What I'm Reading Now

Richard Russo, Somebody's Fool 

This is a sequel to Nobody's Fool, my favorite Russo book, and Everybody's Fool, which I didn't like as much. This one is better! It's set maybe 25 years after Nobody's Fool. Sully is dead, but he haunts both the town and his son, Peter, who fears he is becoming Sully. Those of you who are Russo fans remember that Peter, while he kept his oldest son Will, more or less abandoned his two younger sons, who were raised by their impoverished mother and a series of abusive boyfriends. Well, now one of those sons, Whacker, has shown up on Peter's doorstep. We also see what's going on with Tina, Janey's kid, and my favorite character, Rub.

There's also a murder mystery, and Russo finally takes a look at race. (He kind of did in the previous two books, but the use of the n-word in the first was treated as a joke, and though we saw Black people in the second book, their race was treated as incidental, not as something that might affect their lives.) I like this one better than anything Russo has written in the last decade or so, though Nobody's Fool remains his best book.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden

I've been hearing about Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series on the SF blogs for some time, but our library didn't have the series. It did have this one, though, and when I was hopelessly trawling the shelves for something new to read, I picked it up. 

I see why people like him -- he's an engaging writer with a compelling storyline and some plot surprises. I read the whole thing, which was like a billion pages long (597, in fact), and enjoyed everything but the last fifty pages or so. That's the part where Tchaikovsky had to draw together all his plot lines, and he does, mind you, but at this point he has so many characters that he can't really spend enough time with each one, and it all starts to blur together. Also, he doesn't really do much to develop the characters. He's all about the ideas, which is a feature of hard science fiction, to be fair. 

Still, if you like hard science fiction plus multiverse fiction, this is definitely worth reading. If he were in my workshop, I'd advise him to cut about six characters, but I liked it well enough that I'll probably try the other Tchaikovsky novel the library has in its holdings.

Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

This is a re-read, because the library won't get new books fast enough, and when they do, they are mostly books I don't want to read. Anyway, I love Natasha Pulley. This is the second book about Mori and Thaniel. If you like KJ Charles, you'd probably like these books. Mori remembers the future, the way the rest of us remember the past, but he also remembers all possible futures, and can do things to make specific futures more likely. In this one, Mori pulls hundreds of strings for decades in order to have one specific thing happen, which I won't reveal, since spoilers.

Set in 19th century Japan for the most part, it's full of wonderful details about Japanese life as seen, mostly, through the eyes of Thaniel, but also through the eyes of Takiko Pepperharrow, Mori's wife. I've probably read this book six times now, and I love it more each time.

Ellen Gilchrist, I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with my Daddy

Gilchrist lived in New Orleans and attended the workshop at the University of Arkansas, just as I did, so in a lot of ways it seems like I ought to like her more. Every now and then I check a book of hers out of the library to read and try to decide what it is about her writing that hits me wrong. She's a very readable writer, and I am frequently caught up in her fiction. So it's not that.

This one, frankly, got a little boring. Most of Gilchrist's fiction is autobiographical, and it's all about how wonderful her father was and how special she herself is. That might be what irks me, because she's not special, just rich, which she has mistaken for being special. Anyway, this is a collection of stories about how wonderful her father is and how wonderful she herself is. A little of that goes a long way. Also, there's a lot of panic about teenagers smoking marijuana in the 1970s, which comes off as ludicrous, frankly. Oh no, teens smoke dope! Catastrophe! And there's an incoherent story about Middle Eastern men being terrorists. I'm not sure what to make of that one. Maybe Gilchrist trying to write about something other than her daddy? (Now I'm being mean.)

This one was from 2002. I might try one from later in her career -- I stopped reading her sometime in the late 1990s, as I recall -- and see if she gets any better. The library seems to have every single word she's ever written, so.