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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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There There, by Tommy Orange. I finally got myself to read this generally excellent novel. After the first few chapters, I realized I’d better read it all in one day, and today was the day. It’s the story of “Urban Indians” – Native Americans who live in Oakland, California, where I lived for 11 years in the 1980s and a bit beyond. In fact, I lived six of those years in the same neighborhood with the author, who’s about the same age as my older son, so they would both have been about 3-9 at the time. As the story begins, we learn that several Natives are planning to steal the cash prizes from a big powwow, to be held at the Oakland Coliseum. We meet quite a few characters, whose lives all intersect on that dreadful day. We’re left in suspense about two of the characters, although there’s a prequel/sequel out just now, and a review told me about the fate of one of them.

I’m curious about two of the author’s artistic decisions – which may have been good decisions, but I wonder whether they were deliberate. One was that by having so many different characters, it’s a bit harder for the reader to relate to them as individuals than if we’d focused on just a few. Maybe the point was for us to relate to them as a collective? The second is his focus on a Native/white binary – almost all of the characters were one or the other, even random unnamed strangers. Maybe this was deliberate, if he wanted us to focus on that binary, and since he may have anticipated that a large number of his readers would be white. As someone who’s lived in Oakland, though, it seemed a bit odd for so many of the random strangers to be white, since Oakland has more Black than white residents. I only remember one person being Black – but maybe I was failing to pay enough attention.

The day I started reading the book, it was very fun for me that J. had just returned from Berkeley, and he’d been in many of the BART stations that played such a prominent role in the story.
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The Mage-Fire War, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Recluce #21. This is the third book about Beltur, and tells about their first months establishing Haven (the future Fairhaven) as a somewhat independent community. Mostly it’s about the war they had to fight to keep one of the neighbors from using it as a launching ground to invade another, and if that’s not what you’re expecting from the book you might find it tiresome – hence the title, I suppose, to tip you off. At the end of the book, Beltur solves their problem with a method that Modesitt has used in quite a few of his recent books, and in this case it seems quite justified. The book doesn’t contribute very much to the overall story of the Recluce series, but if you like Beltur (and I do), it’s fine to spend more time with him.
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Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy, by Anat Shenker-Osorio. This book focuses on the metaphors and framings that are often used when talking about the economy, with an emphasis on how progressives should be doing things differently. As someone who is both an expert on conceptual metaphors and framing and sympathetic to progressive politics, I agree with her reasoning, but I’d have preferred a less partisan approach. I also have some thoughts on how I’d rather she’d framed her own arguments differently. For example, by her own reasoning, focusing on the conservative ways of talking about the economy serves to reinforce them, but she didn’t start talking about the alternatives until p.56 or so – it would have been better to start with them. It was also curious that she didn’t include the “household budget” metaphor that’s so commonly used as the rationale for why a business leader should be in charge of the government. Maybe it was less common in 2012 when her book came out, but I doubt it. Also, since she was making such good points, it would have been better if the book were written from a more “timeless” perspective, whereas now it feels a bit dated, even though not all that much time has passed.
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Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, by Henry Lien. In the West, we tell stories in which there’s a problem or challenge that the protagonist resolves – a three-act structure. In the East, a four-act structure is more common: we learn about a situation and the people in it, the situation develops further, a twist comes along and disrupts the situation, then the situation is seen in a new and broader way, with implications for the future. I was already aware of these differences, but Lien adds insights about the psychological and social benefits of the Eastern way, which I appreciated. I also liked learning how various video games and even Western media have used the Eastern structure. He also spends time on nested and circular story structures, which we know from Rashomon and The Thousand and One Nights, which let readers see situations from multiple valid perspectives and explore their nuances. My only quibble, and it’s small, is that in My Neighbor Totoro, the mom clearly didn’t have “just a cold” because otherwise the family would never have moved to the rural area where the story takes place – they move there so she can live in the sanitarium while she recovers, and it takes a while.
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A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher. It took me a few days to pick up this book, the last of the Hugo nominees, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. I’d call the genre something like fantasy-Regency cozy-horror, if that makes sense – it’s a place very like Regency England, in which there are some but not many sorcerers, and although there are horror elements, they aren’t particularly scary or upsetting. We have two heroines: Cordelia, age 14, whose mother is unfortunately an evil sorcerer who likes to control Cordelia’s body, and Hester, age 51 or so, whose brother is the object of the sorcerer’s schemes – the sorcerer wants to marry him so she can better finance Cordelia’s introduction to society. Cordelia is fine, but Hester is great, as are her friends. Tremendously fun, and I will definitely be reading it again.
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Contact, by Carl Sagan. From J’s book club; we saw the movie just a few months ago, so it’s still quite fresh in my mind. I quite liked the book, although the story was rather quietly told. I’m especially interested in the differences between the book and the movie, which I’ll tell without spoilers for the movie. Ellie’s social world was moderately different, but that makes sense given that movies need to have many fewer characters for us to learn over the span of a couple of hours. The eventual strange adventure is similar in some ways but different in one very important way that makes the book far better. Then, at the end, the book and movie have different ways of proving that everything was real. I thought the movie’s way, which was much simpler, was also far more realistic. In the book, the big discovery is that in a sense, circles are embedded within the math for circles – which is cool, but for the average person, it would be very hard to understand why it’s more cool and important than, say, the repeating pattern you’d find when zooming into the Mandelbrot Set fractal – if, in fact, it is. I’m certain that it would be very hard to build a future social movement based on the fact that mathematicians believe something extraordinary is true. So – it’s a fine book, I recommend it, and it’s also fine to read the book if you’ve already seen the movie.
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Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson. Whew! My assigned book for May. The author would have been a very interesting person to know; this book collects a variety of essays and talks he wrote on multiple topics. Trained as an anthropologist, he also spent years working with schizophrenic people, then his ideas about cybernetics (information systems and how they work with feedback, redundancy, etc.) became important in the environmental movement in the 1970s. I read his Mind and Nature many years ago, but this one has always daunted me. And with good cause – his thoughts remain somewhat opaque, but the ideas he raises are also fascinating. I don’t think his thoughts on how family communication feeds into schizophrenia are necessarily current, but his ideas about confusion between metaphor and literal speech could be relevant for talking with people with autism. The chapters on genetics are probably seriously outdated, because they didn’t know about epigenetics back then, but I bet he would have loved all that. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. I would have welcomed more clarity, though – maybe I should reread Mind and Nature.
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Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. In this 2016 book, a Berkeley sociologist shares the results of her extensive interviews with residents of the Lake Charles area in Louisiana, where people have mostly learned to ignore the heavy levels of pollution inflicted on them by the petroleum industry. I was interested in the book because she repeatedly uses the phrase “deep story,” which I’ve used in my own research to refer to the story-shaped beliefs groups tell themselves, like a need to make America “great again” or to invest in progress, etc. She uses the phrase differently – rather than societal meta-narratives, she’s focused on personal meta-narratives that gradually became ripe for others to turn into a group identity. At the time of her research, the Tea Party was that group, but of course many of these folks got excited by Trump and probably now identify as MAGA. Hochschild uses the analogy of waiting in line for the American Dream, and tells us that many of these people feel that other groups have gotten to cut ahead of them in that line, often (they believe) at the expense of their own tax dollars. They see the federal government as the villain and are probably delighted now that Trump is trying to gut it – oddly, many of them think that 40% of Americans work for the feds. Also, apparently it’s a big thing to them that Northerners want all Americans to be more sympathetic to groups that have historically struggled; they see this as an attempt to shame them, resent being told how they should feel, and apparently are thrilled that Trump says it’s fine to ignore or dismiss the needs of these groups. I especially enjoyed the short Appendix C, in which the author debunks many beliefs that were common in the community (like that 40% thing). Her goal was to create empathy for these people among her readers, but it was pretty exasperating to hear how they’ve embraced their own exploitation by multinational corporations and the super-rich.
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The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I have to thank the Hugo voters for nominating this book, because I hadn’t previously heard of the author, who now has 12 novels out. I was quite impressed! It’s a detective story that’s fantasy, in that the world is unlike ours and the people are living with a relatively low level of technology in most regards, but I don’t recall any magic. Rather, they have done a great deal of biological engineering. Our narrator has recently become an assistant to a brilliant but extremely quirky investigator, and the two of them have been tasked with solving a very strange murder. It’s entertaining and moves along well – and the world-building is very creative, although I suspect the giant sea monsters menacing their lands are really just trying to communicate. I also discovered this evening that the sequel is already available – what fun!
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Outcasts of Order, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Recluce #20. This is one of my favorite of the Recluce books, because it has an interesting protagonist (Beltur) doing things other than the usual military / police / magical assassination typical of Modesitt books, in a reasonable and reasonably appealing place (Axalt). As the book opens, Beltur has become a military hero in Elparta, but soon he has to flee, along with his blacksmith colleague and his sweetheart. They head to Axalt, where he continues his smithing and learns more of the nuances of magical healing. By the end of the book, though, they have to flee again – Beltur is just too powerful a mage for Axalt, plus he’s feeling responsible for young Taelya, who’s only seven but likely to become a powerful white mage, and white mages aren’t welcome in Axalt. The book ends with Beltur, Jessyla, and Taelya’s parents taking on the challenge of creating a city that will work for people like them. It’s interesting and relaxing reading.
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Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m afraid this book read too much like a thought experiment. For the first two-thirds of the book, almost, we just endure life on a penal colony planet – our narrator is an exobiologist who would have been quite professionally interested in the way this planet’s life works differently from Earth’s, except that he’s condemned to labor and die out here. There’s no real narrative suspense, because we have no sense that something could be done about his situation (life under totalitarianism is bad), and he’s not particularly likeable anyway. Then, suddenly, he and some of the others do have a major problem to address, and although he tells us right away that they do solve their new problem (getting back to the camp from a considerable distance), we also get to see how maybe they’ve solved their larger problem, either by emulating the way life works on this world or by becoming infected with enough of this planet’s molecules that they’ve now changed enough to make a difference. (Our narrator insists that he is no different biologically, he just sees things differently now, but he doesn’t seem entirely reliable in that regard, which kind of undercuts the point of the story.) It’s interesting, but it doesn’t really work as a story for the reasons I’ve described, nor as an allegory of standing up to totalitarianism, since the solution is essentially an upbeat horror story. I did like his metaphor of life on Earth as authoritarian at the individual level, where we want and need our bodies to have some centralized control over what’s going on internally, rather than just being a hodgepodge of symbionts like they are on this world, which is a more democratic system.
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By the Book, by Jasmine Guillory. Both of the books I was reading yesterday were slightly tiresome, so I picked up this one, and it totally hit the spot. Guillory writes fun modern romance novels that usually have Black main characters; this time Isabelle is a writer and editorial assistant who finds herself temporarily living with a handsome author with writer’s block, at his fancy Santa Barbara home. There are hints of “Beauty and the Beast”! It turns out Disney was the publisher, so there’s a very high ratio of conversation to sex scenes, which I appreciated.
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The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It is London in the very near future, and our main character, whose mother survived the Cambodian genocide, takes a new job as a “bridge” for someone who has been brought forward in time. Yes, there’s a time machine, and five people from Britain’s past who were considered dead by their contemporaries get a chance to live again. Our main character is a thoughtful young woman who is very attracted to her “ex-pat” and helps him adjust to modern Britain as it faces climate challenges… and then the book turns into a thriller, with exciting twists and turns. Wow. Without spoiling too much, since this information is present from the start of the book, I can say that if you’ve had a lifelong crush on Graham Gore, a handsome and likeable member of a failed Arctic expedition who had apparently also been on the Beagle with Darwin, then this is the book for you! (I don’t personally know the names of people who died exploring the Arctic, but apparently some people do.) This book was definitely a pleasure to read.
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Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m trying to read some or all of this year’s Hugo nominees, and this was first (other than the one I read last year). Charles is a robot valet with an extremely monotonous existence, then suddenly he finds himself free to do whatever he thinks best. The world has become a robot dystopia, though, and it’s hard for him to figure things out. Tchaikovsky does a wonderful job with satiric humor – I kept laughing out loud – and also with vividly illustrating the difference between humans and robots by letting the reader realize things that Charles cannot. I also appreciated the value judgments that come up in the last few chapters. All in all, a very entertaining book that’s also worthwhile for bigger reasons.
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