bookpost, part one: the favorites. [west of the moon, 1/7/17]
It has been a million years since I updated on my reading! Or at least several months. (I just checked: not since August. When I was still reading those stupid effing Outlander books, which I did finally get smart enough to give up on.) Several months in which, among other things, I was first burying my upcoming-surgery stress in compulsive reading and then later actually in recovery from surgery, so there have been a lot of books. (Apologies in advance to anyone getting the newsletter who isn't interested in my book reviews, but I've got such a backlog right now and the weight of it is keeping me from wanting to talk about anything else.) Five months worth of books is going to lead to multiple installments, and I think it makes more sense to talk about them in groups. Starting with the ones I liked best, because realistically I'm probably not going to write about everything, so why not start with the favorites?
Arcadia, by Lauren Groff. It's the story of a young man (named, or nicknamed, Bit) raised on a commune, navigating the world as both he and the commune have to adapt to the passage of time. There's something really magical about the way Groff creates the world that Bit lives in, and the way she immerses him in five decades' worth of America, the way he understands the people in his life differently as he gets older and less naive. This was one of the best books I've read in a long time.
Hold Me, Courtney Milan. I love Courtney Milan. LOVE her. This book, A+ one hundred percent did not disappoint, would read again, in fact have read three or four times already and it was only released in October. Here's the thing: it's getting a lot of attention for being a romance novel with a trans heroine, and yes of course that aspect of the book should get attention because that's essentially unheard of in romance. EXCEPT that's really not the best part, or even a particularly important part within the narrative. (Even better than having a trans main character? Having a trans main character where it's not a big deal, it's not the defining thing about her character.) This is a science nerd romance. This is the most goddamn nerdy science-y book I have read in years, and that's including actual science fiction. It's funny, it's charming, it's got a minor character who keeps a transgenic shark in a tank in her living room, it's got main characters who seduce each other with chemistry puns, absolutely everything about this book is perfect and delightful.
Queen Sugar, Natalie Baszile. I picked this book up because I've been interested in the television adaptation, which stars the woman who played Tara on True Blood and I think she's amazing. I never actually managed to watch the television show, but this book was absolutely wonderful and I think everyone should read it. Everyone everyone. The book centers on Charley, a widowed mother of a pre-teen girl, who has just about hit rock-bottom financially when she inherits a run-down sugar plantation from her estranged father. Making the plantation profitable requires her to move back to Louisiana after spending most of her life in Los Angeles, and she comes up hard against deeply-rooted sexism and racism, as well as her own entangled family. It's a messy and emotional book that's also really beautifully written.
The Wangs vs The World, Jade Chang. I seem to have read a lot of books about messy family dynamics? Anyway. The book opens with Charles Wang on the downslope of a rise-and-fall American Dream story. As a young man he immigrated to the US from Taiwan and turned a small economic opportunity into a multi-million-dollar cosmetics empire. With the collapse of the family's American fortune, he's trying to collect his kids in one place (the oldest daughter is a world-famous conceptual artist who's retreated to a Hudson Valley farmhouse to escape critical disgrace; the middle child is a college student who dreams of being a stand-up comic; the youngest child is a high school girl with a popular fashion blog) so that he can focus on reclaiming the family's Chinese fortune, property they lost during Mao's revolution. Every single character is real and complicated, some of them are quite funny (although, tragically, not the one who wants to do stand-up), and it was just a lovely and thought-provoking read.
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff. A story about a marriage that looks very different from different sides. The structure of the book (the first half is from the husband's perspective, while the second half, which has more surprises, is from the wife's) has invited a lot of comparisons to Gone Girl, which is a little bit unfair mostly because the overall feel of Fates and Furies is nothing like Gone Girl. (Also, spoiler alert, no one in this book is a sociopath.) Lauren Groff has a really powerful command of language, so it's another beautifully written book. The whole conceit, of a relationship that looks very different depending on where you stand, could have come off as a little twee, but instead it turns into an interesting exercise in unreliable narrators.
Synners, Pat Cadigan. A classic, which I love beyond measure. First published in 1991 and I still think Pat Cadigan, even in 1991, understood the coming digital age much better than the more widely known cyberpunk authors like William Gibson. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love William Gibson, but Pat Cadigan's highly networked world involves traffic guidance systems being jammed up by computer viruses, and her story is ultimately driven by human motivations, even when it's an artifical intelligence doing the driving. I'm such a sucker for artificial intelligence stories, and the emergent consciousness story in Synners feels more real to me than a lot of other SF narratives manage. (Also, this book sticks with me. There's a recurring phrase throughout the book, change for the machines; it starts with a minor character asking someone for coins for vending machines, but it immediately takes on darker overtones. We change, and we change for the machines. The machines change us. Once or twice a week something pushes this back to my consciousness. Driving by GPS, learning to talk to Siri or Alexa in a way they can understand, the teenagers I know structuring their lives around instagram and snapchat, everyone photographing their food or learning how to compress their conversations into pithy 140-character segments. Change for the machines.)
To be clear, labelling this part of the list "the favorites" might sound like a slight to the rest of the list, but the books coming in the next few newsletter installments are all books I liked too. It's just that these felt like standouts.
--Susan