Holiday Review of Reviews 2025

 

Dear reader, I haven't been posting book reviews here on the blog as much as I would like the last few months. I've still been writing some reviews over on Goodreads, but I haven't even been keeping up over there. It has been a busy few months, and the energy for blogging has often been elusive.

I could keep castigating myself, or I could just post the reviews! 

After I post this, I have two more reviews to finish of Death's End by Cixin Liu and Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. I may also return to a holiday tradition from my past: reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! I may even read A Christmas Carol, which I've been thinking about the last few years in line with my tradition of watching holiday horror movies.

Anyway, here are my reviews of The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Fall of Gilead (graphic novel inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower), and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

Happy Holidays to you and all sentient beings! May all beings be jolly!

Expanding the Essence of Fantasy: Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse

 

It took me a bit to get back into this story of Roanhorse's Beneath Earth and Sky series and to remember who’s who, but once I did, it was engaging and I still love this world as explored in this third and final (?) volume of the series. (See my thoughts on volume one here and volume two here).

Roanhorse continues a great exercise in "fantasy doesn't have to be based on European history and folklore." And I'm here for that 100%. I really love this fantasy inspired by the Americas. I love Tolkien, but fantasy can be so much more than "vaguely Tolkienesque," and Roanhorse is doing some of the best work in that direction.

Slasher Logic: Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Don't Fear the Reaper is Stephen Graham Jones's sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw. As with the first one, I'm not sure I'm quite a big enough slasher fan to fully appreciate this and the characters other than Jade/Jennifer aren't as memorable for me, but Don't Fear the Reaper is still a really fun and interesting book overall. 

Divine Identity: Gods and Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 

I meant to review Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow soon after finishing it, but alas, here I am over a month later, so I'll have to keep it short. This was a lot of fun. I love the Mayan gods and the setting in early 20th century Mexico. 

Thanksgiving Horror 2024: Black Friday Edition

 

In recent years (see here and here) I've made a tradition of watching Thanksgiving horror movies around US Thanksgiving. As with other holiday horror, this is a fun way to process my complex thoughts and feelings about this horrific, delicious holiday. And this year I discovered a film about that most uniquely American of holidays, Black Friday, in which we trample each other to buy stuff we don't need immediately after a holiday about giving thanks for what we already have.

I'll start and end with the movies I watched for the first time with a nice leftover sandwich of movies I've watched in the past. And for some reason, lighting in the films seems to be on my mind lately. Go figure.

I should acknowledge that today is also Native American Heritage Day, which in a peak American contrast, is always also the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Review of Reviews: March 2024

 

It's time for another Review of Reviews! Since it's the last day of Women's History Month, I figured I'd include reviews of books by women authors. Is it too cheesy to call it "Women's Future Month" as I have before? I'll let you decide. Anyway, here are my reviews of The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse, Houston, Houston Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr., and Primary Inversion by Catharine Asaro.

So I Watched All the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture... Again!

 

Last year I wrote a post called "So I Watched All the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture." I didn't set out to do so, but at some point I realized I had seen a few of the nominations and figured I might as well complete my tour. So I did! And it was mostly pretty fun. It didn't hurt that my favorite, Everything Everywhere All At Once, was the winner.

Well, dear reader, as Britney Spears once said, "Oops, I did it again." 

Spooky Reads for Spooky Season: Halloween 2023!

 

Spooky Season has been in full swing for almost two full months here in the US. One of the better things my fellow Americans have done in recent decades: turning Halloween into a full two-month-long festival of ghoulish goodness!

I've been watching a lot of spooky movies, from the old school The Wolf Man to The Descent to the entire Pet Sematary cinematic universe (I re-read the novel, which remains better than any of the films, watched both film versions, even got to Pet Sematary 2, which I don't necessarily recommend, and the brand new, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, which I do recommend). I've also been trying to branch out more internationally with films like Kandisha from France and Kaali Khuhi from India. 

And there's spooky TV, too, most excellently The Fall of the House of Usher (Mike Flanagan's fantastic take on Edgar Allan Poe) and The Changeling (based on a novel by Victor LaValle starring LaKeith Stanfield). I may write up some thoughts about my spooky cinematic adventures later, maybe sometime before my horror and philosophy students present their films on November 16! (stay tuned for details on that)

But for now, here are a few of my spooky reads for spooky season 2023! Happy Halloween!

Digging New Wells: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Slivia Moreno-Garcia

 

I've enjoyed Moreno-Garcia's other work, like Mexican Gothic. I really loved Certain Dark Things, which I'd describe as an excellent vampire novel for people who usually don't like vampires. So how is The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which has been nominated for a Hugo award this year?

Surviving Apocalypses: Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

A lot of post-apocalyptic fiction is the province of woefully over-confident libertarian white dudes riffing on their survivalist wet dreams. Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow, thankfully, is not that at all. 

In fact, Rice does a lot (much like Octavia Butler) to show how stupid those macho survivalist fantasies really are and how community and care guide our survival. Not that everything is puppy dogs and rainbows filled with rosy, bland communitarians, either; there's plenty of tension and drama to be found both within the community and from without. Those accustomed to more over-the-top apocalyptic fiction may not see the underlying tension, but it's there if you pay attention. 

The Slow Pondering of Strange and Beautiful Realities: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

As with all of Le Guin's work, The Telling is profound, thought-provoking, complex, and raises more questions than answers.

The trouble with reviewing a Le Guin book is that anything I could say about it feels inadequate compared to what Le Guin herself has written. But let me give it a shot, anyway.

Prey (2022) and Predators

 

Back in the day (the 1980's) I was a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger fan. (To be honest, I still am.) And one of my favorite of Arnold's 80's heyday was Predator (1987). I was a kid at the time, but something about the story intrigued me. Maybe it was that it started as a Rambo-type military story and became a much weirder science fiction story. Maybe it was my nascent love of stories that turn the tables on preconceived notions, a love that has only deepened over time. Maybe I just thought the Predator was cool.

Over the intervening decades I have watched most of the later iterations of the Predator, most of which were okay but none of which quite captured the same feeling as the original for me. Still, I was really excited when I heard that the newest Predator movie would be set in the early 1700's in North America and most of the human cast would be Native American. What a cool idea!

Looking for Hope on the 5th of July

Yesterday was US Independence Day. I have complicated feelings about this holiday, as I have complicated feelings about the country it celebrates. 

I’ve never really been big on conventional displays of patriotism. It all feels so jingoistic and bombastic. And there’s something a bit gauche about pretending a patch of dirt is special because I happen to live on it. 

But this doesn’t mean I don’t love my country in some sense. I love the people here, because I love humanity and part of humanity lives here, the part that most influences me and which I can influence most. 

Empires and Persons: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

 

I loved the first book in this series: A Memory Called Empire. It grabbed me right away and carried me through until the end. This sequel, not as much. Maybe that "new universe smell" has worn off. Maybe I had forgotten too many details to get invested in the political intrigue, or maybe the interesting stuff doesn't really get going until about halfway through. Still, once A Desolation Called Peace does get interesting, it gets really, really interesting and expands some of the philosophical themes of the first one. So I recommend it to fans of the first one. In fact, you might benefit from reading this soon after reading the first one, rather than two years later like I did.

Looking for What you Find: The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

 

I read the first book in John Scalzi's Interdependency Series (The Collapsing Empire) several years ago and probably would have gotten more out of the first 100 pages or so of this second book (The Consuming Fire) if I had reminded myself what happened there before diving in (I had a general idea of the Flow and the Emperox, but I had forgotten the who's who of the various political intrigues, a lot of which I admit I have trouble following or caring much about).

Honestly the book didn't get super interesting to me until about halfway through, but then some really cool stuff started to happen (more on that in spoilery section).

I also have to say I think that while Scalzi's acerbic wit is still there, the patented Scalzi snark is toned down a bit in this volume, and the book is honestly better for it. You still get a few little smirks now and then, but honestly Scalzi's dialogue can sometimes be a bit extra and get in the way of the story (as if everyone is speaking in carefully-crafted tweets at all times). I appreciated the milder version of all that.

Okay, I have to get into some mild spoilers here. So be warned. 

Thanksgiving Horrors: "That's Not Cranberry Sauce"

 

Last year I decided to watch some Thanksgiving horror movies (read about it here!). This year I decided to make it a tradition. I re-watched one of last year's films (Blood Rage), watched a sequel to one of last year's films (Thankskilling 3), revisited an old favorite (Addams Family Values), and found a new film partially filmed in the city where I live (The Last Thanksgiving).

Apologies to those outside the US, this is going to be focused on US Thanksgiving. But I hope everyone reading this is staying safe and doing their part to avoid spreading COVID whether they observed US Thanksgiving this week or not.

Hugo Ballot 2021: Novels and Novellas

 

My 2021 Hugo ballot continues (see short stories and novelettes here) with novellas and the most high-profile category: novels. You can see the full list of finalists here.

As I've mentioned before, I've been voting for the Hugos for several years, and I rely on my Three Principles of Hugo Voting (but maybe not exclusively: I've been consistently inconsistent in the past and it would be inconsistent to change that now).

You'd think extending the deadline to November instead of the usual late summer time would help, but then you'd be underestimating my powers of procrastination and how busy a time November is in my academic calendar. I think I did pretty well this year considering how many categories there are. I was even more down-to-the-wire than usual this year, but it would be a full job in itself just reading all that stuff, so I'm not going too hard on myself.

So without further ado, here's how I voted!

My Appointment with Destiny (if by "destiny" you mean a tweet with several hundred likes)

 

On Wednesday morning this week, I had a thought that mildly amused me based on another tweet I saw, so I turned it into a tweet. See above. Or see here.

I somehow have a bunch of followers on Twitter (about 1,900), but most of my tweets are lucky to get a handful of likes. I'm actually okay with that. To be honest, I got on Twitter in 2016 unsure of why I was doing so, and I have yet to figure out what I'm doing on Twitter five years later. I don't think at the speed of Twitter, nor have I cracked the code of going viral.

Until now. 

Fantastic Americas: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

 

I loved pretty much everything about Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun: the world building, the characters, the plot, etc. I have more Hugo nominees to read, but I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being my #1 pick.

"Politics by Means of Literary Analysis": A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Recently I was talking to a friend who has been reading the Dune series, and I noted that you don't see many books that try to emulate Frank Herbert's Dune. The Dune books are weird and work in a way that wouldn't work for any other author. Most classics spawn lots of imitators or even their own sub-genres. While you see a lot of space operas out there, none of them have come close to being much like Dune in the last 55 years.

It's not that I was looking for a Dune rip-off (nobody should really want that). But I was excited to read Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire because it sounded like it might be jumping somewhere near Dune space with a far future space empire filled with a melange of cultural influences. It even has epigraphs from historical documents before each chapter. And as I suspect is the case with many Dune fans, having a glossary at the end makes me roughly 37% more excited to read any science fiction book.

Then I saw the blurbs on the inside cover comparing it to Ann Leckie or Yoon Ha Lee. These are also apt given the space empires in both authors' works, especially with one particular idea that's very similar to an idea Lee uses in Ninefox Gambit.

While one could make those comparisons, in the end A Memory Called Empire is its own thing. And this is a wonderful thing. Once I realized this was not an imitator or merely a riff on old themes, I could let the book speak for itself and appreciate it for the unique work that it is. This is the first of the Hugo Best Novel nominees I've read this year, and I have a hard time believing any of the other nominees will come close to beating it.