19 Crows

K.J. Charles, All of Us Murderers. In a lot of ways more a Gothic thriller than a murder mystery, I found this gripping and fun. I hope Charles keeps writing in the thriller and mystery genres. The characters are vividly awful except for a few, and that's just what this sort of thing calls for.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho. And speaking of vividly awful, I'm not sure I would have finished this one if it hadn't been both extremely short and part of a conversation I was having. There is not a piece of vice or unpleasantness not wallowed in here. It's certainly affecting, just not in a direction I usually want.

Frances Hardinge, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. I'm a little disappointed that Hardinge's work seems to have gone in the direction of illustrated middle grade, more or less, because I find the amount of story not quite as much as I'd like from her previous works, and I'm just not the main audience for lavish illustration. If you are, though, it's a perfectly cromulent fantasy story. I'm just greedy I guess.

David Hinton, trans., Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. An interesting subgenre I hadn't had much exposure to. Translating poetry is hard, and no particular poem was gripping to me in English, but knowing what was being written in that place and time was interesting.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Kindle. If you've been reading anything about American Black history this will be less new information and more a new lens/synthesis of information you're likely to already have, but it's well put together and cogently argued, and sometimes a new lens is useful.

Im Bang and Yi Ryuk, Tales of Korea: 53 Enchanting Stories of Ghosts, Goblins, Princes, Fairies, and More! So this is a new and shiny edition, with a 2022 copyright date, but that applies only to the introduction and similar supplemental materials. It's actually a 1912 translation, with all the cultural yikes that implies. Even with the rise in interest in Kpop and Kdramas information about Korean history and culture is not as readily available as I'd like, so I'm keeping this edition until a better translation is available.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. This is a novel, and I knew it was a novel going in. It's a novel I mostly enjoyed reading, except...I kept waiting for the octopus. Even a metaphorical octopus. And when it did come, it was the most clunkily introduced "HERE IS MY METAPHOR" metaphor I recall reading in professionally published fiction. Further, using it as the title highlighted the ways that most threads of this book did not contribute to this thematic metaphor. I feel like with two more revision passes it could have been a book I'd return to and reread over and over, and without them it was...fine while I was reading it, not really giving me enough to chew on afterwards. Sigh. (It was set on a university campus! It would have been trivially easy for someone to be studying octopus! or, alternately, to be studying something else that was actually relevant and a source of a title and central metaphor.)

Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle, Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates. Does what it says on the tin. The last chapter has a lot of very good graphs about differences in restored vs. natural streams. Do you like stream restoration ecology enough to read a whole book about it? You will know going in, this is not a "surprisingly interesting read for the general audience" sort of book, this is "I sure did want to know this stuff, and here it is."

Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island. Surprisingly not a reread--not everything was available to me when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I had hoped it would be Swedish Swallows and Amazons, and it was not, it was a lot more like a Swedish version of something like Noel Streatfeild's The Magic Summer, but that was all right, it was still delightful and a pleasant read. I will tell you right up front that Bosun the dog is fine, nothing terrible happens to Bosun the dog in the course of this book, there, now you will have an even better reading experience than I did.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen. Reread. Probably my least favorite of her collections despite some strong work--least favorite of a bunch of good collections is not actually a terrible place to be, nor is improving over one's career.

Freya Marske, Cinder House. A reverse Gothic where a nice house triumphs over a terrible human. Short and delightful.

Lio Min, The L.O.V.E. Club. I really hope this gets its actual audience's attention, because it is not about romantic love or even about people seeking but comically failing to find romantic love. It's about a teenage friend group trapped in a video game and dealing with their own friend group's past plus the history that led to their lives. It was about as good as a "trapped in a video game" narration was going to be for me, sweet and melancholy.

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. Two hundred years of Mongols, and this is a really good perspective on how Europe is a weird peninsula off the side of Asia. Which we knew, but wow is it clear here. Also it's nice to read books where people remember the Armenians exist, and related groups as well. My one complaint here is not really a fault in the book so much as a mismatch in it and me: I'm willing to read kings-and-battles kinds of history, and this is a khans-and-horse-troops kind of history, which is basically the same thing. I prefer histories that give a stronger sense of how actual people were actually living and what changed over the period that wasn't the name of the person receiving tribute. But that's not a problem with this book, it was clear what kind of book it was going to be going in.

Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea. This debut fantasy (science fiction? science fantasy?) novel is definitely not generic: it's a strongly Tlingit story written by a Tlingit person, and it leans hard into that. Raven is one of the major characters; another character is a bear cousin and another straight-up a wolf. It's a quest fantasy, but with a different shape to harmonize with its setting. I really liked it, but let me warn/promise you: this is not a stand-alone, the ending is not the story's end.

Vikram Seth, Beastly Tales (From Here and There). Very short, very straightforward animal poems. If you read something like this as a child, here's more of it.

Fran Wilde, A Philosophy of Thieves. A very class-aware science fiction heist novel that looks at loyalties and opportunities at every turn. Who's using whom and why--if that's your kind of heist, come on in, the water's fine.