With few distractions and a lot of time for audiobooks, I’ve managed to get to another almost unmanageable list of books to write up. If you, too, are desperately seeking distraction, perhaps consider availing yourself of my novella, or if you want that tactile rush, my local fave Wise Blood is offering Boredom Bundles. Check and see if your local bookstore is doing something similar; the thrill of discovery is half the fun, in any case.

I ended my last book round-up with mention of the eleventh book I finished this year, the aptly-title and increasingly horribly a propos Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, but the first one I’ve read by her, depicts a world ravaged by a fictional flu epidemic, but also wanders back and forth in time and place: long portions deal with the experiences of characters before the fictional “Georgia Flu” outbreak, and also contains detailed recaps of the titular, also-fictional, graphic novel, which was created by one of the characters and takes place on a deep-space exploration vessel. The plot is complex but never too convoluted, the characters lives intersecting and entangling repeatedly throughout both the world before the Georgia Flu and the shattered societies that slowly emerge from it; St. John Mandel ably handles a robust ensemble, maintaining the characters’ distinctive qualities throughout.

Highly-decorated and widely praised, the novel is definitely in line with the apocalyptic scenarios depicted in Jericho or Alas, Babylon: almost pastoral in its depictions of a nearly post-human landscape, and with a focus on group survival rather than the lone-wolf situation that appears in other works. While the novel does fall into a bit of English-major wank — was it truly necessary to quote King Lear at length? — the style is generally light and polished. Although the author resists the characterization of the novel as science fiction, it both falls into a distinct type of post-apocalypse and won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2015, which sort of suggests a bit of Atwood-esque dismay at genre labeling. In any case, I enjoyed the book both for its technical qualities and, in hindsight, its looming prescience; while I consumed most of it in audiobook form (again, thanks, Libby App!), I ended up purchasing a paperback copy from Half-Price Books. You know, when we could still go to places other than the grocery store.

The next book I finished was a collection of Walter Benjamin essays that Cameron got for me for the holidays: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Benjamin has been a figure in the background of things for me for a minute; I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of some of his papers and affects at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris something like ten years ago, and it was his propensity towards really tiny handwriting, along with that of Robert Walser, that inspired me to learn the habit (and have my gaming-group buddies tell me my character sheets look like they contain the notes of a madman). But I had not had the opportunity to read his work directly until this, and it was quite an experience.

The title essay, of course, has had a tremendous influence on subsequent media studies and art criticism, but there are a number of other pieces, including previously-unavailable-in-English fragments that presage some of the longer or more polished works in the collection, and these provided a delightful insight into the processes of Benjamin’s thought. Honestly, my biggest problem with the collection was the essays that introduced the different sections, many of which were extremely dry but provided necessary context to the items they preface; the essays themselves were translated very well, and while I am still processing a great deal of what they discuss, I do not reference Walser lightly. Benjamin’s style, at least in these translations, reminded me a great deal of Walser’s: light and energetic but nonetheless possessing a dreamy quality. Other, more qualified people have discussed Benjamin’s style and ideas, and I would suggest turning to them, if not to the primary source, for better write-ups than I can give, but I suspect I’ll be returning to this one. As an aside, the book also got me into a couple of weird conversations with a coworker in which she put down her own reading habits next to mine, which was deeply awkward.

In any case, and arguably putting the lie to her assumptions about my “elevated” reading habits, I went on to Jonathan Van Ness’ memoir, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love. And you know what? It was fun! It was nice! It was sweet! It was more or less exactly what I was looking for, and unusually, I didn’t come away from the memoir of someone I admire with the admiration diminished. It’s pretty standard fare as early-career memoirs go, and as an example of the genre, it is solidly decent, capturing JVN’s gentle brand of positivity. I assume there was either a ghostwriter or a talk-your-book sort of situation; either well, it was well done, with a good eye to when a story or an idea needed room to breathe and when it could be treated swiftly and then set aside. If you, like me, are also weirdly in love with him, or just need a quick, gentle pick-me-up, I’d recommend it, but I would stop short of calling it essential.

While I read JVN’s memoir via Libby as I was working on the Benjamin, it overlapped with me finishing the Benjamin collection and then beginning my second part of J. Y. Yang’s Tensorate series, The Red Threads of Fortune. I mentioned its other part, The Black Tides of Heaven, in my previous book round-up, and while I am excited to finish the series, this seems like a reasonable spot to take a moment to assess the two, since they are intimately linked.

In some ways, I almost wish that I had read Red Threads before Black Tides; while the latter is a close character study, the former focuses more on plot and world-building in a way that clarified much of what Black Tides only alludes to. This write-up from Tor does a better job of explaining the situation than I can, so I will just say that there’s magic and dragons and gender situations and extremely delicate handling of character, and I really enjoyed both books. Yang’s style has a precise, allusive and almost elusive quality, which reminded me both of Lloyd Alexander if he veered into a poetic mode, or Peter Dickinson’s underrated classic, The Ropemaker (which I just discovered has a sequel? Miracles and wonders), both in the approach to world-building and the way magic is handled. Suffice to say, I am excited to get my grubby little paws on the next two volumes of the Tensorate series.

Speaking of series, this is when I decided that I ought to revisit and actually finish Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy in audiobook form. I started Annihilation towards the end of February, and finished Acceptance the other day. I have some feelings about all this, but here is where I finished the first one for the second time, and we’ll get to the others as we get to them.

Sensitive readers may have noticed a theme here: between the Tensorate series, which is by a nonbinary author and features a distinctly non-cis approach to gender, and the memoir of a fairly prominent nonbinary person, and me being a pretentious little shit of a man, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the books I had been anticipating the most this year should feature next. This is, of course, Daniel Lavery’s Something That May Shock and Discredit You, a loose memoir/reflection on arriving at and accepting his gender, via his relationship with religion, literature, and William Shatner.

Much like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (about which I had much more mixed feelings, for a variety of reasons), this was a very quick read for me; although my Goodreads records suggest it took me a week, that was really just because through my working week, I could only read a few pages at a time, and then devoured the rest in my off-hours. But where The Argonauts was serious and self-consciously drew on literary theory and philosophy, Something… is almost accidentally literary, Lavery’s pop-cultural referents blending seamlessly into highbrow literary and biblical imagery in a way that spoke to me very deeply. Of course, Lavery’s writing long has, and I cannot tell you how many times I have told someone to read his piece on top surgery (which also appears, in edited form, in this book). Much like one of my other favorite trans memoirs, Jacob Tobia’s Sissy, Lavery’s reflections on transition neither shy away from dark passages nor revel in them, and the author’s distinctive, off-the-wall humor comes through strongly.

This is about where I finished Authority, AKA Southern Reach volume two, AKA apparently a very relatable tale of working at the EPA, and where I started on After Babel, George Steiner’s magisterial work on the nature of translation. It’s long and it’s dense, and that’s what I’ve been reading on the physical plane since about this time, though I am currently on a break from it for something lighter. This is also about where my job made the decision to close, it transpired, until further notice. I am an essential worker there; while the museum may be closed, the sculpture park isn’t. With that in mind, we proceed.

We proceed, specifically, to Labyrinth Lost, the first in Zoraida Cordova’s Brooklyn Brujas trilogy. I’ll return to this, too, shortly, when we come to it.

A waiting list for Acceptance led me to seek out other things, and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise: that search lead me to N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first of her Inheritance Trilogy (not to be confused with the other one). I chose this book because it was immediately available; I have been meaning to read her work for quite some time. The unprecedented achievement of the Broken Earth trilogy winning a Hugo award for every volume sort of suggests that it would be a good idea, along with praise from everyone I know — but this was the one that didn’t have a months-long wait. And quite frankly, it was a gift.

The preliminary and final covers, from the author’s blog.

I didn’t realize, until reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, just how much it scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, for what I would characterize as true high fantasy. But where other forays I’ve made into the genre left me rather cold — it’s hard for me, a person who wears a high-vis polo for work, to give much of a shit about people who represent the worst of Tolkien’s elves — this one really grabbed me. Yeine Darr arrives at the court of Sky from her home in the north, where she is unexpectedly named as one of the heirs to the throne. There, she must contend not only with the machinations of the Arameri, the ruling family, but also of the Enefadeh, the subjugated deities who were on the losing side of a long-ago divine war. And honestly, it hits everything I’d hoped it would: there’s a powerful, oppressive religion; there’s discussions of class and race; there’s gods meddling in the affairs of men (and vice versa). I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed this novel, and how I excited I am to dig into the follow-ups.

After that, I think I needed something a little closer to the real world, which brings me to Bruja Born, the sequel to Labyrinth Lost. The first two of a projected trilogy (the third of which will apparently be available later this year), the novels follow the three Mortiz sisters: in Labyrinth Lost, this is Alex, the middle sister, who believes the magical power that runs in her family is a curse and tries to cast it off, to disastrous effect; in Bruja Born, we see Lula, the oldest sister, nearly die in a bus crash, and try to prevent the death of her boyfriend (which, unsurprisingly, also doesn’t work well). Apparently the third novel will be from the point of view of Rose, the youngest sister, who can channel spirits. I first heard of the series through several recommendations on LGBTQ+ book blogs — Alex is bisexual — where the variation of brujeria Cordova has invented for the novels was also mentioned.

I like the design of these editions quite a bit.

As is probably very obvious by now, I love a good magic system, and Cordova delivers: blending Santeria, Candomble, and elements of the author’s own primarily-Ecuadorian family background and contemporary Latinx culture, it’s thorough, logical, and extremely compelling. She does a beautiful job of conveying how thoroughly suffused her characters’ lives are with the tradition they follow, and, in Bruja Born, how the community of brujas in New York City works together. In Labyrinth Lost we saw more of the magical nether-realm of Los Lagos which, while extremely well-realized, took a minute to click for me, but was ultimately quite satisfying. Unfortunately, the plots were less so, but I think that’s more of a me problem: both books relied on fairly established YA plot tropes to get the story going, and while for me that was a little bit of a hurdle, I don’t think that’s a universal issue (as this write-up from Tor, for example, suggests). And it certainly doesn’t prevent me from looking forward to the third installment.

Which brings me up to finishing Acceptance, the third volume of the Southern Reach trilogy. A lot has been said about the Southern Reach trilogy since it appeared six years ago, and honestly, if you’re already reading this, you probably know most of it. Suffice to say: ecological science fiction! Weird shit! Hope you’re ready to see where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner!

I feel like having a bunch of covers all at once helps convey the vibe a little better. The vibe is, in case it remains unclear, revelatory and unsettling.

I had actually read Annihilation and Authority around the time of their release, but due to an ill-advised loan of Acceptance, had never in fact finished the trilogy until now. I’ve also been a bit of a VanderMeer stan for some time: I read City of Saints and Madmen when I was in my early teens, and eagerly devoured the subsequent Ambergris novels. So it’s scarcely a surprise that I loved the Southern Reach just as much, nor is it a surprise that I would seek to return to them, given an easy opportunity to do so.

I will note, however, that I picked a strikingly inopportune time to return to Area X: not only are we in the midst of a global pandemic that leaves our public space ripe for reclamation by nature and a renewed sense of their strangeness for us, it’s also spring time, and I work outside. My environs, as I bathed in VanderMeer’s strange visions, only supported them: an eastern redbud in its first spring flower looks like a fucking alien life-form; lowered traffic in the sculpture garden means that the birds and squirrels have showed a proportionate lack of concern around my coworkers and me. I’m not saying that’s the only way to read the books, but it is definitely a way to read them.

So that’s where we’re at, coming up on the end of April 2020. I hope we’re all well. I hope we all stay that way.

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Edgar's Book Round-Up: March-April 2020