Book #127 of 2021: The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2) A thoroughly excellent nautical fantasy, fleshing out the wider landscape of this setting, adding fascinating new wrinkles to the series lore, and finally introducing readers to beings like the sandgorgons and Elohim who had been briefly mentioned …
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Book #126 of 2021: The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang (Tensorate #1) Some fantasy stories invent cool worldbuilding but then neglect to tell a compelling narrative within that space; others do the opposite and offer a rousing plot amid a generic landscape of medieval castles and kings. This novella, I am happy to …
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Book #125 of 2021: The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois I have a lingering childhood fondness for this funny little title, which taps into a Roald Dahl type of whimsical inventiveness in showing off its various ideas. (My favorite: the bed of ‘continuous sheets’ that cranks a conveyor belt to wash and dry …
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Book #124 of 2021: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams An interesting bildungsroman of a fictional heroine, told in the context of the real history of the compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first edition around the turn of the twentieth century. Author Pip Williams begins from the observation that neither the female …
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Book #123 of 2021: Passing Strange by Ellen Klages There’s a lot to enjoy in this detail-heavy novella of queer life (and particularly its romance of two women) in 1940 San Francisco, but I wish it would provide greater connective tissue between its chapters — and that the minor fantasy element at the start and …
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Book #122 of 2021: Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher Early on in this book, there’s the death of a friend who’s like a sister to the protagonist, and it’s to author Ashley Schumacher’s credit that she’s able to make readers feel that loss so sharply when we haven’t known either character for long. Unfortunately, however, …
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Book #121 of 2021: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #6) It’s always a joy to spend time with Murderbot, the increasingly-poorly-named security cyborg who has reluctantly come to care for the humans of its new home, even if it still mostly wishes they would leave it alone or at least not look …
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Book #120 of 2021: Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson Short even for a novella and with somewhat generic characters and plot, this piece reads more like a proof-of-concept for its setting than a full story, especially by the standards of author Brandon Sanderson’s usual stellar output. The basic idea is a neat spin on the Star …
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Book #119 of 2021: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy (Danielle Cain #1) The setting to this supernatural horror novella is a lot of fun, offering a sort of queer punk commune made up of squatters and/or idealistic radical leftists who are noticeably less common in fiction than in real life. I …
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Book #118 of 2021: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this volume, especially after not really caring for author Daniel Defoe’s more famous Robinson Crusoe. This later book also lacks a lot of the fundamentals that I typically look for in a novel, like …
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