Book 9: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Hey, I finally read a good book in 2024! I've been meaning to read some of this author's short stories for years, and then my book club chose this collection for our first read of 2024 and I had a great reason to. These stories are all inspired by or in conversation with folk stories or fairy tales, but I enjoyed even the ones paired with stories I didn't previously know. It is such a pleasure to read short stories written by someone who knows exactly what they want to do with the form, and how to craft a complete story in that length that never feels like it's a prologue to a novel that may or may not be written in the future. The stories float along and her character voices are distinct and lovely. Some of the stories left me with a strong feeling of narrative resolution, while others were more of a vibe, and I enjoyed them all. Link has just released her first novel, and I'm looking forward to picking that up soon as well. 

Grade: A

Book 12: Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices

Note: I know one of the authors in this anthology socially. 

A book club book! This is a collection of stories written by marginalized voices that are inspired by Arthurian myths and characters, divided into three sections: Once, Present and Future. The stories contained in Once take place in ye olde England but either center women or otherwise expand the white, male, straight focus of the characters and myths, while the Present and Future take place in a fairly broad concept of both time periods but also reinvent the stories in ways beyond the setting. 

The joy of an anthology is that while you're unlikely to love all of the stories included, you will likely find a number of standouts. And this is one where my feelings on the stories range from "well that was nice!" to "oh I LOVE this," so I'm going to highlight a few of my favorites. One aspect I really enjoyed about the three sections is the opportunity to see how different writers take on the same character across the eras, and my favorites were three stories inspired by the Lady of Shalott, an Arthurian figure I wasn't particularly familiar with prior to reading this anthology. I've always been slightly intimidated by Arthurian myths because there's not just one canon source, so getting to read Passing Fair and Young, Flat White and A Shadow in Amber, three stories which all approach the Lady of Shalott in wildly different ways, made me really understand all of the various ways the myths have all been retold and molded for different eras and with different intentions. It made me want to read more versions of these stories, and then return to this anthology with a deeper grounding in the myths. A really lovely collection. 

Grade: A

Book 72: Nevertheless She Persisted Anthology

This is an anthology of flashfiction published by Tor that takes its inspiration from Elizabeth Warren and the famous "Nevertheless She Persisted" moment of 2017. Each story jumps off from that phrase and tells a story of resistance, of hope, of despair, of rage. I liked the concept very much, and they were all interesting takes on a project like this, but none of them stuck with me for as long as I would have liked. Worth reading, but I was hoping for a bit more. 

Grade: B

Book 54: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Boy I loved this book. It's a collection of speculative short stories, all of which manage to be the most interesting kind of sci-fi for me: they are deeply, deeply invested in exploring what it means to be human, and how we function, and how that would extend into multiple different settings and realities. The prose is so easy to read and fall into; it feels deceptively simple. And even his stories that are the clearest metaphors (Exhalation, for one) are so well done that you don't feel like you got hit across the face with it. They're simply another opportunity to figure out how we live. I took this out from the library but I may need to buy a hard copy. A wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 34: Fen by Daisy Johnson

I felt similarly about this book of short stories as I did about this one: well written, with a lot of interesting ideas, but nothing I ever felt like I could fully hook into. I like magical realism a lot, and the themes of many of the stories are compelling and ones I'm really interested in reading about, but I kept waiting and waiting to experience an emotional response, but it never really came. I wish very much that I liked this book more than I did.

Grade: C

Book 38: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is another one of those books that I've had for at least ten years and have no recollection of what made me buy it. I'm guessing I was caught by the title and the cover on a display in Barnes & Noble back when there was one within walking distance of my office, but who can say?

That's pretty similar to how I feel about this collection of short stories, honestly: a bit baffled and without a clear sense of how I got here. Each of the stories takes place in a fantasy version of modern reality, such as the titular Catholic school for reforming wolfgirls. That was one of the stories I enjoyed the most, but as with all of the other bizarre universes (a sleepaway camp for various sleep disorders that don't resemble our own at all, an alligator amusement park in the middle of a swamp, a boys' chorus used to bring down avalanches each spring in the great north), I never felt like I could hook into the worlds or the characters. Part of that may just be caused by the short story form, which often don't give me enough time to become properly invested. But most of these stories just made me feel either sad or alienated or like there was something I was supposed to be feeling, but didn't. I don't know that a book always has to have a distinct, identifiable point, but I kept feeling like I was either missing something, or that I just didn't like it, depending on the story in question. And I can't tell if this is the sort of collection that I don't think is very good, or that just isn't for me as a reader. It's not poorly written, on a sentence or even scene level, but I need something more from stories than what this collection gave me, and whether that's a failing of the book or simply a matter of taste or preference, I'm not sure.

Grade: C