David Gillon

Stephen R. Bown, The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire. Of the three books I bought at the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History, this one was the disappointment. It was fine, and it's not so bad when the worst you do is fine. However, it stopped when the HBC was no longer the de facto government of much of Canada, and I thought the transition from that to ordinary company was going to be the most interesting part. It also dropped facts in without context--things like "these two officials went from having Native common-law wives and families to being absolute bigots about other people doing that" without giving much of the larger scope, for example. Mine is a household where we might at some point have need of a book that covers the early history of the Hudson's Bay Company, so I'm shelving and keeping it, but unless you have that specific interest right now, I wouldn't recommend it.

Sarah Rees Brennan, All Hail Chaos. Definitely a middle book. Completely and totally a middle book, do not try starting here, the first one is still widely available and it is where you start to have any of the impact of what's going on here. You can have the outline of what's going on here, because the outline is all Generic Epic Fantasy, it's the emotional content that makes the isekai work as it does. Chaotically. Full of dread portent. Yeah. Still glad it's here, but start with the first one.

Shannon Chakraborty, The Tapestry of Fate. Second of the Amina al-Sirafi books, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first one. Time has passed, consequences have ensued, and this is a very different shape of plot while still doing much of what I enjoyed in the first one. I was a little frustrated by how long it took the characters to figure out their situation, but I was having so much fun I didn't mind too much. More of this please.

Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. I think one of the things that Crabapple does particularly well in this history of a particular thread of Jewish thought is that she doesn't fall into the trap of "if you all had just listened to my relatives, we'd have been fine." She clearly has not only personal history but also personal sympathy with the Jewish Bund, but at no point does she mistake "these are/were my people, and I generally think they were right" with "and therefore they could have fixed everything." It's a period of Jewish history that's going to have very harrowing aspects but still worth knowing about, even/especially for Gentiles like me who frequently need to remind fellow Gentiles that Jewish thought is not all one thing; it's nice to have the footnotes on that.

Matthew Dimmock, Writing Tudor Exploration: Richard Eden and West Africa. Kindle. Small monograph that went, as he describes it, a very different direction than he'd intended. Interesting watching the Spanish influences and local pressures balancing each other out to get to what early Tudor exploration writing actually looked like.

Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sebastien Malette, Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and Metis From the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Across to the Pacific. This is the last of the books I bought at the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History, and it was very much better than the HBC history above, more nuance, more detail without getting bogged down, very clear points, good stuff and good to know, especially in the parts where this history has indeed been deliberately suppressed.

Ann Leckie, Radiant Star. The thing that really stuck out for me here is that Ann writes so calmly about such horrifying things. This time a famine! Other times other things! But the eerie calm of the prose tone made me practically climb the back of the couch. Super effective. I also like that she's taking the time for the stories around the edges of the supposedly big stories. The universe has room in it. Yes good.

E.C.R. Lorac, Checkmate to Murder and Murder in the Mill Race. Kindle. Quite cromulent Golden Age mysteries. I continue to like her and read what I can get of her, mostly from the library although I have a friend who also may be able to help.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Night Owl: Poems. A lot of these poems are fairly ordinary, but turned just so, in the way that poems can do, in the way that they don't have to be about something spectacular to be spectacular. Really enjoyed.

Sophie Pinkham, The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires. This is more a literary history than a natural history, although there are pieces of natural history in it. It starts in Siberia rather than with the Kievan Rus the way most Russian histories do, and the difference in point of view is interesting. Would like more like this.

Johannes Scheffer, The History of Lapland. Kindle. This is from 1670, and it is a wild ride. There's all kinds of stuff the Anglophone audience of the time does not find familiar, or Scheffer thinks they won't, so he explains things like nomadism and skiing. ("Leaping in wooden shoes." Well. You did your best, buddy.) Among the things that were fascinating here: the attempt to corral the Saami peoples to specific territories for grazing rights started in 1600, so this was fairly recent to Scheffer. The things he was outright wrong about were at least as interesting as the things he knew. He was also doing the very 17th century thing of "...uh...I saw this bit with my own eyes and it contradicts Olaus Magnus so...what do I do with that, let's take a minute." I wouldn't recommend this as your first book about this region and people, but once you're generally knowledgeable it's kind of a treasure.

Bogi Takács, Song of Spores. Alien aliens and super-sympathetic future humans and thoughts about spores, hurrah! I really enjoyed this.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Pretenders to the Throne of God. Kindle. The latest in its series, and bringing several things full circle, so I wouldn't start here, I'd start at the beginning, even though it starts out looking like a stand-alone. One of my favorite things he's done.

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, Pay the Piper. Reread. This was the first thing I happened to grab when I got the news that Jane died and I wanted to do a bit of memorial rereading. Well, the first full-length thing: I did some dinosaur reading with the toddler across the street. I had fun with the Tam Lin aspects of it particularly, and with watching their two voices play together.

Marlene Zuk, Outsider Animals: How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us. This book is primarily for people who have not thought a great deal about what, for example, coyotes or raccoons do in an ecosystem (in our ecosystem). If you have, it's not likely to be greatly revelatory, but maybe you'll want to get it as a gift for a loved one who is not hostile to the idea of complex ecosystems but hasn't really spent much time on the topic.