2023-2024--The year's reading in review updated with the two books that weren't finished last year
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Agent Sonya |
Ben Macintyre |
nonfiction |
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The Voice That Murmurs In the Darkness |
James Tiptree, Jr.; edited by Karen Joy Fowler and
Jeffrey D. Smith |
short stories |
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(I will also confess that I feel remiss insofar as I said in that previous post I might make observations or comments, and here we are in February and I have not. Ah, well--que sera, sera, etc.).
As for this post appearing in February, the truth is that Macintyre's Agent Sonya was finished early in January after it was started (I think) in December. The book that took longer--I'm pretty sure I must have started it in November, and only finished it today (February 12th) was the Tiptree, Jr.
Which deserves comment: Alice Sheldon, a.k.a. James Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Racoona Sheldon, a.k.a. Alice Bradley, a.k.a. Alice Davey, a.k.a. Alli Sheldon) was one of the finest Spec Lit writers of all time. The Voice That Murmurs In the Darkness, an anthology published last year that brings together a number of Sheldon's less-collected stories, is a wonderful assembly of powerful stories. But there's the word: powerful; I don't find James Tiptree, Jr. to be a writer you can binge, I find her a writer you need to brace yourself for and it's very likely one story is all you can handle for a bit.
That's true, I think, even taking her stories on their own terms. Given that this particular collection includes several stories dealing with senescence and suicide, and, well... you know (or in case you don't)... I often found myself putting the book down to process and decompress a little.
Put another way, while I cannot say too many good things about James Tiptree, I also can't say them without too many Content Warnings. Her most famous stories, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" and "The Screwfly Solution" are meditations on misogyny and gender violence that fall under both the categories of "ought to be required reading" and "ought to be printed with a trigger warning"; and they will haunt you. Even one of the lightest stories in Voice That Murmurs, "The Only Neat Thing To Do," which is what Alice Sheldon does to one of Heinlein's juvenile stories, left me needing a good cry and a bit unable to pick up the book again. I realize this is a dodgy recommendation and you're likely thinking, "Why would I want to read this?" It's because I can't recommend without warning, but I also need to tell you: she was very, very, very good, and there's a reason an award was named after her until controversy about the way she passed on led the award's administrating committee to rename the prize to something a bit less meaningful and loaded (completely understandable and I don't fault them one bit).
She was brilliant, just amazing, but yeah; if you're at all like me, you'll love her words while needing a bit of time to decompress after taking in a batch of them.
And that, anyway, brings 2023's business to a close.
(I realize as I wrap that I gave short shrift to Ben Macintyre; if you look at the proper 2023 reading list, I started the year and finished the year reading Ben Macintyre books. They're good! He's good! I've read a bunch of his work and plan to getting around whatever I've somehow missed (if anything). If you want a bit of breezily-written light nonfiction about mid-20th Century spies behaving badly, he's your jam! Agent Sonya was a German born a little before WWI who, between the World Wars, was recruited by the Soviets and did a bit of espionage in Shanghai, Switzerland, and England before defecting/repatriating to East Germany right before Klaus Fuchs' exposure blew her cover; in the meantime, she'd done a good bit of work spying on the Nazis during WWII and played a role in getting the Soviets the atom bomb. If that's your kind of read, grab a copy and you're welcome.)
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