The unexamined life

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.

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.