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landingtree) wrote2025-07-06 08:56 am
landingtree) wrote2025-07-06 08:56 am
New York books read on the East Coast
It more or less began as an accident that I spent most of my trip to North America reading books set in New York. I was reading Deep Roots before I got to New York, and I bought The Chosen and the Beautiful having forgotten that The Great Gatsby, which it retells, is set around New York. Then I read Trouble the Saints to complete the pattern. No ill will toward Montreal, Washington D.C., or Boston, where I had good times - and in diverse ways actually better times than I did in New York - but I did not read books set in them.
~
Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).
~
In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.
I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.
Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.
~
Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.
This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.
This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.
~
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.
This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.
...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.
~
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.
This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.
I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.
~
...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:
Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.
Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.
Also bought at Scintillation.
Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.
These are gifts fromambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine."
The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]
Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.
These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.
Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell
Strand Books.
The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.
Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.
The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thingjsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while.
More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.
~
Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).
~
In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.
I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.
Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.
~
Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.
This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.
This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.
~
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.
This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.
...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.
~
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.
This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.
I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.
~
...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:
Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.
Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.
Also bought at Scintillation.
Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.
These are gifts from
ambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine." The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]
Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.
These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.
Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell
Strand Books.
The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.
Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.
The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thing
jsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while. More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.
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I have only read Vo's novellas, which are very fun, and keep meaning to dive into her longer and heavier work.
Alas, most of the books set in DC are bad.
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I have reserved The City in Glass at the library (beginning my other optimistic book-tendency which is to put too many books on reserve at one time), and also have my eye on the one with mammoths.
That does seem a shame. Are any of the exceptions notable?
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The short stories of Edward P. Jones are extraordinary. (His sole novel is also very good, but does not take place in DC.)
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Future Washington: anthology of short science fiction about DC, of which I have forgotten literally every bit except the Cory Doctorow story where ants control car navigation. And that particular story is set in Southern California.
Andre Norton's Star Ka'at: fairly forgettable middlegrade science fiction. Does have a solid sense of place in its set-in-DC parts, with the slight weirdness that Norton is clearly drawing for her personal memories of DC in the 1940s--but (based on the state of background Cold War politics) setting it in the 1970s. This is a little jarring if you know how DC's urban geography changed across those decades.
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Blind Geometer: interesting enough science fiction, very cleanly drawn DC setting, unfortunately contains the single worst-written sex scene I have ever had the misfortune to read. This is the book with "Now with each plunge into her (cylinder capped by cone, sliding through cylinder into rough sphere.)" Robinson has written other DC-set books I haven't read that . . . probably contain less painfully described anatomy?
Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong, Waking the Moon, and probably other books that I haven't read: fantasy/post-apocalypse. Excellent DC character; Hand knows this city, and I know and love many of the obscure places she chooses to set scenes. Also, gender essentialist in a particular second wave feminist sort of way that IMO thinks it's more radical than it is. I'm just going to quote Hand from an interview here: "up until I was about six I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl. I identified more with boys than girls, so I assumed that eventually everything would sort itself out and I’d end up on that side of the bullpen. I was pretty bummed out when I realized I was stuck being a girl." This approach to gender kinda pervades the books.
Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix: perfectly fine book, mostly not set in DC, that has an extended sequence set at my employer that irritates me deeply. I would like it better if it was zero percent set in DC.
Claire O'Dell's A Study in Honor: Sherlock Holmes done as near-future science fiction with lesbians, set in DC. I hated this passionately, and not only for the petty reason that at one point it describes a bus commute, naming specific real bus lines, that makes absolutely no sense as a way to get from point A to point B. I admit that is part of the reason, though (or at least, indicative of some of the broader problems). If you can't be troubled to get the details right, handwave and make shit up.
Morowa Yejide's Creatures of Passage: more magical realism than fantasy; also, more horror than I usually look for. Gorgeous sense of place; meandering sense of anything else. You might like it more than I did? I don't think it's a bad book, it's just not the kind of book I prefer.
Alaya Dawn Johnson's Love Is the Drug: have not actually read this! I should fix that. After, you know, I read the other Johnson that is sitting on my shelf unread.
Oh, and in other genre fiction, Barbara Hambly set one of her Benjamin January mysteries in DC; that was pretty good, as I recall. Good Man Friday. But I don't know how you feel about mystery in general, and it's not a great place to start the series. (Speaking of which, you know the Vo with mammoths is book four in a series, right?)
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Oh yes there's Robinson's Science in the Capitol too, isn't there. I read the first of those. I think it's not the Robinson I'm likeliest to go back to, though. Even though I do not recall it having any sex scenes involving cones.
I read/skimmed/disliked Waking the Moon without ever registering that it was set in D.C. though I do like the Cass Neary books. Perhaps she improves at gender by then? Or perhaps I was filling in blanks with what I'd want to see there. The rest of that interview at least indicates that she read several books in which transness is a thing in worlds other than ours.
The Book of Phoenix is in fact sitting in our bookshop's back room (and is there a copy out front? If not I should move it.) Sad to hear it is not the answer to my DC book needs.
And these other three have potential and I will bear them in mind! I read the first Benjamin January book and liked it, though haven't gotten around to the others. I feel positive-ish about mystery, without having read much. (I have several long series in my back pocket. Maybe I will read more Dalziel and Pascoe. I own something like the complete Anthony Price spy books, have done for a year or so, and have read three).
I vaguely knew the Vo was in a series, but had only really got as far as seeing that mammoths was the one the library had. I guess I can remember to read things that aren't in hard copy.
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