Book Club Options Redux

My second round came up unexpectedly soon. This time I’m going to hold back to three options.

#1: War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull

This was one of the choices I presented last time. Here’s the pitch again:

After another bad gig, Eddi McCandry quits her boyfriend and his band … only to be drafted into a secret war between faerie courts over the city of Minneapolis. Can she trust the Phouka, who claims to be her guard but acts more like her captor? More importantly, how’s this going to interfere with her new band?

A week later, someone posted this to one of the Discord servers I’m on:

book club discussed War for the Oaks by Emma Bull last night. What an object. What a thing.

I would not call it perfect but there is something so fuckin’ FERAL about it. Her love of the city is primal. It has a real soul about itself. […]¹

I’ve been looking for this book for a while. I wanted something to distinctly pulpy that it had to exist in it’s time and place. and some Urban Fantasy that showed how the urban setting adds to the story. It takes something like War for the Oaks to set the golden standard for that on both fronts. You can’t experience this thing and NOT turn on Kate Bush when she describes Eddie’s manic run through the night.

This won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It’s a banger.

Year of release: 1987
Genre: Urban fantasy
Availability: It’s not in the library, but it’s available as an e-book, and Indigo has the paperback.
Length: 319 pages

#2: This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I haven’t actually read this one. Here’s the marketing text from the back cover:

In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading.”

So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.

Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common — save that they’re the best, and they’re alone.

Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in a war. Isn’t it?

From what I understand, the entire book is written as a series of letters sent back and forth. It won a tonne of awards back in 2019 and 2020, including the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novella. It hit the NYT best sellers chart in 2023 after a viral tweet that took off mostly due to the account name:

read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious. pic.twitter.com/Pzb2FWvFlg

— bigolas dickolas woIfwood (@maskofbun) May 7, 2023

Year of release: 2019
Genre: Science fiction
Availability: VPL; BPL; should be extremely easy to find.
Length: 198 pages

#3: The City & The City, by China Miéville

This is another one I haven’t read.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Besźel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from decaying Besźel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbour, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighbouring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Besźel and in Ul Qoma — and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between the two cites.

I’ve heard nothing but good stuff about this author, and the book won a tonne of awards. I asked D— about this last night, and he replied, “It’s fascinating. I quite like it.”

Year of release: 2009
Genre: Detective. Possibly SF or fantasy. I dunno!
Availability: VPL; BPL. It should be easy to find.
Length: 312 pages