2016 read #93: The Shadowed Sun by N. K. Jemisin.

The Shadowed Sun by N. K. Jemisin
504 pages
Published 2012
Read from December 15 to December 24
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Following on some ten or so years after the events of The Killing Moon, The Shadowed Sun has the advantage of a setting and cosmology already established. Sun is free of Moon's double duties of delineating a complicated cosmology and system of dream-magic, liberating its opening chapters to set up new characters and hook the reader with a sense of momentum lacking in Moon's early passages. That momentum dissipates, however, getting lost like floodwaters across a porous substrate of overly convoluted plot, double dealings, magical threats that get set up early on only to evaporate, replaced by others as if Jemisin got bored halfway through.

The magic and cultures Jemisin depicts are wonderfully inventive and memorable, worthy additions to the atlas of all-time great fantastical lands. For the most part, the characters are interesting enough to follow around, although Jemisin kind of shoehorns a couple of them into an unlikely and unconvincing romance plot. Ultimately, the setting and characters weren't enough to sustain my interest in the meandering storyline -- whether that can be attributed to the book or to my own flagging attention span is for others to judge.

2016 read #92: A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom.

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom
340 pages
Published 2010
Read from November 15 to December 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

What we commonly understand to be the Enlightenment, declares Blom in a moving epilogue, is a bourgeois dilution of the radical ideas of the real thinkers of the Enlightenment -- a dilution that elevated the "moderate" sensibilities of Voltaire and Kant to better fit the ideals of a "rationalistic," industrial society, while discarding the inconvenient positions of Diderot, Holbach, Raynal, Helvétius, and others who frequented the philosophical discussions in Holbach's salon, who formed the core of the true Enlightenment. The philosophes at Holbach's dinner table advocated instinct, the drive for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, moderated and directed by reason and empathy -- a society without gods or priests or aristocrats, without imbalances in wealth or power, without exploitation of the poor or colonization of less-well-armed societies around the globe. This radical Enlightenment, says Blom, was snuffed out by the Revolution in the hands of Robespierre, who seized upon the rival philosophy of Rousseau, a philosophy that permitted autocratic tyranny and religious power in pursuit of some abstracted ideal of "natural man."

Blom sketches a fascinating but often repetitive tale of these thinkers and philosophers as they cross paths with each other and with the wider scenes of history. His personal bias can be blatant at times, between his sustained character assassination of Rousseau and his obvious hero-worship of Baron Paul Thiry Holbach. A chapter detailing the frustrated sexual fetishes of Rousseau is entertaining, but makes for an overly reductive psychosexual case for Rousseau's philosophical convictions. While Rousseau deserves to be taken down quite a few pegs, I'm not sure that exploring his desire to be whipped and punished is entirely relevant to that task.

Rousseau, inadvertent father of the Romantics, holds a place in the philosophical foundations of conservationism and outdoor recreation, by crooked inspirational paths reaching through Muir and beyond, so it was startling to learn, for the first time, how ghastly his "social contract" really was, how reprehensible his personal and family life (siring four children with his mistress, and making her leave them as foundlings, all while writing his highflown ruminations on "proper" childrearing) were. That kind of character assassination -- using his actual positions and his handling of those in his power to portray his ugly character -- is a completely legitimate angle for Blom to take, and he handles it ably.

The overall impression left by A Wicked Company in this Age of Trumpism is a depressing realization of how many of the issues we face today -- ignorance, exploitation of the poor, dehumanization of women, religious and monetary power, colonialism, repression of empathy and compassion, suppression and distortion of healthy sexuality -- were recognized and debated over two centuries ago in a salon in Paris, and how little progress has been made toward realizing the free and happy state of brotherhood and equality dreamed by the philosophes. The Enlightenment ends in the suburbs, Diderot proclaims, and that is especially true in 2016.

2016 read #91: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
140 pages
Published 1911
Read from December 9 to December 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A tragedy of old New England "granite," in Wharton's phrase, shot through with bleakly comic veins. More is suggested than stated: the heartbreak and poisonous struggles hidden behind farmhouse doors, the social and psychological pressures denied outlet by long-standing custom, winter hardships and hardscrabble poverty crushing ambition and curiosity and desire for more under their glacial inevitability.

2016 read #90: Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle.

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle
238 pages
Published 2016
Read from December 4 to December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I wonder how much more I would have enjoyed this novel, had I been more able to enjoy anything these days. That said, I don't feel like this was anywhere near Beagle's best. It left me feeling equivocal, bored even, especially during the first half, which felt at times closer to the urban fairy tales of de Lint than the sensitive and emotionally weighted musings I've come to expect from Beagle's longform stories. That first half read like a somewhat more intelligent but entirely formulaic urban fantasy of a fey being improving the tap water and ameliorating the Pacific Northwest weather with her mere presence, something I would have eaten up a couple years ago but can't get excited about anymore. Interludes of a main character, in his silver years, attaching himself to a blues-harmonica outfit did nothing to cultivate my interest. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't catch on to the identity of the magical stranger until roughly the halfway point, when a certain mythological connection was referenced by name. But that's also about when the book (or at least my interest in it) picked up noticeably.

What follows is a complicated knot of inadvertent betrayal, understandable hurt and pettishness, some light stalking, and a coda of heartbreaking realism. The last couple of pages at long last punctured my Trump Age anhedonia to move me the way I expect a Beagle novel to move me.

2016 read #89: Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
304 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 21 to December 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Meh. I wanted to like this book. The concept -- a corps of spiritualist mediums channeling the ghosts of British soldiers killed in the First World War, to gain instant intelligence of German action on the front -- is entirely my sort of thing. I mostly enjoyed Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey, which showed authorial potential up until the blatant set-up-the-series coda. And Ghost Talkers' opening chapters, while establishing the characters and setting with such efficiency that they could have been generated from a step-by-step "How to write a fantasy novel" guide, presented a decent hook and a moderately appealing cast. But after that... I dunno. It's hard these days to discern whether my lack of enthusiasm for a book results from a mediocre story or from my ongoing post-election anhedonia. I just could not stay engaged with the narrative for any length of time. The initially promising plot -- ghosts! traitors in the ranks! emotionally moving scenes! -- devolved into the main character trotting around pell-mell, first to the front tranches to have a gratuitous encounter with one Lt. Tolkien, then to a book store, then to a train that she thought was going one place then turned out to be going to another place, then a detour to unmask an obvious plot twist, and so on and so forth, like a farce getting played for drama. After a while, I got to the point where I could only read a few pages before losing interest and gravitating toward my D&D manuals.

I don't want to blame my lack of engagement on the book, necessarily -- I haven't felt especially interested in any of the other three books I'm currently working through. Nor do I have anything more substantial to say about this one. I mean, I do like bits and pieces (two words: poltergeist battalion), but the overall effect is just... meh.

So much for being able to finish a hundred books this year.

2016 read #88: Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin
89 pages
Published 1976
Read from November 17 to November 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Only an urge toward completionism motivated me to pick up this book. Aside from Always Coming Home, Malafrena, Orisinian Tales, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and a whole bunch of short story compilations, all that remains of Le Guin's work for me to read is her juvenile fiction; this isn't the sort of book I'd select if it weren't for the drive to read everything. I'm happy for the prompt, however. Prosaic as this tale of an introverted, self-proclaimed high school intellectual may be, Le Guin brings her characteristic insight and deep compassion to the work. Giving into received social expectations leads to heartache and frustration as our narrator disregards what he knows and feels in favor of some half-conscious capitulation to conformity. The emotional fluency of Le Guin's prose, examining adolescent longing with detached yet heartfelt honesty, again and again delivered lines and moments of perceptive clarity.

2016 read #87: The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull.

The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull
356 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 15 to November 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The first couple years I maintained this review blog, I had something of a fixation for novels of Faery. I was still new to fantasy in those days, having discovered how dreary and repetitive modern sci-fi can be after a lifelong allegiance to that genre, and something about a well-done Faery tale hit the right nerves -- for a while. Nowadays I can't even remember the last Faery novel I finished, let alone the last one that really stood out and stuck to me. (An archive search suggests Drink Down the Moon or, possibly, The Book of Atrix Wolfe for the former, possibly as far back as War for the Oaks for the latter.) I can't even list all the Faery novels I began and abandoned only partway in the last couple years; I've reached the point where another solitary, bookish girl stumbling between the worlds has lost any sense of freshness or enchantment.

Catmull's Summer and Bird was a wondrous and strange fairy tale (not, please note, Faery novel), and I was excited to read more of her output -- that was my sole motivation to keep reading after the sustained meh of Road's opening pages, with its condescending, omniscient narrator and constant second-person asides: "Or the Halloween feeling -- you must know that one -- the feeling of dead leaves and chill and early dark..." Even though Road's POV character is older than her counterpart in Summer, Catmull appears to have had a much younger audience in mind. With juvenile fiction, there's always a risk that an author will talk down to their audience, which is aggravating to read as an adult (and probably aggravates its intended audience as well, though I for one never read YA when I was young), and in those first few pages, I worried what kind of slog I'd be in for.

I'm glad I persevered, however. While The Radiant Road doesn't produce any staggering or delightful new addition to Faery lore (I'm doubtful, at this point, that anything new remains to be done with Faery), Catmull spins out a worthwhile and enjoyable sojourn in its halls. Her imagery here doesn't approach the vividness and creativity it displayed in Summer, but glimpses of that talent do emerge: to a much lesser degree, Catmull here does for trees what Summer did for birds, elevating them into the lexicon of fantastic imagery.

2016 read #86: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson.

A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson
159 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 11 to November 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The previous Wilson novella set in this story universe, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, was a modern take on some old sword-and-sorcery cliches. A Taste of Honey moves closer to the science-fantasy of Butler's Xenogenesis series or Le Guin's Hainish books, full of godlike aliens mingling their genetic patterns and psionic powers with a human race seemingly reverted to an Iron Age existence. In both cases Wilson fans new life into the respective subgenres but nonetheless seems bound by their limitations, at least to some extent.

In its structure, plotting, and pacing, Honey is a more assured undertaking, slipping forward and backward through Aqib's life exactly as needed to pull the story along, without the occasional wobble Sorcerer suffered. The characters are richer here, the tragedy more compelling, yet to be honest, I preferred the fantasy elements of Sorcerer (dated as they were) to the rote technobabble here. A better balance between the two influences would be superb, though for me, that balance would rest closer to the fantasy side of things.

2016 read #85: The Road to Corlay by Richard Cowper.

The Road to Corlay by Richard Cowper
202 pages
Published 1978 (includes "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," originally published 1976)
Read from November 7 to November 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I'll forever remember this as the book I was reading when a spray-tanned reality TV clown, riding a wave of nativism and fascism throughout rural America, won the White House. Set a thousand years from now, in a feudal future after man-made climate change has melted the ice caps and Britain is flooded into a series of island kingdoms, where the Church Militant hunts the heretics who preach brotherly love and Universal Kinship, The Road to Corlay is also appallingly apropos to the events of Tuesday.

Corlay is a fixup of two novellas. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is a predictable but sweet little number, the ending of which was spoiled for me (majorly) by the back cover blurb. That blunted the ending's impact, to put it mildly, but I enjoyed the novella nonetheless. "The Road to Corlay" is longer, more ambitious, and also more muddled, getting sidetracked with what I would consider to be a very 1970s plotline: Near-future technobabble experimentation (sample: "From my experience I'd say that what takes place in the pineal zone of the human cortex is beyond the scope of our natural philosophies") sends an English scientist on an out-of-body experience inside the head of a religious fugitive in 3018 AD. It's all quite silly and detracts from whatever merit the rest of the story might have.

At this point I can't parse out my feelings: Was Corlay a middling effort, failing to live up to its setting and the initial promise of "Piper," or am I merely numb and nihilistic over the future we face?

2016 read #84: The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin.

The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin
418 pages
Published 2012
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This book, when compared with Jemisin's debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, neatly represents maturation in the craft of a fantasy writer -- or at least a step in that general direction. Where Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy relied upon first person narration and (for the most part) introduced readers to complicated fantasy exposition through the handy trick of an outsider's perspective, The Killing Moon tosses readers into the thick of things, starting in media res with third-person limited perspective as our characters react to events that occurred before the first page. It's an ambitious leap in storycraft. As an inadvertent side effect, alas, I didn't feel much investment in either the characters or the story for the first hundred or so pages.

Jemisin is a consummate worldbuilder, which I appreciate as a writer, but as a reader, I feel more ambivalent about that tendency. Especially in the early going, Moon suffers from too much attention to the cosmic details of its made-up world, much like Jemisin's The Kingdom of Gods. The exposition is doled out at a comfortable pace, rarely too much at once, but there is just so damn much of it to absorb that it becomes hard to care about the story. The book is, perhaps, richer for it in the long run, but it takes an unfortunate length of time (and book) to reach a balance between caring about the characters and knowing what the hell is going on. The ending is fairly predictable, but nonetheless moving.

2016 read #83: The Star King by Jack Vance.

The Star King by Jack Vance
147 pages
Published 1964
Read from October 27 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This is a flawed but fascinating novel that feels far longer, and far more immersive, than its page count would suggest. Its greatest strength is the richness of its worldbuilding, touring an array of vivid and memorable worlds, from the cosmopolitan panoply of the Rigelian Concourse to a murderer's secret torture den on the dusty wastes of a dead star. It anticipates the iconic worlds of Dune and often reminded me of later space opera of the post-Dune, post-Star Wars school -- books like Hyperion or Grass, in which the planets are explored in great detail and become, in effect, main characters. As with the Dune series, the sense of a lived-in universe with an expansive history is cultivated through the judicious (and thematic) use of in-universe epigram quotations at the start of each chapter. The effect is not quite so well done in The Star King -- the quotations go on for pages at a time, distracting from the central story when they prove more interesting than it, and derailing it when the central story attains momentum. One gets the sense that this book is representative of the genre itself, fossilized in a moment of transition between the rayguns-and-libertarianism of the Ace Doubles and the nascent Serious Experimental Literature of the New Wave. But the overall effect is intriguing, enriching the story and creating an impression of a vast universe I would love to visit again.

If the worldbuilding is reminiscent of Dune, Vance's methodical revenge-assassin presages the supermen of Zelazny's fiction, though without the latter's tendency toward immortality, and with more substantial flaws than Zelazny's gods would ever bother to maintain. Kirth Gerson's lifelong single-minded quest for vengeance has left him ignorant of a range of human experiences and social interactions, which would be a promising avenue to explore in a maturing genre. Alas, this is one area which shows vestigial traces of its '50s sci-fi ancestry: A sunny departmental secretary finds herself unaccountably attracted to our assassin over the video-phone, and immediately agrees to date him, just in time to get kidnapped and provide our hero with fresh motivation.

The Star King stumbles somewhat in its second half, getting mired in a not-all-that-interesting detective story as our hero endeavors to figure out which of three departmental heads at a Rigelian university is secretly the legendary criminal mastermind Malagate the Woe. I felt the "mystery" was obvious from the moment he meets the guy who turns out to be Malagate, so the intervening pages -- again, almost half the book -- were kind of a muddle for me, detracting from the promise of the first half. This, to strain my "transitional fossil" metaphor, could be seen as a relict of '50s-style pulp plotting, but in any case, I felt it was one of the weakest elements of the novel.

2016 read #82: Flight by Sherman Alexie.

Flight by Sherman Alexie
182 pages
Published 2007
Read October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Flight is a work of profound empathy: empathy for cheaters and deadbeats, empathy for alcoholics and would-be spree killers, empathy for US cavalrymen massacring Indian camps, empathy for terrorists flying planes into city centers. Alexie's ability to generate such empathy again and again, each time within a handful of pages -- all while employing a recognizable cousin of the flippant teenage narrative voice I found so off-putting in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- is astonishing. While some of the answers here are too easy, too obvious (we all need love, we all need acceptance, we all need a place), that doesn't make any of the questions less moving, any less vital.

2016 read #81: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell.

Carry On: The Rise and Fall of Simon Snow by Rainbow Rowell
522 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 14 to October 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Simon Snow began his literary life as a Harry Potter pastiche in Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. Carry On was the title of the Simon Snow slashfic written by the eponymous fangirl, but Rowell (as she says in the closing author's note) wanted to try her hand at writing a Snow novel -- "What would I do with Simon Snow?" It's all a delightfully tangled question of literary ontology and ontogeny.

What matters here is that this is a cracking good tale that begins as the same Harry Potter pastiche we all expected -- the equivalents of Harry and Draco are roommates! there's a brilliant and powerful witch who fills Hermione's shoes! there's an eccentric and vaguely fatherly headmaster who keeps throwing our hero directly into trouble! there's a clique of powerful old wizarding families who don't like the inclusive reforms of the forward-thinking headmaster! -- but quickly carves out its own space in the crowded "magical school" subgenre, and establishes its own tone. As my friend Marlene pointed out, after flipping through the first few pages, the narrative voice is a bit manic -- breathless, rushing along in clipped sentences and fragments and exclamation marks, making only a token effort to distinguish between wildly different perspectives. But once you're into it, and provided you don't lose interest at any point, the writing is swift and engaging. (I must confess, I kinda did lose interest for a bit, after -- spoilers -- Simon and Baz consummate their romantic tension with a kiss in the midst of a literal firestorm of angst, which seems like it should have been the climax of the book, but wasn't.) The romance is well-handled, particularly the aforementioned kissy-facing in the firey woods, and while the magical elements aren't particularly fresh, I feel Rowell held her own with them. And the actual climax, while predictable, was satisfying, and the epilogue was miles better than Harry Potter's.

I did wonder whether Simon's musings on whether he was now "gay" constituted bi erasure or not: Is this an oversight by the author (going from dating the prettiest girl in the school to dating the dangerously sexy vampire boy doesn't necessarily mean you're no longer interested in girls, after all)? Or is this an oversight on the part of the character, who may not have ever been exposed to the concept of bisexuality? I'm leaning toward the former, which is kind of a shame.

2016 read #80: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
304 pages
Published 2010
Read October 13
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Of the two novels I've read that pastiched Regency romances with added elements of fantasy fiction, Jo Walon's Tooth and Claw has the flashier gimmick; it takes some time for the subtle weaving of Shades of Milk and Honey to reveal its full effect. But Kowal's allegorical use of "glamour" -- as a feminine means of brightening the household, of manufacturing a soothing homemaking cheer, of concealing emotion, of maintaining gendered illusions, of providing an outlet for creative expression and repressed personality -- is far more elegant and affecting than Walton's blushing dragons. It's a slow burn of a novel, dawdling a bit too long for my current tastes in (what I felt were) obvious social intrigues and illicit assignations, all willfully ignored by our painfully proper Jane Eyre-esque point-of-view character until they reached crisis. Emotional investment in our eponymous Jane, however, crept up on me until the tangled machinations enmeshing her caused me surprising amount of distress with each fresh complication. Regency isn't my usual style, to be sure, but I can't deny that it hooked me. The climax is messy and frustrating, but in a manner that stays true to the world and gender norms of the story, full of male disbelief and condescension hindering the actions of our hero, making a perfect endcap for the general theme. The coda, by contrast, is tidy and commercial, setting up a series of continuing adventures with an abrupt tonal crunch.

2016 read #79: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
155 pages
Published 1953; originally published serially as Gravy Planet in 1952
Read from October 11 to October 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

General spoilers ahead.

This began with such promise. A brilliantly dark satire of a future America where megacorporations run the government and advertizing is the highest form of human expression, The Space Merchants is best in the first half or so, when its merchant is a steely-eyed true believer, oblivious to the horrors he narrates. Even after "the Haroun al Raschid bit" (in the words of Phil Klass, a sci-fi writer friend of Pohl's who read an early draft), when our star-class hero gets violently demoted to indentured servitude and must explore the lowest echelons of society, there are enough nauseating details (Chicken Little!) and too-close-to-home commentary on recent (and, plausibly, future) abuses of labor to make up for the sudden scattershot focus. It's in the final wind-up and climax that The Space Merchants let me down, rushing to accomplish a whole bunch of things in order for the good guys to win and escape to the fresh commercial prospects of Venus. The final third or so feels more like a standard 1950s sci-fi novel, with guns and quick thinking saving the day and the guy getting the girl (plus or minus a suicide along the way). Those first two-thirds, however, deserve classic science fiction status.

2016 read #78: The Hike by Drew Magary.

The Hike by Drew Magary
279 pages
Published 2016
Read from October 8 to October 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

One of my default rhetorical tricks (and one of the easiest ways to manufacture a review in general, whether in music, film, literature, whatever) is to categorize a book as a hybrid between two given styles, authors, subgenres, formulas, etc. Another one of my favorite openings lately has been to respond to the claims of the blurb copy, either in slack-jawed agreement or in snide counterpoint. Today I'll use both methods!

"The Hike is Cormac McCarthy's Alice in Wonderland," asserts one Jeffrey Cranor. (I don't have the time or patience to listen to a recording of some people talking, so I just don't do podcasts; I understand Welcome to Night Vale is a big thing in geek circles, but I have never heard even a snippet of it.) I'll give him his Alice in Wonderland -- The Hike is pretty much a textbook wonderland/portal fantasy, with our hapless hero encountering a series of obstacles drawn from pop culture and hoary fantasy fiction cliches -- but Cormac McCarthy Drew Magary is not. Magary's writing is fast-moving, but has that currently-hip irreverent tone that makes for forgettable, disposable, junk food reading. The brilliance and horror of McCarthy is nowhere evident here.

If I had to reformulate Cranor's statement to my own liking, I'd say The Hike is like one of Catherynne M. Valente's weaker Fairyland books, cramming together old fantasy tropes at breakneck pace, with little time to pause for character or meaning, but starring a white suburban dad and exploring the doubts of mortality and the regrets of workaday middle age rather than the vertigo of adolescence. Speaking as a white suburban dad, I just didn't connect with the existential crises of our basic-as-fuck hero Ben. The temptations the path offers him -- hooking up with that cute girl in college; releasing the guilt he carries over not loving his abusive, absentee dad -- felt as authentic and real as a Hungry Man microwave dinner. The only moments of emotional punch involved Ben's kids (an obvious button to push, but one I can't help but respond to) and the revelation on the very last page, which of course I won't spoil here. Suffice it to say that the psychological toil Ben puts in on the path is not commensurate with the suburban psychological wounds he bears, making the entire exercise feel at times like an indulgent power fantasy: Average white dude breaking the chains of his past traumas to realize his true potential, to become more wise and more powerful than you could imagine, a veritable god forged through his own sheer willpower!

The very ending, as I said, somewhat redeems the book in my eyes, and to be fair, despite the emotional disconnect I felt, I can't say that the book is bad. It just felt rather flimsy to me.

2016 read #77: Vicious by V. E. Schwab.

Vicious by V. E. Schwab
365 pages
Published 2013
Read from October 4 to October 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe got me back into superheroes (a subgenre I honestly hadn't given a crap about since I was 11 or so), I've wished that they were an acceptable topic for fantasy novels. It's weird that Warhammer and D&D fanfic fills shelves, that Star Wars tie-in novels top bestseller lists, but superhero books have just never seemed to catch on. Comic books and cartoons had the monopoly for so long, I suppose, that a text-based superhero story rarely occurred to anyone outside of, say, fan-fiction websites. It's possible that this is changing already -- the other day I saw a YA novel starring Marvel's Black Widow, so it's probably only a matter of time before Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters joins Hogwarts on the YA shelves. In the meantime, Vicious is one of the very first "superheroes as urban fantasy" novels I've ever heard of.

Vicious begins promisingly, with an engagingly nonlinear narrative building two parallel mysteries -- the origins of the characters' "ExtraOrdinary" powers and their inexorable course toward animosity, thirst for revenge, and a final showdown. The characters feel drawn straight from a YA magic-school novel, pairing a haughty bad boy with a charming good boy who excels at everything he touches, but the characterizations are vivid enough to partially disguise how archetypal it all is. However, as the twin mysteries are brought to a head, roughly around the halfway mark, setting up the countdown to the long-awaited confrontation, Vicious loses a bit of its momentum and its charm. One of the blurbs on the back cover calls Vicious "A noirish cross between the X-Men and The Count of Monte Cristo," but perhaps a more apt comparison would be a cross between a magic-school novel and a generic "Hunt down the sociopathic killer before he can hunt us down" thriller. The formulaic build-up to the climax, stumbling over itself to get all the pieces into place, feels like a weak end-cap to the promise of the first half.

And I'm left with an unsatisfied itch: Without spoiling anything, a rather blatant Chekhov's gun involving Sydney Clarke's powers is set up and never resolved. Perhaps that was left for the sequel to investigate.

2016 read #76: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated by Lewis Galantière
229 pages
Published 1939
Read from September 30 to October 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

On one hand, it is fascinating to observe the enduring themes and imagery of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince -- childish openness to wonder and imagination, the delicate beauty and sorrow of mortality, individual beings adrift about the universe on isolated planets -- anticipated here in his memoirs, arising from his experiences in the air and on the ground in the years between the World Wars. On the other hand, Wind, Sand and Stars precipitates the inevitable disillusionment that comes from discovering that an author was the product of his time, mummified in the same casual racial and gendered prejudices of his contemporaries.

Stars is most engaging when Saint-Exupéry is in flight, with his precise descriptions of night navigation and the upper wilderness of clouds suggesting the universe of tiny planets explored by the Little Prince. The closing chapter, a series of sketches from the Spanish Civil War illustrating his philosophy of that ineffable "Spirit," the sense of wonderment and awareness, that turns men into men, is effective stuff as well -- even if his philosophy is little more than a weedy patch of Romanticism, blooming late in the Modernist age, decrying the soulless world of clerks and factories and extolling the virtues of science, art, and rural peasantry. What sets Saint-Exupéry apart from most romantics (in my admittedly meager experience) is his esthetic and philosophical appreciation for invention. An airplane or a locomotive or a factory is merely a tool, its value or its worthlessness determined by how well it serves a man and Man -- and to what ends.

The language is, of course, purposefully gendered: Women, in Saint-Exupéry's proto-Hemingwayan world, are coquettes and objects to be won, hearth-tenders to come home to, beacons for the lost adventurers to find their way home. Observing two women fortifying a Communist roadblock in Spain, he makes sure to note that they don't seem to know how to hold their rifles. The chapter on "Men of the Desert" indulges in some colonialist notions, including a long description of the "contentment" an enslaved Senegalese man feels. I take that a tiny bit out of context -- the passage is part of a larger philosophical musing on the "crippling" effects of a "humdrum life" and captivity, relating to depictions of commuting clerks at either end of the book -- but the stench of colonial power pervades the entire chapter.

2016 read #75: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
246 pages
Published 1985
Read from September 27 to September 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

There comes a time when you must ask yourself why you're reading YA fantasy novels from the 1980s. Especially right after completing a book as psychologically intense as The Girl on the Train, this is lightweight stuff -- not a relaxing change of pace so much as a reason to question my life choices (or at least my tastes in literature).

A prequel to McKinley's The Blue Sword, telling the story of the fabled Aerin the Dragon-Killer, The Hero and the Crown is enjoyable enough, but utterly average and unremarkable. The proto-steampunk elements that drew me into the early chapters of Sword are of course absent here, leaving behind a fantasy kingdom setting that could have been painted on the box of a table-top RPG or repurposed from any number of generic fantasy kingdoms from 1970s sword-and-sorcery. The climactic showdown pits our hero against a beguiling, silver-tongued sorcerer atop an impossibly high black tower. Said hero is what I'm now coming to recognize as a stock Robin McKinley protagonist: A tall, awkward girl with no self-confidence, happiest reading a book or brushing a horse far from the notice of other people, who gradually learns of her great power and earns great competence. It's good stuff for a kid to read, probably, but such a generic character in such a generic setting made it hard at times to care about what was going on.

That said, Hero earns points for its charm. Damar never really develops into anything unique, as far as fantasy settings go, but after Sword, it carries the warmth of familiarity. Aerin is too bland to stand out for much of the book, but from about the halfway point on, her inevitable maturation offers hints (only hints, but discernible nonetheless) of McKinley's later skill with sensitivity and pathos. None of the other characters develop much at all, which is a shame, given that this may be one of the earliest YA fantasy love triangles I've ever encountered.

2016 read #74: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
326 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 23 to September 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I tend to be suspicious of runaway bestsellers. Whatever the ingredient is that makes the likes of Tom Clancy, Robert Patterson, Stephanie Meyer, and their ilk so aggressively ubiquitous, I would not consider it to be "quality writing." I also tend to shy away from mysteries. Murder, clues, "whodunit" -- those words on a jacket flap make me drop a book faster than any others, faster even than "dream wedding." The whole setup bores me, with vanishingly few exceptions (the better Sherlock Holmes stories, mostly, which I haven't read since I was a teen). So I never would have given this book a second look, had not my college friend Francesca nominated it for our informal, two-person book club, on its first reconvening since Doomsday Book.

Spoilers ahead.

This book is intense. Almost all of its power comes from narration, from point of view, digging the reader so deeply into the heads and perspectives of flawed, profoundly damaged people that at times it can be exhausting. It was a slow read for me because the intensity took a lot out of me. The unreliability of the narration is brilliantly done -- and, further, shapes and defines the thematic through-line of the novel. For the longest time I was convinced I had seen through the red herrings and guessed whodunit -- only for the realization to stagger me, at the same that it chilled the central character, that I had been gaslit the entire time. The emotional rawness, the expert structuring, the master class on unreliable narration -- I remain astounded by the skill and intricacy at work here.

The only aspect of the book I didn't like, in fact, is the climax, which rather than building upon the anxieties and passions and disquiet of the rest of the novel, rather than delivering a more psychological payoff, devolves instead into a more predictable, generic thriller novel standoff, an altercation with a coldhearted sociopath in a goddamn thunderstorm. I won't denigrate the name of this novel by calling the showdown Koontzian, but... Hawkins could have done better, I think. Maybe she had the movie deal in mind.

2016 read #73: Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold.

Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold
287 pages
Published 1994
Read from September 17 to September 22
Rating: ★★ out of 5

In outline, this book could almost be a parody of certain trends in the speculative fiction of the early '90s. The narrator, Sarah, is a Magical Mentally Ill woman, tossed out on the streets due to (it seems) budget cuts, fitting the novel within a continuum stretching from Wizard of the Pigeons to The Good Fairies of New York and no doubt well beyond. She speaks only in quotations and aphorisms, drawn largely from Shakespeare. For a while Lindskold manages to make it work, but by the fourth or fifth time Sarah repeats the book's title with a knowing look or a shy giggle, it gets real old. Sarah gets adopted into a colorful underground society of adolescent thieves, beggars, drug dealers, and child prostitutes, sort of like if those kids from Beyond Thunderdome got a gritty '90s reboot. Her rescuer is inexplicably half-naked when we meet her, her lips dyed blue, her hair dyed flaming orange; the rest of the "Wolf Pack" is similarly outfitted in the silliest, gaudiest cliches of crustpunk, cyberpunk, and a square sci-fi writer's idea of rave culture -- thereby beating The Matrix Reloaded to the punch by several years.

Sarah's love interest (for a brief interlude) and adored authority figure (for the rest of the book) is the Head Wolf, and in no uncertain terms, he is the pimp of a child prostitution ring. We are shown the effects of the prostitution on the psyches of various minor characters (in both senses of the word), yet the Head Wolf is elevated by the text as just so damn charismatic and beautiful and insane that our narrator and her rescuer and her elderly professor friend all continue to adore him. Plus, he really cares about his Pack and, like, tenderly cuddles his young prostitutes after they've had a bad night on the streets, because he's such a good soul. I believe this is meant to be some inexpert attempt to build a thought-provokingly ambiguous and flawed antihero. It comes across as equal parts misguided and laughable. At best, it seems like '90s-style grittiness for the sake of grittiness -- shock value to really make you think, dude.

Sarah's magical power is an ability to talk to inanimate objects -- provided they've absorbed some essence of importance from their use or significance to other people. There's some absurd technobabble about Sarah resulting from a breeding experiment, but perhaps recognizing its flimsiness, Lindskold only relies on the explanation long enough to sketch in Sarah's early life in the Institute and her relationships among her experimental siblings. Despite the weird icky stuff about child prostitution, the first half of the book isn't necessarily bad -- it's a silly mashup of early '90s cliches and try-hard grittiness, sure, but almost endearing in a bless-your-heart sort of way. It's when Sarah falls back into the clutches of the Institute that the narrative collapses under its own preposterousness. Interminable scenes of Sarah's friend the master hacker technobabbling her way into futuristic fortresses become redundant (well, further redundant) once Sarah masters her own superpowered abilities to get anywhere and do anything just by listening to inanimate objects. And in an obvious but utterly ridiculous twist, it turns out that this tinkering with the genetic basis of magical realism pretty much amounts to some corporate espionage (there's one more '90s cliche for ya).

There is never any sense of danger, no feeling that our heroes might be in trouble. I barely remember Lindskold's The Buried Pyramid (my extra-laconic review, perhaps the shortest I've ever written, certainly doesn't stir any recollections), but her Child of a Rainless Year shares with Brother signs of Lindskold's reluctance to make bad things happen to her characters. Scenes where almost any other author would tighten the screws and complicate matters for our heroes, Lindskold instead makes everything turn out hunky-dory. Yes, Sarah ends up back at the Institute, because of course she does, but it's almost like she's there to check out some family history, see some heirlooms, and learn some backstory -- rather than, you know, because she got captured by her nemesis and is getting experimented upon. It doesn't seem all that far removed from the intrepid narrator of Child grilling chicken dishes for visiting estate lawyers.

Brother to Dragons begins as a mess of cliches before devolving into, well, just a mess, but there's enough charm to the early chapters to make me not totally hate my experience with this book.

2016 read #72: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed.

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
218 pages
Published 1972
Read from September 11 to September 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

For such a brief, determinedly postmodern book, Mumbo Jumbo is thick with things to unpack. First, and most obvious these days, is the fact that it's 2016 and our society seems to have made little, if any, progress on the issues of race and culture satirized here. We still have a corrupt good ol' boy police culture; we still carry forward a colonialist mentality; the supremacy of "Western civilization" is a never-questioned article of faith for a staggering percentage of the population (a belief which supports a substantial corner of the publishing market, and even shows up to this day in how college art history courses are demarcated); we still have irrational hatred, bigotry, and basket upon basket of deplorables. But these are obvious points.

This is the sort of book that makes me wish I were better at commentary and dissection, at analysis in general. One topic (out of many) that stuck with me during my read of this book was the role of the cultural critic in keeping anything counter to the accepted narrative from entering the public (i.e. White, middle class, self-appointed "real American") awareness. This is deftly lampooned with a selection of juicy blurb quotes on the back jacket ("Propaganda," "Cute," "...such gratuitous viciousness is not called for," "This is diarrhea of the typewriter," from the likes of The New York Times, Kirkus, and The Journal of Black Poetry), and used directly several times within the text, barbed with quotation marks: "so read the 'illiterate' 'contradictory' 'scrawls,' product of 'a tormented mind'...." And more pointedly: "1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal, universal being a word co-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atonists took over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals." You can hear a young author's personal axe against the grindstone while still recognizing the sad social truth within the satire. To this day, conservative types (generally White, cis, hetero, Christian men) enjoy wielding "Calm down, you're too emotional" to shut down any debates -- all while ranting, unprompted, about the social ills brought about by "political correctness" and "millennials" and "people who don't want to work."

On a textual (rather than metatextual) level, I was fascinated by Reed's depiction of history as a clash of rival secret societies going all the way back to Osiris, the original funky brother, and Set, the first wallflower, spiteful over his own inability to bust a move. It is, naturally, as 1970s as you could possibly imagine. There are ancient aliens and oneness with Nature, revisionist archaeology of the "everything goes back to Egypt" school, prehistoric Black universities in Arabia -- all things nowadays relegated to basic cable conspiracy shows (and, well, bestselling books too, I suppose), but in the hands of a writer as talented and vigorous as Reed, it becomes a heady mix.

2016 read #71: The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer.

The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer
107 pages
Published 1960
Read from September 6 to September 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Not far into my read of Laughter in Ancient Rome, I decided it would be a good idea to have a lighter, fluffier book on hand as an escape valve for when all the academic density got to be too much. Luckily I already had this one hanging around, the literal flipside to The Games of Neith, printed together as an old Ace Double. Yet, thanks largely to Mary Beard's skill as an engaging author, I remained more interested in Rome than in old-timey starship shenanigans, and couldn't bring myself to make much progress with Gods until I wrapped up Beard's history.

Another reason I couldn't get invested in this book, of course, is the book itself. I always seem to think these slim pulpers will be easy reads -- short, simplistic, the opposite of literary -- yet those same attributes make them not very good reads. Gods is an improvement over most of these Ace novellas, both in prose and in plotting, but that's a low bar to clear. Bulmer's style is mechanical, telling rather than showing, setting up personal motivations and interpersonal conflict with affectless efficiency. The main character, Roy, is henpecked into "softness" and defeat by his overbearing wife, as we are reminded many times. In space, a chain of command issue between the navy captain (commander of the starship) and marine colonel Roy (in nominal charge of the mission) is mentioned many times as a source of friction between the two men, just in case we didn't catch it the first time.

The cast is surprisingly diverse and relatively egalitarian for the date of publication, but I must stress "relatively." Women make up about half the starship crew, but are relegated to communications, medicine, and the domestic role of quartermaster; a major subplot in the closing chapters concerns itself with Roy's love interest dyeing her hair to a less flattering color so as to not "distract" the men. Characters of many ethnic origins are shown to be competent and intelligent, almost never reduced to contemporary ethnic stereotypes, though most of those of high rank are white men. Still, for 1960, that's pretty impressive.

The flimsiness of the characters kept me from feeling invested in anything that happened, and while interesting, the central conceit -- Terran civilization sends out android "Prophets" in a propaganda campaign to literally convert alien cultures into allies -- is undermined by the vagueness of what the Earthly religion even entails, or what constitutes its antithesis. I kept thinking that this would have been a lot better two or three decades later, as a late '80s "ideas novel" along the lines of Sheri S. Tepper's Arbai Trilogy (1, 2, 3). Bulmer's concept is worth pursuing, I think, but the trappings and conventions of mid-century sci-fi militated against it here.

2016 read #70: Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard
278 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 4 to September 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed Mary Beard's snark and snappy-but-educational style in her popular history, SPQR -- so much so that, after I finished it, I immediately looked up her other works. This one caught my eye: a book about Roman laughter and jokes from a scholar gifted with that rare combination of wit, writing ability, and authoritative knowledge. What could possibly be better?

I suspected my error the moment inter-library loan put the volume in my hands and I saw it was from the University of California Press, published as part of a line of classical lecture series. I still enjoyed Laughter, but it was a dense, technical work, full of the convolutions of postmodern scholarship in the humanities. (Beard vows in the preface, "My aim is to make the subject of Roman laughter a bit more complicated, indeed a bit messier, rather than to tidy it up.") This is a worthy goal -- fatuous simplifications and over-general "explanations" are a pest to be rooted out and burned away -- but the English language has yet to arrive at a fluent way to handle the necessary backtrackings, subordinate clauses, and complexification of statements this entails. I'm having a hard time even getting across what I mean (though, to be fair to myself, I've been out of academia for six years, and it's unseasonably hot and sticky as I struggle to write this review). Beard pushes bravely through the thickets of po-mo social science and emerges with, mostly, a surprisingly readable work, but popular history this is not. It's fascinating, largely because of Beard's skill at making such thick stuff readable, but for a casual reader who keyed in on the title and expected hilarity, it's a bit of a disappointment.

2016 read #69: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated by Katherine Woods
92 pages
Published 1943
Read September 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Charming melancholy, delicate beauty that could fall apart at a breath. As with most books for children, this would probably have left a deeper mark if I had read it earlier in life, instead of just being another book among many books, but even so, I was moved. Wonder and significance and attachment are basic themes, especially in a quasi-didactic children's volume, but there was something bared here, a vulnerability that encouraged me to let down my own guard and left me affected and receptive. Perhaps it helps that I like to think of myself as someone who sees the stars, who questions why sheep and roses have warred for millions of years, whose grown-up love of figures and statistics hasn't buried my own sense of wonder and discovery.

2016 read #68: The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Translated by Alexandra Keeble
Prefaces by Aleida Guevara March, introduction by Cintio Vitier
175 pages
Published 1995; English translation published 2003
Read from August 29 to September 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

My first exposure to Che was in a Hot Topic. It was 2002, and I was 19; having gone directly from an abusive childhood into the army, self-expression was still a new concept for me. One weekend, on break from training, I went with my then-friend to the mall, and after our customary Saturday Cinnabon I ventured into the Hot Topic, where I saw a shirt in a blinding shade of red, emblazoned with the cliched image of Che's face. I was struck by, but at that age unable to articulate, the fine irony of a symbol of rebellion and revolution commoditized and sold to teenagers from a franchise shopfront. That was my rationale for purchasing it over the protests and disbelief of my army friend (who would, of course, go on to be a racist conservative asshole later in life). Over the ensuing months, after my own political awakening, I wore it with proud new layers of irony on the army bases where I was stationed -- a further irony, one I didn't appreciate until later, being my own utter ignorance of Che.

Che himself, as a man and as a symbol, was someone I hadn't thought much about beyond that initial set of ironies. His existence, actions, and ideology seem to be crushed beneath the weight of Che the symbol. To the regressives of the world, he's a hypocrite and a war criminal, guilty of vast (and usually vague) atrocities; to certain segments of the ever-divided left, he's a martyred saint, his every word dissected for hidden wisdom, as in the hagiographic introduction to this volume. Not to get all "the truth is in the middle" here, but in this instance, I'm pretty sure the reality is not close to either of those extremes.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating introduction to the young man who existed before the myth, a polished and edited "journal" of a bumbling expedition, by motorbike and by hitch, across several Latin American nations in 1952. The formative effect this had upon young Che's outlook, priorities, and ideology are obvious, though kept mostly between the lines; Che's tight-lipped indignation at the appalling poverty and class structures he encounters are the most interesting, and affecting, sections of the book. The rest, sadly, has something of a superficial feel to it. Despite the editorial efforts of an older Che (or possibly others), it feels obvious that this was a young student's travel diary, its tone alternately flippant and philosophical -- it would be easy to imagine, say, a college radio DJ writing something similar today, after a summer spent in search of "authenticity." Like a college dude, Che drops casual bits of homophobia and racial prejudice -- though, equally apropos, we could say "Like any dude in the 1950s." The travel portions tend toward the repetitive, fascinating interludes abbreviated in favor of enumerations of hunger, bad drivers, sleeping in police stations, and caging meals from reluctant, or naively enthusiastic, strangers.

It's a shame that Soviet-style Communism, in its day, was as corrupt and oligarchic, as reliant upon hegemonic colonialism, as capitalism has always tended to be. Through his writings, at least, it seems Che was a genuine revolutionary, a believer in the ideals he fought and eventually died for. This edition's appendix, taken from a speech Che gave to Havana medical students in 1960, is flush with revolutionary fervor, with utopian visions of "the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba." Like Che himself, the balance between social organization and individualism is ambiguous, multifaceted, perhaps impossible to resolve -- and certainly too ambitious for me to tackle in a simple book review.

2016 read #67: The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies by Martin Millar.

The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies by Martin Millar
194 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 28 to August 29
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Humor that doesn't land, farce that never achieves momentum, fantasy that isn't the least fantastic, choppy little scenes that go nowhere and add nothing we don't already know, two dimensional characters that wouldn't be out of place in a recent rom-com, capped with outsize praise from prominent authors on the back cover -- why, it must be another Martin Millar novel!

It feels like it's been ages since I first (and last) read Millar, though it's only been about three years. I was far more forgiving of his schtick back then -- either that or in a more genial mood. Perhaps "zany farce with fantasy elements" felt fresher to me then. I was generous in my review of The Good Fairies of New York, but in the years since, I've come to think of it as disposable and cloying when I thought of it at all. I only picked up Buttercups and Daisies for two reasons: one, I haven't read much this month, and I wanted a brief book to bolster my numbers; two, Jo Walton's Just City duology (1, 2) left me primed for more atypical fantasy centered on the Classical Greeks. Well, maybe there was a third reason, a faint inclination to give Millar a second chance.

If I erred in the direction of generosity last time, this time I'm probably erring in favor of being snippy. In all fairness, this wasn't a bad book, or even unpleasant to read at any point, but then again, it failed to stir much of a reaction at all. It was just so generic. The farcical bits about mechanical phalluses being required props in Athenian comedy were mildly amusing, but the rest could have taken place in any time period, against any backdrop, and not lost or gained anything. I entertained myself with casting a Buttercups and Daisies rom-com, perhaps set in a mid-size city with a theater scene, possibly Minneapolis. Jason Bateman could probably tap his put-upon (and not so secretly arrogant) everyman thing to play Millar's Aristophanes, Gwendoline Christie would be the inevitable choice du jour for Bremusa the humorless Amazon, Tony Revolori could fit as the optimistic orphan poet Luxos, any number of effervescent young Manic Pixie types could be typecast as Metris, the titular nymph -- which just shows how cardboard and uninspired her character was. Millar (going by all two of his books that I've read) seems to have a thing for Manic Pixie leads. The one in Good Fairies was better; at least she had a colostomy bag and motivations of her own.

2016 read #66: The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair.

The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair
149 pages
First book publication 1960; original publication date unknown
Read from August 26 to August 27
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I realize I'm far too lenient when I rate these old Ace Doubles, but so help me, this one was actually kind of... interesting? There are intriguingly precocious elements to the worldbuilding that hint at unrealized potential, even as the mores and expectations of midcentury science fiction undercut them. Gwethym is a multi-ethnic colony world, settled by an interbred mix of Chinese, Swedish, and French, with no apparent ethnic hierarchy, all startlingly progressive for 1960 -- at least until a lone "cunning Chinese" stereotype shows up. The main protagonist is a woman with considerable political authority who makes decisions, has responsibilities, follows her curiosity, and plays an active role in the story -- yet also laughs merrily at casual rape jokes and automatically assumes the subservient, "helpmeet" role in her relationship.

That doesn't seem like much, but for a midcentury Ace pulp, it's almost startlingly progressive. The rest of the book, however, is a mess. The characters are flimsy. The dialogue consists of "As you know..." info dumps and ludicrous technobabble, which leaps from the heat death of the universe and energy leaking between parallel universes to mirror chemistry and giant viruses to "space-time tracing machines" and energy beings, all presented as boldly as if it made sense in some fashion. The plot likewise lurches from one disconnected incident to the next, as often as not strung together by the machinations of a psychic alien dog.

The Games of Neith is not a good book. In places it is eye-rollingly bad. It is certainly not the equal of Memory by Linda Nagata, a book I read a long ass time ago and also rated two stars. (If I were to read the latter fresh today, I'd probably bump it up to at least two and a half; I think I had higher expectations for mainstream sci-fi back then.) Yet Games is also not as bad as, say, The Wind Whales of Ishmael or Master of the World. Once again I must wave my hands and plea that my ratings are arbitrary and don't mean all that much in the end.

2016 read #65: Mountains of the Heart by Scott Weidensaul.

Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians by Scott Weidensaul
266 pages
Published 1994
Read from August 24 to August 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

At heart I've always considered myself a Rocky Mountains boy. Born in Ohio, a mere two generations removed from the Appalachian plateau country of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, by happenstance my consecutive, autobiographical memories began when I lived in Colorado Springs, and much of my peripatetic minor years were spent in Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana. Just the other day I was reminded of how deep this connection runs, when I heard "Rocky Mountain High" for the first time in years and felt a visceral music-memory association with being 5 or 6 years old and feeling proprietary and proud that such a classic song would be sung about my home. 

I've lived in New York a dozen years now, and have resisted any sense of feeling at home here. (I live in the dreadful suburbs of Long Island, not the city -- a crucial distinction often lost on people from outside New York.) Yet all the same, since I began hiking the mainland hills about five years back, I've developed a creeping sort of fondness for the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, the Kittatinny Ridge of New Jersey, a sort of pride in my orographic province, a pride I've become aware of only recently. The first time I realized this pride was while watching a hiking vlogger named Red Beard enjoy the Appalachian Trail through New Jersey and New York, and in recent months, planning and sometimes even hiking my own AT adventures, I've become positively fixated on the charms of "my" modest mid-Atlantic ranges.

Scott Weidensaul is an author I've enjoyed, from the hills I've grown fond of, and once I learned he'd written a natural history of the Appalachians, it climbed to near the top of my to-read list. His Return to Wild America was a minor disappointment, but here, writing about the high country he's known his whole life, Weidensaul avoids the tedious journalistic format that dulled Return and permits his unabashed delight for the trees, the birds, and the wild spaces of his native range to warm his prose. This book makes an excellent companion to Weidensaul's The First Frontier, a speculative history of culture contact along the Eastern seaboard, and reminded me at times of Steve Nicholls' exquisite, mournful Paradise Found. They form a loose, obviously unofficial trilogy of sorts, sketching in an archaeological and biological memory-picture of the lost, pre-Columbian magnificence of the Eastern half of the continent.

Weidensaul's science is of course dated (the last two decades have seen explosive progress in the biological sciences), and also not nearly as pessimistic as more recent natural histories (the last two decades have also seen an explosion in invasive pests and diseases, exurban sprawl, climate change, and other cataclysmic alterations of the natural world). In that sense reading it now is a bit like reading Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters -- it's hard to tell just how reliable some of its assertions may be. And as with almost all other popular science books, I personally found myself bored with the inevitable beginner's level explanations of everything from plate tectonics and ice ages to Paleoindian settlement of the New World (which chapter is, as one might expect, particularly out of date). In fact the geology chapter made me wish for an entirely separate book altogether, a thorough and readable geological history of eastern North America. Geology seems even sparser on popular science shelves than the other natural sciences, which is to say almost nonexistent, so I'm probably out of luck -- but a nerd can dream.

2016 read #64: The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner.

The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
379 pages
Published 2006
Read from August 9 to August 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I'd really hoped for a better reading pace this month. It hasn't just been the Minecraft (though there's been plenty of that); it's been difficult to find any time to read whatsoever the last couple weeks, and what little free time I have has been spent planning hypothetical future hikes and vacations and travels (or just sitting with the laptop mired in the internet, like in the old days, before I got back into reading again). And to be frank, this book didn't do its utmost to keep me turning pages.

I love Kushner's Riverside setting, its increasingly lived-in esthetic and the author's sure hand at using the mores of a fantasy fiction society to offer commentary upon our own. The narrator and the more well-developed central characters were a delight, well worth spending time around. Setting and character go a long way toward a compelling story; one might even say that the intersection of setting and character is the meat of more literary fiction, served with various saucy styles of prose. But like many of the more literary authors I've encountered, Kushner seems to have some trouble (if trouble's the word) with crafting and sustaining momentum. Much of the book is a prolonged training montage, as our hero is taken from her life as a society soon-to-be-debutante, on the whim of her uncle the Mad Duke, and at first resentfully, then increasingly delightedly, learns the art of the sword. There is not a stitch wrong with any of that -- it was all thoroughly enjoyable, a light fantasy Bildungsroman with a seemingly straightforward queer/feminist angle. The book does become more complicated, its cast exposing the tension of accepted gender norms, the various ways women and men alike are confined and embittered in Riverside society, as the plot itself takes darker turns and leads to horrible places, and that shift to multiple perspectives and multiple facets of power and identity (and the lack thereof) is when it becomes most compelling. But for its first half, Privilege is something of a lark, a swashbuckling daydream -- enjoyable, but also easy to set aside for a day or a week at a time.

Plotting is by no means an essential tool -- not all jobs are for hammers. Nonetheless, the political maneuvering and backroom treachery in all of Kushner's Riverside books (or at least the ones I've read to date) tend to feel like afterthoughts. In Swordspoint, St. Vier and Alec were the clear focus, so it is understandable that the background politicking made less of an impression. Politics were more central to The Fall of  the Kings, which made the continued interchangeability and lack of dimension of its power players more of an issue. Privilege does a better job of making its secondary characters distinctive -- I managed to keep track of almost everyone, despite taking over two weeks to finish the book -- but the plotting itself lacks a certain polish, the various threads coming together with a rather inelegant thud, so to speak.

2016 read #63: The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley.

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
273 pages
Published 1982
Read from August 4 to August 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Another month, another exigency slowing down my reading pace. This time it's been my rediscovery of Minecraft, which I had thought I'd gotten out of my system last year. I've been playing so much Minecraft the past week or so that whenever I tried to picture this novel's generic desert scenery, I could only see square blocks of sand and pixelated brush. Prompting myself with memories of the Mojave or the Sonoran, or ransacking the cultural zeitgeist of "desert" for some Arabian or Saharan wallpaper, had no lasting effect -- the cubes could not be conquered.

The Blue Sword is another data point in my quixotic survey of fantasy fiction's transition from stale '70s sword and sorcery to the more naturalistic, somewhat less formulaic, occasionally pseudo-literary offerings of the '80s. In its opening chapters The Blue Sword shows promise; McKinley's voice hadn't yet mastered the charm and humor of Spindle's End (though glints of it brighten exchanges between Harry and Colonel Jack), or the unflinching compassion of Deerskin, but for almost the entire first half of the book, the narration is brisk and absorbing, delivering the story far more crisply than I would have expected from an early '80s YA novel (even one that netted a Newbery Honor). The early worldbuilding has a proto-steampunk feel, full of telegraphs and trains and British-y soldiers and bureaucrats and petty nobility stationed in a border outpost of a queen's expanding empire. The local culture is a less interesting affair, more of a generic "noble/magical desert tribe" extracted from Dune and any number of Lawrence-ian romances; McKinley sidesteps making them mere proxies of the mujahideen by avoiding religious trappings altogether, but doesn't provide them much cultural substance of their own. Harry is typically YA-bland, with little to distinguish or motivate her beyond an inborn craving for adventure and new horizons, ambitions quashed by her pseudo-Victorian upbringing until circumstances (and a magical kidnapping) embed her in the brotherhood of the totally-not-mujahideen (who will soon war with a behemoth army of not-quite-humans trundling in from the north). It all makes me want to read a history of the Great Game instead.

As often happens in action-driven fantasy novels, the book's momentum hits a plateau after our hero's training montage, stalling (in the sense of an airplane engine) the narrative to position her in a not particularly interesting or creative (or consistent with desert nomad culture, for that matter) fantasy palace, which sprawls across a mountaintop in unlikely spires and ridgelines of stone, before promptly abandoning that scene as if it never mattered in the first place (because it didn't). Around this point Sword loses its more forward-looking vibe and becomes a classic sword-and-sorcery number, to its detriment. The final confrontation is as generic as they come, finding Harry and her devoted band of stragglers defending a mountain pass from a vast "black army" under a laughing sadist-sorcerer, and the day is saved by the chosen one listening to her destiny and unleashing a big ol' blast o' magic at the most convenient time. Yawn.

Nonetheless, I've developed a fondness for this book and its characters -- perhaps because it took me so damn long to read the thing, but also because McKinley's human touch, though lacking its later refinement, drew me in despite the story's more dated elements.