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The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, by C.M. Waggoner. This fun romantasy pairs “gutterwitch” Delly with kind, aristocratic, half-troll Winn as they work with several other women to investigate a new kind of “drip” (a magical opioid) that has nearly killed Delly’s junkie mom. I’d rather that Delly had been slightly more likeable, but at least she grows up more over the course of the book. Some of the side characters were quite interesting! I’ll want to read the author’s earlier book, which looks to be the backstory for Winn’s parents.
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The Neural Mind: How Brains Think, by George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan. This long-awaited book combines Lakoff’s interest in framing and conceptual metaphors with his earlier linguistics research and new findings in neuroscience to present hypotheses on the embodied, neural basis of cognition and how it relates to our use of language. When I say “long-awaited,” I’ll note that I have a 2018 book by Mark Johnson citing a 2017 manuscript of this book, but the book itself didn’t appear until this June. It’s thorough and the arguments are convincing. My background is relatively weak in neuroscience, so it was frustrating that those sections, especially, hadn’t received a careful copy-editing. Another oddity was that the References and Bibliography were formatted identically, so that when looking up a reference one might start with the Bibliography, fail to find it, then have to remember to turn to the References instead. They could certainly have been integrated.
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Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells. Murderbot #4. It’s only been about six months since our SecUnit left its friends to start deciding what it wants to do with its life, and now they very much need its help. This book, which is exciting and satisfying, concludes the main story arc, although of course Wells has continued to write new, interesting stories about our hero, its various relationships, and the challenges of life in an often difficult future.
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Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells. Murderbot #2. My reread continues. This time we get to meet many people’s favorite character in the series, the research transport ship whom our SecUnit calls “ART.” ART has an attitude; it also has a lot of very useful ideas about how our hero can go about achieving its immediate goals. They make a very unusual team, and it’s great fun to watch. Now on to Rogue Protocol!
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All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. Murderbot #1. In the distant future, a cyborg "security unit" owned by a major corporation finds itself working for a group of kind and thoughtful humans, the type of people it's never believed could really exist. Can it help save them from unexpected danger, and how will they react if they learn its dangerous secret? I've already lost count of how many times I've read the first four Murderbot books - this time I picked it up after watching the final episode of the first season of the TV series. One advantage of the series is that the secondary characters are now more distinct in my mind, so I was able to notice things like Pin-Lee's amazing breadth of skills - she's not only a legal expert but also a pilot and technology expert. I am so very fond of these books.
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The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner. Queen’s Thief #1. Definitely a fun reread; it’s great to spend more time with my favorite unreliable narrator. Eugenides is plucked from prison by a magus (scholar not magician) working for a king and taken to steal an important artifact. The world is very much like an adaptation of ancient Greece, but with amusing anachronisms to spot – the rifles are obvious, as is the coffee; I didn’t notice the glass windows, but there are others. In the interview with the author at the end, she says it’s better to think of the story as taking place in the 1500s, if Christianity (and the Roman Empire) had never happened.
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The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong. I enjoyed the “Monk and Robot” books and the “Legends & Lattes” books, and this book has much in common with both books. It also has far more of a conventional story plot, and character development, than either of those books, and it’s terrific to have a point of view character who’s from a fantasy-China now living in a fantasy-West. I’d recommend this to anyone who might enjoy a “cozy” fantasy. The only thing that I didn’t care for was that there was a character named “Silt” who was far too much like the character named “Silk” in The Belgariad - I kept wishing she’d named him something else so I wouldn’t keep having that association.
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The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn. This is a fun story of three women who worked at Bletchley Park as part of the code-breaking team during World War II. One of them, Osla, was a debutante fluent in German and became the girlfriend of Prince Philip; this character was based on a real woman named Osla who was Philip’s war-time girlfriend. Another, Mab, aspired to a better life for herself and her family; she wasn’t based on anyone particular. The third, Beth, was neurodivergent and had no idea growing up that she was brilliant; instead she was bullied into compliance by her mother, and at the beginning of the story has found herself in considerable trouble. She was based on two real-life Bletchley Park women who had very different life trajectories. The author did a great job of creating a compelling story while honoring many real-life individuals who served at Bletchley Park. I was especially touched by how very stressful it was for the men, in particular, who worked there, because it was forbidden to tell people about their work, so their families and neighbors often treated them poorly because they seemed to be shirking their duty to contribute to Britain’s defense. In fact, as the author tells us in her extensive afterword, there were some married couples who had no idea they had both served at Bletchley Park until decades later.

I’d learned about this book from a video that a book-club friend had encouraged us to watch, and after that I picked it up at the library. Then a few days ago, my mother-in-law let slip the name of the World War II novel she’d been reading and planning to send me, and I realized, aha, it was this very book. I definitely enjoyed reading it.
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The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I had procrastinated reading this book for a great many years – I had the idea that it was dark and stressful. The first few pages had me anticipating something along those lines, too. But soon I couldn’t put it down! It’s short and satisfying, and an especially fun (for me) aspect is that it’s set in Portland. Another thing I appreciated was that a book published in 1971 was certainly anticipating a lot of problems we’re familiar with today. I liked it very, very much.
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Redwall, by Brian Jacques. I hadn’t read this book in a very long time, so it was interesting to find out what I thought again. My memories had been that the food sounds more delicious than I’d actually think if someone set it down in front of me in real life, the books seemed pretty formulaic, and especially the stereotyping bothered me, as in, why couldn’t there be any good rats, ferrets, weasels, stoats, or martens?

Now that I’ve read it again, though, I’m thinking that if you’re going to write children’s military fantasy, and if you’re going to be so violent and kill off quite so many people, it’s probably vitally important, ethics-wise, to characterize the bad guys as inherently, fundamentally bad, and to make all of the characters who die be animals of types that in real life are considered just fine to have die (via one’s cat, for example, if not more directly by humans). Otherwise it could be just too traumatic for the younger readers. There is, in fact, one species where individuals might be either good or bad, with the latter being worthy of death – the sparrows. And again, real-life children are unlikely to become personally attached to individual wild sparrows. (The foxes are bad but treated ambivalently by both sides).

So when we extrapolate from the story to the implied real-life-relevant messages, we get “enemies are generally unredeemably bad – a person’s goodness or badness is generally determined by their category rather than their individual actions” (which is not a message most of us would want kids to apply to humans) and “it may be sad to have animals die but don’t forget, these are just animals” (which does require some reflectiveness on the children’s part, since within the story they are hardly “just animals,” they are people).

Anyway! The parts of the story I most enjoyed were where Matthias leaves Redwall to go find the sword – visiting the sparrows at the top of the abbey, meeting the shrews who were thoughtlessly “democratic,” and exploring the quarry, which was far more beautiful than any real-life quarry I’ve ever heard of. I am still pondering over the decision not to name Constance’s friend the beaver – every time he appeared in the story he felt more like a strange mysterious animal than the person, because the author was making such a point not to name him. Strange!
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Here on the Edge: How a small group of World War II conscientious objectors took art and peace from the margins to the mainstream, by Steve McQuiddy. I’ve owned two copies of this 2013 book by a local author for years (quite likely since 2013), and this month it was my self-assigned reading. I’m fascinated by the premise – a conscientious objectors camp dedicated to the fine arts and located on the Oregon Coast, just 30 miles north of my home town, in the small community of Waldport, and whose residents and activities helped inspire the Beat poets of the 1950s and the activism of the 1960s. The book gets off to a slow start, and when I was approaching the midpoint I was thinking that I’d probably have been fully satisfied with a ten-page synopsis. Things do become quite interesting after that point, though, and it’s easy to see why. If you put together a bunch of artistically inclined people, many with strong personalities and principles but also tendencies toward anarchism, along with others who may not care about the arts but have strong religious beliefs, then require them to work long hours at physically dangerous jobs for no pay while encouraging them to be creative together in the evenings, all packed into a communal living situation often far from their families… that seems like a recipe for a lot of interpersonal drama. And sometimes it was. I’m glad I finally read it.
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The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, by Zoë Schlanger. I’ve now read several books about the surprising capabilities of plants, and this one – carefully researched and informed by credible scientists doing cutting-edge research – is by far the best. I made a point to read only one chapter at a time, because I wanted to take time to assimilate what I was reading. If we were to consider a simple animal that had a long list of abilities – it can communicate, possibly hear, and even possibly see; it can recognize its kin, its neighbors, its allies, and its enemies and treat them as such; it can remember its experiences, form preferences, and make future decisions accordingly – we would recognize that such an animal has awareness and at least a rudimentary form of intelligence. However, suppose the living being is different from animals in three main ways: It’s anchored to the ground, its perception-and-response system is distributed throughout its body (no brain, but as if the entire body were a brain), and its food source is neither plants nor animals but light. Suddenly we no longer see awareness and an appropriate level of intelligence; we’re more likely to think it’s basically a living machine. This is a major bias on our part! But note that it hasn’t been all that long since animals, even familiar ones like dogs, were seen as living machines too. It’s absolutely fascinating that so many surprising things have been discovered about our plant neighbors, and I encourage everyone to read this book.
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A Drop of Corruption (Ana & Din #2), by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is the second fantasy mystery set on a world where there’s a vast “science” of human enhancement and biological engineering fueled by strange chemicals from undersea leviathans. It starts as a locked room mystery set in a strange building in a land that the empire plans to annex, and we get more character development both for young investigator Din and his exceedingly quirky and brilliant boss, Ana. So many extraordinary things to learn about! I appreciated the brief afterword of real-world political commentary too.
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The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by George Lakoff. This excellent book presages the rise of Trump and MAGA, as well as the recent general collapse of the Democratic leadership, even though it was published more than 10 years ago, as an update to a book published 10 years before that. The Democrats don’t understand how to communicate. Lakoff points out that the Republicans invested heavily in understanding the psychology of communication, so they know how to put together winning messages, while the Democrats tend to spend their money helping the needy and thus don’t have the same type of think tanks. He hopes his book can help make up the difference, although obviously it didn’t have the impact one might have hoped, since here we are. It’s a quick read, and useful information – I only wish he cited the academic papers on which many of his points are based.
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Emilie and the Sky World, by Martha Wells. This second (and final?) Emilie adventure was also lots of fun, and quite different from the first, although many of the characters continued. This time Emilie, her new friends, and her younger brother Efrain find themselves traveling upwards to visit a strange ship that appears to be caught above them in the aether current. The chapters resolving the plot were a tad confusing, but that’s probably because so much was happening at once, in several places.
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Fairhaven Rising, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Recluce #22. The first time I read this book, I was picturing something quite different: the origins of the magic education program in Fairhaven, controlled by its white (chaos) wizards. Instead, it was yet more military fantasy, this time with a female protagonist, Taelya, the protegee of Beltur, who continues in an important background role. The goals of the book are more modest – Fairhaven needs to become fully independent and given the room to establish itself. This time I knew what to expect, and it was just fine. Minor spoiler for myself, the next time I read it: I kept expecting one of the two male mages to die, but they survive and end up paired with our two leads. And by the end, they do have two more mages to train, so it does start the magic education program in a sense as well.
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Emilie and the Hollow World, by Martha Wells. The two Emilie adventures for young adults have just been reissued, and I’m having fun reading them – it’s very much like reading Jules Verne, but our point-of-view character is a 16-year-old girl, and the strange science of this world is powered by magical aether. In this first adventure, Emilie runs away from home and ends up stowing away on a ship that’s on a rescue mission to a newly discovered land beneath the world’s surface. She’s helpful and brave and wins new friends.
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The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo. I had procrastinated reading this because I thought it was going to be stressful, but once I had properly started it, I found it captivating and relaxing, and I finished it in two days. It’s the 1590s in Madrid – after the failure of the Armada but Philip II is still alive. Luzia, a scullery maid, is caught doing little magical tricks. (Are they Christian miracles or works of the devil? Neither, they’re small magics from her hidden Jewish heritage). Her unhappy employer, Valentina, decides to use these talents to improve her own social life. Soon Luzia is in a competition to become the king’s new miracle worker, although the person best qualified to help her is… unusual. I enjoyed the book very much; it had a satisfying ending. I especially liked Valentina’s story arc.

After I finished, I looked online and found that people either loved the story or found it off-putting. The reasons for the latter were two-fold. Fans of her previous work didn’t think this was much like it (not an issue for me, since this is the first I’ve read by her, but I guess she’s new to historical fiction). The other issue was the language she used for her spells. I was delighted to realize that it was probably Ladino, and she explained that it was in the notes at the end, but I recognize that I’m unusual in that regard; most Americans have heard of Yiddish but have no idea about Ladino. Latino/a readers were especially annoyed with what looked to them like funky, misspelled Spanish. Maybe she could have explained better in the text that the Jews of Spain had their own language.
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Contemplating Oblivion, by Keith Wiley. This is the first novel by one of J’s childhood best friends, with interesting characters engaging in creative activities in gorgeous places throughout the galaxy. The premise is that Earth invented a mind-upload technology about a million years previously, such that people can now live essentially forever (they don’t even need to sleep) and can experience all sorts of extraordinary things. They can even create extra versions of themselves to go live other lives then eventually, if they want, merge back again into a single individual. The only problem is that eventually the universe will end. What, if anything, can be done about that? Our main character is devoting her life and creative energies to solving the problem. After J’s read the book too then I’ll probably write up a proper review for Amazon and Storygraph.
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The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman. Highly entertaining. Four retirees in an upscale retirement community in a fictitious part of Kent like to meet on Thursdays to solve cold cases – and their talents are exceptional. Elizabeth was apparently a spy for most of her life. Ibrahim was a psychiatrist. Ron was a combative labor leader. Joyce, the new member – well, it’s not entirely clear what her talents are, beyond organizing things, making cakes, and improvising, but she’s very entertaining and keeps a journal. Suddenly they find themselves investigating a real-life murder of a not-very-nice person whom they all knew. Considering this was his first novel, the author is very good indeed. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
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