Category: Blog

My history with this book is long, drawn-out, and expensive. Given all that, I feel the need to write a proper review, so I at least have something to show for my time and effort.

The history

Sometime between 2000 and 2002, my college pal Dillon screened the anime series Future Boy Conan (1978) for Vassar’s geek club, the NSO. The 26-episode series was Hayao Miyazaki’s directorial debut — before Studio Ghibli was even a thing — and it displays prominently the environmental themes Miyazaki will return to in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke.

Personally, I quite loved it. And yet, some fifteen years later, my memories are primarily emotional. I resonated strongly with the deep loneliness that Conan feels, and with the sense of a world lost under the rising oceans.

Also it had a pig called Umasou (Looks Delicious). So there’s that.

Dillon informed us that it was based on The Incredible Tide (1970), by Alexander Key (who I venture many Americans of my age primarily associate with Escape to Witch Mountain, of which I retain even dimmer memories). He also told us that the book was wildly out of print, and hard to acquire.

Well, of course that only made me want to read it even more.

The “hard to acquire” bit was relevant. This was before the era where ’80s and ’90s kids found their childhood re-released in ebook form. The nostalgia factor was driving prices of this volume up to absurdity in the early 2000s, mostly through Amazon resellers — if you could even find it at all. I was told at one point it had only ever been released as a library edition, further fueling its scarcity.

However, in 2004 I attended the World Science Fiction Convention when it was in Boston, and among many other things, they had a ginormous dealer’s room. Here, at the booth of Somewhere in Time Books, from St. James, NY, I traded $200 for an ultra-rare copy of The Incredible Tide.

Which proceeded to sit on my shelf for over twelve years.

Fast forward to 2017

However! An opportunity presented itself this weekend, when I found myself dog-sick with (what I suspect was probably) norovirus. I wasn’t puking, but I was nauseous and feverish, and my skin hurt. Reading in bed was pretty much all I was capable of. And a book aimed at children/teenagers seemed about all I could handle.

I suppose you should examine this review in that light — I read most of The Incredible Tide while being very ill, and it might have colored my perception. But I emerged from the weekend without hating the Rifftrax Time Chasers coloring book I was working on, or Kevin Hearne’s Hounded, or Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair (both of which I attempted to read, to varying degrees of success), so I really do think it was the book.

Because the book is… well, if the adjective “phoned in” was used in the 1970s, one might say Alexander Key phoned this book in.

Possibly via satellite phone while vacationing on a Caribbean island. Potentially while drunk on pina coladas.

What I’m saying is, the craftsmanship is just sloppy throughout. That’s overall my biggest complaint. Each of the factors I’m about to list, by itself, wouldn’t sink the book; but this general carelessness, on the whole, makes this book less than successful.

Anyway, first things first:

Plot Summary

Conan is a young boy who was abandoned on a little spit of rock when an “incredible tide” covered the world. Somehow he figures out how to survive on that rocky islet, and lives there for five years, until he’s found at the age of seventeen by the “New Order,” a group that is trying to remake the world — with technology!

Not these guys.

That makes them, by this book’s logic, the villains of the piece. In particular here we meet Dr. Manski, who becomes marginally relevant later.

At the same time, we also meet Lanna, far away in High Harbor, a community that was established by “Teacher,” a.k.a Briac Roa, when the world was going to shit. For some reason we are never told, Teacher then got captured by the New Order? But he apparently can stay in psychic contact with his daughter Mazal, whose husband Shann leads High Harbor. (Lanna is their daughter).

But there’s political unrest in High Harbor, as the New Order is trying to take over (via its agent Dyce), and a group of feral teenagers, led by a guy named Orlo, are trying to ally with them.

Pretty much, as far as I can tell, Lanna exists only to tell us this side of the story. And to have a crush on Conan. Her only other defining feature is her awful fear of vast expanses of ocean, which is totally understandable under the circumstances!

Meanwhile, Conan is “rescued” and brought to Industria, the New Order capital. They want to enslave him before he can become a citizen, and are resentful that he doesn’t seem grateful about this. He is imprisoned when he resists being branded by the New Order While imprisoned he discovers that Teacher/Briac Roa is also under the thumb of the New Order, posing as crackpot shipwright (two words I never thought I’d put together) Patch. “Patch” rescues Conan by requesting him as labor for his shipyard, and fills Conan in on his escape plan.

Their escape plan, however, goes awry. Whilst in the middle of robbing a workshop for supplies to escape, Teacher realizes that Industria is going to fall into the sea and decides that informing them of this is The Right Thing to Do ™, Right Now. He sends Conan off on the fragile boat they’ve built, while he risks his life to tell the people who have imprisoned him that he is this Briac Roa they’ve all been looking for, and hey, your city is in danger. This goes over about as well as you might imagine. He survives only because Conan comes back to rescue him.

Together they try to make their way to High Harbor, but are pursued by the New Order. A storm lands them on… the very same island Conan was stuck on for five years! The storm does away with his New Order pursuers, conveniently, except for Dr. Manski, who they just kind of run into on this giant ocean. She argues with Teacher about the existence of God while they wander around in the mists that make this post-apocalyptic sea mostly unnavigable. Finally they are able to make it back to High Harbor thanks to Lanna sending Tikki — the tern that kept watch over Conan through his time on the island — back to find him, conveniently overcoming her terror of the ocean all at one go.

The book ends with the tsunami Teacher has been predicting, which decides to show up just in time to wash away the New Order agent on High Harbor. It would have washed away Orlo, too, except that Conan decides that rescuing him is The Right Thing to Do ™. He is knocked over by the wave, but the people of High Harbor help him to his feet.

The end.

No, really, that’s where it ends. Mid-paragraph, it seems, as if the author just got sick of writing the story. What was the promise of the story, and was it fulfilled by this ending? Who knows…

Element by Element

Writing

The basic writing is bland, but not terrible. I’d call it workmanlike. No beautiful turns of phrase here, but we do get a sense, in the early chapters, of the lay of Conan’s island. It didn’t leave me with that nostalgic yearning for a world lost that Future Boy Conan did, though, but I’m willing to forgive that.

But soon enough we meet people for Conan to interact with. And augh, the dialogue. To say it is a wooden is an insult to hard-working wood. Modern reading preferences favor verisimilitude in speech in fiction; SFF, true, can get away with less. But by whatever standard, no humans anywhere talk like this. The conversations are like summaries of talking points, with many exclamation points. To give you an example, there’s this argument between Dr. Manski and Conan:

“Oh, stop talking like an idiot! Don’t you realize it took both sides to do the damage?”
“I don’t believe it!”
“But it did! Now someone has to put the pieces back together.”
“Only it has to be done your way — and with branded prisoners! You’d even take over High Harbor if you could, and rob everybody of his rights! Why you’re the dirtiest bunch that ever–”
“Shut up!” she ordered icily. “No one has any rights, not even I. Only the state has rights — the New Order. It’s only the state that–”
“State, my eye! Of all the stupid ideas!”
“You’re the stupid one! Stupid and ignorant. Of course we’ll take over High Harbor — and soon! We’ll be doing them a favor. They’re entirely incapable of looking after themselves. If you could only see–”
“I can see how warped and twisted you are! And greedy!”

Some of this might be a function of the characters, who are… well, let’s get to that.

Characterization

… is the biggest weakness of this book. Mostly, I didn’t like any of the characters, and I didn’t care what happened to them. It made reading even this little 153-page volume a real chore.

At the core of it, it’s that they are ciphers, with no internal life; more stand-ins for an ideology than real people with hopes and dreams. Most of the narration is just an action-by-action recitation of what they’re doing; occasionally we get a “this made Conan mad,” but no sense of the context, or how we’re supposed to feel about it. It becomes hard to follow, as a result — a bland landscape without value judgments. An example:

Instantly he began scrambling forward, climbing over the disorder of equipment and groping for the coil of line and the piece of broken concrete that, because of the scarcity of metal, had to serve as an anchor. He found the concrete finally, started to heave it over the bow, but thought better of it and began lowering it carefully. It was well that he did so, for he paid out nearly the entire coil before the line went slack, and when he reached the end he found that it had not been made fast to the cleat on the foredeck.

(Don’t ask me how many times my poor, sick mind had to re-read this paragraph).

Teacher at least SEEMS like he might have internality. He’s literally the world’s smartest man, a shipwright, a seismologist — and, more tellingly, the one “good” character who attempts to understand the New Order point of view. But the author doesn’t want to show us more than just a tease of who he is. Does he think the young minds that are his audience can’t handle the complexities of opposing points of view? I don’t know.

God help you if you are a female character, though. Lanna, Mazal, Dr. Manski all seem to exist to further Conan and Teacher’s plots.

The moments where Conan and Teacher choose to endanger themselves in order to help people they hate is clearly supposed to be characterization. But… it feels pasted on. We can’t predict it from their actions elsewhere. And it ends up feeling as preachy as many things in this book are; like the author is bashing us over the head with THE MESSAGE.

Speaking of which…

THE THEME

As I said, Future Boy Conan has environmental themes. The Incredible Tide has an agenda.

It starts before the book even does, with this dedication: “To a people unknown, of a land long lost — for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.”

Well, all right, then.

A few chapters in, I joked to my husband that “so far this book has been Alexander Key’s diatribe against synthetic fabrics,” and it wasn’t far from the truth. Witness these choices tidbits:

Page 29: … he was given clothes to cover his nakedness. They were old and patched, and made of a shoddy synthetic material that felt unpleasant against his skin…

Page 30: “And don’t call the food synthetic. It is the best food ever made, and the most scientific.”

Page 48: But the New Order’s cloth would help. It was sleazy, of course. It was about the worst stuff she’d ever seen. Yet it was better than no cloth at all.

Page 56: It was a pair of sandwiches made of synthetic materials, obviously the product of machines. He thrust the unpalatable things in a corner and reached eagerly for the water bag.

Of course, never is it mentioned that, hey, maybe this is the work of a society attempting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where wood and metals are rare. Nope, it’s clearly because the New Order are the villains, and therefore anything they do is bad. We should all be pitching in together and “making a game” of survivalism (this is literally how Lanna says High Harbor survives the rough times) and weaving our own wool-linen blend cloth, apparently. (Again, a thing Lanna literally does).

We don’t have much doubt as to the author’s intentions, do we? Throughout, he’s sending a message — synthetic bad. Natural good.

And by “sending” I mean “double ham-fistedly pounding you about the head and shoulders with.”

Did I mention the stuff about the Voice? Apparently if you are a protagonist, or protagonist-adjacent, you hear a voice that tells you the right thing to do at any given time. It helped Conan survive on his island, and it also tells you to do things like continue sailing blindly into the abyss, or to love your neighbor, or whatnot. This is so clearly a god-analogue that even Dr. Manski can sense it, and spends much of the penultimate chapter of the book arguing with Teacher about it.

Even if you’re religious, this is like a four year old’s understanding of God, and feels appallingly simplistic in a book that is ostensibly aimed at much older children.

And now repeat that sentence, replacing “God” with “environmental issues,” and that’s my executive summary of this element of the book.

(Idiot) Plot

The plot is the original idiot plot — driven entirely by convenience and people making really stupid choices. Some examples:

Conan apparently could have avoided capture by the New Order by fleeing to the eastern islet of his archipelago. He didn’t.

Conan could have apparently just punched out the door of his New Order prison, because it’s made of plastic. (And as we all know, plastic is an evil — and thus inherently flawed — synthetic). But he doesn’t, until he’s nearly dying of thirst, at which point Teacher convinces him not to, because… they are being watched?

Industria has been in danger from earthquakes and tsunamis since it was founded — and Teacher, theoretically, knows that — but he decides, at the moment when he and Conan are about to make their triumphant escape, to inform the authorities of this?

(In retrospect, it occurs to me that he might have seen signs that there was a recent tectonic shift, which might make the threat more imminent. But from the reader’s perspective, all we know is that Conan has a sense of dread, Teacher stops and examines a crack on the floor, and then, suddenly, they call the whole thing off. My primary reaction was largely, “huh?”, which is probably not the response the author wanted to this dramatic reveal. Again this may be largely a function of Teacher being, like every character, a cipher).

Teacher is blind. Not that this is ever relevant, because he is apparently strong in the Force, and can sense things regardless, up to and including the position of a compass needle. (No lie, he’s framed as being able to sense the world via some semi-magical, sensory-compensation-gone-wild kind of thing). It ends up feeling like Key just sorta forgot he was blind throughout half the book, so made up an explanation that he thought sounded good. (It didn’t).

How the heck does Conan ever end up on the island by himself? It’s implied that he was escaping with Teacher and Lanna before the apocalypse, and that Lanna had enough time to gift him with Tikki, but that’s about it. Why isn’t he at High Harbor with the rest of them? Did they have to drop him as ballast or something?

If Lanna is a gifted psychic communicator, why hasn’t she communicated with Conan during the FIVE YEARS they were separated? Eventually she uses that ability, together with Tikki, to bring him back to High Harbor — which only begs the question of why she didn’t do this earlier. You might be forgiven for thinking it’s her agoraphobia — the view of the vast ocean she sees whenever she ascends to the watchtower on High Harbor sickens her. But she doesn’t need to be there to communicate, as is made clear later in the book. At that point, it’s literally explained to us as, “she tried it once as a kid, and it decided it didn’t seem like something she should be able to do, so she never tried again.” Which seems merely engineered to give us the central plot complication.

The other thing I have to say about the plot is — what is it? Everybody just seems to be reacting to events around them. There’s no through-line, no drive forward, which in most modern fiction comes from the main character’s wants and needs. Conan never seems to want or need much beyond what is in front of him. As an example, he’s only escaping Industria and heading for High Harbor because it’s what Teacher wanted. We have a general idea it’s a thing he wants, too, because we know NEW ORDER BAD, but it doesn’t feel real or complex.

Still not these guys.

This is what I meant when I asked, “what is the promise of the book, and does the ending fulfill it?” I don’t know, because I literally don’t know what the plot of the book is. The end feels abrupt because we don’t know if we’ve arrived — because it’s never clear what the destination should be.

Again it ends up feeling more like ideology than story. It makes a little sense if Teacher and Conan are ciphers for Hope, Youth, Age, Wisdom, Harmony, etc, and High Harbor is some sort of Promised Land, but if these are real characters? It all falls apart.

And personally, I was hoping for characters, and a story.

Random Creepiness

I could have done with Orlo’s clearly (to an adult mind) rapey intentions towards Lanna. Witness:

“An’ do you know what Orlo an’ the commissioner plan to do?”
“What, Jimsy?”
“Take over your house. Doc an’ his wife, they gotta move. But Orlo says he’ll make you stay. That’s how he figgers on getting even for what you done.”

Wtf? I mean, YA these days tangles with some tough topics, but this childish explanation of what is basically SEXUAL ASSAULT just feels so off-the-cuff and unnecessary.

(I also would like to point out: if we’re supposed to accept High Harbor as this standard of community living in harmony with nature, then how the hell are we supposed to reckon the feral teenagers it has apparently produced?)

“Do you want feral teenagers? Because that’s how you get feral teenagers.”

Also strange and hard to explain is how everyone seems to fetishize Conan’s body, like he’s sooooo healthy and toned by living alone on an island and doing physical labor for five years. Multiple examples like this exist in the book:

Page 10: He sighed and stood up, rubbing his calloused hands over his very lean and very hard body.

Page: 29: “I’d hate to see such a fine young body thrown away. Such beautiful muscles! In all my life I’ve never seen their equal.” She felt his arms. “Like steel! The New Order needs your strength.”

Page 33: “But he’s amazing! Such health! Come here, young fellow,” the commissioner ordered, “and let’s have a look at you!”

What Age Range is this Even For?

The breakdown of middle grade/YA is a very modern one, so in general I’m okay with it being vague in books that pre-date that distinction. I recently re-read one of John Bellairs’ Johnny Dixon books, and was able to say, “hey, this is clearly middle grade, even if no one would have called it that at the time.” In many ways that’s a good comparison — they were shelved in the same place in my elementary school library, and the authors were rough contemporaries.

There is no such tell here. If you go by the age of the protagonist, The Incredible Tide is YA. But the reading level is… let’s generously say, it’s below middle grade. It’s certainly not as complex as some of the beautiful MG we have today (take the first Harry Potter novel as an example, or my pal Django Wexler’s The Forbidden Library). It reads as even more simplified than the John Bellairs.

And of course there’s the weird skirting of much more adult topics, which I don’t know how to categorize. One of my favorite YA novels (Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone) opens with a frank discussion of penises. Contrast this with MG, where there seems to be a strict “no kissing” rule — a minor crush is about as much you can show. Again, this book is not consistent with either standard.

The overall effect, then, is that Key is talking down — and quite condescendingly — to his audience. Which is like no-no number one of writing for a young audience.

In Conclusion

In general I felt like this was a manuscript, not a book. It falls prey to common pitfalls of inexperienced writers — mostly around giving us characters to empathize with, and not forcing a point of view down the reader’s throat. (And yet, this is his TWELFTH novel). I’m not sure why an editor didn’t catch any of this, but it does not, ultimately, feel like a book that could be published today.

But who am I kidding. Really, this book failed because it didn’t have a porcine character named Looks Delicious.

And with that, I can confidently say I wrapped this review up more satisfactorily than the book itself did.

If, after reading this review, you feel the incomprehensible need to read the book, fear not! The ebook is free with Kindle Unlimited ($5.38 otherwise). Makes me even more bitter about how much I spent…

Multiple people have complained to me that I seem to only read books that I hate.

This is untrue — but it’s also an understandable mistake. I read lots of books*, but I mostly only have things to say about them if they’re a) mind-blowingly good (see Uprooted, The Goblin Emperor), or b) truly awful (to my tastes) in some way (mostly I just rant about these in friends-only spaces).

*okay, relatively speaking

Just to assure you that I do read stuff that I like, here are the other books I’ve read this year — ones about which I had nothing dramatic to say. I’ll say a few more words about each, but in general they were completely satisfying literary products, and no slight is intended by their inclusion here.

The Girl in the Garden, by Kamala Nair. Recommended to me by EB. I found it entertaining, but not as profoundly awesome as EB did. An Indian-American woman recounts a tale of a fantastical childhood summer visiting her family’s home in Kerala. At first glance, it seems like the genre is magic realism, but the only magic turns out to be that of a family keeping secrets too long and too deeply…

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. Having won the “triple crown” of SFF (the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards), I had high expectations for this book. They were not entirely met, but it was still an enjoyable read. The main character, Breq, is a ship’s AI that was severed from her ship years ago, for Reasons. She’s trying to find reasons to live and get revenge on the Empire that made her what she is.

One of the things that gets a lot of buzz in this book is the pronouns: Breq was programmed by a culture that doesn’t recognize gendered pronouns in language, and she can’t read gender by the myriad cultural clues most humans recognize instinctively. The upshot is that she refers to everyone as “she.”

It’s an interesting effect, but I didn’t think it was the most clever thing about the book. The core mystery that Breq is trying to solve is kind of brain-bending ontological one, and I found it simultaneously frustrating and yet clever. Either by intention or by style, Leckie doesn’t explain anything, so you are kind of thrown into the abyss trying to figure out why so–and-so ordered such-and-such to do the Thing.

I also read some of the third book, Ancillary Mercy, as part of the Hugo voter packet. Man, that was hard to follow without having read the second book.

Overall, the way I tend to describe this series is “meditative” — it’s going somewhere, but it’s taking its time getting there.

Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear. Karen is a prostitute at an upscale brothel in steampunk-y 19th century Seattle/Portland. She finds out the ladies of her house are in danger from a serial killer, and gets embroiled in the political plot of the region in order to keep her chosen family out of danger. This book has voice by the gallon. It has a Singer sewing machine mecha. It has girls in love. It has loads of characters of color. It is very, very entertaining, but at the end of the day it didn’t affect me emotionally as much as I would like.

Of Noble Family, by Mary Robinette Kowal. The final book of the Glamourist Histories, where Jane and Vincent go to Antigua to try to manage Vincent’s deceased father’s plantation. Very dramatic and enjoyable. I thought the racial issues implicit in the setting were addressed head-on, and yet deftly and honestly handled. As always, we the reader are aware of all the ways in which Jane is privileged, and when she does boneheaded things with that privilege, it’s always clear how we should feel about that. Sometimes she uses it to do some truly awesome things, too, and I appreciated that as well.

Let me say, too, that as someone who has no desire to have children, MRK does a BRILLIANT job of making me care about the Vincents’ wanting to have children. This is what’s cool about good writing — it really is a form of mind-control.

Overall, I was definitely sad to say goodbye to Jane and Vincent, and kept feeling like there should be more adventures with them just around the corner. They are one of my favorite fictional couples, because they simulate SO beautifully what it is like to be a happily married couple that still has issues. Also, they have same anniversary as Matt and me, so I feel some personal investment 🙂

And yet on the same note, this was probably not my favorite one of the series — Valour and Vanity hit a high point with Lord Byron and gondola chases.

Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan. This is a memoir by a NY Post reporter who was afflicted by a rare type of encephalitis, and was imprisoned in her own mind for months while doctors tried to figure it out. I borrowed from the public library on a night when I really needed a treat, and knew it had to be something I’d want to read right away, and not let it sit on a table for weeks. I thought this book would fit the bill, and I was not wrong — it was fascinating and yet terrifying. I think medical memoirs hit the same thrill-seeking part of my brain as true crime, and thus are becoming the same guilty pleasure…

Honeymoon in Purdah, Alison Wearing. A Canadian woman decides to visit Iran in the 1990s, under the guise of being on her honeymoon. Funny story to how I picked this book up — I was at a Mennonite thrift store near Stratford, Ontario, waiting for my mom to finish shopping. I started reading this and found it hard to put down, so I bought it and read it before I even left Canada. It is truly fascinating, although occasionally the author’s incredible privilege — and strange, not-always-successful poetic language — got on my nerves.

The Truth About Stories: a Native Narrative, by Thomas King. I picked this one up in the Stratford Festival gift shop — it’s a series of essays (based off lectures) by King about the power of narrative, and in particular how it’s used for meaning-making in Native American/First Peoples communities. He illustrates it with stories from his own life as a Native American, traveling and lecturing across the U.S. and Canada. One of the things I found most interesting was the author’s concern, when he was a young man, with looking “Indian enough” to fit people’s narrative of what an Indian should look like. It’s not something I’d thought a lot about in terms of how people experience their identity.

Also, I love this quote so much I pinned it to the top of my Twitter feed: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”

Young Men in Spats, by P.G. Wodehouse. A collection of stories — some about the Drones Club, some Mr. Mulliner — about clueless Wodehousian young men getting in trouble. I’d read (almost?) none of these before, and it seemed just the sort of silly frippery to get me through my cat Brianna being sick. It was indeed a perfectly cheering, perfectly acceptable piece of Wodehouse to read. (And Brianna turned out to be fine).

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, by Gretchen Rubin. She of the Happiness Project blog writes about habits, giving us, as she so often does, several frameworks towards understanding how to form habits more reliably. Most of them are framed in terms of distinctions: owl vs. lark, underbuyer vs. overbuyer, etc.

One in particular which has helped me understand myself is the abstainer vs. moderator distinction. This describes how you react to reducing your intake of something like food, i.e. do you find it easier to cut a food out of your life entirely, or to have a little bit now and then? I’ve discovered I’m an abstainer, so I thrive better on “you can never have french fries” than I do “you can have french fries once a week.” With the latter, I find I spend too much mental energy trying to calculate whether or not I can actually have fries. (Also, never having French fries doesn’t apply to what I — after Gretchen — call “planned exceptions,” which is a premeditated cheat).

Overall, I like it, like I like all of Gretchen’s stuff, because it feels genuinely human and kind in its outlook. So much self-help/advice is about guilting people into behaving a certain way; hers are more about figuring out what makes you tick and trying to work with that. (And the fact that I tend to refer to her as “Gretchen” should be taken as a sign of how warmly I regard her).

Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey. I talked about this briefly in my “outleveling GRRM” post, so I’ll refer you to that. But mostly? I wanted to love this book more than I did. It gets talked up as being quite smutty, and while it does have quite a few graphic sex scenes, it’s mostly a ginormous novel of political intrigue in which BDSM occasionally plays a part. If you don’t dig that, it can actually be quite boring. I do like it, but it still felt rambling and directionless at parts.

Plus, like any novel written in the first-person, it lives or dies by voice. And Phèdre, the main character, has a voice that’s… polarizing. I feel like you either love it or you hate it. If you hate it, you won’t get very far in this book! I found it tolerable, with occasional quirks that drove me nuts. “There’s little to tell about such and such thing… but let me tell it anyway.”

I doubt I’ll read anything else in the series, as I was perfectly happy to leave Phèdre et al at the end of the book.

The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker. Another nonfiction book, this one about using one’s instincts to escape incredibly dangerous situations. Yet another “I started reading it in a bookstore and had to finish it” book. I will say, by the end I got quite bored of it; it boils down to “you have good protective instincts and you should totally listen to them.” But you can’t really teach instinct, so there’s a certain intangibility to the advice. Although, he does take various signifiers in dangerous situations apart and tell us why they are subtle clues that our prehistoric hindbrain gloms onto before we have time to intellectually process them, which is interesting.

Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Her first post-Glamourist Histories book! I was sold from the minute I read the blurb on her website. Mary is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

This book promised me “WWI mediums serve as a super-secret espionage corps of the British army,” and it delivered. Ginger, the main character, is serving as one of these mediums when she stumbles into a plot to infiltrate and destroy the Spirit Corps. She’s even more invested when the danger becomes personal.

I liked many things about this book, and I enjoyed listening to the episode of Writing Excuses where they took it apart. (One I could finally listen to without spoilers! Hooray!) I have strong emotional memories of certain scenes in the book, like one of the final ones. But overall, I didn’t feel as invested as I would have liked, and I’m not sure why. It hit some high notes, but not enough, I guess.

The Sleep Revolution, by Arianna Huffington. Sleep is awesome and you shouldn’t do what the author did, where you become so sleep-deprived that you pass out and break your cheekbone on a coffee table. But no, honestly, this validated what I already knew: that sleep is not optional, and we suffer from sleep deprivation more than we imagine, both physically and mentally. I am literally a different, more terrible person when I’m sleep deprived, which has made me a bit of a sleep zealot. This is also why I say: if you think you have sleep apnea, get checked, yo.

Grunt, by Mary Roach. More nonfiction. I’ve actually never read any of Roach’s more famous books, but I enjoyed this one, which touches on bits of military science that don’t involve shooting people — things like sweat and birdstrike and zippers. Also, the first chapter takes Roach to the Natick Army Labs, which is down the street from where I work, so that’s pretty cool, I guess.

If I have one big complaint, it’s that the book never delves as deeply into a single topic as I would like. I feel like we’ve just started learning about performance fabrics when she wisks you away to talk about how the bottom of tanks are shaped. Also the segues between topics sometimes feel a little forced.

The Magpie Lord and A Case of Possession, by K.J. Charles. Really… these novels are fantasy m/m erotica. If you don’t want to read about boys fucking, nothing I’m going to say is going to convince you to read these. (And even if you do, it’s a little bit representative of the “gay men as written by straight women” genre, so bear that in mind).

And yet… the craft on display in these novels is superb. The main character, Lucien Vaudrey, the eponymous magpie lord, is a disgraced 19th-century nobleman who’s spent his whole life in Shanghai to keep his scandal far, far away from home. His father and older brother are killed mysteriously, and thus he returns to take the title he never expected to hold. He soon finds that whatever is trying to kill his father and brother is after him too — with magic. Into his life comes Stephen, a magician/detective who’s helping him to unravel the crime. And whom Lucien Totally Does Not Schtup Before the End of the Book. Because, again, this is smut.

The second book continues in this vein, with a series of killings related to old Shanghai acquaintances of Lucien’s. And more smut. There’s a third book, too, but I’ve reached my limit of “money I’m willing to spend on boysmut” for the year, so it’ll have to wait a bit.

One of the things I like about these books is how… refreshingly anti-colonialist they are. Steampunk/neo-Victorian stuff has a tendency to romanticize British imperialism, and I feel like this veered successfully away from that. Having a main character (albeit white) who lived most of his life in China — and clearly views it as a more civilized land — provides a sane, outsider point of view, while having him be back in Britain means we don’t risk fetishizing the “mysterious east” or some such. At least, that was my take on it — I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about this aspect of the story.

Basically I call these books “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, with smut.” Lois McMaster Bujold wrote a really good review of them on Goodreads, so if you don’t trust me, trust a multi-Hugo-Award-winning author.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King. A perfectly acceptable book of advice about editing your own words. It approaches the text on several different levels, from structural to word-level. I’m not sure if it taught me anything that I didn’t already know, to be honest? Not much of it has stuck with me.

Writing Fight Scenes, by Marie Brennan. Mostly I recall being surprised that Brennan contradicts one of the rules I’d already heard for writing action scenes — use short sentences. She disagrees with this, although I think her advice boils down to “make it feel fast and immediate through a variety of tools, not just shorter sentences.” Although I’ve been told I have good action narration, so the necessity for this book may be limited.

How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships, by Leil Lowndes. At first glance, this is a kitschy book with a kitschy title. In fact, I found this so cutesy in parts that I had to take occasional breaks. And yet… it’s largely smart advice. (Yes, I seem to be on a kick of “making up for social skills I somehow skipped in Girl classes”). All the stuff about phone usage is dated, of course, and the ebook has some very odd formatting issues, but all in all a valuable read, and I think about the tips I learned often.

Books I’m currently reading which I may finish before the end of the year:

Maplecroft, Cherie Priest. Despite my kvetching over certain plot details on Facebook, it’s not a terrible novel by any means. I feel like Priest’s writing has a lot of the same weaknesses mine does (pale characterization, overexplaining), which may be why I notice it more. But you know, I’ll still probably give this book two or three out of five stars, depending on the ending.

The Weaker Vessel, Antonia Fraser. An ambitious book, this one — it’s a history of (primarily British) women in the 17th century. Very relevant to Lioness, it turns out!

Also, I was traveling to Dorset when I was reading about the Parliamentarian siege of Corfe Castle (in that county), and the defiant Royalist countess who wouldn’t give it up. I found myself wanting to visit the castle, only to find out it was razed. Alas. But! Someone at Consequences who was from Bournemouth told me it’s not completely gone — it was large enough they couldn’t complete raze it — so I’d kind of like to go see it some time I’m nearby.

One annoying feature of the book is that, in referencing personages that Fraser has mentioned before, she won’t often give you page numbers. So you need to refer to the index to find out which countess married whom and did what, and why we should now care about her.

Also I am even more convinced now that we would know startlingly less about the 17th century if it weren’t for the Verneys being packrats and Samuel Pepys writing about all his amorous affairs in a terrible mix of French, Spanish, and Latin — because it’s rare to find a book about this era that doesn’t source Pepys’ journal or the Verney collection of letters.

Anyway, this is a useful and fascinating book, but it’s also dense, and slow-going.

… wow, I think totally by accident I read mostly books by female authors or authors of color this year. That’s pretty rad.