tabacoychanel

when it comes to books, a looser spoiler policy than you're probably used to

( stuff i read )

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) I know nothing about the Troubles. Ok, I knew somebody died in prison while on hunger strike. Did I retain any knowledge of the Troubles after imbibing this virtuoso feat of four-year investigative journalism? Probably not, but I have a new autobuy author (Keefe’s next book is on the opioid crisis). In fantasy and science fiction we tell so many stories about overthrowing oppressive regimes, but what if the regime is merely fought to a standstill? Where does resistance bleed into accommodation? How does a populace of ordinary people reckon with the trauma of decades of occupation & collaboration, how do they ratify what is justice when there is no Truth & Reconciliation Commission? This book is a slow burn but so worth it. I lol’d at the academics who didn’t consult the legal department before amassing a trove of sensitive tape recordings wherein (still alive! unincarcerated!) Irish people confessed to actual crimes. This base incompetence results in the book’s dramatic opening sequence, the police raid on the Boston College sealed vault containing these tapes. Tapes which are the foundation of this reporting project. “Hughes had taken to telling people, ‘There was a time in my life when I would have taken a bullet for Gerry Adams. Now, I’d put one in him.’” “In the symbolic calculus of IRA politics, in which every funeral is a stage, Adams could afford to dissasociate himself from Hughes in life, but not in death.” “People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”

Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures (2023) Everything a young adult novel can and should be: This book is a thing of wonder. Early on the adolescent protagonists’ grandfather says to him “It was your father’s idea” and he protests, “But why should he get to decide?” which is the nub of it, isn’t it? Why should the grownups get to decide? Much later:

Christopher couldn’t breathe. He thought of his father, always so afraid, always anxiously holding the world at bay. It seemed in that moment that the had been right to be afraid, and Christopher had been wrong. Nothing in the world was safe.

Christopher’s father never even appears onstage. He’s not even a tertiary character. But this shift in how Christopher perceives the world could not have occurred if he had not disobeyed his father and gone on an adventure. The actual adventure involves Christopher falling through a portal and cavorting with griffins and nereids and centaurs, sailing a magic boat, the bad guys hot on his heels. And he meets Mal. The narrative alternates between their two POVs but it’s more Christopher’s story than Mal’s, since he has the clearer arc. Christopher and Mal are two kids who click right away and within an hour of meeting each other they’re both like “I would die for them!!” I was seized by an urge to reread His Dark Materials or rewatch Avatar: The Last Airbender because yes the fate of the world is in these kids’ hands but the beating heart of the story is the strength of their regard for each other. The process of saving the world forges their relationship, and that relationship is the thing worth saving. Anyway Rundell’s prose is sublime, she also wrote this bestselling biography of John Donne that’s been sitting on my shelf for ages. People who can switch between genres on a dime like that have my entire respect.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race (2021) It’s not exactly revolutionary to observe that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Tchaikovsky does something quite clever by juxtaposing the POV of the medieval warrior-princess with the POV of the “wizard” (aka anthropologist tasked with studying her civilization), whose aid she beseeches to vanquish a monster from the forest. The story moves along at a nice clip, and it’s clearly not Tchaikovsky’s magnum opus or anything, but what impressed me was his attentiveness to both characters’ motivations for embarking on this quest. See, I already knew Tchaikovsky was clever. I worried that he would spend a bunch of pages explaining the science behind the shadowy threat, but no, he’s wise enough to omit it. Instead, Elder Race involves a hilarious misunderstanding in which the princess thinks there’s some great foe who stalks the wizard when the “foe” in question is just his clinical depression which he suppresses by keeping his emotions turned off. Yay cyborg augments! Once in a while our anthropologist must let his emotions bleed out and then his brain goes straight to: “What good is anything I’ve done add what good is anything I am, when nobody’s coming back for me, and when nothing I have is of any relevance to any other human being on this planet?” Waahhhh, Tchaikovsky is at his best when he’s writing about how humans can’t function without purpose.

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025) Professor Palmer’s eight-hundred-page doorstopper of a popular history is exactly the thing I needed to augment my reading of her far-future sci-fi series, Terra Ignota. If neither of those things sounds like they’re for you, don’t worry, let me get on my soapbox and I promise you’ll be both entertained and edified. When I was in undergrad I was assigned Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I took to be a rather cynical manual for statecraft and it did not leave a huge impression on me. Palmer, a Florence specialist, spends her first chapter on Machiavelli and it moved me to tears—did I mention this book is eight hundred pages including endnotes?? This was chapter one. Ada Palmer is a certified genius; the problem is she’s playing twelve-dimensional chess and you need your wits about you to appreciate the scope of what she’s doing. Palmer’s superpower: curating examples. In Chapter 3, “Time for a Tangent About Vikings!” she introduces us to a case study in how historians can get it really, really wrong. Palmer’s book is about the Renaissance, but again and again she uses “Did Greenland settlers eat fish?” as a shorthand for certain “live” issues in Renaissance scholarship—a much bigger, more unwieldy field than North American Norse history. Another useful shorthand she deploys: Homerian epithets. In the vein of “swift-footed Achilles” and “Hector breaker of horses,” she gives us “phoenix-brief Pico” and “Battle Pope Julius” and “Cardinal ‘my parrot speaks Latin’ Sforza.” These sorts of mnemonic crutches are invaluable to a lay reader navigating an era when it was not uncommon for fully one-third of the College of Cardinals to all be named Giovanni.

The key to this book, structurally, is that Palmer walks us through the historiography of the Renaissance before circling back to dissect the events proper. She says: Look at the way nineteenth-century Europe and its imperial ambitions looked to the Renaissance as the cradle of “democracy”! Look at how our own secular age locates the origins of “atheism” in the Renaissance! She wants us to see how ideas affect events. She wants us to see the connections between them, not to memorize a passel of names and dates by rote. Palmer’s not saying her version of events is the objective one; she’s saying there’s no objective account because “history” is a story before it is a collection of facts. We are forever assembling the facts to fit the story we’re invested in. This is not to say, when we’re collating facts, there aren’t better and worse forms of evidence, of course.

I cannot say enough good things about Ada Palmer, the flower of our public intellectuals, a speculative fiction author of astounding vision. And her humor! In this book Ada dismisses some podunk backwater as a mere “two-gelateria town,” discusses the “good gay emperors” of Rome and also Assassin’s Creed. Please read it. I have been to Florence four times; I am married to a native son of Florence; I got soooooo much out of Ada’s account and there are things I will look at differently next time I go back. Let’s end on the most Ada passage ever:

It could be easy to feel that our brilliant, peacemaking princess’s life and efforts came to naught, since she herself suffered so much, and both the families she was supposed to link were overthrown not long after her death. But we get another sense when we zoom in. Years of peace—even one year of peace—is a precious thing within a lifetime. Ippolita Maria spent twenty-three years in Naples, a substantial diplomatic career, and during that time she did (a bunch of stuff) …. The world does not stay saved, but to save it three times is no small achievement.

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) I think Le Guin being an ideas-first writer grates against the grain of my brain, so I will never love her on a gut level, but this is my very favorite of her work—judged against The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, both of which I am glad I read but did not enjoy the process of reading. Being ideas-first doesn’t mean ideas-only: she doesn’t just inveigh “the ends never justify the means” and exit stage left! This is the story of a man whose dreams can alter reality. George Orr is a middling man at a middling job just muddling his way along in an overpopulated, oversurveilled near-future dystopia. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about Orr and that is by design. The real star of the show is the larger-than-life figure of his psychiatrist, Dr Haber, who has the bright idea of harnessing Orr’s reality-warping powers to fix the world. What could possibly go wrong?

I want to register that the sort of eucatastrophe envisioned by people in the 1970s—whether that’s climate crisis or social collapse—is so refreshingly alien from the strains we’re used to imagining here in the 2020s. Later in the book actual aliens even appear, and they are ...incomprehensible. Like, Octavia Butler levels of strange. The aliens are part of the seismic transformations the world undergoes every time George Orr has a dream. A world we mostly glimpse dimly, through the window of Dr Haber’s office in Portland, Oregon. Le Guin is deeply attached to Portland. I think this book needed that strong sense of place to ground it because its subject matter is so abstruse. Le Guin asks: Are humans a part of the world, or are we apart from it & acting upon it?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS The thing that kept me turning pages was the question: What fresh hell has Dr Haber unleashed with each new iteration of reality?? He hypnotizes Orr and makes suggestions in the trance state. He won’t tell Orr beforehand what changes he’s going to implement, so when Orr wakes up he rushes to the window to see if there’s a been a plague (overpopulation solved!) or alien invasion (war in the Middle East solved!). Here is a passage from Dr Haber’s POV that really stuck with me:

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool?

Recommend pairing with: Sandra Newman’s The Heavens.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984) Can a man write a really good Gothic novel? Maybe, but not this man. I’ll give him full marks for the atmosphere of creeping unease. The problem is the story features the narrator, his brother, and his father all falling head over heels for the same woman. A woman, by the way, whom the men have conjured into existence via the McGuffin that powers the plot. The woman is a product of the woods. I can see that the woodland is what Holdstock is really interested in, this parcel of unchanging virgin wilderness that resists every attempt to know it (the narrator commissions a plane to do aerial mapping, the plane is grounded by a freak storm). At one point during the rising action, oak trees actually explode through the floorboards of his house. The novel packs a wallop of a psychological punch, but for me, a woman in 2025, it was unpleasant to spend so much time inside the mind of someone who assumes 1) women can withhold sex therefore 2) women hold ALL the power in hetero relationships. I mean, it won the World Fantasy Award, I’m not saying there’s nothing of value here but it was hard going for me.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024)(Shadow of the Leviathan #1) The empire hangs its most vulnerable out to dry. Every empire does this. But every empire also exists for a reason; in this case there are colossal leviathans clambering out of the ocean each storm season, against which the Empire has built a series of concentric walls. The well-resourced are able to retreat behind the Inner walls but our story is mostly concerned with peripheral folks solving murders on the periphery, under imminent threat of encroaching leviathans. Bennett leans into his considerable strengths (astounding worldbuilding! twisty plot!) and papers over his characterization weaknesses by going for a timeless Holmes & Watson detective duo. Ana is our Holmes and she is cast in the mold of an Elementary Holmes, not a House or BBC Sherlock Holmes. There is a basic decency to her. Yes, her synapses fire 200x faster than yours or mine, and she’s liable to do recreational drugs out of boredom if an interesting case hasn’t fallen in her lap lately, but she cares if other people get hurt. Din is Ana’s sturdy, wet-behind-the-ears, I’m-not-even-allowed to carry-a-real-sword apprentice, and he is our POV. I gotta say it was pretty satisfying to watch Din dispatch a nest of brigands with his wooden practice sword. The reason Din can do this is that he, like lots of other professionals, has been augmented with special abilities to help him do his job. The casual acceptance of biological engineering in this preindustrial society is …pretty wild and slightly sinister. Robert Jackson Bennett sure knows how to pace a trilogy! I have so many questions about 1) the Empire and 2) how organic augmentations work.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (2024) Everyone has a phase as a teenager when they’re really into something. Well, what if the (170 years dead!) object of your adolescent obsession showed up, in the flesh, in your living room? What if your entire job was to keep an eye on him, help him get acclimated, keep him complaisant? Enter Commander Graham Gore, an officer and a gentleman. You know when an author is so in love with a fictional character that even you want to fuck him because the infatuation bleeds through the page? I kept expecting Graham to chain-smoke his way into my living room and explain why he was more impressed by germ theory than television. This book had me squealing it was so funny and the prose so exquisitely wrought. While I was reading it absorbed me utterly. After I put it down the larger SFF scaffolding around time travel appeared fairly flimsy, like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It’s an incredibly iddy book, and if it’s not an id-match for you then understandable to give it a pass, but bear with me while I tell you why it works. I’m obsessed with the ways masculinity and caretaking are and aren't compatible; Graham’s from a different era and he has totally different hangups than modern men do. Plus, the supporting cast adds so much depth: One traveler plucked from the Black Plague, one from the trenches of WWI. Arthur and Maggie feel almost as solid and real as Graham, and I would read another 400 pages chronicling the group’s antics. In contrast our nameless protagonist feels rather thin. She’s a mixed-race British woman (her mother a Cambodian refugee) who’s toiled her whole life in the bowels of the bureaucracy. To some extent this is the story of her working through her own complicity in “the System” and if her journey had ended more satisfactorily I would have had no qualms voting this for Best Novel. At the end of the day I think this is a book geared toward a certain kind of reader, someone of the Professional Managerial Class, someone with a lot of education but not a lot of power, someone whose broadly leftist politics are stymied by the world’s steady march toward fascism. I mean, I am the target demographic! I loved the shit out of the book! And if I’d read it as a fic—it started life as The Terror fanfic—I’d have left my kudos and moved on. But for the biggest award in the genre? I think as spec fic fans we should be aiming higher, and bigger. I voted for The Tainted Cup for Best Novel.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model (2024) Robots: they hold up a mirror to humanity! Not a new idea but executed with great aplomb. I did not expect this robot bildungsroman to turn into a “Universal Basic Income vs. Jobs Guarantee” panel at the climax but I’m kind of glad it did. The sort of systemic collapse envisioned here is always multi-causal, however our POV is an unemployed robot butler who has limited insight into the macro forces at work. He just wants the satisfaction of making a sandwich for an appreciative human, because even robots need a purpose! Here’s the problem: We have one comedian and one straight man, and the dynamic gets stale; the book could have been 150 pages shorter. It was fine but it doesn’t hold a candle to Tchaikovsky’sElder Race, which ought to have won Best Novella in 2021.

T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call(2024) Kingfisher continues to be shockingly bad at imagining the inner lives of her villains and superb at evoking the feeling of being crushed under the villain’s thumb (the titular sorceress can puppeteer people’s bodies). If I sound surprised I guess it’s my own fault for living in an era when every bad guy gets a redemption arc. But this is why Kingfisher’s stories are said to have a fairytale-cast to them: Characters might be flat but she does make you feel viscerally for what they are going through. She chooses for protagonists women and girls with limited power to effect their circumstances. This novel has dual protagonists: a standard middle-aged “my joints ache” spinster, and a pubescent girl who is the sorceress’s daughter. I myself am not an evil sorceress but it still made me cognizant of how easy it is to betray a child’s trust, and how simple to gaslight a child who has no notion what is “normal” or not.

Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower (2019) A crazy unique fantasy I was super impressed by, but would I want to experience it again? Uhh nope. It takes a while to get rolling. You have to trust Leckie as an author, and once you glimpse what she she is doing, that is the inflection point at which the story picks up momentum and then it’s alllllll the way downhill, no force in the world can stop it. Yes, I am intentionally loading up on rock metaphors. Only Ann Leckie would commit to the bananas premise of writing an entire book from the POV of a rock!!!! A rock who is also a god. There are two narrative threads: In the past our POV rock lived in the vast far-northern wilderness; in the present they are chained up at the bottom of the eponymous tower. This invites the question: how did they lose their freedom? For the first half of the book the present-day thread with its heavy palace intrigue was the one I cared more urgently about. At about the halfway point my investment in the two plot threads flip-flopped. Very elegant. Thematically this is a book greatly preoccupied with language and power. Ann Leckie is the kind of person who goes on podcasts to confidently pronounce that a cheesecake is neither a cake nor a pie but actually a sandwhich. Her brain is a national treasure. When it clicked for me the meaning of the word “godspoken” I had to go eat half a bag of chips to digest it properly.

Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte(2019) I wish I could get in a time machine and spoon-feed this book to fifteen-year-old me. It’s exactly the flavor of childhood best friends turned star-crossed lovers that would have set my heart aflutter. Nena and Néstor grew up together on a ranch. She’s the patrón’s daughter and he’s a farmhand. After a long, traumatic separation they are reunited. Here is the problem: The choice isn’t hard enough. I see absolutely no reason Nena doesn’t marry Néstor the instant he reappears. He thought she was dead; she is merely the victim of a very bad miscommunication trope. Everything she cares about is arrayed on one side of this equation. He’s saved up money; they could’ve struck out on their own. Of course if they’d done that we’d not have the remaining three-quarters of the book, wherein they slay vampires but the real vampires are patriarchy and capitalism and Yankees. My major takeaways from this book were: 1) A strong sense of place—Cañas’s family roots are in Texas 2) the yearning between the leads is so good!! it does not surprise me to learn from the Acknowledgements that she has written fanfiction 3) the vampires were so viscerally upsetting I want to see Cañas working in the horror genre proper (in her her next book, The Possession of Alba Díaz).

Rainbow Rowell, Slow Dance (2024) I’ve got a new favorite Rainbow Rowell and it’s a second-chance romance! Nobody is as careful as Rowell at depicting how excruciating intimacy is; these kids were inseparable in high school and now they’re reconnecting for the first time in decades at a mutual friend’s wedding. Rowell manipulates the dual timelines to great effect, plus her dialogue is top-notch. I could tell you “Shiloh is insecure about her own worth” and “Cary’s bad at being vulnerable with his feelings” and that is certainly what happens but how does it happen? How does she do it?? Rowell consistently produces work that is so seamless you can’t reverse-engineer her process. hamsterwoman  actually hit upon the word “seamless” when we were discussing Yeats—idk how her brain leapt from W.B. Yeats to Rainbow Rowell but she’s put her finger on it. I found the pacing of the final quarter of the book slightly wonky, however it’s a very satisfying book and I heartily recommend it as an exemplary chidlhood-BFFs-to-lovers story. There’s one scene when they’re reflecting on why they didn’t get together in high school (they behaved in such a way all their friends thought they were already together) and Cary asks, “How could I have gotten any closer to you than I already was?”

On a thematic note, let’s hear it for more working-class heroes and heroines in our romance! How often do you see a thirtysomething paying his mom’s mortgage not the other way around? How often do you see single motherhood depicted not as a moral failing or an anomaly but the norm? Ditto for multi-generational living? Every time I was at risk of identifying too hard with Shiloh and her overthinking, overplanning “get me out of this sleepy small town” Type A tendencies, she would go and do something to lose the moral high ground. Her objection to the military isn’t a principled antiwar one, the source of it is fear for Cary’s safety. Realistically speaking enlisting was the best option Cary had upon graduating. Damn I’m so glad Rainbow Rowell exists.

Barry Eisler, All the Devils (2019)(Livia Lone #3) Finally a thriller writer whose books work for me!!! I first heard of Eisler as a guest on a lefty podcast where he dug deep into the reactionary assumptions of the political thriller genre. Eisler is a former CIA agent, and his protagonist in this novel is a cop, yet the book itself is not the kind of copaganda/unvarnished military imperialism that makes me throw up. Our heroine, Livia Lone, is a former sex-trafficking victim and a martial arts prodigy and a quite decent cop...when she’s not being a vigilante. Livia will do anything it takes to get justice for other rape victims. This is a very #MeToo book.

Kelly Link, The Book of Love (2024) I felt bad showing up to book club having read only 50%, since I am the one who suggested this title in the first place, but to my immense relief only 1 out of 5 of us had finished the cursed thing and that was only because she was at the beach without access to other reading material. Turns out one way to have a vigorous hour-long discussion is by collectively trashing a book! Kelly Link has a kernel of a fantastic idea but she has trouble sustaining tension at novel length (her short fiction is ofc brilliant). Look: If I told you here are four teenagers and their mysterious teacher and a life-or-death magic test he has set them, would you not expect the existence of a deadline to impart some urgency to the plot? To spur the kids to act or react, somehow? Instead we wander around in circles for 600+ pages. The character voices are very samey, there are too many POVs, and the more I read the madder I got. Where was she going with this?! After we extracted a plot summary from the one member of our book club who had made it to the finish line, we were all scratching our heads like, what a waste of a fine premise. (“We want the prequel about the Anabin x Bogomil friends-to-enemies arc.” “Only if it’s less than a hundred pages long.”) What was the point of all this extraneous cruft like Mo’s grandma being a romance author, and Laura spends a whole chapter picking out a guitar? In fact music was such an important theme and so poorly integrated into the story. If you, like me, have a hankering for a modern Tam Lin retelling featuring adolescents who behave like adolescents and immortal bargains and cycles of trauma, that book already exists and it’s called Tam Lin by Pamela Dean.