Asking the Wrong Questions

This latest batch of books is a bit of a grab-bag, stuff I've read in the last few months that felt worth talking about. Not listed here, but discussed at Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lauren Wilkinson's American Spy , an espionage thriller about a black FBI agent recruited to spy on a left-wing African leader that overcame my skepticism towards its genre with its handling of an uncommon subject matter. Highly recommended. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo - I read two books by Evaristo a few years ago, and my reaction at the time was that she was an author ahead of the curve. We've seen a flowering of high profile books about the African and African diaspora experience in recent years, as publishers finally wake up to the financial viability of such works and start putting money and publicity muscle behind them. Evaristo's playful, quasi-experimental books—one a novel-in-verse, the other an alternate history—felt perfectly suited to the late teens, except that...

The first few months of 2017 reading have not been as breathtaking as the comparable period in 2016.  Nevertheless, the feeling of having gotten my reading mojo back persists, and this list of recent reads, a mostly-literary bunch (a lot of my recent genre reading has been for my New Scientist column, and you can find my thoughts on those books there) with a few awards contenders and interesting also-rans thrown in, represents a strong first half of the year.  At least one of these books, I think, will end up on my year's favorite list, and almost all of the others are books I'm glad I took the time to read. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer - It's interesting that in the space of a single year, Tor published two debut novels about non-dystopian, non-corporatist future societies in which the boundaries of national and ethnic identity have been replaced by global affinity groups, to which people assign themselves according to their interests and philosophy.  For ...