The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean
How, exactly, did I manage to miss reading this when it first came out? I am bemused, because this is exactly the sort of thing I should have been all over.
Well, thanks to the Hugo packet I have finally devoured it.
Book eaters are exactly what they sound like: they are people who look human, but who rather than eating human-food eat, well, books. (Most of them anyway: there are also a few who eat, uh, minds. So it’s a bit zombie-ish (but not).) These folk live in our world but generally have no interaction with humans – they’re a very insular community, necessarily. They’re also a community on the wane; women tend to have a maximum of two children, and some will have none, for health reasons. An intensely patriarchal society as well, women are moved around and married where needed – and, key to this story, kept separate from their children after about the age of 3.
Devon experiences exactly this life: growing up she is treated as a princess, as the only daughter in the house; she is married off, to act as a brood mare basically. However, she is a feistier woman than the men in her life expect, and when her son is born a mind-eater… well, things go a bit sideways, frankly.
The story is told across two periods, in parallel: Devon growing up, and Devon in the now, living in hiding with her son. Eventually, of course, the past catches up with the present, and we understand exactly how Devon has got to this point. So while we certainly start sympathetic to Devon, our appreciation and horror at what she has endured deepen steadily and relentlessly: Dean gets the pacing just right, with a steady revelation of more and more terrible things committed both by and against Devon.
A story of mothers and children, families both blood and found; highly enjoyable, with compelling and fascinating characters, and a plot that REALLY works.
Troy, by Simon Brown
I bought this, I think, at one of my first Swancons – I know I bought it direct from Russell, and Ticonderoga. I don’t know if Simon Brown was there, but for some reason I think Sean Williams was? I did discover that I have a a page with signatures from all of the contributors – also including Garth Nix, who wrote the delightfully whimsical introduction – so that’s pretty cool.
All but one of these stories have direct or indirect connections to the Trojan cycle; the exception is an interesting enough story, but one that I do rather wish wasn’t included, because it feels quite jarring to come across (and it’s about troubling Catholic priests, which is not exactly an enjoyable topic). Some of the stories use the issues of war and trauma; others confront the sheer length of time involved with the cycle.
My favourite story is “The Masque of Agamemnon,” for a lot of reasons. First, the title is clearly brilliant. Second, it combines SF elements – AI and space ships – with the Trojan story in delightfully clever ways. Third, it manages to get into some of the key issues and relationships of both the original stories and the ways in which it’s been dealt with since. Also the final line is hilarious.
I have no idea whether this can still be bought anywhere, but I hope so.
Mexico in Your Kitchen: Mely Martínez
I received this book from the publisher, Rock Point (part of the Quarto Publishing Group), at no cost. It’s available now, $45.
I’ve been making my way through this book for… a while now. But: life. Anyway! Now I’ve made enough of the recipes to be able to say that yes, this is a cookbook I’ll be keeping; there are several recipes that I expect will become staples.
How I got to now without a Mexican cookbook in my house is something I can’t quite believe, but here we are. I’ve made bits and pieces, but just by looking recipes up after having something particularly good at a restaurant. Oh, and one of my lockdown purchases was a tortilla press, at a time when a local Mexican supplier had a deal on (press + 3x1kg bags of corn meal). So I’ve now been inspired enough that I have bought more corn meal, Mexican oregano, some dried chillies, and Mexican chocolate…
The first thing to know before you rush out to buy this as your first Mexican cookbook is that it is Martínez’ second book. This means that it does not include some of the more basic, fundamental recipes; she includes a list of the recipes from that first book, and it’s things like tortillas, Frijoles Refritos (Refried Beans), and Pico de Gallo. So if you want the very basics, I suspect it’s actually a good idea to get that first book (The Mexican Home Kitchen), which I don’t personally own but I assume is as good as this one.
Martínez starts with an overview of Mexican food customs, and then – ever-useful for folks looking to cook outside of their usual customs – “The Mexican Pantry”. This section doesn’t just explain foods that the reader may be unfamiliar with (in my case, nopales); it also talks about how particular foods (eg carrots) are used in Mexican cuisine. There’s an entire section on Peppers; living where I do, many of these are inaccessible, but it was useful to see which are hotter than others, so I can make adjustments as necessary.
So, things I have made!
- Chilquiles: actually a breakfast food, but we had it for dinner. Fried tortillas, avocado, refried beans, a tomato salsa… this was totally delicious.
- Papas con Chorizo (chorizo with potato): hilariously, thanks to a mistake with my butcher, I did not get my chorizo… so I made this with bacon instead. And it was fine, but it would be better with chorizo.
- Chilorio: pork shoulder, simmered for an hour, then cooked with a sauce made from peppers and various spices. Super tasty, super easy; almost a breakfast, but this Anglo-Celt can’t come at that.
- Spicy Pork Short Ribs: didn’t make this with short ribs, because this isn’t a common cut in Australia, as far as I can tell (at least not in my area). But it was delicious nonetheless: simmering the pork and then frying it in its own fat is intriguing and excellent.
- Tuna empanadas: delicious also! Empanadas are very easy!
- Tilapia a la Veracruzana: I don’t think we have tilapia, so I used rockling. Fish, capers, olives, tomato… you’re not really going to go wrong.
- Enfrijoladas: same deal as enchiladas, but the sauce is made with beans (frijoles), rather than a tomato or pepper sauce. The things you learn! Stuff tortillas (cheat and use bought wraps) with (store-bought) roast chicken, top with a black bean sauce and avocado… fancy as! And super tasty.
… and there are still more I haven’t made yet. Recipes are generally well written, with clear instructions and times. Photos aren’t the most stylish I’ve ever seen but they do convey what the end result should look like. I’m looking forward to a lot more Mexican in my life. (Anything to facilitate more avocado.)
The Last Binding, Freya Marske
Why haven’t I read these earlier? Look, I just have a lot of books on my TBR pile. This first book didn’t immediately jump out at me when it was published – I don’t know why – and so, although I occasionally heard about them as they got published, they just didn’t get to the top of the pile. (Slight spoilers below, largely in terms of who gets romanced.)
But the final book was published last year, and the trilogy has been nominated for the Best Series Hugo, and thanks to the enormous generosity of the publisher the whole trilogy was in the Hugo packet. And so, finally, I have now read the whole trilogy. One book straight after the other. Because, turns out, this is a really great series. What a surprise.
Marske writes of an England where the magical live unknown but side by side with the unmagical – which is similar to what Celia Lake does, but Marske doesn’t have the magical largely keep to themselves; there are nobles with magic who sit in the House of Lords, for instance. But most unmagical don’t know that magic exists; when they do find out, it’s described as ‘unbushelling’,
which has a great explanation behind it as a term. As the first book opens, an unmagical man (Robin) has landed an unexpected civil service job, liaising between the magical and the Prime Minister… but he doesn’t know about magic. His predecessor is missing, and he assaulted for unknown reasons; so he ends up working with magic-user Edwin, and others, to figure out what’s going on. Which turns out to be a whole conspiracy, of course, and unravelling which becomes the trilogy. At the same time, Robin and Edwin are falling in love. Which is a whole delightful thing, but did I mention this is the first decade of the 20th century? So it’s also a rather dangerous thing, given the laws at the time. This is a fantastic introduction to the series, giving all the necessary information about magic etc without ever losing the fast pace.
The second book takes place entirely on a ship – so it’s not quite a locked-room mystery, although there are indeed a lot of locked rooms; but there are a limited number of people to do things and a limited number of places for them to happen, which puts all sorts of intriguing boundaries on the author. This time the key characters are Robin’s sister and the dashing Violet, who enjoys being entirely outrageous. A different pace from the first one – partly that’s the ship, partly it’s already knowing about magic and the conspiracy – but nonetheless the consequences are real.
Finally, A Power Unbound – I had realised who one of the likely romance partners would be, in this book, halfway through the second. And I wasn’t overly enthused, I have to say, because his particular style of cynicism isn’t one I love. And the relationship that’s portrayed in this book also isn’t one I enjoyed as much as the first two; I am not as comfortable with how they interact. It’s a dom/sub relationship, and Marske is very clear
about the pair having boundaries and consent; the play-acting at making use of unequal power isn’t something I enjoy. This is very much a me thing, though; and the relationship does develop, as the others have, in interesting ways. Aside from the romance, the plot ratchets up the consequences of the conspiracy and quickens the pace and basically makes this a tremendous finale to the trilogy. A lot of secrets are drastically revealed, issues dealt with, relationships both restored and complicated – Marske really knew what she was doing.
This trilogy will be high on my Hugo ballot, and I am excited to read Marske’s new book this year.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I saw this film a long time ago – maybe it was on TV? – and ever since then “I should read the book” has been vaguely in my head. I’ve finally done so because someone else, in my book club, nominated it as one of our books. Sometimes it really does take that external influence. And I’m so glad I did because this really is a great book, and an amazing story.
The basics of the Henrietta Lacks story are that she was an African-American woman who, in 1951, was diagnose with cervical cancer. Doctors took a sample of the cells of the cancer, as was standard; they were sent to a lab that was doing some early work on trying to get cells to live in petri dishes (basically). For whatever reason, her cells were the first to prove functionally immortal: they did not die as every other human cell did, but reproduced… and kept reproducing… and, after a fairly short while, HeLa cells were being used all over the world for a variety of biomedical research.
Lacks, meanwhile, died. She had not been told her cells were being cultured; her family were not told either. Eventually, the family found out – there’s a whole story about how it was revealed who these cells that revolutionised the world came from – and it wasn’t an easy thing for them, for a whole bunch of reasons.
This book would be interesting if it were just the straightforward (well, as straightforward as it could be) story of Henrietta and her cells. But that’s all this book does. Instead, there are really three stories.
There’s the story of Henrietta herself. This is necessarily brief: she only lived to 30, there’s not a whole of sources, and she lived a difficult, but fairly straightforward, life: not a lot of education, married and having children young, not working outside of the home – then sick, and dying. Skloot writes about her life with compassion and, honestly, love; she doesn’t moralise or condemn, she doesn’t go all ‘woe what a tragedy’ in that fake ‘oh how hard things were’ way that some people might.
There’s the story of Henrietta’s cells, and the larger scientific story around it. This, too, is fascinating; the attempts at culturing cells, the fear felt by society about what might happen with such cells… and then there’s all of the ethical issues, too, about whether tissues outside of the body are still the property of the person who grew them. And this is tied into larger questions of American medical history around the white scientific establishment and Black bodies, which is of course a whole thing itself.
And thirdly, there’s the story of the Lacks family. Skloot doesn’t try to keep herself out of the story; in fact, she is very present, as she tries to get in touch with the Lacks children, to learn their part of the story. The children – in particular, the only surviving daughter, Deborah – are reticent, for a lot of good reasons. But they gradually come to trust Skloot, and Deborah takes part in a lot of Skloot’s research; the story of their time together, learning about Henrietta (and the eldest daughter, who died as an adolescent) is a vital part of the story: about Henrietta as a human woman, about the consequences of medical decisions, and about the lives of African-Americans in the last half of the twentieth century.
This is one of the best science history books I’ve ever read.
The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out in a week! (Mid-June 2024.)
My first Tim Pratt novel! And yes, I can see why he’s so popular. This novel is a wild ride.
There are two points of view in the novel, which start off separate and then – inevitably – become intertwined. The first is Glenn, whose story begins with the sentence “This is how I found out my girlfriend is a champion of Nigh-Space.” Glenn is having a perfectly normal life when he hooks up with Vivian – Vivy – and finds himself falling in love, getting matching tattoos, and having the best kinky sex of his life; the dom/sub relationship is, he points out, important for understanding how they interact over the rest of the epic tale he’s telling. Which involves learning that there are multiple planes of existence, there are groups who would like to extend their control over as many as possible, and that Vivy works for one of the groups attempting to just let planets get on with being themselves, rather than ruthlessly colonised.
The second is Tamsin, who gets home one day to a weird business card stuck in her door, and then finds out that her grandmother has been murdered. With no other family around, Tamsin is responsible for dealing with the estate; when she gets to her grandmother’s house, things go very peculiar, to the point where she learns – from her embarrassing ex-boyfriend no less – that she is not actually from Earth but from a planet on an adjoining plane, and there are people who would like to use the door that allows such travel thankyouverymuch. She herself goes through the door, back to her original home, where her family – originally one of the ruling families on their planet – had been eliminated when she was a baby. You might be able to guess where it goes from here.
Eventually the two stories coincide, there are some battles and a fair bit of sneaking, a snarky spaceship compelled to wear a human suit for a while, trust issues are revealed and discussed, people’s true natures are revealed, and so on.
This book is a lot of fun. I had been very worried that this would turn out to be the start of a series – it so easily could be! There are so many planets and potential enemies! – but no, it’s a standalone, and while I think it did wrap up a bit quickly, it was also quite a satisfying conclusion. All in all, definitely worth reading.
The Fortunate Fall, by Cameron Reed
Read courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Tor Books. It’s out in August 2024 (and also was published in 1996, if you can somehow get your hands on an original copy).
This book is amazing and the fact that Tor is reprinting it and I therefore found out about is a very, very good thing.
“The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post Police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be – all this you know.”
As first sentences go, that’s breathtaking.
It seems from Jo Walton’s introduction to this edition that the people who read The Fortunate Fall when it first came out all loved it… but that ‘all’ was super limited, for whatever reason. And that’s just an absolute tragedy, because this book should absolutely be seen as a classic and it should get read by everyone and it should be discussed in all the conversations that are had about gender, sexuality, AI interactions, the use and purpose of the media, human/animal interactions, medical ethics… and probably a whole bunch of other issues that I missed.
It was originally published in 1996, and certainly some of the technology feels a little dated; the idea of a dryROM is amusing, and moistdisks are fascinating and gross. But honestly (as Walton points out) it also feels incredibly NOW. The main character, Maya, is a ‘camera’; when she’s broadcasting, people can tune in and see what she sees, hear what she hears – and experience her memories and reactions as well. This is mediated by a screener, who basically works to help amplify or minimise parts of the experience, as well as doing the tech work behind the scenes. For all that it’s from the very early period of the internet, this aspect feels prescient in terms of using social media, the difficult lines between personal and big-business media, and a whole host of other things that, again, are being thought about and talked about now. Not to mention the question of how much we actually know someone from their public-facing presentation.
And really? this isn’t even the most meaty part of the story. There’s the relationship between Maya and Keishi; that could have been the whole book. There’s Pavel Voskresenye and his experiences with genocide, being experimented on, surveillance – which could also have been a whole book by itself. And the whale. It’s honestly hard to talk about everything that is packed into this book: and it’s not very long! The paperback is 300 pages! How does Reed manage to fit so much in, and still make me understand everything that’s going on, and bring it all together such that I know it doesn’t need a sequel, and I know Maya in particular more than she would be happy with – and it’s only 300 pages in length??
I want to shove this into the hands of basically everyone I know. And then, like Walton says in her introduction, we can all talk about the ending.
Four Points of the Compass
Read via NetGalley and the publisher; it’s out in November 2024.
This is a really neat idea for a book. So much of the “western” world (an idea that Brotton interrogates fairly well) simply assumes that north should be the default direction at the ‘top’ of the map, and that’s how it always has been. AS someone who has deliberately put maps “upside down” and challenged students to think about why – and as someone living in Australia – book that shows exactly how and north doesn’t HAVE to be the default top, and that historically it hasn’t been, is a wonderful thing.
Brotton mingles a lot of different ways of thinking about the world in this book. There’s linguistics – the ways in which different languages’ words for the cardinal directions reflect ideas about the sun, rising and leaving, and other culturally important ideas. Like ‘Orient’: it comes from the Latin for ‘rising’, as in the sun, and came to mean ‘east’… and of course ‘oriental’ has had a long and difficult career. But in English we still orient ourselves in space. Then there’s the connections with various types of weather, in various parts of the world, something I had not considered; and of course there’s an enormous amount of association with mythology from all over the world, often privileging the east and rarely making the west somewhere to be revered. (Three out of four cardinal directions have been regarded as most important over time and space; not the west, though.) Then of course there’s history, as humans learned what was actually out there in various directions, and associated people and places with specific directions (hello, Orient). And the act of cartography itself has had an impact on how people think about direction and the appearance of the world – Mercator, obviously, and the consequences of his projection particularly on Greenland, but even how vellum (real vellum, ie made from calfskin) was shaped and therefore impacted on how things were drawn on it.
Is the book perfect? No, of course not; it’s under 200 pages, it can’t account for every culture and language. But I do think it’s done a pretty good job of NOT privileging European languages; there’s an Indigenous Australian language referenced, which is rare. (I should note that anyone who thinks they can do any sort of navigation by the ‘south polar star’ like you can with the northern one is in for a very, very rude shock.) There is some reference to South American cultures, and I think passing reference to North American ones; some African cultures are also referenced. China and some other Asian societies get more space.
This is a really good introduction to the idea of the four directions having an actual history that is worth exploring for its consequences in our language and our history. The one thing that disappointed me is that there’s no reference to Treebeard’s comment about travelling south feeling like you’re walking downhill, which seems like a missed opportunity.
Cruel Nights, Jason Nahrung
There’s a lot going on in this novella, and all of it is good.
In the first place, there’s been a lot said about the problematic nature of ancient male vampires having a thing for the young ladies. Twilight took the idea of vampires not ageing and made them students (I have no idea how old Edward was when he turned; I watched the first film from a cultural studies perspective… anyway), so the lovers didn’t LOOK that different in age which I guess was meant to make it less squicky? Nahrung approaches the whole question of age and appearance from a different angle. I won’t say his focus is unique – vampires do not tend to be my thing, so maybe it’s been done a lot (see how I avoided ‘done to death’?). But it’s something that’s obvious, once it’s pointed out: what happens for someone who doesn’t seem to age if they’re in a relationship with someone who does age? How will the partner be perceived? The way the key relationship here is approached is the reason I read this in under a day.
Second, I like to think I would have picked up the Heart inspiration based on some of the chapter titles (Magic Man, in particular), if I didn’t already know, but certainly once I got to… well. A particular scene. If you know any of the more iconic Heart songs, you can probably guess what I’m referring to. (No, I am not talking about a big-toothed fish, or any metaphor along those lines.) I’ve read a lot of books that use music in various ways, and Nahrung’s done it very nicely.
Finally, in under 150 pages Nahrung manages to evoke the experience of growing up in Seattle in the 1990s, needing to move for work and love and all the hardship that entails, family love and drama, AS WELL AS the whole vampire aspect. It’s a compact story, tightly written – I can imagine this being turned into a massive novel or duology by another author, but it doesn’t need to be: the novella perfectly conveys Charlie and Corey’s experiences.
Highly enjoyable. Get it from Brain Jar Press.
Anna Karenina Isn’t Dead (anthology)
Take examples of literary women who were, generally for stupid reasons, or otherwise treated very poorly.
Give each a new story. Either still largely within the framework of their original existence, or in a completely new story.
Bring those stories together, and create an anthology. That’s what you have here.
I actually haven’t read Anna Karenina, although I knew that she died (spoilers!). There were several other examples in the anthology where I also didn’t know the source material. Fortunately, the editor and authors have considered this, and give a short introduction to each story so that they’re all as accessible as possible. Doesn’t matter if you don’t know Madame Bovary, or the story of Lady Trieu; you can still appreciate what the authors are doing for those women who have been treated so very badly.
Wendy gets to have adventures. Pandora defies the story set for her. Miss Havisham runs a bridal boutique. Mostly, though, the women live. And thrive. They may not all end up happy, but they do at least get a real story. It’s the least they deserve. Buy it from Clan Destine Press.
Randomly Yours, Alex 