I was on the road for most of September. That photo’s taken in the elevator of the Flatiron Building while I was in NYC, but other places I stayed included Dallas, Texas and Pocatello, Idaho. (More on that to come!) Here’s what I read in September, according to my notes, which always seem to leave out some stuff. Bolded indicates a particularly notable read.
Alex P. Berg. Red Hot Steele.
Jillian Blake. Antisocial.
Ramsey Campbell. The Parasite. Jessica Cluess A Shadow Bright and Burning. George Alec Effinger. Heroics.
Justin Evans. The White Devil.
Rumer Godden. Black Narcissus. Interesting because I’d been thinking about omniscient POV, which this book uses.
Joe Hill. The Fireman.
Tami Hoag. Cold Cold Heart,
Aaron James. Assholes* A Theory. Some useful stuff on dealing with bad-faith actors.
Stephen King and Owen King. Gwendy’s Button Box.
Stephen King. End of Watch. Mur Lafferty. Six Wakes.
Carrie Ann Noble. The Gold Son.
Dan Padavona. Crawlspace. Sarah Porter. Vassa in the Night.
Susan Kaye Quinn. Third Daughter. Enjoyable steampunk romance with an Indian-flavored milieu.
Ron Ripley. Berkley Street. Jon Ronson. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Fascinating read about social media and publicity gone awry. Sherwood Smith. Inda, The Fox, King’s Shield, and Treason’s Shore.
Wendy Corsi Staub. Lullaby and Good Night.
Steven Rasnic Tem. Deadfall Hotel.
I’ve been watching DC’s Legends and am halfway through Season 2 so far.
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Some Favorite F&SF Reads of 2019
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but includes many of my favorites.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. The success of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy has led to quite a few other “college for mages” books. This was my favorite of this year’s batch, although I did also enjoy Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi is a young adult novel that is just extraordinary and beautiful and astounding. I’m about to ship it off to my godkid as well as the next book.
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez is another young adult novel, this time much more humorous than Pet, but with its sadnesses as well. The voice is funny and delightful while still full of all of the insecurities of high school.
unsplash-logoJaredd CraigThe Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey has a gorgeous, depressing texture, an interesting storyline, and an evocatively detailed world that had its Kafka-esque moments. This is very different than Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books — while they’re fun reads, this feels like a much more serious book without being ponderous.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher is a spin-off from Arthur Machen’s horror work The White Ones and it is, like all of her books, crazy good. It’s weird to me, however, that in 2019, she’s got a hoarder grandmother story, I’ve got a hoarder grandmother story, and Ellen Klages has a hoarder mother story that I enjoyed as well. Something in the zeitgeist?
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. It took me a little while to settle into the voice of this book, but once I got with the groove I was totally hooked. Leckie’s a master of storytelling. There’s a lot that’s hopepunk-y about this book, including the casual community-based heroism of the protagonist as well as the insistence on the power and mutability of stories and language.
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire is a complicated and interesting book delivered with McGuire’s usual smooth prose and engaging characters. I don’t want to say too much about it for fear of spoilers.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is like Mervyn Peake’s Gorgmenghast in space with lesbian necromancers. This was a terrific read and (IMO) well worth all the hype. I don’t even know how to describe it but I loved the slow burn of relationship building and the atmosphere and the overall bizarreness of the world. So delightful.
A Song For a New Day by Sarah Pinsker is near-future SF reminisencent of a mash-up of Marge Piercy and Joni Mitchell. This is definitely one of 2019’s hopepunk standouts.
A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland is the follow-up to her amazing A Conspiracy of Truths and it deepens the understanding of the first book in a way that had me going back to read it again. When people are building lists of hopepunk, this and its predecessor definitely should always be included.
Today I am Carey by Martin Shoemaker is a lovely expansion on the award winning story. I really love this piece and it’s very timely.
The Deep by Rivers Soloman (novella) is a fabulous example of how stories can shift forms. Based on a Daveed Diggs by the same name, this is an intense and beautiful translation of the song.
The Fall by Tracy Townsend is the sequel to a book I loved, The Nine, and it was a great continuation of the series, reminiscent of one of my favorite writers, P.C. Hodgell.
The Lesson by Cadwall Turnbull is a fascinating, tightly drawn novel in which humans are forced to co-exist with super-advanced and mostly benevolent aliens, set on the Virgin Islands after the killing of one of the locals by an alien.
You Should Read This: Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle
The newer books have a different cover, but this has always been my favorite version.Doctor Rat is a cunningly well constructed, heartwrenching, horrible wonderful book told from the point of view of an insane rat, thereby reinforcing my theory that odd povs may add to, rather than detract from, good fiction. Be aware: this is a novel about animal experimentation and it pulls no punches.
Doctor Rat witnesses the experiments being carried out on his fellow animals, wandering through a laboratory and speaking to us in a way that makes it clear whose side he’s on while showing how brutal the details of this book can be:
I should now like to sing “Three Blind Rats.” It’s part of the experimental program of music that’s being channeled toward certain rats, to make them more docile and sweet. Several of them are indeed beginning to nuzzle up to each other, one of them even executing a light-fantastic tripping of his tail, in time to the beat.
In the cage beside him, we actually have three blind rats. In fact, we have twenty-three blind rats, part of a magnificent new experiment initiated by a very ambitious student, who I’m featuring in this month’s Newsletter. He’s a sensitive chap and it was his exquisite sensitivity that caused him to dream up the item that’s become the latest rage here at the lab: the fabulous removal of eggs from a female rat’s body and the grafting of them to different parts of the male rat’s body — to the tail, to the ear, to the stomach. And for the past twenty-three days he’s been grafting them to their eyeballs! So now it’s time we all sang that promising young scientist a song.
Doctor Rat is not all horrifying detail though. There’s a lot of sweetness to it, including a moment where a human orchestra plays music in order to warn whales of approaching whalers that makes me cry, every time, while read silently or aloud. The amount of emotion it manages to stir in me is visceral. I wish I knew how Kotzwinkle accomplished it.
Which brings me to another reason by I think this is a good book for writers to read: this is a book that manages to be harrowing and uplifting all at once. It’s the sort of book that a writer confronting a real evil produces, a look that is cynical and despairing and yet tinged with a dark humor that lets you know there may be a glint of light somewhere. This is the sort of book you should read through once in order to experience it for the first time; then go back and see how the writer accomplished that experience. Doctor Rat looks at difficult, political things in a way only the greats manage.
Kotzwinkle is still around and is a prolific of both adult and children’s books. The child in me is compelled to note that the latter includes the “Walter the Farting Dog” series.
I was on the road for most of September. That photo’s taken in the elevator of the Flatiron Building while I was in NYC, but other places I stayed included Dallas, Texas and Pocatello, Idaho. (More on that to come!) Here’s what I read in September, according to my notes, which always seem to leave out some stuff. Bolded indicates a particularly notable read.
