is a book about some of his and the (increasingly old) books they loved.

Peter Dickinson, King and Joker. Reread. One of the most coming of age coming of age stories I have ever read in my life, wrapped in a tidy murder mystery, with Dickinson getting to do an alternate history of a type that is often neglected, the fairly minor change type. I still do like this for its complicated relationships that are allowed to stay complicated.

Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass and Iron. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. Creative nonfiction about the effects of violence at every scale, sweeping where I would have liked it to be specific, readable but not really what I was looking for.

Rokeya Hussain, Sultana's Dream and Padmarag. Mostly historically interesting rather than fun reads for me: this is the work of a very early 20th century Indian feminist writer who used the structure of a dream to talk about the future--popular at the turn of the last millennium, from what I can tell. It was very much a "nuh uh we don't suck, you suck" vision in places, but one can understand that in context. And now I know.

Ange Mlinko, Venice: Poems. Literal and figurative Venice, waters and references. I liked this in a mellow sort of way, even though they aren't all mellow poems.

Jared Poon, City of Others. I'm not sure what's getting us so many good Singaporean authors available in the US in the last decade or so, but I'm for it, I'm absolutely for it. This is in the "weird magical things handled by a specialist in a modern city" subgenre, which I like depending on the skill of the author and the interest of the magical things, and this has both skill and interest.

Anthony Price, The Labyrinth Makers. Reread. Several of the other spy things I had recently revisited from the mid-late twentieth were, frankly, stupid, and I was a bit worried that this, which I remembered as non-stupid, would also be stupid. It was not. Whew. It was clearly a spy novel written both by and about a white British man in 1970, but with less of the attendant gender stuff and a lot less of the attendant race stuff than one might fear in that context. There are several more in this series, which I will also be revisiting as I get around to it, I think. One of the virtues of this series is that I remember them varying considerably; we'll see if and where that also ends up being one of its drawbacks.

T.K. Rex, The Wildcraft Drones. Discussed elsewhere.

John Sayles, Crucible. This is exactly what I wanted out of a John Sayles novel. I'm pretty sure he didn't write it just for me, but he could have. (This was also true of A Moment in the Sun and Yellow Earth.) This one is centered on Detroit in the Great Depression, with tentacles as far north as the UP and as far south as Brazil. It has Sayles's use of multiple perspectives that are genuinely different to make for a richer story of its placetimes and their people. Love it. I did notice that his rather too frequent habit of italicizing the single syllable of a word that would make the sentence sound like it would if David Strathairn was saying it, but you know, we all have our quirks.

Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped. I had enjoyed the others of Sebastian's things I'd read, two mysteries and an historical novel, all with a m/m love story in them, so I thought, hey, maybe I will like a genuine romance by this author, maybe we have found the place where my taste and genre romance overlaps. Answer: not quite. I read the whole thing, and it was fine, it's a nice book with nice people in it, but all the questions I had for the narrative were not the ones it was interested in answering. I can easily imagine describing a book the same way--"two actors who have been on the same science fiction TV series for years fall in love and have to navigate their personal, professional, and public selves"--and having it be focused on the questions that interest me...and that would not be this novel, which was largely interested in their relationship. Which is exactly what its genre claims it will do, and the people who are looking for that will likely find it very satisfying. Ah well, it's good to explore these things to find out.

Una L. Silberrad, Success. Kindle. I spent a lot of my college years and just beyond thinking and talking about the way that the image and self-image of physics and chemistry changed after each of the two World Wars, but it's still fascinating to stumble upon something like this, a pre-Great War book that lionizes its engineer hero to a degree that's been impossible since my grandparents came of age, that seems to take as its thesis that brilliant engineers gotta brilliant engineer, that assumes as obvious that of course a British engineer has the right to sell his weapon plans to France and Germany...in a novel that came out in 1912.... I continue to enjoy the places Silberrad actively rejected some of the standard romance plots that don't fit her characters. This is a book that also has places where I'm not sure whether she's actually neutral on there being background Jewish characters, but there's room for that reading, so I went with it. (Narrative: so lots of this guy's friends were Jewish; me: same, buddy, same; narrative: now on to the plot that has nothing to do with his pals; me: sure, okay.)

Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Another essay collection, about building the new in a time of turmoil, not one of her more outstanding books but still worth a read.

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (The Irish Member). Kindle. Is it Trollope's fault? the thing where people want to tell the stories of the emotional and professional lives of politicians without being, you know, political? Because I hate that thing, and here's a bunch of it--quite a large bunch--he is no more committed to brevity here than he ever was. The ending only makes sense structurally: you can see that's what he's working towards, but not because he's making anything make it satisfying, just because that's what this shape of thing is going to do and by God it does it. The thing is, it's Trollope, so this is not his least satisfying book, not by a long shot, because he manages not to make Finn a cartoon Irishman, thank God, except that it makes me say, okay, look, you could see some of the trouble of being a shunned ethnic minority in this context? yes? and yet when it came to Jewish people in your other books? yes? no, apparently no? But also it is not nearly one of the most satisfying Trollope books, because the tropes don't play well with the actual characters he's written. I see that there's a sequel, so I looked up a synopsis, and I think he saw that he'd done the same thing, but it doesn't make me want to read the sequel really, because I will get even angrier at the treatment of at least two characters as tools of the titular character's arc, I think.

Olivia Waite, Nobody's Baby. A novella with an unusual shape of mystery enabled specifically by the science fiction setting, which is much more satisfying to me than having science fiction upholstery and mystery engine. There were a few bits that were more mannered than I'd like, but I'd just been reading Trollope and may have gotten oversensitized.

Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic. Poems both metaphorically and literally about fungi, definitely right up my alley and I bet right up the alley of several other people around here too.

Darcie Wilde, The Matter of the Secret Bride. Another of the Rosalind Thorne mysteries--one of the two my library didn't have, so I read it a bit out of order. It's the kind of mystery series where that doesn't matter greatly, and the places where it touches on actual history were entertaining as hoped.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Everything Belongs to Us. I felt like the ending of this book did not really come together at all. The things Wuertz was trying to do with class at the beginning just fell apart, and especially how they tied in with the title mostly fell apart, and the bit where people actually overcame their obstacles to reach their goals mostly happened off the page between the last proper chapter and the epilogue. I hate to spoiler something like this, but I know that infant death and particularly infant death for plot convenience are very, very bad things for some of my friends to encounter unawares, so I'm going to say right out: there is a baby who is on the page for a large chunk of the novel and whose presence is not convenient, and then he just dies off the page and no one has to have any emotional reaction to it. Which is too bad, because the beginning was very promising, and we don't get a lot of novels in English about Seoul in the late 1970s. Endings are hard, I'll tell you that for free.

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The Wildcraft Drones, by T.K. Rex

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:09:25 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The line between mosaic novel and themed short story collection is a very blurry one, but I spent 99% of this book fairly sure that it was in the latter category. And then I got to the end and I don't know any more. These stories are linked thematically and by their science fictional world conceit. There's not an overarching character arc for any characters told in these tales.

...unless, as I was carefully taught as a high school sophomore, the setting can be a character, in which case there absolutely is character arc here, and a very settling/satisfying one too. These science fiction stories have a consistent thread of using technology to reach out to the natural world and to heal the things that are already broken in our time. There's a wide range of characters--dolphins, robots, cats! humans I guess if you need those!--and they are generally not perfect but doing their best, which is basically my favorite kind of characters.

I am not the target audience for the type of mini-comic that appears in a few places throughout the book, but these particular examples of the form are charming and fit well with the stories around them. I feel like "now, more than ever" is one of those cliches I don't want to lean too hard on in 2026, but also now, more than ever, we really do need stories about doing the best we can with what we've got, and these are that, and I'm so glad they're all in one place to lean on.

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Short stuff I've liked, first quarter 2026

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:35:21 GMT

This is more partial even than usual, because I've had some download problems that I've since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.

This Is Not a Love Poem, Alexandra Dawson (Reckoning)

I Met You On the Train, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)

The Doorkeepers, A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)

Unsettled Nature, Jordan Kurella (Apex)

Straw Gold, Mari Ness (Small Wonders)

No Kings/No Soldiers, A.M. Tuomala (Uncanny)

Blade Through the Heart, Carrie Vaughn (Reactor)

Antediluvian, Rem Wigmore (Reckoning)

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Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:56:57 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

This morning I wrote to another friend, "I've finished reading Amal's new collection, and now the only problem is how to write a review that's laudatory enough." "A good problem to have," my friend correctly noted.

Seriously, though. I've read most of these stories before, but when I came to each one, it was a matter of, "Oh, I loved this one!" rather than "Oh yeah, this one." There is a stylistic and thematic inclination to the stories that never rises to sameness. It's such a distillation of why I have been consistently happy to see these stories (and a few poems!) in the venues where they've appeared, for the years they've been appearing.

If you were hoping that this would be a source of new Amal stories, you'll have to keep waiting, this is the kind of collection that's a culmination of previous work rather than a revelation of new. But it's a beautiful slim volume, I'm thrilled to have it, I will press it upon my friends and relations, hurrah. Hurrah.

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Books read, early March

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:50:30 GMT

Ruth Awad, Set to Music a Wildfire. A poetry collection that is very directly about her experiences as a daughter of a Lebanese immigrant and her father's experiences in Lebanon. Interesting but not particularly subtle; I'm not sure it's fair to demand subtlety on these topics.

M.H. Ayinde, A Song of Legends Lost. A thumping big fantasy. Did I read this because one of the characters is eating plantains very early on and I love plantains? Well. That wasn't the only reason. But the things it said about the worldbuilding drew me in and kept me going for many hundred pages.

Shane Bobrycki, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Bobrycki noticed a gaping hole between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance when it came to the influence of large group behavior in Europe, and this book is him examining what we know about that, what crowds there actually were, what impact they had on the life of their cultures and why. He manages to remember that Europe does not just mean Italy at first and later France and England, which is always nice.

Eliane Boey, Club Contango. I really like Boey's prose, and this started out well for me, but as the narrative bore inexorably down on the plot twist and I could no longer pretend it would not be that particular plot twist--which I had foreseen at the very beginning and really hoped it would not be--I grew more and more frustrated. Here's hoping her next thing doesn't lean on a twist of that particular sort.

Sarah E. Bond, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. Bond is clear and explicit about where she's drawing parallels between modern unions and ancient groups that have similar traits, and she's willing to make her arguments about them specific rather than handwavey. A corrective for too much of the assumption that the people of the past were not like us, and an angle on the ancient world more interesting to me than most.

Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371. Definitely what it says on the tin, from the top-down perspective rather than anything about what these wars were like for the rank and file. Did you know the Scots were not a restful people in this era? welp.

Steph Cherrywell, The Ink Witch. I loved this so much. It's MG fantasy that's actually funny rather than adult-trying-too-hard, it's got ink magic and a tarantula familiar and a lovely fierce trans heroine whose plot is not about being trans, it's about magic quests and family politics and mermaids and yeti and running a little motel. It's so great, I'm so happy about this book.

P.F. Chisholm, A Taste of Witchcraft. At this point in this series (this is book 10, don't start here), we are no longer talking about an historical murder mystery series but more generally an historical adventure series. This one goes very, very vividly into the tortures accused witches suffered, so if you're not feeling up for that, maybe not this one. It also features quite a bit of my favorite characters in the series, though.

Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces. Discussed elsewhere.

Nicola Griffith, She Is Here. A short collection of essays, poems, and short stories. Most of the essays were familiar to me from previous sources, but they go well here thematically. I love Griffith's novels, but her shorter work does not feel as strong or essential to me. For me this is a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Bassem Khandaqji, A Mask the Color of the Sky. A novel about a young Palestinian man who has aspirations in both archaeology and fiction--who is writing a novel about Mary Magdalen, or trying to--who looks at the wider world and wants a wider life. And then he finds an ID that will allow him, with his particular appearance, to readily pass as a Jewish Israeli, and he does that for a while, and it's the sort of book where the complications are primarily internal, emotional, mental, about his place in the world and his identity, rather than thriller novel shooty-shoot complications. It's short and fairly straightforward.

Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Temporalities. Kindle. This is one of a series of short monographs that I downloaded a while ago, and it's the first where I've really felt that the format limited content beyond what was useful. I wanted a lot more context on emotionality and assessments of past/present/future in the cultures Pernau was discussing; I felt like more and longer examples would have strongly benefitted her argument. Ah well, I'm told you can't win them all.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Secrets. This is the latest of a collection of daily strips of the comic Phoebe & Her Unicorn, which I don't read daily, I read them in collection form. It is nice and fun and nice. Is this the best of them, no, but it does what I wanted it to do, it is a pleasant diversion.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. Reread. So one of the things I didn't fully notice when I read this the first time, 25 years ago on a friend's futon waiting for another friend's wedding, is that this is an almost perfect balance of Victorian and modern novel. Specifically: money is allowed to be the main concern. Money is discussed in detail, what food you can get for it and what clothes and what marriage will do about it and how we feel about that. Marriage is still considered to be the main way that women handle money, but no longer the only way (and the ending makes that matter rather than blurring to a romantic "isn't it lovely that the marrying couple just happens to have enough funds after all?" that some of the other books both Victorian and modern fall back on). It is very matter-of-fact about sex and sexuality for its publication date, but not in a smarmy or overbalanced way. This is also one of fiction's non-evil stepmothers, and bless her for that.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book. Kindle. A very gentle comedy about a spinster in a small village who writes a novel with keen observations of all her neighbors and sets the whole town on its ear. I'm fascinated by the line Stevenson manages to walk between letting the Great Depression feel real (Miss Buncle needs her book to make her money! it's not quite as money-focused as I Capture the Castle but still) and still keeping it upbeat for the people who were reading the book as an escape from that very same Great Depression. Not terribly deep, fairly predictable in its larger plot though not necessarily in its scene incidentals, fun all the same.

Ethan Tapper, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. I was a bit disappointed in this, which aims at being a lyrical memoir of a life in forestry. The lyricism is repetitive (which is harder to forgive considering how short this volume is) and in places twee (writing some sections about himself in the third person as "the man" did not work for me), and in general there was a great deal less how than I hoped for. He talked about what he was doing, he even talked in general terms about those who might not understand how killing plants could help a forest ecosystem. But as it was memoir rather than science essay, he felt no need to go into the evidence behind his positions--and, crucially, actions.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Discussed elsewhere.

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The Girl With a Thousand Faces, by Sunyi Dean

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:28:47 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is such a fresh and vivid fantasy, it is achingly sad and exciting and wry by turns. I am so glad I got to read this. It tangles two timelines, the "past" of the 1940s and the "present" of the 1970s, both in Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City slum and then reaching out to the areas around it. Mercy Chan doesn't have any memories when she washes up on the shores of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation--a terrible time to be friendless and unprotected. But she isn't quite either thing, because she has Bao, her maogui (cat ghost)--not a type of spirit known to be friendly, but Bao has apparently made an exception for Mercy.

Bao won't be the last of the local ghosts, spirits, and gods we meet in the course of this book (although he is my favorite). Mercy's talent at communicating with ghosts has given her steady work with the triads for decades. Now her past is catching up to her, and if she can't remember what it was, her future looks imperiled--and so does the future of Hong Kong itself. This is a book that seeks kindness in a world that doesn't always think it has room to be kind, and I found it to be a very satisfying read indeed.

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Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Walton & Palmer

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:55:48 GMT

(This silly site would not let me fit both of their whole names in the title. It's Jo Walton and Ada Palmer.)

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I've been friends with both authors for a good long while.

Which makes this a very weird book for me to read, honestly, because I met both Jo and Ada through SFF fandom and conventions, through all writing and talking and thinking about genres, and so a lot of the first third of this book is, for me, "the obvious stuff people talk about all the time." Well, sure. Because Jo and Ada are people, and I am around them talking about this kind of thing all the time (or at least intermittently for more than twenty years in one case and more than fifteen in the other, so it adds up), so naturally their points of view on genre theory are in the general category of "stuff I would logically have been exposed to by now." It's a bit "Hamlet is just a string of famous quotes strung together," as reactions go: kind of the cart before the horse. And it means that there are a few things that are in the category of "oh right, there's the thing I always disagree with Jo about; look, she still has her own idea about it rather than mine, go figure." This is to be expected given the long and winding discussion it's been, but it makes it a bit harder for me to say useful things about what it will look like to most readers.

So the first third of the book is the part that most obviously fits the title--it's the section that has the largest-scale thoughts about the nature of genre qua genre. The second third was the most satisfying to me: it was thoughts on disability and pain. I think a too-casual reader might mistake it for random padding to make this book book-length without requiring Jo and/or Ada (some of the sections are co-written and some are written solo by each author) to write more entirely new material. But no. Absolutely not. The way that Jo and Ada process disability is strongly shaped by each of their perspectives as SFF writers and readers, and the way they process SFF is--sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly--shaped by their lived experiences as disabled people. Some of our personal stories are about the project of science fiction and fantasy. Jo's and Ada's are. And they're useful--powerful--to see on the page like this. This is where knowing people for a quite long time doesn't give me a "yes I have already been here" reaction, because three disabled friends do not talk about disability and personal history and its place in the speculative project in the same way as two of them would write about it for a general audience. It's a view from a very different angle, which is great to have. The last section is more miscellany, still related to the title but more specifics, less sweeping theory. It's labeled craft, and this is true, but in a broad sense--there are pieces about The Princess Bride and optimism and censorship as well as about protagonists and empathy in a structural sense.

I wonder if people who come to this book from reading mostly Ada rather than both but by the numbers more Jo would see how Jo has influenced Ada's prose voice in the joint pieces. For me, the stylistic commonalities with Inventing the Renaissance were really striking, but if you'd come directly from reading that I wonder how much you'd be saying, oh, that's got to be Jo Walton because it's not really what I'm used to from Ada Palmer solo! Co-authorship is an interesting beast, and I feel like there's a difficult balance here that's partially achieved by having pieces by each person solo as well as the two together. I'm not sure I can immediately come up with another thing like it that way.

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I speak fluent human

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:18:08 GMT

New story out in Clarkesworld: Person, Place, Thing! This was such a fun voice for me to fall into writing, and it ended up surprising me with how many Muppet references it wanted. Usually I am opposed to "I am but a servant of the muse" claptrap from writers, but when that muse is demanding aliens who have very earnestly learned from mid-to-late period Henson...well, what am I to do?

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Books read, late February

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:23:17 GMT

Joan Coggin, The Mystery at Orchard House, Why Did She Die?, and Dancing With Death. So I finished this series all in one gulp, which I wouldn't have done if a friend had not lent me the last two, but...they did, so here we are, no regrets whatsoever. They're very much on the light end of mystery, and Lady Lupin remains funny and generally quite kind. I don't know that they're going to change your life except for giving you some pleasant hours in your life, which...sometimes is the kind of changing your life a person needs right now.

Kate Emery, The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder. This is a YA mystery from an Australian writer, and while I don't know a lot of Australian teens, the voice feels authentic to me. Another on the light end of mystery, successfully so.

Jamie Holmes, The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America's Forgotten War. I really appreciated having a lot more about this period filled in. I feel like the way that American schools taught the Trail of Tears, at least when I was in school and I strongly suspect now, sort of...had it happen in isolation. Did not encourage people to do the math and realize that the Southern whites who were "defending their way of life" had in many cases had that land and that way of life for less time than I've lived in the house I live in now. The relationships between Black Americans and Native Americans have been complex and interesting, and a book that focuses on some of that also does a better job of decentering whiteness than many histories, so hurray for that.

S.L. Huang, The Language of Liars. Discussed elsewhere.

Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran's Woman-Led Uprising. Oof, the timing on this one. Well. It's an earnest account from two writers, one of whom was on the ground for the events described. This is very recent history--2022-24 or thereabouts--so if you don't have any familiarity with Iran outside that period you'll probably want additional reading before or after reading this, but I think after would be fine, I think you could learn about these brave women now and get more of their backstory later with no problem.

Judy I. Lin, Song of the Six Realms. This was secondary world YA fantasy that frankly did not stick with me particularly well. There was a girl musician swept away to a magical realm with peril and stuff, and it was fine, it did just fine at that, but I wasn't really driven to seek out more of the author's work.

C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. For my group of friends I am very much toward the "non-game-enthusiast" end of the spectrum, so one of the things that was interesting to me about this book is that he could be very clear about what things appeal to game enthusiasts in ways that I could understand even if I didn't share them. But I think the parallels and cross-connections with games and metrics, and how to keep that from growing toxic, is some really useful stuff, worth thinking about.

Karen Parkman, The Jills. This was a very readable thriller that ended up mildly disappointing to me in the end. The protagonist is a member of the Buffalo Bills American football team's cheerleader group, the Jills (if you're like me you did not know that they had a special name), and another of her cheerleader friends goes missing. She has dealt with missing loved ones before because her sister has struggled with addiction, which makes for compelling backstory in a thriller context. However, I felt like several of the plot twists were not very smart ("what if your stalker actually helps you out and is not the real problem" no stop that), and the ending pulled its punches both on dealing with the toxic aspects of professional football cheerleading that it had started to gesture at and at making the protagonist deal with her personal life choices and history.

Cat Sebastian, After Hours at Dooryard Books. I am a tough sell for romances, and I don't want to say "but this isn't a romance" just because I like it. It is, it is a romance between two men in 1968. It is also an historical novel about grief. It is both, it can be both, and it is very beautifully both. It also involves raising a baby and learning to be a family. It is also about moving forward from things you are not proud of without denying they've happened. I love this book. I am so glad about this book. I picked it up because two different friends said it was just what they needed right now, and it was just what I needed too.

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The Language of Liars, by S.L. Huang

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:43:09 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a novella with a whole range of aliens with different language features, wildly different environments, etc. Several of my friends just stopped reading this review to go pre-order or request that their library do so. You are correct, if that is the sort of thing you like, this sure is that thing.

What it does less successfully, I think, is the twist ending. I feel like this is a book that is for people who like science fiction about aliens, but for me, as soon as I knew the premise, I knew the ending, and I was correct. So if you're reading for the aliens, come on in; if you're reading for a clever twist you did not see coming, this is not that novella, that is not where Huang spent time and energy.

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Books read, early February

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:47:52 GMT

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Ride a Rising Storm. I'm usually a second book person, but this one took a minute to win me over. I think the bar was set so high by the first one that when the second one felt like "more of the same," I was disappointed. It is, however, going somewhere, and it finished up with a bang, and I am very excited for the third one. (But where it finished with a bang was more like a starting pistol. Do not expect closure here. This is very much a middle book.)

Lila Caimari, Cities and News. Kindle. A study of how newspapers evolved and influenced the culture in late 19th century South American cities, which was off the beaten Anglophone path and rather interesting, especially because the way that snowy places were exoticized pretty much exactly paralleled how these cities were exoticized in snowy places.

Colin Cotterill, Curse of the Pogo Stick, The Merry Misogynist, and Love Songs from a Shallow Grave. Rereads. And this, unfortunately, is where the series ends for me. I enjoyed Pogo Stick, and then the other two had mystery plots that were "serial killer because tormented intersex person" (REALLY STOP IT, these books came out in the 21st century, NOT OKAY) and "bitches be crazy, yo" (WELP). The mystery plots are not nearly as central to these mysteries as one might expect of, well, mysteries, but on the other hand they are integral to the book and not ignorable and I am done. When I read this series previously I endured these two in hopes that it would get better again, and now I know it doesn't. Well. Five books I like is more than most people manage.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Field Guide to the End of the World. I still resonate less with prose poems than with other formats of poem, and this had several, but it was otherwise...unfortunately apropos, a worthy companion in our own ongoing ends of worlds.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa's Memoirs. Kindle, reread. Charming and quirky as always, with some hilarious moments about memoir that went over my head when I was small.

Laurie Marks, Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic. Rereads. I still really enjoy this series, but on the reread it was quite clear to me that water is very, very much the weakest element here, no contest. The water witches are not really portrayed as people, nobody with water affinity gets to be a character, they're very much the "oh yeah I guess we have more than three elements" element in this series. Water is the element I connect with the most strongly. I still like this series, I still think it's doing really good things with peace being an active rather than passive state and one that has to be made by imperfect humans--more unusual things than they should be. As with the Cotterill books above, the fact that it was a reread meant that I couldn't keep saying to myself, "Maybe there'll be more on this later," because there won't, the series is complete. But in contrast to the Cotterill it was complete in a way I still find satisfying.

Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing. This is a family history novel with strong--in fact integral--fantastical elements, but only the realistic plot resolution is satisfying, not the fantasy plot at all. The fantasy elements are required for the plot to happen as portrayed, there's no chance they're only metaphors, but they only work as metaphors. Ah well. If you're up for a Chinese family history novel that goes into detail of the horrors of both the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, this one has really good sentences and paragraphs. But go in braced.

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Books read, late January

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:48:33 GMT

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.

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The Subtle Art of Folding Space, by John Chu

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:35:58 GMT

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a dear friend, and I read an earlier draft.

I'm so glad we're finally closing in on the day when the rest of you can talk about this delightful weird book with me. If you've been reading John's short stories for all these years, rest assured that this book has the same heart and the same absolutely fresh take on the world and its structures. If you haven't, what a treat you have ahead of you! Go forth and read!

This book, though. Okay. Ellie looks after the structure of the universe far more than most of us with physics training. She regularly visits the skunkworks, an extra-universe space that allows for tweaking and re-coding the laws of this and other universes. John puts the physics in metaphysics here--there's a whole community of people dedicated to this work in a way that's a lot more like a branch of engineering, architecture, or software design.

Unfortunately, most of that community has been poisoned against her by her self-righteous, violent, and gaslighting-prone sister Chris. And when their mother dies, Ellie is left scrambling against changes in the laws of physics themselves. She's not sure who she can trust. Thank goodness for her hulking cousin Daniel, the most food-focused metaphysician you'll ever meet.

So yeah, you'll be intrigued, you'll be hooked, but you will also be hungry. Maybe it's that John and I have similar taste in food (the bao! the brussels sprouts! WHAT DID YOU DO TO THAT EGG TART, CHU), but I was on the edge of my seat mostly to find out how Ellie and Daniel would beat Chris's machinations but also a tiny bit to see what food item Daniel would come up with next. I always knew that cooking was crucial to the maintenance of space-time. Soon the rest of you can see why. Highly recommended.

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