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What I've Read

The Golem and the Jinni – Helene Wecker. Just before the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, a newly awoken golem has to fend for herself after her master dies on the Atlantic crossing, until she's taken in by a rabbi who recognizes what she is. At the same time, a jinni is inadvertently freed from a Syrian family's heirloom by an unwitting tinsmith. As they attempt to integrate into the human societies surrounding them, they find companionship in each other – and are threatened by the same sorcerer from the past.

I really loved this, and it's apparently a first novel, which makes me all the more impressed. The research alone is incredible and must have been very, very lengthy. The focus on human relationships and human communities is the kind of thing I love, and the pace is slow enough to give you a sense of integration into daily life while still having tension. I appreciated how even when Ahmad (the jinni)'s personality makes it very difficult for him to actually accept integrating into human life, the narrative doesn't portray this as some kind of disastrous moral failing, and the way that Chava (the golem) fearing her own free will isn't portrayed as the better alternative. Highly recommended, looking forward to reading more of Wecker's work.

Within the Sanctuary of Wings: A Memoir by Lady Trent - Marie Brennan. The last in the Lady Trent series; Isabella is confronted as the book begins with an offer of information about a possibly extinct dragon species found frozen in the mountains in a province under not!Chinese rule – if she's willing to use her position as a member of the peerage of Scirland to aid the not!Chinese rebel group offering it. (I don't have the book with me and can't remember not!China's name; as none of the alternate cultures are terribly alternate except in the 'fast and loose research' sense I am just going to call it not!China for the duration of this review.)

I liked this for all the reasons I have liked the previous books in this series but I think the previous book was better in terms of quality and fictional scholarship. The MASSIVE SPOILERS really broke my suspension of disbelief in regards to her not mentioning it in what is supposed to be an autobiography at any point over the previous four books; I also felt that some things about the internal politics and the way colonialism was handled really rubbed me the wrong way, and the fact that that was a person's body was never really addressed to my satisfaction. I understand why she'd go that way, it was really exciting as a reveal and fascinating and everything a reveal should be, and I really enjoyed the elements of being surrounded by a totally foreign culture trying to learn enough to function socially because that's the kind of thing I love. But in a way I wish she hadn't; the fridge logic got me very badly once I was done. Also, I was reading book three and four at least fifty percent for Isabella/Suhail and he did not make nearly enough appearances throughout most of the book for eminently logical reasons. (I. I kind of want to write AU!Fic where they get trapped in Sanctuary together now.)

I also wish we had heard more about what the not!Chinese rebels actually were planning to do once they won besides installing someone different on the throne; it's hard for me to swallow the end as positive without that knowledge. More complexity in the political situation would have done a lot, I think, to make me feel less annoyed about the political aspects of the end, and they might have given more nuance to the deal created between not!China and Sanctuary's residents.

The Ladies Auxiliary– Tova Mirvis. Literary fiction; Batsheva and her daughter Ayala move into the close knit Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis and escalate a conflict between the adult women of the community and their teenage daughters, after Batsheva is hired to work as an art teacher at the local Jewish school.

I can see Mirvis' strengths in this – complex relations between people who have wildly different viewpoints but are equally human and real; intricacies of religious diversity within Orthodox Judaism; focus on both positive and negative aspects of community and women's communities in particular – but I can also tell it's a first novel in comparison to the other book I've read by her; some of the characters are a little hard to distinguish, sometimes it's hard to tell why people make the decisions they do. The balance is different; we are clearly supposed to see some people as creating the problems, which is entirely valid but created a slightly stressful read for me. Still, this is very good if you like slice of life and complicated interpersonal dynamics.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is the point of view. This is written in first person plural, narrated by the “we” of the women's community, with dips into the heads of specific women as necessary for scenes and a sort of omniscient-within-the-community point of view overall. This could have worked very badly, but in this case was done very well and it gave me some interesting thoughts about writing point of view in general in fiction. It interacts particularly interestingly with scenes involving dissent between members of that “we,” and places where the collective opinion is not so collective as it initially seems.

The Outside World – Tova Mirvis. Reread. Tzippy has just refused her forty-somethingth shidduch date and stated her declaration to go to Israel for a year, over her mother's protests. At the same time, Bryan/Baruch returns from his second year at yeshiva and horrifies his parents with his declaration that he intends to go back for a third instead of going to Columbia, as well as his newfound strict observance. The two meet in Israel and become engaged – bringing together two families that were once friends and have since become estranged.

This is the other book I was alluding to in the previous review. The general strengths of Mirvis continue; in particular in this book the sense is given that there is an equal failure to reach out that creates personal conflict, and when it's resolved, it's resolved when people engage with each other sincerely. Religious observance differences within the same family can create conflict or unite depending on how it's handled; people can make situations worse by avoidance or attempt to solve them together. I still really like this, it's comfort reading for me, in particular because of the nuance in the characterization and the slow pace. I enjoyed the focus on personal agency here – eg. Tzippy's final rejection is more about her own exhaustion at being pressured to marry immediately than the boy, who the narrative says fairly clearly could easily have been someone she liked; and it is still the right choice, and she is rewarded for that rejection.

Winter Tide – Ruthanna Emrys. This is kind of... counter-Lovecraftian, maybe? Aphra and her younger brother Caleb are the only survivors of the internment camps the United States government sent the residents of Innsmouth to, having become convinced they were dangerous in the twenties. Several years after they were released with the Japanese-Americans who succeeded their people in the camps, Aphra is living in San Francisco with a Japanese-American family who adopted her, while her brother seeks a way to get their community's library back from Miskatonic University. When intelligence indicates the Soviets may be after body switching magic – a criminal pursuit in Aphra's community – Aphra reluctantly agrees to work with the FBI to find their spy to prevent further loss of life – and because she's afraid of the consequences of noncooperation.

This was a difficult novel to read, and I'm glad I did it. I'm having trouble coming up with a way of discussing it. Suffice it to say that I felt the premise was executed well, that I appreciated the relationships between Aphra and her brother, Aphra and the Kotos, and the people they adopt in Massachusetts; that the magic system and the religion intertwined with it were both interestingly written in comparison to a lot of fantasy, and served the premise well. At times I'm not sure the horror of the backstory is conveyed fully – but in a lot of ways I think the quiet absence and pain is more effective than graphic violence would have been, in the hands of another writer. This is as difficult book to review as to read, but nevertheless I recommend it.

What I'm Reading

Just started The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. About fifty pages in, I overall like it but hope the next six hundred pages feature a dramatically reduced page count for the appearance of urine. WE WILL SEE.

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I'm finally caught up on book reviews, so I can go back to regular Reading Wednesday entries, more or less.

What I've Read:

How to Paint Light - Gabriel Martín i Roig. Exactly what it says in the title, this is a short (ninety-five pages or so) book of techniques for painting light and shadow, with exercises from photographs and from famous painters' styles. I found it fairly useful, though I haven't tried any of the exercises yet. I was slightly offput by the dearth of realistic styles in the technique, mostly because a lot of it was interesting theoretically but not the kind of thing I would want to use, but I think it was still useful to read about techniques I'm only likely to try out in the course of experimentation. Also, of course the book is targeted to physical painting, not graphics, and I hadn't quite realized until this how much the ability to paint on different rearrangeable layers changes how you specifically handle light. So, interesting, useful to anyone who also wants to work on painting light, I wouldn't call it perfectly useful if you're only curious.

Clockwork Phoenix: tales of beauty and strangeness – Ed. Mike Allen. Reread of a book I haven't read since high school and only vaguely remembered. My impression this time is similar to my first; this is an extremely mixed bag like most anthologies, but the highs are particularly high and the lows particularly low. The focus is on a particular genre that I don't think I'm aware of a term for, which I might call a sort of hybrid between magical realism techniques – blase world description without a lot of explanation or explicit worldbuilding, surreal, almost dream-like logic in portions – with an underlying cynicism and often worldbuilding details out of cyberpunk.

So for instance one of the better stories, “Bell, Book and Candle,” by Leah Bobet, concerns anthropomorphized instruments of the Spanish Inquisition in the form of near humans, living in an ambiguously timed magical, sentient and fluctuating city that might or might not actually be in Puerto Rico; they have grown and gone on to become new people in the time since the Inquisition's destruction, and when they are called again discover they're now horrified by something they never thought remarkable before. Another story, “Mask of Flesh,” by Marie Brennan, deals with a fantasy version of a Mesoamerican city, with castes made up of different animal people; the protagonist is a member of a persecuted shapeshifter people, going in the guise of a low caste woman to seek a petition from the lord of the city for vengeance.

One of the major strengths is that many of the stories deal with cultural material not frequently found in fantasy novels, and several deal with gender diversity and sexuality. On the other hand, a lot of them are brutally if surrealistically violent, in ways both appropriate to the story and not, depending. (In particular “Akhila, Divided” contained a rape scene that was in my opinion totally gratuitous and there solely for shock value.) My favorites were the two stories I synopsized above, “The City of Blind Delight,” by Catherynne Valente, and “Root and Vein” by Erin Hoffman. My least favorites were “The Occulation,” by Laird Barron, “Choosers of the Slain,” by John C. Wright, and “Akhila, Divided” by C. S. MacCath,

What I'm Reading Now:

I started Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee last week but haven't gotten very far; so far I'm intrigued by the worldbuilding and kind of bored by the slogging on screen violence, but I've only read one chapter.

What I'm Reading Next:

I've had Six Days of War by Michael Oren on my bedroom floor for nearly a year now, so I should probably read it and get it back to the library.

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The Sultan of Byzantium - Selçuk Altun. My main advice to you in deciding whether to read this book is to first ask yourself if a book that is mostly about the Turkish protagonist wandering around Byzantine ruins and thinking about history, with some intrigue to spice things up occasionally, is appealing to you; and if yes, to read about a chapter and decide whether the protagonist is obnoxious or charming. If you find him obnoxious, you will hate the rest of the book, so just put it down there. I, however, actually liked him; it helped that he is possibly the most obviously autistic character I have seen in a while (he speaks to inanimate objects regularly; can read hundreds of pages of history in an afternoon; and displays the plot relevant ability to stand in a room and skim mosaics with hundreds of pieces, then quickly find the one tile out of place – after which he is vaguely embarrassed about having accomplished a difficult task implausibly fast and hangs around pretending not to be finished for a while. I found this almost unbearably relatable.) I also was amused by his blase acceptance of his childhood sweetheart coming out as a lesbian, followed by visiting her in Italy and staying with her and her girlfriend for a few weeks to catch up.

That said, he is also very, painfully arrogant, and the sexism in this novel is really just – weird. On the one hand, it's hard to say the protagonist is particularly oblivious to women when he doesn't seem to notice anyone at all unless they're involved with something he's obsessed with; on the other hand, there's some really creepy behavior in the romance subplot that otherwise affects nothing, and the protagonist repeatedly hires sex workers and is polite but oblivious to them as people, too, so that may bother some readers. (I found the parts of the romance subplot that weren't creepy and stalkerish cute; he meets her when he has to ask her permission to gain entrance to ruins she is currently supervising work on, falls in love with her in the back of a lecture she is giving on Byzantine history, and their courtship consists of three weeks of wandering around Byzantine sites in Istanbul while he provides exposition and she takes photographs and notes. As far as I can tell they discuss nothing else during this time. You see what I mean about autistic coding?)

Pile of Bones: a Novel of the Parallel Parks – Bailey Cunningham. This is a portal fantasy with a twist: the protagonists are essentially participants in a fantasy, immersive MMORPG, which they access via a park in their city. I had trouble getting invested in the basic premise because I had trouble believing anyone would voluntarily go back to the park once they found it; the life of low level players, working drudge jobs until they find an opportunity in a world much more casually violent than modern earth, seemed too miserable to actually work as escapism, whatever the lure of adventure. I also just did not like the constant low level grossness – like, it's possible to write characters sneaking in through the sewer without graphically describing the filth and specifying that they don't have time to wash after, you know? I just don't want to read that. Most people, I would venture, don't find it appealing. That said, once I was invested in the characters and plot it got a lot more interesting, I appreciated the random classical history dropped into the park, and I really loved the slice-of-life academia sections in the real world; I also loved how all of the characters are queer and one of them is a queer woman and a single parent, whose parenting is shown on screen.

Spanish Society: 1400-1600 – Teofilo F. Ruiz. Research reading, described by its author as a social history of Spain. The problem with this work is that it is only unwillingly a social history; the author is really interested in economics and political violence, and spends most of his time talking about those things. The two chapters on topics that are undeniably social history – food and clothing; and popular culture – are probably the worst scholarship in the book and the sections on food in particularly are painfully judgmental and downright bizarre (a pound of bread, half a pound of meat, vegetables and a liter of wine is inadequate food in one sitting? What on earth does the author eat? And please stop telling me about how Fat Heavy Diets Are Bad, this is a history book, not a diet manual). The rest of the book is fine, and useful, with the author's judgmental tendencies obnoxious but mostly limiting themselves to misplaced but ignorable adjectives like “bizarre” and “miserable.” A decent overview of the economics and political violence of Spain immediately post-Reconquista, with some useful citations on food. Ignore everything he says about clothing.

The Ruins of Us – Keija Parssinen. An American expat who married a Saudi man twenty-five years ago discovers her husband has taken a second wife without telling her; the slowly unraveling dysfunctions of their family are abruptly revealed all at once, and things explode. Also involved is a second American expat, a friend of hers from college who works for her husband. The major strengths of this novel are the characterization – everyone is complex and believable, if their behavior is not always likable – and the prose; I found it gripping even when I really wanted to put it down. I think the plot was mostly reasonably well handled, just not my sort of thing. I'm not sure if I bought the denouement, it seemed like the events of the conclusion should not have been so easily swept away, but what was logically difficult to believe came off as mostly emotionally satisfying and fit the generally somewhat dreamlike tone.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes: a Memoir by Lady Trent – Marie Brennan. And the series continues to improve. Loved the archaeology in this one, loved the attempts at experimental science instead of solely fieldwork, loved the protagonist's brother showing up and their sibling relationship loved the romance plot – intellectual companionship plus hilariously in character impulsive decision making, I actually went back to reread one particular scene – but was kind of torn on the setting; I really want an explanation for how the alternate history sets up the Arab caliphate(s) existing and a city that I had the impression was based off of medieval Baghdad, without the Mongol conquest or the subsequent Safavid and Ottoman rule in the region. Like, either write secondary fantasy or don't, you know? Half-accuracy is distracting. The culture also felt oddly thin in places, probably because the early modern middle east is a setting I've actually studied. But overall I definitely enjoyed this one.

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I think I am going to have to stop numbering these and concede it is my new review routine at this point.

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent. The series continues to improve, and I really love the love interest introduced in this one – possibly I just have a soft spot for intellectual companionship, but this is maybe the most plausible romance subplot I've seen in a while. He's an archaeologist and they argue about scientific theory. (*heart eyes*) Anyway, I thought the travel between different locations was interesting, and in a way it made the sometimes sparse cultural description feel more real, because the characters should have somewhat sparse views. I'm not sure I entirely bought the climactic action scene, but eh, I'm never really in it for action. I did feel kind of... eeeh about a specific LGBT-related plot development, like, was it really necessary to put that in with a straight and cis protagonist and then duck away from the full impact? And I feel like the cultural stuff was probably also eeeh although I'm not qualified to judge. But at least there was an instance of a character who it clearly does apply fully to, so, idk. *shrugs*

Prehistoric Britain: 2nd Edition – Timothy Darvill. Textbook on the title's subject, archaeological data somewhat dense but good, just ignore literally everything the book says about linguistics (Fortunately that's not very much anyway; I'm just annoyed when I go chasing down a claim that seemed interesting and discover the citation was to an unpublished archaeologist playing amateur linguist with no clue what he's doing. BUT I AM USED TO THIS FROM ARCHAEOLOGISTS.) Anyway if you need a general overview of the record from a period this is a good resource; some of the theoretical interpretations are a bit... arbitrary but, well, it is archaeology and this is fairly easy to tell from the text since he talks in detail about the evidence most of the time.

(Uh. Apologies to any archaeologists in the audience for my disdain towards their field. I didn't want to develop a grudge, they just won't stop staying stupid things about historical linguistics and eventually one gets annoyed.)

Playing with Matches – Suri Rosen. YA, the MC is an Orthodox Jewish teenager who's shipped to relatives in Toronto following some spectacular incident that got her expelled from school, and she inadvertently sets herself up as an anonymous matchmaker. I did not like this book. The author is apparently a screenwriter normally, and you can tell; the comic mishaps feel very Hollywood to me, and were frankly pretty cringe worthy to me, since I hate comedy based on embarrassing the protagonist. Mostly I wanted to scream at the secondary characters for being monstrously unfair to her. I found a certain development involving dogs incredibly implausible – I think the fact that chocolate is poisonous to dogs is sufficiently embedded in American popular culture that gags based on characters not knowing this are both cliche and totally unbelievable – and the idea that everyone would just do a one eighty about the MC based on what happens during the conclusion was also poorly supported. I could have bought it with better writing but that did not happen here. Also, the misbehavior that got the protagonist sent to Toronto in the first place was poorly described in the beginning (I had the false impression she'd been sexually abused by a teacher and blamed for it for half the book) and when the details were revealed they felt so pointlessly mean that I had trouble reconciling it with the character as she was written.

The Lake – Banana Yoshimoto. This is hard to synopsize; a sort of unconventional romance, but mostly it is a story about people's trauma, and communication between two people, I think. I liked this in general very much; the atmospheric prose was probably its biggest strength, along with the way emotions that don't often make it into novels are portrayed in breathless, realistic detail. The description is very good, and the protagonist is just – likable in a way I found very comforting to read. I also appreciated the way trauma was used, the way small improvements are significant but don't mean that the trauma is gone, it was very realistic in a way I wouldn't have been expected to be compatible with trauma-as-plot, but it was here. I would give this an entirely positive review, except that I was not at all pleased by the way disability was used in relation to a certain character, and there was some behavior by the male lead at one point that I did not like, and felt should have been addressed.

Serpentine – Cindy Pon. Oh, man, this was not a good book. It can't decide whether it wants to be a coming of age story about the protagonist finding out she is REALLY A NAGA SHAPESHIFTER, or a story about the protagonist's mistress being a lesbian, or about the war between demons and humans and the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. This could be done well but it was not, here, the plot lines felt totally unrelated and also they were all handled extremely badly. There was a heartfelt author's note about wanting to write about female friendship but I honestly had the impression the only reason the protagonist was attached to anyone was Stockholm syndrome. Like, you can do master/servant friendship well, but ideally it requires some gestures towards leveling the power imbalance on the part of the powerful party, and also them not being a spoiled brat who throws physical fits when she loses at board games. The part where the book ends with the protagonist being kidnapped to Hell by another demon, losing everyone she was ever attached to after discovering her boyfriend left her to die after all at the same time as her mistress says goodbye to her lover and resigns herself to heterosexual marriage in obedience to her family is a special touch. I mean, who the hell claimed this was good lesbian representation. (Insert rant I am not up to here about using historical research that appears to belong mostly to the Tang period for a book that is supposed to be set during the mythical Xia dynasty three thousand years before that???)

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You know the drill – one paragraph per book, memory may be faulty and nuance may be lacking, soon I may be able to go back to reviewing these as I actually read them.

The Tropic of Serpents: a Memoir by Lady Trent – Marie Brennan. I reviewed the first book of this series last week. The flaws remain the same – worldbuilding rests on a couple of premises that don't really impact the novel anymore as much as they should – but overall I thought this substantially improved on the first book. The cultures the characters visit is more developed and so are the characters from those cultures, the MC has a long term positive relationship with another female character and friendly conversations with several others, and the adventures and plot are just more fun here. I really enjoyed in particular the scene where the MC hurls herself off a cliff with an experimental hang glider in order to achieve a ritual status that will let her ask questions about dragons from the locals.

The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel: Second Edition – Mark S Smith. Mm, I'm not quite sure what to say about this one. I thought it was fairly solid but something about the author's approach grated on me slightly – I think in particular I felt there was a bit of a double standard in how much evidence he felt was persuasive for a position he agreed with vs. a position he disagreed with. I agree with his essential thesis – that ancient Israelite religion developed out of Canaanite religion as opposed to being totally foreign – but felt he didn't take it far enough in places. The chapter on Asherah in particular gave me the impression he'd made a much stronger argument in the first edition (not sure if this is true) and felt trapped by it in the face of mounting evidence he was wrong, and was going out on a limb to try to argue that that evidence wasn't good enough. But he does explain his positions well enough that the book is useful whether you agree with them or not, on the basis of evidence presented.

Two Serpents Rise – Max Gladstone. Another one that was technically good but gratingly unsatisfying. I think in particular what bothered me was the sense that the author had gone out and researched the answers to specific questions he had about Aztec/Mexica culture, like, what does their clothing look like, without making any particular effort to do general research or attempt to portray them as culturally nonwestern. Given that the essential premise of the series is the setting, a fantasy alternate history where the Aztecs maintained sovereignty into modern day, this is a problem. I also just felt that the plot – essentially based on mysterious problems with the city's water infrastructure – did not justify or require the everything-is-gritty-and-terrible noir atmosphere, which is one I already dislike. That said, I liked the characters, I liked the existence of multiple gay characters who live through the ending, I liked the complex and strained relationship between the MC and his father, and I might have enjoyed the book more if I had realized this was the second one in a series, read the first one first, and been more invested in those characters from the beginning.

The Legacy of Israel in Judah's Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition – Daniel E. Fleming. The essential thesis of this one is that Israel and Judah were culturally and politically distinct entities, not only northern and southern extensions of one kingdom and culture, and that it's possible to discern specifically Israelite traditions in the Bible even though it was compiled and edited by Judeans. I agree with the author, found his arguments compelling in general and in specific, and found the book very interesting if a bit dry. I didn't find everything totally convincing about his specific arguments, particularly some of the more esoteric literary analysis based dating, but I basically never do, so.

The Door to Lost Pages – Claude Lalumiére. Nng. I wanted to like this based on the protagonist being an abused child who's adopted by the owner of a mysterious, otherworldly bookshop, and then proceeding to work in the bookshop and help people by giving them access to important information. I think if the book had actually been about that, I would have liked it. Unfortunately, instead it keeps derailing into asides that weren't developed or long enough to be interesting and were instead distracting at best and aggravating at worst, with some deeply unsexy sex scenes (to be fair, some of them were clearly meant to be horror, and I am a very hard sell on sex scenes generally) and a totally unnecessary maybe-they're-all-dead-and-the-plot-is-unreal-and/or-a-delusion tangent that really, really annoyed me. Not recommended, as much as the scenes with the bookshop were fun. (Also came with bonus DEEPLY ANNOYING Inuit-religion-is-magic-for-white(?but definitely not Inuit)-people in like, one paragraph. He should have stuck with the made up cultures for that.)

Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange From Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century – Richard C. Foltz. Exactly what it says on the tin. Not sure I know enough about the area to really evaluate this one's merits, except that the linguistic theory was Wrong, but wrong in a specific way that is unfortunately common among professional historians and archaeologists that are excellent in their own fields. (Really unfortunate, since it amounts to fascist linguistic propaganda being accidentally propagated by people who can't evaluate it as utter bullshit, but I've run into it in enough otherwise-legitimate contexts not to consider it a deal breaker in works by non-linguists.) Really gave me a sense of how much very interesting history I am missing about Central Asia, though – all of these religious movements and cultures and wars that I'd never heard of, and it's pretty readable.

Good Man Friday – Barbara Hambly. Another work in the Benjamin January series. January, Dominique, Dominique's protector Henri, and Henri's wife Chloe all go off to Washington DC to look for a missing friend of Chloe's, after January is blacklisted from work as a musician in New Orleans because he offends his employer. I really liked this one, Hambly continues to be astonishingly good at making you get attached to one book characters you know she is going to kill halfway through. I felt the mystery's solution was telegraphed a bit more obviously than is typical for Hambly – usually I have no clue since I don't really read for that, but this time I'd guessed in the character's first scene. I also really loved how much of Dominique we get in this book, she's one of my favorite characters, and I appreciate that January respects and loves her and she's able to be brave and intelligent even while she drives him crazy by being almost solely interested in fashion and society.

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Again, one paragraph per book, and I'm starting in mid-April so my memory may sometimes be faulty.

Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel – Wilda C Gafney. I liked this! It is so unbelievably refreshing to read scholarship by someone who doesn't just take it as given that the past was a uniformly patriarchal hellscape. Suffered slightly from a lack of nuanced discussion of dating of the Biblical passages it was discussing, but the background in terms of the author's familiarity with archaeology and general Near Eastern history was good enough that it didn't bother me too much because she backed up things with non-Biblical contemporary evidence whenever she could. A couple of her conclusions I'd like to see discussed by someone with a good knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, though, also suffers from imo deeply unnecessary “and this is how this applies to modern Christianity” in places. I will be following up on the stuff about female scribes.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent – Marie Brennan. I have owned this for years and never got around to actually reading it. Protagonist is a Victorian lady who becomes a dragon naturalist; this is the first book in the series. Overall a fun book, I think anyone with a deep drive for scholarship will find the protagonist sympathetic and the plot problems fairly interesting. Some fairly major worldbuilding flaws that kept distracting me, though. It's set in an alternate history with primarily cultural divergence, and the culture is nowhere near diverged enough, it's basically renamed!England which is a really big problem because a) I got the feeling the author did this just so she didn't have to be totally accurate with all of the non-England countries and b) the cultural divergence is that supposedly Europe is Jewish instead of Christian and there is NO. FUCKING. WAY. That would precisely produce the exact social conditions and problems of Victorian England, I mean, WTF??? Like yes, there would be problems, but different ones. Also if usable iron was actually really scarce all of history post the Bronze Age Collapse would be deeply, wildly different and the chances of the colonial era happening as it did in our world are nil. But if those things will not make you want to pitch the book against the wall you'll probably enjoy it; I did despite the desire.

Man, that was a paragraph.

The Tree & Other Stories – Abdallah al-Nasser, translated by Dina Bosio and Christopher Tingley. Very short stories by a Saudi author. This is probably the first book I have ever felt totally unqualified to review, mostly because as far as I can tell every single one of these stories was set up to have a punchline and I got maybe two of them. I think this is the translators' faults; ideally, footnotes in translated literature are for explaining that sort of culturally-specific joke, not for unnecessarily explaining what terms for clothing in Arabic mean. So, uh, the prose was interesting, I did not find the plots compelling except for this one particular story, which is spoiled by the intro so I think I'm okay telling you the point is an ironic one about Western culture's disrespect of elders. I found it deeply, compellingly horrifying and accurate and I also hated it intensely so I don't know what to tell you.

Dead and Buried – Barbara Hambly. Another book in the Benjamin January series. I continue to love this series – I love the setting and cultural bits, I love the characters and their relationships, and – new in this one – I also love the plot, which seems to have captured exactly the right points of compelling-yet-hilariously-implausibility to capture me. I'm not sure if I appreciate action more now or if Hambly's gotten better; I suspect the latter. As per usual I recommend the series, which is a mystery series set in the free black community of pre-Civil-War New Orleans, and recommend you start in the earlier books so you know who everyone is, though the internal order isn't crucial. (In particular if you haven't spent at least a few books with Hannibal the reveal in this one will mean nothing to you.)

The Stars Change – Mary Anne Mohanraj. I wanted to like this book, because I liked the short stories I've read by the author and I also read her blog, but alas, I was unable to. There are brief points of brilliance – exasperated closeted lesbian asks her husband what he thought would happen when he cheated on her, relieved to have an excuse to walk out the door; many pieces of the worldbuilding, which is obviously Mohanraj's actual strength and interest; the moment when the community comes together to deal with a mortal threat and immediately begins to cook as step one. However, the prose is wildly uneven, I found many of the characters unlikable, the sex scenes were deeply unnecessary and uncompellingly to wincingly badly-written, and the plot makes no sense. It reads like a series of one shots of varying quality badly stitched together. In particular the ending failed to convince me; there was no reason for all of those people to be there to get killed, and the fact that they could have been needed is not sufficient in a novel where the author decided to put them there for no purpose. I thought it was a first novel until I checked the author's bibliography, at which point I was just confused.

Ran Away – Same series as above. I found this one particularly interesting because of the very long flashback section in which we meet Ayasha directly, Benjamin's deceased wife. I loved her instantly, and I think that view made Benjamin's renewed grief at being reminded of her freshly all the more compelling – it's really impressive, honestly, I knew she was dead from the first chapter of book one and yet I was still hit by it all over again in this one. That said, the portrayal of Islam here is... eeeeh. On the one hand, the Ottomans in particular were so screwed up I am not sure any of it was really wrong for that place and time; on the other hand it would have been nice to be clearer about the parts that were the special, Ottoman interpretation of Islam, particularly since Ayasha is from North Africa and would know. There were ways in which Turkish Islam was both better and worse than European Christianity for women in this period and it would have been nice to see the parts that were better. I think I would have liked it better if Ayasha was still actively Muslim, I don't think it would be a legal barrier to marrying Benjamin in France in this period if she hadn't converted, and if it was her conversion could at least have been in name only.

The Burning City – Alaya Dawn Johnson. The sequel to Racing the Dark, but new readers should know the series is on indefinite/permanent hiatus after this one. I enjoyed this one, and I think it improves on the first in plot complexity and worldbuilding, as well as in prose. The plot increases in complexity and got a lot more interesting to me and the intermixing of mythology with magic and life also becomes more nuanced here. I continue to really love Lana, the relationship with her father was painfully awkward, I really loved the bisexual threesome in the Black Book's plot thread and I think the book does an overall better job with disability representation than the first one, which was decidedly mixed. That said, I also wish the megalomaniac dictator was not violent because, essentially, he hears voices; like, given the worldbuilding I'm absolutely sure it's not psychosis, it's literally a spirit appearing to him masquerading as his dead sister, but it would be nice if it did not come off as psychosis to all of the characters? I am very curious about how Johnson would have tied up the increasingly complicated plot threads, and disappointed I probably won't find out. Also, just, points for high fantasy set in the Pacific Islands and all of the stuff you don't often see in high fantasy, like, government that isn't a misunderstood version of feudalism, civil war fought in a city, etc.

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Racing the Dark – Alaya Dawn Johnson

Reread of a book I vaguely remembered reading in high school and liking.

I still like this quite a bit on a reread, although it's very obviously a debut novel (from 2007; Johnson has written several more novels in the meantime which I haven't read). The plot is very ambitious, dealing with politics, mythology and magic from angles that I haven't seen in fiction much. The magic system is based on sacrifice – of pain, body parts, even death -- and the cultures in the book are I believe based on south Asia and the Pacific islands in trappings, although this is very much a secondary world fantasy novel, not a fictionalization of a real culture.

Characters grapple with ethical struggles that aren't often examined in fantasy, coming to unusual situations; as an example, at one point the main character's mother sells her into apprenticeship in order to support the entire family's financial situation, and while it's clear that this has unforeseen and dangerous consequences and it ends their family life as it previously existed, the choice is never condemned. Likewise, while sacrifice is sometimes clearly used unethically and characters criticize it in some situations, the book never goes so far as to suggest human sacrifice is wrong. On the other hand, when the main character comes into contact with a society that eats the meat of animals (as opposed to plants or fish), she's completely appalled. I found the unusual ethical landscape and magic, and the transformation in the climax, interesting and generally compelling if not always convincing.

There are significant flaws, as you would expect in a first novel; some threads of the plot aren't really balanced well, the prose is functional at best and occasionally felt intrusively clumsy, and while disability and ethnicity are handled, they aren't always handled well. I will be reading the second in this series for the first time soon.

Lies and Prophecy – Marie Brennan

Another reread of a vaguely remembered book I basically liked at the time. The characters are students at a university that offers prestigious courses in paranormal abilities, a generation after our world's history was changed by the emergence of psychic abilities. One of them is a wilder, a sort of super-psychic group of people who are wards of the state because they require special measures to control them in childhood, who are often outcast because they inherently make non-wilder humans nervous. They're caught up in a new set of potentially catastrophic magical events as fall term unfolds and the fey become involved.

Much like the previous book, there are parts of this I liked a lot, and parts I thought weren't executed very well. The slice of life quality of pieces of it as the characters deal with class, and the worldbuilding with its political history and glimpses of academia were interesting. I basically liked the characters, although I didn't find the romance terribly convincing. (It becomes an established relationship in the second book without any particular drama or plot and I liked it much better that way, as a background thing.)

Pieces of the plot seem strangely stereotyped against their execution, and it sometimes makes it feel like there are two books smashed together here – the book where the group of college sophomores save the world with magic, and the book where a diplomatic and magical crisis requires years of work by multiple countries to resolve. (It's worth noting that this is a book that was written pre-career and then revised by the author once they had several publications done, so that's probably some of why.) Again, the prose is at best functional, though not intrusive.

Chains and Memory – Marie Brennan

The sequel to the previous book. This is the sequel to the second book that was mashed into the first, where change results in massive political action and crisis. Spoilers for the first book follow because it's really hard to explain the premise without them: the main character, transformed into a wilder by the events of the first book, now is fighting to maintain her legal rights, as an adult who doesn't require government control to avoid killing herself and others in infancy. The book opens with her having a meeting with a senator who is preparing legislation on the subject, and continues as the political battle is fought through multiple legal and illegal channels. Meanwhile, the fey are involved, and interfering as usual.

This is probably, out of everything I have read including a lot of nonfiction, the book that goes into the most information about the American political process, despite being set in an alternate universe. That amused me, and I did think it was handled well. Petitioning the Supreme Court and Congressional representatives just aren't solutions fantasy characters usually seek. In general, a better and more coherent book than the first, well worth reading. The established relationship was sweet and supportive without being intrusive. I'm still not sure I find a lot of the premise of the political situation plausible, unfortunately, there are shades of the issue that comes up a lot in fantasy where allegories become borderline offensive, even if this book averts a lot of the usual problems by having a knowledgeable writer. The fey continue to not really feel properly like fey, although the climax came closer than anything else in the series.

Spirits Abroad – Zen Cho

Anthology of stories by a Malay-Chinese-British fantasy writer. They run the gauntlet from horrific and grotesque to hilarious to romantic to combinations of the above. In general I like nearly everything Cho writes; I did find one story that was trying to do something nonlinear with video games completely incomprehensible but that was the exception. Memorable stories include an interesting take on fey as taken on by Chinese exchange students in Britain that I liked, a story set during a national forum on minorities that is abruptly disrupted when an invisible delegate for a mythological people arrives, and a story about a grandmother who becomes a vampire posthumously in order to emotionally blackmail her relatives; also a short story about a family of vampires that I've reviewed before when I read it online, The House of Aunts.

Warning: Zen Cho's fantasy work tends to be disturbing, and this volume includes violence, self harm, child murder, and other similar themes in places. She does include content warnings at the beginning of stories.

Urban Tribes: Native Americans in the City – eds. Lisa Charleyboy, Mary Beth Leatherdale

Anthology of nonfiction pieces by indigenous people living in cities in the United States and Canada. A lot of this seemed to be reprints of online pieces, artwork, etc, although there were also interviews and original pieces. This was a fairly quick read, interesting and very political, worth getting out from the library and would probably serve as an accessible introduction to indigenous politics to someone unfamiliar with the subject, but I didn't think any of the individual pieces were brilliantly memorable.

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I apparently haven't reviewed anything I read in September. Whoops.

What I've Been Reading:

Rice and Beans by Valerie Taylor – trashy lesbian romance, published 1989. Marty, an out of work butch lesbian, takes in physically disabled Thea after she's run out of her college grant money. They fall in love. Contains random racism that is apparently recovered from off screen halfway through, a lot of cringeworthy possibly outdated terminology, a dead serious adultery plotline which is resolved by adding drug issues, apparently unironic reference to The Goddess, a touching AIDS related death that comes on and occurs in about two chapters, and some of the most boring continuity errors in existence (does Marty have a bus pass or have to pay cash? We'll never know!). Not recommended unless you are truly, truly starved for disabled lesbians, or have a weird interest in trashy eighties lesbian romance like me.

The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher – this, on the other hand, was excellent. Fifteen year-old Rhea is engaged to a lord who might or might not be a sorceror, against her and her parents' wills. He demands she come to his house before the wedding, after dark, on a mysterious white road that appears just for her. There, she meets his previous wives and undergoes magical tasks, knowing that if she fails, she will be married. Contains some amazing creepy descriptions and interestingworldbuilding mechanics, and the usual thing I like about Ursuka Vernon's work, in that the characters actually have relationships and like each other. If you don't want to do kindle there's a paperback version coming out in a few months.

Warrior by Marie Brennan, and the sequel, Witch. The first one was a reread; I'm less sure about the second one, which I owned and may or may not have successfully finished before. I really enjoyed these. The premise of the first one involves two women who are dopplegangers of each other, one, Mirage, a Hunter (a sort of highly trained mercenary) and the other, Miryo a witch student. Miryo fails her initiation as a witch and is told it's because she can never control her magic while her doppleganger survives, and is sent to kill Mirage, lest she lose control and kill others with herself. The sequel involves the outcome of her and Mirage's decision and a lot of politics, my favorite thing in fantasy. I think Warrior is in some ways pretty clearly a first (published) novel – minor stuff like odd world building details that tripped me up and structural oddities. But it's still a favorite of mine, and the book that introduced me to Marie Brennan.

(A note if you decide to seek these out – the first printing published the first book as Doppleganger and the second as Warrior and Witch. The current printing published the first book as Warrior and the second book as Witch.)

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto – two novellas, primarily about grief and young adulthood. They both have elements of magical realism, the sort of thing that isn't given enough attention to be true fantasy – a shared dream, a temporary meeting with the dead. The prose was beautiful. The odd gender roles were interesting, and described in ways unfamiliar to me but recognizable. I liked both protagonists, which I find is rare in this genre of fiction. The novellas both felt a little... rambling and aimless to me in ways that might be cultural confusion or might just be that I am not usually a literary fiction writer. I also found a particular element in the first novella extremely upsetting, that I don't want to detail because it's very spoilery, and I'm not sure if that reaction was rational or not.

A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman – fourteen year old Susan explores a haunted house with a group of students she's vaguely acquainted with. She becomes friends with them and the ghost of the house, Nathan, who died in the Edwardian era and is forever fourteen. The primary conflict of the book is Susan trying to cope with her controlling and abusive father, so this one is definitely upsetting (also contains an on screen suicide attempt). I felt it was reasonably well handled, and gave some answers to abuse that I find very... realistic in a way fiction that tries to deal with it often isn't – Susan is unable to escape, but her friends and the magic of the house and its ghost form a new support network and you get the feeling she'll probably be okay long enough to reach adulthood. I find this interesting becuase it has a very human ghost, much more so than is often seen, but at the same time retains elements of creepiness. At times it got a little to heartfelt pop psych-y, but as I said it's better than a lot of the other options out there.

What I'm Reading Now:

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi. Another reread of a book I loved as a teenager and can't remember much of. Eight year old Jess alarms her parents with how quiet she is and her tendency to hide in closets for hours, have screaming tantrums she can't help, and general abnormal social behavior. (I don't think it's established in book but I am totally reading her as autistic.) They go on a month long holiday to her mother's family in Nigeria, where she meets a strange girl she calls TillyTilly. When they return to Britain, TillyTilly shortly appears too. Lots of very well done creepiness that isn't the stock horror stuff, but I'm not really far eough through it to say what I think of the plot yet.

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I found myself kind of stuck trying to figure out what to post today, so I think I'm going to try out something I've seen a few people on my reading list do.

Some general commentary about my reading habits first. I stopped reading significantly in 2014, my first full calendar year out of high school. (Meaning I went from averaging a hundred to a hundred and fifty books a year to fifty, but that's heavily stacked towards spring; the last few months, since I moved out, it's been one to three/month.) I think in some ways, this is indicative of the fact that I no longer feel like I have to hide behind a book or laptop to exist, so in that way it's a good sign.

More of it, though, is that I have been utterly glued to my laptop since I left high school. Almost all of my book reading was done during blocks of time in which I couldn't access the internet, usually in class or during commutes or waiting at the therapist's office, that kind of thing. I still read constantly on my laptop -- it's just mostly fanfiction, because that's what's available on my laptop without paying extra money.

In light of this, I think I'm going to bite it and go ahead and spend money on ebooks more regularly. I've bought a few ebooks and nearly always read them quickly once I get started, but between DRM, my lack of love for Amazon, and feeling like it's wasteful to spend money on ebooks when I have several hundred print books I've never started in my apartment and a ton more at the library, I don't do it much. But if the choice is between ebooks and giving up novels, well, I like novels. I'll be supporting authors as well as Amazon, and it's not like I'm choosing between reading my bookshelves and reading ebooks, I'm choosing between ignoring my bookshelves in favor of fanfic or in favor of ebooks.

And now onto the possibly regular Reading Wednesday bit.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm finally starting In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan, one of the aforementioned books lying around my apartment. I bought this not too long after it came out, I think in 2010? I know I'd previously read the first book in the series at the time. Anyway, I've been chipping at it waiting for class to start and similar for a few weeks and I'm currently sixty pages in. So far it includes exactly the type of political maneuvering I find fascinating, along with some interesting stuff about the Fairy court. It's set in seventeenth century London, and eventually deals with the Fire of London although I haven't gotten to that part. Right now the characters are mostly concerned with Parliament being dissolved, England's imminent war with Scotland, and the Irish Fey trying to insist the English Fey interfere with English colonization of Ireland. I'll have to get further in to have more of an opinion.

On Kindle, I'm two chapters into Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry (edited by by Zion Zohar), an academic anthology on the above subject, which aims to be the first relevant anthology written to be accessible to laymen and undergrads but utilize current scholarship according to the introduction. I bought this for writing research reasons. So far it's fairly interesting because I'm a history geek, but I don't have much of an impression overall. The article subjects look pretty diverse (a bunch of general historical overviews of specific periods or locations, but also articles on eg. liturgical music and Sephardic slave holders in the United States) and I may start jumping around shortly since only some of them are useful to me

What I've Read Recently

According to my records (my memory is less than reliable) the last book I finished was The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes last month, which I reviewed in detail at the time.

More recently, I read the first short story in the lesbian BDSM erotica anthology Her Private Passion: More Tales of Pleasure And Domination (all proceeds go to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission for both this and the gay men's companion anthology, so I recommend you check it out if it sounds like it's up your ally). That was "Bound in Silk and Steel" by Rebecca Tregaron, which was a fun, fluffy story about a spy going to historical Venice to investigate a possible conspirator during Masquerade. Very luscious description (more memorably of the city and clothing than the sex in my opinion), overall the sort of thing I'd describe as fun.

Fanfiction wise, I spent last night marathon reading Revenge of the Jedi by elizabeth_hoot, which is a novel length alternate universe Star Wars fic set after the Empire Strikes Back. It's compliant only with A New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back but uses some ideas from other areas of canon. I kind of wish it had been continued, but sadly, there is no sequel; it does come to a good stopping point, though. Includes Leia being crowned Queen of Alderaan, Shmi Skywalker the Force ghost, Darth Vader being menacing and having a more gradual redemption arc, and a lot of adorable friendship between Leia, Luke and Han. Definitely recommended if you're a Star Wars Original Trilogy fan.

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