Book 48: Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard

This is a lovely little novella within an existing world from a series that I haven't read. So it was an exciting adventure finding out what the world was and how the characters interacted within it! I enjoyed the story, but I'm not sure how well it stood alone--I wasn't sure what the dynamic between the main couple was, or how I was supposed to feel about how they interacted. I liked them, but I felt like I was missing something from the narrative. Which clearly I was! But I had been hoping it would be more of a one-shot I could just jump right into. All that said, I still enjoyed the story of court intrigue, and by the end of it I felt like I knew who these people are. I would have liked a bit more focus on the relationship and less on the court intrigue, but overall it was fun!

Grade: B

Book 47: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

More Murderbot! This is the final novella of four, and it's the one that finally reunites Murderbot with its clients/people/FRIENDS from the first novella. I found the first couple of chapters of this pretty dry, I have to say--a lot of setup and well-voiced internal monologue, but for me these stories really take off as soon as we see Murderbot have to interact with bots or people or both. But the rescue mission to save Mensah is great, and watching it figure out what's going on and having to deal with emotions is always my favorite things. I also really liked the continuation of Murderbot's transformation into a being that is distinct from SecUnits, and then the process of it rebuilding itself after it almost deleted itself in a last ditch effort to save the day was great. I'm really excited to read the full novel now!

Grade: B

Book 46: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Murderbot!! This is the first sequel to All Systems Red, and it is just as charming and delightful as the first book was. Our favorite killing machine with a conscience and an inconvenient fondness for humans is trying to figure out how to go about her life after everything that went down in the first story, and of course she gets herself caught up in a whole thing she did not plan. The main plot is stowing away on a ship so she can find out the truth about the murderous rampage she went on back in the day, but a cargo ship machine called ART sees her and then watches dramas with her and before you know it they're friends, and then murderbot ends up attached to three humans who are making stupid choices and meets a sexbot (more politely known as a ComfortUnit) who would also like to be free. Anyway, it's a great story and it's just such a nice read.

Grade: A 

Book 45: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

A book club book that I've read more than 2 hours in advance of the event! What an accomplishment. Part of why that was possible is because this is a novella and a very quick read, but the other reason why is that it is a lovely read. The story takes place in a vaguely defined dystopia that feels like the Wild Wild West of Westwood, but it is explained that petrol and other modern day technologies are reserved for "the war effort." The main narrative focuses on Esther, who has stowed away from her town in the Southwest after her lover Beatrice was hanged. She joins the Librarians, who are responsible for delivery the approved literature to all the various towns, but of course are doing much more undercover. It's a lovely little story about someone who thinks their life has ended finding her people and a purpose, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 44: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

After finishing the fourth and final book of this series, I am both glad I read them and also convinced that these particular kind of epics are not my kind of books. I prefer this to the more traditionally swooned over male-centered multigenerational narratives; these are books which care about the interiority of women's lives, and the constant question of what would women's lives be able to be if they had the space and time and weight afforded them like men is extremely valuable and important. But I never felt fully connected to the characters, and I kept wanting something different or more from the central friendship at the heart of them.

I think in part these books made me feel almost like they were too adult for me, like they were describing a life of women that is beyond my experience, even though I am older than the main characters are in the majority of the narrative.

I don't know! These definitely aren't a 'I guess these books are good but I didn't enjoy reading them' series of books, but I don't feel moved by them in the way I had hoped I would. Which happens! It's just a hard thing to know how to feel about. I think the objective quality of the book is one of a Grade A, but my experience of it is not quite.

Grade: B 

Book 43: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

It's hard to write about each of these books individually, because they're one continuous story. This book had some of my favorite moments and lines of the entire series so far, but it is also the book where I kept thinking that I still don't know if I actually like any of the characters. Elena, the narrator, publishes her first book, and her response to that and how people review it and discuss it feels so real and so recognizable, and her marriage and children feel like such a defeat, and then the parallel life that Lila is living is its own pain and suffering. There's a line that Lila says to Elena:

"Each of us narrates our life as it suits us." 

She says that after Elena has described her early marriage and the birth of her first daughter in glowing terms. And it's a line that has just stuck with me, and these books are so deliberately narrated; the reader never forgets either the framing of the missing Lila, or the fact that this story is being told by the older version of the young woman Elena was. 

The structure of the books builds to the inevitable; when Nino once again resurfaces, and this time he and Elena finally become lovers and eventually leave their families for each other, it feels like the only thing that could have possibly happened, even if it also feels extraordinarily violent. I don't know what I hope for them, but I also feel like any hope is irrelevant, because this isn't the sort of narrative that gives you that kind of satisfying ending. 

Elena at one point does contemplate whether, if it had been possible, she could have loved Lila in the way she loves Nino. Whether there could have been space for their intellectual and emotional growth together, so that she didn't always exist in a vacuum. I would like to be able to read the story of that life, in some other world. 

Grade: B

Book 42: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Four years after I read the first book in this series, I have finally read the second book. Reading that book during the lead up to the 2016 election was extremely difficult, because the sexism and misogyny both the narrator and Lila have to deal with is so pervasive and extreme. I wouldn't say it feels easier to deal with now, exactly, but the world feels like it's falling apart in a slightly different way than it did in October 2016, and it definitely changes my reading of the story.

In part I think it makes it a bit harder for me to engage fully with the narrative and the characters. I watched both The Godfather and The Godfather II for the first time in the last couple of months, and these books are very much a depiction of traditional Italian culture but from the reverse angle of those stories: told from a woman's point of view. I find some it frankly unbearable; the violence, both physical and sexual, that is just described as a matter of course, is upsetting precisely because of how mundane and expected it is, and Lila's marriage at 16 is hard to take. I keep wanting both of them to have the space and opportunity to explore themselves and each other, both intellectually and emotionally, and that's just not possible within this setting.

I got about three quarters of the way through the book and I wasn't sure if this was going to be one of those novels where my judgment is that it's a good book but not one I like, and then the entire final quarter manages to surprise me and swing me back into full investment again. The final page or two has a narrative cliffhanger in a similar way as the first book, and it's so effectively done and interesting that I'm already very glad that the sequel is next on my reading list. I don't expect that the next two books will be any easier for me to read in terms of themes, but I'm looking forward to them regardless.

Grade: B

Book 41: Lovely War by Julie Berry

This is one of those books that I ended up seeing at the library and something about it just made me want to take it out. It's a historical novel about two romances during WWI, but it's the framing device that really makes the book work--the story of the lives of the two couples is told by Aphrodite to Hephaestus, after she's been caught by him having an affair with Ares. She tells the story aided by Ares, Apollo and Hades, and it is the four of them together who can construct the narrative, needing pieces of love, war, music and death.

One of the couples is made up of two young English people, a soldier and the pianist he meets shortly before being sent to the front. The other is a young Belgian woman whose entire family was killed by the Germans early on in the war, and a Black American soldier who is also a jazz musician. The story follows them through the year of 1918, and the sheer pointlessness of this particular war is just overwhelming. The book does a really lovely job of weaving together many different cultural threads, especially the experience of Black Americans in Europe, and how often they had more to fear from their white countrymen than even from the front. I hadn't know about Black regiments or how much of their labor fueled the entire American line, or how much it reflected the rise of Jim Crow all over the U.S.

I got very worried about fifty pages from the end, but this book isn't cruel; it is a love story that takes place during war, but it doesn't feel a need to punish the characters we have grown to care for simply because of it. I really enjoyed this book, and of course now have half a dozen new books I want to read as a result of it.

Grade: A

Book 40: The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso

This was a perfectly readable fantasy novel about a woman who's a political heir and ends up becoming embroiled in a magic power struggle when she accidentally binds herself to a mage. The setting is quite clearly magic Venice, which is fun, and Amalia and Zaira have a fun and contentious relationship, and there's a love interest and betrayal and politics but it never fully grabbed my attention. It's the first in a series, and I wouldn't mind reading the next one, but I have no great need to, so I think this will be a one and done for me.

Grade: B

Book 39: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Man. I understand why this book got great reviews and won awards, etc.--it is solid literary fiction, about Chicago during the mid-'80s AIDS crisis, plus a contemporary plot, so it's got the back and forth narrative structure of uncertainty and discovery that those sorts of plots create, and the characters are interesting and are neither so good that they don't feel like real people nor so horrible that you don't want them to be real people, but I kept reading it thinking 'well I guess if you've never read Tony Kushner or Larry Kramer or Michael Cunningham this might be really affecting.' Which is both unfair but also not, in my view; I am not entirely sure what the perspective of a straight white woman writing a fictional work about this time added, frankly.

And that goes double for the contemporary piece of the narrative, which I did not care about at all. If it was trying to explore the way trauma affects the survivors of a plague, it didn't land for me, and if it wasn't doing that then I have even less understanding of the point.

The story isn't a direct comparison with Angels in America, but the main couple has enough of Prior and Louis in them that when Yale, the Prior of this story, gets the virus in perhaps the most contrived narrative in the whole story, it feels like a bait and switch to me: you thought he was going to improbably dodge it, and now he's going to get it in the most stupid way possible. And it's not that people didn't either get it when statistically it was very likely, or get it when they probably shouldn't, but it felt like the work of a story, to spare him from the expected transmission and then pull the rug out from the reader. And because it goes to the present day, you have a feeling he can't survive from the beginning, but part of the strength of something like Angels in America is in Prior making it to the end. It's important to have works that really dig into the hole left in our culture by the entire generation of gay and bisexual men who died, but that wasn't what this felt like, either. It's a story about reality that offended me in what it decided to create to tell it as fiction. I am sure others felt differently, but I don't know what I was supposed to take from this story.

Grade: C

Book 38: Two Rogues Make a Right by Cat Sebastian

Okay so listen. Do you want a perfectly lovely Canadian shack fic of a gay romance novel about a sickly noble who's lost his title and money, and his childhood best friend who's back from the navy and has always been in love with him? Then this is the book for you. There's honestly not that much in the way of plot in this book, or even much suspense, but it is extremely nice, and sometimes you just need an easy read about two people beating the odds and finding some love, etc.

Grade: B