L’esprit de l’escalier

Seriously, very excited, friends.

Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. Babine's take on both camping and more generally living as a single woman is particularly interesting because she is very much not solo most of the time in this book--this is a book that is grappling with her roots, her family, and engaging with her current family. It paints a picture of a life that can be satisfying without fitting prior molds--and our demographics are such that there are a lot of tiny details that really resonated with me.

Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind. This is the third YA thriller about Native issues in the US, centering around the same families and clusters of characters. Boulley is writing them to try to be stand-alone but interwoven, and I'd like to see how someone who hadn't read the earlier volumes felt about how well this succeeded. I did read the earlier volumes, and I felt like there was quite a lot of "here's an update on someone you already know" going on here, and like the balance of that with the narrative at hand was a bit off. I also think she's set herself a very hard task, because when the real life issues you're writing about genuinely produce people who behave like cartoon villains, you don't want to sanitize them into something more understandable, and yet then you're stuck with the people who behave like cartoon villains. It's a tough problem. So I still found this worth reading, but I felt like the earlier volumes were stronger in some ways.

A'Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. I picked this up from the "new books" shelf in the library, and I fear it's one of those books where the author had a reasonably good bio of a famous ancestor in her, and she wrote that already (a bio of Madam C.J. Walker) and has gone on to what is clearly a labor of love writing about her famous ancestors but doesn't rise to be nearly as interesting to me as the events and subjects on the periphery of the book. Probably mostly recommended for people with a special interest in this era/location.

Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox. My copy of this arrived early, but it's out now, I think? Interesting take on gods and their relationship with humanity, a fun fantasy novella.

Emilie A. Caspar, Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience. This is a fascinating book by a neuropsychologist who has not only done the more standard kind of campus studies into obedience and the variables that affect (or, apparently, in many cases do not affect) it but has also done a lot of interviews and various kinds of brain imaging (fMRI and EEG primarily) on groups of people who could reasonably be described as the foot soldiers of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Caspar's willingness to admit which things she does not know is only one of the things I find refreshing about her work. She's also willing and able to engage with these interviewees on the subject of stopping either themselves or others from committing similar acts, what factors might be important there. This is not a book with all the answers but I'm really glad she's out there asking the questions.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Reread. The curious thing about this reread is that it's so smoothly written, it's such a pleasant and easy read, that it was startling to notice how little momentum this book has. Each chapter is a lovely reading experience if you like that sort of thing! (You've seen the number of 19th century novels I read. Of course I like that sort of thing.) But also each chapter is a conscious decision to have more of it, because there's very little of either plot or character pushing forward in any way.

Brandon Crilly, Castoff. Discussed elsewhere.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name. Only a handful of these poems really resonated with me, but the ones that did really resonated with me, which is an interesting experience to have of a poetry collection.

Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460. This is largely about the evolutions of the concepts and theoretical bases of power in French society in this era, and was really interesting for the things it bothered to examine in that way--where and when and how the Roman Catholic church got involved in various life milestones, for example, generally later than one might think while living in a world so shaped by those processes that they may seem obvious. Worth having. Did not hate Philip Augustus enough but is that even possible.

Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. I found this harrowing in places, because I am auntie age, so the story of young women making themselves smaller and less interesting for men has my auntie heart wailing "OH BABY NO DON'T DO IT" without, of course, being able to do one darn thing about it. Do they come through the other side from that behavior: well, what is the title, really, it's not a spoiler to say yes. More concretely: this is about a murdered (fictional) Latina artist in the 1980s and an art history student in the late 1990s putting the pieces together. Most of it is not about the putting the pieces together in any kind of thriller/mystery sense. If you're used to that pacing, this pacing will strike you as very weird. Mostly it's about the shapes of their lives. I liked it even when I was reading it between the cracks between my fingers.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark. I feel like the smaller scale of this bit of fantasized history doesn't serve his type of writing well--there's not the grand sweep, and he's not going to turn into a painter of miniatures at this stage of his career. I also--look, I know he's writing these things as fantasy, so he's allowed to change stuff, I just feel like if a character is still obviously Joan of Arc I'm allowed to disagree with his take on Joan of Arc, which I do, on basically every level. Ah well. If you like Kay books, this sure is one all the same.

T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver. I was mildly disappointed in this one. The mirror magic was creepy, but the romance plot felt pro forma to me, some of the plot beats more obvious than a reinterpreted fairy tale novel would strictly require. Of course she can still write sentences, and this was still an incredibly quick read, it just won't make my Favorite T. Kingfisher Books Top Three.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Reread. This title could also have matched up with The Book of Love but definitely not, not, not vice versa. This is not a book of love. It's a book of disorientation and weirdness. Which I knew going in, but having been here before doesn't make it less like that.

Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Look, I can't explain to you why Alec, who seems like a nice guy, has chosen a career path that could be described as "writing biographies of nerds Marissa would not want to have lunch with." But he does a good job of it, they're interesting books and manage to learn a lot about--even understand--their subjects without falling the least bit in love with their subjects. This one is Luis Alvarez. Did a lot of interesting things! Also I went into this book with the feeling that even an hour in his company would be more than I really wanted, and I did not come out of it with any particle of that opinion altered.

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War. An account of a really interesting time, illuminating of things that came after, somewhat repetitive.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Reread. Yes, the stories here were also satisfyingly where I left them, science fictiony and vivid.

Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the US, 1915-1940. This is actually a book about Italian anarchists in Canada that recognizes that there was a lot of cross-border traffic, so it also looked at those parts of the US that directly affect Canada--Detroit-Windsor, for example. Lots of analysis on Italian immigrants' immigration experiences either as caused by or as causing their radicalism. Interesting stuff but probably not a good choice My First History of Early Twentieth Century Radicalism.

Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold. It is not Wee's fault that I wanted more beasts. Poets are allowed to be metaphorical like that. I did want more beasts, but what is here instead is good being itself anyway.

Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms. This was my first reading of this collection but not my first reading of the vast majority of stories within it. This is the relief of a collection by someone whose work I enjoy, knowing that each of the stories will be reliably good and now I have them in one spot, hurrah, glad this is here.