What I'm Reading: September-October 2019

My September reading rate was surprisingly high, considering that I had cataract surgeries: Left eye Sept. 9, right eye Sept. 30.

For well over a year I've had an increasingly smeary view of the world -- as if someone put greasy thumbprints right in the middle of my glasses. I have "complicated" eyes: extreme myopia (-10.5 left eye, -10.0 right eye), scars from an old radial keratotomy, and a longer eyeball depth than many.

Thanks to an intraocular lens in each eye I am now reading without any glasses at all. I'm not quite 20/20 -- surgeon didn't want to overshoot on the correction and I don't fit on the normal charts they use to calculate lens power. But it's good enough to read many things (with cheaters for really small print that shouldn't be allowed to exist), ride my bike, look out at our backyard bird feeders and see at least some of a bird's markings.

Recovery from the implant takes place pretty much right away, hence the prolific reading as I tested my new visual acuity. My prescription will continue to settle down for a few more weeks, then I may get some prescription glasses if needed. Otherwise it will be Dollar Store cheaters. And of course, more reading.

I powered on into October without time to put together a post so this is another two-month list. November is my birthday month and maybe I'll get back into my habit of noting each book in a draft post as soon as I've read it when my memory is fresher.

With appreciation for the authors and those who recommend good books, here's what I read in September and October:
  • The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette): Wonderful sequel to The Calculating Stars, which won the Hugo Award and kept me up until after 2 a.m. on the very last day of August. Before I went to sleep I ordered this. Without feeling dated, both of these nonetheless take me back to my early days of reading science fiction and the sense of wonder, with a writing style that feels as if it comes straight from that time and yet addresses modern issues and concerns. 
  • Followed by Frost, by Charlie N. Holmberg (@CNHolmberg): Circled back to pick up this 2015 work by an author whose other books I've enjoyed: her Paper Magician series and the more recent one that started with Smoke and Summons.
  •  The Bear and the Nightingale Katherine Arden (@ArdenKatherine): Reread so I could continue with the Winternight trilogy with The Girl in the Tower and then The Winter of the Witch. I don't know Russian fairy tales well enough to know how much it echoes and how much it departs from source material. Didn't matter. Great choice for those who love Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik as much as I do.
  • The Shades of Magic Series: A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows, A Conjuring of Light, V. E. Schwab (@VESchwab)
  • The Evermore Chronicles: Before the Broken Star; Into the Hourglass, Emily R. King (@Emily_R_King): Love the central character, Everley Donovan, with her clockwork heart, fencing, and fierce quest for justice for the death of her family. But perhaps it didn't all happen quite as she remembers. I'll be getting the third book in the trilogy, Everafter Song. (Fencing came up again in Creatures of Will and Temper, below.)
  • The House of Sundering Flames, Aliette de Bodard (@AlietteDB): Wonderful conclusion to her Dominion of the Fallen trilogy.
  • The Analog series, Eliot Peper (@EliotPeper): Bandwidth, Borderless, Breach. Like a shorter version of Malka Older's wonderful Infomacracy trilogy, which I read in 2018. If we all rely on a constant feed of information, what happens if someone uses that feed to shape your perceptions, beliefs, even who you might love? And if the company that controls the feed can shape politics and policy, at what point do we outgrow the nation-state?
  • The Rosewater Redemption, Tade Thompson (@TadeThompson): Great conclusion to the Rosewater trilogy; I devoured the first two books while traveling in August.
  • Where the Forest Meets the Stars, by Glendy Vanderah: Picked up on Kindle Unlimited. Loved having a woman scientist at the heart of the story. Lost child enters her life -- or is this child really an alien intelligence that entered the body of a human child who died?
  • Strange Practice; Grave Importance; Dreadful Company, Vivian Shaw (@CeruleanCynic): Thoroughly enjoyed the Dr. Greta Helsing books and I'll look for them in the future if she's writing more. As a human doctor to vampires (which come in different subspecies--who knew?), werewolves, zombies and others Dr. Helsing has quite the practice. Reconstructive surgery for mummies, for example.
  • Creatures of Will and Temper; Creatures of Want and Ruin, Molly Tanzer (@Molly_The_Tanz): Love the idea that a devil possessing you may not be all bad. It depends on the devil, and there are rewards to go with the down side. Both books rest on that same central concept but don't follow the same characters directly and can be read as stand-alones. The women who are central characters aren't traditionally beautiful and they're certainly not helpless. Creatures of Want and Ruin centers on a polyamorous woman engaged to a bisexual man and takes on racists, and Creatures of Will and Temper has both gay and lesbian central characters.
  • The Winter World; The Solar War, A.G. Riddle (@Riddlist): Riddle writes a lot of apocalyptic books and I think I've read most of them thanks to Kindle Unlimited. I have to say they start to blur together after a while.
  • Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (@GWillowWilson): Computer programming, authoritarian religious government censorship and surveillance, and the world of the djinn come together in a really wonderful book; the author, who converted to Islam, says the semi-clueless American Muslim convert in the book isn't really her.
  • The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, Nadia Hashimi (@NashimiForUS): Story jumps back and forth between different generations of Afghan women who followed the tradition of bacha posh, which allows them to dress and be treated as a boy until they're of marriageable age. I so appreciated this look into what it's like for at least some Afghan women. In looking up her Twitter account I discovered she's not only a novelist, she's also a pediatrician and a candidate for a seat in Congress!
  • A Dream so Dark, L.L. McKinney (@ElleOnWords): Loved this sequel to her earlier book A Blade So Black about a new kind of Alice in a darker and more dangerous Wonderland. This has been optioned for a TV series that I will totally binge.
  • The Vine Witch, Luanne G. Smith (@WriterSmith1): Definitely easy to believe that good wine is the result of magic. 
  • The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, K.S. Villoso (@K_Villoso): First in Chronicles of the Bitch Queen. The "wolf" of the title is a young queen in an invented Asian land built around Filipino cultural traditions. In the first sentence of the book she kills a man and her husband goes into exile. Several years of difficult, lonely rule later, she goes in search of him in a country that doesn't respect her nation or her royal status. Good thing she's a trained fighter.
  • Heart of Briar, Laura Anne Gilman (@LAGilman): When a cruel Fey woman bewitches your new boyfriend, takes him away and begins sucking the living essence out of him, what do you do? Partner up with the non-humans who explain the danger to you and head out to save him.
  • Series of very different novellas in the Forward collection, each thought-provoking in its own way: Randomize by Andy Weir (@AndyWeirAuthor, who wrote The Martian), with quantum computing and gambling; Ark by Veronica Roth (author of the Divergent series), about the scientists racing against the impending meteor strike to save as many plant species as possible; Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin (@NKJemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy), which is exactly the way I hope it would go if all the racists and eugenicists were to leave Earth. 
  • Started, haven't finished The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, by Eric Avila. Recommended by Peter Flax in a string of tweets as a corrective to someone's lack of knowledge about the history of highways and what they did to segregate neighborhoods. Highly recommended for anyone working in transportation.
I'm going to skip this month's additions to my TBR (to be read) list and instead may someday publish an updated long list of everything waiting to be read eventually as an update to the list from February.

The importance of online reviews for the author: The numbers matter as much as the content of your review so don't stress out over your writing ability -- just praise what you like about theirs.

A note on local economies and these links: You should shop at a local, independently owned bookstore. Or check these out through your local library -- did you know they can do that with e-books too, if that's how you read? Links on this page are Amazon Affiliate links unless otherwise noted. I've never made a penny from Amazon but these links give you access to more information and reader reviews. If I ever do make anything I'll donate it to a local nonprofit, maybe Books to Prisoners (if you live in Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, or Portland, Oregon you can volunteer with them in person).

Writers on Twitter: I have a Writers list on Twitter. It isn't everyone I read/enjoy but it's a good starting place if you find your tastes and mine overlap. I so appreciate the chances I get to interact with people directly to tell them I enjoy their work.

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