A Jungle of Tales

              This short volume is really a set of three short stories. “Short novels,” the author calls them…and I can kind of see why. They pack a lot of feeling, character development, and setting into a very short page count. Porter is excellent at evoking a particular time and place. I’m not sure if this quite counts as historical fiction, as the stories are set between the late 1885 and 1918, and were published in 1936 (so the author’s life overlaps with some of it), but there is a sepia-toned quality to them.             In 'Old Mortality', two sisters from a well-to-do Texas family ponder the odd qualities of memory and nostalgia. They enjoy, for instance, the romantic stories of their beautiful Aunt Amy, who died tragically young, but they can’t see that romance in the stiff photo that remains of her, or the mothballed dresses and locks of ...

  This is a popular-science book that is both intensively researched and intensely personal. In 1997, the author began her transition to living as a woman, not knowing if she’d be able to keep her job as an evolutionary biology professor. She did – though she was asked to step down from administrative work – and in 2003 published the first edition of this book, and then a second edition in 2013. It explores variation in gender and sexuality in human and non-human organisms, and muses on the role of diversity as a whole in nature and evolution. I re-read this book trying to decide whether to recommend this book to students, since I recalled both parts I really liked and parts I thought were a bit iffy. That impression persisted on this second reading, and I’ll do my best to outline the pluses and minuses below.   Part 1 – Animal Rainbows: Very good (with a few minor caveats)             The first pa...

              How has it taken me this long to discover Samuel Delany? I’ve long been a fan of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction and its focus on culture and interactions between biology or environment and society. Based on this book, and what I’ve read about his works in general, Delany (a slightly younger contemporary of Le Guin) does the same thing but more , particularly leaning into sexuality and alternative social structures. ‘Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand’ is weird, even by my standards, but it was fascinating, and I kept thinking about it weeks after reading it.               This particular book is rather hard to pin down. There is some planet-hopping going on, but it isn’t a space opera in anything like the usual sense. A planet is mysteriously set on fire, destroying the local civilization, but the mystery is never solved, nor is ...

              This is the second book featuring djinn that my husband gave me as a birthday present after seeing me get totally absorbed in the Daevabad Trilogy , and at this point I’m just marveling at how different all of them are – how many different takes on djinn there can be - while still all being really good 1 . ‘City of Brass’ and its sequels are set almost entirely in the hidden world; while the main character grew up in the human world, the story focuses on the diversity of cultures and people in the djinn world and their internal political conflicts. ‘A Master of Djinn’ is set in the human world – a steam-punk 1912 Cairo – and meet only a handful of djinn, with the story instead focusing on an all-female trio solving magical crimes. This book starts out in modern-day Dhaka, Bangladesh, and ends up following three family members. Indelbed and his drunken father Dr. Kaikobad are the black sheep of ...

              This was another witchy book recommendation from my college best friend – and I should have taken it earlier, because I enjoyed this more overall than ‘War Witch’ . Both are first-person narratives focusing on a character who clearly has some trauma. In this case Galadriel, better known as El, is a student in a very dangerous magical school who has a penchant for the dark side that she’s really trying not to tap into. I was a bit put off by the first chapter – “Oh, god. One of these annoying trying-to-be-clever-and-cynical teen narrators…” - but as the book goes on El’s storytelling gets much funnier as we get to see her interactions with more characters and her own character growth.             A lot of tropes get subverted or re-worked in this book, which I am absolutely here for. First, El is essentially an anti-chosen-one. She would ...

              This is a very well-known and well-loved book…and rightfully so. I’m not a literary scholar, but I suspect the popularity of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a large factor in why there are so many romance books that A) feature a misunderstanding between the leads that sets them at odds, B) are set in the Regency era, or both. The trouble, I think, is a lot of writers don’t quite get what makes this romance work so well. (Note: there are *spoilers* below, technically. I'm not sure you CAN "spoil" a book that is this old and this talked about, but if you really want to go in blind...you've been warned).             The foreword of this edition suggests notes that, for most of the book, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy would believe that the book they are in “should be called ‘Dignity and Perception.’ They have to learn to see that their novel is mor...

            Like ‘The Pull of the Stars’ , this is a book I bought as a Christmas present - in this case for my evolutionary biologist husband - thought “eh, I might as well read this before I give it away”… and it totally sucked me in. How to describe this book? It is kind of like what you would get if Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Foundation’ books (the ones that span centuries of an institution trying to tweak societal development) and Ursula LeGuin’s “let’s see what happens to society if we change biological detail X” approach (eg. ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ ) had a baby. But the selling point for me was the spoiler that there is a spider civilization in this book. And, oh my gosh, did it deliver!             The inciting incident of the story comes about because of a dispute over a terraforming project overseen by Dr. Avrana Kern. One of her subordinates is a mole who sabotages the...