Every year, these roundups remind me that I *did* actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of *extremely good books* that I *didn't* read is *much* longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.

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After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players - whose quality steadily declined over a decade - I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!

https://shokz.com/products/openswim

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I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from #LibroFM, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!

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NOVELS

I. Temeraire by @naominovik

One of the finest pleasures in life is to discover a complete series of novels as an adult, to devour them right through to the end, and to arrive at that ending to discover that, while you'd have happily inhabited the author's world for many more volumes, you are eminently satisfied with the series' conclusion.

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I just had this experience and I am still basking in the warm glow of having had such a thoroughly fulfilling imaginary demi-life for half a year. I'm speaking of the nine volumes in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world that humans share with enormous, powerful, intelligent dragons.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon

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II. Destroyer of Worlds by #MattRuff

*The Destroyer of Worlds* is a spectacular followup to *Lovecraft Country* that revisits the characters, setting, and supernatural dread of the original. *Country* was structured as a series of linked novellas, each one picking up where the previous left off, with a different focal characters.

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*Destroyer* is a much more traditional braided novel, moving swiftly amongst the characters and periodically jumping back in time to the era of American slavery, retelling the story of the settlement of the Great Dismal swamp by escaped slaves.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/21/the-horror-of-white-magic/#anti-lovecraftian

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III. Scholomance by @naominovik

The wizards of the world live in constant peril from maleficaria – the magic monsters that prey on those born with magic, especially the children. In a state of nature, only one in ten wizard kids reaches adulthood.

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So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void – a dimension beyond our world. The Scholomance is also an extremely dangerous place – three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation – but it is much safer than life on the outside.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/29/hobbeswarts/#the-chosen-one

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IV. Tsalmoth by #StevenBrust

Longrunning Brust hero Vlad Taltos has been convinced to recount the story of how he and Cawti came to fall in love, and how they planned their marriage. This is quite an adventure – it plays out against the backdrop of a gang-war within the Jhereg organization, with Vlad in severe mortal peril that he can only avoid by uncovering an intricate criminal caper of crosses, double-crosses, smuggling and sorcery.

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But while Vlad is dodging throwing knives and lethal spells (or not!), what's *really* going on is that he and Cawti are falling deeply, profoundly, irrevocably in love. The romance that plays out among the blades and magic is more magical still, a grand passion that expresses itself through Nick-and-Nora wordplay and Three Musketeers swordplay.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/mannerpunk/#ask-anyone

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V. Hopeland by #IanMcDonald

Seriously what the *fuck* is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the *hell* do you research – much less *write* – a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment? The stars of *Hopeland* are members of two ancient, secret societies.

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There's Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical "family," that's one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils). Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people – preferably just one person – that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

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VI. The World Wasn't Ready For You by #JustinCKey

These are horror stories, though some of are sf too, and more to the point, they're Black horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early.

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"Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers – and now, Key – the stories are horror in which Blackness is a fact, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015

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VII. Liberty's Daughter by @naomikritzer

There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would *suuuck*. But it would, and in *Liberty's Daughter*, we get a peek inside the nightmare.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

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NONFICTION

I. The Once and Future Sex by #EleanorJaneaga

A history of gender and sex in the medieval age, describing the weird and horny ways of medieval Europeans, which are far gnarlier and more complicated than the story we get from "traditionalists" who want us to believe that their ideas about gender roles reflect a fixed part of human nature, and that modern attitudes are an attempt to rewrite history:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval

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II. Pirate Enlightenment by #DavidGraeber

In the early 18th century, the Zana-Malata people – a new culture created jointly by pirates from around the world and Malagasy – came to dominate the island. They brought with them the democratic practices of pirate ships (where captains were elected and served at the pleasure of their crews) and the matriarchal traditions of some Malagasy, creating a feminist, anarchist "Libertalia."

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Graeber retrieves and orders the history of this Libertalia from oral tradition, primary source documents, and records from around the world. Taken together, it's a tale that is rollicking and romantic, but also hilarious and eminently satisfying.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia

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III. A Hacker's Mind by #BruceSchneier

Schneier broadens his frame to consider all of society's rules – norms, laws and regulations – as a security system, and then considers all the efforts to change those rules through a security lens, framing everything from street protests to tax-cheating as "hacks." This leaves us with two categories: hacks by the powerful to increase their power; and hacks by everyone else to take power away from the powerful.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/06/trickster-makes-the-world/#power-play

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IV. Responding to the Right by @nathanjrobinson

Robinson describes conservativism as a comforting, fixed ideology that allows its adherents to move through the world without having to question themselves: you broke the law, so you're guilty. No need to ask if the law was just or unjust. This sidelines sticky moral dilemmas: no need for judges to ask if something is good or fair – merely whether it is "original" to the Constitution.

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No need for a CEO to ask whether a business plan is moral – only whether it is "maximizing shareholder benefit." Robinson anatomizes the most effective parts of conservative rhetoric and exhorts his leftist comrades to learn from it, and put it to better use.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo

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V. A Collective Bargain by #JaneMcAlevy

An extraordinary book that is one part history lesson, one part case-study, two parts how-to manual, one part memoir, and one million parts call to action. McAlevey devotes the early chapters to the rise and fall of labor protections in America, explaining how the wealthy mounted a sustained, expensive, obsessive fight to smash union power.

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She moves into a series of case-studies of workers who tried to organize unions under these increasingly inhospitable rules and conditions. The second half of the book is two case studies of mass strikes that succeeded in spite of even stiffer opposition. For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

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VI. Open Circuits by #WindellOskay and #EricSchlaepfer

A drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished. The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it.

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It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall. Peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful

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VII. Doppelganger by #NaomiKlein

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the divergence between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf, with whom she is often confused – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure.

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For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

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