A phenomenal memoir. Full review to come.

Cw for rape, domestic abuse, child abuse, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, racism, suicide, intersex genital mutilation, police brutality, use of slurs, death of a parent

After reading Nino Cipri’s brilliant speculative short story collection, Homesick, earlier this year, I immediately ordered a copy of their novella Finna. This is a quick, charming read about two recently broken up coworkers at an IKEA-esque furniture chain who, because they have least seniority, get stuck traveling together through a wormhole to rescue a missing customer. It’s a funny adventure blending outlandish other worlds, criticism of capitalism, frank discussions of mental illness, and the emotional resonance of two tender hearts wrestling with whether a comfortable friendship can possibly be salvaged from the wreckage of their soured romance. I enjoyed reading this book, my main qualm being that I would have loved it to be a little longer! Definitely check out Cipri’s work if you’re a fan of weird speculative stuff and/or messy queer relationships.

The Fall by Tracy Townsend is the second book in her Thieves of Fate trilogy, following up on The Nine, which was one of my favorite reads of 2018. Thieves of Fate is a unique fantasy series about a found family of criminals and misfits set in a world where science and religion are inextricably tied. There’s a ton packed into these books: numerous POV characters, complex worldbuilding, strange magic, and three sentient races cohabiting and conflicting. In The Fall I loved learning more about Townsend’s take on the lanyani (mobile tree people) and aigamuxa (like ogres but with the eyes on the bottoms of their feet, see the image on the cover), and their history, culture, and ambitions. The Fall feels extra sprawling, even compared to The Nine, but I’m liable to blame my lacking memory of The Nine’s finer details on the two and a half years since reading it rather than them being insufficiently foreshadowed. The complex worldbuilding in the series has some fantastic payoffs in The Fall’s climax and I absolutely loved how all the details came together. I recommend this series to fans of think-y fantasy, adventure and intrigue, and a cast of characters ready to steal your heart.

First published in 1921, I read this 2006 edition translated into English by Natasha Randall. Preceding the more well known English titles like Brave New World and 1984, We is one of the original government control dystopians. Zamyatin envisions a society ruled by rigidity and transformed for better or worse by the belief in the collective, where only the group has “rights” and the individual has “duties.” Things go sideways for our hero when he meets a captivating woman who challenges his steadfast belief in the One State.⁣
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What I loved best was the thoughtful worldbuilding, and the way the protagonist, writing in a journal he anticipates will be read by members of a less advanced society, explains his worldview. The book lost me for a while in the middle; the narrator spirals into an existential crisis and becomes increasingly incomprehensible as he wrestles with new feelings and this uncomfortable opposition to a society he never dreamed could rationally be opposed. I was also generally frustrated by the trope-y relationship between the protagonist and this mysterious woman, who challenges him less with intellectual arguments and more because he’s just recklessly smitten. As the action rises, this book found its footing for me again and I couldn’t put it down as everything roared toward its thought-provoking conclusion. Overall glad I read this one, and excited to discuss.

A Memory Called Empire follows Mahit Dzmare, the new ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire from small independent Lsel Station. The former ambassador, Yskander, died under suspicious circumstances and Mahit is hastily sent to replace him, armed with Yskander’s imago, a secret Lsel technology that allows an imprinted memory to be passed between generations. To make matters worse, the imago in question is an atrocious fifteen years out of date. What follows is a tale of political intrigue as Mahit attempts to rapidly understand Yskander’s years of work, and advocate for the continued safety of her station in the face of the powerful colonizing empire. ⁣
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This is Martine’s debut novel, and I think it’s overly bulky at nearly 450 pages. While I would hesitate to call this book fast paced, it did hold my attention. I especially enjoyed the world building, heavy with history and linguistics, and the cast of (queer!) characters, and plan to pick up the sequel, which promises to continue the story in intriguing new directions.

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s collects fifty short satirical essays by Tiffany Midge, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and all around hilarious person. Midge is so witty and thoughtful, and shows tremendous range in this collection that cleverly plays with various essay forms and repeatedly eviscerates the ever-present popular media tropes of the Native American. It’s a collection in turns both laugh out loud funny and necessarily somber, broken into themed parts with titles like “Me, Cutting in Front of All the People in All the Lines Forever: ‘It’s Okay, I Literally Was Here First’ #DecolonizedAF”, and “Breaking News - Your Neighbor Who Said, ‘Whoa, Dude, This Whole Trump Thing’s, Like, So Fricken Surreal,’ Might Actually Be on to Something”. This collection was a thought-provoking and deeply enjoyable can’t-put-down read, I’m sure I missed many of Midge’s references but it never detracted from the experience. Do recommend!

I definitely should have written my review for Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga more swiftly after finishing it, because I don’t know what to say about this book anymore, if I ever did. It’s a difficult book to describe even, so maybe this review is for those of you who see that cover, hear ‘science fiction that bends towards mystery, set in South Africa’s recent past and near future’, and, like me, are sold on no further information. Triangulum is structured like a collection of first-person primary documents, journal entries and transcribed recordings, which are under review by the South African National Space Agency because their relevance to a recent terrorist attack lend credence to their claim of the impending end of the world. At the heart of this novel is a young woman grappling with the disappearance of her mother and, in the background, the rippling social impact of the end of apartheid. A convoluted but ultimately, for me, deeply satisfying read.⁣
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Cw for disordered eating, mental illness, suicide, drug addiction

This is my third time reading Jones’ work, after his creepy novella, Mapping the Interior, and the phenomenal werewolf coming of age novel, Mongrels. Sadly, this was my least favorite so far by a significant margin. The blurb for this novel proposes that it “plunders, in a gleeful, two-fisted fashion, the myth and pop-culture surrounding the American Indian”, but for me I feel it went totally over my head. I read the entirety of the 300-some pages, and I have almost no idea what happened. The Fast Red Road follows a young man going home for his father’s funeral, twined together with the narrative of his uncle’s guilt over his death (maybe?) The story is muddled with fever dream-esque hallucinatory episodes, but there were certainly some exciting and funny moments. This book probably needs a reread to untangle the wild complex story, but I’m not sure if I’m invested enough to try it.⁣
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October's pick for The Stacks Book Club was The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. As ever I'm so grateful to be part of this amazing book club community. Reading this book, hearing Traci and Mark Lamont Hill discuss it on the show, and talking with the book club was so edifying. I'm pretty sure I read this book assigned in high school, but I didn't remember much of it and so appreciated this reread. Malcolm X was an impressive thinker and speaker, and so many of his words in this text resonated with conversations we're still having today. Traci and Mark also got me thinking about legacy, and wondering what we'd be saying about Malcolm X if he'd had more time. How this book stands with this extra weight because of his death and the finality in that. Lots to think about after this important book.⁣