Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I am still partway through Darnton's The Revolutionary Temper, about Paris in the half century before the French Revolution. I do want to go back to it, but I needed to sync my kindle to put other books on it before going to Montreal.

Books finished last month:

Penric and the Bandit, by Lois McMaster Bujold: the latest Penric and Desdemona story, which I liked. The bandit is the main viewpoint character, and this book doesn't (imho) depend as much on familiarity with the series as some of the previous stories do.

Perfect Accord, by Celia Lake: another of her fantasy historical romances set in Albion. The non-romance part of the plot involves an illegal conspiracy, and it's not entirely clear who they're conspiring against, and some of the conspirators don't seem to know either. The heroine of this one and her gay male best friend agreed, at 13, to get married if they reach the age when their families are pressuring them to marry, and neither of them has found someone they prefer.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by Peter Beagle: novella about a dragon-hunter/exterminator, who would like to be almost anything else; a princess whose parents are hoping she will like one of the many princes who keep turning up; and the first prince she does like, who was wandering around as part of avoiding his parents plans for him. Good.

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow, a queer Jewish sf romance, set on a satellite of Pluto, with some references to Brooklyn. I think Ruthanna recommended this one.

I read both of those while visiting rysmiel, and didn't make any notes,

Since the middle of December:

Bookshops and Bonedust, by Travis Baldree: This is a prequel, I guess, to Legends and Lattes. I liked it, and there was something pleasantly recursive about getting caught up in a book that is significantly about other people being caught up in books (people who think of reading as something that other people do). (If you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this one either.)

Paladin's Faith, by T. Kingfisher. This is billed as "book four of the saint of steel," with an interesting plot about industrial espionage/sabotage along with the demon-hunting and (how) will these two characters wind up together. I liked it, and think it's at least as good as the previous volumes in the series. There's room for three more books, at one per paladin. I'd like a story that's more about the Temple of the White Rat, Zale and Bishop Beartongue, and/or the gnoles, but I'm not sure a romance structure would work for those.

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer: Beck is a teenager living with her father on a seastead, i.e., a group of offshore platforms and converted ships that has somehow managed not to be part of any country. The story starts with some odd discoveries Beck makes while finding random-seeming things someone wants enough to pay or trade for, like size nine black sandals, and the stakes get higher as the story goes on. The people who run the seastead call themselves libertarians, but Beck's father gives arbitrary-seeming orders and expects her to obey, and these are the sort of libertarians who are happy to have most of the scutwork done by indentured servants. [I think this is a fix-up of a series of stories that were originally published separately.]

Mostly just another list, with some notes copied from my "booklog" file.

Lake, Celia, Winter's Charms. Three winter-themed novellas connected to some of her novels. I particularly liked the one about how Seth, Dilly, and Golshan became a triad (after Seth and Dilly were married, and also after Golshan was seriously wounded in the War).

Rather, Lina, Sisters of the Vast Black. Weird sf, with living spaceships, some of them convents, one of which is named Our Lady of Infinite Constellations, and vaguely hand-waved FTL. This is set a few decades after a very destructive war that left behind extremely nasty plagues. I enjoyed the story, but it is vastly implausible, and not just because it involves faster-than-light travel. This is the first in a loose series, but I didn't like it enough to look for the next one.

Christie, Agatha, After the Funeral and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Murder mysteries about Hercule Poirot, well constructed but ( spoiler )

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape A Dragon's Breath. A very good fantasy novel set in a somewhat alternate-history 19th century New England, with dragons. The viewpoint character is a member of the Wampanoag tribe, as is the author, and a significant part of the plot is driven by settler prejudices against the Indigenous inhabitants of the area. First in a trilogy, and I definitely want to read the next book.

Hogan, Linda, The Radiant Lives of Animals. A mix of poetry and natural history, hard to describe but I liked it. I think someone recommended this to me, but I don't remember who.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. An oddly constructed novel about time travel and pandemics.

Dimaline, Cherie, Venco. This is a fantasy novel about a poor Metis woman from Toronto who finds a spoon, which connects her to women who are working against a deadline to assemhle a coven, and about her relationship with her grandmother. I liked this, and not just because it takes it takes older women seriously.

Books I've finished in the last several weeks:

You're My Kind, by Claire Lydon is a lesbian romance that I may have gotten as a freebie via the BookBub email list. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist still misses the ex who walked out on her without a word several years ago, and also has trouble trusting anyone because if Justine could do that, so could anyone. The tone is sweet, but it felt like a little too many of the necessary conversations were not just offstage, but of the form "Maddie, Justine did X" and "Justine, Maddie says Y." Yes, the genre promises the reader a happy ending, but the author is expected to supply it, and this has a bit of the tone of "meanwhile, back at the ranch..."

No Love for the Wicked, by Jessica Cage, is a fantasy set mostly in a world where most people have magic. People are divided into Lights and Darks, which is somehow innate but also everyone is told which they are in high school. There's a romance plot, between two people who meet as adults, mixed in with the assignment to do a series of arbitrary-seeming things to save the world. The plot is driven partly by the protagonist/narrator's mother having carefully not told her the Very Important Prophecy about her. On the other hand, ( spoiler ) This was via a StoryBundle of fantasy books by BIPOC authors, and was clearly spell-checked rather than proofread, based on homonyms and missing words.

The White Mosque: a Memoir, by Sofia Samatar. Someone recmmended it, and I liked her novel A Stranger in Olondria, so I got this from the library.

The White Mosque is a linked collection of many short pieces about Samatar's family; Mennonite history; and her own life, built around a visit/pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of German Mennonite history. The "white mosque" of the title is a Mennonite church in Uzbekistan, built in the late 19th century. Samatar talks about having a Somali father and a white American mother, and looking for a place in a religion that still thinks of itself as ethnically (north) German, although most Mennonites today are people of color who live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

Samatar thinks and writes about memory, and about what missionary work does for, and to, the people doing it and those they're trying to convert. And numerous other topics, including the Aral Sea, a failed end-of-the-world prophecy that led some of those Mennonites to what is now Uzbekistan, and the history of photography and movie-making in Central Asia.

The book feels a bit like long strings of beads, making something but not a straightforward narrative. This shouldn't have surprised me; A Stranger in Olondria wasn't a linear narrative either. The acknowledgements describe the book as "creative nonfiction," saying some living people's names have been changed but the stories are as true as she can make them and the places are real.

I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy, is good but not pleasant reading. It's a memoir by a former child actor. There's a lot about her being a parentified child, including that she was expected to make her mother happy by, among other things, never having a different preference than her mother about anything, even favorite colors.

Current reading: The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, which feels relatively light so far. And I'm still (slowly) rereading Always Coming Home.

Several weeks' reading:

( cut for length )

brief and likely incomplete, because the computer I usually track this on is still in a box:

New (to me): Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead

reread: Pat Wrede, Calling on Dragons; Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky;

currently rereading: Eleanor Arnason, _A Woman of the Iron People_; Pratchett, _Interesting Times_.

This is based heavily on what I had handy on the kindle, either owned or current from the library. (The Delany is from a three-novel ebook, and I started it while sitting in the ER having my heart monitored recently); adrian_turtle had a paperback of Interesting Times in reach last night while I was in her room staying away from the A/C installer.

I haven't been reading much that feels like it belongs here (examples of things that don't: news articles, email). So, for the last couple of months, a list with some comments:

Goblin Fruit, by Celia Lake: a sequel, sort of, to Outcrossing: magic/alt history romance in 1920s England, with a detective story. One of the main characters in Outcrossing appears in the background of this. (I got the first one free; this was $2.95 on Amazon, which is reasonable, but I may wait before getting any more, because I have a lot else available compared to how much I'm reading.

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. This was a reread of an odd, farcical Star Trek novel. It was light and pleasant, but I remember it being funnier the last time I read it.

The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison: a fun, somewhat weird spin-off of the Sherlock Holmes universe, with angels and steampunk-ish automata; the role of Sherlock Holmes in these adventures is played by a literal angel, and his Watson is Dr. Doyle, who came home from Afghanistan with a partly-metaphysical wound. I don't remember the original Doyle stories well enough to know how close she stays to those, for the episodes that clearly started there, like the one about the Hound of the Baskervilles. (The afterword says the book started as wingfic of the Sherlock TV series.)

A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, has dense worldbuilding, and an engaging narrator/protagonist, and is as good as everyone has been telling me.

Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh: fantasy, with a background including a seriously bad love relationship, about a man who is more than 400 uears old and guardian of a woodland, and what happens when a new landowner shows up, with questions. This is good, and I'm not sure how to describe it, but it seems worth noting that one of the important characters is a middle-aged woman, treated sympathetically. (This is fantasy in a fairy-tale sense, rather than high fantasy or a "secondary world" like Elizabeth Lynn's Arun or Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

Apparently I haven't done a reading post in a couple of months. So, briefly:

Relatively recent reading:

Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interviews: This isn't quite what it says on the tin: one of these goes back to when she was working on Always Coming Home, though the last one in the collection appeared after her death. It's somewhat repetitive, more in the introductory matter that was published with each interview than in the interviews themselves, in part because Le Guin made it clear that she didn't want to answer the same questions over and over. I'm fairly sure the collection also included some things I hadn't known. I can't really recommend the collection as a whole, though people who are interested in Le Guin's life and work might want to read just the actual last interview here.

The Halcyon Fairy Book, by Ursula Vernon. In the first half of this, Ursula Vernon reads and comments entertainingly on some odd fairy tales, pointing out the funny, absurd, or just plain incomprehensible bits as well as comparing versions of things. [These started on Twitter, I think.] The second half is a reprint of her short collection Toad Words, which I had already read.

Arsenic in the Azaleas, by Dale Meyer. This is a cozy mystery, of the "woman relocating to a small town after divorce or other life disruption" subgenre. I got it as a free ebook (via BookBub), and enjoyed it enough to finish it, though a copy editor might have helped tidy some inconsistencies about what the viewpoint character knows/has experience with in terms of gardening. (I also worry about the family who brought her up to be incompetent with anything to do with cooking.) First in a series of several about the amateur detective in question.

Catfishing on Catnet, by Naomi Kritzer. This is a very good near-future YA novel about a teenager and her online friends, including the AI that runs her online home. The narration switches viewpoint, mostly Steph (human) and the AI (who uses the handle CheshireCat on Catnet). Steph has never lived in the same place for long, because her mother is terrified of Steph's father finding them; the story starts as they move to yet another obscure town. A very good sequel to "Cat Pictures, Please"--the AI narrator of that story has set up the social network where payment is in cat pictures instead of money.

Wilding: Returning Nature to our Farm, by Isabella Tree. About twenty years ago, Tree and her husband gave up on conventional farming, because they were going broke. Instead, they let the hedgerows and weeds grow as they would, and slowly introduced ponies, pigs, and other livestock that seemed appropriate to the landscape. They tracked the appearance/return of locally rare, or sometimes UK-rare, animal species. Tree compares the common idea of a closed-canopy forest as the natural and/or inevitable climax ecosystem to a medieval (or earlier) mixed woodland with brambles and hedgerows, which lets new oaks establish themselves in the woods. Tree argues that ecological succession is an oversimplification if not myth.

This is definitely a case of "believe the bird, not the bird book," as various birds and insects that were considered to only live/breed in woodlands turned up in their meadows and hedgerows. Stepping back from turtle doves and individual oak trees, Tree talks about how de-canalizing the bit of river on their land reduced flooding downstream. Someone recommended this book to me, and they were right.

Between the bus trip to and from Montreal, and time spent reading while I was visiting rysmiel, I finished six or seven books in the last week, including one reread.

So:

Periodic Tales: A cultural history of the elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams: This is basically what it says on the tin, through a personal as well as British lens. This is I think best read as a series of interesting anecdotes, though I went "wait a minute" on enough things, from osmium being "the densest thing known" [me: what about neutronium?] to the claim (in the section on calcium) that the White House was so named for being whitewashed (in the section on calcium) that I would double-check any facts in here before quoting them.

Clockwork Boys (Clocktaur Wars book 1) and The Wonder Engine (Clocktaur Wars book 2), by tkingfisher (This is why it's "six or seven" books: the two parts are novella-length, and book 2 picks up immediately after the end of book 1.) I liked this a lot: it's a fantasy about a kingdom being invaded/ravaged by some magical(?) creatures, and the unlikely group sent in search of some, any, defense after a more plausible group vanished. Demon tattoos enforcing the group's obedience, if not loyalty. The group leader, Slate (a forger who was convicted of treason) recruits someone by asking if he'd like to go on a suicide mission. The story also includes attack tattoos--aimed at the wearers. Also gnoles, and I don't remember which other Kingfisher book they were in.

Unthinkable, by Helen Thomson: Thomson writes about a variety of people with unusual brains as ways of talking about the human mind and brain more generally. The examples include a woman who is always lost, a man with impressively good memory of his past, a man whose schizophrenia makes him believe he is a tiger, people who believe themselves to be dead, and a color-blind man with the kind of synesthesia that sees letters in different colors, whose brain sees colors his eyes cannot. The individual sections were interesting, but it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts; on the other hand, that may depend on how much the reader already knows.

Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: a second collection of Chiang's sf and fantasy stories. I liked it, though there's nothing here as memorable as "Story of Your Life" (which is a pretty high standard of comparison).

Hawk, by Stephen Brust: another Taltos book, a bit more about relationships (and wanting some sort of connection) than some of the previous, as Vlad tries a complicated plan to get the Jhereg to leave him alone.

Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett: reread of a Discworld novel, which I enjoyed.

I've mostly been rereading (and doing cryptic crosswords), but have read one new book recently, and enjoyed it a lot:

The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher: This is a fantasy about a Scandinavian girl who sets out to rescue the boy she considers her best friend, after he has been kidnapped by the Snow Queen.

Gerta knows that she's doing something risky, but tells her grandmother than she has to do it anyway; her grandmother accepts this and sends her off with a few useful things and a cryptic message. The first thing that happens is that Gerta spends several months in an odd sort of enchantment, in the cottage of a witch; after escaping that, she befriends the titular raven, who accompanies her on the rest of her journey.

I liked this, and not just because never mind the boy, the story turns into a growing friendship, and courtship, between Gerta and another girl, Jenna, something Gerta had literally never thought of as possible. The story also includes interesting magic of plants and dreams, and some very fine otters. Definitely recommended.

Rereading:

Half-off Ragnarok, by Seanan McGuire. Third in her InCryptid series, and either I wasn't in the right mood, I don't like the Alex-viewpoint stories as much as the Verity ones, or both.

The Comfortable Courtesan, by L.A. Hall (as "Clorinda Cathcart"): a long serialized novel, or series of novels (apparently about a million words), a Regency-era historical with quite a few LGBT and non-white characters, and polyamorous relationships (not called that, of course, just as the story predates the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual"). This was originally serialized on Dreamwidth (the_comfortable_courtesan), with reader comments as it went on; in rereading I found my own remark that it was pleasant, and unusual, to read a story that felt as though it/the author understood my life.

The Comfortable Courtesan, and some related stories about Clorinda and her circle, is available at https://www.clorinda.org/