How to Survive in Ancient Greece by Robert Garland

How to Survive in Ancient Greece (2020), by Robert Garland, is a lightly casual tour of the day to day existence in Classical Athens, specifically in the year 420 B.C. in the midst of what most consider the Golden Age of Classical Greece, a time when Athens and Sparta are at relative peace, Sophocles and Euripides are competing for the dramatic competitions, and Socrates is stirring up trouble. Were it not for the threat of plague, cholera, typhus; the constant odor of human waste, slavery, patriarchy, and class division, it’d be a wonderful time to be alive ...

Garland opens up with a concise timeline of major events before and afterward, an explanation of why discussions of Classical “Greece” typically means Classical Athens, a brief dip into pertinent history (particularly the wars with Persia and Sparta), a description of the physicality of the city itse... Read More

It's the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!

What is the best book you read in July 2020 and why did you love it? It doesn't have to be a newly published book, or even SFF. We just want to share some great reading material.

Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.

And don't forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.

As always, one commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose a book from our stacks. Read More

The Radio Planet by Ralph Milne Farley

THE RADIO MAN trilogy, by Massachusetts-born author Ralph Milne Farley, was a series that I discovered quite by accident. I had heard of neither the three novels nor their author before finding the first book, The Radio Man (1924), in a highly collectible 1950 Avon paperback edition, at the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair a few years back. This first novel introduced readers to radio engineer Myles Cabot, who had accidentally transported himself to the planet Venus and helped the winged and antenna-sporting Cupian humanoids there to overthrow their antlike Formian oppressors. I’d enjoyed this first installment so much that I later expressed a desire to read Book 2, a wish that was gran... Read More

Awards:

Martine Arkady took the Hugo for best novel with A Memory Called Empire; Amar Al-Mohtal and Max Gladstone won best novella with “This is How You Lose the Time War;” N.K. Jemisin took the award for best novelette with “Emergency Skin;” the best short story was awarded to S.L. Huang for “For the Last I May Know.” See all the winners.

File 770 printed a correction for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award winners.

A Kerfuffle Because of Course:

The first online WorldCon ever could not go off without problems. Were they technical? They were not. Finalists and the audience were indignant at the poor job George R.R. Martin did ... Read More

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

I recently learned the term Dark Academia, and while I’m probably too old to be a part of the subculture, I wish I’d had a name for it earlier. Schools and colleges with dark secrets have long been one of my favorite forms of literary catnip. It was probably inevitable that I’d be interested in Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House (2020), the story of a rudderless young woman attending a most unusual college.

The titular Catherine House is “not just a school, but a cloister.” Students who are accepted into its selective three-year program are confined to the rambling House and its grounds for the duration of their education. Catherine is cagey about its admissions criteria, but they don’t involve wealth or family legacy, so the novel�... Read More

The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh

It’s 1872 and Celine Rousseau, who’s seventeen years old, has just arrived in New Orleans with several other girls who will work in a convent until they can make matches with respectable young men in the city. Celine is from Paris, where she made gowns for the upper class. She had to flee Paris, and her father, after a tragic event that she won’t talk about.

The work at the convent is boring, but Celine has found a new best friend — Pippa from England — and she’s fascinated by the sultry city of New Orleans, especially after she and Pippa meet a group of gorgeous and mysterious young people in the upstairs room of an elite restaurant. Celine is drawn to their beauty, sophistication, and power, especially to the young man named Sébastien Saint Germain, who seems to be their leader, as well as the richest boy in the city. It’s obvious that Sébastien is also attracted to Celine, but she ... Read More

Where the Veil Is Thin edited by Cerece Rennie Murphy & Alana Joli Abbott

Where the Veil Is Thin (2020), an anthology of stories about fairies and spirits, began as a Kickstarter. The project was successful, and the book is now widely available. Editors Cerece Rennie Murphy and Alana Joli Abbott have brought together a diverse group of authors with a wide variety of writing styles and approaches to the fae. While the tag line on the back cover says “These are not your daughter’s faerie tales,” some of the stories do read as if they might be intended for a youthful audience, while others are definitely not for kids. The stunning cover art is by Anna Dittmann.

The collection begins with a brief introduction by Jim C. Hines. In it, he... Read More

Jana: This week I read Nancy Kress’ recent novella, Sea Change, which packs a lot of story, social commentary, and very-near-future environmental concerns in an economical package. I also began reading Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, realized that I wanted to read the last few chapters of Gideon the Ninth in order to be sure that I remembered who was locked i... Read More

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

In case these times weren’t providing enough anxiety, astrophysicist Katie Mack has arrived on the scene with something else for you to worry about — the end of the universe. More precisely, in The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020), Mack explores five ways the universe might die: The Big Crunch, Heat Death, The Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, and a Bounce. Luckily, most won’t be coming along for some billions of years, so you can probably still get in everything you’ve been planning on — cleaning out the garage, binging that TV show, learning to make cocktails, etc. (Those of us with TBR shelves, though, are out of luck — billions of years just won’t cut it.)

Mack opens with a tour of our current understanding of the universe’s lifetime, from the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago up to now. Then eac... Read More

Winter Lord by Jean Brooks-Janowiak

Winter Lord (1983) was an impulse Alibris buy for me. Under a different name, Jean Brooks-Janowiak wrote a Tudor romance that’s been one of my comfort reads since I first read it in high school. That book had an eerie little vein of the supernatural running through it, so when I learned that Brooks-Janowiak had also written a fantasy novel, I decided to check it out. What with it being an earlier book, in a different genre, and sporting a rather uninformative cover, I went in with no idea of what to expect. As it turns out, I enjoyed it quite a bit, though with some caveats.

Jane O’Neill travels to the remote town of Winterburn, with her brother Brian and their friend Audrey, to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, Rob, who has drowned there under mysterious circumstances. Found with him were his ruined camera and a note with a cryptic quote from Read More