July Reading Recap

I'm doing so much summer reading!

→ THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang: Ro has trained as a Linguist, and he's determined to prove himself by becoming the first in generations to make a jump. The empathic sense of his species, when combined with a deep understanding of languages, allows the rare individual to jump across the galaxy into the body of a Star Eater. That species, so alien in body and mind to Ro's, lives in the vacuum of space and has the unique ability to find and mine the meridian element. Meridian is crucial for every world in the conglomerate, but the Star Eaters and their skills are poorly understood, so the possibility of jumping provides a secret advantage for Ro's small moon against the galaxy's larger powers. Once, the Star Eaters were cruelly exploited, but now they are full members of the conglomerate who participate willingly in meridian mining. Or at least, that's the claim. Ro discovers that this idea, along with so much else he's been taught, may be lies.

This story introduces so many fascinating concepts and explores them all well in a surprisingly small number of pages (about 160). I was immediately drawn in by the focus on linguistics, and thrilled by the continuing language innovations in the story and how important a role these play in the plot. I was also delighted by the alienness of this story without humans, featuring characters who are physically nothing like humans. Huang's skillful writing made me feel immersed in the unfamiliar bodies and worlds. But it was still easy to connect with Ro as a character, because Huang wisely gives him recognizable personality traits and flaws. This is a wildly creative and clever novella, and I recommend it to science fiction fans, especially those interested in language.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams are teenage brothers growing increasingly curious about the world beyond their secluded island. They've been taught about the new nation of America and every scientific innovation of the 18th century, but they've never been permitted to see more of the world. Then one fateful day, the brothers find a mysterious device that shows far more of the world than they're prepared for, including the revelation that the year is 2026. While they make plans to confront their mother with this information, the Antediluvian Society meets to discuss when to introduce their family of clones to modern America and get the country back on the right track.

This entertaining novella establishes its tone immediately with an opening line about Benjamin Franklin discovering internet porn. From there, it's a wild and bawdy ride that speeds right along. Well-handled POV shifts offer the perspectives of the naive clones as well as the informed adults, with appropriate diction for each. I expected the story to play out over a longer period of time than it does, but what's here fun to read, and Elison clearly had fun developing the absurd premise of a new American experiment gone wrong.

→ SANDWICH by Catherine Newman: For twenty years, Rocky and her family have been renting the same house on Cape Cod for a week every summer. Her kids are now young adults living away from home, so spending this time together brings Rocky a special joy. It also brings on memories of every past vacation, all the laughter and tantrums and fights with her husband and love, and the painful memories of long-ago pregnancy loss. As the family visits their favorite spots on the Cape, Rocky deals with her memories, with menopause symptoms, with her children's adult drama, and with the health of her elderly parents.

I enjoyed the balance of breezy summer read and thoughtful family story in this novel. The humor worked for me, and I laughed often at the family conversations and Rocky's commentary. It was great to see writing about menopause that's both frank and funny. The dynamics between the characters, especially the conflicts, felt realistic and sometimes familiar. There's not much to the plot, and it took a little time for me to adjust my expectations to the slice-of-life style, but I was content to hang out with Rocky's family, and I may continue on to the sequel, WRECK.

Complexities

I recently read a wondrously creative scifi novella, THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang. I loved it, and that detailed recommendation will be included in my next monthly roundup. Even past the end of the story, a sentence appeared that resonated with me. In the book's acknowledgments, Huang writes, "This book had such tight complexities that I sometimes despaired I could ever make its many fragile gears fit."

This puts into words exactly what I'm struggling with most every writing day. Yes, tight complexities! Yes, fragile gears! Yes, despair, so much despair! It's inspiring, of course, to recognize that Huang made it through the same struggle as me with the parts successfully assembled into a great story. So did all the other authors of all the other books I love for their clever intricacies. Inspiring, but it doesn't solve any of my self-inflicted novel problems.

I've given myself so many challenges with this story: the future setting, the invented technologies, the amount of science in this fiction, the number of characters, and the several plotlines that need to intersect and affect each other. It's way too much, really, and I've had to scale some of it back, but if I remove too many pieces, it all falls apart. Decisions and changes in one area create repercussions elsewhere, and I keep thinking up new questions and ideas that make me want to rethink everything. Particularly my choice to write this novel, or any novel.

But I persist. Because abandoning this novel would surely pain me more than continuing. And because the difficulty level of the complexities is what excites me about the story and makes me believe it's worth finishing. And because, despite all the despair, I must enjoy doing this work, since there are zero outside forces driving me.

Sometimes, though, I do fantasize about setting this novel aside for a while and turning to a more manageable one that I could complete first. Something simpler, maybe something about... time travel. Then I sigh at myself and get back to work.

June Reading Recap

Someday I'll write another blog post that isn't book reviews, but for now, I once again have so many books to talk about!

→ In the world of SUBLIMATION by Isabel J. Kim, throughout history, whenever people migrate, they might leave behind a duplicate version of themselves. At the moment of instancing, the selves are identical, but from that point, each instance develops separately. Soyoung was ten years old when her mother decided the two of them should leave Korea and move to America, and they both split at the border. Consequently, Soyoung stayed in Seoul to grow up surrounded by Korean family and culture. Meanwhile, her instance took on the name Rose, acculturated to the US, and eventually became a New Yorker. After their grandfather dies, Soyoung asks Rose to travel to Seoul for the funeral. The instances meet for the first time in a reunion that raises questions about their futures. The possibilities become more complicated with the announcement of an instancing technology that may have global implications.

This is an inventive work of speculative fiction that succeeds at character, plot, and worldbuilding. I was engrossed from the beginning by the premise and the personal stakes of Soyoung and Rose's situation, then thrilled by the way the story gradually expands outward. By the end, the plot is action-packed, but there's still a strong emotional core. Kim has imagined many logistical details around instancing and presents these in fascinating ways, especially through the use of alternate versions of old texts. (For example, in this world, Odysseus left an instance back in Ithaca when he set out for Troy.) I'm excited to recommend this book widely, read more of Kim's many short stories, and continue following her career.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett: When Daphne is middle-aged, she reunites by chance with Eddie, who was her stepfather only briefly, when she was nine years old. Daphne and her sister adored Eddie, and he made their life better during the short period he was in her life, but then their mother abruptly divorced him. Daphne never understood why, though it seemed connected to an accident that Daphne and Eddie were in together. She's overjoyed to have him back in her life, and as they quickly reestablish the bond created by their shared experience, Daphne can finally ask for details about what happened all those decades ago.

Patchett excels at writing about complicated family relationships with believable specificity, and this story is full of terrific examples. The center of the novel is Daphne's unique connection to Eddie, first as a child and then as an adult. But along the way, Patchett also develops Daphne's relationships with the rest of her parents, her sister, and her husband, explores Daphne's own experience as a stepparent, and shows a variety of other marriages and family ties. I was captivated by all of it, and I went through a range of emotions with this story, including a lot of laughter. Another delight from one of my favorite authors!

→ THE NIGHT SWEEPS THE MOUNTAINS AWAY by Tanvir Ahmed: In a desert town, Sado makes his living as a water carrier and keeps his past to himself. When he meets Mina, he recognizes a tattoo that marks her as a fellow exile from a failed rebellion. Mina lives a reclusive life, but she gradually opens up to Sado, telling stories of her marriage to a dangerous man. She tries to make Sado understand why she is also dangerous, and yet he falls in love with her, despite the curse she carries.

This compact novella drew me right in with its smooth storytelling. I was rooting for Sado and Mina to have a chance at happiness by overcoming the dark forces they face. Ahmed's evocative descriptions, informed by his background as a scholar of medieval Islamic history, bring the setting to life. This is a beautiful, haunting tale.

→ YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke: Natalie has constructed the perfect life for herself, and she shares it daily with her millions of followers. At Yesteryear Ranch, she and her husband raise their expanding brood of children on homegrown food and traditional Christian values. Of course they're aided by modern appliances, farmhands, and a couple of nannies, because Natalie is less concerned with following a traditional lifestyle than with creating a polished and lucrative online brand. But one day, she wakes to find herself apparently transported to the 1850s, somehow trapped in a pioneer version of her life. She doesn't understand if she's time-traveled into this nightmare, been kidnapped into a horrific reality show, or what, but she's desperate to figure it out and escape.

This is a great concept, and I appreciated that the story is more complicated (and much darker) than that basic premise, but a lot of it didn't end up working for me. Since the book's structure alternates chapters of Natalie in the pioneer world with the backstory of how she became a tradwife influencer, I was often impatient about having to switch away from the more compelling mystery, and both timelines felt too slow to develop. There is eventually an answer to the question of what's happened, and while it's sort of clever, I didn't think it was set up plausibly enough. Where the book succeeded best for me was Natalie's character and voice, and how the narrative continually changes our understanding of her as the story goes on. Despite my complaints about the structure, I found the writing good at a sentence and scene level, and I'll be interested in reading whatever Burke writes next.

→ THE RIDE OF HER LIFE by Elizabeth Letts is a biography of Annie Wilkins, who decided in 1954 to journey across the United States on horseback, or die trying. Annie was in her early 60s, in poor health, with no family left except her loyal dog, and she no longer had the money or energy to run her farm in Maine. Faced with the prospect of ending life in a charity home, Annie chose to seize her own destiny instead. She bought a horse and set out with her dog and the dream of reaching California, and not much plan beyond that. Her journey was made possible by her determination, the generosity of strangers, publicity from the media, and plenty of luck.

This was a book club pick that I never would have read on my own, and though I did become engaged in the drama of Annie's journey with her animal companions, I would have preferred reading about it in a different form. Letts did extensive research that fills in details of the places Annie passed through and the people she met, as well as context about how America was changing in the 1950s. While some of that is interesting, it's not really what I was curious about. And these reported sections sit oddly against the scenes Letts depicts novelistically, describing thoughts and actions that couldn't possibly be verified. At the end of the book, I learned Letts drew heavily on Annie's memoir, LAST OF THE SADDLE TRAMPS, and I was sorry I didn't get the story from the perspective of the person who lived it. Letts also drops the revelation that she chose to call her subject Annie, "instead of the name she called herself, Mesannie," and that doesn't sit right with me.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel makes the case for why There Are More than Five POVs: "It's not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative. Grammatically, 'I' and 'we' are both first-person pronouns. Narratively, there is a dramatic difference between an 'I' narrator and a collective 'we' narrative voice. An I is a single character and the story is limited to one perspective. A we is a group, which can provide a plethora of perspectives or else a sort of consensus chorus perspective. That opens up entirely different storytelling opportunities and restrictions."

May Reading Recap

My May was packed with books:

→ SPENT by Alison Bechdel is a delightful self-parody of Bechdel's previous work, focused on the contradictions of existing in late-stage capitalism. The main character of this comic (in both senses) novel is Alison Bechdel, a cartoonist best known for the strip Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For and the graphic memoir Death & Taxidermy. Alison's memoir has been adapted into a successful prestige TV series that she doesn't enjoy watching, though she does enjoy the financial comfort it provides. She and her wife, Holly, have been able to buy a farm in Vermont where they raise goats and pursue their artistic careers. But life in 2022 has proved too distracting for Alison to complete her next project, a memoir about money called $um: An Accounting, and funds are getting tight. In case this all isn't meta enough, Alison and Holly's friends are a household of characters who will be familiar to readers of the real Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For.

I had so much fun with this, and I definitely recommend it to Bechdel fans. Readers with no prior knowledge will miss out on some of what charmed me, but can probably still find much to appreciate in the characters and their adventures. The story deals with relationships (including polyamory), money, activism, and other concerns of the current era, from the perspectives of both middle-aged Alison and friends, and a group of younger characters. I love Bechdel's drawings, especially the small details and visual jokes in the panel backgrounds.

→ PLATFORM DECAY by Martha Wells: In the eighth installment of the Murderbot Diaries, SecUnit has to travel through a gigantic space structure that's somehow even worse than a planet. It's there to rescue a family unit—a child, parent, and grandparent—who prove themselves to be good teammates when the mission keeps growing more complicated. As the group stays ahead of the corporates who want them dead, they navigate a variety of unusual settings, often thwarted by incompatible or nonexistent mass transit systems.

I continue to love this series, and I recommend any interested readers start at the beginning. I enjoyed rereading all the previous books over the past half year, and I was glad to have the context fresh in my mind for this new story, which builds on everything SecUnit has already been through. That includes a lot of trauma, which it's now starting to get help processing. There are some new disturbing events in this book, but overall, it's a fun adventure.

→ RADIANT STAR by Ann Leckie: In the city of Ooioiaa, worship of the Radiant Star plays a prominent role, though rival sects follow different practices. Even thirty years after ships from the Radchaai arrived to occupy the planet, the local religion continues to thrive. When one of the most powerful residents of Ooioiaa decides he'd like to dedicate his afterlife to the Radiant Star by becoming a saint, it sets in motion a series of events involving his family members, religious leaders, and others. And when a far-away conflict disrupts communication and shipments to the planet, a more dire crisis develops.

This is an unusual, complicated story about characters who are preoccupied with their personal concerns while a global crisis unfolds around them. As always in an Ann Leckie novel, the characters are distinctive, they inhabit fully imagined cultures, and there's plenty of focus on what's considered proper behavior within each culture. This novel also features a particularly inventive setting and evocative depictions of food. I was curious about all of it, but I didn't connect with the story as quickly or fully as with the rest of Leckie's work, I think because so many of the characters are deliberately unsympathetic. It's still an impressive book that I'll be interested to discuss with other readers.

→ THE DEVIL IN SILVER by Victor LaValle: After Pepper gets into an altercation with the police, he's committed involuntarily to a mental hospital. There's nothing wrong with Pepper's mental health besides some poor judgment, but once confined and drugged, he finds it impossible to convince anyone of his sanity. This situation is horrific enough, but what's even more terrifying is that Pepper believes a monster is stalking the hospital halls. Other patients believe in the monster as well, though the staff refuse to acknowledge it. Gradually Pepper finds allies in his quest to prove the monster is real, or to simply escape.

This is a good story that I thought took too long to get going. Pepper and the other characters are great, and I enjoyed the wry humor of the narration, but I was impatient with the slow pace. LaValle has adapted the story for TV (season 3 of the anthology series The Terror), and I'm eager to watch—I expect the show moves more quickly. I preferred LaValle's balancing of mundane and supernatural horrors in his more recent novels, THE CHANGELING and LONE WOMEN.

→ ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid opens in 1984 as astronaut Joan arrives at Mission Control to serve as CAPCOM for a shuttle mission already in progress. The crew members are all people she's formed close relationships with over the past few years of training and missions. When disaster strikes, it's up to Joan to provide a calm voice at the other end of the line for Vanessa, the crew member who's closest to her heart. The narrative then jumps back to the start of Joan's time with NASA, to show how the relationships with her fellow astronauts evolved.

This novel has many compelling elements, but they could have been assembled into a better whole. I enjoyed all the details about astronaut training and the shuttle program. I was invested in Joan's experiences with friendship, family, and falling in love, but while I found certain scenes emotionally moving, many were marred by clunky dialogue or implausible reactions. The novel's structure also creates some pacing problems, and I felt as though certain sections were mostly fillers to pass the time until the next inevitable and more interesting event occurred.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Leah Thomas ponders the therapeutic power of Katamari Damacy: "Of course, we could all clean up our houses instead of playing, and find our lives better served: 'You don’t need cleaning in a video game, son: we have cleaning at home!' But that's not the point. The point is that even the dullest, simplest chores in life can be reimagined and transformed into something playful.""

April Reading Recap

Another month, and another batch of fascinating books!

→ NONESUCH by Francis Spufford: Iris is a modern young women living in London in 1939, as the threat of war looms. She works in a stockbroker's office, but the only role she's allowed there is secretary, though she aspires to more. She's happily single, and happily not a good girl, dating men who treat her to illicit nights in fancy hotel rooms. When Iris goes home with a terribly innocent young man, she knows there will be trouble, but she's expecting lovesick moping. Instead, the trouble that comes her way is an inexplicable menace. As the war begins and London prepares for rationing and attacks, Iris finds herself facing a dark magic, wielded by a mysterious order with fascist tendencies. Though she's fed up by having to deal with any of it, she's determined to do her part.

This is a compelling mix of historical and magical fiction, animated by a delightfully multifaceted protagonist. Iris is opinionated, clever, competent, and flawed. I loved following her through all the story's adventures, and through her, getting to know the other well-developed characters. The book starts out more historical than magical, portraying Iris's reality in rich and fascinating detail. The magical layer grows more complicated and dangerous along with the mounting horrors of life during the Blitz, and both layers are engrossing. I'm as excited about recommending this novel as Spufford's previous, and very different, CAHOKIA JAZZ.

NONESUCH will be followed by a sequel, ARCADY, expected in 2027. This first book reaches a conclusion for one part of Iris's story, but leaves her at a point of more uncertainty.

→ CHERRY BABY by Rainbow Rowell: Cherry has been separated from her husband for long enough that she's ready to move past grieving her marriage and have fun again. Fun appears in a chance meeting with Russ, a college friend who Cherry always had a crush on. To Cherry's surprise, Russ reveals that he always lusted for her as well, and things get more fun from there. An additional wonderful surprise is that Russ doesn't know anything about the uncomfortably popular, uncomfortably autobiographical comic drawn by Cherry's ex, Tom. But with a movie adaptation of the comic coming soon, Tom and his characters are showing up everywhere Cherry turns, complicating even her promising new relationship.

This novel is all about how complicated relationships of every kind are, and Rowell does an excellent job developing characters and situations that are realistically messy. It takes a little time to reveal much of the messiness, and early on, I was less interested, but once the story pulled me in, I tore through the rest of the book. This is also a book about how complicated it is to be fat in the era of GLP-1 drugs, and that had me interested and appreciative from the start. I recommend this satisfying, thoughtful, and often funny relationship story.

→ KIN by Tayari Jones: Vernice and Annie have been friends since they were infants together in a small Louisiana town, both motherless. Niecy's mother is dead, so there's a tragic finality to the grief that Niecy grows up with. Annie's mother ran off, and her status is unknown, leaving Annie always wondering and longing. As the girls come of age, they know that being Black women in the Jim Crow South presents many constraints, but both have ambitions. Niecy enrolls at Spelman College in Atlanta, where she encounters wealthy Black families living in a comfort she never knew to dream of. Annie heads for Memphis, where she believes her mother may be living, and her adventures take her into far less elevated circumstances.

This novel has received high praise from most of its readers, but my feelings were more mixed. Jones brings the historical setting to life, with strong portrayals of different areas of the South, different class experiences, and the racism and activism of the time. I didn't always find the characters as vividly lifelike as I hoped. At times, their actions (or lack of action) felt more motivated by plot needs than by realistic behavior. I was also disappointed by how the book ends, though other readers found it more emotionally resonant.

→ THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. Le Guin: As an envoy to the planet of Gethen, Genly Ai is tasked with convincing the world's governments to join the alliance of the Ekumen. But even after two years on Gethen, he hasn't figured out the politics and people well enough to make progress, or adapted to the frigid climate. Genly especially has trouble reconciling his Terran understanding of men and women with the Gethenians, who have no biological or cultural gender distinction except during the monthly fertile period. His limitations and misunderstandings leave him vulnerable when his only advocate in one of the dominant nations falls out of favor. Genly leaves the capital city to seek knowledge and allies elsewhere. In time, his task becomes more perilous as he faces grave danger, from cruel governments and from the deadly cold.

I first read this 20 years ago, but remembered very little, and it was fascinating to revisit now that I'm familiar with more of Le Guin's work, which gave me greater context for and appreciation of the story. The worldbuilding and politics are dense, and I didn't mind that too much, but I found the story more absorbing in the second half. The events that form the emotional core of the novel don't emerge until late, and I was shocked by how late as I reread, since that's the part that lasted in my memory, so I thought it was the main scope of the book.

I read this with my book club, and it led to a great discussion. Some supplemental material also enhanced my reading experience:

→ "Is Gender Necessary? Redux", a 1976 essay by Le Guin with 1988 updates that can be read side-by-side or inline

→ Afterword to the 2019 edition by Charlie Jane Anders

→ Clarification about a confusing typo on the novel's final page (spoiler alert!)

→ "Coming of Age in Karhide", a 1995 story by Le Guin that focuses on domestic life on Gethen

The Future Is Now

Once upon a time, I spent many long years working on a now-abandoned multigenerational family novel with storylines set in three time periods. I knew the date of every scene, and those dates were all locked together by the timeline of both the fictional family and real world events. One setting was pure history as far as I was concerned, one was a recent past that I'd lived through, and one was the near future. When I wrote the first draft in 2007, the familiar past era was closer than the imagined future. As I embarked on repeated revisions, on and off for more than a decade, the near future setting grew nearer and nearer. The year it took place (you can guess where this is going) was 2026.

It's a little strange to be in 2026 for real now, after spending so much time in my fictional version. (Of course, existing in 2026 is strange enough on its own.) But the strangeness is mainly numerical, and not from writing any vividly bold predictions about what life might be like now. In early drafts, most of my worldbuilding extrapolated from technologies I thought were cutting-edge. That tended to mean I accurately predicted how those technologies would be used about 18 months out, often before I finished a given draft. As my actual timeline barreled toward my near future, I gave up on any science fictional inclinations.

The major worldbuilding in my 2026 storyline was about a significant earthquake striking the Bay Area, something I never wanted to be predictive about. (But to make sure I'm not psychic, for the record: November 4, 7.5 on the Hayward Fault.) I also wrote the almost-throwaway but important-to-me line "The president was on her way to Oakland" way back before there was any particular woman (from Oakland, no less) who I hoped would be in the White House now. Sorry this game isn't more fun!

Anyway, that novel hasn't been in play for a long while, for many reasons, and that is even less likely to change in a future that's become its past. I only bring it up again to commemorate the weird space 2026 occupies in my writerly mind. And as a cautionary tale for other slow writers planning stories set at a particular point in the near future.

At present, I'm applying my slow writing to a different project. It's the novel my recent blog posts refer to, for some value of "recent" and "refer". I know I haven't said anything about it for months, and I've never shared many details. (Another thing that's strange is having a decade of blog posts about a novel that never went anywhere.) But I've been working steadily away, writing sentences and scenes that may eventually cohere into a finished novel.

This one is set entirely in the future. I've repeated the possible mistake of specifying a year, but I think I'm safe for not catching up this time, since the year is 2132. Spending imaginary time in that farther-out future is fun, and challenging, and definitely requires more meticulous extrapolations than I've ever made before. Not that I'm honestly trying to predict what I think the world of 2132 will be like. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in an often-echoed sentiment, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." She wrote more about the idea than just the pithy sentiment, and I recommend the rest of her 1976 Author's Note to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS.

I reread Le Guin's classic novel this month, and my book club had a wonderful conversation about it. Also in April, I turned 51 and had some delicious birthday celebrations, including a cake that I enjoyed baking. I got to show the world the sweater I've been knitting since last summer. And early in the month, early in the morning, I was woken up by a nearby earthquake that didn't result in anything besides the rude awakening. That can be my quake for 2026, thanks.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Miranda Shulman describes What Knitting Has Taught Me About Writing: "When I say that every stitch, every word, is progress, I mean that every stitch, every word, is a valuable learning experience, not that they are permanent. When I'm knitting, I'm often following a complicated pattern translated from Dutch to English. It usually takes a few tries to understand what's being asked of me, and if I'm knitting in a dark room (like a movie theater or a dimly lit restaurant) I'll probably make a mistake. Then again, when I'm knitting on my couch at home, I'll also probably make a mistake. There's no way to knit a sweater faster than the time it takes to create the right stitches and understand the pattern. You have to make all the mistakes and be okay with re-doing it until it’s right. That's the process of making. That's dedication to craft. That's discovery."

March Reading Recap

I've still been reading away, enjoying an excellent selection of books:

→ THE SHAMSHINE BLIND by Paz Pardo: Agent Kay Curtida of the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency is investigating a strain of counterfeit Sunshine Yellow pills. This "Shamshine" has infiltrated the local market, causing harm to Depressives who need the real medication. Curtida is glad to have a case with potential for once, because the criminal underworld operating in Daly City and the ruins of San Francisco is small-time compared to the big cities of Boise or Iowa City. (The US's previous big cities were destroyed almost 30 years earlier, when the Falklands Conflict escalated to a world war and Argentina became the dominant superpower through the use of weaponized psychopigments.) But Curtida is out of leads to follow, so she has to turn her attention to a minor case of suicide at a psychopigment pharmaceutical company. As the new investigation continues, she discovers the death involves an unusual pigment she's never seen before, and that this case is more complicated, and more sinister, than it initially seemed.

I was so impressed by the imaginative worldbuilding and well-paced plotting of this speculative detective story. Pardo has constructed such a fascinating world, between the color-based drugs that control emotions and the alternate history that reshapes politics and culture. Details of this world are dispensed gradually, at points that work naturally in the story, as when Curtida listens to the radio while driving around following leads. Curtida is an excellent character who narrates with a distinctive spin on the hardboiled detective style. Her fellow agents and the other characters are great as well, and there's plenty of real emotion in this story where feelings are sometimes manufactured by psychopigments. If you're at all curious about this literally colorful noir novel, I hope you'll check it out.

→ GOOD PEOPLE by Patmeena Sabit is presented as excerpts from a series of interviews conducted with friends and acquaintances of the Sharaf family, or witnesses who encountered them during a significant weekend. The family and the events of that weekend are under investigation by law enforcement, but the reason is kept as a mystery from the reader at first. Before understanding what's happened, we learn about the lives of the Sharafs in the years before. As a young family, they arrived in Virgina as refugees from Afghanistan. The local Afghani community helped them out through hard times, and eventually they thrived, earning a level of wealth that brought envy and scrutiny. The family is close-knit, but there's been trouble with the teenage daughter, who chafes against the strictures of her parents' traditional Muslim expectations. All this background comes into play in understanding the tragic events that are eventually revealed, explained, and then reinterpreted.

This engrossing, carefully constructed novel kept me guessing and pondering. Every time I planned to read just a few of the short chapters, I found it hard to stop. Sabit brings the voices of the interviewees to life, giving the characters distinctive speech patterns and concerns. The scenario is full of ambiguity, and each new perspective nudges the reader's understanding one way, then another, to great effect. There are no clear answers here, but much to think about, and this would be a great book to discuss with a group.

→ ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD by Jung Yun: September 16, 2001, is a strange time to board a cruise ship, but with travel plans made long in advance, the passengers in this novel embark on a trip to Bermuda. The story follows three characters who all start out feeling conflicted about trying to enjoy themselves during such a terrible time, and who all have personal dramas that keep them from enjoying themselves anyway. Franny is determined to follow through on celebrating her mother's seventieth birthday, with all the traditional trappings of a Korean chilsun, whether or not the rest of the family agrees. Doug, once an actor in a show filmed on this very ship, is appearing as a celebrity because he needs the money, but he has no desire to be back at the site of his drunken past. Lucy was invited on the cruise as a last-minute replacement, but she's afraid she made a mistake in accepting for so many reasons, including that she's supposed to be interviewing for jobs this week. As the cruise's regular schedule of festivities proceeds, the characters grapple with their own concerns, aware of how cut off they are from news of much larger misfortunes.

I was intrigued by the setup of this novel (inspired by the author's real experience) though unsure what to expect. But it didn't take me long to get invested in all three characters and their problems. There's complexity and surprise to how the storylines develop. At times, the story could have been about any cruise, but that felt realistic to the circumstances. Whenever the context of 9/11 returned to the forefront, I found it thoughtfully handled. I liked the writing and the character portrayals, and I may check out Yun's previous novels.

→ LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney opens in 1977 in a well-to-do neighborhood in Rochester, New York. The Larkins and the Finnegans live across the street from each other, and the families are close, each with two teenage children who grew up as friends. Also, Nina Larkin and Finn Finnegan are having an affair. When Nina and Finn decide to take steps to bring their relationship out into the open, they know it will shake up the lives of their families. But they aren't prepared for just how many relationships will be torn apart. Two decades later, there are still more consequences to reckon with.

Sweeney is always skilled at writing about family relationships, and this novel is another strong exploration of characters with complicated and shifting dynamics. Every Larkin and Finnegan family member spends some chapters as a viewpoint character, revealing secrets and grudges that the others don't know about. Not everyone gets the same amount of page time, and I was sorry not to follow some characters in more depth, especially after the time jump. So I would have been happy for a longer version of this novel, but I enjoyed all the story threads and scenes that appear in this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lois Lowry is publishing a new dystopian YA novel this fall, as reported in an interview with People: "For Lowry, this book felt necessary to write for the same reason The Giver's themes — and the themes in Building 903 — resonate so strongly with readers today. 'These are tough times that we live in, with lots of questions about the future,' she tells PEOPLE. 'I'm extremely old, so I lament the fact that I'm not gonna be around to see how this turns out. However, my imagination does that for me.'" (Thanks, Book Riot!)

February Reading Recap

Great books this month, and great variety!

→ THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY by Samuel Ashworth: August Sweeney was a celebrated chef, famed for his restaurants and TV shows, and after a life lived to excess, he's dead at 52. He stipulated that his body be fully autopsied so that everything possible could be learned from it or put to use, just as he'd use every part of a butchered animal in his kitchen. In alternating chapters, August's autopsy is performed and his life story plays out. The pathologist, Dr. Maya Zhu, is as skilled at and devoted to understanding bodies as August was to appreciating food. In the course of the autopsy, her work is interrupted by the intrusion of elements from her own life story.

Ashworth pulls off this unusual concept with great skill. To research the novel, he spent time in restaurant kitchens and an autopsy lab, and the story is packed with fascinating detail. Much of that detail is about the inner workings and dismantling of bodies, both animal and human, so this is absolutely not a book for everyone. But I appreciated how much I learned in the course of the story, and I appreciated how imagery from these fields is used to describe everything: "New York is like the human liver, brilliant at absorbing toxins, forever sloughing off the dead cells of failure and re-growing thriving new tissue in its place." There's a compelling energy to the writing, the characters, and the plot. I recommend this novel to everyone who can stomach it.

→ MỸ DOCUMENTS by Kevin Nguyen opens with the story of how Ursula's grandmother got her family out of Vietnam and to America after the fall of Saigon, and Ursula's discovery that there's a darker truth behind the story. Ursula, a budding journalist, is learning how to uncover and shape the truth into stories, though in her uninspiring first media job, her beat is beauty products. Ursula's brother is also starting his first real job as an intern at Google. Their younger half-sister (the siblings were all abandoned by the same father) is a first-year college student in New York City, where she expected to see Ursula more often. All these exciting futures are interrupted when coordinated terror attacks are committed by Vietnamese perpetrators. In response, the US government incarcerates Vietnamese-Americans into remote camps, cutting them off from contact with the outside world. Ursula and her brother, who have a white mother, escape internment. In the face of the country's apathetic acceptance of the situation, they try to figure out what they can do, as a journalist and a tech worker. Their half-sister and brother are shipped off to a camp somewhere in a desert, where surprisingly quickly, the prisoners adapt to the new normal, and their young lives continue through the usual milestones. In time, opportunities arise to fight back from within the confines of the camp.

Nguyen grounds this story deeply in the experiences of each sibling, to great effect. As the novel explores the details of the horrific premise, the recognizable absurdities of young people fumbling into adulthood makes it even more chillingly plausible. The characters are portrayed with wonderful specificity, and I cared about them, laughed with them, and was frequently infuriated by their flaws and choices. The narrative moves along quickly, switching between characters and building up the tension of how their actions will affect each other. This is an excellent, complex story about characters figuring themselves and their family members out in the middle of a terrible time.

→ WHERE PEACE IS LOST by Valerie Valdes: Kel has been living for years on an isolated planet, where she's avoided getting close to anyone because she doesn't want to reveal the facts of her past and the reasons the Prixori Anocracy empire might be after her. Then one of the empire's abandoned war machines is mysteriously activated and begins lumbering across the peaceful planet, threatening lives and ecosystems. Kel knows she might be the only one with the power to stop it, but two strangers land on the planet and claim they can handle the problem. Their motives are unclear, and as Kel is still deciding whether she can afford to get involved, a naively eager young neighbor volunteers them both to guide the offworlders to the machine. The four set off on the treacherous journey, harboring various secrets and suspicions.

It took me some time to get into this story, but then I became absorbed in the characters and their undertaking. I think I would have connected with Kel sooner if her often-alluded-to past had been explained earlier so I understood what was at stake. (Oddly, the book's marketing copy includes details that aren't revealed until halfway through.) The dynamics between the characters are depicted well and evolve believably over the course of the novel. The worldbuilding is strong, and while the events of this novel are confined to a single planet, Valdes has sketched out a whole galaxy with the potential for more stories. If adventures in this universe continue, I'll read on.

→ WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King: Casey is a writer who's been working on her novel for six years. She writes in the mornings before her exhausting job waiting tables at a high-end restaurant. Losing herself in both endeavors lets her temporarily escape the grief of her mother's recent death. Casey makes an unexpected romantic connection with a guy who's also a writer. And then she falls into a relationship with a second one, adding even more uncertainty to her future.

As the title suggests, this novel is mostly about writing and love, but it also includes many interesting sections about restaurant work, a topic that lends itself better to concrete description than the other two. The story is set in 1997, so there are a lot of (sigh) period-accurate details, especially about how communication worked way back then, with Casey receiving calls from the men on the restaurant's phone line and mailing manuscripts at the post office. I enjoyed reading about all these things (especially the writing struggles!) and spending time with Casey and the other characters. I hoped the plot would have a bit more oomph, and I was surprised it all ended so tidily, in contrast to King's EUPHORIA, which I liked more.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel discusses plot as a story element and the principles of plot escalation: "Eschewing plot because you dislike formulaic stories is like renouncing character because you dislike stock figures and stereotypes. If a plot is too rigid and the hand of the author too overt, that's bad writing. It isn't the fault of plot per se. The idea that plot is in opposition to innovative, experimental, or strange fiction is perhaps even backwards. A strong plot can be a sturdy foundation that allows you to build weirder and wilder structures, akin to how avant-garde painters use traditional subjects (like still lifes or portraits) as springboards to new styles."

Releases I'm Ready For, Spring 2026

Another season of books approaches, with new novels from so many of my favorite authors!

→ LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (March 3): I loved the complicated family and marriage dynamics in Sweeney's first two novels, THE NEST and GOOD COMPANY. I'm expecting more excellent relationship drama in this new novel, which starts in 1977 with THE JOY OF SEX and an adulterous scandal that has long-ranging effects.

→ CHERRY BABY by Rainbow Rowell (April 14): Rowell is the author of so many books I've enjoyed, and I'm glad for another novel with adult characters. The premise involves a failing marriage and a successful webcomic that's getting a movie adaptation, and it's sure to be full of emotion and humor.

→ LAST NIGHT IN BROOKLYN by Xochitl Gonzalez (April 21): OLGA DIES DREAMING and ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST are both fascinating stories that unfold the complex pasts of their characters. In Gonzalez's next novel, set in 2007 (an alarmingly distant past!), a young woman gets a chance to enter the world of glamour and wealth in a changing Brooklyn on the brink of the financial crisis.

→ FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY by Francine Prose (May 5): I've read a few of Prose's many novels, and when I learned what this one is about, I knew I'd be picking it up. The story is an imagining of the real life episode when Hans Christian Andersen went to stay at Charles Dickens's home in what became a legendarily bad visit. That sounds like a ton of fun.

→ PLATFORM DECAY by Martha Wells (May 5): Yes, it's a new Murderbot Diary, the eighth in the series about a Security Unit who's great at its job but would rather be watching media than interacting with humans. I've been gradually revisiting the previous installments, inspired by the wonderful TV adaptation, so now I have a deadline for my reread.

→ RADIANT STAR by Ann Leckie (May 12): Thrillingly, May is also bringing a new book from my other favorite writer of space adventures! This is a standalone story in Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, featuring politics, religion, and characters from disparate backgrounds.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett (June 2): I always admire Patchett's complicated character relationships, especially among family members in novels like COMMONWEALTH and THE DUTCH HOUSE. I'm excited to see what she'll do with this story of a woman who reconnects in middle age with the man who was her stepfather for only a brief part of her childhood.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison (June 23): Elison's previous novels include speculative fiction (a post-apocalyptic series starting with THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE) and intense stories set in the real world (FIND LAYLA and NUMBER ONE FAN). I like her work in any genre, and I can't wait to read this science fictional satire about an attempt to save America with clones of the founding fathers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Baffler, Lydia Kiesling explores the practice of anticipated book lists and the changing internet: "By the time I came on as the editor [of The Millions] in 2016, the previews were creeping up toward a hundred titles. Max, who still owned the site when I was its editor, encouraged me to pare the list down and exert some curatorial influence, but I was constitutionally incapable. First of all, five minutes with the sausage-making of list culture was sufficient to understand how arbitrary the process really was. Secondly, as a new novelist myself, I felt the pain of being excluded. Moreover, the exclusivity denoted by curation was at odds with the revenue possibilities presented by more affiliate links..."

January Reading Recap

I started off the year with a good variety of surprising stories, mostly speculative fiction:

→ WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan opens in 2119 Britain as an academic travels between islands by boat on his way to a library set high on a mountain. Tom is visiting the library to continue his historical research into the life and work of poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. Specifically, he's searching the hundred-year-old archives for information about a poem Francis wrote for Vivien's birthday dinner in 2014, a poem that was never shared publicly but nonetheless became legendary in the decades that followed. While the poem remains elusive, Tom is able to piece together so many details about the dinner and the attendees from an extensive collection of preserved journals, messages, social media, and so on. He's fascinated by these people from the past, and how different their lives and outlooks were in a time before much of Britain was underwater. But even though Tom feels he understands Vivien and Francis as well as or better than his own closest friend, there are limitations to his knowledge.

I was fascinated from the beginning by the unusual layers of narrative and the way they gradually unfold to reveal more of the story. This is a novel where it takes time to understand what's going on, why we're following these people, and what all the pieces have to do with each other, and I enjoy that experience when it's well done, as it is here. What emerges is an exploration of (among other things) love and betrayal, the value and shortcomings of historical perspective, and the impact of climate change. There is also a devastatingly raw story about caretaking a spouse in cognitive decline. I wouldn't give this book to everyone, but if it sounds like your sort of story, I recommend it.

→ LIGHTBREAKERS by Aja Gabel: Maya and Noah's marriage exists in the shadow of his grief. Noah was married before and had a daughter, who died at the age of three. Maya has never quite managed to reach across his sadness, and she carries the baggage of her own past, a once-promising painting career that stagnated. When Noah, a physicist, is offered a job at a secretive science lab in the art center of Marfa, Texas, it seems an ideal opportunity for them both. Maya hopes she'll find artistic inspiration, and that the change of scenery will allow the couple to refocus on each other and their future. But Noah's new project involves a way to travel back into memories, and his great hope is that he might see his daughter again. His fixation on this possibility brings his ex-wife back into his life, and at the same time, Maya reconnects with a great love from her own past.

I liked this more as a relationship story than as the time travel story it eventually becomes. Gabel writes with insight about the complicated relationship dynamics and how the characters love and hurt each other. I found the emotions realistic and affecting. The time travel contributes to the plot in some interesting ways, and the details are fairly well developed, but I expected it to produce a more radical impact on the characters' situation. Though the novel didn't deliver as much as I hoped for on the speculative front, it's a compelling and original story about shared history, memory, grief, and art.

→ THE COMPASS ROSE by Ursula K. Le Guin is a collection of wonderfully varied short stories. It opens with a brief and very Le Guinian story combining imaginative cultural details with surprising developments and humor: "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" presents "extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics," which turns out to be the study of animal language, including writing systems, dialects, and literature. Later stories range across formats, tones, and amount of speculative content, but strong detail of cultures and characters can be found in all of them.

A few stories stood out for especially well-developed emotional situations inside fascinating science fictional plots. "The Eye Altering" is a gorgeous and clever story about the difficulty of adapting to life on a new planet. "The Pathways of Desire" also sends Earthlings to another planet, this time a small team of ethnographers studying the local culture, and the story takes some intriguing and unexpected turns. I'm not sure I completely understood "The New Atlantis," but I was drawn in by the characters and the hope they carry despite their oppressive society. "The Diary of the Rose" features another authoritarian regime and a technology allowing doctors to see and analyze a patient's thoughts.

→ In THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS by Annie Hartnett, four people who have survived a variety of traumas take a road trip together. Along the way, more terrible things happen around them, some they experience and some they never even know about. The travelers are a ragtag family, thrown together by accidents of both birth and death: PJ, an aging alcoholic mourning the long-ago death of his daughter; Sophie, his other daughter, who grew up adrift and resentful of her father's neglect; and two children, Luna and Ollie, newly orphaned and left in PJ's questionable care. The four humans are joined by a cat with the ability to detect when someone is going to die, and also a softball cap that occasionally speaks to PJ. It's that sort of quirkily, darkly comic novel.

Quirky humor isn't going to connect with every reader, and in this case it was an imperfect match for me, but I ended up liking the novel pretty well despite that. I grew attached to the characters in all their foibles, and I was genuinely moved by how they (of course) came to care about each other during their journey. But I was often jarred by the story's quick tonal shifts between heartfelt moments, terrible things treated with absurdity, and other terrible things treated more seriously. I get what Hartnett was going for, but I just didn't find it as funny as I was meant to. Still, since I did enjoy the characters and their relationships, I'll be curious to check out her previous novels.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Eli Cugini writes at Defector about fanfiction’s impact on publishing: "Fanfiction's influence is no longer most discernible in specific, singular megahits. It has deeply shaped some of the highest-selling genres, particularly romance, young-adult, fantasy, and their hyperpalatable Frankenchild, romantasy."