numinicious

A. S. Byatt, Still Life. Reread. I freely acknowledge that "4, 1, 2, 3" is an eccentric reread order for this series. (This is 2. Stay tuned for 3 in the next fortnight's book list.) It's also the one that, in my opinion, stands least well alone, mostly because of the ending. The ending is very cogent about the initial blurred, horrible phases of grief, but what it does not do is move through them to the next phases, to what happens after the first shock--which is an odd balancing for one book but fine for part of a larger story. I also find it fascinating that Byatt exists in this book as an authorial "I" in ways that she does not for the other books. "I wrote this word because of that," she will say, and it seems that if the I is not Antonia, it's someone quite close, it's not anything near to a character and not really much like an in-book narrator. It's just...our neighbor Antonia, who makes choices while writing, as one does, as we all do.

Linda Legarde Grover, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year. If you have a relative who is a person of goodwill but has been paying absolutely no attention to Native/First Nations culture, this might be a good thing to give them. It's lots of very short (newspaper column or newsletter length) essays about personal memories and cultural memories through the turning of the year, nothing particularly deep and nothing that assumes that you know literally the first thing about Onigamiising (Duluth) or Ojibwe life or anything at all really. Not probably going to be very memorable if you do, but not offensive.

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting. Discussed elsewhere.

Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man, Midnight Fugue, and The Price of Butcher's Meat. Rereads. And here we're at the end of the series, and as always I wish there was more and am glad there's this much. I don't think I'll need to return to The Price of Butcher's Meat; the email format conceit ("this is a person who doesn't use apostrophes, that means it's informal!" Reg stop) does not improve with time, and the rest of the book isn't really worth it to me. But the others are still quite solid mysteries, hurrah for Dalziel interiority.

Grady Hillhouse, Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment. I picked this up because it was already in the house, and because I'm writing a thing about a city planner, and I thought it might spark ideas. It did not: it's very focused on the immediate 21st century American largely urban constructed environment. But what a neat book to be able to give a bright 10yo, or really anyone who can read full text but likes careful pictures of what there is and how it works.

Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison. Kindle. I found this to be a heartening read because Mitchison is clearly a person like us, someone who values art and human rights and a number of good things like that, a person who is doing the best she can in an internationally stressful time--and also she's flat-out wrong a number of times in this book. A few times she's morally wrong, several times she's wrong in her predictions...and the Allies still won WWII and Mitchison herself still wrote a great many things worth reading. It is simultaneously a very friendly and domestic diary from someone Getting Through It All and a reminder that perfection is not required for progress.

Malka Older, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses. More Mossa and Pleiti mystery adventures. The two spend a large chunk of the book in different locations. Don't start with this one, start with the first one, but also: events continue to ramify and unfold, hurrah events.

Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well With Others. The sequel to the previous "older women assassins attempting with not a great deal of success to be retired from killin' folks" book, it has similar appeal. It could be that you're ready to be done after one, which is valid, but if you weren't, this is more of that, and reasonably enjoyable. There's less of the dual timeline narrative here, about which I have mixed feelings: on the one hand it's often good for authors to let go of that kind of device when it has served its purpose, and on the other I liked the contrast. Ah well.

Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking. Discussed elsewhere.

Tom Sancton, Sweet Land of Liberty: America in the Mind of the French Left, 1848-1871. This is not just about what people thought of the US at the time but also how they used images and references to it in their own internal propaganda, which is kind of cool. A lot of it was not particularly deep thought, and that is of itself interesting--in what ways do people react to large dramatic events for which they have limited context (but no small amount of possible personal use). If you like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing you'll like. A few eccentric views of, for example, Susan B. Anthony, or the Buchanan presidency, but within the scope of what one would expect for a few lines from someone whose main expertise is not those things.

Leonie Swann, Big Bad Wool. This is the sequel to Three Bags Full, and it is another sheep-centered mystery novel that stays in semi-realistic sheep perspective (except in the places where it goes into goat perspective this time! there are goats!). If you had fun with the first one, this will also be fun; if not, probably start with the first one, because it does have references to prior events. I really appreciate the sheep having sheep-centered theories, it's a good exercise in perspective.

Nghi Vo, A Mouthful of Dust. Discussed elsewhere.

Faith Wallis, ed., Medieval Medicine: A Reader. This is a compendium of translated documents from the period, with very small amounts of commentary between for context. If you want to know how to examine a patient's urine or what humors linen enhances, this is the book for you. Also if you want a window into how people thought of bodies and health over this long and diverse period. I think it's probably going to be more useful to have as a reference than to read straight through, but I did in fact read the whole thing this once (which I hope will help with my sense of what to check back on when using it as a reference).

Martha Wells, Queen Demon. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

I love planetary settlement novels, and I love alien communication novels, and Cam has given us both. When John Maraintha arrives on the planet Scythia, he has no particular intentions toward its inhabitants. It was never his intention to be there, and now that he is, he expects to serve as a doctor for the colonists. But he's simultaneously shut out of some parts of Scythian society and drawn into the puzzle of its sentient species and their communications. Their life cycles are so different from humans', but surely this gap can be bridged with goodwill and hard work, even in the scrubby high desert that serves as home for human and alien alike?

Science fiction famously touts itself as the literature of alienation; Cameron actually delivers on that here in ways that a lot of the genre is not even trying to do. The layers of alienation--and the layers of connection that can be found between them--are varied and complicated. This book is gentle and subtle, even though there are scenes were John's medical training is put to its bloodiest use. If you're tired of mid-air punching battles as the climax of far too many things, the very personal and very cultural staged climax of What We Are Seeking will be a canteen of water for you in this arid time. Gender, relationship, reproduction, and love mix and mingle in their various forms, some familiar and some new. I expect to be talking about this one for a long time after, and I can't wait for you to be able to join me in that.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not a stand-alone book. It's a close sequel to Witch King, and the characters and their situation are more thoroughly introduced in that volume. Unless you're a forgetful reader or specifically like to reread whole series when new installments come out, I think Wells gives you enough grounding to just pick this one up, but not enough for this to stand alone--it's not intended to.

If I had had to pick the title of this book, the word "alliances" would have figured heavily in it. I get that the two titles pair well this way, but this is a book substantially about dealing with one's allies--the ones who are definitely, definitely not friends as well as the ones Kai loves dearly who are not actually as reliable as he might have hoped. The other enemies of Hierarchy are not all immediately eager to team up with an actual demon; some of them require convincing that the enemy of their enemy really is their friend (VALID, because that is not a universally true thing). And of course Kai's own nearest and dearest are growing as people and have the growing pains associated with that. If you enjoyed Witch King, you're in for a treat as this is very much a continuation of all the things it was doing.