July Reading Recap

I read another wide variety of novels last month:

→ A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton: In 1998, three teenagers meet online, calling themselves Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith. They become friends through developing ASCII art games that build on the mythology from a popular video game series. Their connections develop over hours in IRC text chat, where anonymity lets them create new identities and experiment with gender. By 2016, they've lost touch, though they still think of each other often, with regret over how their friendship ended. While their lives have diverged, they've followed some similar paths and all ended up in the vicinity of New York City, where they're being pulled back into each other's orbits.

This is an impressive and immersive novel that initially drew me in with intriguing POV choices, a richly imagined online community, and an early section formatted as a remarkably accurate (even painfully accurate) IRC chat. After the time jump, I loved getting to know the characters as adults in all their complexity, and I felt constant suspense about when and how they would reconnect. The story portrays individual and collective experiences of trans women with care and honesty, which means a good deal of difficult emotional material. I was sad to reach the end and leave these characters behind.

→ ACTS OF FORGIVENESS by Maura Cheeks: With a bill moving through Congress that will finally grant reparations to the descendants of slavery, Willie is anxious for her family to gather the documents that will prove they qualify. In many ways, the Revels are better off than other American Black families: They own both a home and a small business, and Willie was educated at a fancy private school. But beneath the middle-class trappings, they are struggling financially, and Willie worries about what kind of life she can provide for her daughter. Willie's aging parents don't want to discuss either money or family history, so it's up to her to pursue the genealogy search that might provide answers about the past and earn them the funds they're owed.

I enjoyed all the threads explored in this novel, despite some uneven pacing. Willie is a well-developed character who has been shaped by years of competing pressures from family, work, money, and friends. The way the book is structured, there's more focus on Willie's personal and family life in the first half, while the second half is dominated by the implications of the reparations act and Willie's quest for genealogical records. Because the latter topics are what attracted me to the book, I wanted more of that plot sooner. I was glad the story goes deep on the details of genealogy research, and I wished for more time spent on the fascinating questions raised about how a reparations policy might be implemented.

→ SILVERBORN: THE MYSTERY OF MORRIGAN CROW by Jessica Townsend: In this fourth installment of the Nevermoor series, Morrigan Crow is approaching her fourteenth birthday and very much a teenager, both emotionally and in striving to take on greater responsibility. As a result of events from the previous book, she's expanded her magical abilities, and she's burdened with a weighty secret. It turns out the adults in her life also have big secrets, and Morrigan discovers that much about her past and her family have been kept from her. These revelations grant her entry to a wealthy enclave of Nevermoor society, where she witnesses a shocking crime. When the police fail to arrest the perpetrator, Morrigan and her Wundrous Society classmates are determined to solve the mystery themselves.

I like watching this series develop, with each book continuing to expand Morrigan's understanding of Nevermoor, Wunsoc, and her own position within these. I love the relationships between Morrigan and the people she's close with, and the main weakness of this book is that she spends considerable time away from any of them. The new cast of characters comes with a lot of plot complications and mystery, and I became invested in how these would resolve, even if some of it felt awfully peripheral to Morrigan's life. I remain interested in following where the story goes next, and I'm so glad for this wonderful addition to the magical schoolchildren genre.

→ WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy: Dominic and his three children live on a remote island located between Antarctica and Australia, and they're the only human occupants since the last batch of scientists left. The research station had to close due to rising waters and more frequent storms, but things also went horribly wrong at the end. The family will have to vacate the island soon, but first they're tasked with saving what they can from the failing seed vault. It's a shock when a woman washes up on the island from a shipwreck, badly injured but still alive. Rowan claims she reached the island by accident, thought in fact she was headed there for reasons she doesn't divulge to Dominic and his children. While she hides her intentions from them, they conspire not to let Rowan discover the truth about the terrible recent events.

I was excited by the situation and mysteries this novel sets up, but I had such mixed feelings by the end. The intrigue about what's happening is heightened by the unusual setting, which McConaghy depicts with strong writing and fascinating details about the flora and fauna. And to be sure, the story is a page-turner. But I far preferred the tension created by what Rowan and Dominic aren't telling each other to the tension of what they aren't telling the reader. Having a point-of-view character avoid thoughts of a subject that's weighing on their mind is always awkward, and while it's managed reasonably well here, it eventually got old. I also felt increasingly unconvinced by the character choices, even for people driven by extreme circumstances and their various traumas. I wonder what a less thriller-y version of this story could have been.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Melanie Walsh presents a data analysis at The Pudding about animal gender in children's books: "After filtering the data to focus on animals who were explicitly gendered (she/her or he/him) and appeared in at least 10 different books, only a few animals were more consistently gendered female: birds, ducks, and cats. The rest—frog, wolf, fox, elephant, dog, monkey, bear, rabbit, mouse, and pig—skew male."

Releases I'm Ready For, Summer/Fall 2025

The next few months promise a fascinating crop of new books from authors I love!

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (August 5): I always trust Newitz to have an original, thoughtful take on whatever they write about, and I've especially enjoyed their previous fiction involving robots, AUTONOMOUS and THE TERRAFORMERS. So a Newitz story about robots running a noodle restaurant in a post-secession San Francisco sounds like a good time to me. Don't miss the charming retro website for the restaurant/book.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane (August 12): This novel is based on real events from the life of a real person I've never heard of, the author Penelope Fitzgerald. But I was enthralled by Kane's earlier novel also based on real events I hadn't heard of, THE REPORT, so I'm on board. I look forward to more history and more of Kane's great writing about interpersonal dynamics.

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19): I follow Anders's excellent newsletter, so I've been hearing about her next novel for a while and getting excited about the premise: A trans witch teaches her grieving mother how to do magic, while also investigating the secrets of a book from 1749. It sounds like there is so much wonderful stuff woven into this story, and I can't wait to read it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang (August 26): Kuang's BABEL was an ambitious, skillful alternate history about Oxford translators controlling the magic that powers the British empire. I'm intrigued that the new novel features more magical academics, this time at Cambridge, and they're journeying into hell to save a professor's soul, or maybe just to secure a recommendation.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy (September 16): I admired Flournoy's debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, for depicting a large, complex family as well the city of Detroit over time. I'm expecting more strong portrayals of characters over time in this story about the friendship between five Black women as they figure out adulthood.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry (October 14): It takes impressive range and imagination to write a novel about a high school field hockey team performing witchcraft (WE RIDE UPON STICKS) followed by one about Mongolian monks searching for the next reincarnation of a great lama (WHEN I'M GONE, LOOK FOR ME IN THE EAST). I trust Barry with any subject and genre now, but I'm particularly interested in "a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica"!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tom Comitta introduces People's Choice Literature, a project to create America's most wanted and unwanted novels, with graphs: "There are several survey results that might give you pause. For one, there's a glaring contradiction in responses to two answers. The most wanted activity for characters to experience in a novel was 'falling in or out of love,' but the most unwanted genre was romance. Given the popularity of romance novels, it's hard to square this until you consider their place in culture, with romance often seen as a form of women's literature, a category that historically has not been given as much weight and respect as literature written by cis men."

→ Laura Miller at Slate reviews the resulting book: "People's Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age–y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That's the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.... Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times."

June Reading Recap

Last month, along with my usual novel reading, I read two powerful nonfiction books. Both are about not looking away from the death and destruction in Gaza inflicted by Israel during the present war and in the past. Both hope for a future that denounces these acts on the way to peace.

→ ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, writes Omar El Akkad, and "this" refers to the devastation of Gaza. He opens by describing an injured child found in the rubble of her home, and throughout the book, he returns to stories of Palestinian children bombed, shot, killed, orphaned by the Israeli barrage. El Akkad is challenging the reader not to look away from these horrors, not to place the victims in a category that excuses the slaughter, not to soften the language used in discussing the genocide. I struggled with these challenges, and my starting point wasn't as far removed as many who I hope this book will reach, though their challenge will be even greater.

The book is not all dead children, although those stories could easily fill many volumes. El Akkad weaves accounts from the current war with observations from his own life as a Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant in Canada and the U.S. and a journalist in other war zones. He uses all these episodes to frame sections that lay out his well-conceived ideas in powerful writing: "Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

→ In BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING, Peter Beinart approaches the current moment, and the history of Palestine and Israel, from a Jewish perspective. He also brings his perspective of a childhood spent partially in apartheid-era South Africa to consider how one people justifies oppressing another and how a country can move past that oppression.

I appreciated the amount of historical and cultural context this book includes, giving me a greater understanding of the histories of Palestine, Israel, and Zionist movements over the centuries. Beinart also draws from Torah and Talmud passages that help make his case for opening eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering.

Beinart's arguments seemed persuasive and well-developed to me (plus well-cited: there are extensive endnotes), but I didn't need convincing. I hope the book will provide some clarity to readers grappling with complicated feelings about Israel, and I'd love to also see it read by those who only feel a single way.

→ DOWN IN THE SEA OF ANGELS by Khan Wong: In 2106 San Francisco, Maida starts her new job with the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project. The organization finds and documents artifacts from before the Collapse that upended society and halved the population. Maida is a psion, one of the minority with psychic abilities, and her power lets her sense the history of objects she touches. A jade teacup produces stronger visions than she's ever experienced, revealing the lives of two San Franciscans from the past. In 2006, Nathan is a designer who feels unfulfilled by his work in the tech industry but loves the community and creativity he finds at Burning Man. And in 1906, Li Nuan is an indentured servant in Chinatown desperate to escape her brutal life in a brothel. The teacup brings them visions as well, in a connection that provides hope. But Maida's power also shows her that an anti-psion movement is growing, stoking fear and threatening to round up people with abilities.

I enjoyed this ambitious novel. Each of the three storylines is well-developed, with a strong set of characters and a clear arc. Wong portrays every version of San Francisco with care, and I was delighted by the historical details, the familiar-to-me recent past, and the imagined future shaped by drastic climate change. The way the three stories fit together is interesting—there are no huge surprises, and yet the overall story adds up to something a bit different than I expected. I didn't love everything about this (a recurring problem of shifting verb tenses was a big irritation), but there's a lot that will stay with me.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal: After gaining fame as the Lady Astronaut and participating in humanity's first voyage to Mars, Elma is now back on Mars with the second expedition. This time, the plan is to establish a permanent habitat, and Elma is thrilled to have her engineer husband as another member of the crew. At first, the habitat setup goes as planned, though Elma keeps encountering signs that there were problems on the previous mission she never learned about. But when one of the supply crates is found destroyed, it raises questions about the viability of the current mission, as well as more questions about what happened on the last one.

I was glad to return to the Lady Astronaut world and characters, but this fourth book felt slower to get going than the rest of the action-packed series. Since harrowing events didn't arrive at the usual fast pace, I had more time to grow frustrated by details and subplots that interested me less. But whenever the big problems did appear, they were as exciting as ever.

→ CURSED BREAD by Sophie Mackintosh: Elodie lives a small life in a small town, working every day at the bakery with her husband, who is driven by the desire to bake a perfect loaf but has no desire for Elodie. But when glamorous Violet and her ambassador husband move to town, Elodie's life is transformed. At first Elodie observes the couple from afar, catching glimpses of their passionate but disturbing relationship. Then Violet seeks out friendship, granting the attention that Elodie is starved for. Elodie's obsession with Violet, and by extension her husband, continues into a later narrative thread, when Elodie is writing letters to Violet in the aftermath of a strange tragedy that befell the town.

All I knew going into this book was that the marketing connects it to a real historical mystery involving tainted bread. That sets up the wrong expectation, because most of the story isn't concerned with that event, and while it does provide an explanation of the mystery, it raises far more unanswered questions. The novel primarily focuses on exploring obsession, creating unsettling vibes (sometimes both sexy and unsettling), and presenting a narrator who won't or can't commit to what really happened. I found it interesting to read, but not enough of the elements and questions resolved in a satisfying way.

Briefly

I have fantasies in which I blog all the time about writing. (Wow, Lisa, what an exciting fantasy life you lead!) I wish I was both speedy and insightful enough to produce regular essays with peeks inside my process, explanations of craft questions I've pondered, and other such writerly gems. Alas, "speedy" is definitely not the type of writer I am, and my constant surprise over this fact suggests I'm not too great on the insight, either.

I don't have time to write all that stuff, and on the plus side, you probably don't have time to read it, either. We all have a lot going on, what with the various firehoses of real life that just keep spraying.

So I'll keep this brief: I'm still over here, writing my little sentences, or actually my overly long sentences. In the months since I blogged something other than reading recaps, I've also had a lot of not-writing time, with a busy period of traveling, turning 50, and living real life.

I continue to be pleased with how my novel is shaping up. I continue to be impatient about it not being fully shaped yet. Et cetera, et cetera, since I'm saving you time here. Go read something else, or take a moment to grab yourself a breath. I'm going to get back to my fantasy life, and/or my novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Sam Weller recounts the origin story of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: "In the storefront window of the United Cigar Store, he saw John Steinbeck's newly published novel The Grapes of Wrath and purchased it. Heading home by bus, literally traveling through the dust bowl, he read the book. He was particularly drawn to its structure, with its alternating narrative chapters and brief, intercalary passages of contextual information, setting, and social commentary. As he read, he thought about one day using the same architecture, but setting his story on Mars."

May Reading Recap

Last month's books were completely different from each other, but all thought-provoking:

→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters is a collection of four stories, all nuanced, intense, and focused on characters in situations that require complicated thinking about gender (by both character and reader). All are first-person narratives, with fully developed settings and scenarios that made me feel completely immersed—an often uncomfortable experience, since none of these are particularly happy stories.

When I reached the end of the first story, the gender apocalyptic "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones", I forgot I was reading a collection and was sorry to have to move on. I could easily imagine a novel-length expansion of that story. "The Chaser" and "The Masker", both compelling stories based in the familiar world, left me satisfied by their self-contained plots.

About half of the book is the title story, billed as a novel itself, and I was glad to get so many pages to grow familiar with the logging camp setting, its denizens, and their distinctive jargon. Peters writes with such a distinctive and confident voice that every sentence is a marvel of language: "To timber trespass in the full of winter was to countenance ice slicks, frozen fingers, and sunlight hours so short the workday extended from dark to dark. The grade of the slopes made cutting sidewinders a common occasion, and if you weren't careful in how you stacked the cold deck, those massive logs would tumble like straw, snapping knees as they went." As a respite from this cold and challenging work, the boss of the operation (the "job shark") throws a stag dance, meaning that any logger who wishes may play the role of a lady by wearing a strategically placed triangle of fabric. The story's narrator wants this very much, which sets in motion a complex inner journey. I recommend this whole collection (as well as Peters' previous novel, DETRANSITION, BABY).

→ COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna: When Jane's sabbatical lines up with the chance for her family to spend a year housesitting at the extravagant home of her rich and far more successful friend, she finally has the space and time to finish her second novel. For almost a decade, while teaching, raising two children, and moving between cramped apartments, Jane has been working on an increasingly epic book. She started out writing the story of a Black actress passing as white, then incorporated more characters and historical threads about mulattos in America to round out what her husband calls her "mulatto War and Peace." But at last she finishes the novel and sends it to her agent, dreaming of fame and prizes and a fancy house of her own. The response isn't what she expected, and soon Jane finds herself making some ethically dubious decisions and considering writing for television, a field she's always scorned.

Jane's character drew me into the story right away, and I was caught up in the unfolding drama of her situation. I loved the detailed and slightly satirical look inside both the literary and television industries. The writing is always sharply insightful about race, class, and human foibles. I frequently laughed at great lines, and I frequently cringed at Jane's choices. This is my first time picking up one of Senna's novels, but it won't be the last.

→ LUMINOUS by Silvia Park follows two main story threads, and how they connect is a mystery at first. (A mystery that's spoiled by other book descriptions, so beware.) In a reunified Korea, Ruijie is a human girl who uses robotic braces to walk, and she loves roaming the salvage yard after school in search of discarded robots to tinker with. She meets Yoyo, a robot boy who's exceptionally lifelike and advanced, yet has no owner and lives in the salvage yard, hiding from scrappers. Ruijie befriends him, introduces him to some classmates, and hopes to convince her parents to take him in. Elsewhere in Seoul, Jun works as a detective for Robot Crimes, and his latest case involves a missing robot girl who the owner considers her daughter. Jun is human, but following an IED strike during the Unification War, his reconstructed body is 80% bionic. It's also the male body he always wanted. Jun's investigation puts him back in touch with the sister he's been avoiding, a roboticist like their father, and the two of them start to grapple with difficult memories from childhood.

As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this novel. The characters are all well-drawn, and the portrayals delve into thoughtful explorations of disability, gender, and trauma. Park presents a complex vision of a society where robots are ubiquitous but there's no agreement on how much to treat them as people. The worldbuilding is also strong in depicting a Korea brought back together by another devastating war. I liked many parts of the story, but the pieces didn't all come together as well as I was hoping. This is Park's debut, and I'll definitely watch for more of their work.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel contemplates The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing: "Regardless, before 2006 it was rare to see writers engaged with science fiction, fantasy, or horror concepts competing for major literary awards. Since then, it has been rare to not have writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Karen Russell, or Emily St. John Mandel in the mix. We almost expect our big literary authors to embrace genre elements for some books."

→ Charlie Jane Anders looks at How Cloud Atlas Is Shaping a Generation of Authors: "Lately, I feel as though I'm constantly seeing books that are described as 'Cloud Atlas meets ———————.' And I'm also coming across a steady flow of books that use that time-spanning structure, though not always with six whole storylines. I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for 'genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.' As I've said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same."

April Reading Recap

Another month has passed, and I've read another big batch of books!

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes: Cecily is an experienced audio producer who's ready for a turn hosting her own podcast. She's pitched plenty of great ideas to her boss, but when he finally offers her a show, it's not an idea she ever would have chosen. The concept is that a dating coach will demonstrate her guaranteed methods by setting Cecily up on 20 blind dates. Cecily hates the whole plan, but the associated ad deals might keep the company safe from the layoffs always looming over the volatile audio industry, so she agrees. Just as the project gets underway, Cecily has a meet-cute with Will that involves chasing after a very good, very large dog. She can't think about serendipitous encounters while she's committed to following the dating coach's program, but somehow she just keeps running into Will everywhere she goes.

This book was so much fun! I was constantly chuckling over great lines, and I loved all the insider details about podcast recording, audio editing, and ad sales. I appreciated the strong pacing and the balance between different plotlines. The characters are wonderful, and it was easy to understand what Cecily and Will like about each other immediately, and as they get better acquainted. I recommend this for fans of romantic stories, especially those who are also fans of podcasting.

→ TILT by Emma Pattee: Annie is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping at the Portland, Oregon, IKEA for a crib she should have purchased months ago and can't really afford. Then the earthquake hits, the rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone expected to devastate the Pacific Northwest. Inside the IKEA, after the long minutes of shaking, Annie is briefly trapped, but she makes it out of the store. She's lost her phone and car keys, so all she can think to do is walk across the city in search of her husband. In the hours that follow, Annie's walk takes her through ruin and tragedy, while flashback chapters reflect on her marriage and the trajectory of her life.

This intense, introspective novel is an absorbing read. I enjoyed the combination of detailed disaster survival with a close look at a difficult but loving marriage. The story always feels painfully real, whether about the earthquake's impact or the strain that financial precarity puts on a relationship. Annie is a complicated character who doesn't make perfect choices but instead behaves in flawed and not always justifiable ways, just like a real person. I'll be excited to see where Pattee's fiction career goes next.

→ OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING by Shubha Sunder: Pavitra, a citizen of India, has just graduated from a Pennsylvania university and moved to Boston to teach math and physics at a private high school. She's in OPT status, allowed one year for optional practical training, and if the teaching job works out, she'll be sponsored for a work visa. Everything about her life feels uncertain: whether the school will consider her a successful teacher, if she even wants to teach, how much to put down roots, and what it means to be marked as an other in America. Over the course of the OPT year, Pavitra's encounters with colleagues and friends raise and explore these questions.

I enjoyed reading this novel at a slow pace, a chapter or scene at a time, because the sections are mostly separate vignettes. Each episode focuses on an interaction with another character, and while some people recur, there isn't a strong continuing throughline or chronology other than the background of Pavitra's teaching and housing issues. Often the conversations are more descriptive than realistic, with the goal not to convey how people actually speak but to evoke scenes and ideas. This isn't my favorite style of fiction, but Sunder does it very well.

→ ABSOLUTION by Jeff VanderMeer: Long before the Forgotten Coast was engulfed and the Southern Reach was established to explore the mysteries of Area X, the region was already under investigation by Central. A team of biologists encounters strange creatures and unsettling events, and their mission goes badly, as so many will later. Some years after, an agent at Central known as Old Jim studies the records of their mission and prepares for his own time on the Forgotten Coast.

VanderMeer recently published this fourth book in the Southern Reach series, a decade after the original trilogy. The novel is largely a prequel that continues to expand on the story, which means along with providing some bonus insights, it opens up many new questions. I found it to be a good but not essential addition to the series. The book has several parts, and I enjoyed some more than others. I particularly liked the character of Old Jim and the relationships that evolve between him and several other characters.

→ ZERO STARS, DO NOT RECOMMEND by M.J. Wassmer: Dan is enjoying a resort vacation with his girlfriend when the sun explodes. Or disappears, or something, but in any case, the world is plunged into sudden and permanent night. The resort is on a remote island, all communication is down, and the planes that delivered the guests aren't scheduled to return for two weeks. Everyone is desperate to speak to their loved ones and find a way to get back to them, but at least they have plenty of food and booze and are in a tropical paradise. Well, for the moment, because the temperature is rapidly dropping. And the wealthy guests soon commandeer all the supplies, claiming they'll distribute them fairly while actually imposing an authoritarian regime. Dan has never done anything impressive in his life, but he accidentally becomes a leader in the revolt that's brewing.

I was disappointed in this. Part of the problem was my expectations: I was anticipating the focus to be disaster survival rather than class warfare. But since the story did turn out to be largely about the rich people taking over, I wanted either more plausible details or a more insightful satire. The characters and situations were too often generic, and while the book occasionally made me laugh, much of the humor didn't land for me. I kept reading because I wanted to learn the resolution of some mysteries, but the answers were underwhelming. A lot of other readers found this much more fun, but I can't recommend it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Jenny Hamilton makes the case for Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends: "Contributing to this relentless sameness is the way these tropes can calcify into prescription—not just the presence of the tropes on which the whole book hangs, but the way you get recurring trope clusters that are understood to all go together. I can't throw a rock in a bookstore these days without hitting five sprayed-edged romantasies where the girl has to reluctantly team up with a dangerous, sexy enemy in order to save her family / reclaim her throne / overthrow the oppressive ruling class. Fine, I don't have any objection to a girl getting it on with her dark and deadly enemy. (Au contraire!) But it becomes immensely tedious when every book starts hitting the same exact beats, with slightly different set dressing."

March Reading Recap

I've started reading from my list of anticipated new releases, and it made for an incredible book month!

→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James: Erica has recently started understanding herself as a woman, but everyone else knows her as a man—an awkward, recently divorced man who teaches high school English and directs community theater. The consequences of revealing her true identity in her South Dakota town seem terrifying, so Erica can only come out to the one other trans woman she knows, a teenage student at her school. Abigail would love for everyone to forget that she's trans, and she's not at all thrilled about having to mentor her teacher, but in her own sarcastic way, she gives Erica the affirmation and guidance she needs. Though Abigail insists the two of them aren't friends, a friendship develops between them, which makes other people suspicious and threatens to expose Erica's secret.

This novel is so just so good, with fantastic characters, tight plotting, and a story that can switch from funny to gut-punch in a matter of paragraphs. St. James brings Erica and Abigail to life immediately by putting the reader deep into their concerns and mindsets, then continues to play around with that narrative perspective through impressive POV shifts. All the characters and their minutely changing dynamics are portrayed with insight, humor, and authentic emotion. The plot thickens with each chapter, introducing new obstacles and surprising developments. I highly recommend everyone read this marvelous debut.

→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker is presented as a psychiatrist's account of his treatment of a patient with an unusual mind and confounding experiences. (An opening epigraph by Oliver Sacks helps establish the style that the novel is evoking.) At their first appointment, Jane is so reluctant to say why she's there that she leaves before explaining anything, but soon it becomes more urgent for her to seek care. Jane has blacked out for over a day, failing to pick up her young child at day care and apparently wandering Brooklyn before passing out in a park. She has no memory of that time, and Jane otherwise has a remarkably good memory. As she gradually tells the psychiatrist her story, the many strange pieces of her case raise more intriguing mysteries about what's happening to her.

I really enjoyed this book, and I can't even write about many of the reasons it appealed to me, since I don't want to give anything away. I will say that there is heavy material in the story, because it deals with the way experiences like grief challenge a person's sense of reality. Despite the sadness, I found this a joy to read. Both main characters and their pasts are initially almost as mysterious as Jane's case, and getting to know them is part of the story's pleasure. The clever unfolding of the plot puts readers in the fun position of knowing more than the characters, so it's possible to make guesses at what's going on before the story gets there. I read in short bursts to savor and ponder the unfolding mysteries, but I was also tempted to sit down and devour it all at once. This is joining Walker's previous novels on my list of favorites.

→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones is a series of stories inside stories, like the nested noun phrases of the title. In the frame narrative, an academic in 2012 comes into possession of a hundred-year-old journal written by her ancestor, a pastor on the Montana frontier. In the 1912 journal, Pastor Arthur Beaucarne writes about the disturbing discovery of a man's body left on the prairie, skinned like an animal and painted. Indians are immediately suspected, so it's curious when a Pikuni man shows up at his church and says he wishes to confess. Even more curious is that as Good Stab begins to unburden himself by recounting the events of his life, he claims to be decades older than seems possible. Good Stab's confession, told over multiple Sundays, appears inside Arthur's journal, though the pastor can't believe the fantastical tales he's hearing of inhuman powers, immortality, and an unquenchable thirst for blood.

While it's not clear at the outset that this is a vampire story, it becomes clear soon enough (and is revealed in the book's description). Jones draws on existing vampire lore and adds his own fascinating rules that Good Stab must figure out in order to go on surviving. This is definitely not a book for all readers, because it is crammed full of creatively horrific scenes of human and animal mutilation, narrated in loving and bloody detail. That's not usually what I'd seek out, but Jones is such a good storyteller that I was engrossed, while also grossed out.

The story at the core of all this blood and dismemberment is the shameful history of America. Good Stab chronicles an era of real life horror as he watches his people suffer and die at the hands of the US government and witnesses white hunters wipe out the buffalo. He can't stop any of this, but he can use his terrible powers to enact some revenge. "What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had."

→ THE HUMANS by Matt Haig: Professor Andrew Martin has solved the Riemann hypothesis, and a civilization of mathematically advanced aliens doesn't want humans to have that knowledge. So before this dangerous information can spread, Andrew is abducted and killed, and one of the aliens is assigned to take his form, and his place. Playing the role of Andrew, our alien narrator is instructed to find out who might have been told about the discovery, then kill them, too. After all, these are merely individual humans, primitive and ugly and of little value. But as soon as the alien meets actual humans and learns about their lives, he questions his mission. Soon he's disobeying his orders to protect the humans he's starting to value above anything else.

It took me a little time to get invested in this story, but then I found it entertaining and ultimately sweet. The opening section, when the alien narrator is first experiencing Earth and humanity, was too slapsticky for me, with what he understood or not overly based on what would be the silliest. Once he settled into Andrew's life and got to know the other major characters, I began to care about them, too, and became caught up in the events of the plot. This is a fairly fun novel, but it also deals with depression and suicide, a frequent topic in Haig's work.

→ A TASTE OF MIDNIGHT by Shannon Page is a fun story of later-in-life love, small town politics, friendship, and food, set in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Julie has lived on Orcas Island long enough to establish the small business of her dreams and find a tight group of friends. They meet regularly to conduct their soup group (the solution to a failed book club) and stay updated on each other's lives. Julie's still enough of a newcomer to the island that she hasn't cared about local politics, until now. In the face of an outrageous attempt to introduce parking meters ("We're not Seattle!"), Julie and her friends organize to fight back. This unexpected new interest is followed by another, when Julie finds herself attracted to a guy she doesn't even like, when she never planned to get involved with anyone again.

This light-hearted, low stress novel was a pleasant break from my usual reading. I'm always happy to see middle-aged characters featured in stories, especially in romantic plots. I got caught up in the developing drama of Julie's life, and of her friends, who periodically have short POV sections. Page fills the story with local color and flavor, and many scenes made me hungry, whether set at a group meeting or in one of the (likely real) island restaurants. This is the first book in the Island of Second Chances, a series that will follow different members of the soup group.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Brittany K. Allen at Literary Hub talks to props master Michael Cory about the books that appear in The White Lotus: "We had to decide which books characters bought in Thailand, and how many books [they brought from home]. Like for Piper [Sarah Catherine Hook; arguably the show's most literary character], I was buying from the local bookstores in Durham and Chapel Hill. Like the university bookshops, the university press. And putting their bookmarks in her books."

Working Like a Dog

This is how I start writing a blog post. Or anything, really:

It seemed about time to provide an update on how novel writing has been coming along so far in 2025.

I haven't posted a writing update yet in 2025, so I thought I'd do that, but then I

Every few months, I like to post

It's that time again on Lisa's blog when I try to find a new way to say I'm still writing, still slowly writing, to provide an update on my writing progress and hopefully a bit of entertainment.

The way I write involves a lot of piling up stacks of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished, until eventually I hit on something promising. Then I can delete the rejects, or strip them for parts. If I'm lucky, once I have a good opening, further sentences follow naturally, and I only need one version of each. Until I get to the next tricky point. Which might not come until the end of the scene, or might be in the next paragraph.

But even when I'm on a roll, I tend to type out words and phrases multiple times as I put sentences together. For example, I was about to delete these strays that appeared after the previous paragraph:

The next tricky point might

After I've piled up a series of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished,

Eventually I

When I'm making good progress, I barely even notice this aspect of sentence assembly, unlike the aspect where I slow way down to actively grasp for a workable idea. I suppose I must type a great many more words than I end up with, even when I don't have to delete a chunk of writing that I replace with a better idea.

I'm reminded of hiking with a dog, who runs ahead up the trail, then back down to check in, then eagerly uphill again, over and over. Does that make my fingers the dog? And the human hiker is... my brain? The story? This is probably an example of a paragraph I'd delete and replace with a better idea, if this were my novel.

But this is a blog post where I'm letting you in on the workings of my writerly mind, so I'll leave it in, along with a final selection of accumulated cruft to test your patience with this shtick:

Unlike the slower

is something I barely notice doing.

Now that I'm thinking about it, my writing process (if you can call it that)

I usually don't even notice how much my writing process (if you can call it that) involves typing even identical phrases

So, anyway, my novel. I'm writing it! It's slow going, but it's coming along! There are frequent tricky bits where I have to stop and figure out how best to set up a character conflict, lay the groundwork for a plot point, or convey a piece of worldbuilding. But I think what I'm producing is pretty good.

Like a dog on a hike, I spend a lot of time going over the same stretch of ground, and I want to be advancing so much faster. But like a human who can read the trail map, I know how far I've already come and that I'm incrementally moving toward the destination.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laura B. McGrath looks inside the slush pile, analyzing data on a writer's odds of being discovered: "Any agent will tell you that finding a writer in slush is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's so difficult, and with such diminishing returns, that even agents who maintain slush piles still look for clients elsewhere. Still, we like to talk about the needles—those books that made it, against the odds. We can name them: Catch-22 on the one hand, Twilight on the other. But we know quite little about the haystacks in which they're found."

February Reading Recap

There's rarely much connection between the books I read in a month, but my February reading happened to all play around with the borders between reality and something else:

→ THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due: After Robert is provoked into fighting the son of a prominent white family in his Florida town, he's in for a world of trouble. It's 1950, and Robert's father has already been chased out of town for trying to organize the other Black workers, so the law comes down hard (though the judge insists he's being lenient). Twelve-year-old Robert is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, where despite the educational trappings, Robert can expect to be put to work and receive beatings from both staff and other boys. As soon as he arrives at the Reformatory, Robert can sense the presence of ghosts who suffered horrific violence. Meanwhile, as his older sister Gloria tries to get him freed, her premonitions warn her that Robert is in terrible danger.

This is a harrowing story about the horrors of institutionalized violence and racism, and while occasionally the ghostly aspects add to the horror, they mostly allow the characters to fare a little better than their real-life counterparts. The reformatory where Robert is imprisoned is based on the infamously cruel Dozier School for Boys, also fictionalized in Colson Whitehead's THE NICKEL BOYS. The book is often difficult to read, as Robert suffers arbitrary punishments and Gloria struggles to seek justice, but both of them get moments of hope and kindness from people they join forces with. With the help of their allies, plus some supernatural assistance, they ultimately get to fight back against the system. At times the narrative didn't seem to trust readers enough, so events were overexplained or points repeated, extending an already lengthy novel. But for the most part, I was caught up in the emotion and suspense of the story.

→ DEATH OF THE AUTHOR by Nnedi Okorafor: When Zelu is fired from her teaching job and receives another manuscript rejection on the same day, she doesn't want to tell her family. Her parents and many siblings have always had low expectations for her because she's paraplegic, so they fixate on her failures and ignore her successes. Fueled by frustration and anger over all of this, Zelu begins writing something new. Rusted Robots is about a robot civilization in Nigeria after humanity has died out, and the story pours right out of her. Soon Zelu has sold the novel, and she's experiencing success beyond her wildest dreams, but her family still doesn't see her as capable. The more she achieves, the more they want to stop her from becoming everything she can be.

I really liked so many of the ideas and elements of this novel, though it didn't all work for me. The story is presented in three intertwined threads: chapters about Zelu's life, interviews with her family members conducted after her success, and chapters of Rusted Robots. I often find novels within novels lacking, but this one was excellent, and I was fully invested in the robot story. The chapters of Zelu's life and family, on the other hand, started to drag after a while with repetitive episodes, and I think the book would have benefited from being shorter.

→ AUTHORITY by Jeff VanderMeer continues the story of the expedition sent to explore Area X in ANNIHILATION, but this time, the focus is on the agency that sends the expeditions. The offices of the Southern Reach need a new leader, so an outside agent named Control is put in charge and tasked with restoring order. He comes with some strange baggage, but so does the agency, so they may be a good match. As Control deals with the aftermath of the most recent expedition, he's also trying to understand the methods and findings from years of past expeditions.

I ended ANNIHILATION feeling a bit disappointed by the lack of answers, but this second installment of the original trilogy left me more satisfied and excited by the series. It's not that this book provides many answers about the mysteries of Area X, which remains inexplicable. But the perspective from the world beyond fills out the picture, providing context and history that expands the story. Control is an entertaining character to spend time with, a bit odd, but not nearly as much as some of his new coworkers. This book was less creepy overall than the first, but includes plenty of unsettling moments.

→ ACCEPTANCE by Jeff VanderMeer brings the story of the Southern Reach to a conclusion by investigating Area X at multiple points, through multiple perspectives. VanderMeer revisits and follows up on characters and threads from the first two books, further expanding the story and addressing many questions. Not all questions, because the mysterious nature of Area X persists, but I felt satisfied by the ending, and impressed by how the three books work together. This trilogy was published in quick succession in 2014, and then a surprise prequel came out last year, which I'm planning to read as well.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Charlie Jane Anders offers tips on How to Fix a Character Who's Starting to Bore You: "If you look back at what you wrote earlier, you'll probably find that you left yourself lots of clues and hints about unexplored nooks and crevices in this character's personality and backstory. If you spent a decent amount of time building a character's internal monologue and developing their story, you're pretty much bound to find loose threads that you can pull on. I'm often amazed at the stuff I forgot I threw in when introducing a character, which can prove fruitful later on in the character's life."

Releases I'm Ready For, Winter 2025

A remarkable number of intriguing books are coming out in the four weeks between February 25 and March 25. These are the ones I've been most looking forward to:

→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker (February 25): I loved the big, bold premises and fantastic execution of Walker's previous two novels. In THE AGE OF MIRACLES, Earth's rotation begins to slow. In THE DREAMERS, a town is gripped by an epidemic of sleep. The speculative stakes are more personal this time, with a single character "struck by a mysterious psychological affliction," but since Walker's characterizations are always excellent, I'm expecting another fascinating story.

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes (February 25): I first became a fan of Holmes through the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, so I'm delighted that her new book revolves around podcasting. This is sure to be another smart and funny romance, like EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER and FLYING SOLO.

→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James (March 4): St. James is a television critic I've been following for years. Her debut novel has a ton of potential for great character connections and conflicts: A high school teacher realizes she's trans, and she seeks the guidance of the only other trans woman she knows, who is one of her students.

→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters (March 11): The drama, humor, and raw honesty of DETRANSITION, BABY captivated me, so I'm eager to read more from Peters. Her new book is a collection of four stories (billed as "one novel and three novellas") examining gender across a range of genres—including a tall tale about lumberjacks.

→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones (March 18): The only one of Jones's many, many novels I've read so far is THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS, but it's stayed with me for both the compelling story and the horrifying mental images. So I'm excited and scared to pick up his latest, a vampire story set at multiple points in the history of the American west.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal (March 18): I've enjoyed Kowal's Lady Astronaut series, an alternate history in which the space program is accelerated and given higher stakes by a meteor strike that wreaks havoc on Earth. This is the fourth book, and I believe originally planned as the last, though Kowal has probably left room to write more (and has already published many short stories from the same universe).

→ TILT by Emma Pattee (March 25): This is a debut by an author I have no previous experience with, but I knew I'd be reading it when I saw the premise: A big, big earthquake strikes Portland, Oregon, and a character at the end of her pregnancy tries to walk home through the wreckage. I've heard good things.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Emily Temple at Literary Hub asks, What should the cover of Pride and Prejudice look like?: "...despite the fact that we're told not to judge books by their covers, we do. Like the clothes you wear (as Austen herself would confirm), a book's cover does—or at least can—change our perception of it, even after it's been read. Book covers can provide a kind of tonal context, or at least give the reader some hints as to how its publisher wants the text to be understood. It's easy, despite that, for a great book to transcend a dopey cover—many have done this—but it's also possible for a great cover to elevate our experience of a dopey book. A little, anyway. Perception being, after all, reality."