Books read, April 2025
May. 1st, 2025 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerI'm baaaaaaack!
I know I started posting again about my reading last month, but, like, this month I'm really back. As in, I am finally reading fiction again, not because there's a book club meeting I want to go to, not because I owe a blurb, but because I felt like it. And I'm reading a lot. Still a surprising amount of nonfiction mixed in there -- I would have expected myself to go off that for a while -- but this feels more like what I'm used to.
Sea Beyond 1 My own work doesn't count. Though I'll note that part of the reason for the pivot toward reading, away from the video games I've been playing so much, is because I was putting in long hours at the computer on revision and didn't want to stay there when leisure time started.
The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, Mark Forsyth. First of the two books that sparked this post the other day; this is the one I particularly praised for drawing its examples from modern song lyrics as well as classics like Shakespeare and the Bible. It also does something that I liked at first, which (unfortunately) got a little grating as I went along: basically every chapter ends with him saying something like, "that quote is also an example of [next figure of speech]" or "if the author had said XYZ instead, it would have been [next figure of speech]." It was a nice segue the first few times, but it became a bit too much over time. Then again, if I read the book more slowly, spacing out those transitions would probably have helped. Regardless, I highly recommend this if you want to know more about the tricks of rhetoric!
The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, ill. Zenchu Sato. I haven't yet gotten around to monasticism in my Patreon essays, but research for The Sea Beyond made me realize just how much my knowledge of the subject is specifically Catholic-inflected. This is the first of three books I wound up reading this month on Buddhist monasticism, and it makes for an interesting contrast with how "Zen" is conceived of in the popular Western consciousness -- it's not all serenity and enlightenment! In particular, the image of monks being forcibly dragged to meetings with their teachers is rather at odds with the quiet, dignified image we have of such matters. This book also helped me better understand the role koans play in Zen teaching (which itself is not a monastic thing, of course, but still interesting in its own right).
Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, trans. David Bowles. I have another collection of Aztec poetry I read a while back, by Miguel León-Portilla, but that one's more focused on literal translation of the surviving corpus, whereas here Bowles explicitly tries to make his translations read like poetry. It's useful to have both! Though worth noting that Bowles was making free aesthetic decisions about how to shape his poems; we don't really know what the underlying principles of Nahuatl poetry were, other than that they were often sung. So these are not translated "in the same form," but rather are transposed to meters and such that Bowles thought would create a suitable effect. Very glad to have both this and León-Portilla's work on my shelf together.
On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Kate Marsden. Picked this one up semi-randomly because Marissa Lingen posted about reading it, and for starters, just look at that title. How can you resist? (Probably many of you can resist just fine. I, clearly, did not.)
This is a late 19th-century account of a nurse who went deep into Siberia on an ostensible quest to find an herb used there to treat leprosy, reputedly with efficacious results. But it's a weird book because the herb gets forgotten more or less immediately; mostly it's an account of how she got people to fund her expedition, the trials and travails she faced along the way, and the horrendous conditions under which most lepers in Siberia at the time were forced to live, which she agitated to improve with the construction of dedicated hospitals. (Plus some side strands about things like her evangelizing to criminals in prison, because she also kinda sorta wound up inspecting jails from a health-and-sanitation perspective.) Ultimately, what this book was really meant to do was to silence her detractors who thought she'd just gone off on a pleasure jaunt in Russia and surely did not do the things she'd claimed. Since there were apparently memorials in her honor erected later on in Siberia, and this book quotes extensively from the letters and reports of people she dealt with about what she was doing, I think it's fair to say her detractors were full of hot air. (Also full of homophobia: Wikipedia tells me there were accusations later on, which, because of the mores or the time, significantly tarnished her legacy at home.)
Anyway, I mostly picked this up because I thought it would be useful and interesting to read about how travel at the time was effected. And I was not wrong! Yeesh, what a difference a train makes to a place like Siberia.
Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home From the South Seas, Śramana Yijing, trans. Li Rongxi. Hah, so, um, yeah. I'm fairly certain that when I bought this book, as part of my "let's learn something about Buddhist monasticism" bender, I didn't read the description in much depth. In contrast with the Zen book, written in the twentieth century, this one is from . . . the seventh. It is literally just a translation of a Chinese monk's writings home from India, which can be summed up as "guys, we're doing Buddhism wrong."
Which, I mean -- that's kind of fascinating in its own right! At least if you're the type of nerd I am. You learn things about how Buddhist concepts got adapted -- and in some cases, warped -- in translation from India to China, accommodating stuff like a different climate (clothing that's fine in the tropics will kill you with hypothermia in a more northern winter) and different cultural expectations. But also, um, this is full of things like very precise instructions on how you're supposed to filter water before you drink it so as to avoid killing any insects. It gets nitty-gritty, is what I'm saying. And that is probably not something most of us feel deeply compelled to read about.
Mexican Bestiary/Bestiario Mexicano, David Bowles. A short, bilingual work on supernatural creatures of Mexico, by the same author as the translations above. As a matter of personal taste, I would have liked this to focus a bit less on modern cryptids and more on traditional material, but it's still a nice addition to my library.
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, Valerie Hansen. I enjoyed this book, but I also ranted about it at some length to my patrons in the monthly New Worlds book review.
The heart of my issue is that, while I recognize that popular nonfiction benefits from having a hook -- in this case, the idea that globalization really "began" around the year 1000, i.e. when the (brief) Norse contact with North America meant that for the first time, trade networks formed a daisy-chain of (potential) contact around the globe -- I would have preferred Hansen to simply write more broadly about long-distance networks before the early modern period, instead of going for the gimmicky premise. Reading this book, it was blatantly obvious that the date 1000 C.E. comes with error bars of several centuries to either side, rather than being an actual turning point I found persuasive.
Whereas, had this been broader in focus, it could have been organized with an eye toward what gets transmitted over long distances, and what factors shape the answer to that question: when and why is it raw materials like metals, when and why is it religious ideas, when and why is it slaves. Hansen might also not have wound up in what felt to me like a weird middle ground, where the book neither really explores the historical specificity of a given place and time in depth, nor doesn't explore it -- you get these random blobs of detail here and there, which mostly made me want the book to either be longer and do more of that, or shorter and do less.
Interesting reading in that it covered areas and eras I frankly know very little about, but I kind of want that other book I imagined instead.
Discipline & Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Michael Lempert. Third book of my "let's read about non-Christian monasticism" binge. This one wound up being slightly off-topic from what I expected, but in ways that are differently useful.
The focus here is on Tibetan Geluk (or Gelug) monasteries that have been . . . transplanted? re-founded? whatever verb you pick has implications . . . in India, and how traditional life there butts up against modern politics around Tibetan sovereignty. Lempert's thesis is that the Dalai Lama, in order to gain necessary Western support, has promoted a certain image of Tibetan Buddhism, while the religion as it's practiced in the monasteries Lempert looked at doesn't entirely fit that image. "Violence" here is meant in a more diffuse sense than I originally thought, though, as it encompasses things like very confrontational (and deliberately asymmetrical) debate practices as well as physical discipline of monks.
Tibetan politics are another thing I'm woefully ignorant of, so this was as beneficial in teaching me something about what's been going on in that whole corner of the world as it was in telling me anything about Tibetan Buddhist monasticism. Though it was that latter, too.
The Palace of the Dragon King, Matthew Meyer. Fifth of his yōkai books, illustrated as usual with his own art. The focus this time is generally on water, culminating in a look at the idea of the Dragon King of the sea and his court.
Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, Arthur Quinn. This was the other rhetoric book I read recently. Older and shorter than The Elements of Eloquence, with much more of a focus on older examples of the figures, I still found it very entertaining. It also groups the figures according to their nature much more than Forsyth's book does, which I liked.
The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. Illustrated short story Clarke was commissioned to write. Being a short story, naturally it's very slight; the illustrations do not really a whole book make. I ultimately found it not all that compelling, though I like and agree with Clarke's point that honestly, saints might very well come across as weird rather than plaster figures of piety.
Mother of Rome, Lauren J.A. Bear. Historical fantasy novel about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, the first of whom is the legendary founder of Rome. Although I wasn't a fan of how much it relied on long, italicized flashback scenes, I did like the book overall; in particular, the key maneuver it uses to keep Rhea involved in the plot throughout made a lot of sense to me. I also like that -- spoiler, but one I think is worth spoiling, since otherwise certain readers who might enjoy this would otherwise be put off -- it denies the interpretation where the god Mars raped her, and instead has Rhea being an active and enthusiastic agent in getting pregnant. Fair warning, though; there is still a lot of violence against women here, including some perpetuated by other women. Utopian "back in the Good Old Days of matriarchal paganism" this is not.
Sound the Gong, Joan He. Second half of the Kingdom of Three duology, which gender-flips and eventually presents a very alternate version of The Romance of Three Kingdoms.
I say "second half of the duology," but really, it's the second half of a book published in two volumes. As in, this one literally starts with Chapter 26 (or whatever the actual number was). Enough time had passed since I read the first one that I really could have used more of an on-ramp to get me back up to speed -- for pity's sake, at least a recap at the front! -- but I enjoy the duology enough that I persevered and was soon right back in the swing of things. He does not pull punches on the consequences of her premise; be prepared for scads of betrayal and some really gruesome murder. (Her afterword points you at a bonus story on her website if you need some healing afterward.)
. . . oh, and yeah, ostensibly the main characters here are, like, teenagers. It's the Six of Crows thing where you just ignore that and the rest of the text reads just fine with you imagining them as grown adults instead. This does not read as trope-y YA, in large part because, well, look at the source material.
Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. First book of a duology, though I didn't know that when I picked it up, and I think this one arrives at a reasonably acceptable stopping point.
I also think this must have read very differently when it first came out. The starting premise is that, in the face of multiple waves of a deadly flu pandemic sweeping the globe (. . . yeah), the U.S. decided to build first one, then two walls to close off the border with Mexico (. . . yyyyyyyeah). The eponymous town of Santa Olivia is one of the ones caught in the fifty-mile zone between the walls; everyone who chose not to abandon their home was informed they henceforth lived in the military installation of Outpost 12. Oh, and they're no longer U.S. citizens.
Yeah.
Now, if I stop and look at this through a rational lens, I suspect the setup falls apart. There is zero mention made of agriculture or really any other productive industry in the former Santa Olivia; basically every job there is a service job, whether that's directly serving the military (running restaurants and bars, prostitution) or serving the other residents of this Outpost. Even allowing for the worldbuilding details about lots of stuff not being available anymore or not getting replaced when it breaks down, the only plausible explanation is that Outpost is wholly dependent on the U.S. for, uh, absolutely everything, to support a community that is way more than what's needed to maintain the military base. While also pouring effort into making sure nobody ever gets out of Outpost to tell the world what's going on there. For decades on end. I'm not sure I actually believe that over just forcibly relocating everybody.
But those were post-book thoughts, and while I was reading the book, Carey did a good job of creating a tense and plausible atmosphere. One which had much, much less to do with what's described in the cover copy than I thought: while it's true that the main character, Loup, teams up with some friends to do vigilante things as the town's eponymous saint, Santa Olivia, that's a surprisingly small portion of the book. Much of the rest has to do with the monthly boxing challenges organized by the commander of the base, who 1) really really loves watching boxing matches and 2) has promised that if any Outposter manages to beat whichever army champion he puts them up against, they and one other person will get a ticket out of there, back into the U.S. I, uh, don't think it's a spoiler to say this offer turns out to be less than honest and fair. Really, my thought while reading this was "did Carey take up boxing and then write this book?" It very much has the feel of an author building a story around their new hobby. I don't mean that as a criticism, though; I liked the detail on that front, and I think she did a good job of building some interesting twists into the plot.
Not sure if I'll read the second book, though. Based on the cover copy, it sounds like it would be very different in a lot of respects, and I'm not sure I'm that interested in where that goes.
Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao. Sequel to Iron Widow, but this is not a duology. Whether it will be a trilogy or more, I don't know, but this is most definitely not the end.
Kinda hard to talk about this one given how much it builds on key elements from the end of the previous book. The best I can do is to say that I did not expect the mecha + kaiju + primal scream against the patriarchy blend of Iron Widow to expand to include, uh, <checks notes> a communist revolution? But it does, and Zhao goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of that than I usually see in fiction -- without landing simplistically on a "yay, good!" or "boo, bad!" result. If there's a way to pursue the good ideals of such a revolution without falling into excess and cruelty, the characters do not find it here, but boy howdy do they try. I also thought the relationship between Zetian and a certain new character (the one introduced at the end of the first book) was excellently complicated, with all kinds of admirable and horrifying elements blended together until there's no separating them anymore.
Once again, the ending majorly shakes things up, though it takes a bit more time in the shaking and so avoids the worst of Iron Widow's feeling of the wheels coming off the car as it screeches across the finish line. Warning for a lot of gender-based violence as well as regular violence, though -- which, come to think of it, also applies to Santa Olivia. Between these two and Mother of Rome, plus Sound the Gong's very non-gendered violence, I did not have a lighthearted month for fiction . . .
Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. Pretty sure I've read this before, but if so, it was roughly twenty years ago. And this book wasn't new then (it was originally published in 1969), so yeah, I could probably be reading something more recent. But it was on my shelf, and I was not wrong in remembering that it's quite readable, and I have several different story ideas rattling around my head that would benefit from being firmly seated in actual medieval life rather than the watered-down, microwaved, fourth-generation photocopy that infests popular media, so I read it. They use Troyes in France as their focal city, but there are also comments in here about how things are in Italy or England around the same time (1250), and for the purposes of writing in a secondary world, that's enough for me.
I know I started posting again about my reading last month, but, like, this month I'm really back. As in, I am finally reading fiction again, not because there's a book club meeting I want to go to, not because I owe a blurb, but because I felt like it. And I'm reading a lot. Still a surprising amount of nonfiction mixed in there -- I would have expected myself to go off that for a while -- but this feels more like what I'm used to.
The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, Mark Forsyth. First of the two books that sparked this post the other day; this is the one I particularly praised for drawing its examples from modern song lyrics as well as classics like Shakespeare and the Bible. It also does something that I liked at first, which (unfortunately) got a little grating as I went along: basically every chapter ends with him saying something like, "that quote is also an example of [next figure of speech]" or "if the author had said XYZ instead, it would have been [next figure of speech]." It was a nice segue the first few times, but it became a bit too much over time. Then again, if I read the book more slowly, spacing out those transitions would probably have helped. Regardless, I highly recommend this if you want to know more about the tricks of rhetoric!
The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, ill. Zenchu Sato. I haven't yet gotten around to monasticism in my Patreon essays, but research for The Sea Beyond made me realize just how much my knowledge of the subject is specifically Catholic-inflected. This is the first of three books I wound up reading this month on Buddhist monasticism, and it makes for an interesting contrast with how "Zen" is conceived of in the popular Western consciousness -- it's not all serenity and enlightenment! In particular, the image of monks being forcibly dragged to meetings with their teachers is rather at odds with the quiet, dignified image we have of such matters. This book also helped me better understand the role koans play in Zen teaching (which itself is not a monastic thing, of course, but still interesting in its own right).
Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, trans. David Bowles. I have another collection of Aztec poetry I read a while back, by Miguel León-Portilla, but that one's more focused on literal translation of the surviving corpus, whereas here Bowles explicitly tries to make his translations read like poetry. It's useful to have both! Though worth noting that Bowles was making free aesthetic decisions about how to shape his poems; we don't really know what the underlying principles of Nahuatl poetry were, other than that they were often sung. So these are not translated "in the same form," but rather are transposed to meters and such that Bowles thought would create a suitable effect. Very glad to have both this and León-Portilla's work on my shelf together.
On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Kate Marsden. Picked this one up semi-randomly because Marissa Lingen posted about reading it, and for starters, just look at that title. How can you resist? (Probably many of you can resist just fine. I, clearly, did not.)
This is a late 19th-century account of a nurse who went deep into Siberia on an ostensible quest to find an herb used there to treat leprosy, reputedly with efficacious results. But it's a weird book because the herb gets forgotten more or less immediately; mostly it's an account of how she got people to fund her expedition, the trials and travails she faced along the way, and the horrendous conditions under which most lepers in Siberia at the time were forced to live, which she agitated to improve with the construction of dedicated hospitals. (Plus some side strands about things like her evangelizing to criminals in prison, because she also kinda sorta wound up inspecting jails from a health-and-sanitation perspective.) Ultimately, what this book was really meant to do was to silence her detractors who thought she'd just gone off on a pleasure jaunt in Russia and surely did not do the things she'd claimed. Since there were apparently memorials in her honor erected later on in Siberia, and this book quotes extensively from the letters and reports of people she dealt with about what she was doing, I think it's fair to say her detractors were full of hot air. (Also full of homophobia: Wikipedia tells me there were accusations later on, which, because of the mores or the time, significantly tarnished her legacy at home.)
Anyway, I mostly picked this up because I thought it would be useful and interesting to read about how travel at the time was effected. And I was not wrong! Yeesh, what a difference a train makes to a place like Siberia.
Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home From the South Seas, Śramana Yijing, trans. Li Rongxi. Hah, so, um, yeah. I'm fairly certain that when I bought this book, as part of my "let's learn something about Buddhist monasticism" bender, I didn't read the description in much depth. In contrast with the Zen book, written in the twentieth century, this one is from . . . the seventh. It is literally just a translation of a Chinese monk's writings home from India, which can be summed up as "guys, we're doing Buddhism wrong."
Which, I mean -- that's kind of fascinating in its own right! At least if you're the type of nerd I am. You learn things about how Buddhist concepts got adapted -- and in some cases, warped -- in translation from India to China, accommodating stuff like a different climate (clothing that's fine in the tropics will kill you with hypothermia in a more northern winter) and different cultural expectations. But also, um, this is full of things like very precise instructions on how you're supposed to filter water before you drink it so as to avoid killing any insects. It gets nitty-gritty, is what I'm saying. And that is probably not something most of us feel deeply compelled to read about.
Mexican Bestiary/Bestiario Mexicano, David Bowles. A short, bilingual work on supernatural creatures of Mexico, by the same author as the translations above. As a matter of personal taste, I would have liked this to focus a bit less on modern cryptids and more on traditional material, but it's still a nice addition to my library.
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, Valerie Hansen. I enjoyed this book, but I also ranted about it at some length to my patrons in the monthly New Worlds book review.
The heart of my issue is that, while I recognize that popular nonfiction benefits from having a hook -- in this case, the idea that globalization really "began" around the year 1000, i.e. when the (brief) Norse contact with North America meant that for the first time, trade networks formed a daisy-chain of (potential) contact around the globe -- I would have preferred Hansen to simply write more broadly about long-distance networks before the early modern period, instead of going for the gimmicky premise. Reading this book, it was blatantly obvious that the date 1000 C.E. comes with error bars of several centuries to either side, rather than being an actual turning point I found persuasive.
Whereas, had this been broader in focus, it could have been organized with an eye toward what gets transmitted over long distances, and what factors shape the answer to that question: when and why is it raw materials like metals, when and why is it religious ideas, when and why is it slaves. Hansen might also not have wound up in what felt to me like a weird middle ground, where the book neither really explores the historical specificity of a given place and time in depth, nor doesn't explore it -- you get these random blobs of detail here and there, which mostly made me want the book to either be longer and do more of that, or shorter and do less.
Interesting reading in that it covered areas and eras I frankly know very little about, but I kind of want that other book I imagined instead.
Discipline & Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Michael Lempert. Third book of my "let's read about non-Christian monasticism" binge. This one wound up being slightly off-topic from what I expected, but in ways that are differently useful.
The focus here is on Tibetan Geluk (or Gelug) monasteries that have been . . . transplanted? re-founded? whatever verb you pick has implications . . . in India, and how traditional life there butts up against modern politics around Tibetan sovereignty. Lempert's thesis is that the Dalai Lama, in order to gain necessary Western support, has promoted a certain image of Tibetan Buddhism, while the religion as it's practiced in the monasteries Lempert looked at doesn't entirely fit that image. "Violence" here is meant in a more diffuse sense than I originally thought, though, as it encompasses things like very confrontational (and deliberately asymmetrical) debate practices as well as physical discipline of monks.
Tibetan politics are another thing I'm woefully ignorant of, so this was as beneficial in teaching me something about what's been going on in that whole corner of the world as it was in telling me anything about Tibetan Buddhist monasticism. Though it was that latter, too.
The Palace of the Dragon King, Matthew Meyer. Fifth of his yōkai books, illustrated as usual with his own art. The focus this time is generally on water, culminating in a look at the idea of the Dragon King of the sea and his court.
Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, Arthur Quinn. This was the other rhetoric book I read recently. Older and shorter than The Elements of Eloquence, with much more of a focus on older examples of the figures, I still found it very entertaining. It also groups the figures according to their nature much more than Forsyth's book does, which I liked.
The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. Illustrated short story Clarke was commissioned to write. Being a short story, naturally it's very slight; the illustrations do not really a whole book make. I ultimately found it not all that compelling, though I like and agree with Clarke's point that honestly, saints might very well come across as weird rather than plaster figures of piety.
Mother of Rome, Lauren J.A. Bear. Historical fantasy novel about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, the first of whom is the legendary founder of Rome. Although I wasn't a fan of how much it relied on long, italicized flashback scenes, I did like the book overall; in particular, the key maneuver it uses to keep Rhea involved in the plot throughout made a lot of sense to me. I also like that -- spoiler, but one I think is worth spoiling, since otherwise certain readers who might enjoy this would otherwise be put off -- it denies the interpretation where the god Mars raped her, and instead has Rhea being an active and enthusiastic agent in getting pregnant. Fair warning, though; there is still a lot of violence against women here, including some perpetuated by other women. Utopian "back in the Good Old Days of matriarchal paganism" this is not.
Sound the Gong, Joan He. Second half of the Kingdom of Three duology, which gender-flips and eventually presents a very alternate version of The Romance of Three Kingdoms.
I say "second half of the duology," but really, it's the second half of a book published in two volumes. As in, this one literally starts with Chapter 26 (or whatever the actual number was). Enough time had passed since I read the first one that I really could have used more of an on-ramp to get me back up to speed -- for pity's sake, at least a recap at the front! -- but I enjoy the duology enough that I persevered and was soon right back in the swing of things. He does not pull punches on the consequences of her premise; be prepared for scads of betrayal and some really gruesome murder. (Her afterword points you at a bonus story on her website if you need some healing afterward.)
. . . oh, and yeah, ostensibly the main characters here are, like, teenagers. It's the Six of Crows thing where you just ignore that and the rest of the text reads just fine with you imagining them as grown adults instead. This does not read as trope-y YA, in large part because, well, look at the source material.
Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. First book of a duology, though I didn't know that when I picked it up, and I think this one arrives at a reasonably acceptable stopping point.
I also think this must have read very differently when it first came out. The starting premise is that, in the face of multiple waves of a deadly flu pandemic sweeping the globe (. . . yeah), the U.S. decided to build first one, then two walls to close off the border with Mexico (. . . yyyyyyyeah). The eponymous town of Santa Olivia is one of the ones caught in the fifty-mile zone between the walls; everyone who chose not to abandon their home was informed they henceforth lived in the military installation of Outpost 12. Oh, and they're no longer U.S. citizens.
Yeah.
Now, if I stop and look at this through a rational lens, I suspect the setup falls apart. There is zero mention made of agriculture or really any other productive industry in the former Santa Olivia; basically every job there is a service job, whether that's directly serving the military (running restaurants and bars, prostitution) or serving the other residents of this Outpost. Even allowing for the worldbuilding details about lots of stuff not being available anymore or not getting replaced when it breaks down, the only plausible explanation is that Outpost is wholly dependent on the U.S. for, uh, absolutely everything, to support a community that is way more than what's needed to maintain the military base. While also pouring effort into making sure nobody ever gets out of Outpost to tell the world what's going on there. For decades on end. I'm not sure I actually believe that over just forcibly relocating everybody.
But those were post-book thoughts, and while I was reading the book, Carey did a good job of creating a tense and plausible atmosphere. One which had much, much less to do with what's described in the cover copy than I thought: while it's true that the main character, Loup, teams up with some friends to do vigilante things as the town's eponymous saint, Santa Olivia, that's a surprisingly small portion of the book. Much of the rest has to do with the monthly boxing challenges organized by the commander of the base, who 1) really really loves watching boxing matches and 2) has promised that if any Outposter manages to beat whichever army champion he puts them up against, they and one other person will get a ticket out of there, back into the U.S. I, uh, don't think it's a spoiler to say this offer turns out to be less than honest and fair. Really, my thought while reading this was "did Carey take up boxing and then write this book?" It very much has the feel of an author building a story around their new hobby. I don't mean that as a criticism, though; I liked the detail on that front, and I think she did a good job of building some interesting twists into the plot.
Not sure if I'll read the second book, though. Based on the cover copy, it sounds like it would be very different in a lot of respects, and I'm not sure I'm that interested in where that goes.
Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao. Sequel to Iron Widow, but this is not a duology. Whether it will be a trilogy or more, I don't know, but this is most definitely not the end.
Kinda hard to talk about this one given how much it builds on key elements from the end of the previous book. The best I can do is to say that I did not expect the mecha + kaiju + primal scream against the patriarchy blend of Iron Widow to expand to include, uh, <checks notes> a communist revolution? But it does, and Zhao goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of that than I usually see in fiction -- without landing simplistically on a "yay, good!" or "boo, bad!" result. If there's a way to pursue the good ideals of such a revolution without falling into excess and cruelty, the characters do not find it here, but boy howdy do they try. I also thought the relationship between Zetian and a certain new character (the one introduced at the end of the first book) was excellently complicated, with all kinds of admirable and horrifying elements blended together until there's no separating them anymore.
Once again, the ending majorly shakes things up, though it takes a bit more time in the shaking and so avoids the worst of Iron Widow's feeling of the wheels coming off the car as it screeches across the finish line. Warning for a lot of gender-based violence as well as regular violence, though -- which, come to think of it, also applies to Santa Olivia. Between these two and Mother of Rome, plus Sound the Gong's very non-gendered violence, I did not have a lighthearted month for fiction . . .
Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. Pretty sure I've read this before, but if so, it was roughly twenty years ago. And this book wasn't new then (it was originally published in 1969), so yeah, I could probably be reading something more recent. But it was on my shelf, and I was not wrong in remembering that it's quite readable, and I have several different story ideas rattling around my head that would benefit from being firmly seated in actual medieval life rather than the watered-down, microwaved, fourth-generation photocopy that infests popular media, so I read it. They use Troyes in France as their focal city, but there are also comments in here about how things are in Italy or England around the same time (1250), and for the purposes of writing in a secondary world, that's enough for me.
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Date: 2025-05-02 06:40 am (UTC)It read differently in 2014, when I liked it very much and was actively cautioned against reading the sequel.
I enjoyed The Wood at Midwinter, but it felt like a splinter of a much larger narrative which I hope Clarke is able to write.
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Date: 2025-05-02 06:52 am (UTC)(I do have some sympathy for writing the kind of story where a later book has to be really different, because that's the logical payoff of what you did in the first one. But you do run the obvious risk of losing your readers.)
I'd like Clarke to recover her health enough to be able to write more, period.
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Date: 2025-05-02 06:57 am (UTC)Which is a shame, since Saints Astray is a banger of a title, but I have not read it in the decade-plus since Santa Olivia. I used to see it in used book stores. I wonder if it works better for people who accidentally started with the second book.
I'd like Clarke to recover her health enough to be able to write more, period.
Agreed. She did just publish a new story! Just not in a market where I can do anything but hope for it to be collected eventually.
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Date: 2025-05-02 07:04 am (UTC)I have some series I read out of order, most notably Daniel Keys Moran's Continuing Time books. We definitely used to be more tolerant of that in the days before ordering books off the internet, and in some ways I think it's a lost skill.
She did just publish a new story!
I was not aware -- thank you!
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Date: 2025-05-02 07:09 am (UTC)That makes me think of the movies I saw as a child which picked up wherever my parents had managed to hit record on the VCR, which is how I did not know for decades that Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) had either a Halloween setting or a prologue.
(I did once screw up a series by reading the back half first, but it makes too good a story for me to feel bad about it.)
I was not aware -- thank you!
You're welcome! If you can read it, I look forward to hearing how it is.
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Date: 2025-05-02 07:25 am (UTC)The third book of the Continuing Time series talks about some history that went down when the protagonist was an infant.
The second book of the Continuing Time is from the perspective of a character who lived through that history when he was about ten or twelve.
The first book of the Continuing Time, read third, comes across like a Greek tragedy. OH NO. OHHHHH, NO. I KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.
(I dunno how I would have felt about the series, read in order. The protagonist of the first book is in many ways not very likeable, about which the later books are entirely clear. I found him easier to take with context.)
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Date: 2025-05-02 09:02 am (UTC)Yeah, honestly, that order sounds great.
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Date: 2025-05-02 05:20 pm (UTC)It kind of was! Also it helps that Moran improved as a writer as he went along, so I was starting with the bit where he was firing on more cylinders.
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Date: 2025-05-02 11:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-02 05:24 pm (UTC)Moran has come back to writing, btw! I kind of respect that apparently the reason he vanished was to raise something like five kids -- not a common trajectory for a male author. There are two more Continuing Time books now, in addition to The Last Dancer, and others he's been serializing on Patreon, which I hope he eventually releases independently.