Tuesday, January 31, 2023

2023 read #11: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi.

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi
388 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 21 to January 31
Rating: 3 out of 5

I had expected this to be a grand novel of fantasy intrigue, of masked balls and subterfuge and magical secrets, perhaps like a gayer Parisian update of Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. While there are elements of that at times, I was surprised to find that The Gilded Wolves is primarily a book about too-cool-for-school teen thieves pulling off magical heists with the aid of arcane gadgets and doodads. There's the aloof orphaned leader who runs a hotel with his family's wealth while he plots to steal back the magic inheritance that was taken from him. There's the elite superspy who can read the history of objects with her touch, and leads a double life as a burlesque performer for high society. There's the suave young head of a rival magical house who cons and flirts his way into the group in part because he wants to experience true friendship. And whatever each heist might throw our way, you can depend upon our autistic-coded young engineer to have created exactly the right enchanted contraption for any emergency.

At times it can read like a Belle Époque Spy Kids. There’s even a scene where our heroes have to tiptoe through a room filled with red lasers. For maybe the first two-thirds of the book, there's no sense of stakes or peril; someone will inevitably have the correct gadget to get themselves out of any fix, so it felt like a disconnected series of teen Mission Impossible vignettes for far too many pages. And worst of all, somehow it felt less gay than Swordspoint.

The novel's characters, thankfully, were much better than its pacing. Chokshi's characterizations might stray toward popcorn cinema, but her cast of outcasts were precious vulnerable angels that, before too long, I would happily defend with my life. Zofia the engineer was my favorite. Really, the only one that didn't click for me was aloof leader Séverin; his whole schtick of "my tortured past means anyone I get close to will be harmed" got old real fast, and at the end (mild spoilers?), it feels like he hasn't grown beyond it one bit.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

2023 read #10: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.*

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells*
205 pages
Published 1897
Read January 19
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

The War of the Worlds was the first complete, unabridged "grownup" book I read, way back when I was 9 years old. I read it and reread it obsessively all through my tweens and consistently (albeit less frequently) through my teens. It left more of a mark on my prose than I realized; reading it now, my first time revisiting it in adulthood, I'm struck by how my lengthy, multi-clause sentences echo Wells' late Victorian rhythms.

As a primordial exemplar of the science-fiction thriller, The War of the Worlds is an astounding book. Wells was an expert at incorporating elements of the mundane, all the little domestic and suburban touches, to heighten the strangeness and fear of his alien invasion. Scene after scene has lived rent free in my head all these years: the brilliant yellow sunset over the first Martian cylinder, the thunderstorm, the silent struggles in the dark with the curate. And these scenes haven't lingered solely because I read the book so early and so often.

As a blueprint for the eugenicist strain of manly men and breedable women that would infest science fiction for well over a century afterward, well... that part didn't age quite so gracefully. As a kid, I swallowed the "able-bodied, clean-minded" future laid out by "The Man on Putney Hill" without question; the artilleryman's shortfall, as far as I was concerned at 9, was in his inability to back up his big dreams with actual deeds. Reading it again at 40, it's a rotted morass of quasi-Darwinian bullshit, reeking of Victorian race theory. Countless libertarian power fantasies in the ensuing decades parroted this same strain of "our comfortable civilization will lead to decadence, we must Improve the Race through adversity!" I can't imagine anyone over the age of 9 taking this load seriously (like, say, a certain spoiled little boy who wants to reinvent serfdom on Mars with his daddy's Apartheid money).

On top of all that, War of the Worlds is distasteful for being an early exemplar of the "dystopia is when white people suffer through allegories of what white people actually did to everyone else" strain of SFF.

Regardless, this book will always have a special place in my life. I'm glad to have revisited it.

2023 read #9: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
165 pages
Published 2022
Read from January 18 to January 19
Rating: 4 out of 5

The obvious point of comparison here is Mexican Gothic. In the author's note at the end, Kingfisher recounts how she wrote the first 10k words of What Moves the Dead before she read Mexican Gothic, and despaired: "[W]hat can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" But while Kingfisher's fungal retelling of "The Fall of the House of Usher" doesn't quite match Mexican Gothic's sense of decadent and decaying atmosphere, What Moves the Dead has its own vaguely Ruritanian charms, plus a wonderfully realized gender-expansive narrator in Lieutenant Easton, and enough creepy hares to populate a foggy Gothic heathland. (The creepiness potential of the hare has been seriously under-explored in horror fiction.)

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

2023 read #8: The Deep by Rivers Solomon.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes
166 pages
Published 2019
Read from January 17 to January 18
Rating: 4 out of 5

CW: historical violence, murder, and slavery

An entrancing and wounding act of collaborative storytelling, The Deep is, as the afterword describes it, the third link in a game of storytelling telephone. It began with Detroit techno-electro duo called Drexciya, who first built the story of an underwater utopia born from the thousands of pregnant African women tossed into the sea during the horrors of the slave trade. Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes carried the story forward with their own interpretation, the song "The Deep" by clipping. This book builds upon that song. Rivers Solomon contributes their own perspective to the lore woven by Drexciya and clipping.

The result is beautiful, haunting, an exploration of vast generational trauma and the collective weight of memory. The book’s collaborative origins dovetail with its themes of storytelling, keeping the ancestors alive in memory, and the importance of community in one’s identity. A superb balance of prose, theme, and conceptualization. 

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

2023 read #7: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown.

A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown
472 pages
Published 2020
Read from January 10 to 17
Rating: 4 out of 5

In a YA landscape beset with sassy, sarcastic smart-asses who smirk, shrug, scowl, and sneer interchangeably amongst themselves, this book was a welcome find, despite what you might have guessed from its A [Blank] of [Blank] and [Blank] title formula.

Our two leads are an unwilling princess of a colonialist empire and an impoverished refugee fleeing the devastation that empire has wrought. They cross paths on the eve of a festival in the capital city, where the magic that protects the city must be renewed once every fifty years. Karina and Malik have that classic YA thing where it's half will they / won't they fall in love, and half will they / won't they kill each other for Important Plot Reasons. But Brown's assured prose and engrossing worldbuilding keep the story fresh (and also keep Song free of the smirk shrug scowl sneer cycle that plagues so many other YA novels).

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

2023 read #6: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.*

The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien*
287 pages
Published 1937 (text from 1995 edition)
Read from January 9 to January 10
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Clearly I'm on a cozy cottagecore comfort read kick. That's January (and nearly three full years of the isolation that comes with a deadly global pandemic) for you!

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, which I used to reread on a yearly basis and have read at least half a dozen times, I only read The Hobbit once before, back in 2005 or so. Back then, it didn't click with me the same way as Lord of the Rings did.

Rereading it now, in the lovely edition my partner R got me for the holidays, I think it excels at the very things I now enjoy most about Lord of the Rings. The cozy hobbit hole vibes are immaculate, and the mystery and magic of the greenwood is if anything more beguiling and stranger here, closer to the wildwood fairy tale roots of anglophone fantasy. Despite The Hobbit's cultural prominence, and the overblown blockbuster trilogy treatment that reshaped my memories of the book, it feels closer to the strange delirium of its nearish contemporaries, Lud-in-the-Mist and The King of Elfland's Daughter. Put another way, Pratchett's Discworld isn't too far removed from this early version of Middle-earth.

Bilbo trips from one weird encounter to the next in a fae shaggy dog story: Cockney trolls with a talking coin-purse! Talking birds! Talking spiders! A dude who turns into a giant bear and also keeps bees! The elves are less the ethereal nature spirits of Peter Jackson and more fruity little goobers who sing good-natured taunts when the party finally locates Rivendell. The Hobbit delights in its weirdness.

Of course, nowadays I can't unsee the antisemitic origins of the dwarves, especially in Thorin's "sickness" when he obtains the dragon-gold. That, sadly, also is in keeping with its time.

Monday, January 9, 2023

2023 read #5: Sanctuary by Andi C. Buchanan.

Sanctuary by Andi C. Buchanan
297 pages
Published 2022
Read from January 4 to January 9
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Oftentimes when I'm reading a book that explicitly centers queer, neurodiverse, or disabled experiences (or all of the above), there's a didactic element to the text: an effort to lay out basic concepts in, say, consent, communication, accommodation, and so on. I know these are important and necessary concepts to normalize, especially when an astounding percentage of our society is either ignorant of, or actively hostile toward, such radical considerations as "treat other human beings like people" and "try to avoid unnecessary cruelty toward people who don't deserve it." This normalization process can create sections of text that feel particularly hand-holdy, but I understand the need for it and try not to begrudge it.

It occurred to me while reading this book that this process of centering queer, neurodiverse, and disabled perspectives carries a burden of exposition that cishet-normative and allistic-centered texts rarely, if ever, have to deal with. Mass media assumes everyone knows the norms and expectations of white, cishet, allistic culture inside and out. You don't need to spell out why the manly hero can't just have a normal conversation about his feelings with the conventionally attractive love interest, no matter how bizarre that concept seems from the outside, because mainstream fiction assumes no one is reading it from outside the overarching white, cishet, allistic culture.

A lot of the assumptions of queer and neurodiverse perspectives are some combination of newly articulated, evolving, or known only to a small subset or even a single individual. So any book that approaches fiction from these perspectives is gonna have a ton of baggage -- even something as commonsensical and straightforward as enthusiastic consent might need to be highlighted, made explicit, because so many readers might be encountering the idea for the first time.

Anyway, those were some thoughts I had while reading Sanctuary. It is a tale of found family, purposeful community, and mindful cohabitation, perhaps the closest thing to "cozy cottagecore fantasy" that can exist in the parameters of what is, in essence, our own world. The living residents of Casswell House are all some flavor of queer, neurodiverse, disabled, and impoverished. By pooling resources (and kind of sort of squatting in the rambling old manor house), they're able to eke out an existence that, to all of them, is the first time they can truly be their full selves. There are also ghosts, and a malevolent presence that begins to eat away at the intentional life the characters have built for themselves.

The bulk of Sanctuary depicts the day to day management of the characters' sensory and social needs, the respectful negotiations of space, communication, and communal chores, and the pleasures of being around others who more or less understand you and are happy to give you the space you need to function. While reading it, I kept trying to imagine if a straight allistic narrator had to spend so much of a book explaining something like, say, how hint culture and unspoken hierarchies work. (I concluded that it would look a lot like the inner monologues of Dune.) Books like Sanctuary can seem didactic and hand-holdy because, well, they need to be. This stuff is never treated as the default. And here, explaining and normalizing this perspective (and detailing how groceries are obtained and describing how dishes might be done) is much of the point of the book.

Saturday, January 7, 2023

2023 read #4: Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction by Rena Su.

Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction by Rena Su
28 pages
Published 2021
Read January 7
Rating: 4 out of 5

This is a lovely little poetry chapbook: hand-bound, cover decorated with a tyrannosaur skull done with stencil and glue and sand, printed in a batch of 100 copies. I've had it since spring 2021, and I've been wanting to read it for longer than that. Rena Su used to be a fixture in my corner of indie poet Twitter, before she faded away from social media altogether, and she spent months talking about the "dino chap" and its journey to publication. Being an absolute goober for dinosaurs as well as an emerging poet myself, I felt half-feral waiting for it.

But I haven't read it until now, for a silly reason: my policy on how long a book can be for me to read and review it here. Early on, I had settled on 50 pages as the smallest possible book that I could justify calling a "read" (in the noun sense). No matter how lovely, a hand-bound poetry chapbook would never reach that threshold. But on the other hand, I want to review every book I read. It took until the mental housecleaning of this blog's 10th anniversary for me to toss out that rule. From now on, if I want to count a text as a "read" (in the noun sense), I'm counting it.

The other day, someone on writer Twitter coined the term "Adroit-core" for a certain form of contemporary poetry, often produced by young (usually femme or trans/queer) poets: a mix of intellectual remove (used as an ironic narrative device) and deeply personal, often confessional sentimentality. I've dabbled in this form myself, and certainly find it an appealing descriptor rather than a scornful one (though there is a cadre of traditional masculinist poets who find ways to scorn what they call "witchy teen trauma poetry" -- writer Twitter is a realm of contrasts).

Preparing Dinosaurs has its share of "Adroit-core" motifs: death, descriptions of bodily dismemberment employed as metaphors for emotional wounds, religious trauma (or trauma couched in religious terms). Most of the time, the results are transcendent. "Broken Abecedarian of Prehistoric Burial" brilliantly floats through (and subverts) its own format. "Asteroid" closes with some of my personal favorite lines of poetry: "i hope / the asteroid will fall gently / and take quickly / i / wish i could stop this." "To Mummify Myself Alongside an Epilogue" was a masterpiece and quickly had me in tears.

With Rena's (understandable) withdraw from social media, it's a shame that this book will never reach many readers. Truly, Preparing Dinosaurs is an inspiration -- I'm in the midst of writing and revising my own prehistory chapbook, full of science and my own traumas, and this book has given me so much energy and determination to bring my chap to the world. If Rena ever comes back around in a public way, you can bet that I'll request to reprint a good handful of these poems in upcoming volumes of The Mesozoic Reader.

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

2023 read #3: The Saint of Witches by Avra Margariti.

The Saint of Witches by Avra Margariti
92 pages
Published 2022
Read from January 3 to January 4
Rating: 4 out of 5

Avra is one of the rising stars of SFF, particularly in the realm of speculative poetry. This collection is their full-length debut, a mix of original and previously published horror, fantasy, and gothic poetry, with murmurs of deep space and the abyssal sea.

The poems here are queerly sumptuous and vengeful, rotting right off the bone. Ossified hearts, gravediggers, bloated bodies, and putrid apples float by in morbid delectation. Children take delight in destroying the hidden laboratories that had shaped them. Vampires and angels alike sink their teeth into skin. Past lives and future incarnations flutter and rage. Crones, monsters, and demons escape pyres and out from under beds, flay flesh and mix paint from bones, repaying cruelty for cruelty in age-old arithmetic. It’s a swirling cauldron of ideas and imagery that left me breathless.

Some particular standouts for me:

"Witches of Fur and Teeth"
"In the Ever-Night"
"When They Come Back"
"Behold, a Rabbit-Footed Boy"
"Cherry Wine"
"The Birds and the Beasts"
"Lady Vitriol"
"Sugar and Spice"
"The Thing About Stars"
"Darkroom Liaisons"
"Until You Reach Me"
"Blessed Is the Final Girl"
"Mazzeratura or, The Penalty of the Sack"
"The Saint of Witches"

But really, almost all the poems here are all-time bangers.

If I could sum up the mood of this book in two lines, it would be from the close of "Mazzeratura or, The Penalty of the Sack":

They want us to drown, the girl says,
but we float.

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

2023 read #2: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 1 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 1 by Itaru Kinoshita
Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara
Translated by John Neal
194 pages
Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)
Read January 3
Rating: 4 out of 5

One thing that baffles me is how few good dinosaur stories there are. There are some short stories from the likes of Michael Swanwick and Jennifer Lee Rossman; there's the first Jurassic Park (both book and movie); there are a smattering of good episodes of Camp Cretaceous; there's Dinosaur Summer. And that's basically it.

You'd think writing or filming (or, in this case, storyboarding and drawing) a solid work of dinosaur fiction would be a cinch. You get your dinos, you throw some human characters into the mix, and you're good to go. It really doesn't need to be more complicated than that. Yet time after time and author after author, dino stories get mucked up and bogged down with extraneous garbage: It's the army vs. the dinosaurs! Dinosaurs are getting genetically modified into an army! Aliens killed off the dinosaurs! Raptors were actually shapeshifting parasites who could extract DNA from their victims and evolve into human doppelgangers! Simple tales of human drama that happen to feature dinosaurs? Almost vanishingly rare.

Dinosaur Sanctuary is a newish manga series that hits that oft-neglected sweet spot. We follow a small team of caretakers who work with the dinosaurs of a sanctuary that's precariously clinging to business as dinos become passé. Each chapter explores a slice of life in the dinosaur park as the characters encounter a problem with the dinos' health and upkeep, or when the park's financial position threatens to collapse. It never gets deeper or more off-the-wall than that, and it never needs to. The illustrations are lovely, the dinosaurs feel real, and the characters (while not that deep) are engaging. It's a bit like what Jurassic World should have been, with a touch of Dinosaur Summer to keep things fresh. It's sweet and charming and it works beautifully.

Why aren't more dinosaur books like this?

I can't wait for Volume 2 to drop in March.

Monday, January 2, 2023

2023 read #1: The Dragon of Ynys by Minerva Cerridwen.

The Dragon of Ynys by Minerva Cerridwen
131 pages
Published 2020
Read from January 1 to January 2
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I've been maintaining this book blog for ten years now. An entire decade, which carried us from the middle of the Obama years to the current landscape ravaged by fascism and disease, which saw me through heartbreaks and relationships large and small, which saw my own personal horizons of gender, sexuality, and radicalism expand far beyond my banal suburban liberalism of the Obama years. In that time, I've read 561 books (this one is the 562nd), the vast majority of which I read in the first four years. I haven't read the same book twice this whole time.

All those years and all those books, and I still haven't learned to write a real book review. Oh well.

This blog has always been (and likely always will be) for my own enjoyment. In those first few years, I would get a couple dozen page views per review, but those days are long gone. Almost every review I've posted after 2016 has gotten fewer than ten views; the ones I've posted since 2020 have gotten five or fewer, for the most part. And that's okay. I struggle to articulate anything worth saying about any of the books I read, and I've always said that my ratings are purely subjective (remember: 2.5 out of 5 is, from me, a pretty decent review!).

Going forward, I want to make some changes, if only for my own satisfaction.

Firstly, I want to read a whole lot more. 2017-2021 were dire years for me, personally. While the future is dire for our species as a whole, I want to at least read more books while I can. After such a long book drought, I finally cracked 50 titles in 2022. In 2023, I want to read at least 60 books, possibly even match my lowest good year, 2015, at 75.

Secondly, I'm permitting myself the luxury of rereading books that I've already reviewed. I may merely note them as having been read, or I may write out an entirely new review if I think I found some new way to think of it. Look for The Lord of the Rings and Radiance to come back around in the nearish future.

Thirdly, I might make a habit out of reviewing short fiction and poetry from online magazines. I might make a monthly post collecting everything I read from indie SFF mags, for example. Who knows! I'll figure it out as I go. Certainly look for more magazines in general -- my collection of F&SF back issues is extensive.

Finally: I've made a modest amount of contacts in the SFF field, all of them either indie authors or up-and-comers only recently making it into the pro markets. I've been hesitant to read their books because I like to write essentially honest reviews, and I don't want to lead to an indie author losing a single sale because I didn't click with their book. I think I'll try to be a bit less anxious about that, moving forward. After all, no one reads this silly blog but me. (And you, whoever you might be. All one of you.)

That brings me, at long last, to this book, which fits into the hazy printed-on-demand land between small-press and self-published indie author. It's a cozy queer fantasy with a bunch of didactic dialogue about identity, acceptance, neurodiversity, and the various ways in which we can all be ourselves. All of which is super lovely, 10 out of 10, no notes.

I was trying to put my finger on what, exactly, the prose and pacing reminded me of, until I realized this book feels an awful lot like a 1980s middle grade chapter book. Kiki's Delivery Service comes to mind. It isn't my favorite writing style, not by a long shot, and I wasn't expecting it when I went into Ynys.

It's still a perfectly adequate book -- as I said, 2.5 out of 5 is a fine review in my blog -- and I'm glad to have read it. If you want cozy queer fantasy with an old school middle grade vibe, go seek this one out!