It's a magical world

What I'm Reading
Seanan McGuire, A Red-Rose Chain (2015) - The ninth and newest Toby Daye book. I'm enjoying it a lot so far, though at this point I feel like there isn't a lot to say about individual books except in terms of the overall series. At least, after the heavy revelations of The Winter Long, this book is less about heavy personal revelations and more about straight-up terrible things and Toby doing her hero thing, even in some very trying circumstances, viz. Portland.

What I've Read
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Wicked City (2012) - I said from the beginning that Zephyr Hollis was in denial about who she was, and I felt vindicated that Zephyr herself came to explicitly agree with that statement, but by the end of this book I was really irritated with her as a character; at some point in the middle, Zephyr's denial tips over into hypocrisy, and she treats her djinni boyfriend rather horribly throughout the course of the novel in a way that doesn't go unremarked in the text, but which does go unapologized for on Zephyr's part. The elements of the plot around Zephyr and Amir were engaging, and I would totally read a third book if Johnson wrote one based on the revelations in the last few pages, but Zephyr herself was just a bit too self-righteous, without the ethical chops to back it up, for me to enjoy this book as much as I did the first one.

Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek (2006) - I loved this book, if not uncritically, then quite a lot, and having come to VanderMeer's earlier work from the Southern Reach books, it's interesting to pick up the threads of thematic continuity that run back from those books into this one: the question of humans' place in an ecosystem, the idea of places as systems that exert a subtle influence, if not contamination, on their inhabitants; other ideas about decay. I appreciated the sibling dynamic of Duncan Shriek making marginal comments on his sister Janice's (posthumous? there's no way to know) manuscript, and I found myself disagreeing with Abigail Nussbaum's assessment that Janice is shriekingly ordinary but wholly ignorant of that fact and therefore boring. To my mind, Duncan, Janice, and Mary are all bad historians and unreliable narrators, but each in recognizably different ways. The mismatch between their approaches to their own stories is what makes the book go, along with some truly inventive worldbuilding and imagery. I need to read Finch.

Catherynne Valente, The Folded World (2011) - Prester John number two, with the third book on hold perhaps indefinitely. I enjoyed this book; I enjoy Valente's writing, though I suspect that were she to write this book now it would be a tauter manuscript--but I like her language so much that I don't mind the meandering in the tale here, and the fact that it ends with the world smashed but the shape of its shattering wholly unclear. Brother Hiob and company are still decidedly 16thC, not 18th. I need to read Radiance, and the other Valente books I've piled up in the TBR stack.

C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising (2016) - YES I READ THE FINAL ONE FIRST, WHATEVER, IT'S HOW I ROLL. I suspect everyone here knows what this book is about, but as someone who was recced the series for about six solid years before I finally tipped over into reading it, I want to record for posterity the fact that I think Pacat is commenting quite shrewdly not only on tropes of mainstream media but also of fandom in some interesting ways, and that all her choices together push the book firmly into romance territory, which may not be immediately obvious when people start throwing around the term "slave fic." The book was amazing, I think I might be dead, I need to read the first two, and, let me be clear: all of you were right.

What I'll Read Next
Hopefully The Steerswoman and other books!

Books Read
Catherynne Valente, Six-Gun Snow White (2013) - I really like Valente's work, and I liked this a lot; it's a feminist retelling of Snow White with a half-Crow protagonist, rather like Maleficent in that the central relationship is between the protagonist and her evil stepmother. It was too thin at some points, but quite a good read.

CLAMP, Drug & Drop vol 2 - I'm liking this restart of Legal Drug much more than that of xxxHoLiC so far, although it turns out it's a massive crossover with an older CLAMP series, leading to the immortal question, "If angels don't have gender, is this series still BL?" It totally is BL; I am very much down for Kazahaya and Rikuou clutching each other while in the grip of strong emotions. Yes, please, I'd like some more.

Reading
Kumota Haruko, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu vol. 1 (2011) - The author is an up and coming BL writer, though I've just started this manga about an ex-con who wants to do Rakugo and I'm not sure whether it's BL yet. If not, there's always doujinshi.

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria (2012) - Yes, still, I'm busy and exhausted, as good as it is. I was saying to jhameia it reminds me of The Secret Service, which I need to think more about why.

Book-Shaped Space for Acquisitions
Arakawa Hiromu, Silver Spoon vols. 4 & 5 (I got the special edition of 4 with the spoons!)
Suetsugu Yuki, Chihayafuru vol. 1
Vonda McIntyre, The Moon and the Sun

Valente, Catherynne M. The Habitation of the Blessed. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2010.

The Letter of Prester John has to be one of the most famous and influential hoaxes in history. Briefly, in the middle of the 12th century, the Emperor in Constantinople received a most singular letter from a man who claimed to be the priest-king of a fabulous realm in the East, which as all good Christians know is where the Apostle Doubting Thomas the Twin disappeared on his quest to convert people, greeting his fellow monarch and promising him riches while handily implying that he, Prester John, was a Nestorian. The letter was a fake from start to finish, but the legend of Prester John inspired Christian questors for centuries, until the world was girdled and there was no more empty space on the map, or belief that a mythical Christian realm could fill it.

This novel takes the opposite premise: what if the letter were true, what if the fabulous realm it described did in fact exist?

The novel is framed by the tale of Brother Hiob of Luzerne in 1699, whose missionary work in the Himalaya in 1699 brings him into contact with a tree guarded by a woman in yellow which bears book-fruit. Hiob is permitted to take three books, and struggles to recopy them before book-mould devours them. The first is the tale of John himself, a ragged, cowardly pilgrim unfortunately convinced that he is a good man and that Christianity is the one truth faith. The second is the tale of his future wife Hagia, a blemmye who is first a scribe and then a queen, and her life in the fantastic realm of Pentexore, where every three hundred years the immortal denizens of the realm put off their lives and relationships by a Lottery and don new ones as you or I might change shirts. The third takes place many centuries earlier and is the collected stories of the panoti Imtithal, royal nursemaid and sometime companion of Doubting Thomas himself. All three stories are connected in ways that would spoil the lovely, rich delights of this book and of Valente's prose.

( This is either Hell, or Paradise )

Valente, Catherynne M. Deathless. New York: Tor Books, 2011.

With the proviso that I wouldn't know the story of Koschei the Deathless from a hole in the ground, this was an excellent, excellent book. rushthatspeaks's review of the book has the general outline of the traditional fairy tale, which as you might expect is very different from Valente's version.

For Valente's version takes place against the backdrop of the Russian Revolutions and the rise of the Soviet Union and its headlong rush to war with Germany, the war, after which no one will ever be the same. In Sankt Petersburg, which swiftly becomes Petrograd and then Leningrad, young Marya Morevna grows up watching her sisters be courted by birds turned into young men and knows that her day too will come. When it does, in the form of Koschei the Deathless, Marya is not abducted, but goes willingly, and it's a question of will--who will give theirs up to whom--between her and Koschei thereafter. Things go, if you squint, according to the old story, but also not: the real, not the calendar, twentieth century has begun.

Valente's been great at restoring agency to female characters in fairy tales since she started, but this book I think represents a step forward for her--she marries the bones of the fairy tale to the horrors of Soviet bureaucracy, and does so in a way that makes the house committee of the domovoi, of Baba Yaga going by Chairman Yaga, of rusalki determined to become perfect Leningraders, seem perfectly natural and perfectly chilling. I was reminded many times of William T. Vollman's Europe Central, in that both Vollman and Valente have managed to capture in perfect language the utter horror of the Soviet regime, but Valente is also exploding fairy tales, showing that what ends so many of them is in fact a midpoint at best, that death and life are inseparable, that life surrenders even as it declares that death shall have no dominion, that you've got to keep living even as you're dying. I've always loved Valente's prse, but there's something about the language in this book that seems to indicate a refinement of her voice, a reduction in words accompanied by an increase in their power, the lyrical and the pragmatic working together like an iron hand in a velvet glove.

It's also, somewhat quietly, a profoundly kinky book; which of them is to be master is very much a live issue in Marya and Koschei's marriage, and the games of power and pain they play are always something more than games, and Valente is able to bring that out well. In conclusion: brilliant and amazing, highly recommended.

P.S. Valente's newest book, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, is out today, on the occasion of which I read, and enjoyed, her post on Tor.com, which is relevant to both these books: Confessions of a Fairy-Tale Addict.

Item one: Jo Walton's list of neglected books in sff. Some if not all of these--such as Megan Whalen Turner, OMG!--are unjustly neglected. A good list, in any case.

Item two: the text of Cat Valente's GoH speech at ConFusion last weekend, which is pretty damn awesome, and I encourage all fans of sff to read it.

Which leads to item three…a book review! What else, really?

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Valente, Catherynne. Under in the Mere. St. Paul, MN: Rabid Transit Press, 2009.

Thinking back over all the Arthuriana books I've read, to say nothing of the mostly crappy movies I've watched, I can't legitimately claim to not be a fan. That said, however, I've never read The Once and Future King or La Morte d'Arthur (nor watched Merlin), and my standards for Arthurian derivations are now pretty high, since it's so common in the genre. I think I can fairly say, though, that Valente's take on Camelot may be unique.

His name became like the sword in the stone: write Arthur on the skin of your hand and it means more than a boy so named, it means him, always him, forever.

Valente's singular insight--ably illustrated by James and Jeremy Owen--is the extent to which the continued tellings and retellings of the Arthurian mythos have leached the players involved of character; they have become archetypes, and as such they are well suited to being reanimated as archetypes by Valente's admittedly baroque prose. I'm quite sure Valente and this book aren't to everyone's taste, but the beauty of her language is stunning, as are the occasional deft insights into the nature of stories, and of this story, that she slips into the text. Nor is it entirely devoid of humor, which is a nice touch. Her other innovation is her connection of the land in which quests take place, the Otherworld, whence Camelot's enemies come and where they reside, with California. As they say, I'll buy that, partly because her evocation of California--mostly SoCal, okay, let's be fair--is so enthralling and perfect despite its fantastical description.

After I finished the book I realized that the legend's three central characters--Arthur, Merlin, and Gwenivere--did not get sections of their own, which is an interesting decision in light of the fact that even people I'd never heard of, such as Balin and Balan, get their own chapters. But we know them well enough through the other characters, and what else could they say, that their friends and enemies and lovers did not already know? If the people of Camelot are archetypes, its king and queen and wizard are legend.

P.S. thewronghands talks a bit about parts of the book on which I cannot comment, particularly the floral symbolism, here.

I've been reading a lot, as usual. I even dreamed of a Redwall book that doesn't exist yesterday morning--it was about Queen Mariel, who had left her realm in the Northlands after the death of King Dankin and the death of their only child. I have a very clear image of the cover painting in my mind even now. I always did like Mariel and Dankin. But then the book turned metatextual and there were a couple of pages in the front that were flattened-out tissue packages. Not Brian Jacques' usual forte.

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( Seven for a Secret )

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( The Queen in Winter )

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I also cherry-picked some stories out of the anthology The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
( Bullet points )

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I finished Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente (catvalente) and loved it. ( The city on the skin )

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I'm not yet completely finished Tamora Pierce (tammypierce)'s Bloodhound, but I'm far enough along that I'm going to venture my comments anyway: essentially, I think this may be Pierce's best book yet. ( In depth )