Finished reading The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. A kind of a fantasy novel about a group of (mostly) women who gather and share knowledge, and a group of (mostly) men who hoard it, this feels like the kind of story that a younger Ursula K. Le Guin might have written.
Finished reading The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. I read it compulsively, but it was really hard, about sexism and abuse and surviving them. It didn’t help that the protagonist — or at least the narrator, maybe she’s not the protagonist — is not especially likeable. I’m glad I read this, but I can’t easily recommend it.
Finished reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. I read it slowly and sporadically, as I do with a lot of nonfiction, and I’m not sure what to make of it. There seem to be some deep insights about how we perceive time and how parts of it are a social construction, along with digressions about labor and inequity that Odell manages to pull back to the main topic, along with bits that feel a little too woo-woo for me.
Finished reading Dead Country by Max Gladstone, book seven or one in a series, depending how you count. (It’s seven, I think.) Anyway, interestingly, this book sort of rhymed with Gladstone’s previous, Last Exit, sharing some motifs, but I think this was the better book: tighter and with less clumsy preaching.
Finished reading The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. I almost put this one down unfinished: The setting and story are incredibly inventive, and the characters’ portrayal and motivations very one-dimensional and clumsy. I actually found myself skimming parts, which I almost never do with fiction.
Finished reading Babel by R.F. Kuang, about the translators’ college at Oxford in the 1830s that worked magic based on the tension between imperfectly-translated terms, and thus fueled the British Empire. About empire of course, and appropriation and systemic racism and such. I enjoyed this.
Finished reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, about plague, time travel, and the simulation hypothesis. Includes some more-mature forms of her standard tropes, plus links to other parts of the St. John Mandel Literary Universe. Quite good.
Finished reading Joan by Katherine J. Chen, historical fiction about Joan of Arc. Chen, properly, wrote her own interpretation of Joan, one who’s less a holy maid with visions and more “the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass” (note: not a quote from the book). The final part of the book was difficult to read — it’s a tragedy after all — but at least we don’t get to her being (spoiler for approx. six-century-old history) burnt at the stake.
Side note / content warning / complaint: In the book, Joan’s sister is raped (offscreen, and handled delicately, but). I hope someday we can find a better plot point to motivate the main character.
Set aside After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC by Steven Mithen. I’m enjoying it, but it’s a big chonk of a book, and I have other library books due back soon. I’ll return to this while I’m between other books.
The book referenced several books and authors also referenced in The Old Ways, not entirely surprisingly.
Finished reading Imaginary Peaks by Katie Ives. The core of the book is a mountain climbing hoax, but it extends outwards to cartography and its difficulties, hoaxes more generally, and colonialism, among other things.
Finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This was a big chonker of a book, about Thomas Cromwell’s rise from son of a blacksmith to most trusted councilor of Henry VIII (Henry the Butthead). Very enjoyable. I had one significant kvetch: Whether a writing tic or a stylistic choice, there were many passages with ambiguous pronoun references; sometimes I had to reread multiple times to understand what was happening.
The most obvious St. John Mandel motif in The Glass Hotel was the improbable connections between characters; some of the characters were hapless, but not as intensely so as in her earlier books.
Finished reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. Ostensibly (and, to be fair, mostly) about a financial con, it’s also somehow about ghosts and maybe alternate realities. I think this is my favorite of her books (so far; I still haven’t read Sea of Tranquility).
I’ve now reread the ending of Golden Hill two or three times, which I never do.