Books Completed September 2023

 

 

Analog: The Best of Science Fiction, by Analog Magazine - I think I've had this anthology from 1982 since high school, almost certainly from a library sale. Some of the stories were distantly familiar, so I must have picked through it at some point or another, but I pulled it off the shelf a while ago to use as bedtime reading and finally finished it up. There are 32 stories which vary quite a bit in quality and length, and several more right-wingish ones than I'm used to running across. I particularly liked the stories by Arthur C. Clark and Lester del Ray, not so much the longest one by Randall Garrett (mysteries that rely on magic are really dodgy to me), and was reminded I don't much care for Asimov's preachy self-insert characters.

The Snail Factory, by Ari Bach - Originally a webcomic about the factory that makes the world's snails by the guy who runs https://facts-i-just-made-up.tumblr.com which I read via RSS when it was being posted, I decided to pick up this print-on-demand version when he announced it to support him a bit for years of entertainment. Surreal illustrations, some shaggy dog storytelling, and still some legitimately funny and unsettling moments.

Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse - The second installment of the Between Earth and Sky series "inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas" that I picked up new after getting the first one as a gift a while back. I had been wondering if the series was going to turn out to be one of those where you think it's a fantasy but it's really a distant future where people are using misunderstood ancient technology, but I'm pretty sure given the stuff that happened in this volume that is off the table and we're off to full-blown magic land. I enjoy this series quite a bit despite it having so many characters and relationships the book comes with a "players" section at the start, which is a challenge for me, but I'm sticking with it. I think the third one comes out soon.

Cat and Girl Vol. 3 & 4, by Dorothy Gambrell - Yep, plinked through a couple more of these that I picked up last month during a flash sale. Still satisfying, clever, and poignant, and there are a few experiments with color in these volumes. They also have indexes which should seize anyone's attention with the breadth of topics included.

A Natural History of Nonsense, by Bergen Evans - I don't know for sure where this book came from, but I think it was part of a Christmas gift years ago of a stack of natural history books and bestiaries. This is not a natural history at all though, rather a collection of short essays printed in 1947 where the author, who was apparently a prominent skeptic at the time, discusses a variety of topics of common knowledge addressing the misconceptions and logical fallacies that underpin them. He would have done numbers on YouTube. It was striking to me how relevant many of these writings still felt - we're still batting around the same assumptions over 70 years later. The language in the later chapters on race and gender relations have not aged super well, but I think he was coming from the right place.

Bunnicula, by James and Deborah Howe - Saw this in a little free library and it flew into my pocket somehow. This was the first "chapter book" I remember reading cover-to-cover back in elementary school. One thing I appreciated as an adult that I certainly didn't as a kid was how the illustrations by Alan Daniel have an etching quality that plays with what classical illustrations for Dracula. Still a funny and charming  book, and another one I will have to send along to the niblings.