James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Phillips. Non-fiction. Julie Phillips has taken an enormous wealth of material (letters to and from Tiptree and Sheldon, Sheldon’s journals, friends’ and colleagues’ reminiscences, and photographs) and used it to present an image of the pseudonymous author and his creator. It’s a fairly heart-breaking image, and I can’t help wondering what she might have been like born fifty—or even forty—years later, into a society with a somewhat better attitude toward gayfolk, and with access to serotonin reuptake inhibitors. We might have lost a great deal of excellent (though almost uniformly draining) fiction; but a lovely, talented woman might not have spent quite so much of her life miserable. As it was, between her mother’s shadow, her frustration with the powerlessness of women, and the absence of a relationship that was emotionally and sexually satisfying to her, she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed what was to outside appearances an extremely successful life.

Soon I Will Be Invincible, Grossman. Yes. I expect I’m not familiar enough with the field to have noticed everything Grossman did here, but it was clearly a labor of love, and I did catch a few things here and there. I saw the seams only a couple times, as Grossman really did a remarkable job of sustaining good writing with what is fundamentally a stunt premise.

Crow Lake, Lawson. No. The writing was perfectly adequate, but the structure of Lawson’s debut novel killed it for me. More specifically, the relentless, detailed, brutal foreshadowing killed it for me. It reminded me of nothing so much as watching a “non-fiction” tv show: “coming up after the break, you’ll meet three new contestants, one of whom wears a leg brace!” Probably because there are characters named Bo and Luke, I gave the foreshadower a Dukes of Hazzard drawl: “Now don’t y’all think that there porkypine’s goin’ t’ give our boys some trouble on down the road?” Lawson settled down toward the middle (having foreshadowed everything, she at least had the decency to tell the story), but then the story itself didn’t merit the elaborate scaffolding she had put around it. If your point is that people are complicated, I need the trip to be substantially more rewarding. This trip is scenic, but ultimately unsatisfying, and the destination is well-trafficked.

The Club Dumas; Perez-Reverte, tr. Soto. Yes. Translated from Spanish, rather than my more usual French; I imagined sometimes I could tell the difference. Occasionally a bit overwrought, as though it can’t decide whether to be hard-boiled or romantic, but overall lively and engaging.

Lavinia, Le Guin. Yes. Yet another story you should know told from a non-traditional point of view; this one has a slightly different texture that was a little too on-the-nose for me at the beginning, but I was not put off too much or too often.

Ithaka, Geras. Yes. If you’re keen to learn about the classics without the bother of reading them add this one to your list. I didn’t love it so much that I immediately put a hold on Troy, but I may give it a look one of these days.