helenic

I did the other post on its own because I am kinda proud. I read all of the then extant Hugo winners when I was in college and had access to the NYU library for some of the more hard to source titles. I haven't entirely kept up since then, so when I was at Worldcon last summer I was inspired to read all the ones from the last decade I hadn't read. I don't think I was surprised by my response to any of the books I had missed: Nettle and Bone and Network Effect were fine but not entirely my thing, the Teixcalaan books were tremendous but required a lot of focus and attention. I've already written about Some Desperate Glory and The Tainted Cup in the last six months.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

It's very satisfying, the moments that suggest that I am not merely a reader, but a competent reader. The moment when Eight Antidote sneaks into the Ministry of War, I said, "I have never seen a more Cyteen-coded moment in anything I have ever read," and I googled it and found "
Also, everyone knows that Eight Antidote is my version of Ari Emory II, right? :".

Fer-de-lance by Rex Stout

Re-read, the first in the Nero Wolfe series, inspired by my enjoyment of The Tainted Cup. The book's introduction notes, and I agree, that it's a fascinating start to the series because so many serial elements are already in place and presented as established conditions: Archie has been working for and living with Wolfe for seven years already, Wolfe's staff and many of the consultants he periodically hires are maybe not fully realized as characters but are already present. I'm pretty sure when I previously read Fer-de-lance, I assumed it was a middle book in the series rather than Book 1.

What does make this distinctively the first book is its early 1930s vibes. The Depression is still lingering for the poorer and more economically vulnerable, Prohibition is a recent memory (Wolfe is trying out all of the newly available beers, in a hilariously unnecessary subplot that I kept wondering whether it would dovetail, Sue Grafton-style, with the main mystery), and Archie talks like Sam Spade sometimes. Later Nero Wolfe books, as I recall, adapt to post-war culture in many ways.

The Archie/Wolfe dynamic is so much fun from the get-go. Archie is basically competent on his own, and Wolfe affords him a lot of autonomy, but Stout knows that when Archie freelances a little too much he'll always run into trouble that requires Wolfe to bail him out. It's the glue that makes these mysteries distinctive, that the plot will always be complicated by Archie's mistakes and misunderstandings as well as the cleverness of the antagonist. That, moreso than the gimmick of Wolfe solving the mysteries from the comfort of his townhouse, is why I love these stories.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

I was reading and I thought, oh, cute, a queer take on John Green's Paper Towns, with a mysterious high school classmate of the main character disappearing and leaving a treasure hunt behind, and that was all well and good, I like that sort of Konigsbergian puzzle story, but it was not super-challenging as a read. Then I got to the resolution of the Paper Towns-style quest and... there was about a third of the book left. And I was like, what's going on? Is there going to be a Scouring of the Shire? And there was! And it involved a whole bunch of temporary queer found family ganging together to overthrow the social order of a small Southern town and it made the book way more interesting than I thought it would be.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I'm thinking of going back and reading more in this series so I went back and reread this. I don't have much to say, I liked it just as much on a reread.

Dungeon Crawler Carl / Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

I really kind of detested the first one, so I don't know why I went back for book two. I think it's because book one is basically competent at what it's doing, and they're quick reads, so I think I thought maybe it'd grow on me, but it did not. If you hated Ready Player One, you will hate this more. I didn't hate Ready Player One, but I just do not understand why Dinniman is doing the thing he's doing in the way he's doing it. His 'campaign setting' is alternately incoherent and morally upsetting, and the idea of a character cleverly LitRPGing his way through this nonsense world that commences with the murder of 99% of all human life makes me angry in a way I struggle to put in words.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

What can I say, I'm a sucker for magical pedagogy and I loved how this book represented the mundanities of guiding young people through a world full of supernatural dangers. The teacher perspective was incredibly sharp and convincing, and the unreliable narrator of it all was very effectively handled. An excellent book I flew through.