Anyway, July. I suspect Station Eleven would be the stand-out of the month, but I'm only two-thirds through and not at all sure I'll finish by tomorrow. So instead I'll give the top spot to Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times by Michael Dietsch. This is a cookbook! It was also a birthday gift from Noah. It's rare I read a cookbook from cover-to-cover, but this is one of those rarities; it opens with a discussion of the history of shrubs (whose name comes from the same origins as sherbet and syrup), which are essentially fruity simple syrups with a vinegar base. They can be mixed into cocktails or blended with soda water to create homemade soft drinks, and I am looking forward to mixing up a few, which will apparently keep for a year in a fridge. (Hold the jokes, please.) The book opens with some traditional, heavy-on-booze, light-on-vinegar recipes, including recipes used by Benjamin Franklin and Martha Washington. (The whole section, with its presentation of the original recipe wording and a modern adaptation reminds me of the VHS-sponsored historical cider tasting at Blue Bee.) Ben's is basically oranges marinated in rum and is definitely on my to-try list. There are some suggestions for modern white rums that still have some of the rum "funk" associated with darker or blackstrap varieties. (I haven't checked yet to see how well represented these are in the local ABCs.) The majority of the book is devoted to simple but enticing fruity concoctions -- like the strawberry balsamic, cherry mint, and blackberry-raspberry shrubs. Experimentation is encouraged, and there's a cucumber shrub I'm itching to add a jalapeno twist to. The final section of the book is devoted to cocktails, ending with the "ultramodern" twist on an old fashioned: bourbon, Scotch, cinnamon fig shrub, and a dash of bitters.
Roadside Picnic, a Russian sci-fi classic by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, was another July standout. The novel has a bit of the PKD high concept, slapdash feel about it, with long talky moments interspersed with action sequences. We begin, after an introductory faux interview, in the point-of-view of Red, who works at an international research institute but makes his real living as a "stalker," venturing into the perplexing and dangerous areas affected by alien contact and stealing artifacts to sell on the black market. In Roadside Picnic, the cosmos may be indifferent to humanity, and most characters try to make do in an amoral world.
House of Rain is probably the main reason for my slow July. This moderately hefty nonfiction volume had caught my eye some time ago, and the subject was indeed fascinating: author Craig Childs tackles the question of why the Anasazi culture "disappeared" around 1300 A.D., resisting the idea of disappearance and instead looking at archaeological support for possible migration paths southward. He doles out his argument in snippets along with descriptions of ruins and other landmarks (generally very well written; Childs has a feel for the locale) and ancecdotes detailing his own thoughts, hikes, and journeys (often with chance-met travelers or his wife and infant son filling mostly non-speaking roles as add-ons to the scenery). Hey, he obviously walked the walk, but I could do with a little less walking and meditating and a little more of the archaeological data and hypothesizing. The attitude toward the general public that comes across is also kind of ambivalent and perverse. (Many of the sites are on national parkland, and Childs is often trespassing or wheedling his way into special-exception status in order to complete his research/experience. Childs seems to thoroughly believe that he deserves special-exception status while also seeming to think that maybe more of these sites should be more open to the public while also seeming to think that the public are mostly bores who can't appreciate what they're seeing, block the scenery, and get in the way of his mystical experiences). The book was published in 2007, and Childs appears to be ahead of a curve, with contemporary archaeologists seeming to spend more time looking at patterns of migrations and leaning toward a consensus that, yes, many of the Anasazi did move to other population centers. Not a professional achaeologist, Childs is free to make some larger guesses and generalizations and makes a pretty convincing argument for linking many of the Anasazi sites to sites to the south and to worship of Tlaloc, a Mexican/mesoamerican rain god.
Another reason for the relatively low July book count was my tackling of the massive volume The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Volume 9), edited by Jonathan Strahan. I enjoy short stories, but I often find reading a collection of short stories takes me longer than reading a novel ... with a novel, once I get into the rhythm, I can usually read a few pages while standing in line or eating lunch and be able to be fully immersed and remember what I've read. This is not as true for me with short stories, which I prefer to read in one sitting (though that can be hard to count on with some of the novella-length works). So, trying to find sustained reading time slows my pace, as does a preference for pausing for some processing time between stories. A great short story, even though short, is like a novel in that you want some time to think about it before diving into a new work.Overall, although several of the stories veered more toward the slice-of-life approach than I'd prefer, this was a very strong volume. Holly Black's "Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)" was a highlight, telling a somewhat familiar but happily complete story with a few interesting authorial tricks. K.J. Parker's "I Met a Man Who Wasn't There," about a sorcerer's student, is full of delightful black humour and about as far from Harry Potter as it gets. Joe Abercrombie tells a cursed-object in sorta-fantasy-Venice tale with switching points of view; Lauren Beukes deftly tackles biotechnology in "Slipping" while Greg Egan finds utilitarian and criminal uses for drones in "Shadow Flock"; Ian McDonald's "The Fifth Dragon" takes a hard SF approach to life on the moon that also speaks to sacrifice and relationships; Elizabeth Bear's artificially "right-minded" sociopath makes for a compelling narrator in "Covenant," a mini crime thriller that poses several ethical quandaries. Peter Watts detonates the ethics case study in "Collateral"; Kelly Link tells an atmospheric fairy tale; Rachel Swirsky write a well-crafted AI tearjerker; Usman T. Malik writes an ambitious tale that brings together science metaphors, superpowers, conflict in the Middle East, and family values. I'm not much of a horror fan in general, but I found the aestheticization of violence in Caitlyn Keirnan's short story particularly problematic. (That's not to mention the incest, er twincest, which I'm not certain was a problem, but I'm not certain it wasn't, either.) On the other hand, the charming octogenarian narrator in Garth Nix's horror short "Shay Worsted" made for an entertaining if slight piece. There are 28 tales and 634 pages in all.
Largely inspired by my viewing of Justified (and listening to a few of the commentary tracks) was a spurt of crime reading. I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which Elmore Leonard called the best crime novel ever written, published in 1970 and set in the Boston of cops and criminals. Its dense, fast-paced dialogue and way of coming at the main action sideways through different POVs was deft and enjoyable; however, even when it deliberately tries to give female characters some agency or autonomy, it fails miserably in its writing of women. (Thankfully? the book mostly focuses on men.) Swag has a similarly distinctly 70s vibe (also with a bit of a whiff of misogyny, although less so) and tells an entertaining story of odd-couple armed robbers. Leonard has a spare but humorous style that works well here and perhaps even better in his short story collection Fire in the Hole. 
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