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

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 21 to November 23

Rating: 4 out of 5

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

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

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

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

2025 read #89: Sea Siege by Andre Norton.

Sea Siege by Andre Norton

176 pages

Published 1957

Read from November 19 to November 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson*

190 pages

Published 1883

Read from November 18 to November 19

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

* Denotes a reread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Return by Arthur Machen

80 pages

Published 1915

Read November 18

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

311 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 10 to November 17

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

2025 read #85: Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire.

Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

150 pages

Published 2021

Read from November 10 to November 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I remember not enjoying the portrayal of Cora when she was introduced in Beneath the Sugar Sky. As a fat person with aspirations of athleticism myself (before Long COVID made that feel impossible), I thought Cora—a fat girl bullied for her weight, who only ever thought about her weight or her history of bullying—seemed tokenized, reduced to a didactic device rather than allowed to be a character in her own right.

Either McGuire has become more skilled at integrating the social message into her stories, or Cora, as the primary viewpoint character in Drowned Girls, finally has room to become something more. Strained and sleepless from the lingering effects of encountering the Drowned Gods in Come Tumbling Down, Cora begs to be transferred from the Home for Wayward Children to the Whitethorn Institute, a rival school for children who’ve gone through Doors.

Whitethorn is pretty much the worst place for a teen with Magical World PTSD to go. It’s a straightforward allegory for conversion therapy: a gray and rigid school of enforced conformity, where students are drilled to forget what’s real, adhere to one single way of being a person, and become the children their parents wanted. 

2025 read #84: Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Illustrated by Alison Atkin and Marc Dando

390 pages

Published 2020

Read from November 5 to November 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

When I got my BA in Anthropology, way back in the late ’00s, the consensus on Neanderthals was that they were an over-specialized branch of hominin evolution, hyper-carnivores eking a meager living on the edge of the habitable world, oddly stagnant in culture across deep reaches of time, dead without descendants. They may have buried their dead, took care of their disabled cohorts, and utilized mineral pigments, but otherwise seemed to demonstrate no conception of art. It was deemed unlikely that they could make complex and varied vocal sounds. Neanderthals were depicted as a tragic curiosity, offering insight into adaptation and extinction—fellow travelers crowded out by our own species or starved by the loss of habitat.

The beautiful thing about science is that we’re always learning more, and adapting what we think we know to adjust to new information. Thanks to genetic sequencing, we know H. sapiens interbred with Neanderthals (and other related populations). We’ve found evidence of rudimentary sculpture and even construction. Neanderthals lived in and adapted to a broad diversity of environments. They also seem to have engaged in some measure of cannibalism as mortuary ritual. It’s a more nuanced picture by far.

Of course, the very dynamism of science means that this book, a mere five years out of date, might not be worth reading for all I know. Still, Kindred is one of the few science books in my library, and five years out of date is better than my education, which is approaching twenty years old.

Sykes, like so many scientists turned pop-sci writers before her, produces a readable but often uninspired text that feels like she tried too hard to keep her wording casual. It’s a style choice that strikes me as condescending. Each chapter begins with a sensory immersion sequence in italics, which can sometimes still be fun, but here just feels awkward. She also tries to slip in the occasional poetic flourish, which falls flat more often than not.

That said, I love science, I miss studying human evolution and prehistory, and this book is a perfectly adequate refresher. Once it gets past the de rigueur background information, Kindred offers fascinating and detailed looks at everything from Neanderthals’ health and injuries, to granular examinations of the climates and environments they experienced, to extensive inventories of their varied foodways. From there, it sketches more speculative pictures of Neanderthal aesthetics and emotions. It’s a solid pop primer, so far as I can tell with my outdated background. It also offers a gratifying amount of depth that these treatments rarely provide.

2025 read #83: The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

89 pages

Published 1896

Read from November 3 to November 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

I went into this slender volume knowing little about it, beyond its date of publication (I want to pad out all my pre-1900 tags) and its setting in a small village in coastal Maine. It turns out to be an exquisite series of loosely connected vignettes, as our narrator sketches one villager after another in careful, beautiful phrases. It’s altogether charming.

The only sign of the book’s age is when it occasionally follows one of its character sketches a bit too far and gets lost in the weeds. (There’s also some unfortunate stereotypes spoken about South Seas islanders. Guess we can never have anything from the nineteenth century eschew bigotry entirely.) Otherwise, Jewett’s writing seems at least thirty years ahead of its time, crisp and modern and evocative. I was reminded, perhaps inevitably, of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

2025 read #82: Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 1999 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 1999 issue (23:10)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

240 pages

Published 1999

Read from October 30 to November 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

That’s it, time for dinosaur fuckin’.

This issue contains Michael Swanwick’s classic “Riding the Giganotosaur,” which may or may not have been the origin of the present day’s dinosaur erotica trend, but was certainly my teenage self’s first exposure to the concept.

We’ll get to it. But first, what other lost Nineties wonders does this issue contain? The TOC is stacked with a who’s-who of late ’90s writers, so I’m moderately intrigued.

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“A Martian Romance” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven’t read any of Robinson’s Mars cycle. So why not begin at the tail end, as the terraforming project spirals into ice and abandonment? Robinson is enough of a professional that I don’t feel I lacked any information to enjoy this story. It helps that there’s remarkably little of what might be called “plot.” Eileen and Roger, along with some friends old and new, take an iceboat around the frozen seas of Mars. Along the way they chat about what the sudden freeze means for the future of terraforming, Eileen thinks about their past, and they learn a lesson about taking the long view of progress. That’s about it. The story is carried by the relationships of the characters and its pensive mood. I liked it — though, as ever, I have to note how absurdly optimistic these old Nineties futures tended to be, with people living 250 years and resources being thrown at terraforming just because they could. We’ll be lucky to live to 60 as serfs in a dying society on an overheated world. B-

A poem comes next: “When an Alien Is Inhabiting Your Body” by Laurel Winter. You can see the roots of what would become our contemporary speculative poetry scene here in the convergence of quotidian and cosmic, though “Alien” reveals its decade of origin at the end with a Lettermanesque groaner about suing McDonald’s.

“The Winds of Marble Arch” by Connie Willis. Leisurely novella about a conference-goer puzzled by a strange blast of wind in a Tube station. As with the enjoyable but plotless story from Robinson, I had a good time with this one, but couldn’t help but feel that the magazine was being extra indulgent for the sake of printing a Big Name. No mere up-and-comer would get away with thirty-five meandering pages of upper middle class mundanity in Asimov’s, now or in the ’90s. Willis, too, is a professional; the story works, aside from some repetitive passages as our protagonist goes back and forth through different Tube lines. She subtly builds a picture of an aging generation turning small and conservative and maddeningly complacent, repeating that everything’s “gone to hell” as they withdraw within ever-narrowing horizons to avoid their encroaching mortality. Too slow to be a personal favorite, but solid nonetheless. B-

Another poem: “The Dream Wave of John Scott Russell” by Howard V. Hendrix. It throws together dreams, wave states, fractals, and its namesake historic scientist in an extremely of-its-time brew, but it works quite well.

“Hothouse Flowers” by Mike Resnick. They loved stories of longevity science in the latter part of the ’90s, didn’t they? Aside from the mildly clever allegory attached to the title, this is a pretty standard gerontology number, nothing all that interesting except as a museum piece of last century’s optimism. (Also, this superficial and quite capitalist philosophy of “Without quality of life, what’s the point of being alive?” threw open the doors to the horrifying clusterfuck that is Canada’s MAID laws.) C-

A poem follows: “Down in Your Bones Only You Alone Know” by Bruce Boston. Rhymes. Kind of forgettable.

“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Gardner Dozois. Between Kristine Kathryn Rusch at F&SF and Dozois at Asimov’s, this was the golden age of editors putting their own fiction in their own magazines. I can’t even be mad about it, because at the end of the day, Rusch and Dozois both were solid authors. This piece pulls you in immediately, sinking you into precise sensory details of imagery and mood. It can get lost in the weeds of its own future history, but it remains mostly effective, serving almost like an endcap to all the go-to topics of late 20th century science fiction. Sentient AI, virtual reality, uploaded consciousness, nuclear war, genetic engineering, interstellar colonization, and the reaction against accelerating change—all get tossed into one big pile. Even quantum observation and wave collapse get name-checked. The classic 1990s Throw Everything into the Pot approach, but with a faint premonition that this would be the last hurrah for these naive, optimistic concerns. (Though that’s probably the benefit of hindsight talking.) Maybe B-

“In from the Commons” by Tony Daniel. Surreal piece about a single consciousness divided into discrete personas for space reasons. It could have been interesting if it weren’t both ickily heterosexual (the one female persona exists “for intimacy,” her raison d’être to be a fuck buddy for the male personas) and casually eugenicist (a repeated motif draws a parallel with how smart and well-mannered dogs get preferentially neutered by well-meaning owners, which… doesn’t even become relevant to the story, in my opinion). D-

Another Bruce Boston poem: “Beware the Werecanary!” It reads like an inferior imitation of Shel Silverstein.

“Green Tea” by Richard Wadholm. Had I read this story while flipping through this issue when it was on newsstands, it would have inspired my teenage self to write a welter of imitations. It’s a tale of deep space smugglers, illicit materials-science, exotic physics, and refined vengeance, set in a multicultural future of roughnecks and rough men. Reading it now, it’s enjoyable, albeit faintly ridiculous. (Exotic physics stories read like wizards casting big spells at each other, and are just as plausible.) Sometimes I miss that teenage impressionability. B-

“Proof of the Pudding” by Nelson Bond. Deliberately old-fashioned humor piece about an eccentric millionaire who tunnels through the Earth’s crust. Mildly amusing. C

“Riding the Giganotosaur” by Michael Swanwick. The only story I read when I found this issue on newsstands way back in the day. Twenty-six years later, it’s still the main event. It may not be the first “repulsive man’s brain gets transplanted into a giant theropod” story (“Just Like Old Times” by Robert Sawyer predates it by six years), but so far as I’m aware, it’s the best. Swanwick leavens an otherwise basic plot with lush sensory depictions of Cretaceous Patagonia. (Other dino fic writers so rarely make the effort.) And of course, who could forget the climactic mating scene? Truly, Swanwick walked so Chuck Tingle could run. B+

Yet another Bruce Boston poem: “Another Short Horror Story.” It’s another shrug.

“Argonautica” by Walter Jon Williams. A lengthy novella (62 pages!) retelling the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, set in an alternate history version of the American Civil War. There are so many ways this could go wrong. And sure enough, right from the start, it goes wrong in the most fundamental way: Jase Miller and his crew are Confederates. It’s well-written and well-paced, but I’m never going to abide unreformed Reb protagonists (or a white author’s main character throwing around the N-word). Sure, he’s more or less a mercenary, only out for himself, a morally dubious character who declaims any interest in the question of slavery. But I also don’t have to like it. D-

One last Bruce Boston poem: “Curse of the Reaper’s Wife.” Another shrug for the road.

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And that’s it for this issue! Confederate argonauts aside, it was quite solid. That novella makes up such a chunk of this issue, though, that it lends a stink to the whole business.