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.

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.)

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. 

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).

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.

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.