What I’ve Read

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #1)
A re-read for Necromancy Book Club, and man, I am glad I re-read this instead of relying on memory. I had felt rather unmoored while reading it last time, but having the general scope of the plot in my head meant that I could really sit back and enjoy the writing and little character moments. It does such an interesting job of working with the viewpoint of a character who is thinking in first person, but functionally has limited omniscience for segments of the book. I first read this in, I think, 2020, and that overall might have shaped my capacity to really sink into a book – I don’t think I read very well that year. Breq as a character has an incredible drive, and her experiences are both deeply human and deeply inhuman. She loved someone and lost them, she loved her life and lost it, she loved her empire and became disillusioned about it – all of these are very human experiences. And, when you have a character like Breq, for whom a multiplicity of experience is normal, you are getting all of that from multiple angles, sometimes at once. Really tightly written.

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #2) – I liked Justice so much that I just picked this This book picks up immediately after Justice, and the focus of the book is a case study of the cold war that Breq revealed in the last book, now out in the open. There’s questions about policing and justice and empire and how to move forward when you can’t change the past. It also does some wonderful montage work of building scenes around music that Breq and her crew are singing.

What I’m Reading

Out of the Dead Land by orphan_account - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871955 - A Winter Soldier -focused fic. Catnip – this fic focuses on Bucky’s alienation from himself via the metaphor of murderous robots pretending to be real people. The point of view is Bucky’s and the internal conflict as he pieces together what has been done to him, and who he is in the aftermath? Excellently done. (If you like this, worth looking at Some Desperate Glory or Incandescent.)

The Raven Scholar – Static, I should get back to this

Inventing the Renaissance – Ada Palmer – about 75% - This book remains great and really interesting. Her running thread about HOW you first read or teach about the Renaissance shapes how you approach it – honestly great centering point of the book. She talks in the section I read this week about building a syllabus around Machiavelli’s The Prince that gave her students Machiavelli’s letters as well as other historical reference points so that when they finally read The Prince, they have a wealth of context for his writings style and what his references meant to him at the time. I am inspired to try and do something similar myself.
I also found something really interesting in her discussion of Scholasticism as a philosophical movement – the stakes! Her discussion of how Scholastics were trying to reconcile Christian works that were, on the face, diametrical opposite, but endorsed with equal weight by the church – so if you understood them wrong, your literal immortal soul was on the line! And the souls of all your readers! Palmer does a lot of work to help me get to understand the actual weight that this carried for the people living at the time.

What I’ll Read Next
Tomb of Dragons Katherine Addison - reread for Xing Book club

Hugo nominations still to read:

Novels
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Novellas
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)