It's a magical world

What I'm Reading
Seanan McGuire, A Red-Rose Chain (2015) - The ninth and newest Toby Daye book. I'm enjoying it a lot so far, though at this point I feel like there isn't a lot to say about individual books except in terms of the overall series. At least, after the heavy revelations of The Winter Long, this book is less about heavy personal revelations and more about straight-up terrible things and Toby doing her hero thing, even in some very trying circumstances, viz. Portland.

What I've Read
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Wicked City (2012) - I said from the beginning that Zephyr Hollis was in denial about who she was, and I felt vindicated that Zephyr herself came to explicitly agree with that statement, but by the end of this book I was really irritated with her as a character; at some point in the middle, Zephyr's denial tips over into hypocrisy, and she treats her djinni boyfriend rather horribly throughout the course of the novel in a way that doesn't go unremarked in the text, but which does go unapologized for on Zephyr's part. The elements of the plot around Zephyr and Amir were engaging, and I would totally read a third book if Johnson wrote one based on the revelations in the last few pages, but Zephyr herself was just a bit too self-righteous, without the ethical chops to back it up, for me to enjoy this book as much as I did the first one.

Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek (2006) - I loved this book, if not uncritically, then quite a lot, and having come to VanderMeer's earlier work from the Southern Reach books, it's interesting to pick up the threads of thematic continuity that run back from those books into this one: the question of humans' place in an ecosystem, the idea of places as systems that exert a subtle influence, if not contamination, on their inhabitants; other ideas about decay. I appreciated the sibling dynamic of Duncan Shriek making marginal comments on his sister Janice's (posthumous? there's no way to know) manuscript, and I found myself disagreeing with Abigail Nussbaum's assessment that Janice is shriekingly ordinary but wholly ignorant of that fact and therefore boring. To my mind, Duncan, Janice, and Mary are all bad historians and unreliable narrators, but each in recognizably different ways. The mismatch between their approaches to their own stories is what makes the book go, along with some truly inventive worldbuilding and imagery. I need to read Finch.

Catherynne Valente, The Folded World (2011) - Prester John number two, with the third book on hold perhaps indefinitely. I enjoyed this book; I enjoy Valente's writing, though I suspect that were she to write this book now it would be a tauter manuscript--but I like her language so much that I don't mind the meandering in the tale here, and the fact that it ends with the world smashed but the shape of its shattering wholly unclear. Brother Hiob and company are still decidedly 16thC, not 18th. I need to read Radiance, and the other Valente books I've piled up in the TBR stack.

C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising (2016) - YES I READ THE FINAL ONE FIRST, WHATEVER, IT'S HOW I ROLL. I suspect everyone here knows what this book is about, but as someone who was recced the series for about six solid years before I finally tipped over into reading it, I want to record for posterity the fact that I think Pacat is commenting quite shrewdly not only on tropes of mainstream media but also of fandom in some interesting ways, and that all her choices together push the book firmly into romance territory, which may not be immediately obvious when people start throwing around the term "slave fic." The book was amazing, I think I might be dead, I need to read the first two, and, let me be clear: all of you were right.

What I'll Read Next
Hopefully The Steerswoman and other books!

What I'm Reading
Water Logic by Laurie J. Marks - The Small Beer Press editions of these books cleverly contain large samples of of the next book in the series, and I was two chapters into this book after finishing Earth Logic before I realized that it was one thirty in the morning. I'd had vague ideas of keeping this book back to read later this year--there are rumors afoot that Air Logic may be published soon, finally--but no dice. I'm not sure what to say beyond the fact that I adore these books and the way they quite calmly turn every fantasy trope on its ear. Also, this may be the platonic ideal of found family stories.

Silver Spoon vol. 8 - Yes, I'm slow, but things are getting intense, and manga is visual enough that it flips my "I don't want to watch bad/awkward things happen to these characters!" switch--which is probably part of the reason I'm bad at TV, come to think of it. And also part of the reason I like going to movie theaters, where you have no choice but to watch the whole thing straight through. Anyway, it's great, with the exception of the fact that the one black teacher is still drawn using the "white circle around the mouth for black people's lips" visual trope.

What I've Read
Hostage by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith - I thought this was another excellent book in the series (in some ways I tend to like middle books better, because they build on already established relationships), with some very fine writing and interesting expansions of the worlds and the characters' stories. Given what did and didn't happen in this book, I'm very much looking forward to the next one, Rebel.

Annihilation and Authority by Jeff VanderMeer - Two of the three volumes of The Southern Reach Trilogy, which I'm very glad I nominated for the Hugo, because it's excellent. If you like(d) The X-Files or Welcome to Night Vale, I wager that you will greatly enjoy these books--they are very much down with "the unseen and imagined is way creepier than the seen," but there's plenty of creepy stuff going on in Area X and in the Southern Reach, the vaguely menacing government agency tasked with supervising it. I read these books in about 48 hours straight with the result that every creak in my apartment made me jumpy, but the characters are just as great as the atmosphere; Control and the biologist are of course wildly different, but also strikingly similar in some ways, and I can't wait for the last book, once I acquire it.

Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, ed. Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar, and Anita Roy - A really great anthology of feminist speculative YA that is distinguished by the breadth of its contributions and the ways in which those contributions came into being. I didn't like every story, but many of the stories are excellent, and it's very strong overall.

Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge - Now I only have Verdigris Deep left to read, not counting The Lie Tree, forthcoming this year, and while this wasn't my favorite of Hardinge's books (that's still split somewhere between Gullstruck Island and Fly By Night + Twilight Robbery), I thought it was in some ways a technical level-up, and I think its Carnegie nomination is very well-deserved. I think Hardinge's use of historical material in this book adds (and, to be fair, also subtracts) a dimension, and I'm really interested to see where she goes from here. And of course, the story in general was excellent. I particularly liked Violet; I thought her presence really added some complexity to the story.

Earth Logic by Laurie J. Marks - I adored this book for the reasons I outlined above re: Water Logic, and I also think the ending is one of the better candidates for an eucatastrophe that I've recently observed (NB I don't think an eucatastrophe is actually a deus ex machina; I think an eucastrophe makes much deeper thematic and structural sense than a deus ex machina). The image of Karis and the wall is one I won't easily forget.

( Some thoughts on the Zanja plotline, and how it does make sense )

What I'll Read Next
I think it might be time to start Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books. Or something from my Sirens list.

The consensus seems to be that this Friday was less than pleasing. I hope my sister doesn't catch hypothermia at her NIN concert (lawn tickets in the rain at 59º F, natch). At work an incident happened demonstrating how being part of one group does not give a person a magic ability to empathize with all other groups (also the shortcomings of [mostly white male] nerd culture from an ethical perspective). Anyway, there's books to talk about, let's do that instead of brooding.

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The New Weird. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008.
Miéville, China. The City & the City. New York: Del Rey, 2009.

The New Weird is one of those anthologies that actually manages to have not only a purpose but also a point: to explicate the much-debated term "New Weird" and determine what it is, how it is, and whether it actually is at all. After reading this anthology, the closest I can come would be to say "Urban. Weird. Possibly nauseating. You know it when you see it." (Which is why I'm not sure the story "Watson's Boy" by Brian Evenson belongs here. Also it was excruciatingly boring, and reminded me of "The Cube," and I didn't bother finishing it.)

It's probably a strength of this collection, though, that almost all of the stories in here could be argued about as New Weird per se, particularly the entries in the "Precursors" section: we all create our own geneaologies of interest and influence, whether as writers or as readers. What makes this anthology a tour de force, though, is its contextualizing New Weird along multiple axes: historically, by including precursors to the mode, and diachronically, by reprinting an Internet discussion begun by M. John Harrison (apparently archived at K@thryn Cr@m3r's website, but I'm not going there) as well as several essays by participant authors and critics, and most intriguingly, a round-robin story by writers who don't write New Weird, including Sarah Monette and Hal Duncan, taking their own crack at interpreting what it means to them through their art.

I liked the round-robin story, "Festival Lives," quite a lot, especially by the end, but I was disturbed in how closely art seemed to anticipate life in that the story is very much a New Weird-ish take on the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November...which of course hadn't happened when the story was written. With the exception of Evenson, all the stories presented as "Evidence" are excellent (and the China Miéville story, "Jack," has a lot of detail on Half-a-Prayer, as well as on that perhaps quintessentially New Weird concept, the Remade). Some of the stories I did find faintly nauseating, which I tend to regard as a mark of talent, since only one book prior to this has induced nausea in me (Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and which I think is a very interesting effect for a writer to aim to have on a reader, almost political, certainly polemic. I also particularly liked Darja Malcolm-Clarke's essay for her mentioning the grotesque vis-a-vis the New Weird, which I think is very important for understanding it.

China Miéville, of course, is the quintessential practitioner of the New Weird, but as his new book makes clear, he has left it behind, or perhaps it has moved on without him, and that's not a bad thing. The City & the City is set in the coexistent but divided cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, somewhere in eastern Europe, and it is blatantly a noir story: a pretty young woman turns up dead, and it's up to the hard-bolied but effective Tyador Borlú of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad to find out the truth of her murder, whether those in Beszel and Ul Qoma, and especially in Breach, that keeps the border between them, want the truth known or not.

I got an ARE of this book for free thanks to a contest on the Suvudu website (and in style: it turned up FedEx the day after I learned I had won), and I was particularly touched by the story of its genesis: Miéville's writing it for his dying mother, who loved detective fiction but didn't like the monsters in his earlier books. In a weird way, I kind of feel that my own mother arranged for me to receive the book, but that is immaterial to the fact that Miéville has written another awesome novel. He certainly does detective fiction proud, and at the level of story, it's excellently plotted, but of course what really makes it great are Miéville's characters and concepts. I'm not sure I can describe the truth of Beszel and Ul Qoma, of Breach and possibly Orciny, in any way that makes them intelligible, except to say that no cities are closer to each other and no cities are so far apart. Borlú and especially his assistant Corwi are awesome, and Miéville salts his narrative with enough telling details to make the reader thoroughly convinced that, if one does book a flight to Athens, one could come by plane or train eventually to Beszel or to Ul Qoma. I particularly want to read the Palahniuk novel he mentions, Diary of an Incile, but of course I can't (unless by chance I come to the Library of Dream), but surely the next best thing, or even better, is to read The City & the City.