School’s back in session and I’m working to get back on the writing horse. My goal for the fall is to write 250 words at least 4 days a week. And I restarted up my critique group after our summer break, which feels like a feat unto itself given how many critique groups dissolve and fall apart. Hopefully they’ll keep me accountable. I also plan to submit something every Friday. Not all of these will be fiction, but I figure getting myself out there is a good habit to get into. I’m also running social media my dad’s political campaign for the next two months, so I’m keeping myself quite busy.
My reading life is also busy! I finally signed up for Netgalley and found some books I’m really excited to take a look at. Plus the internet seems to be dropping recommendations left and right that I can’t wait to pick up. Does anyone else feel like there’s a book avalanche right now?
Speculative Fiction
Among Others by Jo Walton – A uniquely odd book. I waffled back and forth on actually reading this book for years because the summary and reviews sounded like there was no plot and I wasn’t sure I could handle that. After reading it, I can say definitively that they were correct: this book isn’t driven by plot, or even by character development, though it tries to be with an out-of-left-field ending that didn’t really match the rest of the story in my opinion.
What really makes this book is the voice of the main character. Look, either you enjoy reading the diary of a misfit girl at an English boarding school coping with chronic pain and the fact that she has dealings fairies by reading speculative fiction novels and offering her opinions on them. In fact, it reads more like the 1970s equivalent of a social media feed: random bits of the life of the protagonist all stitched together. If you fall in love with the voice of the character, it won’t much matter than the only thing that’s going on is everyday life (for the most part). I love her wrestling with the morality of the way her magic affects the world, and every time she mentioned a book I had heard of or read, it sparked a thrill of joy. This book won’t be for everyone, but it was a good amount of fun for me. Part of my 2022 5×5 challenge to read recent Hugo winners.
Down the Arches of the Years by Lee Allred – Lee Allred’s work seems to have its own specific genre: steampunk fantasy alternate history with a dash of cosmic horror. If that seems like a lot to fit into a short story, it sometimes is. These stories are crammed with details and ideas that seem to come a mile a minute, leaving less space for character arcs and descriptive prose. You have to be in it for the clever ideas and the twists that the author makes to existing historical ideas. But after reading the collection, I have no doubt that Lee Allred is going places; he’s really utilizing the resources of his Mormon heritage to inform unique and exciting worldbuilding.
Some comments on specific stories in the collection:
“Murmuration of a Darkening Sea” is the most straightforward cosmic horror story of the bunch. It won its way into my heart by being set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, which I have a lot of nostalgia for. Probably the most classic and universal of the stories in the collection.
“Nice Timestream Youse Got Here,” “Suppose They Gave a Ragnarok and Nobody Came?,” and “Pirate Gold for Brother Brigham” comprise a humorous trio. The central conceit of “Nice Timestream” made me laugh out loud and triggered some author envy (why didn’t I think of that?). “Ragnarok” and “Pirate Gold” are wacky and a bit silly, but definitely original.
“Where Nothing Lives but Crosses” presents an interesting Mormon twist on the vampire genre. “New England’s God” begins the more historical portion of the collection, presenting a combination of freemasonry, cosmic horror, and Revolutionary War history. The result is a believable “secret history,” one of my favorite types of alternate history.
“Lump of Clay,” a Civil War story, is perhaps my favorite in the collection. If you’re familiar with Jewish folklore, you can guess from the beginning the ultimate route this story will take, but the execution of the magic system has a particular Mormon flair that really fulfilled it for me.
The last section of the collection contains several longer stories that are all part of a shared Clockwork Deseret universe in which the protagonists use a combination of folk-magic and steampunk technology to fight against Cthulhu-like threats. Though the name Deseret implies a Mormon worldview, only the first two stories are prominently LDS (“Can Such Things Be?” and “Tracting Out Cthulhu”), while the other stories (“Naught But Death Stands Fast,” and “An Imperial Rescript”) develop a similar magic system using British and French folk magic traditions. “Tracting Out Cthulhu” also lays out a Japanese version, resulting in a truly world-wide conception of the fight against cosmic evil. I hope that this worldbuilding makes its way into a longer novel as it felt a bit crowded in the short story length, but the ideas are undoubtably fascinating–and hilarious! I loved the reuse of the Dorian Grey concept.
Overall, I am happy to have finally become familiar with Lee Allred’s work and will definitely be following his future work as a unique creator in the speculative Mormon fiction space.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin – Wow! Now I see why everyone raves about this series. I was hesitant to pick it up, given that what I’d heard about the premise made it seem depressing and hard, and having DNF’d The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by the same author. And make no mistake, hard stuff is definitely present in the story: trigger warnings for sexual abuse, death of a child, mutilation, all the things. And also the earth is actively trying to kill humanity for its past sins. So there’s that.
But the book absolutely deserves the awards it won. The worldbuilding is tremendous and revealed in a subtle way that is immersive and confusing, yet ultimately makes sense by the end. The three narrators we follow play different parts in this society that depends on avoiding natural disasters and using ancient knowledge to survive them. The way the author has built up the society’s reaction to humans who can control and weaponize earthquakes is layered and subtle. I won’t spoil the twist at 2/3 of the way through the book except to say that it completely blew my mind. The ending twist, not quite as much, but I’m interested to see where the next two volumes go with it.
Fiction
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute – I liked this book club pick more than I expected to. It’s a World War II book and set in a prison camp (or rather a prison march), so I expected it to be fairly tough and depressing. What really made the book for me is the turn: Jean’s war experiences are only the first third of the plot. Rather than ending when the war ends (or with death) as most WWII books do, the book goes on to show what Jean does with the rest of her life as a result of her experiences. I knew nothing about the cowboy culture of early Australia where we spend the second half of the story.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the framing device of having the story told through Jean’s lawyer and estate trustee, whom she’s writing letters to. At some points the book forgets about it entirely, particularly during the romance, which it doesn’t seem likely she’d describe to him in full. It also leaves the questions of why Jean needs a man to tell her story, even one who sees and approves of her independence. There are definitely some things that haven’t aged well since the 50s, like the racial prejudice against the Aboriginal Australians and the way Jean has to navigate social constraints on women’s business activity. But overall, it’s a unique story with an uplifting ending.
All Summer Long by Hope Larson – An enjoyable graphic novel about a transitional summer between childhood and teenagerhood and the tension puberty puts on boy-girl friendships. The illustrations were clever but never confusing, and the story was believable, light yet impactful in the way that all events are when you’re 13. I probably won’t continue with the series as I’m not the target audience, but if I was a preteen who was into music, I’d be all over this series.
Nonfiction
Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang – Can a book be both hopeful and depressing at the same time? Yang’s recollections of his work on the presidential trail and afterward, along with his research on the subject of our national politics, paint a depressing picture of the future of America. Yet the last third offers some real solutions that are achievable if unlikely in our current partisan climate. What this book does do well is make a good argument for becoming a one-issue voter, that issue being reform of our institutions to bring back civility, moderation, and compromise as viable political tactics. All other problems are pretty much intractable until these reforms happen. This is where I have been leaning anyway, so that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
