Well, it’s 2021; we’re locked in now, and it already feels like it’s been a full year since 1 January. Needless to say, this has been a lot to deal with, and I have been taking refuge, once again, in the written word (and the spoken one — there’s a lot of audiobooks on this list, yet again). I’ll note, once again, that this absolutely unmanageable rate of book consumption would not have been possible without the services of the Libby app, and I am once again urging you to check out your local library’s digital offerings.

So, without further ado, let’s go.

※

So the first three books I finished this year — Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, and In an Absent Dream, also by Seanan McGuire — are all parts of series and will be discussed later, which means the first one up for real is Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.

The cover design is really nice, though.

And not to lead off on a sour note, but I do not understand what was happening in this one. The novel follows an out-of-work marketing designer, left unemployed by the Great Recession, who finds work at the titular bookstore, and eventually comes to learn that the bookstore is part of a network of such places dedicating to cracking an impenetrable code designed by some guy in the Renaissance, I think? He meets a cute girl who is a coder for Google — this is plot relevant — who inexplicably likes him, and his roommates are quirky types, one a dedicated foodie and the other a prop designer — which is also, to the novel’s credit, plot relevant. And don’t get me wrong: it’s fun and light and pacey, and vaguely book-themed, which I always like, and the scenes in the titular bookstore are delightful. Sloan evokes this fictional San Francisco book haven with the kind of delight in the off-kilter and temporally dislocated quality that the best bookstores (in my humble opinion) have in lively prose that often verges on the gleeful.

But the Google element, read now, in 2021, when we all know what the fuck is up with Google — sorry, Alphabet — feels weird. The narrator and the cute girl have a sort of blind faith in Google as like, fundamentally a good thing, which is fine as far as it goes, but I feel like that stopped being a tenable position some time prior to the novel’s publication (which was in 2012) and has certainly been confirmed since. To add to that, the cute girl (named Cat, because she is quirky and a coder and thinks the narrator’s kind of creepy initial advances are okay somehow) seems to be an unironic invocation of the manic pixie dream girl trope, and I feel like that one was kind of on the way out even at the time of the novel’s publication. Added to that is the fact that the narrator’s childhood best friend is now a successful animator whose company specializes in titty mechanics (I am not shitting you), and the whole thing honestly felt like something that would have been fun as hell in 2005, was already a little retrograde in 2012, and could hardly be better than a bit of a letdown in 2021. And at least one reviewer has noted its similarity to Lev Grossman’s execrable Codex, which I read last year — and having been presented by the comparison, it’s pretty inescapable: it was, in fact, a lot like Codex, except slightly less annoying but with added pro-Google propaganda.

Readers of recent prior book round-ups may recall that I had conflicted feelings about Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea; I wanted to like it, but something about it just wasn’t quite landing. And sometimes you encounter something that you want to like enough that you are willing to sink more time into making yourself like it — I know I’ve done this with The Smiths (not worth it), black coffee (very worth it), and whiskey (mixed results) — so I did what anyone in my position would do and reread it in a different format.

A different cover from the one I used in my earlier round-up.

This time, I went for an audiobook instead of an ebook, and seemed to do the trick: the audiobook is beautifully performed, and the more even but overall increased reading speed — I listen to my audiobooks, now, at one-and-a-half times the recorded speed — helped smooth out some sticking points I had with the novel previously. It’s also worth noting that my family read aloud a great deal when I was growing up, and I often listened to audiobooks in my youth, so the familiarity of the format and the soothing quality of having someone read you a story may also have added to the experience. What seemed before an uneasy coupling of genres — is it sort of normal contemporary fantasy, or is it a Calvino-esque exploration of how stories operate? — now fit together well, the more conventional contemporary fantasy elements providing more agile plotting than oulipian forms can often equal, while the reflections on what stories are and how they move within us felt as if they had more room to breathe. On reflection, I see too that I read it in fairly close proximity to The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, one of my all-time favorite books about books and the people who love them, which may have impacted my enjoyment somewhat.

Were some parts — like the giant Barnes and Noble in Times Square as a plot-relevant location, or Starbucks locations being places where bibliophile espions can garner information — still a little cringe? Sure. But it felt less bad and more fun this time around, or at least easier to overlook, and besides that, the movement of the plot made more sense. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Starless Sea works substantially better as a book devoured rather than savored — and honestly, I liked it enough on round two that I may purchase a paper copy to see how that feels.

never meeting.jpg — I love this angry cat, and there’s at least one essay about an angry cat in here, too.

Next one was Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee, and again, that will be discussed later, when I can cover the Machineries of Empire trilogy in aggregate. But I then burned through Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

The title, unsurprisingly, is a bit of a joke, given than this one covers not only a variety of real-life encounters, including awkwardly attending a straight wedding as an obviously queer person and a lovely reflection on a friendship that started as a relationship and transformed into something possibly even more fulfilling, but also Irby’s meeting (on Twitter), and subsequent decision to move in, with her now-wife. There’s also Irby’s argument for why she should be the next Bachelorette, her recognition that she has an anxiety disorder, and the tale of a terrible Christmas and an even worse birthday.

I don’t know if I can give an honest appraisal of Irby’s work, but my inclination is to say that it verges on life-alteringly good. Her pitch-perfect instinct for comedy, her willingness to let ambivalence flourish, and her ability to offer a more literary and better equivalent of a shrug and an “It is what it is” is unparalleled, and I’ve never seen it in combination — not like this. I cannot recommend her writing highly enough.

But all books come to an end eventually, and I had to follow it with something or face being left alone with my thoughts — and god knows, we can’t have that. So I moved on to Wilder Girls, Rory Power’s debut novel. It’s been billed as a sort of gender-flipped Lord of the Flies, and I also heard it was gay, and the cover art is really fucking nice, and all three of these things in combination was enough to sell it for me.

I mean, look at this cover! The art is by Aykut Aydogu, and here’s his website.

The novel follows three students at a girls’ boarding school off the coast of Maine, a year and a half into their quarantine. The island on which the school is located has been stricken with the Tox, a mysterious illness that affects not only the residents of the school but the very land around it, rendering even the flora and fauna of the island — already odd, home as the place is to “Raxter blues,” which can denote both an iris and a species of crab — inedible. And its effects on the humans on the island are bad enough: girls are stricken with it as with puberty, some losing eyes, some gaining strange glows, and some losing their minds entirely. And while the humans of the island, their numbers dwindling as time goes on, have been supported by semi-regular shipments of food and supplies, brought to them from the mainland by the CDC and the Navy, something isn’t quite adding up.

Wilder Girls was atmospheric and neatly constructed, shifting between three different viewpoint characters with relative ease; the characters were compelling and well-observed. But what sold me the most on it was Power’s ability to convey how girls in groups are around each other. I’m not a girl, but they thought I was at one point, and Power’s unsparing eye for the unstable allegiances, rapidly shifting perceptions, and casual disregard for blood found among adolescent girls really stood out to me. The girls at Raxter School are not romanticized, except to the degree that they romanticize each other; the two remaining teachers — some of the only adults with a substantial presence in the novel — are equally well-realized, their motivations and alliances shifting as the characters gradually uncover more of what has lead them to this place. The nature of the Tox and its impact on the ecology of the island was, if not necessarily realistic, definitely interesting, and the changes wrought in Raxter Island reminded me of early scenes in Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (and that’s high motherfucking praise). If you, too, occasionally look at a piece of media and whisper to yourself, “Just fuck me up,” before diving in, this is a good one.

And now I can talk about Yoon Ha Lee’s magnificent Machineries of Empire trilogy, since this is where I finished Revenant Gun, the third and final book in the trilogy proper (though Yoon has also written a number of short stories in the same setting, I now see).

The covers of all three books — honestly, I think they deserve better, but these are pretty cool.

The novels loosely follow the actions of Kel Cheris, an officer in the army of the Hexarchate, a galaxy-spanning empire; after doing some potential calendrical heresy (come with me), she is offered a chance to “redeem herself” in the eyes of her superiors by playing host to the consciousness of Shuos Jedao, a long-dead general who was a genius tactician — but also a mass-murdering war criminal. As Cheris and Jedao come to know one another, and learn to work together, it emerges that the Hexarchate is not the benevolent empire Cheris might have hoped it was, but rather something to be destroyed however possible.

Look, I don’t want to spoil anything here, and given the beauty of Yoon’s plotting, I would hate to do that to anyone. I recall reading Yoon’s short fiction back in the early aughts and being blown away by its elegant construction and frequent reliance on math instead of, say, biology or astrophysics for its broad concepts. And Machineries of Empire is a great example of that: many of the Hexarchate’s most jaw-dropping tactical weapons hinge on adherence to the high calendar, which is cemented by more-or-less holy days and enacted by infantry or space ships moving into particular formations. Which is all wild enough, but as the novels progress, the actual toll and function of these elements is made steadily more clear: mentioned passingly in the first book, described in more detail in the second, and displayed, finally, horribly, in the third. The slow realization of the casual cruelty of the empire, and its ultimate rationale, is phenomenally well-executed.

But while these concepts are amazing, they almost pale in comparison to Yoon’s attention to detail, both in character and in setting: the characters are shown to have hobbies — they do things for fun beyond simply being members of a galaxy-spanning imperial army — and the settings and garments are described with spare and tantalizing detail. In my limited experience with military science fiction, these details are often overlooked, character reduced to cogs in the war machine, settings simplified into weapons-grade Apple-store futurism. That’s not the case here, and the physical details of the world deepen as the books progress, taking a number of unexpected and beautifully-wrought turns in the process. I really, strongly urge anyone interested in what science fiction — and especially military science fiction — can be to read them as soon as possible.

I followed this with the first of several books I got in a little orgy of book-buying immediately following the holidays: Heaven by Emerson Whitney. And it proved to be an extremely pleasant surprise.

The UK cover, I think: the image comes from the Book Depository.

Admittedly, I did not expect to like it: publicity surrounding the book compared it frequently to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, about which I had very mixed feelings, and Nelson was, in fact, instrument in Heaven’s genesis. But my beef with The Argonauts largely stems from, frankly, not thinking Maggie Nelson is that interesting as a person, and certainly not as interesting to me as her partner, Harry Dodge, and regardless of whether I liked it, it was still a singular reading experience: I devoured it in, if I recall correctly, less than 48 hours, sitting up late with it and ranting about it in the morning. So I was curious, knowing what little I knew about Whitney, whether Heaven might not be similar, with the added benefit that I was actually interested in hearing about Whitney’s experience as a nonbinary person (and the mom stuff, I guess).

I need not have worried: Heaven, too, I burned through in about 48 hours, and while I question some of Whitney’s stylistic decisions (there are punctuation marks other than commas and periods, and you’re allowed to use them), I nonetheless found Whitney’s memoir of their gender and their conflicted relationship with femininity as embodied by their mother and their grandmother extremely compelling. Perhaps wisely, the bulk of the book focuses on Whitney’s childhood — fraught and unstable when they lived with their mother, idyllic, if a little staid, when living with their grandmother — and reflections on how gender and theory connect with everyday life in a body; there are only so many ways to be a teenager in dire straits, and Whitney glosses some of their adolescent and early adult experiences, which in my opinion served to strengthen the book. It emerges as something simultaneously still-tender and held at a distance, not easily explicable but also less bizarre than it might seem. I also appreciated that Whitney copped early on to having been able to afford top surgery by virtue of a settlement from a horrifying car accident they were involved in, but that’s neither here nor there.

The cover of the first edition from Wikipedia.

Next up was A.J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten, which I’ll discuss when I arrive at its sequel, which I also read within the timespan covered by this round-up. (I am desperately seeking to engage with observable reality only as much as I have to.) But the next one I finished was, perhaps surprisingly, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, for the very first time. Which is not to say that prior attempts had not been made: I’ve been trying to read Neuromancer, or thinking about how I should probably read Neuromancer, or bitching about a lot of things trying to do Neuromancer and fucking it up as if I were in a position to comment, for roughly half my life. But it’s 2021; we’re living in the dystopian cyberpunk future (unfortunately), and the time seemed right. Also Cameron likes it.

It certainly was: despite certain of the developments in actual technology in the forty-odd years since the book was published, Gibson’s imagining of the virtual world as spacialized and personified remains extremely vivid, and his characters evince a kind of shattered flat affect — until they don’t — in a way that feels very true-to-life. I was pleasantly surprised, too, by the style, which owes more to the Beats and ‘70s science fiction (you know, the weird shit) than I had anticipated. That style, flirting as it does with stream-of-consciousness but nonetheless rattling against its punctuation, was honestly what made the novel for me. After all, I’ve read my share of genre-defining novels, and the quality of invention is not what makes them classics — it’s the way the story’s told that keeps them feeling fresh. This was also my first encounter with Gibson, and I am excited to maintain the acquaintance.

Honestly, the covers are all really nice.

And now we come to the most-recent book-length entry in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, Across the Green Grass Fields; the two prior entries were some of those first three books of the year that I glossed above, and the three prior entries in the series were discussed elsewhere. And I must admit, the more recent entries have been a little more hit-or-miss for me — not because the writing has declined in quality, or even because they’re not compelling, but simply because, in the case of In an Absent Dream, it bummed me the fuck out, and in Across the Green Grass Fields, I just am not to any substantial degree a Horse Girl, and this most recent one is very much a book for and about Horse Girls. Which is fine! Horse Girls can have nice things! It just didn’t grab me as much. Come Tumbling Down, on the other hand, was thrilling — and this demonstrates the structural beauty of the Wayward Children series.

As the series progresses, it becomes clear that odd-numbered entries will follow a through plotline, advancing the stories of characters introduced in Every Heart a Doorway, while even-numbered entries in the series provide backstories and side-stories, exploring characters either mentioned in the main plotline, or who will become relevant later. This structural decision simultaneously keeps the books very short, which is kind of nice every now and then, but also allows the stories room to roam, taking a languid approach to large-scale plotting for which I am and long have been a sucker (blame LOST, if you want). It does look as if at least two more books can be expected in the series, which is certainly an exciting prospect, which is certainly an exciting prospect.

I might actually like the cover of this one more than its predecessor.

The next one I finished was Drowned Country by Emily Tesh, the follow-up to Silver in the Wood, with which it forms a duology. I actually purchased the ebook of this one right around the time of its release last year, and then forgot about it, which is sort of in line with my journey to reading the first one.

Honestly, though, I wish I hadn’t forgotten about it, or at least had thought to reread Silver in the Wood before embarking on it: in all of the stuff of the last year or so, elements of the first book — novella, really — had sort of receded in my memory, and it took a moment for me to find my footing again. But once I did, the story was very engaging, following tenderly and clearly on the characters’ actions through the course of Silver in the Wood and expanding on some of the ideas put forward in the first novella. Again, though, I wish I’d thought to reread the first one — so I might just have to reread them both together at some point for a clearer picture of what Tesh has so beguilingly wrought.

I followed it up, though, with another completely disarming novella: Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted — which I have to say, I probably would have loved even if I weren’t familiar with Gailey’s work through the delightful Magic for Liars. But where Magic for Liars examined and reworked tropes of the contemporary fantasy detective novel to great effect, Upright Women Wanted reminds me of nothing so much as Deadlands: Hell on Earth in several ways that basically calibrate it to make me love it. The story follows a young woman who runs away to join the Librarians, a group of women who travel from town to town in a troublingly plausible future that looks more like the old west. But in seeking to escape the trauma of her past, she also must confront the horrible inequities of the society she has been raised to accept.

Our main character, Esther, is very compelling: she’s a bit of a blank slate in a way that makes sense, and her sense of disorientation on joining the Librarians, only to discover that they are not what she had been lead to believe, feels believable rather than simply an excuse for other characters to explain things to her. As she begins to understand how her world is bound on every side — by patriarchy, heteronormativity, and “the War,” an ominous, omnipresent social force used to predictable ends by a deeply fascist government — she also learns how and why to fight against it, and what it is the Librarians are actually doing. (Hint: not just distributing “approved materials.”) I burned through this one in a day, and my sole regret is that more people I know have yet to read it so we can talk about how good it is. Please, do yourself — and me, if we talk — a favor.

In case it wasn’t clear, this is a novel about New York City.

And here is where I finished The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin’s first novel since the Broken Earth trilogy made spec-fic history. I’ll admit, I dragged my feet a little on reading it, if only because I sometimes grow tired of hearing about how amazing New York City is — which of course I now regret. Apparently, it’s the first in the projected Great Cities series, the second novel of which is delayed due to… you know… 2020, and her short story, “The City Born Great,” serves as a prequel to it.

The novel follows several characters as they come to realize that they represent the different boroughs of New York City, and seek to find where their sixth member, who represents the city as a whole, may be hidden. They are aided, eventually, by the city of Sao Paolo, himself recently awakened, and racing against time to prevent Lovecraftian horrors from sapping the life out of New York for their own nefarious ends.

I am not intimately familiar enough with New York to comment on the intricacies of inter-borough rivalries, but the novel was good enough that I almost wish I were — and I am well enough informed to know that a twist was actually funny as hell. I am, however, extremely curious to see what the story goes as the books eventually progress: The City We Became ends on a note that feels like a hope spot before things head south again, and based on my experiences with Jemisin’s prior works, and I can’t imagine it’ll be anything less than phenomenal.

Which brings me to The Archive of the Forgotten, A.J. Hackwith’s sequel to The Library of the Unwritten, mentioned earlier. Both books loosely center around Claire and Brevity, the former a deceased human, the other a representative of the Muse Corps, and their adventures surrounding the Library of the Unwritten, a part of Hell’s vast library (one among many in the various underworlds and afterlives), which catalogs books that went unwritten in their authors’ lifetimes. Other characters include Hero, an escapee from one of the unwritten books, Ramiel, a watcher angel seeking Heaven’s grace, and a variety of other angels, demons, valkyries, and bards. The Archive of the Forgotten follows fairly closely on the events of the first book, so I will say no more about the plot.

hells library extant.jpg — See what I mean about the covers? They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but they do look more serious than the novels actually are.

But I will say that the packaging was a little misleading (we’re all shallow, we’ve all done it): done up like fancier and more literary books about books and the people who love them, the design does a disservice to the Good Omens-esque capers within. Which is not to say that the books are devoid of literary weight — they’re plenty well-written, the characters well-drawn — but rather that they’re much more of a romp than I’d anticipated. And that may be part of why I enjoyed Archive of the Forgotten rather more than Library of the Unwritten (alongside possible format-based issues; I read the first book in ebook form, and the second I enjoyed as an audiobook): where Library… sort of brought the gang together, Archive… delves a little more into the characters’ group dynamics, and how they are caught up in their own foibles, to say nothing of machinations infernal and divine. In any case, they were quite enjoyable, and I look forward to the release of the third novel later this year.

It was here that I finished C. L. Polk’s Witchmark, the first in the Kingston cycle; I’m currently reading the second and have the third, released just last week, awaiting me on my bedside table (for once), so it and its sequels will be discussed later — but I have to take a moment here to say that I am loving these books. They’re so good. I cannot wait to gush about them at greater length. But here, I must move on to my next finished book: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko.

The truly lovely cover. I especially enjoy the typeface and design, and the central illustration is a really nice imagining of the main character.

In a fantasy realm inspired by West African mythologies, Tarisai is dispatched from her lonely childhood home to become one of the future ruler’s Council of 11, part of her distant, mysterious mother’s plan to do away with Crown Prince Ekundayo for reasons unknown. Tarisai, desperate for belonging, seeks to throw off her mother’s magical injunction to murder the crown prince — but as the novel progresses, and the inequities that make life in the empire of Aritsar possible grow steadily more clear to her, Tarisai is thrown into a race against time to save her friend, and the empire from itself.

Released last year to positive reviews (this one from Publisher’s Weekly gives an idea), and with a sequel due out later this year, Raybearer is very much a book I’m excited to share with others: the worldbuilding and the characters are rich and well-rounded, the plot unfolding elegantly as its builds to its climactic scene. I’m definitely looking forward to Redemptor’s release later this year, not only to see how the rest of the story unfolds, but also because Tarisai is an extremely compelling character, and Ifueko is a truly gifted writer, whose career I look forward to following.

※

That brings us more or less up to the present moment, and it’s frankly about all I’ve got in me. Worth noting that, where I haven’t specifically linked to a source for the cover images, they came from Goodreads or, in a few cases, Amazon, which certainly doesn’t need the traffic. Happy reading, friends.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books Edgar reviews above, alongside others that have been reviewed and referenced.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, January-February 2021