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Saturday 4 July 2020

Best of June

I finished eleven books in June, which means I'm keeping more or less on track for where I want to be at this time of year. I've read slightly more than half of my goal, and have been feeling mild itches to start writing book reviews again, although remembering how much time I devoted to it, and how bad I felt when I fell behind, I'm not sure I quite want to pick it up quite the same way.

However, I thought that perhaps a monthly post with my top three books finished in the previous month might be a nice way to dip my toes back in the book-blogging water, so to speak. Most of the books I finished in June were Hugo nominees of one stripe or another, as I pushed to get everything read by the voting deadline. (Except for trying to cram a couple more series books in, I'm pretty much done for the categories I want to vote in.)

These books were also all queer as heck, which was a wonderful synchronicity with Pride month. It's delightful to see this much diversity in sexuality and gender being portrayed pretty matter-of-factly in Hugo-nominated science fiction and fantasy.

Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer


First up is a young adult book, which surprises the hell out of me. I am not that fond of young adult fiction - I find it too repetitive a lot of the time, with none of the challenge or surprise I'm really looking for in my science fiction and fantasy. So imagine my surprise when I found out that Catfishing on Catnet is really solid science fiction, as well as tense and all-around excellent. There's so much here - first and foremost, an examination of the emergence of AI (if the AI really liked cat pictures, but was also trying to grope its way towards ethics).

We've also got a young woman negotiating the umpteenth new place she and her mother have lived in in her life, and starting to suspect that the story her mother has been telling her about why they were constantly on the move might not hold up. (I was completely delighted by the reveal of the reasons behind, which tied in both emotional and science fiction elements beautifully.) We have a clowder on Catnet, a group of young adults who learn to be there for each other, and also figure out how to subvert a terrible high school Sex Education Robot.

It's one of those books where I'm almost reduced to making earnest hand gestures at the screen, which you cannot see, in hopes of expressing physically just exactly how much I think you should read this book. Catfishing on Catnet. Definitely my favourite book of the month.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

This novella was just a delight. It has the warm humanism I've come to expect from Becky Chambers, including a crew of an intersteller ship who genuinely like each other. Which is not to say there is never conflict, but it isn't artificial, and mostly comes from interaction with the environment. In this book, we're with one of the first crews Earth has sent out to explore the stars, on a very long return trip using suspended animation, knowing no one they know will still be alive when they get back. They're kept up to date by broadcasts from Earth, but those start to slowly peter out, and the explorers do not know why.

This is a scientific expedition, focused on documenting and exploring, while disturbing new ecosystems as little as possible. It lets Chambers come up with some really interesting planets with fascinating life forms, and then examine some of the difficulties that might arise when you have no back-up, and no information.

This wasn't the most challenging book I read this month, although the way the book ends offers some food for thought. It was, however, one of the most purely delightful. I looked forward to spending time in this universe, and was sad when it was over in a scant hundred or so pages.

The Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

I don't love the title of this book, because I keep forgetting if it's the Silver Wood or the Silver of the Wood, or the Silver in the Wood. I do love the cover, and I ended up liking what was inside a lot. I'm a sucker for fairy stories, if they're well done, and not just humans wearing pointy ears.

The main character, Tobias, has been living in these woods for at least 400 years, guarding the dryads and making sure the more malevolent incursions do no harm to the humans who cluster on its edges. (The book feels like it happens in the late 19th century, but I can't remember if it actually ever says.)

Tobias rescues a young man who has just bought a near-by estate, and the young man will just not let him alone, looking into folklore that Tobias has been guarding for centuries. (The young man's mother makes a rather delightful appearance later, being rather more into the practical side of investigating folklore, rather than the academic inquiries of her son.)

It's not a long book, but Tesh does a great job of creating the atmosphere and the magic. This one sold me on the basis of the prose and the feel.

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