2025 read #92: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

408 pages

Published 1996

Read from November 23 to December 4

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first heard of The Sparrow as a teenager, sometime in the late ’90s. My domineering father rarely permitted books newer than the Edwardian era, but I did read newspapers, which is where I happened upon rumors that a novel about a Jesuit in space was being made into a movie starring Antonio Banderas. That was a tantalizing sequence of words to someone just beginning to encounter the literary, overtly philosophical bent of late ’90s sci-fi in magazines like Asimov’s. Back then, like now, it was rare that high-concept science fiction ever made the jump to theaters. It was rare enough that it stuck in my memory.

The movie, of course, was never made. (Later, Brad Pitt of all people wanted to star as Father Emilio Sandoz. It’s for the best that a movie never came of it, really.) And somehow, in the decades of adult life that followed, when I was free to read whatever I liked, I never took the time to track down the book.

Finally reading it, I’m disappointed by its vibe. This isn’t the ethereal, elevated novel I’d constructed in my teenage imagination. It’s far closer in tone to Crichton’s technothrillers (though, obviously, better written). Rather than a literary masterpiece, it’s pop intellectualism plastered around the framework of an airport novel. Doria Russell builds her plot news-magazine style, hopping from one underdeveloped POV to the next to dole out information. There’s even a Crichtonesque subplot about Japanese business interests buying out Arecibo to automate its technicians out of a job (though Doria Russell out-Crichtons Crichton by having her Japan casually conquer Asia by the 2010s). It’s jarring when you anticipated a character-focused drama.

The 1990s were just a weird time in sci-fi, when bold new ideas jostled against garbage that should have been abandoned in decades past. The Sparrow makes good use of the harrowing nitty-gritty of space travel: radiation poisoning, isolation, the slow death of the human body without the nutrients it evolved to absorb. Doria Russell cleverly applies relativistic effects to a dual narrative timeline. She also embraces lazy, wince-inducing stereotypes; national ancestry determines characterization. Japanese businessmen contemplate seppuku; Muslim terrorists plant bombs; Italians have links to organized crime; a character of Jewish heritage tells herself Arbeit macht frei. Yikes.

In a clumsy way, beneath the stereotyped characters and the requisite Nineties gestures at theological profundity, Doria Russell attempts to examine sexuality, gender, and their attendant power dynamics. After belaboring the spiritual motif (and physical realities) of Sandoz’s celibacy, the narrative slowly unravels the mystery of how he, the final survivor of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat, was found living as a prostitute on the alien planet. The hierarchical society of Rakhat’s inhabitants, and their own restrictions on reproductive autonomy, feeds into this commentary, which makes up a little bit for how prosaic, how thoroughly not-alien, they feel. I’ve read Star Wars books with more alien aliens. (Doria Russell’s decision to give her caste-divided aliens vaguely subcontinental phonemes doesn’t help, either with originality or with beating the stereotype allegations.)

The book as a whole is ambitious but flawed. A relic of its decade, which can often seem more distant and dated than the 1980s.

2025 read #91: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2023

Read December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)

Way back in the day (which, thanks to the speed with which consensus reality has crumbled, here means 2022 or so), the fantasy fiction side of Twitter went into a tizzy over the cover of this installment of the Wayward Children series. A Doorway to dinosaurs! McGuire cautioned readers that dinosaurs really weren’t the focus of the story, but I’ve been excited about this entry ever since. Its cover is the entire reason I resumed reading through the series after a lapse of nearly seven years.

Mislaid continues the storylines of Lost in the Moment and Found (with Antsy now attending Eleanor West’s school, conscientiously if naively applying her talent for finding lost things) and Where the Drowned Girls Go (with Cora back at school with new friends, all of them escapees from the Whitethorn Institute). I tend to find the main School-based storyline less interesting than the more or less standalone books that establish each new character’s backstory. Lost in particular was a highpoint for the series; Mislaid feels even more like a step down in comparison.

It doesn’t help that Mislaid (and Antsy) is tasked with doling out a bunch of exposition about Doors, Worlds, and the ways they work. As a worldbuilding author myself, I’m not convinced any of this is strictly necessary. I found it interesting, but would’ve preferred a more emotionally charged storyline to the nuts and bolts of what is, essentially, how the Looking Glass operates.

And McGuire was right to caution her fans against thinking Mislaid is a dinosaur novel. I mean, it is enough of one for my purposes. But we don’t reach the dinosaur world until page 100, and we pop right out of it again just two chapters later. It’s a charming interlude, and well worth reading the series to get there. If only we’d gotten a full novel of it (instead of more banter between half a dozen main characters).

2025 read #90: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire.

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 21 to November 23

Rating: 4 out of 5

Oof, this one comes swinging for your heart right from the start. (Even the contents warning made me tear up, it was that sensitively written.) Today’s hero, Antsy, has to flee from home when her stepfather’s grooming and gaslighting gets to a crisis point. She ends up in a shop of lost things, joining a magpie and an ancient woman in their travels through Doors.

Antsy’s story is heartbreaking and defiant, one of the best (and most devastating) Wayward Girls stories McGuire has written. The fantasy elements map so perfectly onto the character’s personal journey and the book’s thematic elements, something I love when authors pull it off.

My main complaint is that, as is often the case in this series of novellas, there just isn’t enough room for Antsy’s tale to develop as much as I would want it to. We skip from her first day or two of adjustment to a couple years into her shopkeeper apprenticeship. Though, reluctantly, I have to admit this accelerated narration is once again thematically consistent with the peril Antsy finds herself in.

I do wish Lost hadn’t taken the time to dole out exposition for the rest of the series, and instead had been its own standalone, rather longer novel. But the story we get is one of the best in the series so far, so I won’t complain too much.

2025 read #89: Sea Siege by Andre Norton.

Sea Siege by Andre Norton

176 pages

Published 1957

Read from November 19 to November 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

Let’s continue the nautical theme from Treasure Island with this early atomic pulper. It’s a somewhat interesting stew of 1950s cliches and concerns, mixing aqua-lung diving, a young man with father issues, intelligent octopuses, Seabees building a submarine base, radioactive sea monsters, and global nuclear war. The second half becomes a West Indies-flavored, less good version of On the Beach (which was published the same year).

Sadly, we have to weather a white author in the 1950s attempting to portray islanders of intermingled ethnic heritage. (There’s a “voodoo witch doctor.” Every islander speaks in dialect and says “mon” in every sentence. The entire island is impoverished and lazy and superstitious, except for a few motivated individuals who become San Isadore’s “natural leaders.”) Still, while tiresome, and quite racist, it isn’t as comprehensively racist as it could have been in 1957. Small victories?

2025 read #88: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.*

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson*

190 pages

Published 1883

Read from November 18 to November 19

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 with nostalgia)

* Denotes a reread.

I began the year hoping to shift my reading focus away from big numbers of books to books I’m enthusiastic about reading. That didn’t last long; I resumed padding my numbers with manga and novellas pretty much immediately. As we speed inexorably toward December, I’m officially at the fuck-it phase: I want to reach 100 books this year, and I’m happy to cram in anything I can to get there.

That said, I’ve idly wished to revisit this childhood staple for a while now. After the usual suspects, like War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, this was one of my most frequent rereads as a tween. Whatever his other qualities, Stevenson was skilled at portraying the irrational fears and half-understood thoughts of childhood:

How [the man with one leg] haunted my dreams…. On stormy nights… I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.

As that’s exactly how my own imagination operated, even in waking hours, I felt perceived in a way all too rare in my youth.

Nostalgia’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but even as an adult, it’s an enjoyable read. It’s solidly constructed, briskly paced, and brims with iconic scenes and images. It is exactly the book it sets out to be. Certain aspects haven’t aged well, naturally. But it was a welcome visit back to childhood escapism.

2025 read #87: The Great Return by Arthur Machen.

The Great Return by Arthur Machen

80 pages

Published 1915

Read November 18

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I went into this flimsy novella knowing nothing about it beyond its author (who could write an interesting story if he really wanted to) and its length (which would pad out my reading numbers and perhaps help get me to a hundred books read this year). Despite the story’s brevity, Machen feels no urgency to get to his point. He rambles about marvelous events getting lost in the quotidian apathy of newspaper type for about 15% of the book before we even get a hint of what our plot might be.

The Great Return turns out to be a tale of metaphysical manifestations in a quiet Welsh village, signs and wonders turning the folk of Llantrisant serene and joyful, full of appreciation for the world around them, which seems to have become Paradise. It almost feels like a step on the road to folk horror: a village of ecstatics, albeit played for religious fantasy rather than horror. 

The novella is shoddily constructed. The first half is an account of some guy hearing about the mystery of Llantrisant and coming to investigate it. His efforts consist of happening to overhear conversations in and around the town. Around the halfway mark, Machen appears to grow bored of connecting this framing device to the rest of the story, and has his narrator abruptly shift gears:

This is enough of the personal process, as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.

We are never given an indication of how the narrator pieced any of it together, which (to my tastes) makes the existence of the narrator entirely superfluous.

2025 read #86: The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher.

The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion by Catherine Fletcher

311 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 10 to November 17

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We always have to step carefully around histories of Rome. As with histories of war, the topic tends to attract cryptofascists and bootlickers, glassy-eyed in their praise of power and empire and masculine control. Which is a shame; Rome lay at the center of a fascinating era, a period of cultural interchange and population movement. But no, so many histories want to grovel at the feet of the caesars.

This book is a history of Roman roads, utilizing them as a means of examining imperialism and structures of power throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Fletcher breezes through the Classical Roman section of her history within 60 pages. The bulk of Roads is about how successive cultural moments engaged with (and mythologized) the memory and infrastructure of Rome. We wend through the medieval age of pilgrimage, the early modern Grand Tour, the encroachment of railroads, the imperialist myth-making of Fascism, and the romanticizing sheen of Hollywood and all-inclusive continental vacations.

Along the way, we sometimes get bogged down in recitations of politicians and authors who traveled a road, or who purposefully avoided a road. Fletcher interweaves her sources with her own post-lockdown travels across Europe and Asia Minor. Her contemporary journeys are enjoyably written, seasoned with an academic’s wariness of our decade’s resurgent national populism. Both the historic and modern narratives would have been enhanced with more maps, but publishers are cheap about illustrations these days.

One thing from Roads that will forever stick with me: the understanding that the “Great Man” style of history was “part of a wider European trend of history in service of the modern nation state,” crafting a narrative of national heroes and their patriotic deeds. It’s one of those observations that’s blatant in hindsight, but that our culture doesn’t tend to acknowledge.