Asking the Wrong Questions

"I think he gets everything from novels," Taryn explained to Berger.   Berger was exasperated. "Everyone gets everything from novels."  New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox is a literary nomad. In a career that has spanned thirty years and nearly twenty novels, she has written historical romance ( The Vintner's Luck , 1998), YA fantasy ( Mortal Fire , 2013; The Dreamhunter Duet , 2005 & 2007), and Stephen King-esque horror ( Wake , 2013). Her most recent novel, The Absolute Book , is at once a leveling up and an inevitable culmination of this wandering quality in Knox's career. It is, as its title suggests, a novel about books and their magic. But it is also a novel about stories and how they shape the world. The result has a bit of a magpie quality to it, dipping into different genres and story types, mixing various references and homages, often losing the thread of its story in cul-de-sacs and set-pieces that are more interesting than the whole that conta...

I read 93 books in 2016.  For a while I thought I'd make it to a hundred, but no matter--this is still a huge leap, one more book, in fact, than I read in 2015 and 2014 put together.  I wish I could put my finger on just why my reading this year made such tremendous strides.  Part of the reason is purely practical--I read a great deal of comics this year, and no small amount of YA and single-volume anthologies, and these all made for rather quick reads.  But I also feel like I've broken through a wall with my reading--with identifying books I'd like to read and am likely to enjoy, and with organizing my reading so that I'm not overwhelmed by too many heavy books, or too many trivial ones, and end up feeling dispirited and not willing to crack open another cover.  This was particularly surprising when you consider that 2016 was the year I broke my habit of not reading genre trilogies, or at least not carrying on with them past the first volume.  I read the f...

2016's reading continues to be rewarding, and though perforce less swift now that I'm no longer on holiday, still moving along at a steady clip.  This bunch of books includes several that I can already tell will be on my list of favorite reads at the end of the year. The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie - This spring's it-litfic comes with blurbs by Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, and has a quasi-literary, quasi-romantic, quasi-slipstreamy premise that seems instantly appealing.  The novel spans the short but eventful engagement of Veblen, an underachieving temp worker and sometimes translator who lives in a storybook house in the woods and talks to squirrels (who sometimes talk back), and Paul, a neurologist whose new gadget to prevent traumatic brain injury in the field has been picked up for testing by the US military.  Right off the bat, the book feels like an invigorating blend of the personal, the political, and the topical.  Veblen, whose ret...

I went through an unplanned blogging hiatus this summer, which meant that a lot of books and movies that I would have liked to write about ended up unreported (though some of them will be showing up in my forthcoming year's best list).  Still, it seemed wrong to end the year without another look at what I've been reading (one of the things I'd like to get back to next year is full-length book reviews, which is something I've let slide, but this will do for now).  Those of you who haven't been following along on twitter (or who have been defeated by its ephemeral format) might also be interested in the conclusion of my read-through of the Sherlock Holmes canon--here are my thoughts on The Return of Sherlock Holmes , His Last Bow , and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes . The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - Tartt's bestselling, Pulitzer-winning novel kicks off with a terrorist bombing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker loses his beloved ...

My review of Elizabeth Knox's YA novel Mortal Fire appears today at Strange Horizons .  As I write in the opening of the review, I was introduced to Knox by Nina Allan's Short Fiction Snapshot about Knox's short story "A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill."   Mortal Fire turns out to be less focused and not nearly as weird as the story, but it is nevertheless an intriguing, richly detailed, sharp novel that marks Knox out as a writer to become better acquainted with. This is also a good opportunity to mention that Strange Horizons is running its annual fund drive this month--see the arrow below tracking the drive's progress.  The money raised during this period will be used to pay our contributors and to help Strange Horizons remain (she said, with some admitted partiality) one of the best sources online for speculative fiction and non-fiction.  The main fund drive with details about how to donate and publicize the drive can be found here .  Anyone wh...