November began in Chicago with friends, and I took the train to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where I saw some Boston friends, and then I came home to Montreal, where I still am. I was writing in Chicago and Plymouth and have been writing a bit at home too, and I have high hopes of finishing this novel this year. I read twelve books, and they were an assorted lot, as usual.
Alliance Rising — C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher (2019) Re-read, because the sequel came out. Set before Downbelow Station and indeed at the earliest point of chronology of any book in the Alliance-Union series, this is an exciting space adventure about a struggling space station and the struggling FTL merchanters who supply her. There are factions and alliances, parts of it are very tense and exciting. This is generally an excellent novel in Cherryh’s own tradition—if you like Ann Leckie or Arkady Martine, you should be reading Cherryh and this is a good place to start. If you have already been reading Cherryh, then you will notice some things that would be invisible to a reader who started here, which is an interesting experience. Knowing the future history of this universe affects what you can hope for.
A Sweet Sting of Salt — Rose Sutherland (2024) Selkie romance novel set in Nova Scotia that didn’t quite work for me—I wanted it to be more overtly fantastical. Or less. That would have worked too. There’s a problem with genre which is that if the reader knows that one of the characters is a selkie, if the book is sold and recommended as being about a selkie, if it says in the blurb that it’s a “stunning queer reimagining of the classic folktale The Selkie Wife” then the writer cannot keep the selkie bit as an exciting surprise for later. The other characters may or may not know, but the reader knows, and so teasing the question just does not work. There’s a lot of very good detail of everyday life, and while I think the village is idealised into being less racist and less homophobic than it really would have been, that’s the kind of thing books like this do. But this annoyed me by treating the selkie thing both as a Big Revelation and as a cause of a Big Misunderstanding (my least favourite genre romance trope)—and as both it gets smoothed over much too fast. It’s not as if I was saying “Where’s the selkie, I thought there was supposed to be a selkie?” It was really obvious who was the selkie, and how the story was being retold, and that would have been fine except that it was written as if the reader was supposed to be surprised and excited at the “revelation.” Disappointing.
Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City — Jane Stevenson (2022) Not quite as good as Light of Italy, Stevenson’s book on Urbino, but nevertheless an excellent volume on the history of Siena which clarified many things and answered many questions. I think this would be readable even if you know nothing about anything, and Stevenson writes in a lively engaging style. I’ve just looked her up to check that she is, indeed, an academic, which she is, but I discovered that she’s also written a historical fiction trilogy about Elizabeth of Bohemia secretly marrying an African prince, which sounds amazing, but sadly does not have a US edition. Get on that, publishers! Anyway, if you’re interested in Siena, and in the ways Italian city states were independent republics and then stopped being independent republics, read this. I learned a lot.
The Barbie Murders — John Varley (1980, alternate title Picnic on Nearside) Re-read. It was interesting re-reading this after so long. Varley’s natural length is the short form, and all his best work is novella-length or shorter, and this collection contains some of his best work. When they first appeared they were startling and full of new ideas that made my head explode, and when I find that the Suck Fairy has been at them and I did not enjoy reading some of them now it feels like a betrayal of my fifteen-year-old self. I can find my fifteen-year-old head really easily, and my fifteen-year-old head is yelling at me for not seeing how brill these are, and really, is right. In the context of 1980 this was an astonishing collection, and I see why I thought so. But with my present head, it feels patchy and like a historical artefact of a moment of science fiction more than like something I actually enjoyed reading.
Slow Dance — Rainbow Rowell (2024) An adult romance novel from Rowell, and I loved it. It also made me realise how seldom I see real contemporary American working-class people in fiction, because that’s what we have here. A divorced mother of two from Ohio who’s never seen the ocean and her best friend from school who’s in the navy find a way across their mutual spikiness and history towards eventual happiness. Really well written, as you’d expect, and powerful.
Alliance Unbound — C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher (2024) Don’t read this without reading Alliance Rising first. And if you have read other Cherryh Alliance-Union books I guarantee there is something in here that will make you choke on your tea. I thought this was great and it had a really powerful end. I couldn’t put it down once I started it.
But what I want to say isn’t that. What I want to say is that we have a Best Series Hugo now, and if we don’t nominate the Alliance-Union series this year when there is a new book out in it, we may not ever have another chance. Cherryh was born in 1942; she’s 82. She’s going to write a finite number of new books. The award is for the series, not for the new volume. This series has been going since 1981, it has won two Hugos for individual volumes (Downbelow Station and Cyteen), it is one of the best series ever, one of the series that has shaped what stories of future history and space can be. And there’s a thing that happens where women writers become invisible as they get older. They keep writing, and selling books, but they don’t get award recognition and visibility. I understand that it’s easy to get excited about a new writer, and hard to stay excited about someone continuing to be excellent, but I don’t understand why this happens disproportionately to women. But anyway, if you have read any book in the Alliance-Union universe you can nominate the series for Best Series Hugo next year, and you should keep that in mind when it comes to nomination time. Are there five series with a volume out in 2024 that you think are better than this one? Really? If not, remember that it’s eligible and give it a nomination slot alongside the new hot things.
Grendel’s Guide to Love and War — A.E. Kaplan (2017) A version of Beowulf set in modern American suburbia, but so very different from Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife even though they both have characters with PTSD and use Grendel’s POV. Anyway, this is very good and clever, very enjoyable, much more enjoyable to read, but much less serious. Kaplan is a very gripping writer, and the parallels are fun, and I really liked the community here, and the old women with so much agency. Seen from a different angle, this is a YA book about grief, and a very good one, and it might be better to think of it as that with Beowulf sprinkles than as a retelling.
Lyra Celtica — edited by Elizabeth A. Sharp and William Sharp (1896) This is a very strange poetry anthology. Edited by William Sharp, who wrote poetry as Fiona Macleod, and his wife. The Sharps have collected and translated, or had translated, a lot of traditional Celtic poetry from Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, and Manx, and then added a lot of contemporary (to them) poetry from poets of those nationalities, but who mostly wrote in English, including a fair sprinkling of William Sharp’s own work. It’s arranged by nation. This volume contains some things that are stunningly bad, but also a lot that is surprisingly delightful. I found it on Gutenberg when I was looking for something completely different, and I’m not at all sorry I read it. I like assorted anthologies, and this one was very assorted indeed, and contained a lot of poets I’d never heard of.
Wooing the Witch Queen — Stephanie Burgis (2025) I got an advance copy because I saw two reviews that made it sound like a ton of fun. It is a ton of fun, but it wasn’t what I expected from the way people described it. It’s romantasy, and it’s about a serious nerdy young queen who’s leaning hard on projecting “evil” to defend her kingdom from her usurping uncle and an invading empire, and a young archduke in disguise who’s working as her librarian. In many ways it is a gothic, except that the young person who comes to the scary house to work and falls in love with the owner is the man. Just what I wanted on a pain day.
Marry Me in Italy — Nicky Pellegrino (2024) Romance novel set in Italy. Nicky Pellegrino was my find of 2020, I have read all her books and pre-ordered this one but saved it for when I was home. It has two stories which twine together around food and Italy. Pellegrino is very good at writing about Italy, and also about writing about people reconsidering their lives and priorities. Both women here do this. Really very good example of the genre.
The Edinburgh Mystery: And Other Tales of Scottish Crime — edited by Martin Edwards (2022) In the series of British Library Crime Classics that collects short mystery stories. There’s a fascinating gem from Josephine Tey here, and a generally very high level of stories. The Conan Doyle is a little bit of nothing, but apart from that these were almost all great. I wonder if it’s because the theme was Scotland, and not a thing that lends itself to less variety like “country house weekends” or “police detectives.” I always really enjoy these whatever the theme, but this one felt much more varied than most. There’s a Welsh one, I may get that next.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold — Toshikazu Kawaguchi (2015) Translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot. Odd little novel about a cafe in Tokyo which has a very limited kind of time travel—you have to sit in a particular seat, usually occupied by a ghost, and available only when the ghost goes to the bathroom. You can only meet someone who has been in the cafe, nothing you can do can change the present, and you can only stay in the past until the coffee gets cold. Within these restrictions, the novel weaves a number of changes, though they are of necessity small-scale and not world changing—people changing things in their own lives. The book is sweet and surprisingly interesting, partly, I think, because it is a glimpse of a different culture with different assumptions.
