2022 read #50: Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono.

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono

Translated by Emily Balistrieri

194 pages

Published 1985; translation published 2020

Read from December 21 to December 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

On one hand, it's hard to feel anything but warm and fuzzy toward this book. It was the basis for one of my favorite movies, and besides, my partner R surprised me with this copy a few days before Christmas, which is a lovely association to make.

On the other hand, it's a middle-grade book from a few decades back, and those tend to be indifferent reads at best. The reading level is pitched toward younger grades. And while the skeleton of the Studio Ghibli story is here, the changes made for the movie were entirely for the better. Here, Kiki flies from one random encounter to the next; there are hardly any thematic callbacks or returning characters, aside from Osono and Tombo, who barely receive any characterization. Mostly Kiki seems to meet tired moms who immediately tell her how exhausting motherhood is. The movie's magical interlude with the free-spirited artist in the woods cottage is barely hinted at in this text.

Ah well, it's a sweet little book all the same. It was a nice way to linger in the world of the movie for a little while, at the very least.

2022 read #49: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

109 pages

Published 2019

Read from December 24 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R and I are putting together our own holiday traditions here in our third December living together. Christmas Eve books to swap and read? Yes please!

This is a lovely little novella about the Green Man, the ancient wood, and the shy breath of human connection. It's been in my "cheap treats to buy for myself when I can" list for most of the year, and R just happened to obtain it for our nascent holiday tradition. As with almost every novella I've read this year, it probably could have been longer; more time to linger with the characters in the deep heart of the wood would have been welcome. It's a gorgeous little book all the same, sweet and hinting at deeper wilds in its heart.

2022 read #48: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

775 pages

Published 2000

Read from approximately January 15, 2021 to December 21, 2022

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading so much during the month of October, my attention span got redirected to other hyperfocuses for a while. (I played Fable II start to finish for the first time since 2012 or so, and then followed it up with Fable III.) Books slipped through the cracks. Part of the problem was, nothing seemed to hold my interest. Books I'd have devoured in a day back in October I could only read a page or two at a time before giving up.

Fortuitously, "a page or two at a time" happens to be an excellent way to read London: The Biography.

I first tried to read this book back in 2013 or 2014. At one point I called it "My favorite book that I never finished." It consists of chapter after chapter -- some seventy-nine altogether -- each of them a rambly assemblage of anecdotes drawn from primary and secondary sources loosely grouped around a theme (e.g., alcohol, theater, sound, the crowd, Clerkenwell, the children of the city, the Underground, etc.). It's a fine book to have on hand and maybe read whatever random chapter appeals to you that day, but it's a bear to read cover to cover. I gave up maybe halfway through. I picked it up again last year while sort of casting about for anything to distract me in the wake of some traumatic life changes. Again, I only got about halfway in before setting it aside.

So last month, when I found myself in the mood to peck my way through a book that didn't require sustained attention, I turned once again to London. This time I resumed where I'd left off. I wouldn't remember much of the book, but I wouldn't need to.

Ackroyd spends the bulk of London reiterating what, at this point in his writings, seems to have been his major theme: Certain places in England keep attracting the same sort of personalities, events, and vibes through the centuries. In essentially every chapter he provides a litany of mildly curious coincidences and historical parallels -- for example, the long history of revolutionary thought in Clerkenwell -- and is content to call it "the spirit of London" or attribute it to a given neighborhood's "genius loci." More rigorous sociological explanations receive little attention. The same motif animates Ackroyd's Albion and Thames: The Biography. That's a lot of words for such a slender thesis. Ackroyd's vision of egalitarian London also seems a bit optimistic twenty-two years and one Brexit later.

After considering London "my favorite book I never finished" for so long, closing the cover this final time felt anticlimactic. Perhaps that can be attributed to the general listlessness and anhedonia as we head into year four of a global pandemic and also continue to endure all the ills of modern capitalism.

Perhaps Ackroyd's chapter on the Blitz captured the current mood best: "The intended victims [of the V1 firebombings] became depersonalised.... The general mood was one of 'strain, weariness, fear and despondency.' 'Let me get out of this' was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival."

2022 read #47: Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson.

Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson

191 pages

Published 2019

Read from October 25 to October 28

Rating: 4 out of 5

An exquisitely realized sapphic retelling of the folktale of the Snow Queen, brittle with winter chill and thrumming with heart-deep warmth. The sense of place is perhaps less precisely realized than in The Bear and the Nightingale, but Gibson makes up for that with the aching realness of her central characters' loss, fear, and desire.

I can't tell if this book was self-published or went through an extremely tiny press. Either way, it's one of the finest self-pubbed or small-press novels I've read so far. It has its share of typos and typesetting errors, especially in the later chapters, but that comes with the territory; I note that more for my own reference than anything, something to be mindful of when I go forward with my own self-publishing adventures.

2022 read #46: Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, edited by Jonathan M. Thompson and Alana Joli Abbott.

Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, edited by Jonathan M. Thompson and Alana Joli Abbott

289 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 20 to October 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I'm jonesing so hard for new-to-me dinosaur fiction. Hell, I'm on the verge of tracking down some paperback copies of Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World -- both of which I read dozens of times as a youth, and last reread in 2011 -- just to try to scratch that dino itch.

Luckily, I found this anthology, in part because one of my favorite up-and-coming sci-fi writers, Jennifer Lee Rossman, has a story in it. (One of their other stories, set in the same universe as "Joan of Archaeopteryx," is featured in my own anthology, The Mesozoic Reader. Please get a copy!) I'm not sure what to expect from the other stories here, but I guess we'll find out!

(Also, when I bought it, I had assumed Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology was associated with Apex Magazine, seeing as both involve short sci-fi stories. But no, it's tied into some sort of game company and a dino deck-building game.)

"Smile" by LaShawn M. Wanak. Writers, I've noticed, tend to struggle with making good stories out of dinosaurs. I like my dinosaur fiction to fit one of two very broad categories: either the dinosaurs are just an ordinary fact of life in the setting (such as in Dinotopia, Raptor Red, or many of my own stories), or the dinosaurs fit into the role of movie monsters, albeit constrained to a rough approximation of "realistic" behaviors (such as in the first three Jurassic Park movies, which stop just short of giving raptors mustache-twirling-villain intelligence but still present them as animals, something that could conceivably have evolved on Earth). Some stories, like Dinosaur Summer, excel by combining a bit of both. My least favorite dinosaur trope involves turning them into unconstrained movie monsters, unstoppable creatures with absurd, biologically impossible powers. (Jurassic World comes to mind.) This tale crosses Jurassic World with Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, presenting us with raptors that can sample DNA from other creatures and utilize those traits for their adaptive advantages. At that point, why make it about raptors at all? It's an alien invasion trope given a dinosaurian coat of paint. The story ends with the reveal that a humanoid raptor is telling us how the ascendency of the raptor over the human world came to be. D-

"Just Like Old Times" by Robert J. Sawyer. I originally read this story (first published in 1993) when it was reprinted in Martin H. Greenberg's Dinosaurs anthology. In that review, I griped: "Transferring the consciousness of a human observer into a gigantic theropod -- Michael Swanwick did it best in 'Riding the Giganotosaur' in 1999. This being the early '90s, however, the transferred consciousness is of course going to be that of a serial killer. The innate silliness and datedness of the premise sinks this story." I don't feel the need to revisit it here. D-

"The Day" by August Hahn. Speaking of dinosaurs as movie monsters, this story takes all the raptor pack-hunter tropes hammered into pop culture via Jurassic Park and cranks them up to 11, giving us a "nature red in tooth and claw" scenario from a raptor's-eye view. The very first story I ever submitted to a magazine, back in 1998, was a piece of Raptor Red fan-fiction; I wrote from the perspective of giant raptors roaming the Maastrichtian in search of new territory. Both my ancient tale and Hahn's story here could have benefitted from a bit more ethological science and a bit less of the pop culture killer-claw cliché. Like, I'd be 100% down to read a dino's-perspective tale about an ordinary day where we all laze in the sunshine and take care of our hatchlings and no one has to fight a rex. I feel indifferently about this one. D+?

"Rebuttal" by Andrew J. Lucas. "[By 2135], the gradual effects of climate change reached a crescendo; sweeping forest fires [had destroyed the forests of western Canada]." Oh, you sweet naïve thing. If only we'd been that lucky. Anyway, in the climate-ravaged future, ancient DNA is a valuable resource utilized to rebuild ecosystems resistant to the plagues unleashed by the thawing permafrost. Herds of ankylosaurs graze the hot desolate plains of Alberta, taking the place of beef cattle. Those dastardly Russians cobble together a weaponized Yutyrannus with a mishmash of cloning and 3D printing and unleash it upon the poor Canadian rangers. Like the cyborg Yutyrannus, this story is a mishmash that doesn't quite cohere. It's an interesting revamp of the classic "dinosaurs in the Old West" trope plus a dash of Dino-Riders, but there's no substance to the story. D+

"High Wire: A Horizon Alpha Story" by D. W. Vogel. Military sci-fi in which a batch of blankly interchangeable soldiers, officers, and kids land on a new planet after something went wrong in their ark ship. The planet is populated with vaguely dinosaurian wildlife. There's simply no characterization to be found here, not even a trace. That's almost impressive in its own way. Worse, literally every named character is male. Every single one. No redeeming value to this story whatsoever. Somehow, this is a reprint; it was previously published in a sci-fi anthology back in 2016. F

"A Boy and His Dog: A 'Dinosaur Protocol' Story" by Jonathan M. Thompson. One of the editors of this volume has graced us with a story set in one of the game settings the book was meant to promote. It's a clunky piece, written stiffly and clearly never proofread. (A young Triceratops is described as weighing "13,000 tons.") A deep-time colony, presumably from our far future, suddenly receives a bunch of soldiers displaced from something approximating the modern day. There's an EMP, soldiers fanning out with M4s, and a kerraaazy misunderstanding between the two groups! This story reminds me of "The Cretaceous Colony," a story I wrote when I was 11. That is not a compliment. If anything, "The Cretaceous Colony" featured a deeper plot and richer characterization than this dud. F

"Joan of Archaeopteryx" by Jennifer Lee Rossman. Oh, thank god. It's such a cliché to say this, but I genuinely mean it: this story is like a breath of fresh air after the last... well, after every single story in the anthology before this one. Laugh-out-loud funny, refreshingly queer, written with verve and personality -- literally everything the foregoing stories haven't been. Rossman's setting is superb: for millions of years random portals have opened between our world and a parallel dimension, which now hosts a mix of dinosaurs, Renaissance knights, gay cowboys, and D.B. Cooper. The repressive knights want to conquer the gay cowboys and force them into their medieval social strictures. Our hero Joan, brain crammed full of 21st century pop culture, is taken through the portal to fulfil a prophecy and save the gay cowboy dinosaur land utopia. It's a delight, and the best story here by a long mile. A-

"A Time Beyond Sunset: An Apex Island Adventure" by Alana Joli Abbott. At this point I've given up on anything in this book living up to Jennifer Lee Rossman's piece, or indeed on anything in this book being good besides "Joan of Archaeopteryx." There's vague potential buried deep in this story -- the "teens volunteer at a dinosaur island during World War II" plot borrows heavily from Dinosaur Summer by way of Dinotopia -- but the writing struggles to make anything good out of it. For a story set on a dinosaur island, we spend an inordinate amount of time in New Haven, or repairing a truck, or talking to random soldiers or people in the infirmary. When we do meet dinosaurs, it turns out they speak impeccable English thanks to a rogue Nazi scientist who invented tin-foil hats. The story crams in some mostly unnecessary backstory about the Nazi scientist (whom we never actually meet) and ends abruptly when one of the teens successfully absconds with a crystal tablet the Nazis were using. Clearly, this was written backwards from the Apex game setting rather than as a standalone story. I'll be generous and award this an F+.

"When the Sky Was Starless and the Ocean Flat" by Gwendolyn N. Nix. An undercooked tale of pterosaur riders watching their world collapse along the Western Inland Sea. There's a nice amount of potential here, and as it stands, it's worlds better than almost everything else in this book, but I feel it could have used a few more rounds of editing to bring out the magic. C-

"We Are Emily" by Lee F. Szczepanik, Jr. A distasteful throwback to the "murderous mentally ill" days of the 1980s and '90s, built around a Hollywoodized misunderstanding of dissociative identity disorder. Derrick, Bobby, and Melissa are a "family" -- a DID system inhabiting a body together, trading off consciousness with each other but communicating freely amongst themselves. They vote in a new member, Emily, who is a raptor from a video game called Cretaceous Wars. Somehow, cyberpunk clichés of "hacking the A.I." are also involved. And wouldn't you know it, as soon as Emily becomes part of the family, she takes control and goes on a wild bloody murder spree! It's equal parts silly, sophomoric, and exploitative. I had to check to make sure this wasn't originally published in 1989. This one gets a big ol' F.

"Party Crashers" by J.A. Cummings. A boy wishes for a pet Compsognathus for his seventh birthday. He helps the wish along with some tricks he learned from YouTube. Magic! Two squirrels turn into compies and promptly cause chaos at the party. That's literally all there is to this tale. But it isn't actively offensive or badly written, so maybe I'll give it a D+.

"Starfall" by Darren W. Pearce. A garbled mess of writing that feels like it's trying to squeeze in every "badass bounty hunter who can psychically talk to dinosaurs in a postapocalyptic wasteland" cliché at the same time. Our hero is a blank slate except for her snark, and her raptor companion can only chuckle and crack wise about how tasty their quarry is. It could not end fast enough. F

"Forever" by Robert J. Sawyer. Bog-standard "intelligent dinosaurs achieve civilization right before the Chicxulub impact" story, first published in 1997. Nothing special. nothing objectionable, nothing new. Somehow that still makes it one of the better stories in this anthology. C-

"To Mega Therion" by Markisan Naso. This wasn't badly written, per se, but the prose veers to the amateurish side with its excessive commas and clunky descriptions. Every bit character is introduced with a name, a couple adjectives, and a genus: "His second-in-command, Sotiris, stretched his long, tan opisthocoelicaudia neck..." With so much of the story devoted to descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, this awkward prose is a major liability. That aside, I enjoyed the general vibe of anthropomorphic dinosaurs wielding swords, fighting duels, and erecting heroic statues in a Cretaceous kingdom. This story even has a sauropod using a spiked helmet to turn himself into a giant morningstar. So, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Maybe I'll give it a tolerable C-.

"Droma Station" by Alexandra Pitchford. Derivative sci-fi action piece. Maybe you wouldn't call "secret experimental facility on an asteroid breeds cyborg raptors" derivative, but I certainly would. Like all too many of the stories in this volume, this reads like the writer has never been exposed to any form of fiction more advanced than SyFy Originals and tabletop gaming supplements. All the characters are the shallowest of archetypes, the action is paint-by-numbers, and there's nothing here deeper than a coat of paint. I'll be supremely generous and offer it an F+.

"What Came First" by Kimberly Pauley. A big ol' shrug of a closing number. The kind of pop sci-fi written by someone whose only experience with scientists is in the pages of pop sci-fi. This story is notable mainly for a section which details a domestic chicken's brief adventures in time-travel. Maybe D-?

And that's it. Finally. I cannot express the depths of my disappointment in this anthology.

2022 read #45: HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, edited by Jack Apollo Hartley.

HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, edited by Jack Apollo Hartley

180 pages

Published 2022

Read October 20

Rating: N/A (I liked it a lot!)

It feels weird to review an anthology one of my pieces is in, an anthology edited by a friend of mine and dotted with poems and stories from writers I know. An anthology where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements. Weird, maybe even borderline unethical. But it's not like anyone reads this blog on the regular.

HELL IS REAL began when I tweeted something along the lines of "Someone who isn't me should put together a Midwest Gothic anthology." Jack, an amazing writer in his own right, was taken with the idea, and put in an immense amount of labor reading through submissions and compiling this book. There are a grand total of seventy poems, flash fics, and short stories in here, too many to review one by one.

There are some repeating themes and motifs: Driving and roadsides. Urban decay and rot in the cornfields. Deer. Not-deer. Blood. Burial. Childhood trauma. Religious trauma. Apostacy writ in biblical imagery. Queerness. And as with so much stuff getting published in the indie lit press these days, a great number of these pieces are astoundingly good -- all-time bangers, even.

A running list of some of my favorites:

"When Me and the Other Ex-Mormons Get to Outer Darkness" by K.A. Nielsen

"Postcard from Bluegrass" by Elizabeth Walztoni

"Storm Day" by MP Armstrong

"Welcoming Remarks from Tim Busch, Pillar of the Community" by Amanda Minkkinen

"Cowboy Killers & Corn Fields & Coming Home" by Camille Ferguson

"Poachers" by Andrew McSorley

"We Have All Come from the Earth and in the Earth Is Where We Will Go" by Rowan Bagley

"Kerosene" by Lucy Frost

"The Angel at Harvest Church" by Freydís Moon

"Tornadoland" by Hattie Jean Hayes

"Without Protest" by Cassie E. Brown

"Shelter / Decay" by Andrea Lianne Grabowski

"Local Woman Discovers Remains of Two Girls, 10 and 6, Missing Since 1977" by Kimberly Glanzman

"Blood and Beatitude in the Buckeye State" by Alana Greene

"When the Anthropocene Ends in the Rust Belt, or When the Gods Decide to Repent" by John E.K. Carter

"Seek" by Pippa Russell

"65" by Audrey Hollis

Despite singling out all those poems and stories, I can say that I liked or loved every piece in this book, and I'm only slightly biased.

2022 read #44: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte

398 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 18 to October 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ah, 2018. Now that's a lost world. I remember strolling around Barnes & Noble, blissfully unaware of the potential civilization-killing pandemic then barely more than a year away, and stopping dead in my tracks when I saw this book on display. It had been a long time since the big Dinomania boom of the 1990s. Not many pop-science dinosaur books had been published since then, let alone aggressively promoted into bestsellerdom. I couldn't afford retail price books back then (and I really can't now, though I have enough wiggle room these days to go on the occasional discounted or used book splurge), but I came close to springing for this one.

I didn't, of course. And it's probably for the best that I didn't. I liked this book fine enough, I suppose, but I'm not its intended audience, and that dulled my enjoyment. Unlike later books that publishers snatched up to cash in on success of Rise and Fall -- titles like Beasts Before Us and Otherlands, two books I enjoyed tremendously -- this book doesn't trust its readers with grasping its subject. Rise is explicitly, perhaps even cynically, written for mass consumption, its ideal audience the sort of blandly curious reader who has somehow never touched a book on geology or evolution (or dinosaurs) since middle school. As popular science books go, it feels like a naked grab at bestsellerdom. And apparently it worked.

Like so many popular science titles these days, Rise spends much of its time giving pocket biographies of the cool characters of modern paleontology, all of whom happen to be great buddies of Brusatte's. Publishers love that "human interest" element, I suppose. The presentation of the actual science is hopelessly glib, employing banalities like "This was the real Jurassic Park" and shortening foraminafera to "forams" without ever giving the accepted (and not even that difficult) name. In a book already choked for space thanks to all the bios of Brusatte's rad buddies, there's an entire chapter on Tyrannosaurus rex. If you came for a new history of the dinosaurs' lost world, as I did, you'd be disappointed. If you were a casual reader who didn't know a thing about dinosaurs beyond the name T. rex, this would be the book for you.

More than anything, it feels like Brusatte used this book to position himself as our generation's go-to media paleontologist. The Millennial equivalent of Bob Bakker or John Horner: that one guy the newspapers know the name of and call up whenever they need a flavor quote, or that one guy who's the token expert in any documentary. If that was his goal, it seems to have succeeded admirably.