April was spent entirely in Chicago hanging out with Ada and having fun playing Papal Election of 1492. I read just four books. This is what happens when I don’t spend any time reading. I’ll have more for you in May, I’m sure!
Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears — Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (1995)
Another collection of re-told fairytales, by a large range of people. The last story in the book, Delia Sherman’s “The Printer’s Daughter,” is so wonderful that it almost wiped out the rest of the book in my memory. But there were also great stories by Nancy Kress and Susan Palwick and Lisa Goldstein and a really creepy one by Anne Bishop and that’s just the highlights This is a terrific anthology—if you like re-told fairytales at all, I recommend it.
Gelato Forever — Lynn Joseph (2023)
Yes, a romance novel set in Italy! And in Florence, specifically, and it does a fairly good job of the geography. Ava, the oldest sister of an African American family that lost their mom, became the substitute mom when she was still a teenager, and now for the first time she’s getting to do something for herself. She’s fulfilling her dream of going to gelato school in Florence. On the plane she meets her high school crush, who mistakes her for her younger, more popular sister Bridget. She rolls with this, not expecting to have to keep it up for more than the plane ride, but then of course she does, and they fall in love, and he’s a guy who starts out with trust issues.
More realistic than most such plots, even though the ending is one of the most canonical wish-fulfillment ends I’ve ever seen. I sort of want to spoil the end because it’s such a perfect example of a thing, but there might be people out there who read this to get recs for romance novels set in Italy, and this is a good one: good characters, good Italy, solid family and friends, good pacing. And this is the first US romance novel set in Italy I’ve read that hasn’t leaned into the high-end luxury stuff, Ava goes there to work and learn like a normal person, and experiences Italy the way someone who does that would actually experience it.
Concord: Sabotage — Allen M. Trager (2024)
Emma is the only human living on a huge space ship full of aliens, and there’s an attempt on her life which turns out to be part of a plot to get humans banned from Concord, the association of different “tribes” of aliens who have been in space for millions of years. The background is well thought out, the characters (mostly aliens) are pretty good, but the investigation of the mystery that is the plot drags out a little too long. This is a very fun universe, and the layers of density of the aliens who have been around for millions of years feel very real and well thought through. It would have been a very good book if it had been tightened up, and even as it is I mostly enjoyed it.
The Complete Orsinia— Ursula K. Le Guin (2016)
(Listed as 2016 only because I was reading the Library of America edition that includes the two extra stories; the original Orsinian Tales was published in the Seventies.) Gosh these are good. They’re all set in the imaginary central European country of Orsinia, in times between 1640 and 1989, but mostly nineteenth and twentieth century, and they’re just great. I like Malafrena a lot, but I love these. Some of the characters are in more than one story, and the places and the geography are often in more than one story. They are all mimetic fiction stories, not fantastical, just stories about people living.
So, when I was whining about Michael Chabon and Andrew Sean Greer last month, I was already reading this, and it makes me think you can have stories about people packing up the house at the end of summer, or about an industrial accident, or living under tyranny—mimetic fiction doesn’t have to be zero sum, look, here is Le Guin doing it! I could draw a map of Orsinia; I would recognise the different cities; it feels like a place I could take the train to. Indeed, it feels like a place I might have taken the train through, that a train I was on might have stopped at Aisnar or Krasnoy and I looked out of the window and saw the eighteenth-century streets with trees and thought, oh yes, Aisnar, one day I will have time and come back. There are trains in these stories.
I’ve written before about reading books that are too old for me, and recognising this as something about me and not something about the book. I could understand and love The Dispossessed when I was a teenager, and The Lathe of Heaven, but I wasn’t old enough for Orsinia when I first read it. I’ve grown into them. And this read-through I really loved them, and now I’m sad I’ve finished them and I almost want to turn back to the beginning of Malafrena and read them all again.
I loved Orsinian Tales on first reading — I had already read Malafrena, so I was in my late teens. The last story, “Imaginary Countries”, is one of my favorite Le Guin stories, in the top five for sure. The last sentence: “But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.” — is one of many Le Guin sentences to bring me to tears — not of sadness but of love and admiration.
It’s been a while. Time for a reread!
a little disappointing that we just completely gloss over the clearly AI cover on Gelato Forever…
I’ve always loved “The Printer’s Daughter.” I probably shouldn’t say but it’s always been my favorite in the book.
Sometimes I’ll ask a friend what they like to read, and if they say historical fiction (especially European), I’ll suggest the Orsinian Tales. Not a real Europe, but Europe-adjacent, and certainly as real as many of the ‘real’ places in various historical fiction novels.
I’m often recommending various Le Guin books to people who haven’t read her. You like wizards and dragons? Earthsea! You like Philip K. Dick? The Lathe of Heaven! You like examinations of different societal structures? The Dispossessed (or some of the short stories or novellas). You like essays about SF & F? The Language of the Night! Want to read about the craft of writing? Steering the Craft! You like poetry? Well, where do I start….?
There’s a Le Guin for everyone.
“I could understand and love The Dispossessed when I was a teenager, and The Lathe of Heaven, but I wasn’t old enough for Orsinia when I first read it.”
I had the precise same experience. Then I loved most LeGuin, now I love it all at last.
My experience was the opposite of ecbatan’s above – I read Orsinian Tales first, and Malafrena only years later. More recently, I read the Library of America edition, which I appreciated for its additional material, including a couple of examples of the Orsinian language; there are only brief glimpses, but it is evidently imagined as a fictional Romance language, with influence or borrowing from the Slavic languages, as befitting Orsinia’s location in Central/Eastern Europe.
Among the other information provided is that while Orsinia appeared in print later than Le Guin’s more famous settings of Earthsea or the Ekumen, its conception goes back far earlier, to when Le Guin was a college student in the late 1940s, studying European literature at Harvard’s Radcliffe College. She notes in passing that the cathedral in Orsinia’s capital, St. Theodora’s, is named after her mother, Theodora Kroeber.