Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Published in 1998, this is a tale of Carribbean magic transplanted to a future post-apocalypse Toronto. In another sense it is a coming of age family story. Ti-Jeanne has just had a baby, and settles with her grandmother, a folk healer and magic practitioner. The baby's father is ominously tied in with the posse of organized crime, run by Rudy, who is kept young by an enslaved duppy who is fed childrens' blood but who must also follow Rudy's murderous orders.  Ti-Jeanne of course runs afowl of Rudy, who it turns out is her grandfather, and Ti-Jeanne gets some aid from the duppy, who turns out to be her mother's spirit. It's a competent tale, but not much more. 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke is an odd and difficult to describe fantasy novel. It begins with the eponymous character nearly alone in a world of massive architectural halls, sometimes underwater, all mapped out carefully over the years by Piranesi. Yet some aspects of the author's world-building don't quite fit (that is, why does Piranesi know of concepts and things from our modern world), but eventually (via reading his old journals) Clarke brings in a mystery of the real world that brought Piranesi to this world, at the same time as the process erased most of his memories. The set-up is initially too long, and (unusually) the middle section of the book, unravelling the real world mystery of academic rivalries exploring mystical dimensions, is the most gripping part, leaving the resolution rather disappointing. Though imperfect in minor ways, Piranesi is still a fine if strange novel. 

Dancing with Salome by Nina Antonia

With Dancing with Salome: Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde and Friends (2021) by Nina Antonia, one should ignore the main title (referencing Wilde's macabre play) and cue into the subtitle for the descriptive phrase that tells the reader what this book is about, and why one should want to read it. The small book consists of four essays, plus an introduction by Therese Taylor and a shorter introduction by the author. The first essay covers the supernatural thread in Oscar Wilde's life, while the second discusses "the supernatural affair of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde."  The third explicates Aleister Crowley's unsuccessful attempts to goad Douglas into a lawsuit, and the final one is on the life of Lionel Johnson, the friend of Douglas who introduced him to Wilde, who was also the subject of a previous volume by Antonia, Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era's Dark Angel (2018). Dancing with Salome is an intriguing look at the occult aspects of Wilde and of his friends in the 1890s, a subject usually given short shrift in books for more general audiences.  I found it well-written and illuminating. 

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein is another of those supposedly-classic science fiction novels I had never read, until now.  But I did see the 1997 movie, which was enough to make me think I wouldn't like the book. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought. The book isn't really an adventure story, but a history of the military indoctrination of a young man in the future. It's filled with info-dumps giving arguments about service and citizenship, all of which (if followed) would likely lead directly to fascism. The movie jettisoned all this, taking a snarky tone, and concentrating on the war with the completely inhuman aliens called merely Bugs. It probably was the right choice for making an almost palatable film, but reading the book makes one feel that Heinlein's views of society are as diabolically twisted as Ayn Rand's objectivism (a candy-coated term for selfishness). Why either book is popular is beyond me, but they are book ends on the same bookshelf. Not a shelf I want in my bookcases. 

The Director Should've Shot You by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster has been a prolific author of original books as well as of novelizations of scripts. This book, The Director Should Have Shot You (2021),  concerns the latter, covering some twenty-seven projects from 1974 through 2017, many of them very high-profile franchises (e.g., Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, etc.). I'd previously understood that writers were the lowest person on the totem pole in Hollywood, but Foster's book makes abundantly clear that those writers who novelize scripts are the lowest of the low. Clearly I didn't have a cynical enough view of Hollywood before I read this book. Here's are some choice observations:

"Most of the folks working on large-scale films understand that they cannot set the lights, cannot build the sets, cannot do the special effects or sew the costumes or produce or direct or act or wrangle the dogs--but everybody thinks they can write." (p. 184)

"Nothing will get you eyed with greater suspicion in Hollywood than offering to do something for free." (p. 103)

"Given enough CGI action, a certain segment of the movie-going public will watch anything, no matter how little sense is made by the plot, characters, and dialogue." (p. 229)

"Of course, logic and reason never stopped a movie from getting made, so we continue to be threatened with an endless succession of mind-numbing Terminator films. Maybe that is the machines' real method of exterminating us: dulling out thought processes with increasingly stupid movies to the point where we are unable to mount an intelligent resistance." (p. 218)

First Impressions by Glen Engel-Cox

I've read book reviews by Glen Engel-Cox for a long time, as I find him an interesting critic who expresses himself quite nicely, and one with whom I share a fair number of author-interests. Now comes a supersized (500 oversized pages) collection a lot of the reviews, titled First Impressions (2021). The book's subtitle notes he has been "Dancing about Literature since 1986," though the bulk of the reviews date from the decade of the 1990s, after which the number of books reviewed drops considerably. 

Reading (or rereading) reviews of favorite authors do bring insights, and recommendations for other books I haven't read. Besides masters like Borges and John Crowley, Engel-Cox has a taste for quirky modern fantasists like Jonathan Carroll, Graham Joyce, William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, James Morrow, and many others. But his praise is not unconditional, and flaws are pointed out and discussed. And Engel-Cox does single out books that he expected to like more but in the end found disappointing. I certainly agree with him on Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint,  Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry and even the supposed classic anthology, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison.  

Of course the real value of this book is in the descriptions of books I haven't read that the reviewer found especially worthwhile. So I'm making yet another list of books to read, or to acquire (if I don't already have them). And I look forward to some worthwhile reading. I do hope Engel-Cox will do a follow-up volume, covering more thoroughly the speculative fiction of the 2010s. I wonder if he feels the heavy disappointment I have found in a great many of the supposed standout books of the modern era.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Another ho-hum short modern fantasy that seems designed to tick off various qualities of virtue-signalling. Asian-styled setting. Check.  Character who uses the (annoying) ungrammatical single they/their pronouns.  Check. The publisher's blurb on the rear calls the book "feminist high fantasy" (debatable, on both points) and "an indictment of monarchy" (ditto). Etc. What's left? A thin story of an empress's revenge, played out over years.  The blurbs on the rear by other writers are delusional: "An elegant gut punch" Seanan McGuire; "a small, masterful jewel" Aliette de Bodard; "Glorious, beautifully written"  Kate Elliott.  The book is not dreadful; it's just not very good.