I am running behind on approximately seventeen quadrillion projects, which is why I haven't posted any book reviews for several weeks and probably will continue to not post any until next week, at least.

But! I didn't want to leave my dreamwidth entirely barren, especially immediately after participating in a friending meme (still running here, if you want to bulk up your reading page) and anyway, it's the year-end/new-year time of things, a good moment for summing up and posting lists. And so here is a topic about which I hardly ever post, but which I spend quite a bit of time with in my daily life: podcasts! I'm extremely fond of using podcasts to fill all the boring bits of life, particularly the bits when my hands and/or eyes are otherwise occupied (so that I can't read a book) but my brain is not: commuting, of course, but also washing dishes, folding laundry, showering, cooking, and more. I usually go through two or three episodes of various podcasts a day. And so, of course, I have favorites – podcasts that I desperately wait for new episodes of. And... less favorites, ones I listen to only when I have nothing else ("I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats", why is the host so annoying?) or that I try to listen to and end up abandoning ("History is Gay", why are both hosts so annoying?). But let's stick to the positives for today. Here are my Top Ten Favorite Podcasts of 2019, listed in ascending order:

10. Ben Franklin's World. A young historian (I believe she's a PhD student, at least in the early episodes I've listened to so far) interviews scholars, museum workers, and professors on their research in early American history (generally mid 1600s to early 1800s, with a few episodes that go earlier or later, and with a focus on the area of the British colonies). To be honest, I don't actually like the host's approach very much, but the people she talks to are so interesting that I've kept listening anyway. This is also one of the few podcasts I listen to that doesn't have any element of humor to it at all (I tend to look for a light mood in my podcasts), but it's fascinating, and I always want to take notes while I listen.

9. The Allusionist. The host, a woman with a background in writing and editing, produces this show with a somewhat "This American Life" vibe, but on the topic of weird linguistic detours. She herself describes the show as "about language", but that seems way too broad to be helpful. Some recent episode topics to give you a better idea of whether you'd like to listen yourself: how do you decide what to engrave on your headstone? did the Berlin Wall lead to East and West Germany developing separate dialects? why did medieval Europe believe in a demon whose sole job was making typos? what's the history of the word bisexual? This isn't a laugh out loud type of show, but the host does approach her subject with humor and curiosity, which I appreciate.

8. Sawbones. One of the brothers from MBMBAM and his wife, who is a doctor, discuss the weird, terrible medical practices of the past – bloodletting, black bile, patent medicines, etc – and the weird, terrible medical practices of the present day – drinking bleach, anti-vaxxers, the keto diet, etc – with a sense of humor. I probably would have placed this show higher if I'd made this list last year, because recently they've been focusing more on contemporary issues, which tend to be less funny. And I get it, vaccines are important! But there's only so many episodes I can to listen to on that topic before it gets boring.

7. My Favorite Murder. Yes, I am the last person on earth to start listening to this EXTREMELY FAMOUS podcast in which two women comedians discuss true crime cases, both historical and recent, and I only began listening last month. I'm not entirely sure I'll stick with this podcast longterm, but so far I've found it strangely addictive. It's surprisingly light in mood for such a heavy topic, which makes it a good listen for when I want something I only need half a brain for.

6. Gastropod. Another "This American Life" style podcast. In this one the two hosts, both women journalists, focus on the history and science of food. Some of my favorite episodes include the one on cilantro (what is the science behind the haters?), the one on a maple syrup crime ring, and the one on if eating off a literal silver spoon can make your food taste better.

5. My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Everyone already knows about this podcast, don't they? Just in case you've missed out: three comedian brothers respond to advice questions (both questions emailed directly to them and random ones pulled off of Yahoo! Answers) with a mix of deliberately terrible and genuinely sweet advice. Occasionally interrupted by other projects, such as the oldest brother's news updates on fast food developments, or reading ebay auctions of haunted dolls.

4. The Dollop. Hosted by two comedians, both extremely unknowledgeable about American history. Despite that, one host finds and researches a strange incident therein and presents it to the other, who reacts. Episodes I've listened to recently include topics like the origin of the Ouija board, the Rajneeshee cult, mountain man Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Revenant"), and the history of the LAPD. Even when I'm already familiar with the subject matter, their commentary makes me laugh out loud.
A sidenote: history, inevitably, tends to involve racism, sexism, people being just generally terrible to one another, and many related topics. The hosts are both straight white men, and have the blindspots you'd expect. That said, I've been honestly surprised at how willing they are to learn and to correct themselves just in the small percentage of their backlog that I've gone through.

3. Apocalist Book Club. Two women read every post-apocalyptic novel ever written in chronological order, starting with "The Last Man" by Jean-Baptiste De Grainville (1805). Some of the books are terrible, but there's nothing as funny or as weird as the bad fiction of another era. This podcast is a relatively recent discovery for me, but I'm almost out of episodes and very sad that they update only once a month.

2. The Baby-Sitters Club Club. Two thirty-something dudes, comedians, review each book in Ann M. Martin's classic preteen-girl series, The Baby-Sitters Club. I realize that this sounds like a set-up for mockery and condescension, but the hosts instead show a lot of love for the series: arguing about who is the best babysitter, debating the deeper themes of the series, analyzing the writing styles of the different ghostwriters who took over after the first thirty books, tracking the careers of rarely mentioned side-characters, and so on. I absolutely love listening to this podcast, and am very worried about it ending soon, as they've read nearly all the potential Baby-Sitters content. But I never want it to end!

1. Alternate Ending. A podcast about movies with three hosts: Tim, "the expert"; Carrie, "the casual viewer" (aka the person who knows nothing about movies); and Rob, who is sort of the in-between in terms of movie knowledge. Most episodes have a theme, and each host brings their own list of movies to discuss (recent examples: "Top 5 Nicole Kidman movies", "Top 5 movies about divorce", "Top 5 cats"). I've been a fan of Tim's written movie reviews for many years – he's absolutely the person who taught me to notice things like shot composition and set dressing, though I'm still trying to figure out editing – because of his wonderful mix of critical technical analysis and appreciation for underappreciated genres like slasher flicks and Disney animation. Also he writes hilarious reviews of bad movies, such as this one for Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. The podcast is all of this plus great chemistry between three friends. It is my very first listen whenever new episodes download.

What podcasts to do you listen to? Anything you'd recommend for me? These aren't all the ones I listen to, but I'm happy to talk about others as well!

Let Me Breathe Thunder by William Attaway. An early (1939) novel by a Black writer, focusing on the life of two young white hobos, Step and Ed, who open the story by meeting an orphaned ten-year-old Mexican boy and stealing all the cash he has. They then, with the short-sightedness typical of them throughout the book, realize that they feel too guilty to abandon the kid and so decide to bring him along on their aimless wanderings. Their relationship with the kid, whom they christen "Hi Boy" since they never learn his real name (Hi Boy doesn't speak much English, and neither Step nor Ed knows Spanish), catches the attention of kindly orchard owner Sampson, who invites them all to come work for him. They do so, and Sampson's teenage daughter promptly develops a crush on Step which he takes advantage of.

There's an obvious comparison here to Of Mice and Men: two closely bonded men riding the rails during the Great Depression, a woman's sexual desires setting off the climax, an anti-capitalist dream interrupted by accidental death, a lynch mob, tragedy all around. But the more distance I put between myself and the end of Let Me Breathe Thunder, the more certain I am that Attaway, unlike Steinbeck, felt no pity for his main characters. You don't quite notice it during the experience of reading Let Me Breathe Thunder itself; Step and Ed are written with sensitivity and attention to both the joy of their freedom and the pain of their rootlessness. They struck me as sympathetic, even likeable, particularly Ed, who is the less cynical and more tender of the two, and the book's narrator. Nonetheless they are thoughtless and selfish and by the end their actions have resulted in at least one death, with others possibly implied. I suspect we're not meant to cry for Step and Ed so much as for all the ruined lives they leave behind. I don't think it's an accident that a Black author made his main characters white men, not when they reach the end curiously safe and sound – the only ones who do.

I liked Let Me Breathe Thunder a great deal, and wish it was taught or critiqued in parallel to Of Mice and Men more often, instead of simply being overshadowed by it. It's not a lesser version of the same story but one that casts similar events in a quite different light.


An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. A novel about a classical musician, a violinist in modern-day London (well, modern-day at the time the novel was published, which is to say the 1990s, as is evident by the number of faxes characters send to one another), and the woman he loved and lost. Ten years ago Michael was a music student in Vienna, deeply in love with fellow musician Julia and studying under a demanding professor; he spectacularly flamed out and abruptly disappeared from both relationships without a word. Now he works with a string quartet – his professor, who envisioned a solo career for him, would be disappointed – and pines for Julia – who refuses to answer his sporadic letters – while sleeping with one of his own students. Until he catches sight of Julia on a London bus, and discovers that she's a) married, and b) going deaf.

I'd been looking forward to reading An Equal Music because I love Seth's other work, but this is absolutely no A Suitable Boy. The writing itself is fine, even wonderful: sparse but evocative, lyrical and descriptive, particularly about cities, landscapes, and music. Unfortunately everything else about the book is completely terrible. The concept of a musician losing the ability to hear is a bit trite, but could also have tremendous potential in the hands of the right author. Unfortunately An Equal Music is very much not Julia's story – it's Michael's, and that of the manpain he feels at her loss. Everything about Michael is awful. It's been quite some time since I hated a main character as much as I hate him; by the end of the book, I was actively rooting for bad things to happen to him and felt annoyed whenever fate gave him a break.

Let me list the things Michael does over the course of An Equal Music:
– actively stalks Julia, ignoring her clear wishes to be left alone, to the extent of popping up unexpectedly at her parents' home and asking his agent to call her agent
– once he meets Julia again, nags her into having an affair with him (I suppose she acquiesces to this, though An Equal Music never really explains why)
– ghosts his current girlfriend once he has Julia's attention
– throws tantrums when she continues to express affection for her husband
– after he finds out that she's going deaf, makes it all about him, continually bringing it up and asking questions despite her stating that she doesn't want to talk about it
– lets out the secret of her deafness despite her explicitly asking him not to, because she's afraid it will either destroy her career or turn her into a novelty gimmick
– makes the final time she's able to perform with others all about him by having a major nervous breakdown in the green room, forcing her to comfort him and to miss the rest of the concert
– physically and emotionally abuses her because he finds an affectionate letter she wrote to her husband
– actively tries to expose their affair to her husband
– after she breaks things off, shows up at her young son's school to force a confrontation
– witnesses the fact that the widespread knowledge of Julia's deafness has indeed turned her music into a publicity stunt; feels no remorse
– creates disasters for his quartet to clean up because he's too obsessed with Julia

All of this could make for a decent novel, I suppose, if it was about a horrible, selfish monster and the disasters he causes. An Equal Music is not that book. We're clearly supposed to find Michael sympathetic and his love and struggles tragic. The only question I came away with was how the insightful and astute Seth I'd read before could possibly have produced this book.

A couple of weeks ago (yes, I am a couple of weeks behind in writing up the books I read), I visited a friend in Rochester. What better time, I thought, than to catch up on the Donald Strachey series, the first book of which I read a while ago. Of course, this series is set in Albany, not Rochester, but eh, it was still the closest to a thematic read I had on hand. And then it turned out that the one I had chosen was set during a massive heatwave, which was extremely not my experience of the weather in November, but still. I'd tried.

On the Other Hand, Death by Richard Stevenson. The second book in the Donald Strachey murder mysteries, starring a gay private investigator in early 1980s upstate New York. In this one, Don is hired by a massive real estate company who's looking to build a mall just outside of town. The only thing preventing them from starting construction is a pair of elderly lesbians who refuse to sell their farm. All their other neighbors have signed away their land – but won't actually be getting the cash unless the ladies sell as well. When homophobic vandalism and threatening letters turn up on the ladies' farm, Don is hired by the very same real estate company to look into it. He's fairly certain the company is responsible, but if they want to pay him thousands of dollars to make themselves look better, Don won't say no. Matters are complicated when a houseguest of the ladies is kidnapped, and an enormous ransom is demanded; the only way they can raise the money is by selling the farm. The missing guest is the boyfriend of a young gay activist currently touring the country to try and convince people to sign up for a nationwide gay strike. Would he fake a kidnapping just to raise awareness? Has the real estate company crossed the line into violence? And will they figure out where the missing man is before he's killed?

I liked this book a lot better than the first one in the series, Death Trick, though it does continue the trend of terrible names (at least this one is semi-justified in the dialogue). Timmy, Don's longterm boyfriend, is much more of a presence this time, and their relationship has an actual subplot: Don won't stop sleeping around despite Timmy's desire for monogamy. They both feel more like characters and less like empty figures meant only to drive the plot. Even the secondary characters – the elderly lesbians, the gay activist couple, the jerkwad cops – are fleshed out. The evocation of time and place is very well-done, and I quite liked the solution to the mystery. A very fun, quick-paced read.


Ice Blues by Richard Stevenson. I enjoyed On the Other Hand, Death so much that I went on immediately to this, the third book in the Donald Strachey series. And it was a very good choice, proving just as compulsively readable as its predecessor. The interesting historical (now; it was originally contemporary) detail also continues: Ice Blues was published in 1987, and unlike the previous two books, here AIDS has begun to have its devastating impact on the gay community. A death caused by AIDS, in fact, becomes a major driver of the plot.

Said plot starts with a bang: one winter evening, Don's car is towed to make way for the snow plows. When he arrives at the city lot a few hours later to pick up his car, there's a dead body in the trunk. It turns out that Don once met the dead guy at a party, and – more shockingly – the dead guy has left him $2.5 million dollars in cash, hidden in a few suitcases currently on their way to Albany from L.A. There's also a letter instructing Don to use the money to clean up the corrupt city government.

Which leads to a lot of questions: who killed him? Are the people who did it now trying to kill Don? (Spoiler: yes.) Why did he leave the money to Don? And most importantly, where did the money even come from – the dead guy's former drug associates? His grandfather, who was a central part of said corrupt government? The unknown and possibly imaginary man in L.A. whose will legitimized the money?

Ice Blues continues the welcome trend of fleshing out the side characters in this series, and I particularly loved the role Timmy got to play here. (The best kind of melodrama!) Brutal winter weather is a constant throughout the book, and I felt a lot of empathy with Don's plans to decamp for somewhere tropical. On the other hand, I'd expected there to be more about what the rise of AIDS meant to this community and these characters, but well... Stevenson is going hard for that hard-boiled style, so I can't expect anyone to talk about their feelings. However much I might want them to.

As a side note: I read both of these books as ebooks, and some editor or publisher or whoever has done a terrible job transferring them from the print editions. Weird breaks in the middle of paragraphs, random italics, and typos on nearly every page. If that kind of thing renders a book unreadable for you, you might want to put in the effort of chasing down the original print books.


Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy. Nonfiction about the Greely expedition (also called the Lady Franklin Bay expedition), yet another of the many terrible Arctic disasters that occured to (or were caused by) various explorers.

In 1881 American Army lieutenant Greely and his 24 followers (mostly scientists or other army men, plus two local Inuit men and one random French doctor) headed up to Lady Franklin Bay (an extremely ominous name that Levy somehow never points out the irony of! Perhaps it was too obvious?) near the very northernmost tip of Greenland, far out of the range of habitable lands. They intended to spend three years there, collecting various scientific data (on weather, astronomical events, the function of magnets so near to the north pole, etc), exploring the mostly unmapped areas to the west and east and, if possible, sending a sledge team to the north pole itself, which would make them the first to reach it, claiming the glory for the Americans instead of the British (who held the record for Farthest North at the time). The plan was for a supply ship to reach them each summer with fresh food, clothing and, if needed, men. As you might guess if you're remotely familiar with the history of polar exploration, the supply ships never arrived, due to a combination of ice blocking the way and political arguments back in Washington DC. In August 1883, Greely decided they had to abandon their station, so the whole crew headed south using a combination of small ships, sledges, and walking. They made it two hundred miles before further travel was halted by winter weather – still alone and with extremely little food left. Out of 25 men, seven survived that winter to be rescued in June 1884, with one more dying soon after.

This is a fascinating enough piece of history on its own, rife with dramatic scenes of man v nature, brutal endurance, wolf attacks, polar bears, the northern lights, bad decision making, theft, murder, madness, and (of course) allegations of cannibalism. Unfortunately Levy is not the person to tell this story. He engages in practically every single tick that I hate in nonfiction writers. He imagines details that he can't possibly know two hundred years later:
He observed them and everything else, squinting through his oval spectacles at the breathtaking expanse, trying to visualize what lay ahead. [...] Massive slabs of glacial ice cleaved off the shore and crashed into sea, spewing freezing brine over the gunwales and frosting his sharp narrow face and pointed black beard. His heart raced with anticipation, but his mind was much burdened.
If you wanted to write a novel, Levy, just write a novel! I don't need your fictionalizations in a history book!

Levy also focuses on mind-numbing minutiae while ignoring the larger context. For example, he spends chapters describing the foot-by-foot route Greely and co took south: on August 26th, a storm drove them east! On September 1st they made it back south! On September 16th they floated back north! On September 29th they finally made it back south! On September 22nd they went east instead! On September 27th they went west! On September 28th they went south again! (THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION, IN FACT I COULD GO ON FOR MUCH LONGER) Was my summary boring to read? Well, imagine spending nearly a hundred pages on it, and you have a good idea of the middle section of Labyrinth of Ice. On the other hand, topics that I eagerly would have read a hundred pages of are skipped entirely: what was the point of all that scientific data they took? What questions were they trying to answer? What did they successfully learn? (Levy comments in the epilogue that their weather measurements are important to scientists today studying global warming, but I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that wasn't the original intention.) Levy mentions briefly that another of the expedition's goals was to search for the missing USS Jeanette – what was the story there? What was the cultural context around polar exploration, scientific expeditions, or stories of survival? How long did their record for Farthest North last? Why did they wait so long before they started eating the local shellfish? Levy mentions some of the men going "mad" as starvation set in – but what does that mean, in actual medical terms? Were they suffering just from calorie deprivation, or was some combination of scurvy and other diseases also affecting them? There are a hundred more subjects that the story of the Greely expedition could shed light on, but Levy ignores them all in favor of a tedious accounting of exactly how many miles were covered each day.

As a side note, I could also have used way more maps. There are a few included at the beginning of the book, but there are so many side trips and back-and-forths that a map for every chapter wouldn't have been out of place. I tried to follow along on Google Maps, but either place names have changed or Google hasn't bothered to finely map the Arctic Circle, because many of the locations Levy mentioned just weren't there.

I'm not objecting to the genre of polar exploration histories; I've read plenty that were exciting, enlightening, hard to put down and even, occasionally, funny. Labyrinth of Ice is definitively not one of them. I can't imagine recommending this book to anyone unless they had to write a report on the Greely expedition, and even then there are probably better resources.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. A horror novel set – very specifically, with many pop culture references – in 1988. Abby and Gretchen, high school sophomores, have been best friends for years and years, the sort of best friends that have secret codes and personal rituals and phone calls every night to dissect that day at school, despite Abby being from the poor side of town and Gretchen's parents being extremely wealthy and WASP-y. Until one summer night, when Abby and Gretchen experiment with LSD and Gretchen ends up alone and lost in the nearby woods for hours. Or... maybe not alone, because the next day she begins to act differently. Subtly, at first – not showering, not sleeping, claiming she hears voices. Then she begins to lash out violently, actively destroying her friendship with Abby and sabotaging the other girls in their class. Was she raped that night, and this is all some form of PTSD? Is she being abused by her parents? Or did she encounter a secret group of Satanists and is now possessed by the devil?

As you might guess from a plot that involves both Satanic conspiracies and the dangers of trying drugs, My Best Friend’s Exorcism is extremely enamoured of its 80's setting. (Look at that cover! This was published in 2016, but someone clearly knows their stuff.) However, what the novel's really about, more than anything else, is the friendship between Abby and Gretchen. I was shocked when I realized that the author is a man, because it's such a perceptive, kind, respectful depiction of teen girls and their bonds. It's honestly hard to believe Hendrix was never himself a sixteen year old girl! There is horror (warning for a dead dog) and humor (the exorcist Abby eventually turns to is a bodybuilder who lifts weights for Christ and who, as becomes increasingly obvious, has never actually led an exorcism before), but every element – including a climax that is equally scary, hilarious, and emotional – is a celebration of their friendship. An excellent book for anyone who has the slightest affection for lifelong friendships and their importance.


The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation by Rich Cohen. God, I had so many problems with this book. Let's start with the title. The Last Pirate of New York is the nonfiction account of Albert Hicks, who murdered three men in 1860 in a crime that set off a media frenzy, making him hugely famous. Hicks was hung on Liberty Island (before the statute was installed, of course) with a watching crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people, the last man to be publicly executed in New York. This is enough to base a book on! This is an interesting story in and of itself! This is not remotely the story of either a pirate or a gangster!

Okay, fine. Hicks technically was tried for piracy, but only because – no one having found the bodies of his victims, which presumably were at the bottom of New York Harbor – the state was afraid he'd escape a murder charge. He did commit the murders on board a boat, but a boat that never made it to the open ocean, staying within the harbor for the entirety of this doomed voyage. Not really what I think of when I see a book with "pirate" on the cover. Especially because NYC did have real pirates of the stereotypical sort, most famously but not limited to Captain Kidd! Secondly, if we're going to count killing people in a bay as piracy, Hicks is not the last; Cohen several times mentions other river pirates operating around the same time.

Thirdly, Hicks is even less of a gangster than he is a pirate. Cohen is obviously very enthused about New York's history with gangsters and spends a lot of time discussing them, bragging about his interactions with their still surviving relics. (I mean all of this is in regards to gangsters of The Godfather and Boardwalk Empire sort, not gangsters of Boyz n the Hood or The Wire sort, which I feel is an obvious point of confusion but one which Cohen never deigns to acknowledge.) Hicks worked alone, and had no followers, accomplices, or any sort of larger organization that one might call... you know... a gang. You can't be a gangster by yourself. Cohen does argue that Hicks became a legendary figure in the NYC underworld after his death, his story told and retold for generations. But this theory, which could have been fascinating and a major focus of the book, is relegated to a few pages in an afterword and we're never shown evidence that it actually happened.

Another problem I had with The Last Pirate of New York is that the majority of the pages are spent on the police investigation and subsequent trial, which is fine in and of itself; many a true crime book has chosen that focus. But Cohen gives us a detailed description of Hicks's actions during the murder at the beginning of the book, which means the subsequent 120 pages have no tension or suspense. We know he did it. There's no question of if they're following the right guy, or if maybe the suspect is really innocent, or if he did it but won't be found guilty. All of that is obvious from the very beginning, leaving nowhere new for the book to go. Bizarrely, Cohen details the step-by-step of the murder at the beginning of the book, then does so again near the end, when Hicks confesses. Not only is it the same scene told twice, Cohen uses many of the exact same phrases. And it's not a particularly long book, so wasting pages on this retelling really stands out.

Cohen also spends a lot of time on Hicks's confession, which he sold in book-form to a publisher immediately before his execution. Personally, I was extremely skeptical that anything in this confession actually happened; not only did Hicks supposedly participate in every single important event of mid-1800s America (he visited the California gold rush! He was in the Mexican-American war! He lived in Hawaii, Tahiti, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, New Orleans!) but it hits every trope of the standard penny dreadful (he was the only survivor of a shipwreck – twice! He killed hundreds of men but was too good to rape women! He protected mistreated cabin boys! He buried $200,000 in Mexico and the treasure is still out there for you to find! All of these crimes attributed to a famous bandit were actually committed by Hicks!). Cohen doesn't seem to have made an effort to verify any of the stories that happened outside of NYC. And I get it, the historical records for rural Mexico on crimes that were never tried are not going to be a great source of information, but that's not an excuse to spend dozens of pages uncritically recounting this story.

Cohen uses a lot of photographs to illustrate his story, but they were mostly taken much later than the events in question, sometimes up to sixty years later. And again, I understand the choice – there's not a lot of useful photographs from the 1850s; a building won't have changed that much in appearance – but the fact that he never explicitly acknowledges this discrepancy bothered me.

So, is there anything good about The Last Pirate of New York? Cohen's writing isn't terrible... at least, not all of the time. His descriptions of Old New York can be quite well-written: The little party followed State Street across Bowling Green, then walked up Broadway, which had once been an Indian trail. Before the Civil War, you could still see evidence of that, in the hard-packed dirt, in the way it rambled, and in the smells, which were the smells of America old and new, smells of horse manure and leather and human sweat, but also the stench of factories; of putrid meat from the slaughter yards and tanneries, of oil from the gasworks and refineries.
Unfortunately it's also not always accurate, since south Broadway was absolutely not a dirt road in 1860. Alas, such an intriguing title, such an annoyingly deficient book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane. This is a collection of two novels, "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water", both originally published in the 1930s and the only horror novels Sloane ever wrote. Which is surprising, because these are very accomplished and confident works. There's a very Lovecraftian tinge to both novels, though less in the sense of "cults and elder gods" and more in the sense of "scientist discovers things man was not meant to know". Also: much less racism and anti-semitism. Unfortunately Sloane does not entirely escape being a writer of his time; his attitude toward women in both stories is fairly appalling, though more so in "The Edge of Running Water".

"To Walk the Night" begins with the narrator arriving at the house of his best friend's father, carrying the ashes of that best friend, who has just killed himself. The father – understandably! – asks the narrator to explain what drove his son to suicide, and they pass a long night staring out into the dark as the narrator tells the story of how he and the friend went back to visit an old college professor, only to discover his freshly murdered corpse. It's a particularly mysterious death, and even the police have no answers as to how it was done or who wanted to kill him. The friend slowly becomes obsessed with a) solving the mystery, b) working on the equations about Einstein's theory of space-time the professor left behind, and c) hooking up way too soon with the professor's hot widow. These three strands eventually come together into a terrible revelation the friend couldn't live with.

In "The Edge of Running Water", our narrator is himself a professor, this time traveling to rural Maine to visit another professor, a former friend of his who dropped out of the college scene five years previously after the sudden but not mysterious death of his wife. It turns out that he's spent this entire time trying to invent a machine for communicating with the dead. While our narrator struggles to find a nice way to tell his friend that he needs therapy and the machine is definitely fake, he deals with the creepy surroundings: a small town of locals who distrust all outsiders; the strange woman who seems to be taking advantage of his friend and who claims to be a medium; weirds sounds emanating from his friend's laboratory; and the disappearance of his friend's housekeeper. There's also the friend's step-daughter, who the narrator fondly reminisces about babysitting as a preteen while currently commenting on her body and kissing her, but let's skip that part, shall we? Indeed! As you probably could guess, the novel concludes with a literal bang when it turns out that the machine isn't so fake after all.

Both stories are heavy on a creeping sense of dread, spending a great deal of time establishing the characters, setting, and coming darkness. They're both extremely slow builds, which is certainly part of their appeal but also my main complaint. Perhaps the ending revelations were more shocking in the 1930s but they're easy to see coming today and taking so very long to get to the climax lessened the impact for me. I think they would have made great episodes of The Twilight Zone, not least because shortening them to a thirty-minute runtime would have cut out the extraneous material. Nonetheless, the writing is effective at pulling you into the world, and I raced through both novels. Sloane is particularly a master at creating evocative scenery; the descriptions of barren mesas in the New Mexican desert in "To Walk the Night" will stay with me for a long time. Recommended for anyone who's into the history of the horror genre, though the scares here are quite mild.


The Dinosaur Tourist by Caitlín R. Kiernan. A collection of 19 short stories, mostly in the horror genre though frequently more mildly creepy than outright horrific. Despite the stories being disconnected, there are images and themes that appear repeatedly: paleontologists (though dinosaurs themselves appear only as fossils or, once, as a cheesy tourist attraction); lesbian couples; protagonists who grew up in the southern United States only to spend their adult lives up north; sitting in a psychiatrist's office describing bad dreams based on weird but not directly traumatic childhood experiences; vivid descriptions of locations in the US's north-east, mostly NYC, Boston, and Providence; the scent of the ocean and/or rivers; explicit Lovecraft references, most often to Mother Hydra, here repeatedly depicted as an evil Venus of Willendorf. As a whole, the stories are a mixed bag; some of them I loved, and some I found far too vague and ambiguous.

My favorites included:
"The Cats of River Street (1925)" – the pet and feral cats of Lovecraft's Innsmouth come together on the spring equinox to fight back a tide of sea monsters. A wonderful portrayal of a diversity of personalities in a specific time and place.
"Far From Any Shore" – three paleontologists dig up the Mother Hydra statue and succumb to mysterious illnesses while revelers celebrate the end of the world. Creepy and understated; very well-done.
"Fake Plastic Trees" – in a world somewhat like Vonnegut's Cat Cradle (though in this case nanobots have turned everything to plastic), a teenage girl makes a horrific discovery. Nice tension and worldbuilding here.
"Elegy for a Suicide" – a woman touches what looks like a fungi, only to find her body rotting and an ancient power consuming her inner self.

Unfortunately too many of the other stories are meandering and unclear, in that way of literary fiction in which nothing actually happens but it's all very weighty and meaningful. Frequently I was bored enough that I had to force myself to keep reading. The other books I've read by Kiernan didn't have this problem, so I was disappointed to encounter it here. But that said, the stories that worked, really really worked.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu. A horror novel that reimagines the Donner Party by adding monsters to the real difficulties of starvation, cannibalism, and bad weather. An excellent premise!

Unfortunately the execution is not as good. The Hunger has gotten a ton of good press and even been nominated for several awards since it came out last year, and I really can't imagine why. The writing is flat, the characters are a collection of historical fiction cliches (the sexy bad girl, the naive good girl, the honorable man who is unfairly judged by others, the closeted gay man who's obsessed with sin), the themes could have been interesting but Katsu doesn't quite manage to bring them full circle, and it's not even that scary.

The vast, vast majority of the book concerns the party's progress along the trail before getting to its infamous winter camp snowed in up in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Which is fair enough, I suppose: plenty went wrong beforehand to cause the group to end up in the wrong place with such low supplies. But I feel like the winter camp is the heart of the Donner Party's notoriety, and where the most obvious horror waits to be crafted; it's shocking that Katsu chooses to spend such a tiny segment of The Hunger there. And even when the narration does finally reach the winter camp, most of that section is spent following characters outside of the camp itself – a group who tries to hike out to find help, and a group who halted earlier and so is further down the trail. It's such a strange absence that I have to assume Katsu left it out deliberately, but I have no idea why. Maybe she felt it was too obvious? But it left me feeling like The Hunger was all build-up and resolution without a climax in between.

The monsters themselves are most similar to wendigos, although that word never actually appears in The Hunger, probably so that Katsu could give the folklore her own twist. There are elements of werewolves here too, and maybe just a touch of zombies. All of this is nicely done and creepy enough, if it hadn't just been buried in chapters and chapters of boring writing style, characters I didn't care about, and "hidden secrets" that were obvious from page one.


Full Throttle by Joe Hill. A collection of thirteen short horror stories. Well, mostly horror. A few are more literary than horrific. I really enjoyed Full Throttle; I seem to like Hill's writing better in short story form than in full novels, because this is my favorite book of his since 20th Century Ghosts.

Let me cover just a few of my favorite stories:
All I Care About Is You – in a not too futuristic sci-fi setting (with worldbuilding very reminiscent of the 1950s; I recognized a few elements taken almost directly from The Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury) a newly poor girl whose friends are all still rich celebrates her sixteenth birthday alone, with only a robot for company. There's a twist at the end which I did not see coming at all and which fit well, but which might be too grimdark for some readers. I loved it.
Faun – what if the door to Narnia was discovered not by sweet innocent children but a venal big game hunter?
By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain – a group of small children in the 1930s discover the dead body of a Nessie-esque lake monster. This story had a style different than most of Hill's writing: lovely and nostalgic and almost silver colored.
You Are Released – a random flight from LA to Boston is in the air over North Dakota when World War III suddenly begins and the nuclear weapons start falling. The POV switches between an assortment of passengers – an aging celebrity, a MAGA-hat-wearing news producer, a gay Jewish man, a young South Korean woman, a spelling bee champion little girl – as they slowly realize what's happening. This is another of the stories that's less horror and more just sad and tender.

There's also two stories that depend on a structural gimmick. In both cases I'm not sure the gimmick itself worked, but I liked each story, so meh.
The Devil on the Staircase – set in the steep cliffs of the Amalfi Coast in the late 1800s, this story concerns a laborer who spends his days carting loads up and down staircases until he discovers one particular staircase that leads to hell. The rhythm of the writing here wonderfully mimics the cadence of an authentic folktale, and the text is set to look like a series of staircases:
I
hated
him of
course.
He had his
cats and he
sang to them
and poured them
saucers of milk and
told them foolish stories
and stroked them in his lap
and when one time I kicked one–
I do not remember why–he kicked me to
the floor and said not to touch his babies.

So I
carried
his rocks
when I should
have been carrying
schoolbooks, but I cannot
pretend I hated him for that.
I had no use for school, hated to
study, hated to read, felt acutely the
stifling heat of the single room schoolhouse,
the only good thing in it my cousin, Lithodora, who
read to the little children, sitting on a stool with her
back erect, chin lifted high, and her white throat showing.

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead – a teenage girl live-tweets her family roadtrip and their decision to check out a small town attraction starring zombies. The story is told as a series of actual tweets: timestamps, screennames, and all. It is unsurprisingly annoying to read 15 pages of tweets, but honestly I'm not sure how else the plot could work. This story is like the "found footage" genre done in writing.

One of my least favorite stories was In the Tall Grass (cowritten with Stephen King), in which a brother and pregnant sister get lost in a field of grass and discover that getting back out is more complicated than it seems. It was certainly brutal and gross, but there just wasn't much to the story outside of that. Of course, this is the story which has now been turned into a movie by Netflix; you can watch the trailer here.

But despite that complaint, even the stories that didn't stand out to me were better than average. Overall, a really excellent collection, especially for Halloween!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

How to Write a Book Proposal (5th edition) by Jody Rein, Michael Larsen. A nonfiction step-by-step guide to, well, writing a book proposal. Since there seems to be some confusion over this: a book proposal is a lengthy pitch (not uncommonly 50+ pages) used to sell nonfiction books to agents and/or publishers. Fiction mostly does not use proposals, or, at most, uses extremely short and simplified ones; instead, fiction is primarily sold via a complete manuscript. Nonfiction writers can get away with having written only one or two chapters of the proposed book and still have it picked up on the basis of the idea. As a result, How to Write a Book Proposal has almost no advice for fiction writers, simply because they're not a relevant audience.

How to Write a Book Proposal divides potential nonfiction writers into two groups: those who write what they dub "promotion-driven books" (things like inspirational books, cookbooks, business books, celebrity books; books where a great deal of the sales are going to come from the platform the author already has) and those who write "prose-driven books" (memoirs, historical narrative, literary journalism, science writing; books where the drive is less the author's name and more the power of the story itself). Although both groups need to write a proposal to sell their books, the proposals for each differ slightly, and Rein and Larsen go into plenty of detail on how to adjust an ideal proposal to your book's specific strengths.

How to Write a Book Proposal is organized around the potential proposal itself, with chapters going in-depth to each particular part of a proposal (author bio, comps, detailed table of contents, etc) and how to write it, what to include, how long it should be, and any other information a writer could possibly need. Rein and Larsen even offer advice on what order to work on the proposal – different from the order in which it should ultimately be assembled! – to provide the most efficient use of research, planning, and writing. It's wonderfully up-to-date (particularly compared to another proposal advice book I'm currently reading, in which emailing agents is a new concept), with plenty of links to websites for agent contact information, or further advice, or additional sample proposals. There are dozens of examples of actual proposals included in this book itself, which I loved; sometimes it's just so much easier to see something than to have it explained.

One drawback, for me, was that I felt How to Write a Book Proposal is slightly more geared towards promotion-driven books, whereas I was most interested in advice for prose-driven books. Though I suppose this is fair enough, since promotion-driven books require a more complicated proposal (prose-driven books, being a bit closer to fiction in appeal, lean harder on the sample chapters – which is also a bit like selling fiction).

Overall I would highly recommend this to anyone looking into writing a book proposal.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey. Book Eight in The Expanse series. I complained in my review for the previous book in this series, Persepolis Rising, it was unbelievable that none of the main characters had died despite the extremely long passage of time and many, many dramatic adventures.

Welp. I guess I got my wish, because Tiamat's Wrath is killing off characters left and right, including in literally the very first sentence.

The Laconian Empire, established on the shoulders of Martian military prowess and a bunch of alien technology even they don't quite understand, has a stranglehold over all the many solar systems where humanity has established itself. There's a Resistance, of course – there's always a Resistance – but given Laconian superiority in weaponry, communications, government, trade, education, and pretty much every other field, it's a Resistance that's dwindling and feels increasingly futile. Of our main characters, Holden has been imprisoned in the Laconian capital for years; Naomi is a leader of the Resistance's spies, focused on gathering and disseminating information; Alex and Bobbie are on the only warship the Resistance has that's maybe capable of winning even a minor battle (a ship stolen from the Laconians, of course); and Amos has disappeared while on an undercover mission, not heard from in years.

The Laconians have better things to worry about than this petty Resistance: primarily figuring out what happened to the protomolecule builders and how they can avoid the same fate. Towards which goal they proceed to declare war on physics-defying, unknowable, deadly... things. Great choice, guys. Unsurprisingly, this immediately has devastating consequences for the Laconians (shocking consequences – I literally gasped), though I suspect most of the ramifications won't make themselves clear until the next book.

Outside of the many literal deaths, Tiamat's Wrath is a book hugely concerned with the idea of death; as the eighth book in a nine-book series, a sense of endings and wrapping-up hangs over everything. This theme is best encapsulated in a litany that first appears in Bobbie's memories of her dying father, but which she repeats over and over in her narration: Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories? Alex is confronted with the news that his son is marrying, and struggles with the next generation of Resistance fighters. Naomi considers what it means to fight a war that is, realistically, unwinnable. And everyone just wants to go home, whatever that means.

Tiamat's Wrath also brings up the question of, what even is death, anyway? We've already had Winston Duarte, literal immortal, and now there's consideration of expanding his one-man immortality club to include his fourteen-year-old daughter and theoretical heir (do immortals have heirs?), Teresa, or his pet mad scientist, Dr. Cortázar. In addition, there is a character whose body seems perfectly healthy but whose soul seems to have left the building – or perhaps the entire dimension. There's even a few reanimated corpses. But are the things living behind their eyes their former human occupants, or some sort of new protomolecule development? And how would you tell the difference, in what may be the highest stakes Turing Test ever administered? With all of this, the line between life and death is not as clear as it used to be.

This time around our POVs are Naomi, Alex, Bobbie, Teresa (spoiler alert: it turns out that growing up in the poisoned infighting of halls of power plus being around unethical experiments involving exposing humans to mysterious alien goo does bad things to your psyche), and Elvi Okoye (renowned scientist specializing in alien biologies; she's been unwillingly incorporated into the Laconian military as the only way to continue her research. She previously appeared in Cibola Burn, but I enjoyed her character MUCH more here). Yes, that does mean that for the first time ever, Holden doesn't have a POV! Okay, he sort of does – he gets the prologue, epilogue, and one chapter set exactly in the middle of the book. But still! Such a change from previous books, and a direction I didn't expect The Expanse to go in.

Overall, I didn't enjoy Tiamat's Wrath quite as much as some of the highest points of this series, but it's a very good book, and I cannot wait to read the conclusion. I don't where this story is going to end up, but I bet it's awesome.

Also, one more quote, since I loved this quip: This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.

What I Plan to Read Next
Happy October 2nd, everyone! AKA: the second of my thirty-one days of Halloween celebrations. I have quite a nice stack of horror novels to work through this month, but I could always use more. What I've already read is too long to list (you could start here, but that only covers the most recent three years or so), but if you don't mind that caveat, I'll happily take recommendations!

The Sixth Victim by Tessa Harris. The first in a forthcoming murder mystery series set in London during the 1880s. That time and place is famous for one particular murder mystery – Jack the Ripper – but Harris takes an interesting approach by having the Ripper murders be merely the background to her own story. Constance Piper is a young woman in the extremely impoverished Whitechapel district who makes her living through a combination of selling flowers and pickpocketing. Her teacher and friend, Emily Tindall, a well-educated upper class missionary, has taught her to dream of a better life for herself, but Emily has gone missing and no one except Constance seems to care. Meanwhile, the headless body of an unidentified woman is discovered on the construction site that will eventually become Scotland Yard. The police claim it has no connection to Jack the Ripper, but are they right? And can Constance figure out who the woman was?

The story switches between two narrators. Constance, the first POV, is mostly just trying to live a normal life, and does not particularly want to solve mysteries. Her neighbours' and family's ghoulish interest in following updates of the Ripper case scares her, and though she wants to figure out what happened to Emily, she doesn't have trouble believing such a well-off woman might have left town without bothering to tell her poor student. The other POV is Emily herself, who – not a spoiler, since this is revealed in the very first pages – is now a ghost. Emily wants to make contact with Constance and direct her towards a problem Emily tried to solve while she was alive herself, which eventually connects to that nameless torso. Emily's narration frequently speaks directly to the reader, throwing in hints such as "now I will reveal this" or "you'll have to wait for me to tell you that".

I thought this was an awesome idea for a murder series: taking on the tropes of Victorian Spiritualism by giving the detective her very own spirit guide! Unfortunately Harris's writing falls flat on multiple fronts.

One of the problems – as I suppose should have been self-evident – is that having a nearly omniscient ghost as a main character means that far too much is revealed to the reader far too soon. One lengthy subplot in The Sixth Victim is whether the headless torso is evidence that a doctor killed his missing wife. But we know, from literally the very first scene the doctor is in, that he couldn't have murdered his wife, since invisible Emily is witness to scenes that don't fit with that scenario. Why then does The Sixth Victim spend something like a third of its running time on the red herring of the doctor? There's just scene after scene after scene of ~oooh, maybe he did it~ when we know all along that he didn't! It's simultaneously boring and frustrating.

When Harris does reveal the actual answers to her mysteries, they're... dumb. Sorry. I'm trying to think of a more evocative, more specific word to describe the ending of this book, but it's just dumb. ( Spoilers, in case anyone cares about spoilers for a book you're probably not going to read )

I had other problems with The Sixth Victim as well (Emily's character in particular is inconsistent: she's described both as having a degree from Oxford and as being so poor that her salary as a part-time teacher at a charity school is the only thing keeping her off the streets; she never has the sort of culture clash I would expect from a Victorian woman raised in wealth introduced to a London slum), but it really is the dumb ending that's going to stop me from reading any other books by Harris, no matter how intriguing their premise.


Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. A modern-day take on Don Quixote (Quichotte is the spelling of the eponymous hero's name in the French operatic version of the story). This time around, Quichotte is an elderly Indian man now living in the United States, making his living as a traveling salesman for his cousin's (who owns a massive drug company) new opioid painkillers. As Quichotte drives from small town to small town, staying alone in rundown motels, he becomes obsessed with TV – all types of TV, from reality shows to the news to infomercials to reruns of black-and-white movies to sitcoms – and in particular with Salma R, former Bollywood star turned US TV star turned talk show host, who has an Oprah-like level of popularity and significance. Quichotte sets out to win her heart by a journey both literal (a road trip from Nowhere, Out West to NYC) and metaphysical (going through the mystical "Seven Valleys of Love", which involves giving up belief and knowledge and desire and all material belongings, before finally uniting with the beloved). Along the way he accidentally summons into existence a teen boy named Sancho, who may be Quichotte and Salma's son from the future or may merely be a figment of Quichotte's imagination.

Quichotte's is not the only story going on in this novel, however. Salma gets her own chapters, revealing her troubled childhood and addiction to the very drugs Quichotte sold, as well as her reaction to the mysterious stalker letters Quichotte keeps sending her. Sancho struggles to figure out who he is and how he can become a "real boy", complete with assistance from a talking cricket and the blue fairy. Quichotte's cousin, the owner of the multimillion drug company, deals with the American-Indian community while seeking to avoid arrest for bribing doctors to overprescribe his drugs. And outside of all of this, we have Brother, who is the author of the novel Quichotte, yes, the very one you're reading. Brother's "real" life has prominent parallels to Quichotte's: they both grew up in the same neighborhood of Bombay and have mixed feelings about their move from India to the US; they both have long-estranged sisters; they both have troubled relationships with their sons.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, in case you haven't guessed. And I haven't even mentioned the Elon Musk surrogate (here named Evel Cent and obsessed with travel between dimensions rather than spaceflight), the thread about increasing American racism, the secret military cabal of computer hackers, the brief but odd flight of fantasy about Trump voters turning into woolly mammoths, cheesy spy thrillers, and, oh yeah, the literal end of the universe. With so much stuff, inevitably some of it doesn't work (I was particularly annoyed by a rant about 'cancel culture' late in the book), but a surprising amount of it does, and hangs together in unexpected ways.

Overall, it's a rolicking, bouncing satire that lingers less and seems to have less to say than many of Rushdie's books. There's not much of a message below all the dazzling twists and turns ("the opioid crisis is bad", I guess, is the main takeaway? Not a particularly deep conclusion, that). Which is fine! Not every novel has to Explain the Condition of the World Today. But it's oddly the closest I've ever seen Rushdie come to writing a Beach Read – though still with all the allusions and stylistic flourishes that are typical Rushdie.

My main complaint is that, despite the basic premise of "Don Quixote but with American TV", Quichotte does not actually seem to be all that influenced by TV. Sure, we're told frequently enough that he watches too much TV, but nothing about his speaking style (described as old fashioned, mannerly, and charming), his behavior (gentle, slow, determined), his approach to life (philosophical, forgetful), or really anything else about him resembles modern TV in the slightest. In fact, the main influences on Quichotte are medieval Persian poetry (the source of the Seven Valleys of Love, which together form the main structure of the novel) and two old-school sci-fi short stories: one the well-known The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (with its famous final line, "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out") and the other the much more obscure Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean. All three of these are repeatedly referenced by characters throughout the book, but don't have any connection to Quichotte's supposed diet of nonstop TV. I definitely got the vibe that Rushdie had the idea of updating Quixote from chivalric romances to their modern mental-junk-food equivalent, but doesn't actually watch enough trash TV himself to describe or reference or include it in any detailed way. Which does make me wonder why he decided to write a book about it, but oh well.

Quichotte is a lot of unexpected fun, but I wouldn't count on it becoming Rushdie's defining work.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. A collection of short stories themed around the ideals of Howard Zinn's legendary A People’s History of the United States – history told from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged – except that this time it's, you know, the future and also fictional. Honestly I picked this up mostly because LaValle was one of the editors and after his The Ballad of Black Tom I will forever read anything LaValle is involved in. Unfortunately it turns out that he didn't write any of the stories here. Oh, well. His introduction was good?

The stories themselves varied in quality, as anthologies tend to do. Though in this case the stories I disliked outnumbered the ones I did; there's nothing exactly bad in this collection, but there are quite a few stories indistinguishable from the sort of extremely earnest tumblr posts in which the good people are Very Good and Very Oppressed and the villains are Very Bigoted and Very Mean and after some struggles Our Heroes are recognized as Beacons of Pure shining Innocent Goodness and probably the crowd applauds. And, I mean... bigots and oppression are bad! I'm happy to see villains get their comeuppance! It's just that I'd like it even better if everything could be a little less one-dimensional and boring.

Thankfully not every story was quite so checkbox-woke. Let me tell you about the ones I did enjoy:

The Wall by Lizz Huerta. Brujas are real and are being born in increasing numbers, as humanity's instinctive attempt to heal itself after catastrophic climate change and chemical pollution. They are mostly present in Mexico, which leads to Americans smuggling themselves south (which, yes, very clever, but if it was a plot point in a Roland Emmerich movie 15 years ago, it's not exactly the cutting edge of political satire). The US government obviously does not approve, so it doses its entire military with obedience-drugs in the drinking water to force them to commit war crimes. In this setting, Ivette (a bruja) has a secret relationship with her cousin Surem (the leader of a violent drug cartel which has also taken over running large portions of the local government), and between bouts of sex they fight about the ethics of rehabilitating mind-controlled US soldiers. This is all fascinating and some incredible world-building! Unfortunately it desperately needed to be at least an entire book, or maybe even a series of books, and not crammed into six pages. Hopefully someday Huerta will write the longer version.

Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted] by Malka Older is a fascinating experiment in style, supposedly an academic article on "futurist histories" (apparently histories of potential but not yet realized futures?), focusing on a twitter community's experiment with grassroots democracy. I have absolutely spent enough time online to laugh in recognition at the group's troubles, although the odd mix of tenses required by the very idea of futurist history occasionally made getting through individual sentences a slog.

It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes It All Right by Sam J. Miller. Caul is a gay man in an America where being gay is incredibly illegal. Caul also has an intense crush on his coworker, which he represses via anonymous street sex. Unfortunately, in one of these encounters Caul catches a metaphysical STD in which sex transports him to a terrifying alternative dimension, but one where he might be able to control a great deal of power. Homophobic dystopias aren't a new concept (and show up repeatedly in A People's Future of the United States), but Miller's writing was vivid and specific enough to make this my favorite of the several examples here.

Riverbed by Omar El Akkad. The US government imprisons all of its Muslim (and Sikh, due to confusion) citizens in camps – in what is a quite clear allusion to the Japanese internment camps – supposedly to protect them from racist attacks. Decades later, Khadija Singh returns to the camp where she was imprisoned as a child (which has since been turned into a peace memorial; Akkad's portrayal of this is wonderfully cynical) to claim the belongings of her brother who died in an escape attempt. Her grief and rage, and the incompetent bureaucracy she has to face, are all incredibly well-written.

Calendar Girls by Justine Ireland. All forms of birth-control have been made illegal, so Alyssa (a teenager, since you can't try minors as an adult) sells packets of The Pill on a street corner in Manhattan. That is, she does until a leading pro-life senator blackmails her into helping his daughter get an abortion, because hypocrisy reigns eternal. Calendar Girls promptly transforms itself into a very clever heist story, and I loved Ireland's sense of humor in the narration.

The Blindfold by Tobias S Bucknell. It's well-known that race and gender influences jurors – a black man is more likely to receive a longer sentence for a crime than a white man, all other factors being equal. How to fix this? Force jurors to wear headsets that randomize the defendant's appearance, of course! The unnamed narrator is a hacker who, for the right amount of money, will make sure that in your case, you get that sweet, sweet jackpot of "white male" appearance. Unfortunately, his latest bout of hacking attracts the attention of the Russian government, which promptly begins trying to assassinate him. Bucknell's writing is funny and quick-paced and has a great twist of an ending.

Good News Bad News by Charles Yu. This isn't even really a short story so much as a series of excerpts from sci-fi themed articles from The Onion, but it made me laugh harder than anything else in A People's Future of the United States, so who cares. Excerpts:
An earlier edition of this story quoted Jeff Bezos as CEO of AmazonGoogleFace. Technically, the quote should be attributed to “Jeff Bezos Version 3, LLC, an incorporeal person organized under the laws of Delaware” as the legal heir and cognitive descendant of the human known as Jeff Bezos.
***
These latest changes to the tax code, expected to disproportionately benefit the largest and wealthiest corporations, were passed by the R-Bot in a 1–1 vote against the D-Bot in the Robo-Congress-O-Matic 5000, with the tie being broken by the tie-breaking algorithm, all of this taking place, as usual, inside a four-foot-by-three-foot black box inside of the U.S. protectorate satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Washington, D.C.
***
“We’ve long been silent in the face of unspeakable acts. Deforestation. Clear-cutting. Toxins in the soil,” said Eondo’or, an eighty-foot, six-hundred-year-old redwood and senior representative to the U.N. for Kingdom Plantae. “Not to mention getting peed on by drunk people.

Now Wait for This Week by Alice Sola Kim. Bonnie, a self-centered rich white girl with a habit of victim-blaming who lives in present-day NYC, gets trapped in a time-loop, doomed to repeat the same week over and over again, ad infinitum. Bonnie reacts to this in various hilarious and/or tragic ways: attempting to go viral by predicting the future (at least seven days of it), starting a dark magic cult, learning new languages and traveling, denouncing all her friends, becoming much closer to all her friends, aging a terrifyingly unknown amount. Now Wait for This Week, however, is actually narrated by Bonnie's roommate, who has no idea that she and everyone else on Earth are trapped in the same week, and just occasionally thinks to herself, "huh, Bonnie seems different today". It's all a metaphor for the #MeToo movement ("the actor many of us loved would be revealed as a leering terrible date who expected sex as his due and took no for an answer only temporarily before starting up the sex stuff yet again until he took no for an answer only temporarily and so on until the woman gave up."), but is also just a fantastic conceit written fantastically well. It was BY FAR my favorite story in the book, so good job ending on a winner, A People's Future of the United States!

Anthologies of Resistance-themed speculative fiction have been something of a wave this year (just on my own bookshelf, there's also New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color and How Long 'til Black Future Month?). Which is great! But given that we have available such a diversity of options, I would recommend pushing A People's Future of the United States to the bottom of your reading list. It's just too uneven with too frequent annoying stories. Plus, hey, you can read Now Wait for This Week online! So why bother with the rest?
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century by William Rosen. Nonfiction about the several years of heavy rains and brutal winters beginning in 1315 that led to crop failures and famine across northern Europe. Although nearly six million people died, the Great Famine has been largely forgotten – mainly due to the Black Death hitting a few decades later and claiming all the attention for itself.

Rosen focuses his story on England and Scotland and particularly the borderland between them, which had to deal not only with the continent-wide bad weather and food shortages, but also the local problem of armies repeatedly crossing the territory, burning fields and looting storehouses as they went. This is the time of Edward II (of Marlowe's Edward II) and Robert the Bruce (of Mel Gibson's Braveheart), of Scotland's attempts to claim independence and England's attempts to... not... have that. Since most of my previous knowledge of Edward II was from Marlowe and other sources primarily concerned with Edward's homosexuality, I was intrigued by The Third Horseman's vastly different approach. Rosen argues that Edward lost his throne not because he was gay (and indeed, kings of England both before and after managed to be gay without getting killed for it), but because he had the bad luck and/or incompetence to be a king who kept losing battles and whose country was hit by a famine he failed to alleviate. Poor Edward. It's hard to live up to a dad with a nickname like "Hammer of the Scots".

The Third Horseman involved way more discussion of medieval battle tactics and way less discussion of anywhere in Europe off the island of Great Britain than I was expecting, but nonetheless I loved it. Rosen has a great conversational tone of writing, dropping all sorts of interesting facts into his narrative, and the period and topic are just fascinating. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys popular history.

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee. The third book in The Machineries of Empire trilogy, a brilliant anti-imperialist space opera. Like the previous two books, Revenant Gun is very much concerned with questions of identity. Here we have two Jedaos: one is the Jedao we've met before, sharing the body of Cheris and roaming around the galaxy while attempting to destroy the Hexarchate. The second Jedao is a new and younger version, rebooted with memories that only go up to about seventeen years old (though he exists in a fortyish body, for an extra level of cognitive dissonance), when he was still a student. This baby Jedao, who is the main POV character of Revenant Gun (as much as there is a singular main character; it's an ensemble-heavy book), knows nothing about Nirai Kujen, the man who rebooted him and who claims they were once lovers; knows nothing about the current political situation, which is several centuries forward from the life he does remember; and knows nothing about the older, supposedly traitorous and mass-murdering, version of himself. Who should he trust? Given his deliberately limited information, how can he make any safe choice? And even if he figures out what he wants to do, what will he be allowed to do?

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Hexarchate attempt to make themselves immortal, others attempt to assassinate them, the robots in the background of the previous two books begin their own rebellion, space ships come to life, and rebel territories work on establishing functional governments.

Revenant Gun didn't work for me quite as well as Ninefox Gambit did, alas. A lot of that comes down to the role of Kujen, who is revealed to be the main villain (I thought about warning for spoilers, but eh, it's pretty obvious from Kujen's first appearance that he's not a good guy). On the one hand, he is an excellent villain, and spending more time with him really fleshed him out in wonderfully haunting ways – learning his backstory in particular was just... gah. Good but also terrible. On the other hand, I felt like a lot of the problems with the Hexarchate ended up coming down to Kujen's influence, and turning structural oppression into the doings of one mean man feels so simplistic after all of the wonderfully complex worldbuilding early on. But on the third hand, bringing in the robots and spaceships opens up the series in a direction that I absolutely did not see coming, and which is just fantastic. Mainly, this is such a rich series that I feel like I need to reread it before I can even decide what I think of it. At least rereading books like these is far from a punishment!

And I didn't even mention the humor! For all of the grand battles and bleak ethics, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments in Revenant Gun. The robot POV is particularly adorable. I'll absolutely be following Lee's future work.


Amazing Loom Knits by Nicole F Cox. I recently got into loom knitting – which is more or less the same thing as regular old knitting, at least in terms of the finished products, but uses a solid frame to make the process of looping and tying and twisting the yarn simpler. It's fun! And since I'm very much the type of person who is always fiddling with things, it gives me something to do with my hands when I'm watching TV. However, I hit a wall fairly early on. There is a lot of 101-level, Intro-to-Loom-Knitting content out there, whether you're looking for books or websites or YouTube videos. There is much less 201-level or above content, which means that once you've made a basic scarf or hat, what you find is just... more basic scarves and hats.

But then I came across Amazing Loom Knits! A book that is very much not meant for the beginning loom knitter, and I love it for that. (By the way, if you are looking for beginner material, Round Loom Knitting in 10 Easy Lessons by the same author is one of the best books on the topic I've found.) Cox uses the patterns in this book to teach all sorts of advanced techniques: eyelet lace, Japanese lace, cables, brioche knitting, Gansey stitch, Fair Isle, etc. I immediately jumped in with the "Gansey Beanie"... which I have since abandoned, after unravelling it for the third time after making yet another mistake. But that only proves my point about Amazing Loom Knits being exactly the book I wanted: it's actually challenging! It gives me techniques that I can look forward to eventually mastering, instead of everything being so mindlessly simple that I quickly get bored. It's a book that you can spend a lot of time with, as you learn and progress to the more advanced patterns.

(By the way, I instead made what Cox calls an "Autumn Welted Toque", which has a cute and easier-to-master design of alternating raised and recessed stitches.)

Amazing Loom Knits includes thirty patterns, from the standard hats, scarves, gloves, and earwarmers, to slightly more unusual bags, socks, legwarmers, and shawls, and even a unique vest-cowl-combo-thingy. (I'm not entirely sure it's a vest-cowl-combo-thingy that I personally would want to wear, but I still applaud Cox for thinking outside the box). However, if there is an organizational structure to the book, I missed it. It's certainly not organized by type of product (putting all the hats together, for example), and it's not organized by difficulty level (Cox does label every pattern from "Beginner" to "Confident Beginner" to "Intermediate" to "Advanced", but the order they come in seems to be random). Which made choosing a pattern to work on very complicated, with much jumping back and forth from one page to another as I attempted to work out which ones I was currently capable of.

Despite that minor complaint, if you're looking for a book for advanced loom knitting, this is absolutely the one to pick up.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.