The Essential Kit

 I hope you're not tired of first contact stories, because I've gone and written another one. Apparently this is what's on my mind lately? Anyway here's Waiting for Them in Nature Futures, go, read, enjoy!

 

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. Reread. I'm going to be on the Plains of Abraham in May, and I would like to be able to know what I'm looking at. Also I really love this book. He's so good at the spots where different cultural assumptions clashed disastrously, and he managed to notice that that was happening between colonists and metropolitan British and between different Native tribes from very similar regions as well as between those groups with theoretically larger differences.

K.J. Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda. Kindle. I had to get a new ereader this month, and one of the up sides (down side: I just want to buy things once and have them work forever) is that this one accepts library books. So I went through my wishlist and found bunches of things that the library had in ebook but not in physical copy, hurrah. This was one of them. It was fun, it was...if you wanted the kind of action-y thing that The Prisoner of Zenda was but with modern sensibilities and LOTS of gay sex, this is that. It's not more than that, but it's also not less.

Peter Dickinson, Some Deaths Before Dying and The Tears of the Salamander. Kindle. Two very, very different books in genre terms--the former is a meditation on old age with a crime or two here or there, the latter is a kids' fantasy painted in generally bright colors. What they have in common--what a lot of Dickinson has as a common point--is the willingness to let some people just be rotten, to just go with that and have other people have to oppose it or work around it, and to know that it isn't necessarily the people they'd have expected would be. Neither will be a favorite but I'm glad I read both.

Nicci French, What Happened That Night. I feel like the subgenre of "college friends back together after at least a decade [in this case three], probably with some murder" is bigger now than it used to be, that in some ways it's taking the place of "high school reunion, probably with some murder." I have room for both, but I admit I prefer the college friends because of the element of being able to choose for yourself for the first time, and not always choosing wisely but understandably either way. I also feel like the college friend version tends to be more individual, less dealing in archetypes, both for the friends and for their college experience. I didn't find the very ending of this one particularly satisfying, but it also wasn't bad enough that I won't try more of French's work.

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief. Okay, so I did not expect to like Tennyson ever, and then my dad died and now I do like Tennyson, I'm as surprised as anyone really. But this sort of thing, where there is a person working in the arts and someone traces the influences of contemporary science on their work: I could read this kind of thing all day. Yes please.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death on the Oxford Road. Kindle. An older British mystery, with a really delightful older woman character who has muscular dystrophy and a history nursing in the Great War. Just the sort of thing I like when I'm in the mood for this sort of thing, will seek out more of her stuff.

Sarah Gold McBride, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. I was happy with how this book handled race and gender, but I was a little disappointed it didn't go into more detail about subcultural signaling with the infinite varieties of facial hair that were au courant at various times in the stated period, and I felt like there were a lot of questions where more comparison with what was going on in the outside world would have been illuminating. And it wasn't terribly long, so I felt like there was room for it. Ah well.

Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate: Poems. Sometimes I'm very glad to have encountered one thing before another, and this is one of those cases: I found Venice far more resonant than Distant Mandate for reasons I'd have to go through with a fine-toothed comb to figure out. Not sorry to have read either, but I'll likely return to the other one and not to this.

Solvejg Nitzke, The Elegance of Ferns: Portrait of a Botanical Marvel. This is very brief and lavishly illustrated--I went around the house singing "Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about ferrrrrns" for the whole time I was reading it, but luckily for my family that was not very long. (Nirvana joke, sorry, don't worry about it.) It's not what I'd call a deep dive, but if you have days in these parlous times when you could benefit from reading a nice quiet book about plants, complete with pretty pictures--and I know I do--then this is that.

Gin Phillips, Ruby Falls. There is a character in this called Ruby. She does not fall. It's just that that's what the place is called. If I was from the South I might have taken that for granted, but I'm not, so I wanted to warn you. Anyway it is about the Tennessee waterfall and all the adjacent underground caves and trails, and it is very, very claustrophobic and full of grim natural danger (underground caves are not safe, buddies!) as well as the more tiresome human kind. The plot hinges on one of the most obvious questions of identity that one would ever think to not mistake, and Phillips makes it clear that it is in character for the person who is an idiot to be an idiot, but...still an idiot plot in that sense. Luckily there is a lot more cave stuff to think about instead. Again willing to try more from this author, again not fabulously impressed by the ending.

Anthony Price, The Alamut Ambush, Colonel Butler's Wolf, October Men, Our Man in Camelot, Other Paths to Glory, War Game, The '44 Vintage, and Tomorrow's Ghost. Rereads. This is about half this series (not quite half), and I didn't read it all in one go like this the first time through. I have clear favorites and unfavorites, and there's a pattern to them: basically I think that Price is at his best when he's writing about British men, and the more he's trying to do something else the worse the book was. I'm not sorry to have reread The Alamut Ambush (not actually the better for exoticizing both Arab and Israeli characters approximately equally) and Our Man in Camelot (his Americans are SO BAD), but I also won't have any need to do it again, and Tomorrow's Ghost left a bad taste in my mouth (THIS is what you're doing with your first female protag in the series, Price? really?). On the other hand, Other Paths to Glory and War Game were really good at what they do. I didn't stop here because of lack of enthusiasm, I had library books intervening.

Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown. I'm not at all sure why this is a separate book, except that it had its own strong effect in 1938 and its author didn't do other things to collect with it? It's an epistolary short story about the breakdown of a friendship as one of its members is swallowed as an Aryan into the Nazi regime and the other stays safe as an American Jew. It is harrowing, and one can only imagine its effect at the time.

Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Kindle. I really like how she gives the political and cultural background for what these scientists were working around in getting to appropriate locations with useful equipment to measure the Transit of Venus in the mid-18th century. It was a good book to read in close proximity to Crucible of War, lots of stuff proximate to each other but not covered in both volumes. Also I find the early assumptions that each new method will work well and give great answers right away extremely touching. Science: it takes a minute, and you learn different stuff than you expected.

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Welllll, I bet Vo wishes this was less topical.

Given the time it takes to put a book through production, she was clearly thinking about refugees and their treatment with the cohort of us who knew that it was a crucial world political issue before the early months of 2026. But now here we are, and hey, look! A protagonist who is sensitive to and helping refugees without requiring them to be moral paragons! Everybody buy two copies and pass them around, its time has come.

I am not being sarcastic.

This is the latest in the Singing Hills Cycle, which is the chronicles of Cleric Chih and their memory hoopoe, Almost Brilliant. It is a perfectly good entry point to the series--you will smoothly and swiftly find out who these people are, what they're up to, and why you should care, and then you can circle back and read the others as you can find them. (They're still in print, but we live in parlous times etc.) And while the plight of refugees is not exactly an upbeat topic, the different volumes have different levels of harrowing, and this is definitely on the less-harrowing end, which often makes for a good starting point. (Again parlous times.) I'm glad this series is ongoing, and I'm glad this is the way it's going on.