February Reading Recap

February was a month of unusual, surprising stories, all with speculative elements:

→ LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon: City is one of the finalists in the 2013 Can You Use That Word in a Sentence contest, with the chance to demonstrate that a black boy from Mississippi can deliver more dynamic sentences than any other competitor. But when the event takes a racist turn, City either makes a fool of himself or stands up for himself, depending on who you ask. He finds some consolation by reading an odd, authorless book called LONG DIVISION, in which he's surprised to find a character named City living in Mississippi in 1985, who finds a tunnel that takes him to 2013...

This novel starts out strange and gets stranger, and the story pulled me in more and more. The two Citys are compelling characters, though often adolescently frustrating, and each has an intriguing, amusing group of friends and foes. There's a lot packed into this book about love and hate, the past and future, and words and actions. By the end of the mind-bending, intense plot, I wasn't sure if I understood everything I was supposed to, but this is a story that will stick with me.

→ THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT by Charlie Jane Anders begins in a city located at the boundary between night and day, the only area habitable by humans on a planet where the same side always faces the sun. In Xiosphant, the principles of Circadianism are strictly enforced to maintain order in this environment where the sky never changes. Sophie, a student from the dark side of town, takes the fall for her friend's petty crime and is banished into the frigid night. This should be a death sentence, but Sophie is rescued by the feared native inhabitants of the planet, who she discovers are intelligent creatures with their own civilization and technology. With their help, Sophie survives to team up with smugglers and revolutionaries, eventually working through the many traumas she suffers along the way.

The worldbuilding in this novel is fascinating and original. Though humans came to this planet with sophisticated technology, the knowledge and materials were lost over generations and through wars, so the story takes place in a fairly low-tech era, with much cobbled together from old parts. Anders put a lot of thought into how people would manage life in the terminator of a tidally locked planet, with schedule-controlled Xiosphant as one extreme and a freewheeling city Sophie visits as the other. I enjoyed listening to Anders talk about developing her novel's rich backstory on a recent episode of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast (segment starts at 16:30).

Much about the story and characters kept me interested, but significant pieces didn't work for me. The plot is oddly paced at times, and as the characters face obstacles that require changing their goals, I sometimes felt earlier parts of the story were rendered unnecessary. Deep friendships and/or love between characters are central to the novel, but I was confused about the story's position on the nature and health of these relationships, or whether my confusion was the point. The aftereffect of trauma is another major story concern, but it might have been more powerful with a lighter touch, which is something I've noticed in other novels and struggled with handling in my own writing.

I think this is one of those books that different types of readers will have very different reactions to (the reviews already support that), so I don't want to warn readers away from this novel, but I wish I'd liked it better.

→ WHAT I DIDN'T SEE AND OTHER STORIES by Karen Joy Fowler: I've read several of Fowler's varied novels, so it was no surprise that the stories in this collection also range wildly in setting, genre, and focus. What they have in common is excellent writing, at least a dash of humor, and richly developed characters and worlds.

About half the stories depict specific historical eras and sometimes take inspiration from real events and people. Two revolve around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: "Booth's Ghost" tracks the careers of the Booth family of actors, focusing on one of the brothers of the infamous John Wilkes, and except for the mildly ghostly bit, it's all rooted in truth. "Standing Room Only" follows a young woman, daughter of co-conspirator Mary Surratt, who is in love with JW and completely unaware of what else is going on.

I'm impressed thinking about the amount of research that must have been required to write the 20-odd pages of a story like "The Dark", which starts with Yosemite disappearances in the 1950s and 60s, moves on to the history of pandemics, and then shifts to the work of soldiers who cleared tunnels during the Vietnam War. It shares a few elements with "What I Didn't See", narrated by a woman on a gorilla-hunting expedition in the 1920s, including that both stories aren't quite science fictional but also aren't quite grounded in reality.

I enjoyed the blurry genre lines throughout this collection, and the frequent feeling that I had no idea what sort of story I was reading or where things might be going. "The Last Worders" involves twin American sisters taking a trip to an odd European city, on an odd quest, and every development twists the story in another direction until it all comes to a strange and satisfying ending. In "Always", a young woman joins an immortality cult in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the story arcs nicely around the many questions raised by the premise.

Karen Joy Fowler will be one of the guests at FOGcon this weekend, and I can't wait to hear and talk more about her work!