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107. The Silence of Bones by June Hur. 4. Historical mystery set in 1800s Korea. Most of the noir tropes hit in a very different way (a good way!) with a female protagonist and a wildly different culture from the typical noir setting.
108/109. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis. 3.5. They're two different books, but really, it's just one split in half. Time traveling historians stuck in WWII is a great hook, and a bunch of this is fantastic. But at the same time, a lot is really repetitive and the number of problems that could be solved by a simple conversation is far, far too high. I realize that the author is going for certain themes in the repetition and the number of near-misses and coincidences has a point...but I can't help but feel like the same effect could have been accomplished with a third less total book.
110. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon. 3.5. Painful but thoughtful discussion of how Americans view fatness and fat people, and exactly how messed up that all is. I'm not sure how much was entirely new to me, but it was worth challenging some of my own assumptions.
111. Innate Magic by Shannon Fay. 3.5. This is interestingly set in a magic-filled alternate London right after WWII, but somehow feels more like the more typical magic-filled Victorian London. Maybe because of a similar pre-occupation with the peerage and social events that I associate with Regency and Victorian settings (that may well be perfectly suited to the time, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly American). The cloth magic the protagonist openly practices is not well exploited but the innate magic he hides is intriguing.
112. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. 2.5. Shteyngart is clever, very clever, but he's so delighted with his own cleverness that the first chapter becomes wearying. This is probably one of the first serious literary books out that wrestles with the events of 2020, mostly through a tiresome author and his eccentric-into-irritating friends. Some of the prose is lovely (but I can't help but find the number of hallucinatory dream sequences at the end exhausting). Many of the characters are finely drawn (but I can't help but wonder if this is a person who actually likes even his own friends).
113. Daughter of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. 5. Ignore the hilariously dated cover art. This is competence porn at its finest, as a younger daughter of a noble house unexpectedly inherits and then goes about overcoming all kinds of difficulties in ridiculously clever ways. From marrying a bitter enemy and cleverly turning things to her own benefit to walking into a house party that's entirely intended as an assassination, Mara is endlessly resourceful. So much fun.
114. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. 5. Thoughtful, brilliant, devastating, and hopeful. A city sits on the edge of twilight on a tidally locked planet. Two women who do not fit at all into its draconian social order take to the deadly open road. The imaginative societies and the strange ways they interlock are gorgeous and inventive and true and sad. Honestly, this is what I'd want out of literary fiction - I can see why people are comparing Anders to Le Guin.
108/109. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis. 3.5. They're two different books, but really, it's just one split in half. Time traveling historians stuck in WWII is a great hook, and a bunch of this is fantastic. But at the same time, a lot is really repetitive and the number of problems that could be solved by a simple conversation is far, far too high. I realize that the author is going for certain themes in the repetition and the number of near-misses and coincidences has a point...but I can't help but feel like the same effect could have been accomplished with a third less total book.
110. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon. 3.5. Painful but thoughtful discussion of how Americans view fatness and fat people, and exactly how messed up that all is. I'm not sure how much was entirely new to me, but it was worth challenging some of my own assumptions.
111. Innate Magic by Shannon Fay. 3.5. This is interestingly set in a magic-filled alternate London right after WWII, but somehow feels more like the more typical magic-filled Victorian London. Maybe because of a similar pre-occupation with the peerage and social events that I associate with Regency and Victorian settings (that may well be perfectly suited to the time, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly American). The cloth magic the protagonist openly practices is not well exploited but the innate magic he hides is intriguing.
112. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. 2.5. Shteyngart is clever, very clever, but he's so delighted with his own cleverness that the first chapter becomes wearying. This is probably one of the first serious literary books out that wrestles with the events of 2020, mostly through a tiresome author and his eccentric-into-irritating friends. Some of the prose is lovely (but I can't help but find the number of hallucinatory dream sequences at the end exhausting). Many of the characters are finely drawn (but I can't help but wonder if this is a person who actually likes even his own friends).
113. Daughter of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. 5. Ignore the hilariously dated cover art. This is competence porn at its finest, as a younger daughter of a noble house unexpectedly inherits and then goes about overcoming all kinds of difficulties in ridiculously clever ways. From marrying a bitter enemy and cleverly turning things to her own benefit to walking into a house party that's entirely intended as an assassination, Mara is endlessly resourceful. So much fun.
114. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. 5. Thoughtful, brilliant, devastating, and hopeful. A city sits on the edge of twilight on a tidally locked planet. Two women who do not fit at all into its draconian social order take to the deadly open road. The imaginative societies and the strange ways they interlock are gorgeous and inventive and true and sad. Honestly, this is what I'd want out of literary fiction - I can see why people are comparing Anders to Le Guin.
