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Christina Rossetti was a hell of a poet. “In An Artist’s Studio” is surely the cruelest verse ever composed about a sister-in-law. I’ve long loved her “Goblin Market”, even if it does trade in antisemitic imagery.

Bovalino imagines a fascinating problem: how would modern girls react to the Goblin Market? Whether you think the forbidden fruit is lesbian love or the renunciation of christ’s yoke, it’s going to play differently today than in 1862.

18 years ago, May Wickett was an apprentice witch, a defender of York from the annual underground market. May doesn’t really want to be a witch, but it’s a family duty. A sudden personnel crisis moves up the date of her initiation, and suddenly there’s not going to be a lovely time at University, far from the cares of home. In a week, she’ll be a professional witch and have no time or anything else. Then Eitra, a beautiful goblin girl walks into the pub.

Now, May and her sister have been banished from York. They live in Back Bay, with May helping to raise her 17-year-old niece Lou. Lou is a modern girl, sophisticatedly asex, impatient of her mother’s weird superstitious puttering with salt lines on the sills and iron charms on the doors. Then her beloved aunt Neela (who is the same age as Lou) leaves a message on Lou’s iPhone: she’s stuck in the market and cannot escape.

There are problems here, but it does draw a fascinating contrast between yesterday’s girl, who is wrapped up in liberation and love, and today’s girl, who doesn’t need to be liberated and doesn’t much want to know what love is. Bovalino doesn’t pull punches: if the girl you love turns out to be covered in thorns, you’re going to learn about an S&M kink you didn’t know you had. (Eitra, in turn, discovers sugar.) I think more might be done with this material, but this was a lot of fun.

December 18, 2023 (permalink)

Recommended by Cory Doctorow, who writes:

There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck.

Beck Garrison is fifteen. She’s grown up on a Libertarian Seastead: no taxes, no police, no schools. She finds stuff for people to pick up spending money, which is an ideal setup for an opportunity to find what everything really means. This is a fixup of a series of short stories, and a lot of fun.

December 10, 2023 (permalink)

At the start of this book, Bunny West is a sullen teenager daughter of a US Foreign Service Officer, currently posted to a Baku at the start of the oil boom. At the end, she’s a grandmother, and the oil industry for which she has worked for decades as pretty effectively wrecked the planet. Reminiscent of Olive Kittredge, this is a fine book.

December 2, 2023 (permalink)

Among the best of the sprawling Liaden series and one of Linda’s favorites, this book sure has its moments. Come for the sentient turtles, stay for the tree-protecting computer that time forgot. Characteristically for this team, this is a family story: the clan is in trouble, we have to pull together against shady outside hostility and perverse mischance, and at the end we hope to find the grownups are still (at least nominally) in charge.

December 2, 2023 (permalink)

A fine introduction to information gardening for beginners, with tips of selecting and using contemporary tools and sensible fallbacks for those who prefer paper. Good intros to Obsidian and Tinderbox are well situated in a discussion of the purpose of notes and the role of notebooks in thinking clearly.

December 2, 2023 (permalink)

This remarkable novel is the best treatment I’ve seen about games and narrative. It is also richly imagined, and its characters are drawn with care and compassion. Some of the best characters are games — a schoolgirl assignment in which Emily Dickinson meets Space Invaders, named Emily Blaster, a MMORPG invented to please one particular player. Zevin seldom or never asks characters to deliver buckets of exposition. It’s not difficult to stay ahead of the plot, but then, that’s the nature of the game.

October 29, 2023 (permalink)

Jacob argues that several separate movements considered themselves enlightened, and each contributes a distinct strand to our collective memory. Her sources are fascinating: a major part of her treatment of French materialism are the book-scouting notebooks of a Parisian distributor of imported pornography.

October 29, 2023 (permalink)

Theo Waitley escapes the conformity of the university world in which she was raised to attend pilot academy. She doesn’t have a comfortable time, but neither did Tom Brown. A rollicking good time.

October 29, 2023 (permalink)

Charlie is a former businesss journalist who is barely getting by as a part-time substitute teacher. Then his Uncle Jake, who owns lots of parking garages and whom Charlie scarcely knows, dies unexpectedly. It turns out that, in addition to the parking garages, Jake owned a volcanic tropical island filled with scientists and technicians. There are smart cats (who are savvy real-estate investors). The dolphins (who are jackasses) are going out on strike, and all the other supervillains of the world want to have a quiet word with Charlie. Or, maybe they just want to blow him to bits.

October 7, 2023 (permalink)

Amber Glass is a dealer in outsider art, specializing in the art of the incarcerated. She understand the incarcerated: she woke up in a hotel bathroom the morning after her high school prom in a pool of blood, with a dead infant on the floor. It was a tabloid sensation: Prom Mom/ She wound up in juvenile detention until she was 18. Now in her 30s, she’s back in suburban Baltimore, and back in touch with Cad Dad — who is married to a plastic surgeon.

This odd, slow-burning thriller takes a while to get moving, but once the acceleration kicks in it doesn’t stop.

September 30, 2023 (permalink)

Pleti is a young and very junior professor of classics, meaning that she studies the ecosystem of Earth before Earth became uninhabitable. Her college girlfriend, Investigator Mossa, appears unexpectedly one day, working a case and requiring expert advice. This happens on platforms that orbit high above Jupiter. They make a wonderful couple, in a world beautifully designed to support a classic timetable cozy.

September 30, 2023 (permalink)

A very valuable source of anecdotes of Lévi-Strauss, especially for his war years in New York when he taught under the name “Claude L. Strauss” to avoid confusion with blue jeans. One striking thing about the book is how relaxed Lévi-Strauss is about old rivalries, old slights, ideologies, ecological disaster, the War that was past, the War that was ongoing and the War that is to come. When they said, “Structures do not go out into the street,” they were not wrong.

August 24, 2023 (permalink)

Adam Gardner, a biologist, lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He is about to be 70, he has always been bipolar, and he’s secretly adjusting his meds to take one last shot at a Nobel-sized discovery. His son, Ken, is making a fortune in real estate and running for Congress as a Republican. His daughter Abby is making a name for herself in the art world. It’s going to be one hell of a birthday party.

This is a quietly accomplished book, not least because it borrows some old-fashioned tools (a psychoanalyst for buckets of elliptical exposition, a regrettable will to foul things up, and an off-duty copy to unsettle everyone) for very contemporary ends.

August 21, 2023 (permalink)

A luminous, tiny little novel about an extraordinary young woman and her extraordinary mother. Maman has raised us to be resourceful and self-reliant. Now, we’re on our own.

August 21, 2023 (permalink)

Over many years, John McPhee has written well about an extraordinary range of topics. Oranges, museums, shipping, geology, conservation, and basketball are among them. This volume collects lovely, and often hilarious, notes about subject that got away. Some were profiles whose subject died, or turned out to be busy. Some, like a profile of every other Princeton in the U.S. never quite gelled. “Nothing goes well in a piece of writing,” McPhee reminds us “until it is in its final stages or done.

August 12, 2023 (permalink)

This novel takes a long time to get going, but when it goes, it’s a hum-dinger. Elizabeth Zott is a scientist. It’s the 1950s, so everyone assumes that women cannot do science. Much of the book is a primer on why second-wave feminism was needed. What really works here is that this is an exceptionally good portrait of what science is like.

There’s also a dog named Six-Thirty (6:30) and a five-year-old daughter, Mad, and each is superbly drawn.

July 30, 2023 (permalink)

If you’re in the mood for a solid, golden-age mystery, this is the ticket. It’s got upstairs and downstairs, crime on the railroad train, the niece of the creator of Downton Abbey, and a denouement at a ball. And it’s got Mitfords, ranging in age from debutante (Nancy) to infant (Deebo).

There are problems. The book is designed to culminate at Nancy’s first ball, which is fun but which leaves the other sisters mostly in the shadows. Nancy herself keeps shading into Nancy Drew; this is a hazard because, in a way, she’s our Basic Mitford. Muv and Favre are actually pretty good. But we don’t really get much out of her being The Nancy Mitford. To be fair, I think Fellowes does a nice job of little Unity, stewing by herself in a corner. A decade and change later, we know she will shoot herself out of love for Hitler, but getting there is, really, the point of historical fiction.

There are virtues, too. The book is filled with down-market characters who are drawn and are not picaresque, and that’s something even Sayers seldom could manage.

August 12, 2023 (permalink)

A Readercon find (thanks, Gwynn Garfinkel), this is a nifty anthology that explores lots of ways in which things might have turned out very differently. What if the lord our god, king of the universe, blessed be he, was running a few hours late one day and the Red Sea parted after the rebels had been rounded up? What, for that matter, might have happened if Miriam has seen Pharaoh’s daughter drowning a Hebrew infant and, in her incandescent and perpetual rage, had led a military revolt that burnt all the ancient empires of the Mediterranean to the ground? What if Spinoza had married and gone off to live in his wife’s village, and then led a massive flight of Jews from the pogroms to New York?

Not every pivot is picked up — I’m surprised, for example, that no one wanted to take on any of the various ways that Paul might have been thwarted and how that might have changed things. But never mind: a lot of this was fun, and some was fascinating.

July 30, 2023 (permalink)

About 3000 BCE, a sheep-owner (or perhaps the owner’s accountant) in the neighborhood of Uruk got tired of keeping track of large numbers of sheep by making large numbers of marks, each meaning either “a sheep” or “a flock of (10) sheep”. Instead, he borrowed a symbol used to represent a big measure of grain — 60 bags full — and put it before the symbol for a sheep. That afternoon, this fellow invented abstract numbers, and also invented the notation that would eventually be the writing we know. (Other people invented writing in China and in Mesoamerica; it's possible there were even earlier scripts that didn’t catch on.)

July 2, 2023 (permalink)

Gödel proved the completeness of first-order logic in his 1929 doctoral dissertation, handing it in to a surprised supervisor. Little more than a year later, at an August meeting in Vienna’s Café Reichstrat, he showed that first-order logic was undecidable — that some statements may be true but impossible to prove or disprove in finite time. These results are the foundation of computer science and delineate the computing world we know, but though Gödel sometimes wrote of “machines” as a metaphor for the mechanism of proof, he was not, then or later, much involved with the idea of computers. He was trying to establish the boundaries of what mathematics could do.

He was a ghastly lecturer, a poor teacher, and he chose his wife poorly. The rest of his career was fairly unproductive. Yet he was Einstein’s closest friend at Princeton, and the leaders of the Institute For Advanced Study worked hard to keep in on the staff. It’s an intriguing story, and Budiansky draws it well.

July 3, 2023 (permalink)

Winner of the 2020 Hugo and Nebula Awards, and perhaps the best space opera, ever. Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador from Lsel (an independent mining station) to the Empire of Teixcalaan. She has dedicated herself to studying the Imperial language, its poetry, its manners and rituals, but of course she arrives as a Barbarian, and things that come naturally to her liaison (asekreta Three Seagrass, patrician second class) are alien to Mahit. Three Seagrass herself (“Reed” to her friends) is superbly, unforgettably drawn, and in fact most of the minor characters are superb.

At one point, the two diplomats try to escape inside a restaurant. Mahit, who grew up in a space station even if she has on several occasions visited the surfaces of (uninhabited) planets, is fascinated and appalled when Three Seagrass orders a steak that looks like it was recently part of an actual animal. Caught staring, she asks her minder, who answers “Of course! This is a nice restaurant, Mahit! Do you want some?”

Superb.

June 1, 2023 (permalink)

A British food writer takes a bicycle/train trek across France, punctuated by 25 classic (if not very imaginative) dishes, plus plenty of croissants. A lovely tribute to travel: you may not get the best onion soup in the world, but if you try, you can find an onion soup that is pretty damn good.

July 1, 2023 (permalink)

A quick Wellfleet rereading of this fascinating memoir, partly preparation for viewing “Turn Every Page” (edited by my cousin Molly), but mostly because I’m trying to find a better framework for a short book, which is perhaps a pair of short books, exploring what computer science might be if the sort of research that most interests me were near the center, and not an obscure, unfashionable backwater.

June 16, 2023 (permalink)

A second brilliant novel, following the wonderful A Memory Called Empire and, like its predecessor, a Hugo winner. Three Seagrass is now a senior functionary in the Ministry of Information when a request arrives from The Fleet for a special diplomat to help cope with a frightening alien incursion. Bored, Three Seagrass appoints herself, and sets off to pick up the barbarian diplomat Mahit Dzmare, whom she had served as cultural liaison, en route. The problem is that the aliens appear to have no interest in talking to humans, and seem not to comprehend that “talking” is a thing. Meanwhile, the fleet’s internal politics are simmering.

Absolutely wonderful.

June 16, 2023 (permalink)

Alex, who is 22, is a working girl with a graphic designer, social media strategy, and a foreboding sense that business is not doing well. In fact, she’s executing an exit strategy, living with a civilian investment manager with whom she gets along reasonably well. A mild argument, a bit of irritation, a dented bumper make her unwelcome in her boyfriend’s Long Island summer house, and his personal assistant is told to put Alex on the train back to the city.

Alex doesn’t want to go back to the city, where her roommates have surely changed the locks. She has $400 in the bank, and absolute confidence that this fight can be patched up at her boyfriend’s Labor Day party, just 5 days away. Can she stay amongst the dunes and daiquiris for five days?

June 16, 2023 (permalink)

(Previous notes here)

I needed Stephen Lekson’s email because I wanted to ask a favor. That led me to emails in which I’d asked a previous favor, and his generous (and patient) answers led, in turn, to a holiday weekend rereading of this fine book. It’s a study of a discipline: Southwestern Archaeology as an enterprise or a vocation, rather than the pre-history of the people who lived in the region that would someday become the American Southwest. That’s a different book (into which I also enjoyed a pleasant Memorial Day plunge.)

I turned to Lekson in part because I’ve been reading a biography of Kurt Gödel in order to get a better understanding of a foundational question: what did the founders of computer science think they were doing? One thing they were not doing was metaphysics: one of the coffeehouse seminars had a fellow who would bang the table whenever someone said anything metaphysical. Lekson’s fight for History against Théorie is, I think, an echo of the dilemma in which serious thinking about computation and the mind has caught itself: we cannot do what we do without a belief in structure, but we can also problematize that belief until paralysis sets in.

Lekson is, I think, the great stylist of his generation. He crafted an approach to academic writing that is precise but accessible, allusive yet open, rigorous but light on its feet. An important facet in this achievement is his embrace of footnotes, which he uses to great effect. At one point in A Study Of Southwestern Archaeology, he reports that some students read two copies of his earlier A History Of The Ancient Southwest at once: one copy open to the text and a second copy open to the footnotes. That’s an excellent idea. (Beware: the Kindle edition assumes that footnotes consist of a single paragraph, and that’s not necessarily the case; insist on visiting all the footnotes.)

June 1, 2023 (permalink)

“When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.” That’s quite a first sentence. Our sister is Angel, and the girl she eventually helps to murder was Birdy. A and B. This is a schematic novel, one with interesting ways to explore shifting points of view. It’s got a nifty sense of place, too, and makes a fun pair with Ready, Set, Oh!, Diane Josefowicz’s fine and spooky 2022 novel.

March 15, 2023 (permalink)

In Catalonia for the Hypertext Conference, we saw plenty of Roman ruins. Some, like Tarragona, I expected, but others (Emporias!) were a remarkable surprise. On the way home, I had a nice dip into the Decline and Fall. One night, wanting to look beyond my familiar reading stack, I grabbed this. What fun!

Gibbon published the start of The Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. His cadences have the resonance of that era’s best writing, and he is a subtly funny writer, the master of adding a footnote or choosing an extra adjective to turn a statement on its head. This volume is filled with finely-written, accessible and engaging pieces on such topics as Gibbon’s style, his library and note-taking practices, and his knowledge of the city of Rome. More fun than a book like this has any right to be.

January 4, 2023 (permalink)