My reading mojo seems to have returned from the wars lately, so I’ve been devouring things I’ve been meaning to read for ages. And then there was the Narratess sale, where I scooped up a lot of fresh books.
Here are some books I’ve read in the last few months, divided up into a few categories.
ARCs
Requesting advance review copies is a little fraught, because sometimes my brain just refuses to read a specific thing, and other times I don’t like the book and feel guilty because after all they gave it to me for free.
But to my great rejoicing, I liked all of these:
Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry
This was an ARC from an author I’ve met a couple times. I have mixed feelings about cozy books, because I love the coziness but often these books lack enough narrative drive to actually get me to finish reading. This one promised a bit more plot, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s mainly mystery, with a little smidge of romance. And a lot of food descriptions. A lot. That’s what people like in cozy, right? But it was nice that it wasn’t “a group of friends starts a restaurant,” but a food museum that’s on the rocks and needs to be saved. This book has now released so you can read it yourself.
My corner of the writing community is mostly querying or self publishing. Jesse Aragon is the one person I know who’s actually gotten a serious trad deal. I knew I’d be reading it as soon as I knew it had an evil church in it; that religious stuff always gets me. It’s a very creepy book with lots of body horror in it, but I was more there for the characters trying to work through the trauma of a religious upbringing and the difficult moral choices (spoiler: they don’t always choose right).
This won’t be out till July but I definitely recommend picking it up when it appears. I’ll be posting more about it then.
This is another ARC; the book comes out in October. Technically, it’s a sequel to Star-Crossed Empire, but you can read it alone. A queen comes to power while far from home, and back home somebody’s trying to usurp her authority. I liked the romantic tension between the queen and her bodyguard.
Indie Reads
I’m trying to read more indie books lately, to support my colleagues in this self publishing gig, as well as to discover cool books that would never have fit in the trad ecosystem because, like me, they’re just a bit too unique. I have found quite a lot lately that I loved.
This was an obvious choice, given my love of Jeeves and Wooster and my current project involving a prince and his valet. It lived up to its promise: a romance between a rather dumb gentleman and his brainiac gentleman’s gentleman. There’s a tiny bit of magic, really just enough to justify it being in its own universe rather than ours. And there’s a lavender marriage with a fun heroine, so that it’s not all about the love interests alone.
Safety Protocols for Human Holidays
I saw this novelette when looking for alien romance, and in fact it was the only I book I found that looked similar to the kind of thing I would like to write next. Unfortunately, it was a Kindle exclusive, and I generally don’t buy those because it means I have to read them on my phone.
But I found it on Kobo recently and nabbed it. It was exactly as I’d hoped it would be: focusing on alien differences, from an alien point of view, mainly cozy, a little smutty. Definitely recommend it.
Another one in the column of “most specifically targeted toward me.” This is a gay romance taking place on a sailing ship in the British Royal Navy. And the author definitely knows what they’re talking about. The history is accurate and pretty gruesome. But there’s a happy ending.
Reflections of Lilje Damselfly
This book is about a naiad whose severe chronic illness drives her to seek treatment on land. I expected it, somehow, to be more a comedy of manners, high-class characters flirting at the spa. It’s not really that. It’s about adjusting to life in the human world, not understanding the customs, and about the beauty of nature. There is a romance, but not a high-class one, it’s just two young women with their own troubles getting to know each other in the great outdoors.
I started a prior book in this series but never finished it for some reason. But this book stands on its own, explaining what you need to know about the universe. I like this one because it takes place fully on an alien world, with alien characters. The single human character is a mystery to the aliens. There’s mystery and intrigue and a lot of thoughts about gender, as experienced by aliens who have a whole different setup than we do. Jennifer Povey has an incredible way of imagining alien societies and embedding herself deeply into their mindset.
Trad books
The main way I read traditionally published books is at the library. Despite living in a rural area, I have access to quite a lot this way, both in print and on Libby. I did shell out cash for one of these, though—Remnant Moon I got from a BookBub deal. I definitely recommend subscribing to their emails if you read a lot of ebooks and would like to afford more than you can at full price.
This book is getting a ton of buzz, and the library had a gorgeous edition of it, so I checked it out. I guess a bit of me was hoping it would be overrated; often the year’s bestsellers are. But I didn’t find it so at all. It was a fascinating world and well-written, focused on character development and digging up old mysteries.
There’s a lot of darkness and violence in it, but in the end the morality is less gray than you’d think. The idea is that yes, you may sometimes have to do bad things in the service of a good end, but you’ve got to be very careful you don’t lose sight of that good end.
It is not a romance. I would not describe any of the plot as romance, at all. I think if it had been a romance, it would have been wildly problematic and a way worse book.
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die
I follow the author on Tumblr purely for their cute cats. But I saw some excerpts and it promised to be funny, so I waited weeks and weeks to get it on Libby. It was, indeed, hilarious.
It won’t be for everybody. It didn’t take itself seriously, which led to a lot of cheesiness. But I personally enjoyed it a lot. And the ending twist made the world make a lot more sense than it had up to then.
This was one of my favorite audiobook listens this year. The main character is a robot valet who definitely isn’t sentient or self-willed and definitely didn’t do a murder. UNLESS…
I loved it for the very plausible AI apocalypse, based not on robots being evil but on humans being lazy, shifting all the work to robots while at the same time devaluing humans who don’t have jobs.
The author reads the audiobook himself, doing great voices for all the different characters.
This is my favorite book I’ve read so far this year. I loved the main characters, a ship autopilot and the medical AI on board. They don’t get along very well or understand each other at all, which is a big part of why they keep having problems.
What I loved most was the way the autopilot genuinely doesn’t think at all like a human. She can’t interpret images; she has to piece together voices to communicate; she doesn’t know anything about what is normal for humans. That makes her kind of the worst possible person to deal with the challenges that arise on board, but at the same time, it also makes her the one who has to.
Somebody suggested Elizabeth Moon as an author who might write things similar to me and my tastes. They were absolutely right. I loved this book, starring an old lady (who actually feels like a genuine old lady!) and an abandoned space colony. The aliens don’t show up till halfway through the book, but I still don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention them because that’s one of the big draws of the book. There are aliens!!
Classics
Here are a few books I’ve been meaning to read for years and now abruptly my brain has decided to let me.
This has been on my list since last year, though I had no idea what it was about. I was drawn by an excerpt I read once.
“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”
It was a weird, weird book. Basically, it’s the author’s experience of his time as a POW and the firebombing of Dresden, but through the eyes of someone who is time traveling. Or hallucinating that he’s time traveling. One or the other. It leans into a thought I’ve had before, which is that things like death and loss are illusions created by the way humans experience time. If we weren’t linear creatures, we could go back to any moment we wanted, understand the consequences of the things we did. But alas, we are stuck on a single train track that goes only one way.
It goes without saying that this is a pretty serious book, to be read when you’ve got the emotional bandwidth to read about the horrors of war.
I bought this ages ago at a used book store because obviously you’ve got to read Contact, right? I love Carl Sagan’s nonfiction writings, after all.
Well, I stalled out on it after about a hundred pages, when there were still no signs of alien life. I picked it up for aliens and the longer we went without seeing them, the less interested I was.
But I finally gave it another chance, and I’m not sorry I did.
It turns out this book is not really very much about aliens. It’s about how humans would react to the possibility of aliens. It’s also a bit about faith, about how we need things to believe in, but also we shouldn’t believe things without evidence. I really liked the main character and appreciated that a man managed to write a believable smart woman.
Another classic I’d been meaning to read for a long time. It’s the seminal anti-war military science fiction book, written by a Vietnam veteran who clearly knows what he’s talking about.
There are some dated elements. The idea that women are in the military…and therefore they’re ordered to sleep with the men every night?? There’s a future set around the time of our present, and it’s so dark and dystopian that for almost the first time I thought, “Wow. We are actually in a pretty good timeline, comparatively speaking.”
But I very much liked the commentary on war, how little understanding or say the rank and file have. Most military sci-fi does not address any of this, and that’s why I don’t care for it. The thing it reminded me of most was The Light Brigade. Personally, I preferred The Light Brigade, but I don’t think that book could have happened without The Forever War coming first.
In other news
I’m still looking for signups for my Revolutionary May sale. I have eight so far but more would be better! Feel free to submit more than one book, because there is definitely room. The form closes on the 17th.
I’m in a May the Fourth bundle on itch.io. 23 books for $10, all sci-fi. Definitely a steal.
For Memorial Day weekend, I’m going to Balticon again! This year I will be in panels about hopepunk, murder mysteries in space, gender and sexuality, and even fonts. I highly recommend Balticon for anybody remotely near the area; it’s a great con that’s comfortably fan-sized.
Do you do Discord much? I just started a discord, and now I’m nervous about inviting anybody to it, because it feels egotistical to be like “yeah here’s a space centered on Me.” But hopefully it could be space for all of my writing and reading friends. I’m not going to post the link here, but I’ll hand it out on request to you guys.
Sheila Jenne, author 