Qualified Perceptions

An orc retires from her adventuring party and opens a coffee shop. The subtitle is "A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes" and that's exactly what it says it is. It's sweet and kind, while still having enough conflict to have there be a plot, but it was never surprising. It's a Hugo nominee for 2023, which is a little surprising, but I think Baldree has extra name recognition and affection fromr all the audiobook narrations he's done. And, I don't have anything against the book - it's pleasant, like perfect latte and a fresh baked pastry on a cold morning. Three stars.

This is "Nick and Nora and Nora's service dog Asta go on a space cruise for their honeymoon, from Earth to Mars, and murders ensue." Quite a lot of it was a lot of fun, and I got amusing JoCo Cruise vibes from it. Kowal does the audiobook narration and that's also a lot of fun (including one awesome scene in which <spoiler redacted>). It's a little irritating when Tesla (Nora), who is one of the super-richest people in the solar system, wields her super-rich super-privilege for other than Great Justice - not at all unrealistic, but it mqkes her rather less sympathetic when it's happening, and I imagine it might be completely offputting for other readers. (Shal (Nick) does call her on it.) Tesla's PTSD and interactions with Gimlet (service dog Asta) are a recurring thread that felt plausible and didn't veer into "skip the disability when the plot requires it" territory. The setting and plot are a fun romp, and the characters are interesting and have some depth to them. All the chapters start with cocktail and zero-proof cocktail recipes, and I was particularly amuse by her made up "Dangerous Words" riff on the Last Word, which Jerry also constantly does. Four stars.

This and the next book are part of my continuing quest for a new cozy puzzle-box mystery author by way of Kindle Unlimited. This one does well with the "cozy" - the two detectives are entertaining enough as they Investigate around a small British village (it has a village green! and a vicar!), but I solved the puzzle box pretty quickly once I spotted the right (admittedly not super obvious) Clue. Oddly, that particular clue wasn't even referenced in the denouement.

Oh my goodness this one is exasperating. Spoilers ho! The most interesting thing about the murder is that the victim is poisoned with a Super Expensive Obscure Poison ("bella indigo" which is like belladonna but more obscure and expensive). The killer leaves a fake suicide note, leaves a bottle of common arsenic on the bedside table, insufficiently washes the original poison water glass to then leave some arsenic on the lip of the glass, before the body is discovered. The terrible Scotland Yard detective is happy to leap to the proffered conclusion of "suicide", but the sleuthing of the Noble Amateur Detective and his scientist discover clues like the victim being illiterate and also she wasn't poisoned with arsenic (this is Sherlock Holmes era so having good forensics is not much of a guarantee). So... why the shenanigans with the two poisons? It isn't even clear in the endgame whether the killer was expecting it to be taken for suicide, or murder by arsenic, or murder by weird poison shenanigans. On a meta level, I think the reason for the shenanigans is that the puzzle box needs knowing exactly "when the killer committed the murder" which a poisoning is the wrong crime for. But there is never a character level explanation for "why not just use the arsenic in the first place"! There's a suggestion that "bella indigo" is more reliable than arsenic, but... okay, sure, just put them both in! Very odd.

Hey! S. L. Huang is MIT class of '07! This is a queer feminist wuxia retelling of a 14th century Chinese novel called Water Margin which I am of course unfamiliar with. It is amazing.

The characters are all turned up to eleven in different directions - both good guys and bad guys and both-good-and-bad guys. Everyone has shtick. The good guys don't win every fight, but everything is dramatically epic. I think I am fondest of Lu Da, who has a kind of Gideon-the-Ninth boisterous thug quality to her with a dollop of Lijuan from Dragon mixed in:

Lu Da did believe in the way of the Fa - well, except for the vegetarianism, and the temperance, and the celibacy, and also how was it possible one needed that much practice at one's art to reach enlightenment? But as little actual philosophizing as she might do, her heart was the heart of a philosopher, and she would live according to the Fa ( with her own adjustments ) until the day she died. Or preferably didn't die and became an immortal forever.

Fun, but not one of his stronger works. He got COVID and brain fuzz while writing, which led to lateness and also, I think, less polishing and copy editing. (I found the mixed capitalization of "Dad" surprisingly jarring - that is, mostly capitalized as "my dad" or "Dad", which is fine, but there are a bunch of references to "dad's Maxima" without the "my", like some sort of cut and replace gone wrong. Anyway, the plot is "Charlie is surprised to inherit the supervillain business belonging to his uncle, that he didn't know about." I find "villain business" not nearly as much a thing as "supervillain business" but there's no superpowers. Blofeld was a villain, not a supervillain. Anyway - it's not about villaining so much as about the politicking surrounding villaining, but it was fast moving and fun, and there were cats. HOWEVER. For all would-be heroes and villains both - when the person next to you is being charged by a knife-wielding adversary, I do not think "jump on top of them" is the right protective move. Getting down is quite possibly correct against ranged attacks, but run away from melee. Three stars.

I quite liked this, though I kept being nagged by the sense that it was an Agatha Christie that I had read before - a painter from one story, a shooting party from another - but it turns out it was actually the first of the Midsommer Murders TV show, which I watched last year or so. There's a lot of interesting characters, tons of red herrings, and some genuine feeling. I liked this description:

Miss Bellringer settled herself in the chair that Sergeant Troy drew forward and rearranged her draperies. She was a wondrous sight, festooned rather than dressed . All her clothes had a dim but vibrant sheen as if they had once, long ago, been richly embroidered. She wore several very beautiful rings , the gems dulled by dirt. Her nails were dirty too . Her eyes moved all the time glittering in a brown seamed face She looked like a tattered eagle.

(Now I am beset by a memory of a novel in which there is a shooting party, and one character leaves early to go back to the house, where they are also in disguise as some other character - and I can't tell if I am imagining this plot or really did encounter it. Also, "ask Chat GPT to identify the book you are thinking of from a plot point" is the first time I have really found it to consistently lie to me about everything. Not that I am surprised that Chat GPT lies, but I have mostly not asked it questions which went so hard in that direction.

This was reasonably entertaining to read - to a large part because of the details about ecological surveys, the main character being an ecologist. Mysteries frequently have a shtick (crossword puzzles! the detective has six dogs! the detective is a sheep!), and the entertainment comes from the shtick instead of the mystery. In this case the author is an ecologist and it sounds like she has quite a lot of stories she could tell. The mystery, on the other hand, is not very mysterious - there are a few false leads but for the most part I kept looking at suspects other than the obvious one only for meta reasons. But all the stuff about feeding treats with non-toxic colored plastic bits so you can see where they poop and figure out their territories was kind of compelling! Also, the whole concept of badger surveys and bat surveys being this HUGE ISSUE for doing any development is not something that I had encountered before, so Today I Learned.

Marcus recommended this one, and I also really enjoyed it. Emily Wilde is a dryadologist (an anthropologist of faeries) - a cranky fieldwork academic who is not all that good with people, but very good at ferreting out the rules and characteristics of the faeries she studies. She's come to Ljosland - a Scandinavian island in fiction (apparently an actual village and ski resort in Norway) to study "the Hidden Ones", a wintry variant of the sort of cruel tall beautiful elf who steals children or fair youths. It's a little slow to start until the second main character arrives, and Emily is abrasive enough that I wasn't sure she counted as a sympathetic protagonist, but once it gets going it's a lot of fun. I've read a lot of books which are set in fairytale-land or follow the rules of fairytales (or faerie stories or Child Ballands or whatever), and this is actually not that. It's the real world, if the real world had faeries in it, and the faerie magic followed the rules of faerie stories. That is, if you help the old lady (who is really a fairy) and that means she will give you the thing you need for later, that's because it's her rule, not the rule of the story you're in. So that means that Emily, as an academic who studies these things, has a working knowledge of how to deal with / trick / bargain / coerce faeries and faerie magic and faerie rules, without being part of those rules herself. (This is a line that I didn't think about until afterwards when I was thinking about how it was different than some of the other people-entangled-in-faerie-story-logic stories that I've read). Four stars. (There is a sequel due in 2024 but this stands on its own just fine).

For your entertainment, a self-description of Emily, and then a description of Bambleby, our other protagonist:

In truth, my parents are perfectly ordinary and perfectly alive, though we are not close. They have never known what to make of me. When I read every book in my grandfather's library -- I must have been eight or so -- and came to them with certain thorny passages memorized, I had expected my mother and father to offer clarity -- instead, they had stared at me as if I had suddenly become very far away.

His slender frame was clad in its customary blacks, all immaculately tailored from the line of his cloak -- which had an upturned collar -- to the folds of his scarf . You would not think a scarf could be tailored, until you met Bambleby.

Another queer romance where the two characters have to Work Together To Do The Plot - this time the plot is a muurder mystery. Surprisingly, the mystery is actually reasonably well done - there are clues and red herrings and some interesting twists that make sense once found. But the romance and working-together aren't as nice as some of the others in this genre - Ned is a consulting magician who is brought into detective a murder case, and Julian is a detective who knows some magic, so I kept getting them confused. Twice there are witnesses who run away because Ned (or Julian?) "scared them off" simply by investigating (in one case *AT THE REQUEST OF THE PERSON WHO THEN GETS SCARED AND RUNS OFF*), which keeps what they know off the board for a while. The first time I would allow, but the second time was exasperating. And there's this whole abusive backstory at school, between Ned and Julian and the guy who hires them, which I expected a little more closure to. But maybe the point is that you can't get closure with jerks, you have to find it on your own. Dunno. The magic system feels real - not overpowering but a substantially useful tool with quirks and limitations. There's a second book, but it seems to have gone out of print and is coming back to Kindle later in the year. Hmm. Three and a quarter stars.

I gave up on this audiobook at what proved to be twelve minutes from the end, when the main character lost their last vestigates of sympathy for me. This is a fictional queer-ish retelling of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, so I guess anyone who goes from being no one to being emperor is going to be pretty ambitious, and the story does a good and interesting job of paring and honing the character from a girl who wants to survive the unsurvivable and will do what it takes, to someone who just wants and will do what it takes. But the origin story of an ambitious antihero isn't all that enjoyable for me, and there wasn't a lot of wit or warmth to leaven the cold.

I gave up on this one too! I'm clearly in a finicky mood. It's a genre I'm usually pretty fond of (fantasy heist), but I found that I was highlighting things to grumble about rather than to praise, which is never a good sign. My main complaint is that there are a lot of nice bits, but I didn't feel like they were all really aligned right. Like, the heist crew is from an extended family that used to be the rulers of fantasy-Venice, but they got deposed and mostly murdered; it's just the kids who were spared, and are now grown up and more or less vengeful, depending on which one they are. Two of the older ones have been saving up their heist loot to eventually go straight and open a shop; the heist leader feels COMPLETELY BETRAYED when he learns about it. Which... okay, he can decide that, but he's also been protecting his little sister and not bringing her on the heists, so this feels inconsistent; surely the important thing is that you preserve your family, not that your family has to stay in the criminal business? This next bit is a set piece that I really liked, but raised way too many questions.

To set the stage, our heroes ran a Heist yesterday, to steal an idol from the religious ceremony that the new ruler was holding, ostensibly to bless the city, really to make himself a god (or so he thought). The ritual ended up life-draining a lot of servants, the idol got broken in half, the god manifested, the Doge ruler shot lightning from his hands, people jumped out of windows, it was a big mess. Today, the crew has decided to flee both the city and the save-the-world plot, as it is above their pay grade. (I assume they are to change their minds again later in the book.) The city is kind of panicking and kind of rebuilding. Three of the crew are going to pick up one of their stashes.

Bolstered by my plan--rudimentary though it was--and my overweening confidence, I led Kai and Mira across the city to the Thistle and Bloom. The perfumery had been built in the continental style, eschewing the typical hodgepodge of red and orange brick for a creamy facade that Aunt Nell must have paid a fortune whitewashing every year.
Dusty rose shutters framed the curving windows and a cheery white- and-sage-striped awning covered her door. If it seemed like an odd place to hide an armory...
It was.
Which was what made it so damn genius. The last place the codies would search for illegal weapons was the store where they bought their mother's last solstice gift.
The door chime shrieked to life as I pushed into the store, setting my teeth on edge with its false merriment. I squinted into the gloom, trying to squeeze the sun out of my eyes when a voice lanced out from the darkness.
"Take one more step and it will be your last."
I knew better than to argue with Nell when she used that tone. Gluing my legs together, I raised my hands, felt Kai and Mira do the same as I scoured the shop for its owner. She wasn't sitting behind the gleaming mahogany counter, or cataloging any of the thousands of perfume bottles arranged on the cramped shelves. Rather she sat perched in an upper balcony made of black wrought iron. A slingshot, of all things, braced in her hands.
She wasn't aiming at me, I noticed, rather belatedly. But rather at an enormous--and extremely fragile-looking--glass canister above my head. It was full of clear liquid, and I was damn sure it wasn't perfume. Probably acid.
"Relax, Aunt Nell," Kai called out, a bright smile easing across his face for the first time all day. "It's just me."
Nell took another second to glare at me before turning to Kai, her expression transforming. Not that she looked particularly kind, mind you. Unlike most women who reached the far side of eighty, Nell hadn't softened with age. She was a wiry slip of a woman, and tough as old boot leather-in both looks and temperament.

I really like little ancedotes about octopodes (or those youtube videos about them pretending to be sea snakes and angelfish). This has some interesting anecdotes, but it maybe suffered (for me) in being a specific memoir of the author's interactions with particular octopodes at the New England Aquarium, and the people around her and the octopodes. Any one particular octopus will only generate so many anecdotes, and a lot of the ones here are variants of "I put my arms in the water and the octopus touched me and I touched them back and it was amazing". And the subplot of "The author sometimes has horrible ear pain when scuba diving" never went anywhere - but that's because it is real life, which does not always conveniently shape itself into Conflict and subsequent Resolution. But I did like the sense of the different personalities for each of the Giant Pacific Octopuses that the NEA had over the course of the book.

I thought this was a book in which the octopus solves a murder mystery, which would be the weirdest intersection of my genres ever, but I misunderstood the brief summary:

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors - until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

But it's a story aiming for sweet but not always hitting it, about kind of uninteresting sad and lonely (and often annoying) people stuck in their ruts. The octopus is more interesting as a character, though after the previous book the anthropomorphization is even more implausible. Ah well.

This is a layered mystery, and a layered love story, set on a two-person spaceship on a rescue mission to Titan. I could imagine doing it as a play, or a movie, with two actors. It works quite well as the mystery unfolds; it doesn't work quite as well for me after the fact, the way many complicated mysteries end up with a result of "Yes, this plot explains all the clues, but it doesn't explain why the people who set it in motion chose to do it this way rather than something more sensible." I do like "loop" stories - time loops, world shifting loops, whatever - and this does a nice job of its version of it. I think a couple of my quibbles are forgiven for being YA - I don't expect quite as rigorous worldbuilding, and the characters are very teenage. Three and a half stars plus half a star YA correction.

This is a VERY cozy murder mystery - Lady Hardcastle and her maid Flo retire to a quiet life in the country, but Lo, there are Murders. It aims for whatever era Wodehouse was written in, and the banter kind of reflects that. The two main characters have a surprisingly competent backstory (not quite Spies, but nearly!) that lets them occasionally do their own fisticuffs, and whlie their banter is not full Wodehouse, it's snarky and amusing. The mystery is, as I said, VERY cozy - I don't think anyone is found guilty who wasn't already foreshadowed as an unpleasant character, and nothing is all that twisty, but it's a pleasant comfort read (or listen).

OK, this was my least favorite of the Four Secret Projects. I think, the thing is, I don't care about the Cosmere as the Cosmere - but that's just my taste, not a judgement on the idea as a whole. I don't keep my fiction in my head with enough detail for long enough to enjoy the collectibles aspect of it. Whenever Hoid appears I eye him with suspicion and wish he was just a normal character. So this one, as the most Cosmeric of the secret projects, fell the flattest with me. I'm not even sure if I don't remember who the main character turned out to be, or it's just that I haven't yet read the book he came from. That said, the exploration of the physics of the world (a planet a little bigger than the Little Prince's, in which sunlight is fatal, so everyone circles more or less around the equator in steampunk airships), and the character groupings and magic-system-building (as always, for Sanderson) are all interesting.

The first two of the Police Detective Kaga series (translated from Japanese). These were fascinating and unlike most other mysteries that I've read - not just because they're Japanese and the whole manner and culture is different, but because the structure of both books was different.
Malice involves the murder of an author, and the last witness to see him alive, who is partly the narrator. There's the intial narration of what happened, and then another go-round by the detective in which Things Are Revealed - which was all interesting for the unusual-to-me atmosphere, but seemed not very surprising as a mystery. But then there is another go-round, in which lies are uncovered. And *another*, in which different lies are uncovered. Detective Kaga is unwilling to accept a "ticks all the boxes" solution, even when the murderer has confessed, and keeps digging. The solution is turned on its head several times until the final revelations in which everything falls into place. It reminded me a little of, all things, Columbo - the polite civility between detective and murderer the whole way through, the way in which Detective Kaga keeps learning just another thing. By the end I was hooked.
Newcomer has a completely different structure - it's almost completely episodic, with each chapter being Detective Kaga intereacting with a different family or shop in the neighborhood in order to get a pertinent clue/detail for the murder he is solving, and en passant solving a minor mystery or tension that the group is having. All the clues come together to explain why the murdered woman, a newcomer in the neighborhood, is there, and why she died. Both the mini-mysteries and the main plot focus on family, estrangement and reconciliation. Detective Kaga seems to drift through the little groups, untangling their little distresses, like a man who can't let a mess go untidied. (We also get to see a little bit of his own life, and his own mess he has not tidied, in comparison to book one). Now that I'm writing about both of them I can see the structural similarities I didn't before - both of them are going back across the same ground over and over, but while Malice is rewriting the narrative each time, Newcomer is layering each pass on top of the last, like brushstrokes in a painting.
All this was sufficient to get me to buy the next two, though I took a break to read other things before getting back to them. Four stars.

Andy mentioned this book, about the varied senses of different animals and how they come together in defining their own versions of the perceived world (their umwelt), around when I was reading the Anecdotes about Octopodes book, so it seemed a natural segue. (Yes, octopus umwelts were included, and make the Remarkably Bright Creatures story even more impossible). It's an immense book, and was fascinating to listen to, though I suspect I would have learned it better if I had read instead of listened. Yong does his own narration, with an enthusiasm that makes everything interesting instead of dry. The end goes into sense pollution (noise pollution, light pollution, pollution pollution) so it ends in a rather depressing tail rather than the "Whee! These are interesting!" tone of the first thirty chapters. Though it tries to be optimistic about how if we can understand the problems we can work to fix them. But who are we kidding? Humans don't even fix light pollution in the cases when we barely have preferences; we're not going to fix things that require that we make sacrifices. Humans suck. Probably not the take-home I was supposed to have from this book.

The magic system here goes all in on the one-note weirdness - magic is all due to edible alchemical components, that mages (called Chefs here) can cook and detect and taste. It's a dramatic romp that feels a lot like a role-playing run - the main characters have a bit of PC glow to them, and an unhidden self-righteousness even in their interaction with monarchs and gods which happens a lot more in runs than real life. It turned up in my Kindle Unlimited, and I did read it all the way through, but I might have regretted paying full price.

This, like He Who Fights With Monsters, came to Amazon from Royal Road, hence the username-author. The premise is that there's a semi-uplifted cat running an abandoned orbital battle station, in the post-weird-shit-apocalypse where the last suriving humans are menaced by paperclip AIs, interdimensional invading aliens, and everything in between. It's surprisingly good. It's also maybe a little longer than I was expecting - I listened to it in audiobook - because it's a serial, some plots keep circling around on the guitar again, and some sources of angst get explained several times without making progress towards resolving them. It's fun, and touching, and kind. Four stars.

Oh, this is back to the RJB that I really love. (Okay, perhaps I should give the Foundryside series another chance - I think it could probably have been fine if the magic power wasn't called "gravity"). It's one of the rare books that inhabits the overlap between heavy worldbuilding fantasy and mystery that does a good job at both, and that's hard. You can't have your mystery depending on a piece of the worldbuilding that hasn't been explained yet, or that's a cheat, and you can't just run around explaining only the plot-relevant pieces of the world or that has all the clues pre-highlighted as important. Bennett does both halves really well here. Dinios Kol is a new assistant to Iudex Ana Dolabra. He's an engraver (enhanced to perfectly remember things) and she's very eccentric. She has been sent to the Third Ring of the Empire, where the leviathans keep breaching the walls, in order to investigate a number of unusual deaths by contagion, where people die of having trees grow out of them. My short summary doesn't do justice to either the mystery or the complexity of the world, and both are very nice. The reader has to learn about contagions and where they come from and how to investigate them, while the detective has to learn about this contagion and where it comes from, and so on. But it does so with grace and transparency, so that it can drop proper clues and not just Explain Things. I figured out some of the answers but not all, which is my favorite difficulty level for mysteries. Five stars and I have forgiven Bennett for gravity and put him back on my "must buy" list.

Between download and reading I had forgotten the details, so I went in kind of expecting another superhero villain book. It's not that at all. It's about love and obsession and death and Shakespeare in a tiny acting program. The author's bio says "She holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe and a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of Maryland, College Park" and of course she must. I could easily imagine Tom being one of these characters. It's not quite a mystery, and not action-y enough to be a true thriller. Actually, I guess it's a Tragedy.

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart -- by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

It's told in retrospect, which leans into the melancholy rather than actiony, but even so I couldn't put it down; afterwards, it is the atmosphere which lingers, rather than the plot.