Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey

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The chief delight of this book is Avasarala, the potty-mouthed UN politician insider who is one of the best features of the novel (and series), and whose portrait by Shohreh Aghdashloo is the highlights of the filmed series; actor and character are intertwined in my head and can’t be separated. She is that near-stereotype of the savvy politician who gets things done but she has panache. The rest of the book delivers on a high level as well, but on the whole it has the feeling of something transitional, necessary to reach the next high point but less than compelling on its own terms. The political and military maneuvering, including space navies and missiles and counterdefenses, are part of the opera, as it were. Added to the mix is our obsession with children, in this case the saving of a single child whose fate is caught up with the workings of the protomolecule and forms the central spine of the plot. And of course there’s Bobbie Draper the Martian space marine, who is almost as good as Avasarala. The various pieces of plot blend but in a lumpy way, and I find myself impatient with nearly everybody for being themselves. I also wondered in retrospect why the protomolecule, that magical can-do-anything bit of invention, went to Venus rather than to Earth, which was its original destination, and was impatient for it to do what I already knew it would do from having watched the streaming series. The weakest part of the book by far is the villains, the evil scientist and the evil corporate head, who are a bit pro forma, though they are certainly necessary and their plans are clearly nefarious. This particular volume has a feeling of under-complication in those areas. But it is nevertheless a strong read and a page turner and does its job.

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

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It’s likely that I was disposed to admire this novel because I had streamed the series on Prime and enjoyed it, and this also meant I knew what was coming. The world building is very strong and underscores that the novel originates from a deeply conceived game universe. The environment on Ceres and the depiction of space travel are both detailed and I felt a tangible connection to the settings. There is a sense of slightly hackneyed noir to the whole, but I was willing to forgive that because I already expected this from the TV version, which was developed and managed by the book authors. There is a wearying quality to the action sequences, which pass much more quickly in the filmed version. But this is handled about as well as could be expected and is engaging. This is the novel in the series in which I had the most empathy for the belters since the portrait of Ceres was so vivid, and the idea of the underclass of the solar system resonates with reality, though it is a bit naive in formulation. The book works because the writing is very fine. This is the opening of one of the best novel series I have ever read, probably top two, given the fact that I adored Tolkien through so much of my youth, despite the stilted quality of his prose in the high action parts of the book. The Expanse books never make that mistake, and the journey is immense.

The Bostonians by Henry James

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The Bostonians by Henry James

In general I try to avoid judging a book because it exemplifies old social attitudes but in the case of this novel I think it’s fair to be a bit harder on the near-misogyny of James’s take on women and their place in the world. This book deals, uncharacteristically for him, with politics, and in specific with the women’s movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century. His sneering depiction of women’s rights advocates makes his views all too clear. The book would work best if one could read the relationship of Olive and Verena as a lesbian partnering but if James had this in mind he equivocated. Verena is one of many doll-like female centerpieces of James novels, fascinating for her oratorical abilities but born of the wrong kind of parents and anxious to please all and sundry. She is another James heroine who is special because he says so and yet somehow does not earn the distinction on her own. Olive and Ransom engage in a battle for her soul, Ransom being an expatriate southerner and former slave owner who states over and over again that women only matter in their impact on the lives of men. He has only to state this position clearly to Verena to convince her to abandon her ambitions to become an important part of the women’s movement in Boston and in the nation. When she is in his presence she heeds the siren call of his mastery but when she is away from him she attempts to escape her fate. The culminating incident of the book takes place backstage at a speech that is to launch Verena’s career, when Ransom’s appearance drives her into a frenzy of indecision and finally into his arms, her natural place, as it appears. James is too good a writer to present this in such bald terms but such is his contempt for his subject that he is more careless here than in any other of his novels that I have read. An odious performance from a master writer is still an odious performance.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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I have been hearing a lot about this book and read it yesterday all in a breath. It is one of those gems that happens from time to time. I would not quite say I was enthralled by it, but almost. Aristotle is a fifteen year old at the beginning of the story, and meets Dante at a public swimming pool and they start to talk. They both need friends and find each other. They are fierce and interesting in their different ways. Their meeting has a quality of recognition that is wonderfully rendered, and they are able to talk to each other in scenes that are pretty perfect, that capture their voices. Over and over we read that they laugh together. This is just lovely and is exactly what I need in a book these days. All through the book Ari makes it clear that he is straight while Dante comes to realize that he likes boys and in particular that he likes Ari. But they deal with it. There is pretty amazing drama in the book, a life-saving rescue and later an attack, that draw the boys and their families together. The fact that this is a young adult novel was never a hindrance. The reason that I don’t give it that last edge of praise is simply that the ending felt abrupt. Suddenly Ari realizes he loves Dante, after his parents sit him down and tell him he does. He has known most of this all along but finally yields to it. There’s nothing wrong with that except that it feels so easy and happens maybe too fast. And it feels slightly as if Ari has been hiding this from us the whole time, since this is a first person novel and he speaks his thoughts to us throughout the book. But that is more in the line of a quibble. It’s a very fine novel.

You & Me by Tal Bauer

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There were effective passages at the beginning of this book, especially the depiction of the single father’s traumatized relationship with his son. There were lots and lots of pages devoted to making out and to detailed sex. This is fine if that’s what you want in a romance novel, and a lot of people do. But you can only read variations of “they kissed” so often before it becomes grating. And everything else was so easy. Everybody wants Luke and Landon to get together, there’s practically a town meeting about it. Their sons draw pictures of them together. Their sons are both football heroes of a Texas State championship team. Neither of them has a girlfriend, in fact the idea of such a thing never comes up. I don’t even remember there being any cheerleaders. I can see the appeal but kept being irritated by the book rather than immersed by it.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

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This book kept harkening back to the feelings I had when I first read A Wrinkle in Time; it’s the oddest mix of elements held together by a magical set of characters. The story begins with a transgender girl fleeing her home with her violin, which is a pretty strong hook; the violin acts as a promise that what you’re reading is not what you might expect. This is quickly followed by the revelation that you are in the world of a superstar violin teacher who has sold her soul to the devil; and she quickly becomes involved not only with Katrina, the young girl, but also with a family of aliens who run a local doughnut shop. If this doesn’t pique your interest then I don’t know what to think. The book is lighthearted and full of whimsy but veers into dark moments and dangerous paths, especially when Katrina endures sexual violence, and when she films herself for paying customers on the internet in order to get money to keep herself alive. So this is not a simple book to categorize. Not every moment in the book quite works for me but the missteps are slight and stem mostly from the daring of the fantasy and the pace of the story. The writing is very strong. Katrina is depicted in a way that feels more like the book is aimed at young adults, with a simplicity of soul that is quite appealing, though this portrait is not easy to reconcile with the book’s harder moments. Nevertheless the book is strong and readable and rather glorious in its invention. Just when the soul-selling part of the plot comes to the head, the other storyline comes to the rescue, and the ending is lovely and unexpected. And there are doughnuts. Every part of the book breathes and moves. A special experience.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

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After reading the sequel to this book, Children of the Sky, which felt tepid to me, I reread this novel to see if it was really as good as I remembered. And it is. This was my introduction to Vernor Vinge decades ago and the second reading was a stronger experience than the first. This novel introduces the notion of the Unthinking Depths, the Slow Zone, the Beyond, and the Transcend, which are the Zones of Thought that give the series its title. The idea is one of the best in science fiction, that the laws of physics are zoned in a hierarchical way, not necessarily by nature but due to action of one or more of the transcendent races at the tip-top of the galactic food chain. A human colony at the Top of the Beyond has crossed over into the Low Transcend to do work on an archive that turns out to contain something quite nasty, and this sets in motion a story that arcs through thousands of light years when the human scientists flee the archive and their remnants end up on a world inhabited by packs of doglike creatures who achieve sentience in groups. The ideas are amazing and entertaining and they expand and expand in Vinge’s careful story. The medieval dog-world (Tine’s World) contrasts with the high powered cultures of the Beyond in a marriage that grounds the high-flown ideas about Powers and Transcendence and each side of the story balances the other. I loved this book the first time but I don’t think I absorbed nearly as much of it as I did after a second reading. It is one of the best examples of the new space operas that started to appear late in the last century, and the world building – well, one might as well call it galaxy-building – is superlative. If you are a science fiction reader you probably already know about this book but if you don’t, you really should crack it and take it all in.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

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Many years ago I read the first two installments in this series, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Both of those are excellent and even enthralling reading experiences, especially if you love 90s space opera. Vinge is a masterful writer. So I remembered the books and looked up the third installment of the series, which takes place on Tine’s World ten years after the defeat of the Blight. This will be gobbledygook to anyone who hasn’t read the books but that’s how it goes in SF. This book finishes the tale of the godbuilding screwups from Straumli Realm who flee something they made that goes wrong, crash-landing on a world of intelligent dog-packs. The dogs are self-aware only when there are enough of them, from four to eight, and they bond into a self. There are mechanics to this process that make it fascinating and fluid. What this idea did for the earlier book was to delineate one of the most fascinating schemes for an alien species ever devised. What this idea does for the current book is to stand still and be exactly the same. This is not entirely true but it’s true enough that the book feels the flaw all the way through. It’s a book set on one world where two species are building some kind of synergetic civilization, and details a lot of politics among the rivals spurred by actions in the earlier book. Absent is the element of the Zones of Thought except as as threat to be explained over and over. The earlier book had a cosmological sweep. This book is narrow and relies too heavily on the novelty of the Tines. It’s not that they can’t carry a story, but it’s the case that I expect something else of Vinge. The book is weighed down by a back story that is barely relevant. This is not enough of an evolution for a sequel and not enough of a departure for a good novel. It was a slog to read though after about a third of it had passed I became more absorbed by it.

The Way Life Should Be by William Dameron

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This book relies on the love of family and of revelations and transformations to do its work. The story has so much going for it along those lines that it jerks the inevitable tears, mostly in an earned way, and it has as its distinction that at the heart of the story lies a gay couple, two men who were married to women and who have children from the marriages. This has always been a problematic issue for me, gay men who used unknowing wives as the doors to their closet, but it is a fact of the world and the book treats the issue with passion. The families of the two men are artfully if clunkily brought into collision in a very small beach house in Maine, with the aging parents of one of the couple as near neighbors. The compression of the house drives the story thereafter. There is much to admire here but also much to question. The plot is loaded like a Lifetime movie; we have a drinking problem, an eating disorder, a rape victim, a narcissist, a neurodiverse child, a middle-aged woman in a midlife crisis, a woman roaming the neighborhood with dementia, a father with dementia, an unforgiving mother; this is not a comprehensive list by any means, but it gives the idea. The book is loaded for melodrama and delivers. There’s nothing wrong with any of that except that it’s a bit too much. The sentences themselves are well done, but the construction of the book is a problem for me. The writer chooses to focus on nearly all the family members in terms of point of view, not in an orderly way but head-hopping in most of the scenes. The writing is constantly explaining. The daughter who feels abandoned by her gay father plays this out in every scene as if we might have forgotten her trope since the last time we were in her head. Most characters display their particular bit of drama over and over again in the same way. It becomes a slog to read. Then, at the end, nearly all the characters reach a point of change at the same time, even some of the ones who have been offstage for most of the book. Nevertheless the book is affecting and worth reading and I’m glad to have spent time in it. This is actually pretty remarkable given the fact that the book does so many things I don’t like.

The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri

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This lovely book makes its mark through gentle comedy, pristine writing, and the rich oddity of its people, especially Monkey and Samir, the central figures of the journey along the Silk Road. The comic touches within the writing are many, as the author is enamored of word play and of puns, which, while not my favorite practice, is handled here so deftly that it brings a good deal of amusement to the flow of the writing. The remarkable first sentence of the novel introduces a scene that is nearly the high point of the book, the stoning of the twelve-year-old orphan whom we come to know as Monkey and his rescue by the wizened caravan trader Samir, who is a seller of dreams, which is a nice term for a bullshit artist. Samir’s dream-telling operates at a very high level, however, and becomes as entertaining to the reader as it is to his audience. The story that follows is quick, heartfelt, and rich. Many people have been swindled by Samir and have hired killers to enact their revenge. The attempts on Samir’s life are the spine of the plot, and the trick of the writing is that each of these murder attempts takes on a different spin from our expectations. All the while Monkey is coming to understand what love and family really mean, an important lesson for him, since he is an orphan who has experienced almost no affection in his short life. The book reminds me of Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey, especially in its reliance on the voice of the writer, though Nayeri’s book is slighter in some ways, or perhaps more clearly aimed at including younger readers in its audience. It’s a very fine performance.