Bookpost #4

Ah, I've been negligent.

It's been a fallow season for me, TTRPG-wise; I've been going through some drama in my personal life, and my long-running Stars Without Number game has gone on a “hiatus” that will probably prove to be permanent. I had a falling out with one of the players, and nearly all of the others have gone through something major of their own in the past couple months (two had deaths in the family; two are about to have their first kid). Most of the group continues to meet, but sporadically now, and often with only two or three players. We've been trying out Black Sword Hack, which is delightful and great for some drop-in, drop-out adventure-of-the-week action, but after literally years of getting six people together every week, almost without fail, seeing the game come to this is tough. And missing my best, most enthusiastic player—who was one of my closest friends, too—is tougher still.

But life goes on. I'm not doing much TTRPG stuff, but I'm writing poetry and fiction, I'm drawing, I'm playing board games, I'm cooking. And I'm reading a lot! And I haven't done a post about books since January! So now there's way too damn much to go into detail, and I'm skipping over a bunch of things I didn't like or don't have much to say about. But the highlights:

Convergence Problems (Wole Talabi)

The last thing I mentioned in the previous post was, reasonably enough, the first thing I read this year. And it was great! The quality of the stories is a bit uneven, but the best are fantastic, and even the weaker ones are different enough from what's popular in American SF, and offer enough insight into Nigerian society and culture, to be fascinating.

How Not to Network a Nation (Benjamin Peters)

If/Then (Jill Lepore)

Two different 1960s-centric nonfiction stories about the technological futures we didn't have. Lepore is a much, much better writer than Peters (no offense, Ben), and her book infinitely more readable, but the subject matter of How Not to… is, to me, much more interesting. Kinda wish Lepore would write about it!

All for Nothing (Walter Kempowski)

Old Filth (Jane Gardam)

Two great literary novels about some of the darkest corners of 20th-century history that are way, way funnier than they have any right to be.

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen (Garth Nix)

History of the Runestaff (Michael Moorcock)

The Languages of Pao (Jack Vance)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

A bunch of “Can you believe I'd never read this before?” SFF classics. (Okay, maybe Pao specifically isn't exactly a classic, but it's the first Jack Vance I'd ever read, so that's something.) Love a lot of the worldbuilding detail in Nix's work, particularly the musical magic. Love how clear it is that OD&D was just “let's turn the Runestaff books into a game.” Love a good old SF take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, Vance's vocabulary, and his eye for environmental detail (his characters leave a lot to be desired, though). Absolutely adore the over-the-top, overstuffed space opera plenitude of Vinge's Zones of Thought setting.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Stanislaw Lem)

The Two of Them (Joanna Russ)

Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin)

A bunch of new-to-me works by beloved favorites. Memoirs isn't the most gripping narrative, but it's a fascinating perspective on American Cold War paranoia from an outside perspective. The Two of Them is vivid, incredibly well drawn, and repeatedly heartbreaking. And both of the Le Guin books, well, shame on me for not having read two of the best works by my all-time favorite author earlier. Five Ways is gorgeous, incredibly moving, far more romantic than you'd expect from her. Always Coming Home is just astounding. A whole world, a whole philosophy, a whole way of living.

Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Yeah, it really is that good. And they really were that bad.

Godwin (Joseph O'Neill)

Funny, strange, thought-provoking. Wonderful characters; the degree to which the narrators are utterly distinct and different from one another and both absolutely believable is real virtuoso writing.

Total Chaos (Jean-Claude Izzo)

A fun, pacy, trope-heavy crime novel that is so thick with culturally, geographically, chronologically specific detail that it's easy to forgive the many predictable beats.

You Dreamed of Empires (Alvaro Enrigue)

Best thing I've read all year. One of the most memorable, strange, immersive, exciting novels I've read in quite a few years, in fact.