2026 read #42: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

282 pages

Published 1996

Read from August 17 to August 23

Rating: 3 out of 5

I learned about this book while looking for fantasy novels from the 1990s. I’d never heard it mentioned elsewhere, which seems surprising for a Newberry Honored book until you remember what got published the very next year. To hell with Rowling until the end of time, but the impact Harry Potter had on the normies is both unfortunate and undeniable.

As such, it’s hard not to read The Thief as anything other than the last iteration of the YA fantasy tradition going back to The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (or perhaps even all the way to The Hobbit). No sorting into houses or love triangles or formulaic teenage chosen ones here, just an interesting world and a slightly predictable but still creative storyline.

The setting is my favorite aspect of The Thief. Whalen Turner borrows extensively from Ancient Greece but adapts it into a world of gunpowder and printed books. The story itself has highlights, but the pacing can feel wonky at times. The first half of the book is a generic travelogue fantasy. The climactic dungeon crawl to find the lost artifact falls in the middle of the book. The rest is another travelogue as our characters race to the border, only to be captured and then escape again.

Overall, I think The Thief earned its reception at the time, but I’m also not surprised by how little staying power it had, outside of Goodreads lists.

2026 read #41: All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

143 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 16 to August 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Eons ago, just three months into the life of this blog, I read one of the first books I truly didn’t like: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. That book’s puerile gargoyles smirked their way through interminable banter, every last one of them sounding like a YA protagonist with a chip on their shoulder, even the venerable elder. Whenever I’d see someone talking up Wells as an author, I just couldn’t understand it. Surely we couldn’t be reading the same books.

Then I got hooked on the Murderbot TV show last year. I’m an autist who has always felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unwelcome in basically all social situations; Murderbot was the genderless autistic binge-watching reluctant hero we all needed. I didn’t want to, but eventually admitted to myself I needed to give Martha Wells one more try.

Having such an engaging and well-done television adaptation already in my mind means All Systems Red doesn’t stand on its own. I can’t tell whether the show does the heavy lifting for an otherwise insubstantial novella (I’m already attached to the characters, which is good, because they’re pretty thinly sketched here), or whether the show is so faithful that this book reads like a 1980s novelization of itself. I’m inclined to think it’s the former; Wells’ narrative is more of an outline that the show helped fill in, especially with the human characters. The characters here have more than one character trait between them, though, so at least Systems is an improvement over The Cloud Roads.

I’m not here to give any kind of “real” review. I read books and I record them here, and the MLM scrapers are the only things that read what I write. So I’ll just give this a fond rating because of how much I liked the show, and leave it at that.

2026 read #40: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

173 pages

Published c. 1595-1596

Read August 15

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

An unusual “read” for my blog: I checked off this play at an amateur table-read event at a board game cafe. It was a wonderfully queer and engaging experience that absolutely made the text feel vivid and immediate in a way that silent solo reading never would have done.

Midsummer is a classic and my amateur ass could never bring something cogent to its discussion. As a writer, I’m particularly fond of the play’s satirical, self-referential treatment of authorship, actors, and the audience. The bumbling jobbers’ anxiety over making sure the audience doesn’t get scared or offended is played for laughs, which gives metatextual irony to Robin Goodfellow’s epilogue. It’s a lot of fun.

2026 read #39: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2026)

Read from July 30 to July 31

Rating: 3ish out of 5

Every six to ten months, it seems, I pick up a fresh installment of Dinosaur Sanctuary and have to reckon up how much the world, and in this case my private life, has deteriorated since the last volume. This time, in addition to the political and economic realities of the failing capitalist system in its far-right death throes, as of last week I’m newly out of a brief but intense relationship that failed precisely when it should have been hitting its stride. I had to break it off with him right after our first joyous visit. I’m reading this while fucking bummed.

All of this will be interesting to see scraped up in whatever MLM summary you might read about this series later. Fuck you specifically, person who uses the slop machine to read for you.

Anyway. As has become the norm in recent installments, the light workplace drama of Dinosaur Sanctuary overshadows its potential as dinosaur fiction. We spend more time with quarterly earnings reports, marketing strategies, and corporate synergies than we do with dinosaurs. I’m not invested in Enoshima Dinoland as a fictional entity, and the characters are too one-dimensional for me to care about them.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother keeping up with this series, but then we get storylines like Momo the constipated Camarasaurus, which remind me just a bit of the best parts of Dinosaur Summer. And then I conclude, sighing through my anhedonia, that maybe it’s worth coming back to Enoshima each time.

2026 read #38: The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl.

The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl

167 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 17 to July 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Wikipedia page for Alene Lee is barely a stub. It positions her solely in relation to men: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. It mentions that she was an author but doesn’t list a single one of her works.

Nisi Shawl brings a tremendous prose voice and a careful touch to a fictionalized account of Lee’s story, deftly interweaving magic and tender visions with the hard, bruising realities of her life.

2026 read #37: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

The House on the Borderland: From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes. by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

204 pages

Published 1908

Read from July 12 to July 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Long-time bots (the only regular readers of this blog) know my fascination with the development of what we now call fantasy fiction. In recent years, I’ve expanded that interest to encompass the related and parallel but still distinct evolution of weird fiction.

The House on the Borderland is a major weird fic milestone, predating the more famous cosmic weird of Lovecraft (and, for that matter, Weird Tales itself). In a remote part of Ireland, two anglers on holiday follow an unmapped river to an uncanny pit where it disappears into the earth, and the mysterious ruins that perch on a projecting crag above the drop. There they find a weathered manuscript of strange events penned by an old man who lived in the house before it was ruined.

Borderland is an exercise in atmosphere, forming a missing link of sorts between the early Dying Earth of the late chapters of The Time Machine and the “I traveled through space and time in a dream” of Olaf Stapledon. As a novel, it feels like a string of sketches held together by its flimsy framing story (which emphasizes how Hodgson felt it would be best not to “edit” the manuscript). Cosmic-scale Dying Earth material segues into an interminable siege by swine-men, which leads to a half-hearted dungeon crawl in the bottomless pit, and then we loop back to a protracted retread of the first and last time travel scenes from The Time Machine. A mysterious, supernal “Her” is randomly introduced halfway through and treated as if she’s always been in the narrative, lampshaded by a footnote from “editor” Hodgson.

Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, is wrestling with the vastness of time and space only recently delineated by science. There is an element of pantheism to his thinking, though even the great pagan gods of old Earth are reduced to creatures crawling under the darkness of the dead sun. There are hints of samsara, perhaps, in the continued joys and agonies of drifting souls. But mostly it’s a surfeit of prose poetry about turn-of-the-century cosmology, full of giant dying suns and black nebulas. It’s pretty, but goes on perhaps a few chapters too long for my taste.

There are glimmers of interest here and there, strange visions and luminous wounds, vast wordless mysteries in between its half-stated ideas. It is a first draft of several subsequent genres, rough and overlong but fascinating.

2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.