October Reading Recap

Once again, it's time for my monthly batch of book reviews:

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders: Jamie's relationship with her mother Serena has been strained ever since her other mother died. It's been more than six years, and Serena still hasn't recovered from the loss of her wife, and that grief keeps her isolated, living as a near hermit. Jamie thinks it might help Serena, and bring the two of them closer, if she shares a secret: Jamie is a witch. She's never spoken about this to anyone, even her own partner, but as a child, Jamie discovered that there's magic in the neglected, overgrown places where human structures and nature coexist. Throughout her life, Jamie has harnessed this magic to attain her modest desires for happiness, love, and success in her academic career. Magic has always made things better for Jamie, but the first time Serena tries on her own, the spell goes scarily wrong. Now Jamie isn't sure what to do about the fact that she's let her unpredictable mother in on knowledge that's far more powerful than she realized.

I was immediately invested in the emotional story of Jamie and Serena, and their uncertain attempts to heal their relationship and each other. I love how magic works in this novel, both the mechanism of finding neglected places and the subtle way that many of the spells take effect. An additional fascinating plot thread focuses on Jamie's academic research in eighteenth century literature. Anders has crafted a literary mystery involving real historical figures and a fictional book of unknown authorship, and Jamie's investigations lead to accounts of some fun historical scandals. The two parts of the story don't always sit together easily, but at the end, they connect up in a satisfying way. This is a beautiful novel full of big emotions and unexpected pieces, just like its characters.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy opens with Desiree traveling from Los Angeles to Paris with her grandfather. She's been looking after him as his health declines, and now he has decided they should take this final trip before he undertakes assisted suicide in Switzerland. Desiree knows she needs to tell her sister what's happening, but she fears that revealing the plan only when it's too late to stop it will end their relationship—and she's right. Years later, Desiree is estranged from her sister, but she has three close friends, "almost enough to fill the hole a sister could leave." The three other women each take focus for parts of the story as it jumps forward and back in time, exploring the ways their lives and friendships evolve over more than 20 years.

This is one of those novels where I liked all the individual scenes but found the whole a bit lacking. Flournoy has crafted a great set of characters who I was glad to get to know over time, and sometimes wished to know better than the constraints of the story permitted. The friends are all Black women of the same age, but they don't have much else in common, making for interesting conflicts and changes in how close the different pairs are as the years pass. Each chapter places one or more of the characters in a situation that's emotional and realistically portrayed, if often fairly isolated from the surrounding events. With the way the book shifts between times, characters, and styles, leaving many pieces out, it might be better approached as a set of linked stories.

→ THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston: Janie returns to her Florida home after more than a year away, and the neighbors are abuzz with gossip. She left with a younger man, and because she's returned alone, they speculate that he ran off with someone else and stole all the money she inherited from her late husband. But Janie tells her best friend that isn't what happened to Tea Cake, and she'll relate the whole story, beginning back in her childhood. Janie was raised by her grandmother, who was born in slavery and tried to set Janie up well by marrying her off to a successful farmer. It wasn't the life Janie wanted, and her longing for love and for change led her into a second marriage. Eventually the story reaches Janie meeting Tea Cake, the love they share, and the adventures they have together before events bring her back home.

I first read this 1937 classic for a high school class—or at least I think I did, but I'd forgotten everything about it. I was inspired to pick it up now because of two recent podcasts: Our Ancestors Were Messy recounted the friendship and falling out between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and Zero to Well-Read discussed Hurston's novel and its position in the history of Black literature.

This was fascinating to read as an artifact of its time, even though my engagement in the story fluctuated. Some sections dragged for me, but I was completely captivated toward the end, when the last few chapters become nonstop tension. I love the way Hurston writes, switching between two distinct modes: poetic descriptions that paint a scene or convey an idea, and dialogue in dialect that captures the sounds of the characters' spoken language. I was glad for an opportunity to return to this novel and learn more about its context.

→ AUDITION by Katie Kitamura begins with a middle-aged actress (our unnamed narrator) meeting a young man for lunch. This is their second meeting, and Xavier wants something from her, but what he wants, and what happened on the first occasion, remains unspoken. There is tension to their interaction, and in the narrator's realization that people around them are making incorrect assumptions about the nature of their relationship, when the truth is something else entirely. As the chapters unfold, who Xavier is becomes clear, though the situation is strange. And then in the second half of the novel, there's a major shift, and everything is less clear, and far stranger.

All the talk around this novel concerns the mystery of the shift at the midpoint, and my curiosity drew me to the book, and quickly through the first half (it's quite short). I definitely didn't predict how the story would change, and that surprise delighted me and set my hopes high for how the two halves would connect. I continued speeding through, forming theories around various fascinating moments, but also starting to wonder whether the disparate pieces could all lead to a single conclusion, especially after the narrative grows particularly strange toward the end. As it turns out, Kitamura didn't intend for the story to have a definitive solution or interpretation, and that approach left me underwhelmed. Reactions to this book have been highly polarized, and my feelings fall somewhere in the middle. It's a well-written and compulsive read, and I like the concept, but I wanted something different from it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Mo Willems breaks down the mechanics of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! for Dan Kois at Slate: "When someone reads a book, they try to spend the same amount of time on each page no matter what. When an adult reads to a kid, each page, you're going to spend the same amount on the page. So when you have eight images on a spread like this, you're going to read that four times as fast as single images."

Fall's Back

The calendar has come back around to fall, with its various seasonal trappings. The parade of holidays is underway, the days are shortening, the weather is changing. Here in northern California, the past month has brought a shift to less chance of sudden heat waves and more of sudden rain.

November has several traditional associations, including US elections, so I'll remind you to vote if there's an election happening where you live. I'll also remind you that any writers you know might become especially weird next month, due to November's connection with extreme writing.

If you're reading my blog, you're probably aware of National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages writing a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November, for the joy, challenge, and community of it. You may not have heard that the nonprofit organization which provided the infrastructure for NaNoWriMo shut down earlier this year. Despite this unfortunate development, the spirit of NaNo survives. Plenty of writers will still push themselves to meet big goals in November, either solo or as part of a group, whether or not they're specifically counting to 50k. (One place to find resources and an encouraging newsletter is NaNo 2.0, a more modest endeavor launched by NaNo founder Chris Baty and other longtime volunteers.)

The spirit of NaNo always calls to me in the fall, and while I'm not setting myself any word count goals, I will be using November as motivation for increased writing progress. In my last update, two months ago, I shared photographic evidence of the planning I was doing to sort out structural changes and make decisions before moving ahead. The planning stage dragged on for longer than I intended, and I'm ready to get back into serious writing mode.

September Reading Recap

Another great month of reading, with some intense stories of different kinds:

→ THE LIONS OF WINTER: SURVIVAL AND SACRIFICE ON MOUNT WASHINGTON by Ty Gagne chronicles the true story of a 1982 search and rescue mission for lost climbers that resulted in a tragedy. Gagne begins by introducing Albert Dow III, a dedicated volunteer with New Hampshire's Mountain Rescue Service, and establishing that he will be killed in an avalanche while searching for two lost climbers. Then we meet the young but experienced climbers, Hugh Herr and Jeff Batzer, and follow them on their ice climbing expedition as Mount Washington's famously severe weather worsens and they lose their way. Over the course of their harrowing ordeal, it begins to seem increasingly impossible that Herr and Batzer will survive, except that we know Gagne interviewed them in the present. While their predicament grows more dire, a search is organized, and we also get hour-by-hour accounts of the teams of heroic rescuers who brave the extreme conditions. Among them is Dow, who we follow into the avalanche that claimed his life.

Gagne creates so much suspense in this story despite the known outcome, because the tension isn't over what will happen but how it will play out, and how it might have gone differently with other choices or circumstances. The account is full of careful detail about winter mountaineering, search and rescue, and other fields, and it's also full of emotion and compassion for everyone involved in the story. I read one of Gagne's earlier books, WHERE YOU'LL FIND ME, and found it gripping but sometimes overly technical. I think the pace and stakes of this book would appeal to a wider audience who enjoy reading about true life adventures and disasters.

→ THE TREES by Percival Everett: In the town of Money, Mississippi, during a family gathering in 2018, an elderly white woman remarks that she wishes she never told that lie about the Black boy all those years ago. (Only, she doesn't say "Black".) Soon, one of the men in her family is gruesomely murdered, and his body is found alongside another brutalized corpse belonging to an unknown Black man. Local law enforcement is puzzled, even more so when the Black body disappears from the morgue. The situation really starts getting out of control when a second relative is killed in a similar fashion, and the same dead Black man is found at the scene. (By the way, this novel is written as a comedy.) Two agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are called in, both Black men who find the largely white population of Money resistant to their presence. As they push through racism to conduct their investigation, they discover that the murders are connected to the history of lynching, in Money and throughout the United States. (Again, this is a comic novel.)

I am impressed by the way Everett has crafted a madcap comedy with a rollicking, page-turning plot that revolves around the deadly serious topic of racial violence. From that unexpected combination comes further surprises, and every time I started to figure out where the story was going, it veered off in a new direction. The book is over-the-top in many ways, but it goes light on the history lessons, which works for the story, but motivated me to do some outside research into referenced events. I recommend this, and I bet you haven't read anything else like it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang: Alice is a graduate student in Analytic Magick at Cambridge, and her advisor recently died in an experiment gone gruesomely wrong. With her professor dead, Alice has little hope of completing her dissertation and finding a good job in academia. She also feels responsible for his death, since she's the one who drew the pentagram. (He always made his grad students handle those tiresome details.) So Alice sets out on a rescue mission to Hell, armed with all the arcane knowledge she could uncover and a new box of chalk. But at the last moment, her co-advisee and former friend Peter insists on joining her, since he has just as much at stake. Together, they will have to face the unknown challenges of the Eight Courts of Hell in hopes they can return with their professor's soul, and their own lives.

This is a big novel with a lot of ideas, and while I liked all the pieces, I didn't find them as well put together as in Kuang's earlier (and even more ambitious) BABEL. I most appreciated the imaginative depictions of the different areas of Hell, the allies and foes that Alice and Peter encounter, and especially the wonderful magic system based around logical paradoxes. The portrait of academia is also very effective, both when it receives satirical treatment and when the toxic elements are seriously critiqued. Alice and Peter are compelling characters, but there's unevenness to how they're developed over the course of the story. In general, my major complaints are about pacing, and I wished the novel had been edited into a tighter story. I do still recommend this to interested readers who are willing to push through some slow sections and forgive some flaws.

→ THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald: In 1913, Frank's wife leaves him, taking their three children on the long train journey from Moscow back to her original home in England. The next morning, the children return, since Nellie changed her mind about bringing them with her. Frank's life is naturally thrown into disarray by all these events, and he's faced with the problem of how to ensure his children are looked after while he attends to his work running a printing business. Some early attempts at finding caretakers go comically wrong. At the same time, Frank is dealing with various problems connected to his company, including the concern that the Russian government might stop tolerating businesses run by foreigners.

I was inspired to pick this up after reading FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane, a novel which features author Penelope Fitzgerald as the main character. I wasn't sure what to expect from Fitzgerald's own work, but I wasn't surprised to find that it focuses closely on Frank's observations and interactions with the people around him. I enjoyed Frank's view of the world and the way he often takes amusement from the events of the story. I also enjoyed how Fitzgerald portrays the details of the place and time, including the operations of the printing company. Even as I continued through the book, I never really knew what to expect next, and that made for a fun ride.

August Reading Recap

Last month's reading was a great mix of science fiction and stories grounded in the real world:

→ METALLIC REALMS by Lincoln Michel takes the form of a volume of annotated science fiction stories compiled and analyzed by Michael Lincoln. This delightful metafictional premise is established at the start of Michel's novel by the title page of Michael's book (you with me so far?) indicating that we're about to read The Star Rot Chronicles by the Orb 4 writing collective. Also established at the outset, in a footnote to the epigraph, is that this tale will end in tragedy. In a foreword, and then an introduction, Michael explains his connection to the Orb 4: He's not a member, but rather a scholar of their work (and passionate fan) who witnessed their turbulent creative history firsthand, by virtue of sharing an apartment with the founding member. Michael is determined to present these brilliant stories to the world, along with commentary providing a definitive account of all that transpired from the collective's beginning to its premature end.

This is a very funny novel about a character who takes himself and his subject far too seriously. Michel, the real author, has given himself several challenges with the book's inventive format, and he handles them all wonderfully. In particular, the humor demands that the Orb 4's stories not in fact be "the greatest achievements in science fiction imagination of the twenty-first century," but they have to fail to meet that bar in a way that's still enjoyable to read. Not only does Michel find the right balance, but he keeps the stories fresh by changing up the style for each one and paying homage to various science fiction authors and subgenres. I had so much fun reading this novel, and at the risk of sounding too much like the main character: I want everyone else to experience the greatness as well.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane: In 1952, Penelope makes an onerous journey from England to Mexico with her six-year-old son, leaving behind her husband and small daughter for an unknown number of months, in hopes that this extreme venture will pay off financially. Penelope and young Valpy have been invited to Mexico by two elderly widows with a distant connection to her family who suggest that perhaps they will leave their considerable fortune to the boy. With the money, Penelope and her husband could escape a life of poverty, continue funding the prestigious yet struggling literary magazine they edit together, and perhaps stop him drinking away their meager income. When Penelope and Valpy arrive in Fonseca, they discover the widows are also heavy drinkers who show little interest in their invited guests. The mansion is filled with a motley collection of other visitors, all apparently there attempting to win the inheritance for themselves.

I loved reading this story of a character who finds herself in a strange situation and observes it with a writer's eye. Kane conveys Penelope's perspective with a wonderful dry humor and crafts a compelling drama among the characters thrown together in Fonseca. What adds a fascinating layer to the novel is that it's based on truth: Penelope Fitzgerald was a real, acclaimed writer, and she actually made this trip to Mexico with her son, though the circumstances surrounding it are unclear, even to the family. Kane started with details from a 1980 Fitzgerald essay that alludes to the trip, and Fitzgerald's children provided some additional insights, but most of the novel is delightfully imagined fiction. I wasn't familiar with Penelope Fitzgerald before this, but I'll be checking out her work now, and I'll continue looking forward to Kane's stories.

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz: When four robots who staff a San Francisco restaurant discover that the owners have abandoned them, they begin scheming to reopen on their own terms. As bots in the new nation of California (still recovering from a war of secession), they are granted limited rights to autonomy but aren't permitted to operate a business, and most are indentured until they can buy out their own contracts. So while their new restaurant begins earning attention for the quality of the hand-pulled biang biang noodles, they're trying to avoid focus on the dearth of humans involved, until a malicious campaign of bad reviews puts that fact into the spotlight.

This delightful story presents great characters along with thought-provoking ideas about how society might handle robotic intelligence. I liked the balance Newitz strikes between cozy food escapism, a bit of harrowing adventure, and serious issues such as discrimination and PTSD. Each of the four robot characters is developed fully as an individual personality, with a distinctive body type and corresponding backstory. This is a short book, so I wished for more time with the characters, but it's the right length to tell the story.

→ THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison opens with the news of a young girl, Pecola, who is pregnant with her father's baby. The story then moves backwards and depicts events in the lives of Pecola's family members and neighbors in the months and even years before, only returning directly to Pecola and her tragic situation near the end. Sections of the book shift between different perspectives and styles, but one recurring narrator is Pecola's friend Claudia, who observes with a child's limited but curious perspective. Claudia rejects the idea that as a Black child, she should worship white, blue-eyed baby dolls and actresses, while Pecola is dangerously enamored of blue eyes.

I've known the basic premise of this novel for years, but on finally reading it (prompted by an upcoming series on canonical books by the Book Riot podcast), I was surprised by the other threads it contains. The many narrative shifts as well as the content make this a challenging read, and a rewarding one. The edition I read includes a fascinating afterword written by Morrison in 1993, reflecting on her intentions with the novel and where she thinks the implementation fell short. Interestingly, Morrison calls out her dissatisfaction with the section focused on Pecola's mother, but I found it one of the most engaging.

→ BEAUTYLAND by Marie-Helene Bertino: Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977 to a mother who is soon parenting alone and struggling to make ends meet. Adina also has an origin far beyond Earth, and at the age of four, she comes to understand that she's an extraterrestrial, sent to observe humans. Every night, she feeds her notes into a fax machine, and her alien superiors send back terse responses. Though Adina always carries her responsibility as an outsider trying to analyze human behavior, she grows up like any other misfit kid. She forms a couple of strong friendships, survives the perils of adolescence and the uncertainty of early adulthood, and eventually makes a life for herself in New York City. Whenever she chooses to reveal her extraterrestrial nature to others, they question whether it's a delusion or a metaphor—and Adina's story is basically the same regardless of what the truth is.

I guess I'm the alien on this one, because this widely beloved novel did not work for me. Much of the book is mainly a coming-of-age story that I found interesting enough but nothing special. Same for the depictions of life in New York City and the experience of grief. Adina's observations on humanity didn't illuminate the human condition for me in the way they were probably supposed to. And I really disliked the book's bleak ending, though I gather other readers went away feeling more hopeful.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Literary Hub presents How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents, a conversation between writers Maria Reva, Jasmin Schreiber, and Ed Yong, about snails and storytelling. Reva explains, "Once Jasmin and I connected over email, we discovered that our novels were indeed linked, in a way I hadn't expected. Both drew from the same article, published in The Atlantic six years earlier: Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ed Yong's 'The Last of Its Kind,' featuring George, the last known Hawaiian tree snail of his species."

Show, Don't Tell

On most of my writing days, I don't have anything to show for myself in a literal sense: There's nothing visually distinct about my progress beyond a gradual amassing of words typed. But occasionally I reach a stage where it's productive to get away from my keyboard and screen in order to write nearly indecipherable notes on index cards or sticky notes or other convenient rectangles. And then you get photos!

I started writing this draft a year ago, which is what it is. And hey, look, in that post I foreshadowed that "Once I reach a certain point, I may need to stop writing for a little while and make decisions about some elements that remain vague." So I guess that's what I'm doing now, as well as determining structural changes and mapping out what's ahead.

First I wanted to reread what I've written so far. I also wanted to somehow see the entire work-in-progress at once. My solution for this was to print the manuscript with 16 pages on each piece of paper. That's too small to comfortably make out the text, but I reread on screen while following along on paper to notice things like how much space each scene takes up. I jotted down a lot of big picture notes, and the scale kept me from getting bogged down in individual sentences.

July Reading Recap

I read another wide variety of novels last month:

→ A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton: In 1998, three teenagers meet online, calling themselves Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith. They become friends through developing ASCII art games that build on the mythology from a popular video game series. Their connections develop over hours in IRC text chat, where anonymity lets them create new identities and experiment with gender. By 2016, they've lost touch, though they still think of each other often, with regret over how their friendship ended. While their lives have diverged, they've followed some similar paths and all ended up in the vicinity of New York City, where they're being pulled back into each other's orbits.

This is an impressive and immersive novel that initially drew me in with intriguing POV choices, a richly imagined online community, and an early section formatted as a remarkably accurate (even painfully accurate) IRC chat. After the time jump, I loved getting to know the characters as adults in all their complexity, and I felt constant suspense about when and how they would reconnect. The story portrays individual and collective experiences of trans women with care and honesty, which means a good deal of difficult emotional material. I was sad to reach the end and leave these characters behind.

→ ACTS OF FORGIVENESS by Maura Cheeks: With a bill moving through Congress that will finally grant reparations to the descendants of slavery, Willie is anxious for her family to gather the documents that will prove they qualify. In many ways, the Revels are better off than other American Black families: They own both a home and a small business, and Willie was educated at a fancy private school. But beneath the middle-class trappings, they are struggling financially, and Willie worries about what kind of life she can provide for her daughter. Willie's aging parents don't want to discuss either money or family history, so it's up to her to pursue the genealogy search that might provide answers about the past and earn them the funds they're owed.

I enjoyed all the threads explored in this novel, despite some uneven pacing. Willie is a well-developed character who has been shaped by years of competing pressures from family, work, money, and friends. The way the book is structured, there's more focus on Willie's personal and family life in the first half, while the second half is dominated by the implications of the reparations act and Willie's quest for genealogical records. Because the latter topics are what attracted me to the book, I wanted more of that plot sooner. I was glad the story goes deep on the details of genealogy research, and I wished for more time spent on the fascinating questions raised about how a reparations policy might be implemented.

→ SILVERBORN: THE MYSTERY OF MORRIGAN CROW by Jessica Townsend: In this fourth installment of the Nevermoor series, Morrigan Crow is approaching her fourteenth birthday and very much a teenager, both emotionally and in striving to take on greater responsibility. As a result of events from the previous book, she's expanded her magical abilities, and she's burdened with a weighty secret. It turns out the adults in her life also have big secrets, and Morrigan discovers that much about her past and her family have been kept from her. These revelations grant her entry to a wealthy enclave of Nevermoor society, where she witnesses a shocking crime. When the police fail to arrest the perpetrator, Morrigan and her Wundrous Society classmates are determined to solve the mystery themselves.

I like watching this series develop, with each book continuing to expand Morrigan's understanding of Nevermoor, Wunsoc, and her own position within these. I love the relationships between Morrigan and the people she's close with, and the main weakness of this book is that she spends considerable time away from any of them. The new cast of characters comes with a lot of plot complications and mystery, and I became invested in how these would resolve, even if some of it felt awfully peripheral to Morrigan's life. I remain interested in following where the story goes next, and I'm so glad for this wonderful addition to the magical schoolchildren genre.

→ WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy: Dominic and his three children live on a remote island located between Antarctica and Australia, and they're the only human occupants since the last batch of scientists left. The research station had to close due to rising waters and more frequent storms, but things also went horribly wrong at the end. The family will have to vacate the island soon, but first they're tasked with saving what they can from the failing seed vault. It's a shock when a woman washes up on the island from a shipwreck, badly injured but still alive. Rowan claims she reached the island by accident, thought in fact she was headed there for reasons she doesn't divulge to Dominic and his children. While she hides her intentions from them, they conspire not to let Rowan discover the truth about the terrible recent events.

I was excited by the situation and mysteries this novel sets up, but I had such mixed feelings by the end. The intrigue about what's happening is heightened by the unusual setting, which McConaghy depicts with strong writing and fascinating details about the flora and fauna. And to be sure, the story is a page-turner. But I far preferred the tension created by what Rowan and Dominic aren't telling each other to the tension of what they aren't telling the reader. Having a point-of-view character avoid thoughts of a subject that's weighing on their mind is always awkward, and while it's managed reasonably well here, it eventually got old. I also felt increasingly unconvinced by the character choices, even for people driven by extreme circumstances and their various traumas. I wonder what a less thriller-y version of this story could have been.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Melanie Walsh presents a data analysis at The Pudding about animal gender in children's books: "After filtering the data to focus on animals who were explicitly gendered (she/her or he/him) and appeared in at least 10 different books, only a few animals were more consistently gendered female: birds, ducks, and cats. The rest—frog, wolf, fox, elephant, dog, monkey, bear, rabbit, mouse, and pig—skew male."

Releases I'm Ready For, Summer/Fall 2025

The next few months promise a fascinating crop of new books from authors I love!

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (August 5): I always trust Newitz to have an original, thoughtful take on whatever they write about, and I've especially enjoyed their previous fiction involving robots, AUTONOMOUS and THE TERRAFORMERS. So a Newitz story about robots running a noodle restaurant in a post-secession San Francisco sounds like a good time to me. Don't miss the charming retro website for the restaurant/book.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane (August 12): This novel is based on real events from the life of a real person I've never heard of, the author Penelope Fitzgerald. But I was enthralled by Kane's earlier novel also based on real events I hadn't heard of, THE REPORT, so I'm on board. I look forward to more history and more of Kane's great writing about interpersonal dynamics.

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19): I follow Anders's excellent newsletter, so I've been hearing about her next novel for a while and getting excited about the premise: A trans witch teaches her grieving mother how to do magic, while also investigating the secrets of a book from 1749. It sounds like there is so much wonderful stuff woven into this story, and I can't wait to read it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang (August 26): Kuang's BABEL was an ambitious, skillful alternate history about Oxford translators controlling the magic that powers the British empire. I'm intrigued that the new novel features more magical academics, this time at Cambridge, and they're journeying into hell to save a professor's soul, or maybe just to secure a recommendation.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy (September 16): I admired Flournoy's debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, for depicting a large, complex family as well the city of Detroit over time. I'm expecting more strong portrayals of characters over time in this story about the friendship between five Black women as they figure out adulthood.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry (October 14): It takes impressive range and imagination to write a novel about a high school field hockey team performing witchcraft (WE RIDE UPON STICKS) followed by one about Mongolian monks searching for the next reincarnation of a great lama (WHEN I'M GONE, LOOK FOR ME IN THE EAST). I trust Barry with any subject and genre now, but I'm particularly interested in "a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica"!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tom Comitta introduces People's Choice Literature, a project to create America's most wanted and unwanted novels, with graphs: "There are several survey results that might give you pause. For one, there's a glaring contradiction in responses to two answers. The most wanted activity for characters to experience in a novel was 'falling in or out of love,' but the most unwanted genre was romance. Given the popularity of romance novels, it's hard to square this until you consider their place in culture, with romance often seen as a form of women's literature, a category that historically has not been given as much weight and respect as literature written by cis men."

→ Laura Miller at Slate reviews the resulting book: "People's Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age–y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That's the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.... Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times."

June Reading Recap

Last month, along with my usual novel reading, I read two powerful nonfiction books. Both are about not looking away from the death and destruction in Gaza inflicted by Israel during the present war and in the past. Both hope for a future that denounces these acts on the way to peace.

→ ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, writes Omar El Akkad, and "this" refers to the devastation of Gaza. He opens by describing an injured child found in the rubble of her home, and throughout the book, he returns to stories of Palestinian children bombed, shot, killed, orphaned by the Israeli barrage. El Akkad is challenging the reader not to look away from these horrors, not to place the victims in a category that excuses the slaughter, not to soften the language used in discussing the genocide. I struggled with these challenges, and my starting point wasn't as far removed as many who I hope this book will reach, though their challenge will be even greater.

The book is not all dead children, although those stories could easily fill many volumes. El Akkad weaves accounts from the current war with observations from his own life as a Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant in Canada and the U.S. and a journalist in other war zones. He uses all these episodes to frame sections that lay out his well-conceived ideas in powerful writing: "Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

→ In BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING, Peter Beinart approaches the current moment, and the history of Palestine and Israel, from a Jewish perspective. He also brings his perspective of a childhood spent partially in apartheid-era South Africa to consider how one people justifies oppressing another and how a country can move past that oppression.

I appreciated the amount of historical and cultural context this book includes, giving me a greater understanding of the histories of Palestine, Israel, and Zionist movements over the centuries. Beinart also draws from Torah and Talmud passages that help make his case for opening eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering.

Beinart's arguments seemed persuasive and well-developed to me (plus well-cited: there are extensive endnotes), but I didn't need convincing. I hope the book will provide some clarity to readers grappling with complicated feelings about Israel, and I'd love to also see it read by those who only feel a single way.

→ DOWN IN THE SEA OF ANGELS by Khan Wong: In 2106 San Francisco, Maida starts her new job with the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project. The organization finds and documents artifacts from before the Collapse that upended society and halved the population. Maida is a psion, one of the minority with psychic abilities, and her power lets her sense the history of objects she touches. A jade teacup produces stronger visions than she's ever experienced, revealing the lives of two San Franciscans from the past. In 2006, Nathan is a designer who feels unfulfilled by his work in the tech industry but loves the community and creativity he finds at Burning Man. And in 1906, Li Nuan is an indentured servant in Chinatown desperate to escape her brutal life in a brothel. The teacup brings them visions as well, in a connection that provides hope. But Maida's power also shows her that an anti-psion movement is growing, stoking fear and threatening to round up people with abilities.

I enjoyed this ambitious novel. Each of the three storylines is well-developed, with a strong set of characters and a clear arc. Wong portrays every version of San Francisco with care, and I was delighted by the historical details, the familiar-to-me recent past, and the imagined future shaped by drastic climate change. The way the three stories fit together is interesting—there are no huge surprises, and yet the overall story adds up to something a bit different than I expected. I didn't love everything about this (a recurring problem of shifting verb tenses was a big irritation), but there's a lot that will stay with me.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal: After gaining fame as the Lady Astronaut and participating in humanity's first voyage to Mars, Elma is now back on Mars with the second expedition. This time, the plan is to establish a permanent habitat, and Elma is thrilled to have her engineer husband as another member of the crew. At first, the habitat setup goes as planned, though Elma keeps encountering signs that there were problems on the previous mission she never learned about. But when one of the supply crates is found destroyed, it raises questions about the viability of the current mission, as well as more questions about what happened on the last one.

I was glad to return to the Lady Astronaut world and characters, but this fourth book felt slower to get going than the rest of the action-packed series. Since harrowing events didn't arrive at the usual fast pace, I had more time to grow frustrated by details and subplots that interested me less. But whenever the big problems did appear, they were as exciting as ever.

→ CURSED BREAD by Sophie Mackintosh: Elodie lives a small life in a small town, working every day at the bakery with her husband, who is driven by the desire to bake a perfect loaf but has no desire for Elodie. But when glamorous Violet and her ambassador husband move to town, Elodie's life is transformed. At first Elodie observes the couple from afar, catching glimpses of their passionate but disturbing relationship. Then Violet seeks out friendship, granting the attention that Elodie is starved for. Elodie's obsession with Violet, and by extension her husband, continues into a later narrative thread, when Elodie is writing letters to Violet in the aftermath of a strange tragedy that befell the town.

All I knew going into this book was that the marketing connects it to a real historical mystery involving tainted bread. That sets up the wrong expectation, because most of the story isn't concerned with that event, and while it does provide an explanation of the mystery, it raises far more unanswered questions. The novel primarily focuses on exploring obsession, creating unsettling vibes (sometimes both sexy and unsettling), and presenting a narrator who won't or can't commit to what really happened. I found it interesting to read, but not enough of the elements and questions resolved in a satisfying way.

Briefly

I have fantasies in which I blog all the time about writing. (Wow, Lisa, what an exciting fantasy life you lead!) I wish I was both speedy and insightful enough to produce regular essays with peeks inside my process, explanations of craft questions I've pondered, and other such writerly gems. Alas, "speedy" is definitely not the type of writer I am, and my constant surprise over this fact suggests I'm not too great on the insight, either.

I don't have time to write all that stuff, and on the plus side, you probably don't have time to read it, either. We all have a lot going on, what with the various firehoses of real life that just keep spraying.

So I'll keep this brief: I'm still over here, writing my little sentences, or actually my overly long sentences. In the months since I blogged something other than reading recaps, I've also had a lot of not-writing time, with a busy period of traveling, turning 50, and living real life.

I continue to be pleased with how my novel is shaping up. I continue to be impatient about it not being fully shaped yet. Et cetera, et cetera, since I'm saving you time here. Go read something else, or take a moment to grab yourself a breath. I'm going to get back to my fantasy life, and/or my novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Sam Weller recounts the origin story of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: "In the storefront window of the United Cigar Store, he saw John Steinbeck's newly published novel The Grapes of Wrath and purchased it. Heading home by bus, literally traveling through the dust bowl, he read the book. He was particularly drawn to its structure, with its alternating narrative chapters and brief, intercalary passages of contextual information, setting, and social commentary. As he read, he thought about one day using the same architecture, but setting his story on Mars."

May Reading Recap

Last month's books were completely different from each other, but all thought-provoking:

→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters is a collection of four stories, all nuanced, intense, and focused on characters in situations that require complicated thinking about gender (by both character and reader). All are first-person narratives, with fully developed settings and scenarios that made me feel completely immersed—an often uncomfortable experience, since none of these are particularly happy stories.

When I reached the end of the first story, the gender apocalyptic "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones", I forgot I was reading a collection and was sorry to have to move on. I could easily imagine a novel-length expansion of that story. "The Chaser" and "The Masker", both compelling stories based in the familiar world, left me satisfied by their self-contained plots.

About half of the book is the title story, billed as a novel itself, and I was glad to get so many pages to grow familiar with the logging camp setting, its denizens, and their distinctive jargon. Peters writes with such a distinctive and confident voice that every sentence is a marvel of language: "To timber trespass in the full of winter was to countenance ice slicks, frozen fingers, and sunlight hours so short the workday extended from dark to dark. The grade of the slopes made cutting sidewinders a common occasion, and if you weren't careful in how you stacked the cold deck, those massive logs would tumble like straw, snapping knees as they went." As a respite from this cold and challenging work, the boss of the operation (the "job shark") throws a stag dance, meaning that any logger who wishes may play the role of a lady by wearing a strategically placed triangle of fabric. The story's narrator wants this very much, which sets in motion a complex inner journey. I recommend this whole collection (as well as Peters' previous novel, DETRANSITION, BABY).

→ COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna: When Jane's sabbatical lines up with the chance for her family to spend a year housesitting at the extravagant home of her rich and far more successful friend, she finally has the space and time to finish her second novel. For almost a decade, while teaching, raising two children, and moving between cramped apartments, Jane has been working on an increasingly epic book. She started out writing the story of a Black actress passing as white, then incorporated more characters and historical threads about mulattos in America to round out what her husband calls her "mulatto War and Peace." But at last she finishes the novel and sends it to her agent, dreaming of fame and prizes and a fancy house of her own. The response isn't what she expected, and soon Jane finds herself making some ethically dubious decisions and considering writing for television, a field she's always scorned.

Jane's character drew me into the story right away, and I was caught up in the unfolding drama of her situation. I loved the detailed and slightly satirical look inside both the literary and television industries. The writing is always sharply insightful about race, class, and human foibles. I frequently laughed at great lines, and I frequently cringed at Jane's choices. This is my first time picking up one of Senna's novels, but it won't be the last.

→ LUMINOUS by Silvia Park follows two main story threads, and how they connect is a mystery at first. (A mystery that's spoiled by other book descriptions, so beware.) In a reunified Korea, Ruijie is a human girl who uses robotic braces to walk, and she loves roaming the salvage yard after school in search of discarded robots to tinker with. She meets Yoyo, a robot boy who's exceptionally lifelike and advanced, yet has no owner and lives in the salvage yard, hiding from scrappers. Ruijie befriends him, introduces him to some classmates, and hopes to convince her parents to take him in. Elsewhere in Seoul, Jun works as a detective for Robot Crimes, and his latest case involves a missing robot girl who the owner considers her daughter. Jun is human, but following an IED strike during the Unification War, his reconstructed body is 80% bionic. It's also the male body he always wanted. Jun's investigation puts him back in touch with the sister he's been avoiding, a roboticist like their father, and the two of them start to grapple with difficult memories from childhood.

As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this novel. The characters are all well-drawn, and the portrayals delve into thoughtful explorations of disability, gender, and trauma. Park presents a complex vision of a society where robots are ubiquitous but there's no agreement on how much to treat them as people. The worldbuilding is also strong in depicting a Korea brought back together by another devastating war. I liked many parts of the story, but the pieces didn't all come together as well as I was hoping. This is Park's debut, and I'll definitely watch for more of their work.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel contemplates The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing: "Regardless, before 2006 it was rare to see writers engaged with science fiction, fantasy, or horror concepts competing for major literary awards. Since then, it has been rare to not have writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Karen Russell, or Emily St. John Mandel in the mix. We almost expect our big literary authors to embrace genre elements for some books."

→ Charlie Jane Anders looks at How Cloud Atlas Is Shaping a Generation of Authors: "Lately, I feel as though I'm constantly seeing books that are described as 'Cloud Atlas meets ———————.' And I'm also coming across a steady flow of books that use that time-spanning structure, though not always with six whole storylines. I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for 'genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.' As I've said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same."