Some prefatory notes (in case you didn’t read the first installment):

1. I have left off any books I did not finish, because not finishing a book implies, in some sense, a negative review, which is not always the case. Certainly, I have picked up books this year which I subsequently put down due to boredom or disgust; there were others, however, that appeared to be perfectly good books, just not the correct ones for me in that moment in time. I would prefer that any negative reviews I produce be grounded in a complete reading, rather than consisting of implication or omission alone.

2. I have also left out some books which I read, enjoyed, and declined to write about for unrelated reasons.

3. Books are presented in the order in which I started reading them. Reviews vary from actual reviews to series of disconnected associations or impressions.

4. In the interest of scale: I finished sixteen books during this period of time. For those of you keeping score/judging me at home: that is ten fewer books than I finished during the first three months of the year. I will also say that I started fewer books in the first place, so my rate of books-finished actually improved. Also, I changed jobs and started playing Disco Elysium and Hades during this time period.

5. Yes, I am aware that it is August.

A Deadly Education (2020), Naomi Novik

This novel kicks off Novik’s Scholomance trilogy, which I think is a strong contender for the title of best magic-school series ever written. I read all three books in April, greedily, losing swaths of time to them; the experience reminded me of the feeling I used to get, between the ages of nine and twelve, when four hundred pages in paperback could vanish the rest of the world. It’s not easy to cry when you live at the bottom of the ocean; during the third book, I managed it twice.

Novik takes a systems-first approach to worldbuilding, but A Deadly Education is so grounded in its narrator’s voice and thorny adolescent psychology that the setting’s complexity sneaks up on you a bit. She dives into the exposition needed to move forward in the story with breathtaking directness, having El just tell us, with no apparent audience, where she is (magic school), where she’s come from (a Welsh commune where everyone except her angelic single mother hated her), and what her most immediate problem is (everyone at magic school hates her, and the place is crawling with hungry monsters). I’m still not sure how Novik got away with that; it’s essentially the opposite of all received wisdom about writing fiction, nonrealist work included. For that matter, she does it again in the second and third books, in case you, unlike me, were reading along during their release cycles or took a breather between installments. I don’t mind this sort of thing myself, but it is the kind of approach people complain about on Goodreads.

Like Ann Leckie, Novik is fundamentally concerned with the distribution of power and resources in her setting; I often thought, while reading all three Scholomance books, of the famous dictum from Ancillary Justice, that “luxury always comes at someone else’s expense.” This is evident mostly on a micro-level in A Deadly Education, since the action is constrained to the innards of the Scholomance itself and the characters’ knowledge of the outside world is limited; El continually notices, and passes judgment about, the microtransactions the whole school functions on: check our lunch table for hidden creatures before the rest of us sit down, and I’ll give you a spell copy or my place in line at the materials bin in lab or fraction of the stored power I have access to. El disdains those politics, longs to set herself beyond their reach, but eventually has to admit to herself that she too is a part of the system she despises.

Because these are after all teens at magical boarding school—and because this is a Novik production—there’s a romance. El’s love interest, Orion, kills monsters without a thought for his own safety; to the majority of the student body, that makes him a hero, but to El he’s only a dangerous annoyance. I do not usually seek out or enjoy teen romances, but even I am forced to admit that this is a classic enemies-to-lovers pairing, and one that becomes more powerful and resonant over the course of the trilogy. Each half of the pair sees themself as somehow monstrous; each understands the other as human, in a way that outsiders to their relationship do not.

Stone Butch Blues (1993), Leslie Feinberg

It occurred to me, when I was about a third of the way through this novel, that I had read part of it before: sometime between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, when I was just beginning to consciously suspect certain things about myself. I made it to the first of the book’s numerous rape scenes, closed the browser tab I was (with a distinct feeling of illicitness) reading it in, and jumped away from the computer as if it had just erupted with acid. I don’t recall consciously thinking if that’s what happens to queer people, then I’d better not be queer, but that was on some level what I took away from the experience.

(Did you think this whole “squid” thing was a metaphor for my being queer? It isn’t. I’m queer and a squid, so there.)

I wish I had powered through and finished it as a teenager, but I suppose that, even if the best time to read it would have been fifteenish years ago, the second-best time was still now. Among other things, it’s a powerful demonstration of the argument Kit Heyam makes in Before We Were Trans about just how thoroughly the labels we have for queer genders and sexualities are rooted in highly particularized times, locales, and cultures. Jess’s self-definition as butch refers to both gender and sexuality, but I was also compelled by Feinberg’s alignment of the descriptor with class positionality—for Jess, butch means working-class just as much as it does men’s clothes or attraction to feminine-presenting people or top surgery. (Feinberg is far from alone in using a class lens to describe butch identities, but theirs is the most extensive and nuanced such description I’ve encountered.) Jess’s butch-ness is inextricable from its time and place, from the ongoing struggle to get a union job and the ever-present violence of police raids and the learning process she (a white Jewish person) undertakes to seek solidarity with the Black queer people in her community.

This novel is also a reminder that infighting within the queer community is nothing new—we didn’t just collectively decide to be horrible to each other when we got access to the internet. (An impression you could be forgiven for walking away with, if you’ve spent any time in queer online spaces at all.) One of my favorite scenes along those lines occurs when Theresa, Jess’s longest-term partner, comes home from a lesbian-feminist meeting at the college campus where she works and tells Jess, in immense frustration, that the younger lesbians there have all called her regressive and accused her of trying to assimilate into cisheteronormative culture. The reason? She wears dresses and makeup, calls herself femme instead of lesbian, and prefers butch partners. (I don’t have the actual text handy, but it’s essentially a they think I’m not a real lesbian because I want a man; I told them the whole POINT is that you’re not a man, but they didn’t get it sort of thing.)

Among Others (2011), Jo Walton

I was supposed to read this for my qualifying exams, and didn’t. (I can say this stuff now, because they’ve already mailed my diploma.) Glad I read it in the end, though, since it’s an amazing demonstration of Walton’s stylistic flexibility; on the surface, it’s worlds away from Tooth and Claw, the only other book of hers I’ve read. For one thing, there are no dragons in Among Others, though there are faeries and witches; for another, this is a classic Bildungsroman instead of a Trollope-fanfic-by-way-of-feminist-fantasy. Then, too, Among Others presents itself as the diary of fifteen-year-old Mori, so it’s entirely found text. Like most novels posing as diaries, this one wears its formal conceit lightly, and comes off as essentially first-person/past-tense narration with time stamps. (I’m not as irritated by this here as I am in, say, Future Home of the Living God or A Tale for the Time Being, but the extended reports of dialogue and scenic detail do occasionally strain my capacity to go along with the conceit.) The most convincingly diaristic aspect of the novel is its pacing, which moves in fits and starts that closely mimic the daily-ness of lived experience.

At its core, Among Others is a love letter to the SFF landscape of the 1970s. When she’s not engaging in long-distance magical warfare with her abusive mother, Mori spends most of her time reading; she encounters the classics of the era in real time, and some of the best scenes chronicle her attendance at an SFF book club that meets in the local public library. Walton undertakes a generous, spirited, and thoughtful investigation of the interdependence between what you love and what you are, of the dynamics within fan communities, and of the alchemical process that can transform texts into relationships, and visions of imagined futures into visions of your future.

The Betrayals (2020), Bridget Collins

A thoroughly weird book—which I mean in a mostly positive way. It’s Herman Hesse fanfic, with a healthy dose of Brideshead Revisited and a side of Gormenghast. It’s a chilling chronicle of the rise of a fascist state; an investigation of emotional intimacy and its requirements; seen in a certain light, a thriller. There’s magic, but you never get to see it happen. There’s a strain of what if WWII but they persecuted Christians? that left a bad taste in my mouth. This one has a diary, too, but—unusually—we get it alongside the third-person narration surrounding a much older version of its teenage author. (The effect of this was, at first, mostly that I hated the older and younger iterations of said character equally but for different reasons.) There is a fantastic section, in the middle, that captures the fever-dream stage of a collaborative creative project so exactly that I nearly screamed.

There are some other things that I would love to complain about in this novel, but I cannot do it here without explaining the entire plot. Send me a message if you wind up reading it, and we can complain together.