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Here is a rundown of some the books I read this year which 1) were new to me rather than rereads, 2) which I managed to record (so disproportionately ebooks), 3) which I did not do full reviews of already, and have given up on all hope of doing so, but remember well enough to do very short ones. You'll see that I felt mostly meh about them. Generally I feel compelled to write a review when I love a book, hate a book, or have strongly mixed feelings about a book.
The House is on Fire, by Rachel Beanland. Historical fiction about a real theatre fire in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, in which an enslaved blacksmith saved a lot of people's lives. I meant to write it up to rage about it, didn't have time, and then couldn't remember the exact details. It's written by a white woman and you can tell she means to illuminate racism, but WAY understates the actual racism of the time - something underlined by her afterword, in which she explains how she deviates from historical facts.
Her deviations mostly make white people way nicer than they really were, like completely making up grateful white women whose lives he'd saved raising money so the heroic black man can buy his wife's freedom. The white people in the town did eventually take up a collection for him... but it was FORTY YEARS LATER, when he was destitute, way after his enslaved wife had been sold away and lost to him forever. And also, in real life, after he saved the lives of multiple white people, he still didn't get freed for another TWENTY YEARS, and that was because his bought his own freedom with money he'd saved. The whole book can be summed up with white people calling him, a SLAVE, Mr. Hunt. I don't think so!
Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones. Odd little novel, eccentrically structured, about a family of werewolves leading a very marginal existence; being a werewolf mostly means there are about a million ways in which the modern world is liable to kill you. A lot of it reads like Jones listing every thought he's ever had about how werewolves might really work. A sharp portrait of outsiders and drifters, sometimes very funny, sometimes gross, sometimes oddly sweet. LOTS of animal harm. Any given part is engaging but it doesn't have a lot of forward momentum.
The Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn. A lonely, poorly socialized white orphan girl travels back in time to Canada during the American Civil War, and makes friends with some white Canadians who are involved in it. I learned some stuff about Canada's involvement in the American Civil War, which is a subject I had not considered before and will undoubtedly never consider again.
The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw (the Greta von Helsing writer). A novella about a necromancer who helps with plane crash investigations and gets haunted by the ghost of a dead pilot. I was entertained while reading, but now remember almost nothing about this.
In the Drift, by Michael Swanwick. Depressing dystopia about America after a Chernobyl type nuclear accident. Swanwick's prose is gorgeous and that plus ambiguous psychic powers kept me reading, but it was a fix-up novel and felt a bit aimless. I wasn't that interested in the politicking and there was lots of it.
Saturation Point, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella about a scientist in a depressing dystopia who gets tapped to go another expedition back to a deadly area, after the first one she was on 20 years ago ended in disaster. The area's deadliness is largely because of its wet bulb temperature. I enjoyed this while I read it but the ending felt like it belonged more on a short horror story than on the book it had been up to that point. Very little characterization. Not his best work.
Horizon, by Scott Westerfeld. A bunch of teenagers crash-land in a very weird environment filled with weird things. This was pretty entertaining, kind of a more science fiction-y middle-grade Lost. But then I realized that the subsequent books in the series were written by other writers and no one seems to like the ending, so I stopped there.
The House is on Fire, by Rachel Beanland. Historical fiction about a real theatre fire in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, in which an enslaved blacksmith saved a lot of people's lives. I meant to write it up to rage about it, didn't have time, and then couldn't remember the exact details. It's written by a white woman and you can tell she means to illuminate racism, but WAY understates the actual racism of the time - something underlined by her afterword, in which she explains how she deviates from historical facts.
Her deviations mostly make white people way nicer than they really were, like completely making up grateful white women whose lives he'd saved raising money so the heroic black man can buy his wife's freedom. The white people in the town did eventually take up a collection for him... but it was FORTY YEARS LATER, when he was destitute, way after his enslaved wife had been sold away and lost to him forever. And also, in real life, after he saved the lives of multiple white people, he still didn't get freed for another TWENTY YEARS, and that was because his bought his own freedom with money he'd saved. The whole book can be summed up with white people calling him, a SLAVE, Mr. Hunt. I don't think so!
Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones. Odd little novel, eccentrically structured, about a family of werewolves leading a very marginal existence; being a werewolf mostly means there are about a million ways in which the modern world is liable to kill you. A lot of it reads like Jones listing every thought he's ever had about how werewolves might really work. A sharp portrait of outsiders and drifters, sometimes very funny, sometimes gross, sometimes oddly sweet. LOTS of animal harm. Any given part is engaging but it doesn't have a lot of forward momentum.
The Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn. A lonely, poorly socialized white orphan girl travels back in time to Canada during the American Civil War, and makes friends with some white Canadians who are involved in it. I learned some stuff about Canada's involvement in the American Civil War, which is a subject I had not considered before and will undoubtedly never consider again.
The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw (the Greta von Helsing writer). A novella about a necromancer who helps with plane crash investigations and gets haunted by the ghost of a dead pilot. I was entertained while reading, but now remember almost nothing about this.
In the Drift, by Michael Swanwick. Depressing dystopia about America after a Chernobyl type nuclear accident. Swanwick's prose is gorgeous and that plus ambiguous psychic powers kept me reading, but it was a fix-up novel and felt a bit aimless. I wasn't that interested in the politicking and there was lots of it.
Saturation Point, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella about a scientist in a depressing dystopia who gets tapped to go another expedition back to a deadly area, after the first one she was on 20 years ago ended in disaster. The area's deadliness is largely because of its wet bulb temperature. I enjoyed this while I read it but the ending felt like it belonged more on a short horror story than on the book it had been up to that point. Very little characterization. Not his best work.
Horizon, by Scott Westerfeld. A bunch of teenagers crash-land in a very weird environment filled with weird things. This was pretty entertaining, kind of a more science fiction-y middle-grade Lost. But then I realized that the subsequent books in the series were written by other writers and no one seems to like the ending, so I stopped there.
