Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. I felt like Kenya is too large a country and the Mau Mau Rebellion too large an event in its history for me to be as wholly ignorant as I was, so I set out to remedy some of that with this book. As often happens to me, remedying some of my ignorance left me aware of how much more I don't know. Still, this is from all I can tell a fairly even-handed book that avoids a lot of the colonialist assumptions that all rebellion against the colonizer must have been irrational and manages to convey what the propaganda was in that direction without endorsing it--but also does not pretend that everyone who has ever rebelled has been a holy saint, nor that they have to be. I don't recommend this for happy fun-fun times, but if you'd like to know more about the topic, it'll sure help with that goal.

John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages. Baldwin is definitely not fanboying Philip Augustus, which is good because neither am I; there were points at which he is using fairly elevated speech to say, "Y'know, buddy, if you hadn't expelled the Jews from France, you'd have had more options here, my my my, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions." But the interesting thing about Philip Augustus was not the person himself but the documentation of his reign. When he left for the Crusades there was quite a lot of writing down of France: How I Runs It By Phil Age 24 (okay, he didn't actually write it down, his scribes wrote it down), and then there was quite a lot more of What We Did While You Were Gone, so it was...basically he turned on Track Changes for the country of France. And Baldwin poked at that in this book, and I liked that, but if you aren't particularly interested in twelfth century governmental Track Changes...welp, there sure are other books on this list.

Renan Bernardo, Different Kinds of Defiance. Discussed elsewhere.

Bertrand Bickersteth, The Response of Weeds. Poetry about one person's Black experience in Alberta, which is sure not a thing I had a surfeit of poetry about and you probably didn't either.

Winifred Boggs, Sally on the Rocks. This was mostly a light-hearted village satire about a young woman who has "ruined herself" by the standards of the (1915) day (she went and had sex with a man in Italy for a month, not on the page), having made up her mind to settle down and marry for the sake of her fortune only to find it less easy than she thinks to snag a not very appealing man. The up side: she and her rival for his fortune are entirely pleasant to each other rather than getting in the designated cat fights, seeing each other's virtues immediately; this is also a book that sees and deplores gender-based double standards. The down side: there is some absolutely appalling "go have white babies to maintain the Empire" nonsense in the ending, just jaw-dropping "you didn't actually say that oh no you did" stuff. Fortunately I watched Blazing Saddles at a formative age so I always have clips from it ready to play in my head in times of need; unfortunately the miniature Cleavon Little in my head who abides with me always had to abide with me particularly on that day.

Samatar Elmi, Portrait of Colossus. Absolutely beautiful poems about being an immigrant to modern Britain. This one I will want to return to, and gosh how nice that it was the next thing to hand after the Boggs. (This is a coincidence, the alphabetical nature of these entries does not usually reflect my reading order.)

Margaret Frazer, The Servant's Tale. The second in its medieval murder mystery series, with a troop of players traveling through around Christmas time. The festivities were period-appropriate, not Victorianized for the modern reader. The ending was a bit...if it had been the first in the series I would have thought "oh is this what she thinks is a good twist, thanks but nah," but as I've already had a pretty good one I'll keep going with the series.

Merilee Grindle, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico's Ancient Civilizations. A long-overdue look at a very interesting scientific figure who bridged eras of anthropology and fought for recognition that was due her.

Kathleen Jennings, Kindling. I've followed Jennings's career pretty closely, so I'd read most of what had already been published here before, but not all, and in any case there's a lovely new story and also it's good to have things I previously liked collected in one volume, hooray, hooray.

John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of American Musical Theatre. I was doing all right with the early part of the book that was mostly names-dates-places, and then we got up to the part where Jones had really personal opinions about things he'd experienced and I'd experienced, and the wheels came right on off this bus. I found his opinions about Fiddler on the Roof pretty risible and it did not get better from there. It doesn't help that this was a book from around the turn of the millennium, and events since shed a rather different light on American musical theater; he couldn't have known where it was all going, nobody could have predicted Hamilton for heaven's sake, but when you feel someone's gone off the rails fifty years before that, you can hardly think not predicting Hamilton is the main problem. Not recommended.

Rosalie M. Lin, Daughter of Calamity. Discussed elsewhere.

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. I loved this, well written and interesting, about four mid-century women at Oxford looking at the world as it unfolded and thinking that it absolutely had to influence philosophy and...not always finding that the men around them felt the same, and persevering in their own ways despite a university system that was not particularly interested in women in general and women who wanted to think about the horrors of our time in specific. Complicated relationships, still meaningful friendships all the same, more like this please.

Lauren Markham, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. I have to tell you, I'm sorry, this book is not as good as its title. Just look at that title, what an amazing title. Would it be possible to live up to that title? I think so. This, however, is a fairly ordinary book that interweaves Markham's search for her own roots in Greece with how Greece and the rest of the world are handling refugees. It's got some solid interviews and reporting. It is not the transcendent shining thing that title promises. Many of us can benefit from a workmanlike book about the current handling of refugees and won't mind some musings about personal identity thrown in. Just...set your expectations.

Marianne Moore, Complete Poems. Moore's line lengths are all off from my own sense of rhythm, and her references are all off from my own sense of reference, so she will never be one of the poets of my heart, but I still liked reading this all the same, and will almost certainly read it again later.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Delia's Shadow. Reread. What I want to say here is that it is a very strange experience to have a memorial reread of a recently deceased friend's book when that book is a ghost fantasy full of Tuckerizations of other friends.

Jared Pechaček, The West Passage. Discussed elsewhere.

Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, Tone. This is short, this is very readable, and also I'm not sure it will tell you a lot about tone (in writing, prose tone) if you aren't already thinking a lot about it on your own. This is a book that is part of a conversation with writers who are already knee-deep in this subject, not Baby's First Tone Book.

Noel Streatfeild, Grass in Piccadilly. Kindle. The inhabitants of a large house turned into flats in the immediate post-WWII period have to sort their personal lives in the upheaval of that period. Streatfeild is trying something with a German Jewish refugee family that doesn't entirely work--she was always terrible at writing German accent dialect even when it's word choice rather than phoneticization--but is clearly entirely well-intentioned, she's going out of her way to show what a lovely generous person the mother in particular is and that the children are--in the end the whole family is--British, dammit, that German Jewish refugees can by her lights be British. It's one of those attempts at Philosemitism that go a little off but only in a mildly embarrassing way, not a hateful way. The ending is not as tied up with a bow as it might be, and I think that tying it with a bow would have been cloying but I'm not sure the suggested ending is more satisfying--I think among other things it relies on a concept of childhood resilience that I do not for a moment believe and a certain amount of biological essentialism about motherhood. There is some brief and absolutely gratuitous homophobia at the end. (Are there queer characters throughout? no, they show up to be sneered at in the end. Noel what are you doing stop it.) There is also interesting stuff about what you can and cannot get done in the immediate postwar period and how people of different classes manage to get along. Take from all that what you will.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author a bit because we share an agent.

Jingwen is a cabaret dancer in a 1930s Shanghai quite a bit, but not entirely, like our own. She also goes by Vilma, for a little Western glamour when she's lighting up the tiles with her fancy footwork and practiced flirtation. She loves her life of dancing, drinking, and beautiful qipaos and shoes. Her grandmother, a doctor with the ability to make people new limbs out of a magical silver substance, is disgusted by Jingwen's frivolity. She has made her bargains with the seamier side of Shanghai life in the gang of the Blue Dawn, and she expects Jingwen to follow in her footsteps.

When another dancer is attacked in a horrifying and unnatural way, Jingwen can't be comfortable running the occasional errand for her grandmother and her gang contacts any more. Gradually competing with the other cabaret girls for the richest patron feels less important--and the rich patrons look more dangerous. When her diurnal dance troop is bought out by one of them and its artistic director replaced by a mysterious figure who makes her the lead dancer, she knows she's playing with fire, but she has to pursue justice for the other dancers--and safety for herself.

There are powers beyond the human in play in Jingwen's Shanghai. She will have to try to sacrifice to them, embody them, control them, work around them--but she can't ignore them, or not just her way of life but her life itself--will be in danger. This is not our Shanghai, quite, but it is still a crossroads of the world, keeping its culture and making it new in the face of dozens of outside forces and divided desires from its own people.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sometimes when I've been doing a lot of revisions and bouncing off a string of bad library books, I grump around the house asking if I even like books. The house is stuffed with books. I like books better than basically any other material object. Of course I like books. Sometimes I need the right book to remind me. And Foul Days was one of those books.

Kosara is a witch in the walled city of Chernograd. The rest of the world wants its monsters behind the walls, where the witches and warlocks of Chernograd know how to ward them off, hunt them, or at least mitigate their damage--and Kosara has a lot of experience with all of that. She's even had very personal run-ins with the Zmey, the terrifying human-like force known as the Tsar of Monsters. But this year in the monster-ridden Foul Days that start a new year, her luck has run out--and she's cornered in the worst situation a witch can get herself into. With new allies looking suspicious--and the old ones even worse--Kosara has to get her shadow back and beat the Zmey in order for herself and her city to survive intact.

Foul Days is infused on every page with a wry and loving blend of Dimova's Bulgarian background and her own considerable imagination. The characters, down to the smallest house spirits, relate in a way that feels real and vivid. The entwining of Kosara's magical and personal obstacles feels real. It was exactly the right thing to snap me out of a reading slump, and I can't wait for the promised sequel.

Benjamin Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. This was really interesting but there were places where I feel like it suffered from Breen wanting Mead to be able to have accomplished things that were beyond the scope of her power. I think he made an incredibly clear case that Timothy Leary was a toxic force in the study of psychedelics on the human consciousness--that seems nearly irrefutable--and his points about the context of what we now call psychedelia before the 1960s were very interesting. But when he leaned into the idea that Mead could have, by championing therapeutic use of psychedelics, changed the course of attitudes, he seems to be ignoring her context as a woman, a mother, and a closeted bisexual person--and I think ignoring the people who tried to change those attitudes and were ignored in multiple directions. It's a tempting counterfactual, what if Margaret Mead instead of Timothy Leary. It just...doesn't hold up for more than a short story. Still, gosh the early 20th was full of people mucking around with each other's brains, wow.

Anne de Courcy, Chanel's Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930-1944 and Magnificent Rebel: Nancy Cunard in Jazz Age Paris. I really like de Courcy's work in general, and I went and got these two from the library because they were the two the library had that I hadn't read yet. They were disappointing. I think there is an important line a biographer walks where enthusiasm for the subject cannot be permitted to cross the line into making excuses for the subject, and de Courcy repeatedly crosses it here. This is particularly clear because I picked up these books due to enthusiasm for the biographer rather than the subject. She claims that Chanel's Riviera is not a biography of Chanel but of this particular snapshot of place and time, which means several things in practice: one, it means that the balance of how much the book is about Chanel and how much it's about other people is always very weird, and two, it means that there is a lot of telling what's interesting about Chanel that de Courcy doesn't feel she has to do. The problem is that I...don't actually already agree that Chanel was amazing and wonderful and extraordinary. So that when de Courcy falls back on these adjectives, which she did in basically every sentence in which she had to refer to Chanel's Antisemitism, I have not already been convinced that her style of dress was uniquely worth it. Some of de Courcy's arguments were just jaw-dropping, like: well, she collaborated, but you see she was used to having a man in her bed. Oh okay. Oh sure well then. It was...not her most coherent work. Magnificent Rebel was not a lot better, arguing for the importance of some relationships over others not with particular focus on Cunard's life as a whole but more because de Courcy felt like it--sometimes with Paris as the heart of the argument, often not. She wanted to focus on how Cunard promoted the work of Black writers but often made excuses for places where Cunard actively abused those Black writers on a professional and a personal level. There were interesting points here but far too much handwaving for my taste. Earlier work better. Sigh.

Camille T. Dungy, Trophic Cascade. I seem to be working my way backwards through Dungy's life and oeuvre. The child I first met as an opinionated tween in Soil is a fetus and infant in these poems, and this combined with change in genre is fascinating. Seeing what she was talking about people asking her about writing about nature and race and parenthood, having that back story going in, doesn't take away a single bit of its power.

Davinia Evans, Shadow Baron. This is in some sense a reread, but the version I'd read before was the manuscript form, and this is the finished version, and it did not disappoint. Lots of ramification from the first book, more magic, more adventure, the world going even deeper, so much fun, recommended.

Marco Fontani, Mariagrazia Costa, and Mary Virginia Orna, The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table's Shadow Side. These authors very earnestly wanted to be the next Primo Levi, writing a book about the things that were mistakenly identified as elements. Their writing is not limpid and lovely, it is workhorse prose--and the history of mistakenly thinking that you've isolated a new element is less exciting than the history of correctly thinking you have. Only a few of these stories were the wacky errors of science tales I was hoping for. Mostly it was, yes, here's another time someone was wrong, yes, and another. Also there was a lot of weirdly earnest biographical information about who loved their spouse or child and what they died of, which is in some ways sweet but not particularly vivid. Read this if you're interested in the information it contains, not if you're interested in reading per se; it would be just as nice beamed directly into your brain.

E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Kindle. This is Forster's first book, and it has some really lovely parts, well-observed and sometimes witty and sometimes affecting. If you have a friend who loves Italy to the point of viewing it as the solution to all mortal ills, you may laugh out loud at several parts. However. The very ending of this book, and this is a spoiler and I am not sorry for it, the book is over a hundred years old and this is intense, features one of the most gratuitous infant deaths I have ever encountered in fiction. "Yeah, and then this asshole screwed up and the baby died." It was heavy-handed, it was awful, and I want to warn about it in the strongest of terms, because in some ways Forster is clear about its effects and then in other ways I'm like...no...I don't think that's all, there, Morgan. I cannot say it was worth it. No. Really not.

Nicola Griffith, Spear. Reread. Two different book clubs I'm in or near were reading this, and it was no hardship whatsoever to sink back into Peredur's story, rich as it is in its own angles and deeds and decisions.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Reread. Also a book club choice, and I hoped I would like it better than the last time I read it, which was my senior year of high school. I think I respected it more, which is not really the same thing; Le Guin wanted to tell a story where not-doing is the correct choice for good reasons, and I get that, but there were lots of places where I felt like the results still jarred. I would also note that it's good that she had a chance to grow out of some of these choices--explicitly treating whiteness as the racially unmarked case in ways that I feel sure she would not and did not do later in her career, for example. This is going to remain not my favorite Le Guin, and that's okay.

Premee Mohamed, The Butcher of the Forest. Discussed elsewhere.

Marieke Nijkamp and Sylvia Bi, Ink Girls. A middle-grade comic of defying censorship and a community coming together to demand justice, in case you know anybody who's feeling like something like that right now.

Saghïmbay Orozbaq uulu, The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan: A Kirghiz Epic Poem in the Manas Tradition. One of my friends heard I was on an epic kick and sent this one along for comparison, and I'm grateful, because some of it is very similar to other epics I've read--comparing this Muslim epic to Roland in terms of how the religious out-group is treated was fascinating, so many parallels--and some of it is very, very different. The scene of how the wrestling champion gets into his tight pants is clearly done in formula terms, for example, and yet is not one I've seen elsewhere. There is significantly explicit sexual content here as well as quite a lot of violence, so if you're thinking "cultural epic" means "read it to the wee kiddies for bedtime," well, make sure you share premodern nomadic standards for the wee kiddies' bedtime before you do.

S. E. Porter, Projections. Discussed elsewhere.

Melissa Scott, Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and The Empress of Earth. Rereads. This is a trilogy, and I read it in an omnibus volume. It's got a plucky young pilot overcoming sexism to fly spaceships and later join the previously all-male magi and find the lost road to Earth. I found it readable while I was reading it, but once I was away from each volume some of the emotional motivations seemed very opaque: Silence has now fallen in love with her convenience spouses? Why? One of them does not seem very lovable to me, nor does she seem to have had the chance to have found lovable traits not shown on the page. And their choice of habitation for the very ending...seems like it would make all of them miserable, absolutely miserable, and seemed completely unmotivated. So it was a case of enjoying the experience and then turning it over and not really enjoying the aftermath as much, not because anything became offensive so much as because the length constraints of the time didn't permit Scott the space to go into as much of the characters' psychology as I think would have been beneficial--because these were from the era of very short space opera.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Little Nugget. Kindle. This is entirely forgettable Wodehouse. The title refers to an unpleasant spoiled rich boy, assumptions about whom are entirely period, the protagonist agrees to kidnap him for reasons that never hold up very well, and in general if you are on an airplane and this is on your e-reader, fine, but I see no reason to seek it out.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is an online pal.

Look, even those of us who aren't Premee's friends online have learned by now that you do not pick up a Premee Mohamed novella in hopes of the teddy bears having their picnic. There is...outdoor eating? in this one? That's as close as you're going to get. Oh: and the children's nice dog is safely left home, tied up in the kennel. The dog is Sir Not Appearing In This Dark Fantasy, you're welcome.

Because nobody else is really having a nice day in this book. Nobody else is having the day they hoped for.

Veris Thorne is the only person ever to come out of the North Forest alive, with the child she meant to save from it. Only she has ever braved its magic and won. So when the tyrant's two children go missing, it's Veris who's sent after them--under threat of the destruction of her entire village. It's Veris who must dodge and feint and bargain with the powers of magic--and get two clueless privileged children to obey her in every particular--or she will lose everything she loves. That is, everything she loves that the tyrant has not taken already.

"Maybe I'll start this tonight and finish it tomorrow," I said to myself late last evening. "Maybe I'll just read a little, and the rest in the morning. It's been a long week, and I don't have to read it all now." Ha. HA. Well, the good news is that it is a novella, so when you make a bad choice like that, it won't cost you too much sleep. Entirely engrossing.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Mossa and Pleiti are back.

And unfortunately for them, their fellow citizens of the floating settlements above Jupiter--and its moons--are disappearing again. It's up to Mossa to find them, or at least to figure out where they've gone, and university politics have reached enough of an unappealing fever pitch that Pleiti is all too glad to spend the time helping her instead. Even if it means going to Io, where everything is--gasp--stuck to the ground, and modes of transport are--oh horrors--not on rails but free form at the operator's discretion. Who knows what might happen in a place like that. (Well, Mossa knows. She's from there.)

I'm on the fence about whether I think this would work as well for people who hadn't read The Mimicking of Known Successes. There's a lot of characterization and worldbuilding in that volume that carries through into this one, and at such a short length there's not really room to do everything again at full length. On the other hand, if you're ready to pick up details by incluing I think it's all there. On the other other hand, the first one is still in print and is quite short. So if you want to go get the feel for this detective relationship above Jupiter and where their bumps and uncertainties--with the world and with each other--are coming from, it's not a huge time commitment. But if you haven't reread the first one since it came out, Older will definitely remind you who's who and what's what as you go. I feel like the series is only getting better as it goes on, so to me it's worth the time to read both.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Look, friends, this felt so comfortable, okay? This felt like--of course, of course this is what reading a Kelly Link novel feels like, haven't I been doing this for years? I haven't? It's her first go at it? Really? Oh. So is it a novella, then, or a near-novella, sort of a stepping stone to dabble her toes into the land of novel? Nnnnnope it is an entire bugcrusher, it has the room to have secondary characters and subplots and texture to the setting.

So. Three young people disappear for a year from a small coastal Massachusetts town. This is not a thriller, it is a fantasy novel, so it's not a great surprise that when the early reveal is that they've been dead all that year, they're back, more or less intact, confused, interacting with magics they don't entirely understand. Their high school music teacher seems to be at the center of it, but the more they learn, the less his centrality seems sure.

Of the three of them--Daniel, Laura, and Mo--two have lives that can fold them back into the magical explanation given by their music teacher for their absence. But Laura's sister Susannah is not so easily swayed. Though she can't quite place what's wrong with the spell that's cast on her, she knows something is--and she keeps circling around those memories and those feelings, trying to figure out what isn't adding up. As Daniel, Laura, and Mo--and the other supernatural beings in their orbit--hurry to settle their relationships with life, death, this world, the next, and magic itself, before a disastrous figure brings catastrophe to all they love, Susannah keeps finding pieces of the answer to what really happened a year ago. And it's her relationship with them, and their relationships with each other, that prove crucial in that answer.

We get time with each of the major characters, and many of the minor ones too. When one twist arose I knew immediately who it applied to and gasped "OH YOU HAD BETTER NOT," not because it was predictable but because there was a tidal inevitability. But each crash of the tide in this book revealed something else fascinating on the shore, a new piece of glass or gnarled wood washed up its characters' emotional lives, and the final resolution was one I could accept as satisfying even with some heartbreak along the way. As who would not expect heartbreak in a book of this title, this woven with life and death--and families? The main characters of The Book of Love are mainly achingly young, but Link doesn't make the mistake of imagining young people to exist in some kind of youthful isolation. Each one is a grandchild, a child, a sibling, a friend, an employee, all things that turn out to matter crucially to their lives. It's not The Book of [Romantic] Love, it's just The Book of Love, wholeheartedly. Or as whole as hearts can remain in the land of the living, where there is suffering and loss. But it's a much better book for all of these things being part of it, for taking the time and the space to allow these things to be part of it. I really loved this. I'm glad to have made a start on the years of reading Kelly Link novels.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The alternate history of Everfair was a creative work not quite like any seen before in the genre, bringing a steampunk story to a fictional African realm and peopling it with vivid and beautifully drawn characters. With Kinning Nisi Shawl returns us to Everfair in a direct sequel that takes it in a new direction.

Now siblings Tink and Bee-Lung have developed a fungus that bonds people into telepathic super-organisms, and Queen Josina is working behind the scenes to determine which of her children should inherit the throne of Everfair, who should be fungally bonded in which groups, and how else the fungus can be used for the benefit of Everfair and the world.

If this sounds like a major departure, it sure is. Everfair read like alternate history steampunk. Kinning, on the other hand, falls more into a trend I've noticed where contemporary authors take on tropes of the '70s and redo them without the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. that plagued the works of that era. So why not, the people who didn't get to play with the toys the first time around should get to play with the toys, everybody gets a turn, this time someone's actually thinking about not being gross about incest in addition to all the above-listed improvements. If you want "more of the same, only slightly different," Shawl isn't interested in doing that. If you want to see what she wanted to do next, here you go, this is it.

Casey Blair, The Sorceress Transcendent. Kindle. Very much a romance, but with very much epic fantasy level consequences--there are characters killing the heck out of other people right after they've been bantering and doing cozy things with each other. If either of those things is not for you, this shorter work will not be for you.

A.S. Byatt, Possession and Sugar and Other Stories. Rereads. The first half of Sugar and Other Stories made me think, oh, oh lovely, why don't I rank this higher in my mind, and the second half reminded me why not, because it's a bit Orientalist and exoticizing and I hope I remember to skip it in future. As for Possession, it was very much in the category of "this is exactly what I want to be reading the minute I start rereading it." I love the different styles of poem and letter and how those fit together, and this is the first I'm reading it since reading the letters of the Brownings, which gives it more resonance.

Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising. Reread. One of my online book clubs read this as a cozy late-December discussion that was a reread for most of us, including me. Among the small points I picked up fresh on this reread, I noticed this time how careful Cooper was to make sure that she was not setting her work up to be coopted by xenophobes, which I appreciated.

Seth Dickinson, Exordia. Discussed elsewhere.

Christina Estes, Off the Air. Discussed elsewhere.

Linda Gregerson, Waterborne. Probably my least favorite volume of her poetry so far, the one that feels least characteristic of her voice, although she could of course disagree on that. It was entirely readable, just did not feel as special or vivid.

Derek Heng, Southeast Asian Interconnections: Geography, Networks, and Trade. Kindle. This is another monograph in the series about the Global Middle Ages, so it's an examination of what these networks looked like in that era, which is a useful stone in the wall of knowledge one can build about the period, the region, or both.

Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. A relief, in some ways, to read in holiday time, a poetry examination of the philosophical concept of ordinary time.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Faith. Kindle. Another satisfying entry in this series, with a disturbing ending that leaves the door open for much more. I wouldn't start here, as there are references to earlier events and characters, but there's the kind of love story and creepy fantasy villainy and everything you've come to expect of Kingfisher/Vernon's work.

Rose Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances. The story of a woman trying to make a living writing and make a life for herself in her father's class, not her mother's, with all the omissions and sometimes lies that involves. There's a structural trick in it that you might find clever or you might find frustrating; I sighed at it a little. The end was a typical frustrated (but not, for me, frustrating) Rose Macaulay ending. Her works stand alone, and this one is very much of its period, but not in a bad way per se.

Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, Star Trek Lower Decks: Rarely Going Where No One Has Gone Before. A holodeck episode in graphic novel form. It turns out that some of the forms of joke in Squirrel Girl were not something special Ryan North was doing for Squirrel Girl, they were just...his shtick. Which makes it frustratingly less appealing in both works, unfortunately. It was fine; it was in the house because someone else wanted it, and it didn't take me any amount of time to read. Would not have been among my favorite episodes of the show if filmed.

Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time. This book was so good, and it made me just ache in spots. It had more sensible interest in reindeer herding, what was going to happen to various herds at various times of the year, than any other novel I've ever read. Its depiction of how it feels to have disappointed a Swedish parent were so intense I could hardly bear it. Historical novel about the period of Laestadius, and I loved it so much.

Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting. It took me about half this volume of poetry to really get into Ramlochan's poetic rhythm, which in some ways is good, if I'm only reading things I immediately get into it means I'm not reaching far enough. A lot of the poems deal graphically with sexual violence, some of them with interesting mythic resonances. They are quite good, but you should have that content warning going in.

Margery Sharp, Martha, Eric, and George. Kindle. The last in its series of short novels, and actually my least favorite, because it spends the least time on Martha's art, which is the part that most interests me. Martha sees the world differently; how will this be accommodated or not, how will she make others around her bend to her vision, or not. The existence of Eric and George in their own ways complicates this problem interestingly, but for me as for Martha the central question remains Martha's art, and for this book it does not. Ah well.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lords of Uncreation. The end of its smash bang space opera trilogy full of interdimensional weird godhelpus, and for heaven's sake don't start here, you'll be lost, but if you've enjoyed the rest of the series, this sure is more of it.

Diane Wilson, The Seed Keeper. A gentle and straightforward novel about the land and Dakota identity in the Minnesota River Valley, the far eastern end of which I live in. The construction of mixed race identity as a CHOICE made me wince a little but there was some really good vivid writing as well.

John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Discussed elsewhere.

Ann Wroe, The Perfect Prince: Truth and Deception in Renaissance Europe. Wroe does an amazing job of discussing the person who was known as various names including Piers Osbeck, Perkin Warbeck, and Richard Plantagenet; she is really great at not putting her thumb on the scales about what we know about him at any given time. It's a really good book about how we construct people's identities and what we know about them in any given era.

Lisa Yaszek, The Future Is Female! Volume Two: The 1970s. This was for my other online book club, a gradual read as we discussed about four stories per session. Some familiar stories, including both loved and hated, and some new. A real mix, including some that provoked a lot of discussion and some where the main discussion was "why is this here." It's really good to have a book club where you can have big (good) feelings about Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution" together.