Books Completed January 2023

Apparently I'm going to keep doing these posts in 2023.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan - Got this one for Christmas from my wife. This was pretty out of my regular fiction comfort zone. I tend to get lost in large casts, and this book had dozens of characters coming and going and running all over the map (there's a map in the front cover, it's that kind of book). There's a main character, but I'd be hard pressed to call her a hero, and all the antagonists are acting out of understandable motives. It ends being set up for a sequel, which would explain some inclusions along the way that didn't make a lot of sense to me while I was reading them, like the one-page scene where someone's trying to invent firearms that's never referenced again. I think this might have been a case of "that was beautiful, but I didn't like it".

The Book of Gaub by Lost Pages - I Kickstartered this back in 2021, but pulled it off the shelf at random as a quick read. It's a book of system-agnostic horror magic that I don't think I'd ever use at the table, which opens with a lengthy content warning and discussion of the X-Card and Lines & Veils. The physical book is really nice, heavy paper with a weird blue/purple iridescent cover featuring an embossed monstrous hand. Actually, I do think I could use this minor magic item at the table: "Grimy bucket. When lowered down into a well on a property, it will fish up a single bone of one of the deceased previous owners, regardless of where they are buried."

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor - A Christmas gift from my sister. This one was creepy! I used to listen to Night Vale a lot but kind of fell off and the catalog is so huge now trying to come back as a listener is kind of intimidating, so it was cool to be able to check in through another medium. My favorite terrible faceless old woman "prank" was leaving a Honey-Nut Cheerios box full of tarantulas in someone's pantry. Well done.

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut - Another Christmas gift from my sister. I have read a fair amount of Vonnegut, but hardly anything in this short collection, so that was a nice surprise. An impactful selection of stories about war and its aftermaths, plus the text of the last speech he was to give but was never able to deliver. I like his approach to science fiction where the miraculous is there to allow him to explore how people would react to a strange situation, and not as the focus of the story itself.

Color (The Nib #14) - One of my favorite collections since I subscribed. The short history of orange, both as a color and a fruit, was extremely interesting, as was the longer piece about the history and science of gendered colors. Blurbs throughout about poisonous sources of pigments from around the world through history tied it all together.

Happy Cruelty Day! by Bob Powers - My laptop died in January, and in the process of setting up a new one I found myself going through reams of old bookmarks. One was for http://www.girlsarepretty.com/ which I used to follow via RSS before it stopped updating, and it turns out they put out a book. You're... probably not supposed to read these in a go like I did. Microfictions of despair and abuse and absurdity and horror and hope, with no fear of dropping you in the middle of thing and letting you figure out the vignette, or not, presented like something like the inverse of daily affirmations. Powerful stuff, I think That's The Black Sludge Part Of You Day! is one of my favorite examples.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers - The first book I read in 2023 was this short novel my wife gave me for Christmas. I really enjoyed this, it was hopeful without being maudlin, and I haven't read a decent "person versus nature and self" story in a while. If I was still seeing my game group on the regular I would have brought this along and made someone take it and pretend they were going to read it.