A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon

read by Jeff Woodman

This is a novella from the Seven Stones to Stand collection—these are stories set in the Outlander universe, about characters other than Jamie, Claire, and their immediate family. It recounts the story of how Minnie met Lord John Grey’s brother Hal during a distinctly low period in his life, and it’s charming as all hell.

Minnie is a 17-year-old whose father runs a rare book business—and also trades in gossip, secrets, and documents whose originators and/or proper owners would prefer remain private. Minnie, like most people in that day and age, has been brought up in the family business. And she may have just a little too much knack for the illicit information trade for her own good.

As the story begins, Minnie’s father is sending her off to London, putatively to both deliver and receive some books and at the same time to be introduced to polite society with the idea of catching a wealthy English husband. In reality, he has a handful of less legal commissions for her—and she has some personal business of her own.

Accompanied at various times by two stalwart Irish bodyguards and by the redoubtable matchmaker, Lady Buford, Minnie sets out to accomplish her father’s errands, evade her new suitors, and find and meet her biological mother. Along the way she meets Hal.

Hal’s wife has just died a month ago, giving birth to a probable bastard. In addition to dealing with that, he’s trying to restart the regiment that was disbanded when his father became a convicted traitor, and to do that, he’s got to secure royal patronage. In order to secure royal patronage, he’s got to get rid of the stain on his reputation that was caused when he dueled with and killed his dead wife’s poet lover. And he’s got plenty of evidence—a cache of letters between his late wife and her paramour. But he refuses to let the deeply painful letters be made public, or seen by anyone at all.

Into this muddle sails Minnie, at a critical point. She has the tools to cut this Gordian knot—but will she find a way to do it without unacceptable consequences? How will this mess get set to rights, and who will pay for it?

Ms. Gabaldon’s crystal-clear pose and deft, balanced hand with character, setting, *and* plot will hook you and keep you hooked. (Not to mention a cameo from a certain Jamie Fraser, whose masculine charms get him out of hot water without him even knowing about it.) A must-read for fans of the Outlander books.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

I devoured this book in one sitting. Yes, it is a quick read—but it’s also a compulsively engrossing one.

Each page is a dictionary entry, a definition of a single word, in alphabetical order. But the definitions are idiosyncratic memories and emotions, definitions-by-example. And these examples are snippets from the life of a relationship--beautiful little snippets, as clear and specific as snapshots.

The snippets are set up in alphabetical order, not chronological order, so the narrative emerges like the image in a pointillist painting as the artist adds first ultramarine, then phthalo blue, then cadmium red, and so on—one image suddenly swimming into focus as others become temporarily more obscure, but what it’s being obscured by is detail that’s building up another section of the image, or linking one figure in the painting to another.

Which makes this sound very high-brow and maybe difficult to comprehend, but it’s not. The little “snapshots” are each so engaging, so clear, so poignant in small and large ways, that you just want to read the next one and the next one. And it’s no harder to understand than your own life, or a rambling story told by a friend who is rambling as they try to figure out where they went wrong in the most important relationship in their life.

If I told you absolutely anything about the narrative, I’d be robbing you of the joy of discovering it for yourself. I won’t do that. This book is compulsively readable and you can do it in an evening. Go do it. You won’t be sorry.

Semiosis by Sue Burke

read by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas Hay

In the wake of ecological catastrophe, starvation, and universal war on Earth, 50 pacifists (and a lot of frozen embryos) are chosen for a privately-funded mission to colonize a distant planet. Traumatized by decades of war, starvation, and despair, they land on a different planet than the one originally planned on. Now they have to find a way to survive: as individuals, as a species, and as a society, with their ideals intact. It’s those ideals that are going to prevent the new planet from going the way of Earth.

It’s going to be harder than anyone imagined, though. The new planet, Pax, is lush and full of unpredictable dangers. It’s also home to two sentient alien species, one native and one not. And the native life-form is such an alien intelligence that the Pacifists come perilously close to failing to recognize it as an intelligence at all. 

As each generation follows the one before it and adapts to life on Pax, new conflicts and opportunities arise. The Pacifists are clinging to viability as a colony, plagued by a lack of understanding of the local plant life, diseases they could have easily cured with their grandparents’ technology, and a crash in male fertility. Paternalistic first- and second-generation colonists hide crucially important things from their adult “children” for their own good, setting the scene for real violence, not to mention revolution.

To what degree do they need to adapt, and when does adaptation become dangerous backsliding into barbarism? What became of the other alien species that also colonized this planet at some point in the past, and left a ruined city behind? And can the rainbow colors of the bamboo grove near the ruins actually be a form of communication?

Burke does a fantastic job of world-building, depicting a human civilization that clearly owes a lot to LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and an alien intelligence that is truly alien, and the struggles and motivations of each to communicate. The structure of this book, divided into sections based on the current generation of the colonists and with a new unreliable narrator/protagonist for each section, doesn’t lend itself to a lot of character development for the human protagonists. But their society does develop, as does the alien intelligence, along fascinating lines.

A ripping yarn that also gives a lot of food for thought. Highly recommend.

The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story (Middle Falls Time Travel Series Book 1) by Shawn Inmon

read by Johnny Heller

Anybody who knows my taste in literature knows I’m a complete sucker for a time travel tale. Whether it’s a romp or a horror story, whether the fate of reality itself is at stake or just the fate of the protagonist and a few close friends, whether the story is beautifully thought out or the writer came up with a concept and just went for it, I’ll read it. Of course I appreciate something literary to sink my teeth into, and am delighted by a plot twist that actually surprises me (and that happens all too rarely anymore). But really, if a book is about someone traveling along the 4th dimension, I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.

So I’m not setting a high bar. But I will say that The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver was above-average delightful.

It starts with our eponymous protagonist, Thomas, as a middle-aged man who has wasted his entire life. After a stupid mistake in his youth led to a tragedy, he sank deeper and deeper into depression over the decades, doing absolutely nothing of worth to himself or anyone else and not especially enjoying himself in the process. One day the final straw lands, and he decides to do himself in. He closes his eyes for the final time in 2016…

...and opens them in 1976, in his bedroom, in his 15-year-old body, with all his memories intact. After some disorientation, he figures out that it’s a few months before the tragedy. He’s got a second chance--maybe he can do things right this time. And while he’s at it, maybe he can stop a serial killer.

And then—well, and then he learns he’s not the only one to have traveled through time in exactly that fashion.

The tone of this book is by turns creepily suspenseful and thoughtfully hopeful. The author does a great job of putting you right back in 1976—if you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll instantly feel the verisimilitude of his depiction. It’ll feel almost claustrophobically like going back there. If you’re not old enough to remember it—well, here’s your chance to get a glimpse.

Our protagonist feels very believable. He vacillates between a burning desire to fix the wrong things and despair that they can’t be fixed. Also between an adult sense of agency and responsibility and the weird in-between passivity and acceptance of life of the young teenager. (As someone who moved back in with her parents to finish grad school, I can tell you that this is a thing.)

Thomas is a bit of a dufus, though, I will say. A well-intentioned dufus, but a dufus all the same. He just doesn’t seem to think things through. And we can’t blame it on him not being a science fiction geek and therefore never having thought about the potential consequences of his actions. He mentions, near the beginning of the story, having read some books and watched some movies about time travel, and being familiar with the “butterfly effect.” 

Maybe some of his dufosity can be explained by the fact that, although he has all of his memories from his adult life through 2016, he’s now back in the body of a teenage boy, all hormones and undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Our narrator is definitely unreliable, so it’s probably that, rather than lazy plotting. In any case, you’ll want to slap him sometimes.

Fortunately the story doesn’t revolve around his tendency to make mysteriously stupid mistakes. Instead it revolves around free will and the nature of causality, like any self-respecting time travel tale. Also around the interactions between Thomas and the other time-traveler, and the ripples (both emotional and in the time-space continuum) those interactions create. And the book leaves some mysteries unsolved--maybe because it follows Thomas’ point of view so closely and he doesn’t learn everything there is to be learned, or maybe because it’s the first of a series and the author wants to leave the reader curious.

Speaking of that, once the denouement becomes apparent on the horizon the book does seem to draw itself to its conclusion very quickly. In spite of which, the ending isn’t at all unsatisfying—if anything, it’s more satisfying than I expected.

In conclusion, if you’re not a fan of time travel novels, this one probably won’t convert you. But if you are, you’ll find it intriguing and mysterious and creepy and sweet, and you’ll enjoy meeting all the characters and getting lost in the setting. And maybe being surprised by some of the twists.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

read by Bahni Turpin

Children of Blood and Bone takes place a richly-detailed mythical African country called Orïsha, in which magic is very real. That is, it’s real until a ruthless, despotic king decides that magic and the dominant social order can't coexist. So he finds a way to sever the people’s connection to the gods; after that, it’s effectively dead. He then proceeds to persecute and oppress the former magic-using caste, calling them “worms” but treating them worse than any animal.

Our protagonist, Zélie, has the distinctive white hair of a (potential) magic user, and still has flashbacks to the night her mother was hauled off and killed by the king’s soldiers. As a “worm,” Zélie lives in grinding poverty and constant fear of the random cruelty of the king’s brutal guards. Not only is she not safe, but nobody associated with her has any real expectation of safety or fair treatment. 

Very much against her own better judgment, Zélie finds herself helping a young woman escape from the king’s guard… and that young woman turns out to be a royal princess, and in possession of an item that just might let Zélie bring magic back. If she can learn how to use it, and whom to trust, and if she can stay ahead of the king’s guard and get to a mythical island on the one day of the year that it appears.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes what could be a fairly standard fantasy plot line and enriches it, transforms it, and fills it with surprises. Not simply by setting it in a mythical Africa instead of a mythical Europe, though Adeyemi does a wonderful job of that (Nnedi Okorafor calls it Africanjujuism); but also by taking individual elements of the plot (the romantic interest, the rules by which magic works, the hero’s journey) and subverting them.

In short, this is a very solid and compelling read, especially for anyone who loves fantasy or who used to love fantasy but has become bored with how derivative the genre has become. 

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

read by Michael Crouch, Karissa Vacker, Brittany Pressley, Christopher Gebauer, Ari Fliakos, and Rebecca Lowman

This is a gorgeous, gorgeous book. (And I’m not talking about the inhumanly lovely face on the cover.) Westworld, HUM∀NS, Black Mirror—if you’re a fan of any of those, this universe will feel familiar to you. Then again, it will feel familiar to you if you live in the western world (and probably most other places) at all right now.

So then, what’s it about? Well, let’s try a little philosophical exercise. 

I don’t think that most people would argue too much with the proposition that if you lose, say, a foot, and it’s replaced with a prosthetic foot, you’re still you, and still human. Still true if you lose both feet, or both feet and both legs. And the recipient of a donor heart or liver is obviously still human and still themselves. Got a tattoo? Still you. Skin completely covered in tattoos, 27 piercings, and no appendix or tonsils? Possibly an unusual specimen, but definitely still human.

All right, but where does the line begin to blur? 

Let’s say a pair of twins were both born with numerous potentially fatal birth defects, and at a certain point in their lives, when they’re in their teens, one of them begins to suffer from cascading organ failure. There’s no question that this twin is going to die; only massively invasive medical technology is keeping her body even minimally functioning. Meanwhile, her twin continues to suffer from numerous major disabilities and it’s medically certain that he won’t live past his twenties. At best.

Unless. Unless his twin’s organs are harvested—the ones that are still functioning—and used to replace or repair his. This has to be done while they’re still in some kind of condition to do him some good, of course. And it has to be done using new technology that allows her organs to be grafted to his—stem cells, 3D-printed artificial tissue, CRISPR gene editing, what have you. And this is truly major surgery. A really significant percentage of this teenager’s body, going forward, will have once been part of his twin.

So… is he still himself? Unless his brain were being replaced, most people would still say yes. Likewise to his still being human… though some people might call him a monster. But they would probably mean that metaphorically. Mostly.

All right, then. What if, a couple of decades later, a teenager is in a terrible car accident, and half her body is completely destroyed, and she doesn’t have a dying twin to provide her with donor parts… but she has really top-notch health insurance and access to the world’s best medical technology. Which can replace literally everything that’s been damaged or destroyed with synthetic and/or mechanical parts. Is she still human? Is she a cyborg? What does that even mean? And how will that affect her social life when she goes back to high school?

It goes on from there. What happens when we start deliberately modifying ourselves with parts of other people, or even animals? What is it that makes us human, what makes us other, and where does morality lie in all of this? Where does it end? Centuries, millennia from now, where will we be? Will we even be "we" anymore?

If any of this is even a little interesting to you, you should read this book. It’s written with such clarity and curiosity and understanding of what makes people tick that you will find yourself empathizing with points of view that are deeply inimical to yours.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

read by Scott Brick

This book interested me because I heard that it featured a triad—a stable romantic partnership involving three individuals. It was one of a handful of examples of polyamorous relationships in science fiction that a group of friends on Facebook were able to come up with. Since I also enjoy dipping into the odd New Wave hard sci fi novel, and Asimov is of course one of the greats, I decided to give this one a go. 

It doesn’t start in a promising way. Basically a cadre of in-fighting, nerdishly vicious, and highly competitive white-guy scientists discover a source of infinite free energy, and they fight and fight and fight about it. Who really discovered it, who gets how much credit, whether it’s dangerous in any way and how shall we discredit and ruin the career of anyone who dares to ask that question, and so on. This, and the discovery that the energy source is actually a parallel universe with slightly different laws of physics than our own and that this may cause the sun to blow up, take up the first third of the book.

In the next third of the novel, we get to visit the alternate universe. This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. The species that has initiated the energy transfer (which goes two ways and thus benefits the civilization utilizing it in each universe) consists, in its immature form, of three genders: Rational, Emotional, and Parental. Every relationship consists of a triad including one individual of each gender, and they blend their essences to produce exactly three children, one of each gender. After that, they go on to the next phase of their existence.

All of this is interesting enough in theory. But what hooked me was Asimov’s gritty, unsentimental but not unsympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of these beings. He paints a vivid picture of the way their society is shaped by being comprised of three genders with very distinct roles and personality types, how that affects relationships and thought patterns, what this kind of relationship feels to someone who is in it and how that differs by gender. 

The day-to-day happinesses and compromises and failures to communicate and generosities of any romantic partnership, as transformed by the triune nature of relationships in this society, don’t have to be imagined by the reader. Asimov shows us both the differences and the similarities between that form of relationship and the two-person sort that most of us are more accustomed to and he does it with a very… I can’t say human touch here, can I? With a portrait painter’s eye for the homely, telling detail.

In the third part of the book we get on with the business of saving the universe, and for me it becomes somewhat less interesting. I mean, of course I’m all for the universe being saved, especially when saving it means flipping a highly humiliating bird at the forces of greed and egotism that got us in that mess in the first place. The pacing, once you figure out who’s who and what their agendas are, is good. The characters are interesting, the lunar society depicted is interesting, and there’s even a well-written central female character. It’s a good story and a fine final third. But for my taste, Part 2 is what this book is all about.

Verdict: read it! Just be prepared to do some eye rolling for the first hundred pages or so. Your patience will be rewarded.