April Reading Recap

Another month has passed, and I've read another big batch of books!

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes: Cecily is an experienced audio producer who's ready for a turn hosting her own podcast. She's pitched plenty of great ideas to her boss, but when he finally offers her a show, it's not an idea she ever would have chosen. The concept is that a dating coach will demonstrate her guaranteed methods by setting Cecily up on 20 blind dates. Cecily hates the whole plan, but the associated ad deals might keep the company safe from the layoffs always looming over the volatile audio industry, so she agrees. Just as the project gets underway, Cecily has a meet-cute with Will that involves chasing after a very good, very large dog. She can't think about serendipitous encounters while she's committed to following the dating coach's program, but somehow she just keeps running into Will everywhere she goes.

This book was so much fun! I was constantly chuckling over great lines, and I loved all the insider details about podcast recording, audio editing, and ad sales. I appreciated the strong pacing and the balance between different plotlines. The characters are wonderful, and it was easy to understand what Cecily and Will like about each other immediately, and as they get better acquainted. I recommend this for fans of romantic stories, especially those who are also fans of podcasting.

→ TILT by Emma Pattee: Annie is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping at the Portland, Oregon, IKEA for a crib she should have purchased months ago and can't really afford. Then the earthquake hits, the rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone expected to devastate the Pacific Northwest. Inside the IKEA, after the long minutes of shaking, Annie is briefly trapped, but she makes it out of the store. She's lost her phone and car keys, so all she can think to do is walk across the city in search of her husband. In the hours that follow, Annie's walk takes her through ruin and tragedy, while flashback chapters reflect on her marriage and the trajectory of her life.

This intense, introspective novel is an absorbing read. I enjoyed the combination of detailed disaster survival with a close look at a difficult but loving marriage. The story always feels painfully real, whether about the earthquake's impact or the strain that financial precarity puts on a relationship. Annie is a complicated character who doesn't make perfect choices but instead behaves in flawed and not always justifiable ways, just like a real person. I'll be excited to see where Pattee's fiction career goes next.

→ OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING by Shubha Sunder: Pavitra, a citizen of India, has just graduated from a Pennsylvania university and moved to Boston to teach math and physics at a private high school. She's in OPT status, allowed one year for optional practical training, and if the teaching job works out, she'll be sponsored for a work visa. Everything about her life feels uncertain: whether the school will consider her a successful teacher, if she even wants to teach, how much to put down roots, and what it means to be marked as an other in America. Over the course of the OPT year, Pavitra's encounters with colleagues and friends raise and explore these questions.

I enjoyed reading this novel at a slow pace, a chapter or scene at a time, because the sections are mostly separate vignettes. Each episode focuses on an interaction with another character, and while some people recur, there isn't a strong continuing throughline or chronology other than the background of Pavitra's teaching and housing issues. Often the conversations are more descriptive than realistic, with the goal not to convey how people actually speak but to evoke scenes and ideas. This isn't my favorite style of fiction, but Sunder does it very well.

→ ABSOLUTION by Jeff VanderMeer: Long before the Forgotten Coast was engulfed and the Southern Reach was established to explore the mysteries of Area X, the region was already under investigation by Central. A team of biologists encounters strange creatures and unsettling events, and their mission goes badly, as so many will later. Some years after, an agent at Central known as Old Jim studies the records of their mission and prepares for his own time on the Forgotten Coast.

VanderMeer recently published this fourth book in the Southern Reach series, a decade after the original trilogy. The novel is largely a prequel that continues to expand on the story, which means along with providing some bonus insights, it opens up many new questions. I found it to be a good but not essential addition to the series. The book has several parts, and I enjoyed some more than others. I particularly liked the character of Old Jim and the relationships that evolve between him and several other characters.

→ ZERO STARS, DO NOT RECOMMEND by M.J. Wassmer: Dan is enjoying a resort vacation with his girlfriend when the sun explodes. Or disappears, or something, but in any case, the world is plunged into sudden and permanent night. The resort is on a remote island, all communication is down, and the planes that delivered the guests aren't scheduled to return for two weeks. Everyone is desperate to speak to their loved ones and find a way to get back to them, but at least they have plenty of food and booze and are in a tropical paradise. Well, for the moment, because the temperature is rapidly dropping. And the wealthy guests soon commandeer all the supplies, claiming they'll distribute them fairly while actually imposing an authoritarian regime. Dan has never done anything impressive in his life, but he accidentally becomes a leader in the revolt that's brewing.

I was disappointed in this. Part of the problem was my expectations: I was anticipating the focus to be disaster survival rather than class warfare. But since the story did turn out to be largely about the rich people taking over, I wanted either more plausible details or a more insightful satire. The characters and situations were too often generic, and while the book occasionally made me laugh, much of the humor didn't land for me. I kept reading because I wanted to learn the resolution of some mysteries, but the answers were underwhelming. A lot of other readers found this much more fun, but I can't recommend it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Jenny Hamilton makes the case for Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends: "Contributing to this relentless sameness is the way these tropes can calcify into prescription—not just the presence of the tropes on which the whole book hangs, but the way you get recurring trope clusters that are understood to all go together. I can't throw a rock in a bookstore these days without hitting five sprayed-edged romantasies where the girl has to reluctantly team up with a dangerous, sexy enemy in order to save her family / reclaim her throne / overthrow the oppressive ruling class. Fine, I don't have any objection to a girl getting it on with her dark and deadly enemy. (Au contraire!) But it becomes immensely tedious when every book starts hitting the same exact beats, with slightly different set dressing."

March Reading Recap

I've started reading from my list of anticipated new releases, and it made for an incredible book month!

→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James: Erica has recently started understanding herself as a woman, but everyone else knows her as a man—an awkward, recently divorced man who teaches high school English and directs community theater. The consequences of revealing her true identity in her South Dakota town seem terrifying, so Erica can only come out to the one other trans woman she knows, a teenage student at her school. Abigail would love for everyone to forget that she's trans, and she's not at all thrilled about having to mentor her teacher, but in her own sarcastic way, she gives Erica the affirmation and guidance she needs. Though Abigail insists the two of them aren't friends, a friendship develops between them, which makes other people suspicious and threatens to expose Erica's secret.

This novel is so just so good, with fantastic characters, tight plotting, and a story that can switch from funny to gut-punch in a matter of paragraphs. St. James brings Erica and Abigail to life immediately by putting the reader deep into their concerns and mindsets, then continues to play around with that narrative perspective through impressive POV shifts. All the characters and their minutely changing dynamics are portrayed with insight, humor, and authentic emotion. The plot thickens with each chapter, introducing new obstacles and surprising developments. I highly recommend everyone read this marvelous debut.

→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker is presented as a psychiatrist's account of his treatment of a patient with an unusual mind and confounding experiences. (An opening epigraph by Oliver Sacks helps establish the style that the novel is evoking.) At their first appointment, Jane is so reluctant to say why she's there that she leaves before explaining anything, but soon it becomes more urgent for her to seek care. Jane has blacked out for over a day, failing to pick up her young child at day care and apparently wandering Brooklyn before passing out in a park. She has no memory of that time, and Jane otherwise has a remarkably good memory. As she gradually tells the psychiatrist her story, the many strange pieces of her case raise more intriguing mysteries about what's happening to her.

I really enjoyed this book, and I can't even write about many of the reasons it appealed to me, since I don't want to give anything away. I will say that there is heavy material in the story, because it deals with the way experiences like grief challenge a person's sense of reality. Despite the sadness, I found this a joy to read. Both main characters and their pasts are initially almost as mysterious as Jane's case, and getting to know them is part of the story's pleasure. The clever unfolding of the plot puts readers in the fun position of knowing more than the characters, so it's possible to make guesses at what's going on before the story gets there. I read in short bursts to savor and ponder the unfolding mysteries, but I was also tempted to sit down and devour it all at once. This is joining Walker's previous novels on my list of favorites.

→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones is a series of stories inside stories, like the nested noun phrases of the title. In the frame narrative, an academic in 2012 comes into possession of a hundred-year-old journal written by her ancestor, a pastor on the Montana frontier. In the 1912 journal, Pastor Arthur Beaucarne writes about the disturbing discovery of a man's body left on the prairie, skinned like an animal and painted. Indians are immediately suspected, so it's curious when a Pikuni man shows up at his church and says he wishes to confess. Even more curious is that as Good Stab begins to unburden himself by recounting the events of his life, he claims to be decades older than seems possible. Good Stab's confession, told over multiple Sundays, appears inside Arthur's journal, though the pastor can't believe the fantastical tales he's hearing of inhuman powers, immortality, and an unquenchable thirst for blood.

While it's not clear at the outset that this is a vampire story, it becomes clear soon enough (and is revealed in the book's description). Jones draws on existing vampire lore and adds his own fascinating rules that Good Stab must figure out in order to go on surviving. This is definitely not a book for all readers, because it is crammed full of creatively horrific scenes of human and animal mutilation, narrated in loving and bloody detail. That's not usually what I'd seek out, but Jones is such a good storyteller that I was engrossed, while also grossed out.

The story at the core of all this blood and dismemberment is the shameful history of America. Good Stab chronicles an era of real life horror as he watches his people suffer and die at the hands of the US government and witnesses white hunters wipe out the buffalo. He can't stop any of this, but he can use his terrible powers to enact some revenge. "What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had."

→ THE HUMANS by Matt Haig: Professor Andrew Martin has solved the Riemann hypothesis, and a civilization of mathematically advanced aliens doesn't want humans to have that knowledge. So before this dangerous information can spread, Andrew is abducted and killed, and one of the aliens is assigned to take his form, and his place. Playing the role of Andrew, our alien narrator is instructed to find out who might have been told about the discovery, then kill them, too. After all, these are merely individual humans, primitive and ugly and of little value. But as soon as the alien meets actual humans and learns about their lives, he questions his mission. Soon he's disobeying his orders to protect the humans he's starting to value above anything else.

It took me a little time to get invested in this story, but then I found it entertaining and ultimately sweet. The opening section, when the alien narrator is first experiencing Earth and humanity, was too slapsticky for me, with what he understood or not overly based on what would be the silliest. Once he settled into Andrew's life and got to know the other major characters, I began to care about them, too, and became caught up in the events of the plot. This is a fairly fun novel, but it also deals with depression and suicide, a frequent topic in Haig's work.

→ A TASTE OF MIDNIGHT by Shannon Page is a fun story of later-in-life love, small town politics, friendship, and food, set in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Julie has lived on Orcas Island long enough to establish the small business of her dreams and find a tight group of friends. They meet regularly to conduct their soup group (the solution to a failed book club) and stay updated on each other's lives. Julie's still enough of a newcomer to the island that she hasn't cared about local politics, until now. In the face of an outrageous attempt to introduce parking meters ("We're not Seattle!"), Julie and her friends organize to fight back. This unexpected new interest is followed by another, when Julie finds herself attracted to a guy she doesn't even like, when she never planned to get involved with anyone again.

This light-hearted, low stress novel was a pleasant break from my usual reading. I'm always happy to see middle-aged characters featured in stories, especially in romantic plots. I got caught up in the developing drama of Julie's life, and of her friends, who periodically have short POV sections. Page fills the story with local color and flavor, and many scenes made me hungry, whether set at a group meeting or in one of the (likely real) island restaurants. This is the first book in the Island of Second Chances, a series that will follow different members of the soup group.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Brittany K. Allen at Literary Hub talks to props master Michael Cory about the books that appear in The White Lotus: "We had to decide which books characters bought in Thailand, and how many books [they brought from home]. Like for Piper [Sarah Catherine Hook; arguably the show's most literary character], I was buying from the local bookstores in Durham and Chapel Hill. Like the university bookshops, the university press. And putting their bookmarks in her books."

Working Like a Dog

This is how I start writing a blog post. Or anything, really:

It seemed about time to provide an update on how novel writing has been coming along so far in 2025.

I haven't posted a writing update yet in 2025, so I thought I'd do that, but then I

Every few months, I like to post

It's that time again on Lisa's blog when I try to find a new way to say I'm still writing, still slowly writing, to provide an update on my writing progress and hopefully a bit of entertainment.

The way I write involves a lot of piling up stacks of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished, until eventually I hit on something promising. Then I can delete the rejects, or strip them for parts. If I'm lucky, once I have a good opening, further sentences follow naturally, and I only need one version of each. Until I get to the next tricky point. Which might not come until the end of the scene, or might be in the next paragraph.

But even when I'm on a roll, I tend to type out words and phrases multiple times as I put sentences together. For example, I was about to delete these strays that appeared after the previous paragraph:

The next tricky point might

After I've piled up a series of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished,

Eventually I

When I'm making good progress, I barely even notice this aspect of sentence assembly, unlike the aspect where I slow way down to actively grasp for a workable idea. I suppose I must type a great many more words than I end up with, even when I don't have to delete a chunk of writing that I replace with a better idea.

I'm reminded of hiking with a dog, who runs ahead up the trail, then back down to check in, then eagerly uphill again, over and over. Does that make my fingers the dog? And the human hiker is... my brain? The story? This is probably an example of a paragraph I'd delete and replace with a better idea, if this were my novel.

But this is a blog post where I'm letting you in on the workings of my writerly mind, so I'll leave it in, along with a final selection of accumulated cruft to test your patience with this shtick:

Unlike the slower

is something I barely notice doing.

Now that I'm thinking about it, my writing process (if you can call it that)

I usually don't even notice how much my writing process (if you can call it that) involves typing even identical phrases

So, anyway, my novel. I'm writing it! It's slow going, but it's coming along! There are frequent tricky bits where I have to stop and figure out how best to set up a character conflict, lay the groundwork for a plot point, or convey a piece of worldbuilding. But I think what I'm producing is pretty good.

Like a dog on a hike, I spend a lot of time going over the same stretch of ground, and I want to be advancing so much faster. But like a human who can read the trail map, I know how far I've already come and that I'm incrementally moving toward the destination.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laura B. McGrath looks inside the slush pile, analyzing data on a writer's odds of being discovered: "Any agent will tell you that finding a writer in slush is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's so difficult, and with such diminishing returns, that even agents who maintain slush piles still look for clients elsewhere. Still, we like to talk about the needles—those books that made it, against the odds. We can name them: Catch-22 on the one hand, Twilight on the other. But we know quite little about the haystacks in which they're found."

February Reading Recap

There's rarely much connection between the books I read in a month, but my February reading happened to all play around with the borders between reality and something else:

→ THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due: After Robert is provoked into fighting the son of a prominent white family in his Florida town, he's in for a world of trouble. It's 1950, and Robert's father has already been chased out of town for trying to organize the other Black workers, so the law comes down hard (though the judge insists he's being lenient). Twelve-year-old Robert is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, where despite the educational trappings, Robert can expect to be put to work and receive beatings from both staff and other boys. As soon as he arrives at the Reformatory, Robert can sense the presence of ghosts who suffered horrific violence. Meanwhile, as his older sister Gloria tries to get him freed, her premonitions warn her that Robert is in terrible danger.

This is a harrowing story about the horrors of institutionalized violence and racism, and while occasionally the ghostly aspects add to the horror, they mostly allow the characters to fare a little better than their real-life counterparts. The reformatory where Robert is imprisoned is based on the infamously cruel Dozier School for Boys, also fictionalized in Colson Whitehead's THE NICKEL BOYS. The book is often difficult to read, as Robert suffers arbitrary punishments and Gloria struggles to seek justice, but both of them get moments of hope and kindness from people they join forces with. With the help of their allies, plus some supernatural assistance, they ultimately get to fight back against the system. At times the narrative didn't seem to trust readers enough, so events were overexplained or points repeated, extending an already lengthy novel. But for the most part, I was caught up in the emotion and suspense of the story.

→ DEATH OF THE AUTHOR by Nnedi Okorafor: When Zelu is fired from her teaching job and receives another manuscript rejection on the same day, she doesn't want to tell her family. Her parents and many siblings have always had low expectations for her because she's paraplegic, so they fixate on her failures and ignore her successes. Fueled by frustration and anger over all of this, Zelu begins writing something new. Rusted Robots is about a robot civilization in Nigeria after humanity has died out, and the story pours right out of her. Soon Zelu has sold the novel, and she's experiencing success beyond her wildest dreams, but her family still doesn't see her as capable. The more she achieves, the more they want to stop her from becoming everything she can be.

I really liked so many of the ideas and elements of this novel, though it didn't all work for me. The story is presented in three intertwined threads: chapters about Zelu's life, interviews with her family members conducted after her success, and chapters of Rusted Robots. I often find novels within novels lacking, but this one was excellent, and I was fully invested in the robot story. The chapters of Zelu's life and family, on the other hand, started to drag after a while with repetitive episodes, and I think the book would have benefited from being shorter.

→ AUTHORITY by Jeff VanderMeer continues the story of the expedition sent to explore Area X in ANNIHILATION, but this time, the focus is on the agency that sends the expeditions. The offices of the Southern Reach need a new leader, so an outside agent named Control is put in charge and tasked with restoring order. He comes with some strange baggage, but so does the agency, so they may be a good match. As Control deals with the aftermath of the most recent expedition, he's also trying to understand the methods and findings from years of past expeditions.

I ended ANNIHILATION feeling a bit disappointed by the lack of answers, but this second installment of the original trilogy left me more satisfied and excited by the series. It's not that this book provides many answers about the mysteries of Area X, which remains inexplicable. But the perspective from the world beyond fills out the picture, providing context and history that expands the story. Control is an entertaining character to spend time with, a bit odd, but not nearly as much as some of his new coworkers. This book was less creepy overall than the first, but includes plenty of unsettling moments.

→ ACCEPTANCE by Jeff VanderMeer brings the story of the Southern Reach to a conclusion by investigating Area X at multiple points, through multiple perspectives. VanderMeer revisits and follows up on characters and threads from the first two books, further expanding the story and addressing many questions. Not all questions, because the mysterious nature of Area X persists, but I felt satisfied by the ending, and impressed by how the three books work together. This trilogy was published in quick succession in 2014, and then a surprise prequel came out last year, which I'm planning to read as well.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Charlie Jane Anders offers tips on How to Fix a Character Who's Starting to Bore You: "If you look back at what you wrote earlier, you'll probably find that you left yourself lots of clues and hints about unexplored nooks and crevices in this character's personality and backstory. If you spent a decent amount of time building a character's internal monologue and developing their story, you're pretty much bound to find loose threads that you can pull on. I'm often amazed at the stuff I forgot I threw in when introducing a character, which can prove fruitful later on in the character's life."

Releases I'm Ready For, Winter 2025

A remarkable number of intriguing books are coming out in the four weeks between February 25 and March 25. These are the ones I've been most looking forward to:

→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker (February 25): I loved the big, bold premises and fantastic execution of Walker's previous two novels. In THE AGE OF MIRACLES, Earth's rotation begins to slow. In THE DREAMERS, a town is gripped by an epidemic of sleep. The speculative stakes are more personal this time, with a single character "struck by a mysterious psychological affliction," but since Walker's characterizations are always excellent, I'm expecting another fascinating story.

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes (February 25): I first became a fan of Holmes through the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, so I'm delighted that her new book revolves around podcasting. This is sure to be another smart and funny romance, like EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER and FLYING SOLO.

→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James (March 4): St. James is a television critic I've been following for years. Her debut novel has a ton of potential for great character connections and conflicts: A high school teacher realizes she's trans, and she seeks the guidance of the only other trans woman she knows, who is one of her students.

→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters (March 11): The drama, humor, and raw honesty of DETRANSITION, BABY captivated me, so I'm eager to read more from Peters. Her new book is a collection of four stories (billed as "one novel and three novellas") examining gender across a range of genres—including a tall tale about lumberjacks.

→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones (March 18): The only one of Jones's many, many novels I've read so far is THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS, but it's stayed with me for both the compelling story and the horrifying mental images. So I'm excited and scared to pick up his latest, a vampire story set at multiple points in the history of the American west.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal (March 18): I've enjoyed Kowal's Lady Astronaut series, an alternate history in which the space program is accelerated and given higher stakes by a meteor strike that wreaks havoc on Earth. This is the fourth book, and I believe originally planned as the last, though Kowal has probably left room to write more (and has already published many short stories from the same universe).

→ TILT by Emma Pattee (March 25): This is a debut by an author I have no previous experience with, but I knew I'd be reading it when I saw the premise: A big, big earthquake strikes Portland, Oregon, and a character at the end of her pregnancy tries to walk home through the wreckage. I've heard good things.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Emily Temple at Literary Hub asks, What should the cover of Pride and Prejudice look like?: "...despite the fact that we're told not to judge books by their covers, we do. Like the clothes you wear (as Austen herself would confirm), a book's cover does—or at least can—change our perception of it, even after it's been read. Book covers can provide a kind of tonal context, or at least give the reader some hints as to how its publisher wants the text to be understood. It's easy, despite that, for a great book to transcend a dopey cover—many have done this—but it's also possible for a great cover to elevate our experience of a dopey book. A little, anyway. Perception being, after all, reality."

January Reading Recap

My reading year has started off well, at least!

→ A HALF-BUILT GARDEN by Ruthanna Emrys: Judy is on call for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network and goes to investigate an alert about a water pollutant. Expecting a false alarm or minor issue, she brings along her wife and infant daughter in hopes that the excursion will settle the baby. But to her shock, the source of the pollution is an alien spaceship, and so Earth's first contact is made by members of one of the world's cooperative environmental networks rather than the archaic nation-states or a corporation. That Judy is carrying her baby also turns out to be significant for the diplomacy that follows, because the alien who emerges from the ship to greet them (having learned human language from studying broadcasts) is holding her own babies and considers motherhood a sign of the highest cultural status. The aliens have come in peace to bring a warning: Every technologically advanced species exhausts the resources of their planet and can only survive by abandoning it to live in space. The aliens want to help humanity escape in time, and they don't understand why Judy puts up any resistance to this offer. But as Judy explains, the watershed networks have been working for half a century to improve conditions on the planet, and most humans probably aren't ready to give up on Earth yet.

I loved this optimistic novel about people working together to solve big problems. It's a complex story with a good balance of plot, worldbuilding, and character development, well-constructed so that every introduced element is made use of later. The aliens are fairly alien, distinct from humans physically and culturally, and their expectations about motherhood, family, and gender drive the story in interesting ways. As the accidental ambassadors, Judy and the rest of her queer, poly, Jewish family are the central human characters, but more humans representing other backgrounds and family styles also play roles. All this variety is treated with nuance: For example, Judy starts the story believing corporations and capitalism are pure evil, but once she's forced to interact with corporate representatives and see their world, she realizes the situation is more complicated. This book is full of joy and hope, plus acknowledgment of how hard it can be to stay joyful and hopeful in difficult times. I'm glad I read it to start off 2025.

→ DOLL SEED by Michele Tracy Berger: In this collection of short fiction, most of the stories verge into some type of horror by the end, even if they start out with the trappings of another genre. The opening story sets this up well. In "Nussia", a Black family wins the honor of hosting the first alien child to visit Earth not long after first contact. The inventive developments lead to a much darker ending than I expected, preparing me for the rest of the collection.

A number of the stories involve the invoking of spirits, demons, and ghosts, but Berger imagines a range of situations within this repeated theme. "Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent", set during the Harlem Renaissance, is surprisingly about Zora Neale Hurston summoning a spirit so she can access lost stories. In "Family Line", which packs some real emotional power into a few pages, the demon is connected to a family legend going back to the days of slavery. Certain elements from both of these reappear in the tensely escalating "And They Will Rise From the Oceans". The ghosts of the "Cemetery Sisters" are friendly at first, but of course the truth is more complicated, with several creative elements that combine into a satisfying whole.

While the stories are largely speculative, some stay in the real world and focus on the horror of how people treat each other, as in "Miss Black Little Hill of 1965" and "The Invisible Son". Not all of the stories worked equally well for me, but even some I didn't enjoy overall tended to build to a strong conclusion, demonstrating Berger's gift at the difficult skill of writing endings.

→ ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer: On expeditions into the mysterious Area X, investigators are discouraged from sharing personal information or even using names, so they know each other only by their roles. The biologist of the twelfth expedition is more comfortable getting close with plants and animals than humans anyway, and she's reluctant to reveal the very personal reasons she volunteered for this dangerous mission. She knows that many members of previous expeditions did not survive, but most of her other prior knowledge about Area X is immediately suspect once her team crosses the border. The lush environment and its natural phenomena are unsettling in ways she never imagined, and the first discovery is a huge underground structure that doesn't appear on the provided maps. The biologist feels compelled to explore it, and what she finds defies any rational explanation.

This is a creepy horror story where everything is disturbing: the setting, the narrator's thoughts, what characters do to each other. VanderMeer's writing is highly evocative, and it generated both visuals in my mind and visceral reactions. I was absorbed in the novel's events, but as more and more questions continued to be raised by the expedition's discoveries, I realized this might not be the type of story to provide many answers. Indeed, far fewer mysteries are explained by the end than I would have preferred. But I've been told that the rest of the series builds out a more complete picture of the situation around Area X, and I'm planning to read on to learn more.

→ RENTAL HOUSE by Weike Wang: Keru and Nate have been married for five years when they take an extended vacation to Cape Cod (with their dog) and rent a house near the beach. The world is just emerging from the worst of the pandemic, so they haven't seen their parents for a while, and they invite both sets to visit, during separate weeks. They know the visits will be trying. Keru's parents, who grew up in China, always stress their daughter out with their stubbornness and criticism. Nate's parents, who live in the rural community where they grew up, infuriate their son with uninformed opinions about topics such as his career in New York City academia and Keru's background. And both parents want to know when the couple is going to have kids, yet won't accept the answer that they're not. But everyone survives the vacation. Another five years pass, and Keru and Nate plan another getaway for just the two of them (and the dog).

As the description suggests, this is a novel highly focused on characters and their relationships, and Wang depicts these with care, specificity, and humor. I found each scene engaging and realistic (sometimes painfully so). The interactions throughout the first vacation, between Keru and Nate and with each set of parents, set up so much tense potential for what might unfold in the second half of the book. But the events of the second vacation didn't follow up on as many threads from the first as I was expecting, and the story felt incomplete to me. I remain interested in Wang's character portrayals, but I've wanted a bit more from all her novels, and especially this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel shares thoughts on flipping from "TV brain" to "prose brain" when writing fiction: "The problem is that if you're 'thinking in TV' while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don't believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it's typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel."

2024 By The Books

It's the start of a new reading year (that's the main purpose of a year, right?), and time for my annual January tradition of looking back at the books I most enjoyed in the year just ended.

In 2024, I read 59 books. This number fits into a general upward trend of recent years, but I'm not specifically aiming for my book count to keep increasing. While I do think I've finally become a slightly faster reader and able to squeeze more books into my reading time, there is only so much time. It might even be sensible for me to spend less time reading in favor of more time writing (or some of those other things I hear time can be used for).

I've maintained my practice of writing descriptions and impressions of books I read and sharing those reviews on Goodreads and in my monthly reading recaps. (Very close observers will notice a few rereads in 2024 that I omitted from the monthly roundups.) I like figuring out how to present and explain my experience with each book, but it's time-consuming, and the more I read, the more I have to review. I'm considering switching up my strategy, but I haven't settled on anything for now.

A year ago, I noted changes to my reading habits that shifted me away from focusing quite so heavily on new releases. That trend also continued, and while I did read (and anticipate) many brand new books, more of my reading was from the previous few years and decades. I've been making even more use of my local library, both borrowing digital books from Libby (still highly recommended!) and checking out paper ones.

I started 2024 by taking a class on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, and that set me on a project to read more of her work. (Probably a lifelong project: She wrote a lot of books!) I especially loved THE BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES (from January), a collection that shows off her talent for approaching science fiction anthropologically. I was excited to spend more time in Le Guin's imagined cultures and the universe of the Ekumen in FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS (March) and THE TELLING (November). It was also great to see her pull off a very different sort of story in the surprising turns of THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (January), where a man's dreams change the world around him.

Another reading project I've theoretically had for a while is to read earlier books by authors whose work I've started following. In 2024, I finally got to Emily St. John Mandel's backlist, and I'm so glad I did. Her pre-breakout work all exhibits her familiar narrative style of shifting time and perspective, compellingly flawed characters, and a sense of mystery. THE SINGER'S GUN (October) and THE LOLA QUARTET (December) are both tense stories about people hiding secrets and making terrible choices, and I particularly recommend them to those who liked Mandel's THE GLASS HOTEL. (I wasn't quite as into her first book, which I could have sworn I read this year, but it was actually in 2023.)

The book club I'm in continued meeting for most of the year, though we're on hiatus now. I enjoy our discussions, as well as the motivation to pick up either books I wouldn't have chosen on my own, or ones I've been meaning to read. In the latter category is my favorite book club selection of the year, FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews (September). It's an unusual, darkly funny family story with a hilarious narrative voice. Several people had already recommended it to me, and I'm passing that recommendation along.

Many of my other favorite books from the year fall into the category of "speculative fiction that manipulates time":

→ THE OTHER VALLEY by Scott Alexander Howard (June) provides a new twist on time travel, with carefully developed character dynamics and a satisfying plot.

→ CAHOKIA JAZZ by Francis Spufford (November) is a brilliantly rendered alternate history (a form of playing with time!) and a compelling noir detective story.

→ LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson (a reread that I reviewed back in 2013) features a main character who keeps repeating her life, witnessing several major historical events of the first half of the twentieth century.

→ THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley (August) uses a time machine to pull characters from the past into the modern era and watch the amusing antics that ensue, but there's also more to the story.

→ THE ANOMALY by Hervé Le Tellier (December) involves a variety of characters who all experience the same turbulent transatlantic flight, and time strangeness I won't specify further.

December Reading Recap

I closed out 2024 with a final great reading month. Next week, I'll round up the highlights of my reading year.

→ THE ANOMALY by Hervé Le Tellier, translated from French by Adriana Hunter: The story opens with a hitman in the middle of a job that required traveling to New York from Paris. The transatlantic flight encountered terrifying levels of turbulence that left him fearing for his own life. We meet a number of other characters, mostly in France and the US, and learn about their lives and problems. All were on the harrowing flight in March, and some made big changes as a result of feeling so close to death. Still, the experience is far from their minds by June, when federal agents arrive to take each of them into custody. Something very strange has happened, and that flight is at the center of it.

I knew the premise before I started reading, but nonetheless, much about this excellent novel came as a surprise. I wasn't expecting to meet so many characters, and I enjoyed encountering each of them and learning their widely ranging stories. I didn't anticipate how deep we'd get into the book before the initial reveal, and though it would have been fun to go in unspoiled, I also liked being able to recognize the hints and foreshadowing. And I was happy to discover there's another whole level of premise I knew nothing about. This is a delightful read that's full of surprises!

→ THE LOLA QUARTET by Emily St. John Mandel: Gavin is a newspaper reporter in New York City, the life he dreamed of while growing up in Florida, but that life hasn't turned out the way he imagined. Things are already going badly when he's sent to Florida for an assignment and his sister drops some shocking news: She encountered a ten-year-old girl who might be Gavin's daughter by Anna, his high school girlfriend who disappeared. Soon Gavin's New York life is over, and he's back in Florida, on the hunt for Anna and the girl. As he searches, it becomes clear that the other members of Gavin's high school jazz quartet are all involved in the story of Anna's disappearance and return, and there's far more to their histories than he ever knew.

I'm so glad I went back to read Mandel's pre-breakout work, because I love her writing style and characters (plus the subtle ways her books are tied together). This third novel is immediately Mandelian, with time shifts, secrets, and a gradual unfolding of the plot as both reader and characters come to understand what's going on. Part of the fun of this story is figuring out how the different storylines connect and staying several steps ahead of Gavin. Everyone in this novel makes terrible decisions, and I really felt for them anyway.

→ THE DAZZLE OF DAY by Molly Gloss: The Dusty Miller left Earth 175 years ago, holding a community of humans and an ecosystem of other species prepared for generations of travel. Now the ship is approaching a new planet that could support human life, but the conditions are harsh, dominated by cold weather and rocky soil, and there's uncertainty about whether to settle there or journey for generations more. Juko is one of the sailmenders who does the risky work of performing maintenance on the outside of the aging ship. Her husband Bjoro is in the midst of an even more dangerous job as part of the advance crew landing on the planet to gather more information than can be gained from probes. Their experiences and those of other family members show the complexity and constraints of life on the Miller in the months before that life may change unimaginably.

The generation ship that Gloss imagines is a fascinating one where much of daily living appears low-tech, with most people focused on farming and crafts. The ship was launched by Quakers and is governed by those principles, so decisions are made in meetings involving long stretches of silence and a goal of consensus. These meetings, and neighborhood life in general, are a major focus of the novel, and I generally enjoyed the intricacies and logistics. The planetary details are also well-imagined, and Gloss does a great job depicting the disorienting experience of being on a world after a lifetime inside a ship.

The characters in the story's central family experience a number of difficult changes during the novel, not always as connected as I would have expected to the massive change facing the whole community. I was occasionally frustrated when the story turned away from the questions that interested me most, and some threads felt unfinished to me. What the characters experience is sometimes hard to read about, because there's quite a bit of tragedy and trauma. Not everything about this book worked for me, but it was an engrossing and thought-provoking read.

→ DISPOSSESSED by Desiree Zamorano: Manuel is a small child when, one day in 1939, his parents are gone. He's too young to comprehend why he and his older sister are suddenly being moved between the homes of strangers. He isn't even old enough to grasp that he can only understand his sister because she speaks Spanish, while the strangers they encounter all speak English. And then his beloved sister says goodbye, and he's alone in the incomprehensible world. At last Manuel is placed in the home of a kind, Spanish-speaking older woman, and he has a chance at growing up with some happiness. But nobody explains what happened to his family until he's much older and learns that his parents, Mexican nationals, were caught up in a mass deportation. Manuel would like to search for his parents and sister, but he has so little information that the quest seems impossible. The anger and pain of their loss is always on his mind as he makes his difficult way into adulthood and imagines making a new family of his own.

This novel about the consequences of mass deportations is tragically timely, and the story is often a tragic one, though there is joy at the end of it. Manuel's story covers decades and intersects with many heartbreaking events in the history of Mexican-Americans in Southern California. The way the opening chapters capture young Manuel's disoriented perspective is especially effective, and the book continues to be at its best when the narrative goes deep into Manuel's feelings.

→ LOST ARK DREAMING by Suyi Davies Okungbowa: Following an apocalyptic ocean rise, hundreds of thousands of people spend their entire lives inside a massive skyscraper off the coast of now-flooded Lagos. The wealthy enjoy luxury in the upper floors, while in the lowest third of the tower, submerged beneath the water, residents are crowded into dark, poorly maintained spaces. Yekini is a midder, grateful that her grandparents managed to ascend and that she holds a decent job, a junior position in the tower's bureaucracy. But it's unclear whether she's being punished or rewarded when she's sent to an undersea floor to investigate reports of a leak. To Yekini's horror, she realizes the breach might be the work of the mysterious Children, rumored to be part human, part aquatic creatures. What she discovers changes everything.

This is a short book that moves along fast, unfolding in the span of a day. The major characters are portrayed well, and the ideas are fascinating, but I wished both had more room to develop. Like many novellas, the story left me with a frustrating number of questions about the world and the concepts. I also wasn't as interested in the mystical aspects of the story that ended up getting much of the focus by the end. So the book wasn't a great match for me, but it has a lot to offer different readers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Molly Templeton has advice on finding small press science fiction and fantasy: "Anyone who reads small press work will cite their own favorites. And because the world is so wide, and publishing so specific, and distribution so complicated, you may or may not have heard of them. It'll take more work to find their books, maybe. But it's also kind of fun. If you have a certain kind of temperament—the kind that liked hunting down obscure albums in the pre-internet age, say—it may be a familiar sort of work. It is the work of trying to find art outside the larger corporate sphere."

Upon Reflection

It's become my annual habit that prior to the final week of December, right before switching from work mode into vacation mode, I write a post looking back on the year. I sum up writing accomplishments, consider the state of the novel, try not to overly dwell on the slow pace of progress, say something that will be unfortunately ironic later, and so on.

This year I was particularly pressed for time when I would usually put together such a post, but with the way the calendar works out this December, I decided I could wait and post in the very last days of the month that are my frequent posting window anyway. I reasoned that during some of my vacation downtime, I'd have plenty of opportunity for the review of previous blog posts, novel progress notes, and other records I tend to consult when figuring out what the heck I did in any given year.

Though I am in fact following through on the year-end wrap-up, because here it is, I didn't spend a single minute in preparation before the afternoon I'm posting it. During a lovely beach getaway with family, I also didn't write any novel scenes, make any novel notes (well, one note—it's four words long), or put any thought into maybe finally redesigning my website.

Of course I didn't do any of that. I was on vacation, and while all those tasks are enjoyable in their own ways, they are work. Instead, I walked on the beach, I played games, I read with a view of the ocean, I spent time with people I love. And I felt grateful for my incredible good fortune in getting to take vacations as a break from a life of enjoyable work that falls far outside the common criteria of work.

I'm back home but still in vacation mode, really, and I sure resented committing myself to turning my work brain back on to get this post out. I remained resolved, but I had to motivate myself with the promise of just how minimal the post could be. I really only wanted to make sure I had a record for myself that the first half of 2024 involved a lot more planning, including a concerted effort at crafting complete character arcs, and that in late July I finally began a new, for-real draft. Progress has been predictably slow, but I'm not dwelling on that. Despite my real life often pulling attention away from my fiction, I've consistently returned focus to the novel whenever I can, and that's a significant accomplishment.

My first step for this post was to see what I had to say at the end of last year. I was surprised to discover how much I wrote, and how detailed and useful a record I'd made of my work and intentions throughout the year. My ambitions for today's post shrank even further in comparison.

Still, I got to work, with a plan for how I might eke out three or four paragraphs of reflection. By a couple of sentences in, I'd already changed that plan multiple times. By the third paragraph, I was contemplating deleting everything and starting over, only I just wanted to be done and post something, anything half-decent.

Now here I am in the eighth paragraph of what is certainly not my best writing ever but is probably at least three-quarters decent. The post has achieved the goal of capturing an accurate record of my writing state of mind, currently and recently. And it might sneakily have arrived at some broader truths about my writing year that can serve as useful lessons for the year ahead:

→ While I constantly wish I'd written something sooner, often by the time I write it later, I've come up with a different and better idea, so there's no sense in despairing over not writing faster.

→ But also: Usually I just need to get writing in order to figure out what I'm trying to write.

→ Writing time is important to me. Not-writing time is also important. Even after all these years, I'm still far from expert at distinguishing and prioritizing these times sensibly, but I can continue to learn.

Best wishes to you all as we move forward into another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Atlantic, Jordan Michelman explains the phenomenon of The Most Coveted Screenshot in the Literary World: "It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book."

November Reading Recap

I was so busy reading books last month, I got behind on reviewing them until now!

→ CAHOKIA JAZZ by Francis Spufford: Detectives Barrow and Drummond of the Cahokia PD are called to the scene of a grisly murder. It's 1922, so most of their cases involve the illegal liquor trade, but this is something else. An eviscerated body has been left atop one of the city's highest buildings, with a message scrawled in Anopa, the local language that most Indigenous citizens speak along with English. Barrow isn't an Indigenous local, though he's often mistaken for one; he's a newcomer of uncertain heritage to this ancient kingdom on the Mississippi that's now part of the United States. Since Barrow is still learning Cahokia's customs and culture, he tends to let Drummond take the lead, even when his friend's policing strategies are corrupt. But this time, Barrow is compelled to look past the convenient suspects and figure out what's really happening with this case and its complicated repercussions.

I loved everything about this compelling detective story set in a brilliantly rendered alternate history. Cahokia was a real city that prospered centuries before European colonization, and Spufford has established a timeline in which it continued thriving. He puts enough of the worldbuilding details on the page that my curiosity was satisfied, but not so much that Barrow ever gets much chance to rest from the grueling pace of his investigations. Barrow is an excellent character, burdened by all the usual trappings of a noir detective and also grappling with who he wants to be in the world. This is a smart, complex, dark novel, and I highly recommend it.

→ THE TELLING by Ursula K. Le Guin: When Sutty was growing up, Earth was dominated by an oppressive religious regime. She couldn't wait to complete her training as an Ekumen Observer and leave for an assignment on another planet, where things would be different. But when she arrives on Aka, she finds it's another rigidly controlled society, this one stridently anti-religious. The Akan government, in pursuit of technological progress like that of Earth, has outlawed everything associated with the planet's once-widespread spiritual practices. Sutty wishes she could learn more about this situation, but she's granted little access to anything worth studying while she's confined to the city. Once permitted to leave, Sutty travels to a remote village and realizes the old ways are still a part of daily life, though kept hidden from government monitors. As she gains the trust of the villagers, she learns the traditions of the Telling and the history that brought Aka to this point.

As I continue to wander through Le Guin's extensive body of work, I'm particularly enjoying the stories that place characters in cultures they're unfamiliar with and delve into the anthropological details. I didn't know anything about THE TELLING when I started it, so I was pleased to discover it's firmly in this category. I was immediately drawn in to Sutty's story and happy to get to know her better as we learned together about Akan culture and history. This novel is so heavy on the anthropological details that I grew a bit impatient in the middle, but soon more plot developed, and I was enthralled again. It's interesting to read a story contrasting a society that demands religion with one that bans it, and Le Guin explores this with her usual nuance.

→ OREO by Fran Ross: Oreo begins before the birth of the title character, when her eventual parents, a Black woman and a Jewish man, announce their marriage. The news of the union is so upsetting to their own parents that one drops dead and another is rendered catatonic. The marriage doesn't last long, and soon Oreo's father is gone from her life, but he leaves behind a set of clues Oreo can find him with when she's older. Though Oreo and her younger brother are raised by the Black side of their family, they are exposed to a certain amount of Yiddish as a consequence of their (now immobilized) grandfather's extensive but spite-based knowledge of Judaism. After a childhood immersed in the various language eccentricities of her family members and tutors, the precocious Oreo sets off to New York City on a quest to find her father.

This novel was published in 1974 and largely ignored until decades later. I went in knowing only that it was a satire with a biracial protagonist, and the book was quite different from what I expected, and from anything else. While there is social commentary on race as well as gender, the most prominent feature is Ross's extensive, inventive use of wordplay. The puns and jokes and rhetorical devices draw on numerous languages and fields of reference. I was constantly amused, impressed, and looking things up. The broader humor of Oreo's adventures is, well, broad, and often too slapsticky or surreal for my taste, but the language jokes are magnificent. The quest's structure turns out to be based on a legend from Greek mythology, adding another unexpected, fascinating layer. I didn't always enjoy this as a story, but I appreciated its idiosyncrasies, and I'm glad I read it.

→ THE SEQUEL by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to THE PLOT. The plot of THE PLOT involves a writer who publishes a wildly successful novel based on a plot that originated with another writer, and consequently ends up in the middle of his own sinister plot. The plot of THE SEQUEL results from the events of THE PLOT, making it difficult to describe without revealing the plot turns of THE PLOT. Once again, THE SEQUEL involves a writer publishing a wildly successful novel, but the plot of that novel is less important to the plot than the plot of the novel from THE PLOT, which continues to have sinister consequences in the life of the new writer. You got all that?

This is a reasonably clever followup, but I found it far less fun than the original. What THE SEQUEL adds to the story is the new protagonist's perspective, which Korelitz brings to life with some complexity. However, the premise requires going back over much of the material from THE PLOT, so this novel lacks the freshness and surprise of the first one. The rehashing made my disbelief lose suspension, and some of the publishing insider stuff felt like unnecessary filler this time. I was also sorry that one of the plot twists hinges on sexual assault, a trope I'm very tired of. Read THE PLOT if you're looking for an entertaining, over-the-top thriller set in the literary world, but you may want to stop there.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ For Literary Hub, Jadie Stillwell and Nicole Blackwood attend a Nancy Drew convention and consider the mystery of the girl detective: "Even if Nancy can't be defined by her image, surely we can nail down a character logline. Sherlock Holmes is abrasive, Hercule Poirot is vain, Veronica Mars is prickly, and Nancy Drew is... the quintessential teen girl of her time, at all times. Yes, she was lovingly sculpted into being by Carolyn Keenes (Carolyns Keene?) and scores of illustrators, but she's also one publishing executive's idea of how an independent young woman might look and act, packaged for the masses and routed straight to a bookshelf near you—and your mom, and your mom's mom. It's true that most of Nancy's iterations share a few traits: cute blue roadster, loyal boyfriend, indulgent dad. But these are things she possesses, privileges she has; there's still frustratingly little to cement her as more than a concept."