Well, here we are, halfway two-thirds of the way through 2021. How’s everyone holding up? It feels nice to know we’ve made it so far, even though it all seems to be starting over again. And honestly, that’s why I’m getting this up so late (my apologies). After thinking we might be able to get out of the house again, maybe even visit my (fully vaxxed, Democratic) family in Florida sometime, *waves hands* all this happened. And I am just so tired of it all.
But since apparently we’re just going to keep on trucking away through our own pandemic version of Groundhog Day until the FDA authorizes vaccines for kids and we have a vaccine mandate, I may as well get back to it. So onto something happy. If there’s one thing I can keep up, it’s my reading habit. So let’s go ahead, shall we? Below the books I read from Jan. – June of this year.
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell
This was a surprisingly hopeful book! It is O’Connell’s attempt to grapple with the world we are bringing about through climate change, while also having and raising children. He does this in part by looking at how others are handling coming catastrophe, and taking to task those who seem to want to save only a few or retreat to individual bunkers rather than trying to save humanity and community. It doesn’t have easy answers or a great reason to get out of bed in the morning, but it does reinforce why we should still want to do what we can.
And to the complete other end, a tale of pain and power and why someone might feel the only option is to burn it all down before we can start again. Ella is a young child in Compton and then Harlem with extraordinary hidden powers, and her brother, Kev, is born the day of the Rodney King riots and ends up trapped in the path to prison. It is an intense, passionate, angry book, pulsing with the wrongness of the world.
Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman
Bregman wants to rewrite the story we have been told. The story that insists that we are all in competition, and that people are actually bad and must constantly fighting our terrible nature. He argues that for the most part, humanity only exists because we are wired for cooperation and trust. He might be too willing to wave away some of the ways people can be terrible, but overall I found his argument compelling and, yes, hopeful. And possibly the best argument he had is that whether or not its true, life is better if we act as if people are good and can be trusted. So much of our pain is caused by systems assuming the opposite, and being wired towards punishment and selfishness instead of care and cooperation.
The Last Continent, Terry Pratchett
I love Discworld, but unless you’re a completionist (which I am) you can probably just skip the Rincewind ones. In this one Rincewind ends up in the Counterweight Continent, an Australia analogue, and has been selected by fate to help bring the rains back. The Senior Wizards also need to find Rincewind so they can learn the Librarian’s name. The plots never really coalesce, and the central conceit of our cowardly hero Rincewind is wearing thin. There are much better Discworld books to read instead.
Wow. I don’t want to write too much because it’s best to go into this book without knowing exactly what you’re getting into. But this book is an absurd delight that includes narration from a chicken’s perspective about their religious beliefs and a massive heist from radical animal rights’ activists, while at the same time seriously opining about coping with loss and grief and giving a searing critique of industrial farming. And it pulls all of it off. You should probably go read it right now.
Zuboff has written an incredibly well researched tome about the extent of surveillance, and how we have all turned over our privacy and our power for a bit of convenience for a game we really want to play to pass the time. She highlights that none of this is inevitable and companies are constantly monetizing our data for the obvious reason that it is making them lots of money, not because there is no other way. She falls down some in trying to say, though, that this is something new and sinister. Nope, this is just the logical next step for capitalism always doing what capitalism does.
The Church of Marvels, Leslie Parry
On the surface this is typical novel about underdogs in the late 1800s. Taking place in New York and Coney Island it shifts between several perspectives and the challenges anyone, especially women, faced at the time. The plot centers around a sister who has gone missing after their family’s Coney Island sideshow burns down and the other sister’s search. And in broad strokes it follows the pattern you’d assume, but in the details it has some surprising and intriguing twists and turns. I liked it way more than I thought I would from the first few chapters.
The Watch is everything you really want from a Discworld book. In these, Pratchett explores his larger themes of politics, the need to have a code, and the sins of those who would control others, even for the greater good. An island pops up between Ankh-Mopork and Djelibeybi, and though this scrap of rock has no use and was never there before, partisans from both sides see the benefits of claiming it for King and Country. Hijinx and philosophizing ensue.
Land of Love and Drowning, Tiphanie Yanique
I hadn’t really thought of “sprawling multigenerational magical realist nationalist novel” as a genre before, but I guess it sort of is? This certainly fits that genre as Yanique’s story takes place at the hand off of the current US Virgin Islands from the Dutch to the United States. It primarily centers on two sisters, one considered so beautiful she bewitches and controls men, the other with a fierce connection to the islands, and their lives after their father dies at sea, their fortune is lost, and as the people of the Virgin Islands go through the years after becoming a US territory. It has some pretty uncomfortable family relationships, but was a well woven story and on a history I didn’t know much about.
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
This was a surprising book, that somehow both played with familiar tropes and managed to have so much unexpected in the storyline as two childhood friends are pulled to technology or magic. In the world Anders has created, in the near future, magic is real and not entirely hidden, although not always believed, and technology has become advanced enough that those in the most cutting edge research may as well be magicians. And both have the power to save or destroy the world, and the utmost belief in themselves.
Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
Let us take a moment to say good bye to the witches, in their last book of Discworld. It’s not too surprising, as Pratchett did seem to be running out of what to do with Granny Weatherwax. But here she gets her hardest enemy yet, as the new, modern vampires come down from Uberwald to take over Lancre. It’s just a shame that Pratchett seemed to be setting up a new trio of witches that never had a chance to take their place.
Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage, Dianne D. Glave
I was a bit disappointed in this book. The issue for me is that it only focused on ways that African Americans may have interacted with the earth before, but only in the ways so many groups did – until a fairly short time ago, no human populations were as disconnected from the natural world as we are now. This book didn’t seem to explore any particular spiritual or philosophical connection that would suggest an African American Environmental Heritage, just an acknowledgement that people used the natural world in a variety of ways in the past.
The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
More than halfway through the Discworld series, it’s clear that Pratchett is starting to get a little restless. The last City Watch book had the Watch sent off to Djelibeybi for a war; this one has Vimes assigned to a diplomatic mission in Uberwald. That’s okay, though, since it’s still fun to go along on this journey for him. This one has the Watch explore the tensions between tradition and liking tradition but wanting change, of what is a dwarf when they’re not underground, and even an exploration of traditional and gender.
I’m not much on the slice-of-life character studies that were popular with modern short stories for a while there, but Munro is a master of the form. If you’re going to read any of them, she’s probably where to go. This is a collection of stories where seemingly small decisions have life-altering consequences, even if not seen at the moment, and how decisions have far reaching repercussions for others we may never even see.
Great Issues in American History, Vol. 3, 1864-1957, Richard Hofstadter
This is a simple book that everyone should have to read. This volume shares key documents – editorials, speeches, book excerpts – from key issues in America’s History starting in Reconstruction to right after WWII. They are presented in a straightforward manner with little to no editorializing. It was fascinating to read about how issues were discussed, especially the racial issues right after the Civil War, and the push for progressive changes in the early 1900s. There are so many other ways our history could have gone!
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
For such a widely heralded book, I found it very disappointing. Orlando is the story of a wealthy, titled, British gentleman who wakes up at a young age as a woman instead, and lives for another 300 years as such. There is some interesting commentary right when the change happens, but otherwise, it’s just a tale of a wealthy dilettante and how they went through the world (with no one commenting on the age or gender thing.) I didn’t quite understand the following it has.
The Truth, Terry Pratchett
One of the ‘Industrial Revolution” series, this one features the inventing of the printing press in Ankh-Mopork, and newspapers and tabloids and all the good and bad that go along with them. This one is a bit more ambiguous than other Discworld novels – Pratchett usually isn’t shy about spelling out his morals – but was still consistently fun and engaging.
The Division Bell Mystery, Ellen Wilkinson
Wilkinson herself, a strong Labour politician who led worker’s marches and one of the first woman MPs, is fascinating. This book – one of two novels she wrote between civil service positions – was a bit hard to follow. It works well enough as a murder mystery, but my goodness there is a lot of parliamentary knowledge one needs to follow along.
I really want to like Sarah Gailey’s books more than I do. This is about an alternate history where an absolutely true and bonkers idea to breed hippos in Louisiana was followed through, and there are hippo ranchers and riders, and a major feral hippo problem in the bayous. It’s the wild west but in Louisiana, and there are hippos. I should love it. Gailey is good at the world building, and the short stories included in this edition were my favorite parts, but I think could do better with the plot. I’d love for her to write a miniseries or a book of connected stories, like I, Robot.
Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
While I love other series more, Death is one of my favorite Discworld characters and I really enjoy the idea of our belief making anthropomorphized abstract concepts real (something echoed in American Gods and Good Omens). This one features Death and Time, so of course I love it. In this book the nameless Auditors, always upset by change and chaos, try to trap Time and end humanity. It was one of my favorites of the series.
I generally enjoy abstract Soviet and post-Soviet satire but this one may have been a bit obscure even for me. Kashin is a journalist who was targeted by some of the oligarchs after a mean blog comment, and saw no action taken after proof was provided of who was behind his incredibly violent beating. He ended up going into exile, and writing this book. The book isn’t written for the story so much as to take down all parts of Russian society. This satire was just a bit too full of deep cuts for me-apparently, almost all the characters map onto someone in Russian politics or culture, and even the title is mocking one of Dmitry Medvedev’s first tweets. I imagine it’s hilarious if you can identify all the people and moments he’s discussing.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
I hadn’t read Arendt before, and I have to say I was surprised and a bit disappointed. There were some really insightful pieces, don’t get me wrong. But overall I didn’t think it really captured well, the origins of totalitarianism. Arendt’s explanation for anti-semitism bordered on anti-semitism as well, and while I thought it did well describing a definition of totalitarianism, the origins and explanations weren’t there. All in all, I think I got more from quotes of the book I’ve read elsewhere than from the book itself.
The Last Hero, Terry Pratchett
We finished with The Witches earlier, and now we’re at the last Rincewind book. It was better than the other Rincewinds, with the aging Cohen the Barbarian and his elderly band of followers heading off to fight against their destiny ad, well, death itself. Not my favorite of the Discworld books, but a fitting send off.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, Bill Gates
Bill Gates doesn’t get it. Not really. That’s what I was left with after reading this book. He is so focused on additional technological research without recognizing that we have most – not all, but most – of the technology we need, but we lack a) the political will, and b) a knowledge that everything will have to change. We cannot continue to live as we have been. We may have to have occasional blackouts. We will need far more public transportation, or less travel, rather than better electric cars. We may need to stop just in time manufacturing. We cannot engineer our way to the same lifestyle. The only alternative to major change and fairly miniscule sacrifice is hundreds of millions of displaced people, devastating droughts, wildfires, and storms, and the extinction of most species on earth.
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, Ian Mortimer
And on the other end of the nonfiction spectrum, this was a delightful book. I love learning more about how, just, regular life has worked in different societies and situations, and that is where this book focuses. What would an average person be wearing? What did they eat? Why were colors restricted to different classes? It was really easy to pick up and put down, and a lot of fun.
News of the World, Paulette Jiles
This was a fine book if taken just as itself, but it deals with the American West after the Civil War, White settlers, and Indigenous peoples, and so this story can never be told on its own. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd who goes from town to town reading newspapers, ends up tasked with bringing a White girl back to her aunt and uncle. She was captured by the Kiowa on a raid, and her family was killed. Now, only a year later, the young girl is fully assimilated and not willing to return to the world of the Whites but he must deliver her through this dangerous journey. And yes, this happened, but the book as a whole plays into the narrative of the dangerous tribes and the White settlers trying to live in these surroundings, with no acknowledgement of what was being done to Indigenous peoples and their children and, I just don’t think you can tell one story from that in isolation.
Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk
Jane Austen meets witches. I think it was good for what it was, but I am not the biggest fan of Jane Austen and novels of awkwardness and etiquette and the characters biting their tongues the whole way through. Adding magic only made it a little more bearable. However, this was very much an issue of it not being my thing. If Jane Austen + Witches + a better Darcy is your thing, you’ll probably really like this book.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This was an absolutely beautiful book on considering a completely different way of being with each other and with nature than our WEIRD colonialist culture. Wall Kimmerer explores the concepts of a gifting culture than a market based culture, the idea of how we interact with nature, and how we can consider humans as an actual part of the ecology, in a very authentic way that also brought me, at least, hope for alternative futures.
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
This was a strange and fascinating book. Onion is an enslaved boy who ends up being ‘liberated’ and taken in by abolitionist John Brown, and, as a slight child, being mistaken for and temporarily living as a girl. It does not glorify anyone in this novel, other than possibly Harriet Tubman who appears for a brief moment, and showcases the strange existence of the western territories at the time. It also really highlights the internal and external contradictions that existed for slaves trying to survive, for slavers, and for abolitionists during this time period. I’m not sure I fully understood everything in it, but I did get sucked into reading it and may do so again.
Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline
If you read Ready Player One –which I really liked!—you already read this book. It’s kinda sorta the same. I did think that Cline tried to address some of the complaints from the first one, and address the criticisms that exist of Jobs and of, well, white, male, gamers currently. But it did feel a bit like he had a checklist of correctness to get through and then on to the story, which was sort of the same story. I do give points for trying, though! At least he’s doing that.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
This collection of short stories puts twists on classic tales. In the first, “The Bloody Chamber”, a young woman marries a wealthy marquis with a locked room and a dark secret, much like Bluebeard, but is saved from her fate at the last moment by her mother. Others are reimaginings of the way Beauty and the Beast may go, or darker versions of “The Snow Child.” In a red riding hood twist the grandmother is a werewolf who had tried to kill and eat little red. It was a very short book, and I never quite grasped the tone it was going for. Overall, not my favorite in the retelling stories genre.
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
I have somehow not read a lot of Octavia Butler before, but I’d been meaning to read the Earthseed books for a while. It’s rather a harrowing read. Climate change has led to massive shortages, the country has started to collapse, and new powerful drugs and gangs lead to an incredibly dangerous life for anyone outside a walled city, and for refugees trying to get to Canada or Alaska. Lauren Olamina, young girl, is trying to lead a group of people in a new life, home, and philosophy/religion she has ‘found’ and written. It’s surprising how quickly I read it given how painful much of it is, but that’s what happens when you’re reading a master writer, I suppose.
Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
Circe was one of my absolute favorite books I read last year so of course I was going to pick up Song of Achilles next. Presented by Patroclus, this is the tale of Achilles, from childhood to death and somewhat beyond. I think I liked Circe more, but this was also a wonderful read. Miller plays with many of the same concepts in this, of how horrific the Greek heroes were, the whims of the Gods, and trying to make how one treats others actually matter in the story. She’s so good, and I love the way she presents these ancient tales.
This was a very dark comedy about modern India, from a man who grew up in a poor village, had to give up his school scholarship to care for his family when his father died, became a driver, and eventually an incredibly wealthy entrepreneur by killing his boss and stealing his money. This isn’t a spoiler, the arc is shared early on and you’re just reading to learn about the journey. Surprisingly for a book with no redeeming characters, I really enjoyed reading this. It isn’t laugh-out-loud-funny, but it is darkly humorous, and is well put together.
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, & Their Secret World War, Stephen Kinzer
It’s strange that as we’re going through this spate of taking down monuments and renaming things that no one has yet come for the Dulles brothers, two people who have done such a great amount of damage to the world. Seriously, it is astounding how much evil they did and how much of today’s horrors can be placed soundly at the feet of the Secretary of State at the beginning of the Cold War, and the first head of the CIA. I wonder what the United States would look like if we didn’t have a Secretary of State who had gone all in on the unholy fusion of Calvinist moralism and extreme economic right wing thought. I wonder what Latin America would look like if our Secretary of State and CIA head had not literally also worked for United Fruit. I wonder what Africa and Asia would look like if we didn’t have a CIA head who wanted to play at adventure, and a Secretary of State who could only look with Manichean eyes. Truly everyone should read this and understand the sins of our country and post WWII colonialism.
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
This odd tale is significantly shorter than Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. And while that book was, for all its complexity, fairly straightforward in the telling, Piranesi is meant to throw you off track as you almost immediately realize things can’t be as they seem. Piranesi is a young man who lives in universe made up entirely of an infinitely large house, made up of strange statues, a handful of skeletons, and tides that flood some of the rooms. The only people there are him and the Other One, until evidence of a potential visitor shows up.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, Margaret Killjoy
The problem with this novella is that it was the start of a series, and it very much felt like that. It’s in a world where things have fallen apart even more than they have now, and in response even more people have joined groups of punks and anarchists trying to create their own societies. Also, sometimes they can call giant spirit animals to protect the city until those animals get out of hand. I didn’t dislike it, but it was very incomplete and felt like I was watching Episode 1 of a show, and also that the series opener was meant to be a two parter. Which is fine for a show, but I’m probably not going to binge read the series.
The Crimean War, Orlando Figes
Several years ago, when reading The Eyre Affair for the first time, I realized I basically new nothing about the Crimean War. I still only know a bit, but this very well researched and very long tome goes a long way in explaining the basic outlines of it, why it happened even though it didn’t really need to happen for anyone, and the way it fit in to European history between the revolutionary period of the mid- to late-1800s and the start of World War I.
The Amazing Maurice and His Enchanted Rodents, Terry Pratchett
This is labelled as one of his young adult books, but I will be honest, I didn’t notice much of a difference in style. I’m not knocking it, just scratching my head at how things get categorized. After eating some things behind the wizarding school in Ankh-Mopork, Unseen University, a cat and several rats become sentient. They set up with a young boy who plays the flute pulling a piper scam until finding a town where other rat catchers have already come up with a different, more damaging rat scam and unwittingly created a Rat King.
A History of What Comes Next, Sylvain Neuvel
Again the first in a series. There are entities that always exist as two, never more (when they existed as more they always correct at some point), a human seeming mother and her daughter, always a genetic replica. They have nothing to guide them but their shared story, a talisman, and a knowledge that they are meant to take humanity to the stars. They are hunted always by a human seeming father and his sons, again, genetic replicas, angry at being stuck on this planet with humans, incredibly sadistic, and hunting down the women. This, too, ended the book with clearly much more to come, and I’m not sure yet if I’ll read the rest of the series.
The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow
Okay, this book definitely grew on me during the reading. It is in the early 1900s in New Salem, and a world where the strong days of witchery are gone, being burned down and destroyed by men now considered saints, although some small amounts of magic exist in the world, passed down in families. But these are mostly spells for cleaning laundry or healing cuts, not the strong magic that existed before. Three sisters come together and are able to call strong magic down again, magic which is tied tightly to the fight for the vote, fights for unions, and fights for equality.
Love in Colour, Bolu Babalola
This was such a charming book! Babalola takes many different fairy tales, from many different cultures, primarily African and Middle Eastern, and plays with their characters and themes to create new tales. Some of the stories are in a fictional world, some taking place in our world today, always focused on tales of love. I am not a romantic, and it wouldn’t usually be my cup of tea, but this was so well done and so fun to read. If I could boil it down, for Babalola, love is about seeing and being seen to one another, and being able to be one’s true self even for just one person, and I can get behind that definition.
And that’s it for now! I’ll try to get back into regular reviews, and fill out the links here. Happy reading!
Filed under: Book Reviews, books, cli-fi, discworld, dystopia, Environment, fantasy, hugo awards, literature, mystery, nebula award, Politics, russian literature, science fiction, short stories | Tagged: book reviews, books, books 2021 | 1 Comment »
Cavalcade of Whimsy 