Ports of Call

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Reread. I'm running a bit short on TBR pile at the same time as I'm looking forward to a "Classic or Just Old?" panel at Can*Con in mid-October, so several of the things I've read in this fortnight have been with that panel in mind. The interesting thing about this one is that basically all the good bits are perpetuated and reproduced in nerd culture. Usually there are at least a few "oh I forgot about that"s, especially in a book I haven't read since 1992 at the latest (probably more like 1990).

Louisa May Alcott, Under the Lilacs. Reread, Kindle. And speaking of books I haven't read in a minute: this was the Alcott I didn't own and the branch of the library I used most regularly also didn't own. So while it was a reread, I didn't retain nearly as much of it as I do of, um. Any of her other work. Which is too bad, because it has a poodle (although also the poodle has some official and substantial peril, which I wouldn't have liked much even knowing how it would end). It also has a gratuitous section anti-Chinese racism--no Chinese characters, but room for racism all the same. Sigh.

Stephanie Burgis, A Waltz of Sinister Import. Discussed elsewhere.

Octavia Butler, Patternmaster. Reread. Violent and straightforward telepath-on-telepath violent adventure with plenty of violence. Did I say violence? Yes. Did I say nuance? Not really; this is one of my nominees for "author wrote some classic work but not all her work is classic."

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. Reread. I let myself reread this favorite in honor of my own dubious book. We are doing very different things with doubt in them, but hardly anybody else is taking it head-on at all, so I went to go sit by Pamela for a bit, literarily speaking. Still love this so much.

Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, eds., We See a Different Frontier. Kindle. It's always nice when one doesn't get to an anthology anywhere near its publication date to find that it has held up. Several people in here are now much more broadly published, which is good to have the hindsight to see, but I really enjoyed most of the stories, and "most" is about all an anthology usually gets.

John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air. Reread. Always with your games and identity, Mike. Well.

Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gündoğdu, eds., Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State. Read this for book club, and it's the sort of science fiction anthology you get when most of the authors don't regularly write science fiction: there was a lot that felt like attempting to invent the concept of science fiction from scratch and ending up with similar sorts of clunky telling that we got early on. In service to this very underrepresented culture, still interesting to have.

Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England. This was about most of the 17th century rather than just the years of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Interregnum, and I think that was to its benefit. If you're not very familiar with that placetime, this is a good place to start, and if you are, it's still well done and interesting.

Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times. An autofiction by/about someone whose first year at Stanford was the fall of 2019. So yes, a pandemic novel, staggeringly and overwhelmingly a pandemic novel. One of the things that's always a question with autofiction is whether it's the auto- or the fiction part that has failed when there is a failure: if the characters of the former friends seem flat and insufficiently considered, is it because she didn't do as good a job with that part of writing fiction as with some of the other elements of this novel? Or is it because she is accurately writing down real behavior she never fully understood? Both are possible--even, I suppose, simultaneously. It's a very young novel and I sometimes lost patience for the protagonist and/or for the author, but the writing propelled me through all the same.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter. Kindle. This is a collection of minor Le Guin nonfiction: introductions to other people's books, short reviews, a few speeches and essays. It's nice. It's not more than nice, mostly.

Rose Macaulay, What Not. Reread, Kindle. This, on the other hand, is not nice at all, and I love it. It's darkly hilarious. It understands the science fiction technique of incluing when the official genre of science fiction mostly had no clue about it. It's a dystopia whose people are very directly the people she knew, generally speaking; they read like the cast of any other 1918 English novel, but gone horribly wrong with eugenics. I think one of the great things about What Not is that her dystopian technologies are entirely social. Macaulay understands that it's people, the problem is humanity, and the solution, to the extent that there is one, is also humanity.

Iain Pears, Stone's Fall. I hate this book so much that I hope I remember how much I hate it and never read anything by this author again. The twist ending is so unmotivated and so stupid and so bad. The problem is that he can write sentences, so I kept reading, and it got thoroughly and abruptly worse.

Sophia Smith Galer, How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Smith Galer's focus is entirely away from the circumpolar region that's my particular interest here, but it's still a compelling collection of essays that focuses more on how to save languages when we can than on how to kill them. The resistance is not in the subtitle just for marketing clicks. Good read.

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves. Kindle. This sure was itself. The non-Wooster-and-Jeeves stories were less good, but still fine. I knew what I was getting into.

Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing With Dragons and Searching for Dragons. Rereads. I didn't find these at a young age like a lot of the fantasy writers my age--I was in my twenties and living in this house and had read other books by one Patricia C. Wrede. But these are definitely high on the list of Pat's works considered classics, and they're fun, fast reads; glad to have gotten to them again.