The book opens with:
It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
He was there, waiting. He was the first one, standing lounging trying to look occupied or at least innocent, under the shed in front of the closed blacksmith's shop across the street from the jail where his uncle would be less likely to see him if or rather when he crossed the Square toward the post-office for the eleven oclock mail.
The book is among other things a murder mystery. It's also a coming of age story for the main character, Chick Mallison, the unnamed “he” in the second paragraph, who hopes to prevent a lynching, and it's a social novel about race relations and about the way that the white South remembers the Civil War.
Most of Intruder in the Dust is written in a distinctive stream of consciousness style. Back when I was in high school one of my teachers issued a not-for-credit challenge: diagramming the long sentence in the third paragraph of “The Whiteness of the Whale” from Moby-Dick. One kid (not me) succeeded. A real challenge, though, would be diagramming some of the longer sentences in Intruder in the Dust, some of which go on for well over a page and defy all ordinary rules.
The second book in the trilogy beginning with Little Thieves. The main characters continues to have a complicated romantic relationship, complicated relationships with various gods, and a complicated relationship with the law. The book is partly about justice in a world where the powerful are legally untouchable, and partly about the lasting consequences of unresolved trauma.
The main character is the god-daughter of Death and Fortune, which is a mixed blessing, and early in the book she acquires a curse from yet another of the Low Gods. It's a heist novel, although not in the sense that the main character initially imagined.
This book is loosely inspired by the Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” which I haven't read, and the land it's set in is reminiscent of pre-modern Germany in the time of the Holy Roman Empire. First of a YA trilogy.
Superpowers in the comic book sense of powerful extranormal abilities, and also superpowers in the sense of major world states. This graphic novel is about the play between those two things: tensions between a handful of extraordinarily powerful individuals, and their relations with countries like the US, as an extension of nuclear age dangers and brinksmanship.
Maybe I've just watched too much of The Good Place, but I'm amused that the main character is a nerdy looking glasses-wearing Francophone Black guy who worries deeply about different theories of ethics. The book begins with him saying “Of course, the ethical thing to do is take over the world.”
A YA novel about an early teenage boy who's who's threatened by dangers like dragons, assassins, plague, and his father, a brutal and vengeful Earl determined to recover the wife and child who are trying to escape him and build a new life under new names. Charl is fascinated by sword-fighting, but his mother is more concerned that he learn to solve his problems without becoming a murderer. Ghosts, fortunately, don't exist. Everyone knows they're just a pagan superstition.
One of the finalists for the 2026 Lodestar. It's set in the same world as Serafina and its sequels, but I think there's no connection between them.
Unrelated to the kid's books from the middle of the last century. It's a graphic novel about Nnedi's cat Periwinkle Chukwu, who, at least in his own mind (and maybe in reality; who knows with cats?), has his own spaceship and defends his humans against hot sauce aliens and invading mind-control plants.
A fairytale-like novella, and one of this year's Hugo finalists. A girl, the daughter of a Grand Duke in the human kingdom of Prosper, has to contend with the war between Prosper and the Summer Lands, and also with the curse she accidentally laid on her brother. The war and the curse both end up having a lot to do with toxic masculinity.
The title refers to fanfic, of course, but that's not what the book is about. (Although it is an in-book joke.) It's a romance between two Southern California high school girls, Brenda Nguyễn and Kat Woo, who meet cute in a coffeehouse. A romance story always involves some barrier or misunderstanding between the couple, and in this case it's that the girls are indeed from alternate universes. Brenda gets the wrong idea when Kat says her high school offers Advanced Spelling, and Kat gets the wrong idea when Brenda talks about her party's adventures in D&D.
A retelling of Cinderella, but as a ghost story. One of this year's Hugo finalists for Best Novella.
A fairy tale and love story, set somewhere near the border between elfland and the fields we know, with lots of grammar. I also thought it was somewhere near the border between sweet and twee.
One of this year's Hugo finalists for Best Novella.
Flags in the Dust is one of Faulkner's earliest books, and in a sense also one of his latest. It was originally published as Sartoris in 1929, heavily abridged, and the full version was only published posthumously in 1973. It's the novel where the fictional Yoknapatawpha County first appeared.
The book is set in 1919 and early 1920, and some of the characters have just come back from France, but when people in it talk about The War, the one that ended in 1918 isn't the one they have in mind. The book centers on the declining Sartoris family, whose men die young in stupid, pointless, flamboyant ways, and it's largely about being under the shadow of the past. It's dominated by someone who died decades before the book began, the Confederate cavalry officer, railroad builder, legislator, and Klansman, Col. John Sartoris.
Owen Mallory is a young history professor who specializes in the stories of Sir Una Everlasting, the semi-legendary knight, with distinctly Arthurian vibes, whose name and heroic feats are still remembered a thousand years later and who was at the beginning of her country's rise to greatness. He ends up having a more personal involvement in her story than scholars typically do, and the book ends up being about the ways stories get made and used. As Mallory's academic mentor says, “You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”
One of this year's Best Novel Hugo finalists.
One of this year's Best Novella Hugo nominees. One of the detectives wakes up in a new body, which isn't abnormal in and of itself, but several other things about it are very abnormal. She soon learns that she has at least one murder to investigate, possibly including her own.
The title comes from an Ogden Nash rhyme: “O adolescence, adolescence, / I wince before thine incandescence!” The main character isn't an adolescent, though. She's Dr. Saffy Walden, a teacher and school administrator at a posh boarding school. The book begins with her filling out a risk assessment form in preparation for teaching an advanced class.
Walden's colleagues—in particular, those who were her responsibility, the loosely grouped Faculty of Magic here at Chetwood School—possessed, as a body, an admirable and well-judged lack of imagination. In the three years since she took the post as Director of Magic, she had had someone in her office once a term to weep on her shoulder and say but why would anyone ever—
Some of these people had been teaching for years, and yet they still managed to be surprised how bloody stupid the average teenager could be, given a group of friends to impress and a fifteen-second video about major invocation that they found on the internet somewhere.
It turns out that a middle aged teacher with an Oxford education and a Ph.D. in magic from Stanford is still quite capable of making very bad decisions.
The first book of a fantasy trilogy, and one of this year's Hugo Best Novel nominees. It's partly a novel of political intrigue, where it's clear from the first chapter that some of the characters are extremely ruthless and ambitious, and then we gradually learn what true ruthlessness is. It's also a murder mystery. There are several shocking twists, most of which I didn't see coming, but none of which seem cheap or unmotivated or unfair.
A novel of first contact. The Concerns have sent an exploitation expedition to the system they call Prospector413, and they encounter something they hadn't expected on a moon of a gas giant. The aliens are genuinely alien, neither they nor the humans can understand each other, and they have very different notions of personal identity. It's reminiscent of Mission of Gravity in some ways, and Solaris in others.
One of this year's Hugo Best Novel nominees.
The main character of Death of the Author, like Nnedi Okorafor herself, is a well known Nigerian-American science fiction writer. Death of the Author alternates a third-person narrative closedly focused on Zelu Onyenezi-Onyedele, interviews with family and other people who knew Zelu, and excerpts from her wildly successful novel, Rusted Robots, set in post-human Nigeria. Both the story and the story-within-the-story are, among other things, about stories.
It's partly a history of the Renaissance, and partly a history of the ways that people in the centuries since the Renaissance have viewed it and have used it in their own ideological projects. Partly the book is about how the Renaissance was longer, more diverse, and weirder than one might have thought. Partly it's about how history is made: what kinds of questions historians ask, what methods they use to study the past, how those methods and questions and answers have changed over time. Or to use a bigger word, it's partly about the historiography of the Renaissance.
When I was reading this book in a waiting room, one of the other people saw me reading it and wistfully talked about how marvelous the Renaissance was, how the people back then accomplished so much. The subtitle of this book, though, is “The Myth of a Golden Age.” One of the reasons we have a tendency to think of the Renaissance as a golden age is that many of the authors of that time wanted their readers to think it was or could be, and another is that various people since then have had reason to portray it that way. Some of this is literally circular and self perpetuating.
Inventing the Renaissance is written in an informal style and the author is part of the story, from her dissertation research in Florence, to an academic dispute involving her advisor's advisor, to the conclusions she draws from the classes where she has her students reenact the Papal election of 1492. I learned a lot of fascinating details, including the status of atheism in the 15th and 16th centuries, the improbable life of “goldsmith-sculptor-necromancer-assassin-polymath” Benvenuto Cellini, what Niccolò Machiavelli meant in his own time, the reason that the Norse Greenland settlements vanished. (Not the incorrect reason that Jared Diamond gave.) I also learned new ways of thinking about the Renaissance.
A novel of the decaying Compson family, originally published in 1929. Yes, it deserves its reputation as a difficult novel, especially the first section, Benjy's stream of consciousness narrative. I think it also deserves its reputation as a great novel, but I'll have to reread it now that I've more or less put together the sequence of events. Things get clearer as the novel goes on, especially with the appendix that Faulkner wrote for the 1945 The Portable Faulkner, chronologically tracing the Compson family from 1699 through the present.
The title comes from Macbeth, of course, and part of the book is literally a tale told by an idiot.
A Gervase Fen detective story, published 1945. It's significant that it's set during the Battle of Britain.
There's a reason people associate John Dickson Carr with locked room mysteries.
Sequel to The Witch Roads, and the second book of a duology. It's a somewhat open ended ending, and some mysteries are left unanswered, but yes, it does feel like a finished story.
None of the characters are William Bligh or Fletcher Christian, and the Renegat isn't exactly the Bounty in space, but it has some of the same vibes.
I've seen some descriptions of this book as a mystery novel, or a thriller, or even noir. That really isn't the tone of the book, even though it might sound like it from the plot description. It mostly takes place in an isolated hamlet outside a smallish village, near the Czech border. The main character and narrator is a loner who usually likes animals better than humans, and a few of her neighbors, one by one, start dying by accident or violence. She has her own theory, which she writes incessantly to the police about: they were murdered by the deer and other animals, taking revenge on hunters. Most of the book is her meditations on astrology, the nature of the world around us, what we're like.
As soon as the Sun came close to the horizon, a family of Bats began to make regular appearances. They'd fly in noiselessly, softly; I always thought of their flight as being fluid. Once I counted twelve of them, as they flew around each house in turn. I'd love to know how a Bat sees the world; just once I'd like to fly across the Plateau in its body. How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise?
Toward evening I would sit outside and wait for them to appear, to fly in one by one from over the Professor's house, as they visited each of us in turn. I gently waved to them in greeting. The truth is I had a lot in common with them—I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn't suited to living in the Sunlight.
The title comes from Blake, as do all of the epigraphs. I recognized some of them, since some are famous enough to be recognizable even to someone like me who doesn't read much poetry, but only some. This book must also have posed a challenging problem for the translator! Part of it is about translation: the main character and one of her few friends are working on translating Blake. In one chapter they quote a short poem in the original English and compare four possible Polish versions, discussing the nuances of the word choices, which the translation I read, of course, rendered back into English.
Part of the InCryptid urban fantasy series.
Grandma sighed. “You're right, honey. Alex, I'm sorry. You know we're only worried about you, right? Lycanthropy is nothing to play around with.”
The most recent novel in the Tyrant Philosophers series. The book lets us see from the viewpoints of many different characters and it's broadly sympathetic to almost all of them, including the ones who have made bad mistakes or done terrible things. “It's just the things he has to do, for his army, for his nation. None more dangerous in the world than someone who thinks he can do bad things for a bad cause, but remain a good man.”
C'era una volta…
— Un re! — diranno subito i miei piccoli lettori.
— No, ragazzi, avete sbagliato. C'era una volta un pezzo di legno.
Pinocchio was first published as a serial in Giornale per i banbini beginning in 1881, and in book form in 1883. There have of course been many translations into English and other languages, but many of them have been sloppy or heavily abridged or heavily adapted, often more novelizations of the 1940 Disney cartoon than actual translations of Collodi's book. I read Perella's late 20th century translation in an excellent dual-language edition published by University of California Press, also including a long critical essay and the original illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti.
A mystery novel including Richard III must, of course, have a callback to The Daughter of Time. This is a 20th century country house mystery where the host and his guests are all Richard enthusiasts, members of a society dedicated to proving that he was framed. Crimes ensue, which seem to be related to the events 500 years earlier.
“Though the infernal path is paved in corpses, savor the journey, for one day you will be a body on the road to another's ruin.”
“Uh, thanks?”
“Poem I wrote when I left home and all that shit behind.”
A novella in the Tyrant Philosophers series, the backstory of one of the main characters in Days of Shattered Faith. It begins when the main character is a small girl, some time before the first book of the series, City of Last Chances, and finishes just before the beginning of Days of Shattered Faith. As the author's note at the end of the story says, the series as a whole is “about small people being caught in the wheels of history.”
A novella, as opposed to one of James's ginormous novels. The subtitle is “A Study,” and it is indeed a study of the young American tourist Daisy Miller, as seen theough the eyes of the slightly older American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne. It's at least partly about a contrast between two subtly different classes of wealthy late 19th century Americans, and it's not clear that either of the two main characters understand each other even at the end of the book.
A complicated what-might-have-been, with magic.
A scavenger manages to get her hands on a mysterious new technological artifact, and there's more to it than appears at first sight. It's partly a story of survival and revenge, and partly a love story.
A novella set at roughly the same time as The Nightmare Stacks. Bob Howard is in Tokyo on a joint operation with the Miyamoto Group, the Laundry's Japanese counterpart. Hello Kitty is scary.
A Laundry novella, A Conventional Boy, and two bonus Laundry short stories, “Overtime” and “Down on the Farm”, with an afterword about the D&D moral panic of the 1980s.
A Conventional Boy takes place some time after The Fuller Memorandum and before The Rhesus Chart. The main character is Derek Reilly, who appears as a minor character in other Laundry books, and he's a victim of that moral panic: at the beginning of the story he's been imprisoned for decades in a secret camp for dangerous wizards and cultists because the Laundry, just like the more mundane authorities, had trouble realizing at first that D&D was just a game.
A historical fantasy about a different version of the late 18th century, where one of the great struggles between aristocrats and commoners is the right to practice magic, and where slavery is even more horrific than in our world. All but one of the main characters are historical figures, I think, including the revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins in Paris, and the parliamentarians and abolitionists William Pitt and William Wilberforce in London. It's obviously the first of a series.
The book reminded me in some ways of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the parts about the French Revolution reminded me of Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. I was amused to see, in the author's photo on the flyleaf, that both of those books are clearly visible on the bookshelf behind her.
Also published as The Hollow Man. It's a classic locked-room mystery, including a chapter where the detective gives a lecture on the general theory of locked-room mysteries.
Sequel to Witch King, and a continuation of the story. Or a continution of both stories: both books have the same dual-timeline structure, alternating the story of a revolution against the Hierarchs, and a story set generations later in a world that's still trying to rebuild.
I finally understand why the previous book was called Witch King. I don't understand why this one is called Queen Demon. Only two of the characters are demons, and neither of them is a queen.
A late Gideon Fell book, published 1958, just a few years before Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It starts off as a midcentury American small town novel about academics with unhappy marriages, and then we get the locked room mystery. The mystery itself is inspired by a (fictional) unwritten Wilkie Collins novel, including letters from Collins to Dickens hinting at the clever trick.
It's a long novel with no single central character, but with several interlocking and overlapping storylines. It's carefully plotted, and the different storylines and groups of characters mesh together like gears.
This is also one of the books that reminds you that Dickens can be very funny, and sometimes it's the most horrible characters who are the funniest. My favorites are probably the two fortune-hunting swindlers who married each other because each of them mistakenly thought they were marrying money. The first passage that literally made me laugh out loud was when “that horrible old Lady Tippins (relict of the late Sir Thomas Tippins, knighted in mistake for somebody else by His Majesty King George the Third, who, while performing the ceremony, was graciously pleased to observe, “What, what, what? Who, who, who? Why, why, why?’) begins to be dyed and varnished for the interesting occasion.”
It begins with someone stealing hats and putting them in whimsical places, then we get the theft of an Edgar Allan Poe manuscript, then a murder. Yes, all is connected.