America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien

 

Reading this novel reminded me a good deal of reading Processed Cheese. America Fantastica is more subtle, and the points it's making are ... more varied, I think--not just privilege and wealth and inequality (though that) but also identity and the lies people tell each other and themselves. It's either kaleidoscopic or disjointed, I'm not sure I know which, and I'm not sure the going is particularly worth the ride, though there are some passages that made me laugh out loud.

Windigo Island by William Kent Kreuger

 

I spent like the first two-thirds of this novel not sure whether I really wanted to finish it. I'm kinda a sucker for mysteries set in various and sundry Native American countries (yeah, like Hillerman ..) but I really wasn't sure how I felt about all the Anishinaabeg beliefs being portrayed as though they were objectively real--I don't believe in nothing, and having mystic stuff in a mystery novel seemed like a bit of a violation, or a category error. Last third grabbed me and held tight: The characters are well-drawn, and the budding romance is handled ably, and whatever gawds there may be know the various Native American peoples got many fuzzy ends of many lollipops, and the evolution of one crime method to another as society changes was deeply believable. The couple of instances of "Hello, crime novel from 2014" not withstanding, I feel pretty good about this book, and the chances I'll look into other novels in the series are high.

Where They Wait by Scott Carson

This is an actual Horror novel. Not a big shock, reading the blurbs, but the jacket text makes it seem vaguely Mystery/Technothriller-ish, and the Mystery is a feint and the Technothriller is a disguise. This is supernatural Horror, with all sorts of other concerns--family and identity topmost--along with the typical Horror moral themes. It's pretty well-executed, though I spotted some of the moves at the end coming; whether someone spotting those things means the author's playing fair, or playing with tropes is a fair question--and I've read *a lot* of Horror over the years. I mostly don't mind, since if you're going to pull the trigger on that gun late in the story you need to show it to me earlier--and you probably want to make sure I see it, so you might show it to me more than once.

SignWave by Andrew Vachss

 Andrew Vachss wrote novels about seriously violent people doing seriously violent things. Usually the people who die are at least marginally worse than the people doing the violence. I wouldn't say the main character of *SignWave* exactly good, but he has his rules and he lives by them--and by the end he seems very much as though he's who he feels he should be, maybe taking some last step out of darkness. There's a strong whiff of noir here. I should probably read more Vachss.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

 

For whatever reason, the blurbs--even the couple-three that *explicitly* compared it to *The Stand*--weren't enough for me to twig that this was a novel of apocalyptic fiction. There's nothing wrong with apocalyptic fiction, though it's not really my fave, and I figure my failure to grok the messages I was receiving is at least partly my fault. It's a good novel, though there's some misdirection going on at places in it, and it's not as grim as apocalyptic fiction can be, which is nice--the end is ... mostly hopeful-ish. I saw at least one part of where the book was going about 100 pages before it got there, but that just means Wendig was playing fair. Apocalyptic fiction does have a tendency to have an air of "...and good riddance!" to it, and this novel does go there, but it's not persistent about it. Lots to like about this book, more if it's more your thing.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

 

Hrrrrm. This is a short-ish novel that wants to say big things. It's from 2016 and its future is already dated. The characters in it mostly aren't people I'm interested in spending time with, even the time it takes me to read a ~300 page novel. The conflict between magic and super-science is overblown and poorly resolved. The novel vacillates between twee and almost technophilic. Things are resolved by an action taken in the first half of the novel. And it still kinda sticks the landing. I've read novels I've resented reading, and I've started novels I couldn't finish or didn't want to, and this isn't either of those, but I can't really recommend it, either.

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

 

So, this was a book that I almost stopped reading a couple-three times. It's not *bad*, exactly, but it's a weird dissonant tonal mix of whimsical and grim, romantic and hopeless (and not hopelessly romantic) that basically makes for a bit of a jarring read. Also, it feels slightly over-elongated in the denouement: Your story's done, wrap it up, will you.

Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March

This is a deeply romantic series of adventures in the pursuit of solving a mystery. There are references to Doyle, it's possible the author wants people to think of it as a mystery of ratiocination, but while the resolution is well-handled the mystery isn't the strongest plot here--there's other, more interesting stuff going on, and that's fine. Sara had checked this out from the library, and I can definitely see why she stayed up late reading it.
 

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Well. I remember seeing the movie made of this book in the theaters, and I'd seen the book around here and there, but I didn't read it until now, after Sara found it in a Little Free Library and grabbed it. It's not a badly-written book, though the structure of it means it takes a while to get to what it wants to tell you. I do not think Mr. Berendt liked Savannah much--there's no way one depicts a city as the kind of shithole Savannah is in the book by accident--and I think there's exactly one character in the book Berendt liked, and it's not himself: Chablis is the closest thing the book has to a sympathetic named character (there's an unnamed old guy at a party who absolutely nails all of Savannah's shit to the wall, he's also pretty cool) and I'm not sure that's so much that Berendt liked her, exactly, as that the Black trans woman is much more sympathetic to a reader in 2023 than she probably was to the writer in the 1980s.
 

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore

It'd been probably at least a decade since I'd read this--more than the first chapter, anyway, which I read every year about this time--and I need to read this book more often. There's much more to it than that first chapter, all of it really good. I have a tendency to recommend Sacre Bleu at people without much provocation (sorry if I've done this to you) but there's a pretty good argument The Stupidest Angel is funnier; it's goofier, at any rate. It takes several snarky potshots at Christmas, but it doesn't really have much of an axe to grind, there, it's more a target of opportunity thing. Any novel that has me laughing out loud a dozen times while I'm reading it is clearly hitting my sense of humor dead-on.
 

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan

 

Well, this was a bit of a disappointment. Not *horrible*, but a bit bland. and with stakes that in the end seemed abruptly lower--in the sense the POV character's life wasn't really in danger--than they really were. Also, the author solved the problem of mobile phones by setting the novel in like 1994, which I would have been happier about if it had been explicit, if I hadn't had to piece it together from clues and hints scattered throughout.

The City We Became and The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

Read these over the weekend. They're a duology, because Ms. Jemisin ... lost the will to complete it as a planned trilogy but wasn't going to leave it unfinished. Really, *The City We Became* could have served well as a standalone novel--I thought it ended just fine--but the escalation in *The World We Make* made sense. There are some things in both books that pay off in surprising ways, and Ms. Jemisin writes smooth and engaging and funny as hell.

All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

 

I ... don't think I have words for how good this novel is. I've describe reading Cosby in conversation as being like French-kissing an electric light socket (don't French-kiss an electric light socket, that'd *hurt*) and this novel is as electrifying as his others. There's less vengeance in this than in *My Darkest Prayer* or *Razorblade Tears* but at least as much pain; guilt and grief twine in the background like vines. Bigotry and abuse of power flash at all angles. Read Cosby--unlike French-kissing an electric light socket, it won't kill you.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

 

So, this book is doing weird things in the meta--one of the conceits is that the first-person POV character, the "I" of the novel, has written "how to write a mystery novel" books, so the narrator goes to great lengths to demonstrate that he's "playing fair." That ... strangely, doesn't interfere with this working as a reasonable modern take on a Fair Play Mystery, at least to my not-deeply-involved-in-the-genre taste, without at all coming across (to me) as anything like a satire. The voice is reasonably engaging, and the characters are ... fun to find in a book, though I honestly wouldn't want to spend more real-world time with them than necessary.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark by Derek B. Miller

 

This is an interesting and very amusing book. Not goofy-funny like Christopher Moore or Terry Pratchett, but still soaked in humor. One of the blurbs uses the word "Jew-noir," and it's very noir and very Jewish. It's also, I think, something of a bildungsroman, though that's not a position I'm willing to die in a ditch over. While there's pain and vengeance in the novel, it's much more lighthearted than, for instance, S.A. Cosby; that's fine, there's room for them both.

Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

 

Spent the afternoon and evening reading this. While the title story is distinctly weird--the word I'd go for is "surreal," though that might not have been in the vocabulary yet when Kafka was writing--most of the stories here seem better described as "neurotic." The big takeaway for me is that fiction from 100-ish years ago is going to be *alien*, whatever the intent, and that's almost certainly amplified by works being in translation (though I've had bad experiences with works in translation, this wasn't one). There are some fragmentary-seeming things that don't really resolve, which these days I might be inclined to call "prose poems," and those tend to work less well than the stories, probably because what makes them work in German simply doesn't convey to English.

Machine: A White Space Novel by Elizabeth Bear

 

Wrapped the last couple-hundred pages of this after gaming tonight. It started a little slowly, a little dryly, but it got moving the last third or so--and some of the wit and humor I remembered from *Ancestral Night* appeared. It's been a couple-three years since I read that novel, and I don't remember much of it, but this novel stands more than well enough on its own.