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This Is How You Lose The Time War (Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone)(2019): Novella, DNF. Multiverse time travel conflict between bio-oriented Garden and the tech-oriented Agency stands as background for the romance of Blue and Red, who manipulate the fate of different strands to their masters' wills. 

The narrative alternates between Red and Blue, each chapter made up of first person present tense experience leading to a letter from the other character. It has the most lush prose I've slogged through since I gave up on Valente; and like Valente's work, is more interested in purple prose-y artifice and stilted effect on the sentence level than telling a story. This is what happens when you aim for "luminous prose" and miss, IMO. It's frustrating to have a run of stories that sound great on paper and summarize with a bang, but fail to capture and sustain my interest in the story, the characters, or any of the related elements of the written word. 

Around halfway through I want looking for spoilers and found lightreads' comment that the novella's "about" is "engendering hunger", which killed any lingering desire to finish the story. Cue "I Want It All" on my headphones as I walk and bus and drive through a city absolutely crammed with people who are hungry to found a unicorn, people who are hungry for food security and housing, people who are numbed to hunger by personal upheaval, at a time when we see corrupting, unbalanced hunger at a national level... an absence of hunger has rarely been a problem I have thought to worry about. It's a metaphor that speaks to me, yes: it says that it's time to hurl the story against a wall and move on.

I postponed the throwing reflex long enough to flip to the last sections, which goes to that place where Red and Blue's personal timelines wind up inextricably meshed in ways that are Not For Me, and gave up.

Lent (Jo Walton) (2019): Jo Walton does Groundhog Day! In Renaissance Florence! Mostly Florence. Richard III guest stars. 

( Liked it! Spoilers. )

Thrawn: Treason (Timothy Zahn) (2019): Entertaining tie-in novel. Tarkin throws down a bet: if Thrawn solves a problem for Krennic, Thrawn's TIE Defender product gets the budget. If Thrawn doesn't solve Krennic's problem, Project Stardust gets the budget. Thrawn and the Chimera are saddled with one of Krennic's assistant directors - and his flowing white cloak -  the bet runs into Imperial politics and an intrusion from some old foes from the Unknown Regions.

At the beginning of the novel I disliked Assistant Director Ronan with all the fire my heart generates for Third Imperial Flunky On The Left (with a flowing white cloak!). By the end of the novel, Ronan was promoted to Accidental Comedic Relief thanks to his genuine belief that Thrawn had a secret plan to fight inflation. (Spoilers: there is no secret plan to fight inflation.) The last time someone took the available information and ran with it in such a catastrophically mistaken direction was back in Legends. Something about the Noghri in general and Khabarakh clan Khim'bar in specific having an off day? Ronan's small - almost insignificant - failure to figure out what is going on is going to make his post-novel life Something Else.

What more... I am absolutely in favor of the plan for Faro to get a fleet instead of a task force. There's an essay I am not writing about military SF and women in mil SF and how much I miss straight-up early Honor Harrington novels, which in retrospect are kind of clunky, but were a formative influence in my teens. I am A+ in favor of Faro and Ar'alani passing the Bechdel; I am not in favor of Eli getting the "please kill me if the pirates board" speech from the navigators. Come on, the navigators are Force-sensitive, I'm pretty sure Vah'nya at least could figure out how to use a knife; or, this being SW, a thermal detonator to take some Grysks straight to the afterlife with her.

The Raven Tower (Ann Leckie) (2019): Fantasy standalone in the same universe as several of her shorter works including "The God of Au", "Marsh Gods", "The Nalendar", and "The Unknown God", none of which I've gotten around to reading as of this writing. I did my best to avoid spoilers; this starts slow, in my personal nemesis, second person present tense, which did not help. Once I adjusted to that, and to the flashbacks, I got along with the novel perfectly well.

( The spoilers. )

The Fated Sky (Mary Robinette Kowal) (2018): Sequel to the Nebula- and Hugo-winning The Calculating Stars.

The story seems to be aiming for Space Race alternate history as a subgenre. ( The problem is, the choices are not organic to the characters or opening premise; they are forced by where the author wants the plot to conclude, and how she wants her social justice to work out. )

If you liked The Calculating Stars, you'll probably like The Fated Sky. If you thought reading Stars was as fun as Eating Your Vegetables, well, Sky is very like, only mostly in tin cans far from Earth. Go forth and make good choices.

Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): reread. First, because the local used book store had a copy; second, because was not done with my disappointment with last year's Hugo nominees. (It was not a good year for me!)

Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (Janet Mock) (2017): Second biography by the writer and activist, touching on love and further explorations of living an authentic life. The author is 100% in control of her material, managing to describe her experiences in a way that evokes both empathy and the occasional "ouch, what a roommate situation" wince as she grows, heals, and lives.

Me, early 2017: I will be better about reading and writing about what I've read!
Me, November 2017: So that's going to be a 2018 goal, as well as a 2017 effort.

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Victoria Sweet) (2012): A memoir of practicing medicine at Laguna Honda Hospital, one of San Francisco's last-ditch facilities for long term care. The memoir is infused with Sweet's research into the medical practice of Hildegard of Bingen.

I opened this with a vague idea I'd get a look into one facet of San Francisco's health care history. That's not what God's Hotel is most interested in. Its focus is on the human face of doctoring, as experienced by Dr. Sweet during her tenure at Laguna Honda, and how her approach to medicine was influenced by her doctoral research on Hildegard. It's a topic that needs periodic reinforcement: the myriad tools available for medical intervention are secondary to healing the sick. Sweet emphasizes cutting back on dramatic intervention and letting time and the human body do their work. It's the same lesson Shem wrote down forty years ago: the delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible. Sweet emphasizes the more positive interpretation: the delivery of good medical care is to figure out what's blocking the path to health, and get rid of the blocks, including the egos of the doctors, nurses, and other people involved with caring for the patient.

Provenance (Ann Leckie) (2017): standalone in the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy, set shortly after the trilogy, but essentially unrelated. Ingrey Aughskold, daughter of ambitious and politically connected Netano Aughskold, takes a daring course to challenge her brother for inheritance of Netano's name and position. This gets complicated by Hwae politics, an upset Geck ambassador on her way to the Conclave, and the provenance, or lack of provenance, of Hwae's most revered cultural artifacts. If you've read the Foreigner series, the the complicated political dynamics muddied by personal concerns, and the personal relationships muddled up by the political situation, are going to feel pretty familiar. Provenance takes that muddling in directions that feel pretty homey if you've read the Imperial Radch trilogy.

I was lucky enough to attend a reading when Leckie was on book tour for Provenance's release, and got to hear her say - I'm paraphrasing - that she'd learned some things about gender and gender presentation during or after writing the Ancillary trilogy which got put into Provenance. Hwae society has three genders, thrown in as part of the worldbuilding along with the family and inheritance structures. Those social constructs that have profound implications for Ingrey and her family, and tie into the thematic questions about where things come from and how are they - ha! - made significant.

All this, and aliens too. The Geck ambassador's involvement brings with it a pervasive fear of breaking the Treaty. The Geck angle brings with it questions of humanity and identity that thematically ties back to the previous three novels in the universe. Provenance is a lighter and faster read than the Imperial Radch trilogy, but very preoccupying for the characters and enjoyable as a lighter thing.

All Systems Red (Martha Wells) (2017): first novella in the Murderbot series.

Murderbot is the chosen identification of the protagonist, a self-proclaimed cheap security droid whose defining traits are being responsible for a mass casualty event and later hacking the governor module that made it kill 55 people. Secretly free of its override protocols, Muderbot's most significant change in habit is its unrestricted space!TV addiction. All Systems Red covers a contract job gone sideways, which forces Murderbot to reveal its self-actualization to a group of softhearted humans.

Murderbot is... not necessarily the most reliable narrator? Wells has a fondness for a certain type of isolated, distrustful protagonist who is convinced revealing their true nature will end with rejection, more isolation, and maybe death. Murderbot follows the trend, with bonus self-deprecation and psuedo-indifference to the governor module incident that is totally over, cough, which has nothing to do with why it calls itself Murderbot. Ahem.

I suspect this will come up again in the future novellas, which I look forward to reading.

After many years and several tries I finally got through Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993). When I first tried to read it I had a vague assumption it would focus on the mechanics of comics, and it does that, but it goes much deeper into how comics function as art and also into the hows and whys of symbolism in comics. A tougher read than expected but very rewarding.

Raven Stratagem (Yoon Ha Lee) (2017): does one of my favorite things in fiction, the late-story plot twist that is a wonderful surprise and also totally fits with everything that came before. There's limits to that strategy, but Lee hasn't reached them yet.

Thrawn (Timothy Zahn) (2017): Months after reading this I can say it was reasonably clever, it was as good as I expect from Zahn, and the Pryce backstory was nice, but it made me terrifically nostalgic for The Last Command.

Binti (2015) and Binti:Home (2016) (Nnedi Okorafor): young woman defies tradition to attend space university, has adventures. If you've read Okorafor, these novellas will feel very much in her style.

Three Parts Dead (Max Gladstone) (2012): Craftswoman Tara Abernathy, cast out of the Hidden Schools of the Craft, is recruited by Elayne Kevarian, of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to deal with a tricky case of Craft whose roots trace back to the God Wars that changed the world, and cut through a tangle of Craft and personal relationships.

If that summary is a mess, well, the novel is ambitious to a fault. The PoV is tight-ish third noir-ish in a D&D-ish fantasy world. But it most reminds me of old school science fiction, the sort where the clever plot turns on the writer explaining the way everything works except for the pivot-element that swings the final twist into action. In the epilogue, Elayne remarks, engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict.

A couple of years ago the Legion of Honor hosted an exhibit of Breguet watches, fancypants high-end timepieces of the last three or four centuries. The plot of Three Parts Dead reminded me of the tiny interlocked gears powering the conventional hour, minute, and second hands, as well as all the complications that could be imagined and packed into a handheld device. Like some of the honological complications on display, I didn't quite see the appeal of the threads of history and action connecting the deaths of Judge Cabot and Kos Everburning to Tara, Elayne, Novice Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning, addict and agent of Justice Catherine Elle, Shale of the Guardians (gargoyles), Craftsman Alexander Denovo, and the vampire Raz Pelham. There is a point where piling on history, secondary worldbuilding, personal backstory, and red herrings turns a cats-cradle plot from a tense interconnected story to a mess.

The book does a number of things "right" - women as protagonists, Bechdel test pass, people of color as characters with agency - but the execution it felt bloodless, clockwork, to me.

On a really petty, petty note, every time someone talked about the city of Alt Coulumb I had college physics flashbacks. It was really, really distracting.

A Closed and Common Orbit (Becky Chambers) (2016): Hugo nominee. Double timeline story about AI fish-out-of-water Sidra's first steps into personhood played against young Jane 24 (aka Jane, aka Pepper) and shuttle-AI-slash-parent-ish Owl teaming up to fix a junked spacecraft.

Orbit is a character book. If you're interested in the characters and their personal journeys, you're going to enjoy this book. The plot acts in service of time with the characters, winding through there's Sidra's challenges as an AI stuck in an un-AI body, with attendant dysphoria; an exploration of Port Coriol's people and cultures; and Pepper's history, topped off with a Leverage-esque shuttle heist / family reunion at the end of the novel, because this is a novel about identity, found family, and not leaving people behind.

There's a sense of a lot of influences, not that far under the surface. That doesn't always work to Orbit's benefit. The Dispossessed has a memorable, tightly structured, thematically resonant double timeline narrative. The other double timeline narrative that has rocked my world is Ancillary Justice. There are interleaved usenet-slash-irc-slash-reddit-ish excerpts with people being people, with AIs on the table, accidentally evoking A Fire Upon the Deep. Orbit includes a glancing interest in how to make a person, which is right up my thematic alley, but that's secondary to its focus on self-actualization, see "focus on characters". Orbit is a competent but not brilliant or definitive take on the tropes and ideas in play.

This year I finally finished The House of God (Samuel Shen) (1978), a semiautobiographical novel of a first year medical intern's trial by fire, gomer, and administrivia. It's dated, raunchy in the least erotic way possible - there is an awful lot of kind of objectification and doctor/nurse sex - and yet the issues of patient care raised are still painfully relevant to American health care almost forty years later.

Thick As Thieves (Megan Whalen Turner) (2017): Slave Kamet escapes the calamitous death of his owner in the Mede Empire. Since this is a King's Thief novel, there is a big, plot-changing twist, perhaps even several. If one builds a reputation on surprising readers, there's a point where the readers know the story isn't being told straight and start to question closely the statements the characters take for fact, which works against that element of surprise. There's a limit to the strategy of plot twists for the sake of plot twists, which Turner might be starting to bump up against.

For the holidays, I asked for and received epub copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House novels (1932 - 1943), most of which I reread over the first half of January. They have held up surprisingly well. I was worried about Little House on the Prairie, one of my favorites, where the Ingalls family tries to establish a claim on Native American land, anticipating the government will force relocation of Indian Territory. The novel is surprisingly not-awful at respectfully presenting the Native Americans' rights to treaty land and to be treated as human beings, despite the lens of the Ingalls' prejudices and manifest destiny. And, of course, the Ingalls depart Indian territory at the end of the novel, relocated when the army tells them to leave. The tone of the departure is that the Ingalls were the problem, not the Native Americans. So it's not perfect, but it dances between the attitudes of the time and the attitudes of a more modern era in a way I can live with.

At some point, I will reread Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek, which for some reason I started and didn't finish. Oh right, my library hold for Scoundels came in.

Star Wars: Scoundrels (Timothy Zahn) (2013): ( IT'S A NEW ZAHN SW NOVEL AND IT'S HEISTFIC. WIN. Giant twist-revealing spoilers. )

Since then, I have been reading the Brick, also known as Les Miserables (Victor Hugo) (1862). The Brick's nickname is instantly explained when one holds the paperback 1,460 page Fahnestock and McAfee translation, published in 1987. I'm alternating it with Project Gutenberg's 1887 Hapgood translation as appropriate. So far I am through book one of five.

Notes so far: I am heavily influenced by cahn's reread, in conjunction with the skygiants reread. I didn't discover the bookmark function on the ereader until book 2 "Cosette", so I have very little to say about book 1. That's okay, because two opens with Waterloo, the famous 50 page break from narrative.

( I am not an English major, nor do I play one online. )

I look forward to getting back to Valjean; one gets the impression Hugo is boxing him in with tangents, cutting off the lines of escape from revolution and social justice and striving for self-improvement until those are the only choices left.

Numbers game: 7 total finished; 7 fiction. 6 reread, 1 new. Working on Les Miz.

Mirror Dance, Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold): Ah yes, the classic signs of a bad day: you are in complete sympathy with Howl, in a "let's go to Macy's and buy several hundred dollars of makeup and professional clothes I don't need" way. (I didn't go to Macy's. I may have browsed the website, though. Ironing gets really old.)

These two are both technically excellent Bujold novels, but really dark; I'd elided some of the nastier bits of MD right out of my back-brain, and barely made it through the first third. Memory has far fewer painful scenes, and it's a different sort of reading agony: Mark's got a lot less to work with than Miles, even when Miles is at the bottom of his personal well. I'm still feeling more more empathy for Mark's struggles this month, in the deep uncertainties of post-move establishment.

A Wizard Abroad (Diane Duane): Reread. Diane Duane moves to Ireland, and writes a book! (Um, seven years later. I stand corrected.) "Abroad" is cute, but it's a weak follow-up to the first three novels, which have a clear evolution of evil (possibly transformative Lone Power, "good" but scary Ed vs. Lone Power, Dairine vs LP Ultimate Wizard Smackdown and redemption). The series sort of flounders in the comics mode after that: having defeated ultimate evil, what do you do next? In "Abroad", the answer is "defeat different ultimate evil, teamwork version". I really want the series to grow up a bit and fight evil on a small-scale context: not a giant fireworks-and-shadows magical climax, but more like Nita confronting Joanne at the end of So You Want to Be a Wizard. As a standalone, Abroad is fine, but it doesn't build on the context provided by the preceding three novels. Having read the following novels, I'm tempted to call the structural weakness an effect of series construction shift, but without rereading the entire series I'm not wedded to the theory.

A Grave Talent (Laurie R. King): Reread: when in San Francisco, why not read books set in the city? It's not bad, but it was published in '93. The social agenda and lack of cell phones gives it a flavor of its time.

The Best American Science Writing 2005 (Ed. Alan Lightman): catching up on my pop sci. A very mixed bag: my appreciation can be predicted by knowing whether the writer was covering contemporary science or being contemplative. Therefore, high marks for "Einstein's Compass" (Peter Galison), "The Genome in Black and White (and Gray)" (Robin Marantz Henig) for getting me frothing about how we need to stop screening for stuff and boost the technology so it's cheaper and more effective to outright test for conditions, and Laurie Garrett's "The Hidden Dragon" on the politics of HIV in Vietnam; low marks for Edward Hoagland's "Small Silences", and Andrea Barrett's "The Sea of Information". "The Sea of Information" particularly irritated me because it's not about science, it's about feelings and the writing process as an author of fiction. Old news in baby-steps packaging.

Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command (Timothy Zahn): For a set of Star Wars novels I started reading when I was ten, these have remarkable staying power. I don't think I've ever actually read the trilogy through from Page One to the very end, so it's a pleasure to find it holds together, both as a story and as an adult reader. These aren't deep novels, but they deliver a story I still like with style and fun. Zahn captured some key elements of the movies and franchise, and puts in clever plot tricks, which make some writing tics bearable. He's also not afraid to expand on the universe as it stands, and can write original characters who carry the narrative where it needs to go. Like most media tie-ins, the Thrawn trilogy isn't deep, but unlike many tie-ins, it's entertaining and rereadable.

Scott Pilgrim vol. 3: Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Things I dislike: hipsters. Things I like: comics with video game references, snappy writing and witty fourth-wall breaks. If the series weren't at the absolute minimum effort threshhold, I wouldn't keep reading it. Yet I am compelled to continue in a quest to understand why other people like it. I suspect it's the hipsters.

The publishing industry does me the favor of using key adjectives in book descriptions. For example, I forgot that "lovecraftian" is publishing code for "this book will scar me for life". I didn't finish John Scalzi's The God Engines; actually, I didn't really start it. I opened the novel, read the first page, flipped to the last page, and slammed it shut.

Numbers game: 7 total finished. 2 new, 5 reread; 6 fiction (1 graphic novel), 1 nonfiction (1 essay collection)

Late, they tell me, is better than never.

Star Wars: Alleigance (Timothy Zahn): Rebels post-Yavin, Imperial corruption, Emperor's Hand, shake well and mix. Who cares about the details, it's Zahn writing a SW original trilogy novel! We all know that I am a gigantic fangirl for Zahn, what with the original characters I don't want to die and the prose that I can read without wincing, so this is all about the happy indulgent storytelling. Seriously, people: lightsabers!

One for the Money (Janet Evanovitch): Stephanie Plum has lost it all - her job, her savings, even her car. Her last hope for financial solvency is Joe Morelli - or rather, the $10,000 she can earn by bringing the New Jersey cop-turned-killer to justice. Will Stephanie overcome her mixed feelings for Joe to make the case, or will Rex the hamster be forced to eat hamster kibble for the rest of his days?

cathydalek recommended this, and she was smack on the money. I kept thinking of people while reading this - if norabombay lost her car, this would be her life - every sketchy NJ city story aoumd mentioned - the possible appearance of a cousin of cathydalek's family's Biscayne in the next book.

Pure junk reading, literally. I read this while compulsively chomping Cheetos.

Sixty Days and Counting (Kim Stanley Robinson): If you know KSR's previous novels, you know how this one goes, except maybe with Phil. I'm putting the gigantic rant below the cut, becuase it boils down to the novel (and the trilogy) being a policy story, not a policy secondary impact story.

( There is a river dividing Anacostia and Arlington. )

Fortunately, I'm 80 pages from the end of a nice nonfiction polio book, so there's only so much griping you can expect in the May list.

The terrible thing about reading something at the age of ten is that it's really hard to reread with anything like objectivity later in life. It's warm and fuzzy comfort reading. You tend to overlook a lot of flaws. This is probably also true of movies, and likely goes a long way toward explaining my unkillable love of the original Star Wars trilogy and my bitter disappointment in the prequels. Well, that and the terrible directing and dialogue.

Thank goodness for professional fanfic.

The thing that struck me this time is how much Zahn likes misdirection and playing with the flow of information. ( Huge spoilers, of course. )