lottpoet's 2015 reading

This is my 2nd year in the 75 Books Challenge. In 2014, I read 76 books, a new high. I was pleased with the diversity and the quality of the books I read. Last year, for the first time, the number of literary fiction reads surpassed the number of science fiction and fantasy reads. I was feeling sff starved and now the numbers bear it out. I definitely want to try to have a better balance between the two this year.

My favorite reads from last year:

1. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
3. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
4. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
6. The Likeness by Tana French
7. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
8. The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson
9. The Year the Music Changed by Diane Thomas
10. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

2014's thread

Last year the touchstones stopped working in the post with my list of books read when I got close to 75 books. I thought maybe it was too big. Hopefully, splitting into up will work this year.

Books I've completed Jan.-June 2015 (favorites are bolded):

1. Tainaron by Leena Krohn, trans. Hildi Hawkins, 10/27/2014-1/3/2015
2. Nothing, Nobody by Elena Poniatowska, trans. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt, Arthur Schmidt, 10/23/2014-1/12/2015
3. The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, 8/21/2014-9/30/2014, 1/5/2015-1/28/2015
4. The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan, 11/13/2014-1/29/2015
5. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, 12/16/2014-12/31/2014, 2/1/2015
6. The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman, 2/9/2015-2/12/2015
7. The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon, 1/28/2015-2/18/2015
8. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, 2/23/2015-2/25/2015
9. The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, 6/23/2014-6/27/2014, 2/26/2015-3/3/2015
10. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, 3/1/2015-3/8/2015
11. Science Fiction: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition, ed. Rich Horton, 8/13/2012-8/15/2012, 3/9/2015-3/12/2015
12. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, 1/31/2015-3/14/2015
13. Blindsight by Peter Watts, a re-read, 1/20/2015-3/14/2015
14. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, 2/19/2015-3/17/2015
15. Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, 12/23/2014-3/18/2015
16. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, 2/11/2015-2/18/2015, 3/13/2015-4/4/2015
17. Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, trans. Andrew Bromfield, 2/26/2015-4/11/2015
18. Lexicon by Max Barry, 3/16/2015-4/12/2015
19. Beneath the Vaulted Hills by Sean Russell, 2/26/2015-4/15/2015
20. Echopraxia by Peter Watts, 3/19/2015-4/18/2015
21. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, 1/30/2014-2/12/2014, 11/15/2014-4/23/2015
22. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, 4/23/2015-4/28/2015
23. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan, 4/17/2015-5/4/2015
24. Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo, 4/28/2015-5/9/2015
25. Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee, 4/15/2015-5/16/2015
26. Treason by Orson Scott Card, 4/20/2015-5/21/2015
27. Anthem (collapsing) by Douglas Kearney, 5/23/2015
28. Consolation for Beggars by Antony Oldknow, 5/24/2015-5/29/2015
29. Enchantment by Orson Scott Card, 4/18/2015-6/1/2015
30. Looking for Jake by China Mieville, 4/20/2015-6/2/2015
31. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, 1/30/2014-2/13/2014, 5/16/2015-6/4/2015
32. Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady, 6/5/2014
33. The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson, 4/21/2015-6/5/2015
34. Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes, 5/31/2015-6/8/2015
35. Vice by Ai, 6/9/2015-6/17/2015
36. Communion by Primus St. John, 6/11/2015-6/28/2015

Books I've completed July-Dec. 2015

37. Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, 6/6/2015-7/4/2015
38. The Hidden City by Michelle West, 2/4/2015-2/8/2015, 6/26/2015-7/20/2015
39. Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, 6/30/2015-7/21/2015
40. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 8/11/2015-8/15/2015
41. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, a re-read, 6/24/2015-8/16/2015
42. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, 8/14/2015-8/24/2015
43. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, trans. John Bester, 8/11/2015-9/11/2015
44. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, 8/18/2015-9/11/2015
45. Sunshine by Robin McKinley, a re-read, 8/22/2015-9/17/2015
46. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling, a re-read, 9/18/2015-10/4/2015
47. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, 9/9/2015-10/11/2015
48. Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, 9/26/2015-10/15/2015
49. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, 9/13/2015-10/18/2015
50. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling, a re-read, 10/14/2015-10/23/2015
51. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling, a re-read 10/28/2015-11/10/2015
52. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson, 11/12/2015-11/14/2015
53. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, 9/26/2015-11/15/2015
54. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, a re-read, 11/12/2015-12/1/2015
55 & 56. The Inferno from The Divine Comedy by Dante, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, illus. Gustav Dore, trans. Clive James, 8/18/2014-10/20/2014 (James), 1/30/2015-3/16/2015 (Longfellow), 9/27/2015-12/12/2015 (James, Longfellow)
57. Hollywood Be Thy Name by Cass Warner Sperling, Cork Millner, 11/13/2015-12/22/2015

Books I gave up on in 2015:

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly, about 330 pages in (out of about 470)
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, ed. Jack Zipes, about 600 pages in (out of about 730)
Wool by Hugh Howey, about 140 pages in (out of about 510)
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, about 410 pages in (out of about 640 pages)
Children's Attention by Valerie Hess, about 20 pages in (out of about 40 pages)
Foundling by D.M. Cornish, about 160 pages in ( out of about 312 pages)
The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston, about 240 pages in (out of about 290 pages)
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, about 130 pages in (out of about 380 pages)
Shroud of the Gnome by James Tate, about 50 pages in (out of about 70 pages)
Timescape by Gregory Benford, about 80 pages in (out of about 370 pages)
Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant, about 130 pages in (out of about 270 pages)
Interviews with Black Writers, ed. John O'Brien, about 60 pages in (out of about 270 pages)
Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber, about 130 pages in (out of about 360 pages)
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, about 50 pages in (out of about 160 pages)
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, about 200 pages in (out of about 500 pages)

Books I'm Reading Right Now:

The Return of Simple by Langston Hughes
Working by Studs Terkel
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip, a re-read?
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling, a re-read
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Books I Might Read Next:

Welcome back!

If you are reading more SF&F this year, I'll be checking in regularly!

Thanks for visiting. I will do my best with the SFF reading this year. I still have to get around to visit the new 2015 threads. I wasn't even ready to make mine yet, but I finished a book, so. Perhaps this year I'll be able to do more than lurk. Ronincats, I've been admiring your pottery and jewelry. I have some of the necklaces saved on my favorites page.

I generally enjoy John Connolly, and I look forward to reading his books. What was it that you didn't like about Every Dead Thing?
(I'm asking in order to get an idea whether to keep away from it or not)

>10 kaystj: It was my first John Connolly. I wavered throughout between finding it engrossing and finding it too convoluted. I stuck with it as long as I did because of Louis & Angel. I was intrigued by them. Mostly, the book was extraordinarily gruesome and violent without enough counterbalance, for me, or a shorter length. I actually dropped it several times within the span of a month but kept coming back to give it another try. It's hard because later books in the series sound great. So, it's no at this time to this particular book but I'm totally willing to try another book by him and even another book in this series.

1. Tainaron by Leena Krohn, trans. Hildi Hawkings

This is a slender epistolary novel from a Finnish writer. The main character is in exile of some sort in a foreign land that is insectile. She is writing letters home to an old lover or partner telling about the strange land and reminiscing about home. We only ever get her letters in the text. The city and its inhabitants and her adventures are quite clearly meant to be metaphorical or fable-like. At first, I was a bit queasy at the insect stuff, even as I was taken with the spare evocation of the land. It's a feat to have letters that tell all about the city of Tainaron without telling all about it. I liked the ellipses in the book; it made me think of poetry. I read this book slowly, just a letter or two a day. Then, about 2/3 through, I decided I had enough and withdrew it from my LibraryThing library and put it in the bookstore pile. Only, I couldn't stop thinking about it, about the characters, insect and human. I had become emotionally invested. In picking it back up, and even in talking about it here, I noticed that most of the gaps in knowledge are about the main character. Why was she in that city? How did she get there? What happened with the person she's writing to, with their relationship? Why won't she leave? What's keeping her in Tainaron? She definitely seems in a state of flux or reassessment, in an interlude before settling on what comes next. I enjoyed the book greatly and have saved it for later re-reading.

4/5 stars

2. Nothing Nobody by Elena Poniatowska, trans. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt, Arthur Schmidt

If this book were a movie, it would be a documentary. The subtitle is 'The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake.' The material, collected soon after the earthquake, was distressing, heartbreaking, moving, visceral. The presentation, for me, was a great hindrance. I get that putting the book out quickly after the earthquake was a priority, but Temple University published it more than five years after its original publication. I'm not sure why they didn't edit its layout further? Perhaps they wanted Americans to experience the book as the Mexicans did, without further intermediary forces? Typefaces, spacing, uniformity of quote marks and headers, all would have been a great help to me. From paragraph to paragraph, section to section, it was difficult for me to know who was speaking about whom. In the end I'm somewhat glad I read it. It was informative and powerful. But it's hard for me to separate out my struggles with format from my enjoyment of the text.

3.5/5 stars

No book bullets yet, although your first book definitely sounds...interesting!

3. The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

This book's plot had a mix of things I enjoy and things I do not. I love a good first-contact story and a sort of secret-history story, a this-is-how-things-really-are discovery story. I don't really care for rebel stories/uprisings/revolt--I find them too tense and misery-filled. Paige has huge psychic powers which she uses for an underworld syndicate who have become a sort of family to her. Early in the book, she is abducted by other psychics and, it turns out, other beings into an abusive prison camp with a brutal hierarchy. There was a plot reason for the interweaving of past scenes in her underworld with the current events, and even a logistical reason because we need to know more about what sort of world Paige is escaping back to. But knowing that still didn't help me resolve how I felt about that structure, which is that it was distancing and distracting. I couldn't really feel why she was so close and protective of her underworld crew.

Here is a book I felt was ill-served by its first-person narration. I find first-person narration most acceptable when there is a quite distinct voice whose mode of narration is a key part of the story, or, a cheat, I suppose, pretty much invisible (sort of a third-person where the author goes in and changes all the he/she pronouns to I). This book's narration had too, too much awkward verbiage on interior mood and reasoning, and exterior tracking, in a way that felt obligatory rather than organic. People don't 'think' like that, even given the artifice and tidying of novel-making.

I sound like I didn't like the book, but I did, quite a bit. I found it page-turning and emotionally involving. Warden was my favorite character, partly because he's such a cypher. I couldn't make sense of why the world worked the way it did in this story, the reasoning behind stuff, but I did enjoy that it was such a complete world to itself. It felt mysterious and alien. I was excited to discover there would be seven books in the series because I'd love to spread out in this world and learn more and more about it.

4/5 stars

Edited yesterday (3/11) to re-order text for a smoother, hopefully more logical flow. Minimal content change.

Edited today (3/12) to add a star rating.

4. The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

I enjoyed this much more than The Lightning Thief. The kids are older and the story felt smoother, less episodic. I liked the use of the mystery of Jason's origins/back story. He's quite clearly being used for something by someone(s). So, of course, he's suspicious and, understandably, he has a lot of feelings about his plight and his lack of self-knowledge. Leo was a fun character, and his magical tool belt, rapport with machinery and gadgets, and love of the dragon were all endearing. I felt sorry for Piper and her yearning for a closer relationship with her father. This was a story where I really didn't mind the rotating POVs. I have a few quibbles with the book. Some of the presentation of characterization was a bit wobbly, the super-earnestness feeling like a shortcut to characterization, its depth feeling unearned. I felt more of a sense of jeopardy than I did with The Lightning Thief, but over the course of this book the scenes of danger still settled into a pattern, one of overwhelming odds overcome by a character's discovery of an un-/under-tapped strength or power leading to or from character growth. So, even though those scenes made me tense, I was also annoyed that I knew they would all come out OK. I will definitely read the next book in the series. And, hearing talk of the Titan War made me want to go back to the original Percy Jackson series which I've decided to follow in graphic novel format. Plus there were cool monsters in this book, which I've learned over the past year can be a huge draw for me.

4/5 stars

5. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

I knew this was a true story involving Hurricane Katrina. I was prepared for corruption, agencies working at cross purposes, chaos and confusion. I was not prepared for Homeland Security's and profiling and unlawful detainment. I came into this just wanting to try some Dave Eggers. I got What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in addition to this book last year. I had tried What is the What previously and been baffled by it. I didn't think it was actually nonfiction. I thought it was fiction being meta, but I suppose it really is nonfiction. I continued to bounce off the text, engaged by some of the material from Sudan, but completely turned off by the slower moving current frame of the story. I abandoned that book and at the end of the year came around to this one. Such a difference! I found the writing smooth and welcoming, easygoing. The lead-up to Katrina was frightening enough. That would have been a gripping and enlightening story to me. But there was more, disturbingly much more. I kept this book because I will definitely want to re-read it. I appreciated the way the author wove in background stories to really make the people come alive and to add resonance to a story that all ready had so much propulsion to it. I was pretty impressed so I'm looking forward to reading more by Eggers.

4/5 stars

6. The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman

Lots of creatures and entities trying to persuade, bribe and/or threaten Morpheus to hand over the recently vacated Hell to them. Which should be really awesome and was. But. I couldn't settle down into it because I was trying to figure out what Lucifer really, really had in mind. What's his plan really? Apparently, it was this simple, powerful, but simple. Morpheus's other problem, the original one that brought about all this Hell stuff, is righting the (egregious) wrong he done his woman. Well, the woman who wouldn't be his woman. I found the conclusion to the Hell part of the story pretty satisfying, but when the woman's story concluded I felt annoyed, as if I was supposed to be giving Morpheus loads of credit for personal growth that I wasn't feeling. Still, this volume is the one that's come closest for me so far to the highs of The Sandman: Brief Lives.

4/5 stars

7. The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon

This second book picks up the scene right where we left it at the end of the first book. Paige, having escaped the prison camp back into her old world, has to adjust her relationship with her underworld crew's leader (some of it is because of re-assessment/re-thinking she did in the camp, some of it is their disagreement over how involved to get in the wider world she discovered in the camp), figure out how to spread the word about all the knowledge she gained in the prison camp, keep herself and her fellow escapees hidden and safe, pretty much reconstruct her world along new lines. She's got a lot of stuff to figure out so I should be more forgiving of the interiority of the first person mechanism, but I still find it unconvincing. I had not realized in the first book how high up she was in her underworld crew. I got that her psychic ability, their power and their type, made her very valuable to them. I did not realize she was second in command. It was hard to believe from how she behaved in this book. She doesn't seem very tough or savvy. Again and again she blunders into trouble, which maybe I could attribute to her recovering from the dire events of the first book and having so much on her plate, but it's even how she got caught in the first book and shipped to the prison camp. She knew the trains were generally unsafe, she knew they were under extra monitoring, she had access to a ride, but she decides not to call for it/wait because, something?, it'll all be OK? For me, she doesn't act scared or cautious or paranoid enough, but she doesn't have the swagger or bravado that I would think of as the flip side. The action of this book felt scattered, haphazard. There was not enough Warden. I'm not even sure I want a romance, but I am interested in how the Rephaim and the voyants will come to a sort of equilibrium. How can they when the one needs to feed on the other? I'm also interested in the back story of the Rephaim, the Emim, and how that all relates to humanity. We got some history from Warden but it still leaves me with many questions. I loved learning more about the world of this book however the roughness of the writing and the plotting left me underwhelmed. It feels like a wasted opportunity. Seven books is a lot, but there are only five more left. I want everything tight and every event related to the bigger whole, and, more than anything, I want to feel the author's authority/masterfulness. I want to feel like I'm in the best hands for the journey, that it'll be deliciously worth it in the end, but I'm not getting that so far.

3.5/5 stars

8. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I enjoyed this short novel well enough. The best part was how deeply into a young child's viewpoint we went. I don't have much to say about it because I felt indifferent to most of it: admiring its craft & the deep POV, creeped out by the middle third, cogitating mildly on the mythic and psychological resonances of the tale. And then it was done. I think I would have preferred it as a short story.

4/5 stars

Over a week long staycation, I watched a couple of movies based on recent reads. The first was Stardust. I read the text only version of Stardust so I don't have any idea how close the visuals of the illustrated edition and the movie are. The film parts that were set in Wall felt very close to our historical world (mid- to late-1800s/early 1900s?) in a way I don't remember in the book. The star, I was glad to see, had attitude and spirit, although not nearly as much as she did in the book. The heirs who were murdering each over for the throne were entertaining, the witch sisters. Things were clever and close enough to the book to appeal. I was having a pleasant if forgettable experience until the pirates showed up. At first, I really wanted to be offended (by the sensitive & effeminate pirate, by the sort of alter-cliche of the tough guy who's covering his entirely opposite interior) or annoyed (why this change from the text, am I supposed to find this funny (cheap laughs)), but I ended up finding them all very sweet but pleasingly off-kilter. The movie was clever and decently done, the pirates elevated it another half star for me.

4/5 stars

The other movie sort of based on a recent read was Twilight. I finished up the series last year, but I originally read Twilight years ago. I figured I'd see the movies in order, as much as I could stomach. I was actually interested in seeing the car crash from Twilight as I thought it could look spectacular (I remember thinking that when I first read it, before there were any movies). Alas, it was a wasted opportunity. Also, the Cullens were ridiculously un-human looking in the movie. I suppose it's true in the books as well, I remember lots of descriptions of their ivory and marble skin. I was glad to see what looked like color-blind casting for the secondary characters (Bella's human high school friends, the vampire interlopers). (It is possible the books were so subtle about the race of those characters that I just assumed they were all white.)

The movie had a strange look to it. It took me half-way through to put my finger on it. But it looked like a horror movie, one of those ones where the human killer is some loner on the outskirts of town, and people keep disappearing and everyone seems to obliviously carry on with their frolicking, especially the teens. There were lots of nature shots that were filmed very clearly like a no-frills documentary (no artful blurs or skewed angels or lens flares or dramatic lighting). I'm guessing it was a way of poking a little fun at the story or the idea of the story, in a good-natured way. Because I saw other things like that too in the movie. The scene where the Cullens are introduced to the viewers (and Bella) when they come in to the cafeteria was so over the top dramatic, slow-mo, flipping of perfect vampire hair, a running commentary from Bella's new friend that you can tell the vampires can overhear by their smirks, and the paired-off Cullens (with jokes about that being vaguely incestuous) leaving a straggling lone Edward to catch Bella's eye, I cackled throughout it.

Nobody looked like I thought they would but the Cullens physical appearance grew on me quite quickly. I definitely felt in the movie how close Carlisle and Esmee were, their coupleness caught very comfortably and with ease on the screen, that was very different from the book. Rosalie was the best, her soreness over Bella, especially, but Edward, too, able to go beyond the book's brattiness or sulkiness to point up what the movie does, that the whole thing is utterly ridiculous. He's in love with Bella because she smells overwhelmingly delicious! But, of course, from Edward's and Bella's perspectives it's more than that and the movie allows for that too. Lots of long looks and assessments that are not exactly making eyes at each other, at least not only. It was enough to get at the strangeness of the situation. I was very impressed with how the movie was able to exteriorize Bella's intense interior.

It all made for a a pretty decent translating of the text to the screen. The small elisions, the re-arranging and re-combining of scenes, I think they made for a nice whole story just as effective as the book. The first movie was the only one streaming on nextflix so I have to wait to receive discs of the others, which will be a while. I think it sounds like I enjoyed the movie a great deal and was pretty satisfied. Which I was but also wasn't. I really wanted a more artful attempt, something that could stand side by side with the intensity of the experience of the book, at least as I experienced it. I know something that went for art first over fidelity would have displeased many fans. But this movie adaptation left me feeling like it was too cautious.

3.5/5 stars.

9. The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

I loved the idea of this book but I really didn't like the execution of it. I found people's behavior, including the main character's, cryptic, such that when a scene in the middle of the book which, like the movie The Thing, has an antagonistic entity that has probably taken over the body of one of their team, I suspected every single person, with some relief, I must say, because it actually explained their strange behavior. (No, everyone was not compromised, most of them were just behaving strangely I guess, because that's what people did in this book.) There was way, way too much jargon for my liking. I kept reading because I kept thinking, I should love this. What I wanted from the premise was something along the lines of Neil Gaiman's "Cold Colors," something book familiar and strange that riffed on 'the way things are heading' but played it pretty straight. I think the tone of this book was broader than I find satisfying. The last story, a simpler scenario, more self-contained (although bringing together loose threads from the previously two longer stories) and subdued, was more to my liking (except for the stereotypical roles of the women characters), enough so I considered reading the next book in the series. This is the second Stross I've tried. (The other was Accelerando which I didn't quite finish.) His books completely sound like my sort of thing but the dense techno-talk of the texts and the skewed characterizations (not necessarily that the characterization is poor, but that he chooses to focus on characters that are so far off the typical curve) are off-putting to me. I had the highest hopes for this book, but I'll try a few more of his before I give up completely.

3/5 stars

>23 lottpoet: You and me both. I still haven't found a Stross I really get immersed in.

10. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I have no idea why I bought this one as I'm much more interested in the subject matter of his Blink. I did enjoy this, much more than I expected. I liked seeing the different organizations try stuff that sounds like it ought to work and probing why it didn't. I especially remember Sesame Street's story. Mainly I ended thinking Malcolm Gladwell was a great fella. Somehow he is able to get across in his writing warmth, genuine interest, his very humanness. Even when I quibbled or outright disagreed with some of his ideas, I just wanted him to tell me more because I just wanted to spend more time with him.

4/5 stars

11. Science Fiction: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition, ed. Rich Horton

Way back in 2012, I checked this book out of the library. I managed to read about half before it was due back. Here in 2015, I couldn't figure out why I had it marked as something I wanted to pick up again to finish. With the book in my hands, I immediately saw it was because of Susan Palwick's "The Fate of Mice." I loved that story so much, it made the whole book golden in my memory.

"The Fate of Mice" follows a mouse who's been experimented upon to increase his intelligence and give him the power of speech. It also follows, often indirectly, a little girl who's stuck in the middle of a messy divorce. Her father is the experimenter on the mouse and because he buries himself in his work and has trouble connecting with his daughter, and because, much like Henry James' What Maisie Knew, the parents seem to spend a lot of time finding the least opportune time to foist the child onto the other parent, the girl spends a lot of time in the lab. The mouse and the girl become friends, giving each other advice and exchanging knowledge. The mouse seems to have a sort of racial memory, somehow knowing the outline of many mouse-featuring fairy tales and stories, claiming that he dreams them. This leads to, of course, Flowers for Algernon, which the mouse does not know the ending of. If I remember rightly he looks to that mouse as a model for himself. The girl does not know the story, but she guilts her mother into getting the book for her so she can discover how the story ends. Things come to a crisis between parents as the troubled girl under that pressure and her fears for the mouse's fate, frees him from his cage. I found the story subtle, with a lot of levels to it and few certainties. I also found the mouse's crisis heartbreaking, learning all in the same moment about death, the certainty of his death (if not necessarily it's method), and the restrictions and seediness of his world, and the dangers of the world outside the lab (cats, mouse traps). Poor thing. I also felt for the girl and liked the echoes between mouse and girl without going for a one-to-one correlation. The sense of foreboding at the end has stuck with me.

The rest of the stories, except for the first 2/5 of Alastair Reynold's "Understanding Space and Time", ended up underwhelming me. Reynold's story of the last survivor on a Mars colony that will not see re-supply from Earth because of population and infrastructure depletion from a catastrophe (I can't remember if it's biological or nuclear?) was moving and intriguing and mysterious, and then the aliens showed up. It was still good, but a lot of the wonder was deflated for me, replaced by philosophical meanderings.

I was glad to be returning this book back to the library. Looking forward to reading more Palwick, though. I think I have The Necessary Beggar. I'll have to look out for the collection The Fate of Mice.

3/5 stars

>17 lottpoet: Just found your thread - adding this to the wishlist, sounds like something I'd enjoy reading (although 'enjoy' sounds like the wrong term given the subject matter).

>27 charl08: I did enjoy it even when I was horrified and disturbed and outraged. I've kept it in order to re-read it at some point.

12. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

I had a hard time getting into this book. I held The Little Stranger against Sarah Waters. I really, really didn't like that one, the only other Waters I had read. I also am not fond of gritty stories of low-level criminals. Once Sue got to Briar and the con began in earnest, I was hooked. Even though, since I knew it was a con, I didn't trust any of those involved. I was still unprepared for the twists and turns of the plot, partly because I underestimated the scope of the con, including the number of players. The novel is divided into roughly thirds with a point of view switch at each section break. I loved the first section. It was where I thought I fell in the love with the story, mainly because the con gets complicated as the participants get to know each other. It was a real challenge to continue on after that first, most shocking plot twist that ends section 1. I also had a hard time adjusting to a new viewpoint as I was invested in Sue's. I put the book down for about a week, but curiosity got me back and also thinking that there's more than half the book left, surely there'll be more chances for things to right themselves. The second section is where I really fell in love with the book. There is a revisiting of events from the first section so that we can see how differently things look now that we know more (and are more cautious about thinking we know it all). We also get a chance to see how viewpoint effects interpretation. I loved how devious they all were. But I also began to feel very sorry for both young women and the lives they got stuck with. Another section break (the final), another plot twist. Again, I had a hard time keeping myself engaged in the story. This was the toughest section of all for me. There was little in it I liked, though it was all necessary and part of the plot whole. I was wondering if it was a mistake to give my heart to this book, and then we get the ending scene. I cried my eyes out, understood better the shape of the book and what it was really about. A love story in the midst of a con story (which is all about distrust and gaining trust under false circumstances), pretty impressive, and sad. I'm so ridiculously pleased with this book. Maybe I'm ready to forgive Sarah Waters for The Little Stranger. I certainly feel ready to tackle more of her books.

4.5/5 stars

13. Blindsight by Peter Watts

I originally read this in 2008. I remember how giddy I was about it, declaring it the best read of the year when the year wasn't quite half over yet. It is hard science fiction, and I was very concerned I wouldn't understand it. But it's a first contact story, and there are vampires, two of my great loves. When I originally finished the book, I wanted to flip straight back to the beginning and read it again, but I restrained myself. In the several years since, I've thought fondly of it, but I've been afraid to give it a re-read--perhaps the wonder of it was mainly in the initial discovery, maybe it wouldn't hold up to a re-read. Then I learned of Echopraxia at the end of last year. I mean, I had heard the book was out, but I hadn't heard that it was a sequel to Blindsight. So, I picked up Blindsight this year in anticipation of reading the follow-up. Seriously, the night I decided I would re-read it and I put it in my bookbag for the commute the next morning, I could barely sleep that night, I was so excited.

I enjoyed this re-read so much, almost as much as the original reading. It was the perfect combination of things remembered to look forward to, forgotten plot twists, and more scientific ease with familiarity (I'd already done the work of understanding the science the first time around so I could concentrate more on the themes of the story). The first time I read it, I thought it had a slow start. I just wanted to get to the aliens, all ready. I didn't find that this time, as there is so much character development and society set-up that are just as important as the unknown aliens. I gave it a calmer, more measured read this time, and I thought the work stood up to it: rich, nuanced, intellectually satisfying, emotionally appealing. You take the things I find appealing (alien aliens! vampires!) and combine them with ruminations on what makes us who we are, how what the brain perceives is and is not reality, can there be a hierarchy of sentience with the most 'evolved' being the best/top? I'm in love all over again.

5/5 stars

Hello all,

Last year for the first time in my working life, I only worked one job. I took a year's sabbatical from my day job and focused on my writing. Well, the money ran out and right about the time I stopped posting here, I went back to a day job with a long commute. You may not be able to tell, but I spend a lot of time on my posts here. At least a half hour per. Also, my computer's dying and most browsers crash my computer, so I don't mind puttering about online (reading other threads, organizing my library), but I haven't wanted to do anything I'd be too invested in. Those are my excuses for my absence. None of that stuff has changed, but I'm determined to try to get back into the swing of things here. There's probably no way I'm going to completely catch up. I'll just get as far as I can.

14. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I got stuck on this review just before going back to my day job. All I wanted to do was figure out how to make an emoticon heart and just type line after line of them. My niece said that's not a review. And I said, I know, that's why there's no review up yet. With a little distance and having read the second book and gotten a good start on the third, I might have a bit more to say.

I got this book from last year's SantaThing because there was extra money after the books my Santa chose. I had seen all the chatter around about this book, and all the awards it was winning, but space operas can be difficult for me, so I figured, it's probably a great book, but it's not for me. I'm so glad this book was thrust before me. Within a few pages, I was hooked and quite frightened. I thought for sure that all that I loved could not be sustained. The world was strange and not everything was explained. We're dropped in the middle of things. But I think what I most admired about the opening, was how quickly clear it was that the viewpoint character is not like you or I. She seems much colder yet more passionate, driven I suppose (this is a story of revenge). She is also not like most of the people she meets in the book. For once, the excessive interiority of a first-person narration makes complete sense. It makes sense for how she communicated and operated when she was a part of the larger organism of her ship, and it makes sense because she's constantly having to assess people's response to her and adjust her behavior because she's trying to pass/hide what she truly is. I won't say it doesn't go overboard a time or three. But for all I get, I'll take it.

Is a plot summation needed? I don't know, it didn't sell me on the book, but I'll try. The main character was an ancillary of a ship called Justice of Toren. The name she's hiding under when the book opens is Breq. The ship was part of a fleet of a vast interstellar empire, a bit like the Roman empire, that functions by expansion, conquering and colonization. When they annex a planet, they cart off some of the most troublesome folk and make examples of them by linking them up to be the eyes, arms, ears, etc. of various ships. This act of making them into ancillaries overwrites or alters the original personality in a painful and pretty brutal way (the person must be conscious for the procedure), and in the end they are just one of many somewhat disposable parts of the ship. The novel takes place some time after the leader of the empire has decided to stop annexations and focus on the integrity of the empire as it stands. Partly this is because they've finally met a species that ripped them apart for fun until the empire managed to work out a treaty with these aliens. Partly the empire is so big that it's exceedingly difficult to manage. There are other reasons but those are spoilers. No more annexations means no more ancillaries. And that means more conventionally living soldiers. It also means citizens coming to terms with the new state of an empire that has been expanding for thousands of years. What should be their mission? Where does each individual fit? How will their borders be protected? (The reason always given for annexations.) The main character's ship was destroyed before the book opens, under mysterious circumstances, and, unknown to any, she is the only survivor.

The book splits its narrative between the present day vengeance story and the past inciting incident (what she is trying to avenge). For me, the split worked perfectly. The present day stuff is not within the empire which is how Breq can stay in hiding. The empire has a vast interconnected set of AIs that keep an eye on everything, including your autonomic functions, while maintaining, say, a space station, or a ship. It is through the past that we can see how the empire fuctions, including some of its history and philosophy. There's even something in the first page, the first paragraph, that lets us know that we will be dealing with the past as well as the present, that it will all matter greatly: Breq stumbles upon someone from her deep past, Seivarden, who shouldn't be alive, just as she shouldn't be. I found the events from the past added a sense of dread and horror to the present events because it was all being revealed as much worse than what I had originally surmised. In the past scenes, the author does a really good job of showing a bit of what it's like to be an ancillary, to be a part of a ship, without being confusing or alienating. Vengeance stories can be tricky to maintain sympathy for the avenging character. These scenes from the past helped me see how much wrong had been done (instead of knowing it with the character in the present, I got to experience it in the past moment). They helped maintain a good balance of perspectives: Justice of Toren One Esk in the past, Breq today.

I talked about being scared at the start, that it couldn't be this good all the way through, that it'd turn conventional, comfortable or, honestly, just blah. So, what I did on first read: I read the first few pages several times before moving forward. That was my progress through the book. I'd move forward, but I'd keep circling back to re-read. I think I couldn't believe how awesome it was and needed to reassure myself, but also I think I needed processing time, I needed to linger with the story, in the world of the story, with the characters. I'll still, every few weeks, sit down to re-read a section and end up re-reading half the book. I've never felt the urge to write fan fiction. But it's what I do with this book in my head. I make up stories where I'm Seivarden and I get to love Breq. I feel foolish saying it, but you'll notice I haven't marked another book as a favorite since I read Ancillary Justice. Just writing out my thoughts, such as they are, my heart feels bursting with love and I have a silly grin on my face. I still need to learn how to make those hearts.

4.5/5 stars

15. Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

I have this very odd relationship with Gaiman's stories (short stories, novels, graphic novels). Most don't connect with me, but when they do I'm enraptured. When they don't connect with me, I'm not indifferent or disappointed, I'm super annoyed, I'm, like, affronted, taking it all quite personally. I spent a goodly portion of this book being 'affronted.' I'll focus on the few stories that wowed me.

I had read "Troll Bridge" ages ago, in a Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Actually, I think it was probably my first solo Gaiman. I have a love-hate thing with retold fairy tales where I crave good ones but find so many to be ordinary/conventional, they don't take risks and they have nothing new to say. This is one of the good ones. A retelling of the Three Billy Goats Gruff that takes into account the leeching of magic out of our everyday in the modern world. It also deals, profoundly, I would say, with the emptiness that many modern lives seem to encompass. Our lives are full of happenings, but they are paler, smaller, thinner than the space they take up. Re-reading this, I got to admire the horror but rightness of the end all over again, but I also got to notice how deeply disturbing the story is all the way through.

I enjoyed "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" for its bookish boy narrator. "Cold Colors" is presented as a poem, but I find it doesn't seem very poem-like to me. The rhythm of the lines is slack, there doesn't seem to be much effort to have the individual lines hold their own as units, and even the diction is more prosy. The line breaks are decent, especially with many of their following lines upending the expectations of the previous line, making us rethink the information given us. But I love the world of this piece. There is technology, like computers, but it seems to work by magic, with sacrifices and candles and chalked circles. There are pits opened to Hell where you can wave to suffering relatives. It's all strange and creepy, but presented by the narrator quite matter-of-factly.

My absolute favorite in the book was "Only the End of the World Again." It follows a werewolf whose narration is delightful, so weary and yet so yearning for relief (from his shapeshifting affliction? from the vagaries of life? from life itself?). People he comes across randomly give him advice on how to kill a werewolf or subdue it or stop a werewolf from manifesting. Oh, and it's all set in Innsmouth where the rising of the Deep Ones is more nigh than typical, and he seems to be a key, unwitting player. The best.

3/5 stars

16. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

I enjoyed this book well enough. I learned things. But, it was difficult to read how the brown people of the world seemed to consistently have huge geographic strikes against them, especially being a brown person myself. I felt very defensive reading this, even though he kept saying, it's nothing to do inherently with any of the races and all about what geography does or doesn't do for folk. I think I would have had a better time of it if there was one thing geographically, say, lack of domesticable animals. But as it was, there was a preponderance of things, which on the one hand began to seem like an apologist, grasping to find any explanation for European dominance, and on the other hand like The World itself is in league with Europe against everyone else. The talk of the axis orientation of the Americas being a problem was one thing too many for me to accept unreservedly. I thought the writing was fine and I'd read other stuff by him. As, I said, this one was just hard for me personally to engage with.

3.5/5 stars

17. Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, trans. Andrew Bromfield

This was a return to form of the first book. Philosopical ruminations that matter to how we, as well as the main character, weigh out the 'rightness' of the tactics of the Light Ones and the Dark Ones; machinations by the highest up of each organization, mostly to stop the other side from gaining any huge advantage, working furiously to maintain the stalemate; more examination of the day-to-day world of the Others and how power manifests and is deployed--those are the things I look for in these Watch books. I really didn't like Day Watch, the second book. I'm sure part of that is that we spent a good amount of time following, yes, a Dark One, but more importantly, not Anton. With this current book, I'm still disgruntled at how it's safe now for Anton to marry a woman now that her power's been downsized, but I did enjoy the stuff with his family and trying to raise up their daughter more freely than the higher-ups would prefer (she might be one of the most powerful Others, now, soon, later, or never, it's all a bit hazy), and Anton's good at constantly questioning everything, which in this case means 'lucking into' his wife and their relationship and her career potential (her batteries are slowly recharging). I liked Anton's questioning of staying a Light One and leaning a bit towards the Inquistion. I'm looking forward to the next book.

4/5 stars

18. Lexicon by Max Barry

I didn't know what to make of this book when I started reading it, or even remember how it got on my radar. I was a bit skeptical. But it's all about words and their power and uses and misuses. I'm bound to like that. Also, it's really about the power of love, for self and for others. It's got a wild, wacky extended opening sequence where a man is assaulted in a strange manner and taken hostage while people around him, including his girlfriend, start behaving bizarrely--he pretty much gets plunked down in the middle of a very odd spy novel or thriller. I spent the first chapter or two teetering between feeling vaguely offended and finding the shenanigans hilarious. Hilarity won out and I started being invested in trying to figure out why the world was behaving this way. A secret history of the world? I love it. It took me a little bit to realize that the warring factions were named after poets, although that's a fact destined to hook me, the poet. I liked the movement through time of the book where we keep getting chunks of narrative to show a sort of puzzle piece for the state of things in the opening of the book. I really enjoyed this book and have found that I grow more fond of it, the more I think of it after the fact. I'm definitely intrigued to read more by Max Barry.

4/5 stars

19. Beneath the Vaulted Hills by Sean Russell

What I enjoyed about this book was how unknowable and fearsome the final mage of the world is, and all the people trying to piece together legends and archaeology of a past mysterious event and its interconnectedness with a painter who may have been a seer/visionary. I love all of that. But then the book in the last third becomes obsessed with caving. Going down into the cave makes sense because that's where they will find the building from the painting that archaeologists have never been able to find. And it's a great tense spot to have all the parties who have an interest in confronting or dodging each other come together, especially because it's difficult terrain to navigate and it's really only set up for one group to go through at a time (there's a lake to cross which needs a boat). Also, there might be a mole in the group our main character, the first through the caves, is a part of. But, my god, the level of minutiae about caves and cavings and their tedious process through the cave, it's all too much for me. That's when all the magic was sucked out of the book for me. I started wondering about the mechanics of the book. Did the author do so much research for verisimilitude and then they wanted to use a lot of it, either to show they've done the work or because they themselves found it so fascinating? Did the author, randomly, just fall in love with caving in his day to day life and was giddy at being able to fit it in a book? Either way, I wanted to stay in the world of the book and not wonder about the making of the book. I was hoping to find out more about the relationship between the last mage and the main character, but maybe that's in the second book of this duology? I found the first 2/3 of this book exciting (even thought it is a slower, more contemplative book) and intriguing, but then fizzle.

3.5/5 stars

20. Echopraxia by Peter Watts

I enjoyed this follow-up to Blindsight, mostly for the antics of the vampire, Valerie. I do like when a band of misfit characters go jaunting off in their space ship to save or defend humanity. The main character that we follow has opted out of many of the implants and neural boosts that most people in the future get just to keep up for their jobs, much less fitting in with society in general. In that way, he's a good stand-in for the un-augmented reader. However, I had a really hard time with his attitude. He both feels sorry for himself, not being able to keep up with society, and is snobbish about his decision to be 'more natural.' It's realistic, a person feeling that way, but it's so annoying. I just wanted to keep reminding him that opting to go without implants is a *choice* he made. (I'm remembering the first book, where there were some augmentations that would not work on the main character there, no matter how much he may have wanted them.) It just seemed so arrogant to expect the world to be set up ideally for him, when there are so many different people in the world: it can never please all the people all the time.

He was however, a very good person to pair with Valerie, because she was his great deflator (and would be mine, too). Everyone else seemed pretty blase about having this minimally contained vampire on board, except for him. Of course, she takes a shine to him immediately, in the manner of a cat finding the mouse that will give her the most play. I found their interactions frightening and hilarious.

I can't say I understood much of the science in this one, or the alien, although part of that is the alien dealing pretty much in extreme stealth, shifting shape, mimicry, and impressive adaptability. I had to go online for help with the ending. (Well, I was really looking for help in the bigger picture, what it all meant, but deciphering the ending did help with that.) The story was a little bit of the 'there and back again' kind, with a trip off to space, terror and unknowability, and then back to the 'safety' of home. I liked it. I would re-read it. My biggest gripe with the book is that it tried really hard to suck a good bit of the enjoyment I got out of the first book by hinting quite strongly that all that stuff, you know, what you enjoyed, didn't really happen. It was well done, the clues presented and the re-evaluation with more information from the other end (from the world of this second book), but I don't have to like it.

4/5 stars

21. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

When I first tried reading this book last year, I got maybe 2/5 in and got very impatient. The writing was very strong, but I couldn't see what the point of the story was. I was in the middle of a million books and some had to go. I found I missed it when it was gone, so I picked it back up later in the year and read it a bit more slowly. This is a book that, once I relaxed, I enjoyed the actual process/act of reading it. I enjoyed discovering new things about the characters and their situations. I enjoyed learning new things about Trotsky and Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Mexico and the McCarthy era. The character work in this novel was extraordinary. I felt like I knew all these people by the end. I cared about them and worried about them. Some of that probably was carry over from the main character and his extreme introspection and his big heart, but that still gives major props to the author for bringing that main character and his perspective alive. Now I just want to read all of Kingsolver's book, to always be in the middle of a Kingsolver book. I will definitely be re-reading this book.

4/5 stars

22. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

This is the middle book of a trilogy and it very much felt like it. I think because the first book had such a strong through-line, a massive right to wrong (which realistically was not completely resolved), it's hard to figure out where things should go from there (where I as the reader would expect or like them to go). This book felt to me both like setting up for something to come and like we were a long way from a satisfactory-enough conclusion to the trilogy. I did enjoy reading it. I loved being back with Breq and Seivarden. And I even get a little of my misfits off in space thing because this ship, Mercy of Kalr, was originally captained by a person who couldn't let the idea of ancillaries go so she forced her crew to behave as ancillaries. This, of course, makes Breq uncomfortable, but since she hasn't been outed to most of the crew as a former ancillary she can do little about it. Besides, she has her hands full with other hazards, especially balancing between the Lord of Radch's factions and her (the Lord's) various allies. We do get to know the crew, if not as much as I would have liked because we spent so much time on the space station. Mercy of Kalr and Station are two more AIs we get to know. I am liking Mercy of Kalr almost as much as Breq and Seivarden. We also get a bit of the all-seeing eye via the ship because this ship, Mercy of Kalr, is a bit more openly close to her crew than would be typical of non-ancillaries, and the captain, Breq, has access to most of it even if she no longer can contain it all as she could when she too was a ship. I enjoyed it and was excited and nervous about the last book of the trilogy.

4/5 stars

Edited to fix pronoun slippage.

23. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan

It took me a little time to realize that this book's stories are set in the same small town with a few background characters recurring in different tales. I've read one other book by Kenan, the novel A Visitation of Spirits, which I enjoyed greatly. I find his fiction dense with telling details and complex character work. Each of these stories followed a different sort of character and told a different kind of story. We even get a sort of meta story at the end, the title story, that sort of attempts to explain this collection as an exercise in oral history and goes on to give more gathered history of the town and the 'author's family. Not all of the stories follow African American characters, but race is important to all of them: racism, bigotry, being black enough or light enough, how people of color deal with the oppression that pits them against each other. My favorite was "Cornsilk," a story that features incest but has a passionate voice that sells this disturbing and heartbreaking story. It was a story that felt raw and true. I also really appreciated the story, "This Far," about Booker T. Washington at the end of his life returning home for a brief visit and hoping, despite himself, for understanding and reconciliation. I thought the very first story, "Clarence and Dead," had a bit of a misstep with an Asian character who, similar to a Magical Negro character, was more of a Mystical Asian character than a person in their own right. I can sort of squint and see him as a figment of the main character's imagination, conjured out of his own ignorance, but I'm not convinced it's not an authorial stumble. The book works well as a whole, with enough variety yet enough thematically to tie it together. I will definitely re-read it.

4/5 stars

MAY BOOKS:

24. Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo
Another science fiction book by Russo with a very old-fashioned feel (which I enjoy!). This one is set on one of those generation ships where they've been migrating for so long they don't quite remember what their original mission was. It's a little unclear whether this ship was to seed an original colony to have freedom for their religion (sort of like the Puritans), or if they were meant for a sort of missionary work for their religion (what they ended up doing, although they haven't had landfall for awhile). Of course, there are lots of factions and politicking and struggles with the church and stir-craziness from not being planetside for such a long time. They find a planet which, upon initial exploration, is eerie and only gets more unsettling and mysterious as they look further. There ends up being an unknowable, stealthy alien, a trap, and a clever plan of escape. I didn't like this one as much as I like my other Russo, The Rosetta Codex. I was mostly impatient, and I didn't care for or about any of the characters. Mainly they seemed not very smart, even allowing for the distraction of their feuding and power plays. I also expected religion to be more important thematically to the story.
3.5/5 stars

25. Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
So very dated. This is the follow-up to Don't Bite the Sun, which was right up my alley in high school: a girl who is frustrated by society's hemming in and yearns for freedom to discover what she really wants. This book follows on with the girl having been chastised and brought back to this future society where humanity is taken care of by AIs and are required to have a protacted youth of debauchery and (sanctioned) deviltry. So, I say girl, but she's a young adult, probably. They all just read so much like hippies. I mostly didn't enjoy this one, although it had a vaguely satisfying ending.
3.5/5 stars

26. Treason by Orson Scott Card
Another disappointing return to a teenage favorite. I read the original novella called A Planet Called Treason which I enjoyed very much at the time. I've got it marked as an all-time favorite. This is the novel that was expanding from the novella. I really didn't like it. The philosophizing seemed so simplistic and ridiculous. And the way women were treated and looked upon, again and again, throughout the different societies. Ugh. This is a sort of a coming of age story masquerading as a planetary romance, or maybe vice versa. Now, I wonder if the original novella had these problems as well.
2.5/5 stars

27. Anthem (collapsing) by Douglas Kearney
A self-assembled, self-published poetry chapbook by a friend of mine. He was a graphic designer working with magazine and book publishers as his day job so the book, although made on the cheap via Kinko's, holds together well as an actual physical book with the appropriate gutters, margins, pagination, spacing of text, etc. I really appreciate that. As to the contents, his poems are very modern, influenced by rap and hip-hop, as well as more traditional literary influences like post-modernism and LANGUAGE poetry. They feature lots of word-play (both the look and sound of words) and extensive extended punning and rhyming. They are grounded in the urban, working-class and working poor African American experience. I enjoyed revisiting his poems (we took workshops together at the time of the composition of some of these works) and look forward to revisiting them in the future. I think of them as a little bit of a kinder, gentler Hermine Pinson or maybe Harryette Mullen, if that's helpful in placing his work.
4/5 stars

28. Consolation for Beggars by Antony Oldknow
This slender book of poetry has faded into the mists of memory. I gave it 3.5 stars, so I must have been all right with some of the poems.

JUNE BOOKS:

29. Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
A historical time-travel fantasy mashed up with a retelling or slight deconstruction of the story of Baba Yaga. I loved the foreignness of the historical setting and mindset. I liked the magic of Baba Yaga being explained by the beliefs about the magic of the world (how the world works, including succession) of the time period. We even get a reason for the house being on chicken feet from the clashing of the modern and historical time. I enjoyed this pretty well, mostly for the culture clashes of the time periods (especially between what the modern historian thinks he knows of the time period, even with its lacunas, and what is the reality/what he's misunderstood), even if I was a little unhappy with the old-fashioned, conventional feel of man-woman relations in the story.
4/5 stars

30. Looking for Jake by China Mieville
These stories mostly felt like horror stories with a smidge of fantasy. They were mostly too grim for me, and also too... overt about their messages. I got weary well before the end of the book.
3.5/5 stars

31. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
I didn't like this one as much as the first, although it was still very good. I definitely felt more at odds with Cromwell, perhaps purposefully so?, where I was like, you seriously don't believe what you're saying, dude, do you? and why are you doing this? Of course, I look forward to the next book.
4/5 stars

32. Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady
These poems are deceptively flat on the page. I've been to readings of his and he can really deliver his poems such that the little hairs stand up all over your body, so I was a little disappointed when I started this book because they just don't read like that. But I did got caught up in their more didactic nature, their telling. The conceit of the first part of book is that they are in the voice of the Black man who Susan Smith said kidnapped her children. It is my favorite part of the book, especially the poems with reactions to the fallout of all that with Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, etc. I will definitely revisit these poems.
4/5 stars

33. The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson
It took me awhile to warm up to these stories. I think their endings felt too abrupt and horror-tinged for me. Then I read his UFO abductee story, "The Observor," and he broke my heart. I wish I had left more time to talk about this collection as a whole, but especially this story. It gives a scientific explanation involving observor-effect and the nature of time for alien visitation. It also does a great job of validating the experience of intense anxiety and night terrors and a young girl's fraught experience just being in the world. I also really enjoyed "Plato's Mirror," another heartbreaker, this time featuring a really unpleasant character who holds people at a distance to protect them from his 'rotten'/ruinous core (I spent the story thinking he didn't want to get near/was afraid of other people's core) of which he has gotten external proof of within the timeframe of the story. (He has gotten proof that there is something there, but not necessarily that his interpretation of its 'goodness' or not is correct.) I can't wait to re-read these stories.
4/5 stars

34. Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes
I really thought I would love these poems, but I mostly just liked them when I wasn't actively annoyed. Sometimes they felt too-too clever for me? I haven't figured out yet what it means when I get that feeling when I'm reading a work. (I got it a bit with the Mieville story collection mentioned above.) Maybe that I feel the author's hand to heavily? My favorite poem was in the voice of Willis from Different Strokes talking to Arnold but being meta. Sometimes, I felt like I didn't have enough information in the poem to understand a poem, they felt a little too anchored in the personal.
3.5/5 stars

35. Vice by Ai
Another book I thought I would love, but ended up being mostly indifferent to, and often annoyed by. She does a lot of dramatic monologues and they are indeed well done. Also, these poems tend to overwhelmingly feature very brutal stories. I mean, her books have titles like, Sin, Cruelty, The Killing Floors. I definitely got overwhelmed very quickly by the dire stories. It also began to feel a bit... mechanical? by-the-numbers? Certainly it began to seem very easy, maybe exploitative. These are well-crafted, moving poems that really dig into characters and their voices and their tragic stories. They are well-done, but I guess they're not for me.
3/5 stars

36. Communion by Primus St. John 4/5 stars
Another book I wish I had way more time to talk about. These poems are more LANGUAGE poetry-oriented, but they are not LANGUAGE poetry, as far as I can tell. Their language is cryptic, often working against a simple laying bare of the story. Their subject matter tends to be African American focused. I ended up quite enjoying them. My favorite was a very long poem, "Dreamer," which is about 25 pages long and tells the life story of the man who wrote "Amazing Grace," John Newton. The poem actually starts well before and after his life, giving some of his lineage and giving some perspective from the modern day. I'll leave you with the ending lines of this awesome poem:

I dream I will not be forgiving him
for the timeliness of his innocence, for
betrothing the dead to the dead,
but will be lifting
up my hands to an appetite for life
that will take slavers and slaves with me.

I wish
There was no timelessness,
That slavery was over
And so far away
It was an incredibly mysterious
Jungle--
Somewhere else.
An uncharted river
Canopied by extensive moss--
Somewhere else.
A spectaular ragged
Waterfall
Mystically expressed
Over an enormous
Obsidian wall,
But it is right here
In my pouch, today,
Like the acori beads
I have been swimming with
For hours--
Presidential, prime ministerial,
Corporate, grassroots based.
Right here,
Racist, imperial, and sexist.
Right here,
Woefully spendthrift
And Democratic,
Anally retentive
And Republican,
Militantly inappropriate,
And so good to itself
That it jogs.

All caught up now? Looks like lots of good reading.

JULY BOOKS:

37. Black Juice by Margo Lanagan
A short story collection full of strange and mysterious stories. I can totally see why Kelly Link was recommending this writer. I was definitely getting a Kelly Link vibe when I was reading them. I really liked most of these stories, not loved but liked very much. They seem to have a core of sincerity and truth, even when I wasn't sure what had happened. I've kept them to re-read.
4/5 stars

38. The Hidden City by Michelle West
This was my first Michelle West book. I'd read the Elantra books where she writes under the name Michelle Sagara. On the website she says she uses the name she writes under (West, Sagara, or Sagara West) to give an idea to readers which books they're most likely to be drawn to based on which of hers they've read before. This is a very different style than the Elantra books which are more plain spoken. This book was dense, extraordinarily interior, and, I don't know, Baroque? Gothic? (I'm trying to get at their 'wordiness' and their impedimenta-filled-ness.) Its style is more formal. It took some getting used to. I enjoyed it more when the story followed just the one dude and the orphan that latches onto him. I was not quite as enamored with the whole passel of damaged orphans that get collected. I'll probably read the next book.
4/5 stars

39. Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
I had not read any Jones since my college and grad school days when I was in love with Howl's Moving Castle, The Homeward Bounders, and Fire and Hemlock. I've had a tough time getting into any of her books I tried post-grad school. Maybe I got all the winners early on, or maybe my winners? Maybe I'm in a different space now as a reader? I'm hoping to recapture that Diana Wynne Jones magic from the past. I bounced off of this several times, but this time I was able to hang in there and found it very enjoyable and moving by the end.
4/5 stars

>43 ronincats: Hi, Roni. Thanks for visiting 'last year's' thread. (I don't have a new one yet.) I have 5 more months of books to talk about (18 books?). Will I make it before the pull of the new year is just to strong to resist? :)

AUGUST BOOKS:

40. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
At first, I was a little disappointed that the text of this book seemed a bit simpler than that of Persuasion, the only other Austen I've read. This was a very smooth read and quick for me (done in less than a week). Jane's aunt, the one who lives in Cheapside, had a much meatier role in the book than in the BBC adaptation (the one with Colin Firth). I appreciated that. It was a fun read, and I look forward to future re-reads.

4/5 stars

41. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, a re-read
This was a re-read of a favorite from last year. It was almost as much fun as the original read. I got to think more about the psychology of the characters, and I didn't have to worry quite so much about them because I knew things would be mostly ok for them in the end.

4.5/5 stars

42. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
I was really into this book when the boy was trying to solve the mystery. I didn't know how he would manage it, but I liked seeing him get outside his comfort zone for the challenge of it because it mattered to him. I pretty much lost interest when the story seemed to make a sudden shift to a personal growth or more of a coming of age story exclusively. It all seemed so typical. Except for the Dad's reactions to events--they seemed awfully extreme. I was afraid of him, too, for awhile.

3.5/5 stars

SEPTEMBER BOOKS:

43. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, trans. John Bester
A man in Japan is trying to find a suitable marriage for his niece who is his ward, but he has to stem rumors that she is a victim of the black rain from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Most of the book is him transcribing his encoded journals from that time period to 'prove' her health. These passages are gripping and horrifying. Meanwhile the niece is actually falling ill but trying to put on a brave front. I'm making the book sound like it has more of a through-line than I thought it did. It's much more meandering and contemplative. Most of what happens in the present day feels like an excuse to get back to the journals, which follow those first hours and days quite minutely. I enjoyed learning more details about what happened shortly after the bomb and long after. I liked the book.
4/5 stars

44. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. Like what I hoped for from the earlier Ship of Fools, I'm intrigued by the idea of religion and aliens/alien life meeting. I liked all of the characters, even if their interactions felt very studied, like they were characters in a play. I suppose I mean that the scenes where they interact felt spotlit or carefully dramatized? Things are messier, with way more loose ends in reality. People don't understand each other's motives quite as well as they all seemed to, well, they might think they do, but in reality they end up just missing the proper connection. I was interested in the process of how they conducted their first contact with the aliens and the misunderstandings on both ends that end up being revealed. I was extremely frustrated by the kinds of decisions they made or how they made them, in their non-professionalism--that they're not a professional group that was organized to set out for this mission. So many things they did, they got lucky (or didn't, like with the shuttle fuel or the crash landing) but... it just didn't seem like they were taking it as seriously as I felt they should, as if they kept relying in the end on this trip being blessed, because God created the opportunity and brought them together. I kept wanting to be like, God helps those who help themselves. I felt highly manipulated by the setup/structure of the book, which I might have been fine with if the mystery revealed felt worth it, but it didn't to me. I sound like I was unhappy with the book, but I actually liked it quite a bit. I just wanted to love it.
3.5/5 stars

45. Sunshine by Robin McKinley, a re-read
An enjoyable re-read. I get a kick out of all the hints of the bigger world (beyond the dire events of this book) and how the world of the book differs so much from ours even when it is still recognizably our world. I really love the narrative voice of this one. I wouldn't want every book to sound like this, but it feels right for this book, this character.

OCTOBER BOOKS:

46. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling, a re-read
I dithered for a few months over whether to re-read these or not. It's been long enough since I read them that I've forgotten lots of important details (or misremembered them). I liked this first book well enough. For me, it's mostly just about getting to understand this new magical world along with Harry Potter and enjoying Hogwarts.
3.5/5 stars

47. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
This is my first Westerfeld. I liked it well enough. I was especially more interested before the romance was brought in. I might read the next book in the series.
4/5 stars

48. Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi
Grim. Depressing. Unrelenting despair. It's not like, after the Windup Girl, I didn't know what I was getting into with this short story collection. I suppose I was expecting most of the stories to be set in the that same future of the novel, but there are lots of different futures or alternate nows, and they're all so doomed. I liked the collection ok.
3.5/5 stars

49. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
This book was so beautifully written. I enjoyed it greatly. Artistically, I appreciate that we don't find out 'what really happened' the day of the murder and Grace's part in it, that it's left more open because the truth can not always fully be known. But the intellectual part of me was still disappointed not to get an answer or at least a strong enough hint one way or another.
4/5 stars

50. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling, a re-read
More of the same. Similar pleasures as the first book.
3.5/5 stars

NOVEMBER BOOKS:

51. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling, a re-read
This is where the series woke up for me during this re-read. (It was the fourth book that made a fan of me my first read through.) When I first read this book, way back when, I remember being impatient and irritated, not sure now why that was. I do remember feeling the book was overlong. This time through, I longed to be reading it when I wasn't. I eagerly pulled it out at any opportunity. I looked forward to reading it. Good times.
4/5 stars

52. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
I most enjoyed the behind the scenes stuff about how the comic strip business works and how comic strips are formatted and their stories told. The stuff about the origins of certain story lines in Calvin and Hobbes and influences, that was good, too. It was great revisiting Calving and Hobbes. I did find the author's tone off-putting sometimes. Pretty good overall.
4/5 stars

53. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I wish I knew how to include pictures because the cover of my book, a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, is hilarious, especially the back cover which features a drawing of Heathcliff in front of a big, gloomy building with a full moon in the skeletal trees, and Heathcliff wearing a long, dark coat with the collar turned up, a bit like Dracula with his cloak furled over his face, and his hair spilling dramatically forward. I found the first 50 pages or so of this book to be just about as hilarious as the cover. I didn't expect that. I felt like I was getting validation from the tone of the text that I was supposed to get how over the top everything was, so I felt like I was laughing with it not at it. The writing itself is gorgeous. It's too bad the author died so young because I would read almost anything she wrote. There was much humor, but also much sadness at the poor choices people made and the displaced retribution they tried to get. I became much more impatient in the second half of the book when we got to the next generation being held accountable for the wrongs done their parents. All I could see was the great injustice, even when I understood why these very damaged people were behaving this way. I thought the ending was perfect.
4/5 stars

DECEMBER BOOKS:

54. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, a re-read
On this re-read, different stories caught me than on my prior read. I enjoyed the woman-centeredness of "Travels with the Snow Queen," the almost-knowing but not quite everything slotting into place of "Water off a Black Dog's Back," and the goddess-spotting in the modern era of "Flying Lessons" with the girl figuring out her inner strength. I was much more comfortable and relaxed about the strangeness and open-endedness of these stories.
4/5 stars

55. The Inferno from The Divine Comedy, Dante, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, illus. Gustav Dore
56. The Inferno from The Divine Comedy, Dante, trans. Clive James
These are my 2nd & 3rd reads of the Inferno. I enjoyed the rhythm and flow of the Longsworth translation, but struggled with parsing the long sentences and understanding some of the diction. I also enjoyed the rhythm of the Clive James translation which is an untypical choice for form when translating The Divine Comedy, but I missed the grandeur of the more old-fashioned language of the Longfellow. They made a good pairing.
4/5 stars

57. Hollywood Be Thy Name by Cass Warner Sperling, Cork Millner
I found this tracing of Warner Brothers from the origins into the modern era fascinating even as I found the writing pretty rough. This nonfiction account does the thing where dialogue is recreated, as well as thoughts and inner dialogue. They were a bit like those reenactments you see on true crime tv shows. Also the writing was a bit awkward and overly dramatic. But I really enjoyed reading it because I got to learn a lot about the start of the movie business and Hollywood.
3.5/5 stars

Finally, here's my 2016 thread.