Galaxies and Goddesses: A Sci-Fi & Fantasy Bookcast

Andrea: I’m Andrea.
Elizabeth: And I'm Elizabeth.
Andrea: Join us as we chat about sci-fi and fantasy books and beyond.
Elizabeth: Looking for a little escape from reality. So are we.
Andrea: Welcome to Galaxies and Goddesses.
Elizabeth: On this week's episode, we're discussing books that we read for Summer Book Bingo.
Andrea: Specifically, we're discussing the books that we like the most and who we'd recommend them to.
Elizabeth: Along with how book bingo categories can change how we think about and view books.
Andrea: Let's get started.
Elizabeth: Just a note to our listeners, on our last episode we said that our next episode we would be doing a deep dive into the second book of the Farseer trilogy, Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb, but we actually both need a little more time to read the book, and so we're doing the Summer Book Bingo instead.
Andrea: So I think I know the answer to this question because we didn't finish the book. Does that mean you did not get a blackout, Elizabeth? I think that was your last book bingo square was 500 plus pages, and I thought you were planning to fill it with the Robin Hobb Royal Assassin.
Elizabeth: Well, I did read a different book earlier in the summer that was 500-plus pages, but I put that under Romantasy. So I actually read a different Romantasy book and moved things around. So yes, I did get a blackout.
Andrea: Nice.
Elizabeth: What about you?
Andrea: I did not get close to blackout, but I did get three bingos.
Elizabeth: All right. Nice.
Andrea: So, we don't need to talk about single book on our Book Bingo, but we'd like to share our favorite ones and the ones that perhaps listeners would also enjoy. To start off with, was there any book that surprised you, Elizabeth, that you chose to read it for a specific category and you ended up liking it more than you thought you would?
Elizabeth: I mean, I guess you could say that I was surprised by this book, but I actually wasn't, 'cause it was recommended to me by my Mom, and she just had a copy of it and I then proceeded to inhale it in like 48 hours.
Elizabeth: And so it wasn't surprising, because she said it was really good, and it was. A book called Good People by Patmeena Sabit. Have I talked about that book before?
Andrea: Yeah, you’ve mention it before.
Andrea: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Elizabeth: It's an immigrant story of a family from Afghanistan, and it's told from the perspective of everyone else and at no point is it from their perspective.
Elizabeth: Basically each section is from someone else in the Afghan community, or it's maybe from one of the detectives, or it's an excerpt from the newspaper, or from one of the local news channels or something. And it's almost like it's a book that's entirely made up of gossip.
Andrea: Interesting.
Elizabeth: I actually recommended this to one of my neighbors 'cause she is involved with the Afghan refugee community in Helena. I think she's helping with English as a second language. And I recommended this to her and then when I started talking about it, she was like, "Oh, my gosh, this sounds like a really good book to read with this class."
Elizabeth: When I recommended it to her, then she went and read it pretty quickly and loved it, and then she just got really excited about using it to teach this class, 'cause she said that it would be really fun to basically tease apart the story, like one piece of gossip at a time. I just sorta loved that.
Andrea: Well, it does kind of remind me of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, since it is an epistolary novel, I feel like when you're writing a letter, it's all of the pertinent information in a really condensed format. So similar to how you're saying it's all gossip basically, in The Correspondent, you get all of the good bits, and you're piecing together what happens as you read the story, and it's not sci-fi or fantasy either, but it's just a really good book, and a standout book from my summer reads.
Elizabeth: I started it last night. Andrea gave me her copy, and I proceeded to zip through, I think, like 75 pages really fast, and I will probably read it in 48 hours.
Andrea: Oh my gosh.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Andrea: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Because it's epistolary, the chapters are really short 'cause people don't usually write 20-page long letters.
Elizabeth: The maximum is maybe I don't know, four or five pages or something for a long letter. And so the letters are short, and often many of the chapters have large blank spaces on the pages, so it also does read really quickly.
Elizabeth: But yeah, you do have to piece it together. I found myself many times already just flipping back through the pages to read, like a previous letter to that same person to then try to figure out, like, what's the relationship between this person and the main character, and…
Andrea: Like who’s sending this email to who? Yeah. You do grow to love some of those characters, and I think it's just really impressive. It feels like they're real letters and emails. They feel like real people.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I like her. Sybil Van Antwerp is the main character. I really like her. She's feisty.
Andrea: She gives her opinion.
Elizabeth: Yeah, she does. You know, I think some of the letters may not really have anything to do with anything as far as the overarching story, but they just do really well in terms of characterizing Sybil.
Elizabeth: One of the letters she writes a really angry letter to the editor of the newspaper about a story that they published. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the overarching story. It's just pretty funny, though.
Andrea: Right, or like her not wanting to give ground on letting someone's son give a real estate presentation at their garden club.
Elizabeth: Oh yeah!
Andrea: I really got a kick out of that. Yeah.
Elizabeth: Yeah! Which she's right. It's like sort of the ridiculous kind of politics or interpersonal relationships that can happen in a large group of like women, especially like older women of means. And so, her whole point is that it's a garden club.
Elizabeth: It's about them trying to get together to talk about gardening, which does not mean a real estate presentation from one of the other member's son, who is a real estate agent.
Elizabeth: Almost like as if the vibe is that this woman's son, the real estate agent, is like preying upon these older women, because maybe they're older and they're not gonna live in their houses forever.
Andrea: Right.
Elizabeth: And they might have really nice houses with waterfront property, and so he wants to like pounce upon…
Andrea: Yeah, scoop in…
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Andrea: Before they move to the retirement home, and she's doesn't wanna acknowledge her age or how her life is changing. And I think it's a little bit of anger towards person inviting their son because it's not the time or place to give real estate presentation, but I think it's also a bit of denial in that she doesn't wanna accept where she is in life. I think there's more than one reason for that. I think a lot of that book kind of uncovers that there's another reason below the surface reason for people's actions. She distances herself and she only corresponds through letters, and you understand where she's coming from by the end of the book. So… I'm excited for you to finish it, and next time we talk get to talk more about it.
Elizabeth: Yeah
Andrea: But, too bad you didn't get to put it for, it has a bird on the cover if you're reading it now.
Elizabeth: What I realized in having a square that says put a bird on the cover, or has a bird on the cover, is that it made me look at my books a lot differently. And I would say maybe perhaps half of my books have a bird on the cover, and not necessarily in the way that people would traditionally think.
Elizabeth: Yes, The Correspondent does have two birds on the cover, like the cover art is birds. But also the publishers' logos often, it seems like more often than not, publishers use a bird for their logo.
Elizabeth: Like Penguin. Or like… I had one book that has a puffin on it, which is like a division of Penguin Group. So many publishers use a bird for their logo, and that absolutely counts as a bird on the cover.
Andrea: Yes.
Elizabeth: You cannot deny that's not a bird on the cover.
Andrea: I like the idea that book bingo is encouraging you to look at the books on your shelf in a different way, and looking at the logo to see if that has a bird on it. Looking more deeply into the covers. And I did a little bit of research into is there any relationship or like history behind bird logos and publishing companies, and yes, there definitely is a relationship.
Andrea: The two you just mentioned, Penguin and Puffin, absolutely! Because there are so many different traits for birds, they were picked as a symbol of different imprints. There's Pelican Books a nonfiction imprint Penguin. Puffin is the children's literature imprint. And do you remember seeing old fantasy books that said ROC?
Andrea: Roc is a type of mythological bird mentioned in Arabian Nights, and so it was picked to be the fantasy imprint of Penguin Books.
Andrea: Even going back to the beginning of Penguin as the mascot for their logo, that was based on a German publishing house called Albatross Books. Albatross, it was the same word in many European languages, and that was founded in 1932.
Andrea: So going back to 1932, there have been bird related house logos.
Andrea: It went from Albatross influencing Penguin, and then there was somebody that left Penguin to start his own house, he established Bantam Books. A bantam being a louder, prouder, show bird to disrupt the publishing pecking order apparently. So bantam being chosen specifically as a response to Penguin as their logo. I thought that was interesting.
Elizabeth: Yeah, the Puffin book that I saw, it's interesting that was the children's imprint, 'cause I'm pretty sure the Puffin book that caught my attention on my shelf was an Oscar Wilde book, but it might have been a collection of short stories from Oscar Wilde, one of which I think is called The Happy Prince, so maybe it was targeted towards children, even though Oscar Wilde isn't necessarily thought of as, a children's author.
Andrea: Right.
Elizabeth: And as far as Bantam Books, that was the book that I used for ... It has a bird on the cover, was a Bantam Book. I read White Fang by Jack London, and I had a really old mass market copy that I got out of a little free library that had both Call of the Wild and White Fang in it.
Elizabeth: And I didn't think that there was a place for it on my book bingo. And then I looked a little closer at the cover, and I saw a chicken.
Elizabeth: So then there you go, it's got a bird on the cover.
Andrea: It's about a wolf?
Elizabeth: So Call of the Wild is like dog with humans that then goes out into the wild, and White Fang is like more wolf than dog out in the wild that then ends up with humans.
Elizabeth: So they are almost like opposites of each other.
Andrea: Yeah, there was a square on the Seattle Public Library Book Bingo that just said animal, I really struggled with choosing what book to put there, but White Fang would be a perfect book for the animal square on a Book Bingo.
Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrea: I ended up putting Dungeon Crawler Carl as the animal square because the cat in the story is just as important of a character as Dungeon Crawler Carl is. The cat is arguably more important in some cases. So many people like that book that I thought it was probably overhyped, so I was surprised and I actually enjoyed it just as much as everybody else that's talking about it. So I didn't think it was possible to be as good as everybody said, and then I read it and I agreed.
Andrea: It's fun and fast-paced.
Andrea: A little bit of a stretch though. It wasn't my initial thought for where to put that book.
Elizabeth: How is that a stretch? That's not a stretch. There's an animal.
Elizabeth: You could have put Assassin's Apprentice for animal.
Andrea: That's true.
Elizabeth: There are animals.
Andrea: I put Assassin's Apprentice for honorable mention because it's been nominated for various awards in the past.
Elizabeth: Ohh.
Andrea: For the Seattle Book Bingo. I put Assassin's Apprentice as first in a trilogy on our Book Bingo. What about you?
Elizabeth: That's also where I put it was first book in a trilogy.
Elizabeth: For standalone novel. I put The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. It was fantastic.
Elizabeth: Steven Graham Jones is part of the Blackfeet tribe, but he doesn't live in Montana. He's a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Elizabeth: But because he's part of the Blackfeet Tribe, I'm sure he has lots of family members that live on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and so I'm sure he spent lots and lots of time in Montana. And I have now read two of his books. One is called The Only Good Indians, and now this one, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and they both take place in Montana.
Elizabeth: It's kind of fantasy, thriller, vampires, ghosts, but Native American stories. I thought it was so good because I have been trying to read more Native American literature in the last however many years.
Elizabeth: Being somebody from Montana, I wanna, spend more time investing in that. And so, in the last maybe six months I read a book that is now, I think, considered like a classic of probably 20th century fiction and Native American fiction for sure called Fools Crow by James Welch.
Elizabeth: And the main character's name is Fools Crow, and takes place in the 19th century as like, white people are coming to the West and, sort of tension and clashes between white people and the Native people. And what's really cool about Fools Crow is that there are lots of terms that are used that, I don't know this for sure 'cause I'm not Native and I don't know, but it seems like maybe these are the terms that the Blackfeet at least used to describe the animals.
Elizabeth: And then when James Welch was writing it, it was just, written in English. So for example deer are referred to as wags their tail, ' cause deer will often wag their little tails. Or elk are referred to as long legs, or antelope are referred to as prairie runners. Grizzly bears are real bears, and black bears are sticky faces.
Andrea: That cute.
Elizabeth: Yeah, it is really cute. You know, I read that- six or eight months ago or something. And so it actually was fairly fresh in my mind. And then, Stephen Graham Jones in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter uses those same terms. And then, in the acknowledgments he even says "I wanna thank James Welch for the vocabulary."
Elizabeth: So like I already knew what all these terms meant and didn't really have to spend time thinking about it as much.
Elizabeth: There's a lot of really good Montana and Native history in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Elizabeth: And it's almost like a Russian nesting doll like story of a book because there's like a story within a story.
Elizabeth: And so there's like the story that takes place in like 2012, and then there's the story that takes place in 1912, and then there's the story that goes back to the 1870s. And it's almost sort of like Interview with the Vampire in a way 'cause the story in 1912 is one of the characters hearing a story being told to him by one of the other characters, that is the vampire.
Elizabeth: The Blackfeet Reservation today is just outside of Glacier National Park. Glacier is stunningly beautiful and their reservation is right up against Glacier, so also stunningly beautiful. And the Blackfeet refer to what we think of as Glacier National Park and what today is Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, it's basically like the Rocky Mountain front where like the plains of Eastern Montana meet the Rocky Mountains, and the Blackfeet refer to it as the backbone of the world. And so when the vampire character is telling his story, he refers to going into the backbone.
Elizabeth: At one point that character gets captured and imprisoned, and when he's describing where he was imprisoned, it didn't make sense to me at first, 'cause he was describing it as an ice river, and he's completely enveloped and caged within this ice river.
Elizabeth: And then as I continued to read it, it just suddenly dawned on me that he's talking about a glacier. He was imprisoned inside a glacier, and it just was, like, mind-blowing at the time to think about that.
Elizabeth: I don't know if everyone would necessarily love it as much as I did. If you really like vampire stories, then yeah, I think you would. If you're from the West or you like books that take place in the West or about sort of Western history and Native American history. I just thought it was really, really good.
Andrea: I've heard good things about the book before, but not in such detail, so thank you for sharing.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah, and not to say that you have to read Fools Crow before you read it. You don't have to. But Because I had read Fools Crow and recognized those terms and how they're used to describe different animals, then it was like, "Oh, I, I know what that is already."
Andrea: It sounds like a happy coincidence, right?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah, it was. I was saying this to myself like, " "Oh my gosh, I know what these mean," and then when I'm reading the acknowledgments, and he even says "The vocabulary comes from Fools Crow by James Welch," I was like yeah, it does. I knew that."
Andrea: On the subject of happy coincidences Elizabeth and I just went to Worldcon in Anaheim, and the book that I decided to bring with me was to fulfill my Involves Time Travel box, The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, and it was the winner, and that was really cool to bring a book and be reading a book that ends up winning the Hugo Award when I'm at the convention.
Andrea: I just love her writing. The word choice is really good, but also looking at country politics and what stories we decide to keep who benefits from different stories. A love story.
Andrea: I would recommend it to anyone that's read her books before and liked them, but also to anyone that enjoys dark academia. This idea of peeling back the veneer of politics to see who is benefiting.
Andrea: What did you put for your time travel square?
Elizabeth: I used This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal Motar and Max Gladstone. I think I used that book on my Powell's Bookstore Book Bingo for award winner 'cause This Is How You Lose a Time War also won a Hugo Award.
Andrea: Amal El-Mohtar won the Hugo for best novella this year with The River Has Roots.
Elizabeth: Oh, cool.
Andrea: Amal El-Mohtar read the acceptance speech for Alix E Harrow. They must know each other.
Elizabeth: Oh yeah, they must.
Andrea: They must be good friends.
Elizabeth: Yeah, This Is How You Lose the Time War won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2019.
Andrea: Ok.
Elizabeth: It was all right. It was kinda weird I remember you kind of saying that, that like you didn't necessarily love it, and I also didn't necessarily love it. It was a weird little book.
Andrea: It was thought provoking, but it was hard to follow at times and understand what's going on. And I think when I'm reading a book, I have a hard time with really poetic prose.
Andrea: There's a beauty to it, but it also takes me a lot longer to read and process. So even though This Is How You Lose a Time War was short, I felt like it took me a long time to read and understand what was going on.
Elizabeth: Well and I also don't think you're necessarily supposed to understand all of it. If you have a novella or a, short story or something, they don't have the opportunity to explain everything, how everything works or how everything is connected and so you just have to go with it. Yeah, so there was a lot of not entirely understanding what exactly was happening or why. But that's okay.
Andrea: Right.
Elizabeth: I’m glad I read it. It was interesting.
Andrea: It was interesting and creative and original, and I think just because it was so different is why a lot of people it. But yeah, I recommend it to people if they like more poetic prose.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Or like my sister these days seems to really be into weird little books, and it is a weird little book. So if you wanna read a weird little book, it's a good one.
Elizabeth: There was another weird little book that I read recently, just like last week that I don't think I used in our book bingo.
Elizabeth: I think at that point, all I had was like the 500-plus pages left and couldn't find a way to move things around. But I used it for my Powell's book bingo card, and I think I used it for the square that was in translation.
Elizabeth: The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada translated from Japanese, and that is a weird little book.
Elizabeth: But also super thought provoking and I actually really enjoyed that weird little book, and can't wait to give it to my sister for her birthday, 'cause she actually gave it to me for my birthday. Now I've read it and I'm gonna pass it along to her for her birthday. Basically like if you've ever had a job, if you've ever worked a job, it's a really good book to read. It's really surreal and at times you're like, " What? What is happening and what are they doing?" And that's the same questions that the three main characters are asking themselves as they're working these various different jobs of just "What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I here?”
Elizabeth: “What is the point of this?" Yeah. It was really good.
Andrea: I got to read a few pages of it and I was really interested, but I had to give it back to Elizabeth, but I do wanna read it. Even just reading the first eight pages, it was like, “Oh, wow”. There’s so much that’s relatable.
Elizabeth: Yeah
Andrea: Bizarrely relatable.
Elizabeth: It's maybe science fiction fantasy adjacent. There's a weird part about animals. It would also be a really good one for your animal square.
Elizabeth: I know these are all done now, and you can't use it now, but if you have an animal square and you happen to read it next year, it would work great for an animal square. I think there were three different species of animals that live on the factory's campus, and there's a little kid at one point.
Elizabeth: He's not one of the main characters, but there's a little kid that decides to like, do like a scientific description of these animals, and these animals are really strange, really really strange. One of these animals is referred to as a washer lizard because they live next to the washing machines and the dryers, and they only eat lint.
Elizabeth: And so I think that counts as science fiction, but then there's sort of a slight fantastical element on the very last page, like the second to last sentence or the third to last sentence. I'm not gonna give anything away, but it was like, "What?" Something happens to one of the characters in the last couple of sentences, and it's not explained any further.
Andrea: I really want to read this. Like, I put it on my hold list at the library the second I got home.
Elizabeth: Did you?
Andrea: Yes.
Elizabeth: And now I can't wait for my sister to read it too, 'cause like I want more people to read this book so I can talk to them about it. I think it's one that's gonna kinda stick with me too. And once again, it's just a really weird little book.
Andrea: Things about novellas sometimes is that they are short enough that you can read a bunch of them and then recommend it to somebody to get their opinion. I will recommend novellas that I don't even necessarily love, to see what other people think of them.
Andrea: It doesn’t have to be my absolute favorite book, but I think people should read them.
Elizabeth: And if it's short, it also then makes it easy to recommend too,
Andrea: Right.
Elizabeth: You know, it's sometimes kinda hard if someone's not a big huge reader to recommend a book that's 500 plus pages, and it's like, "No, trust me, it's worth it. You should read it." Versus something that's like just over 100 pages, it's like, "It's really quick, so read it."
Elizabeth: And then even people who don't read a ton, to say it's so short, I can read that." When they are so short and they don't really have an opportunity to explain everything or go into great detail for lots of things, does that make it more thought-provoking because you…
Andrea: Right.
Elizabeth: have to assume more things, or you have to just suspend your disbelief more and just go with it?
Andrea: For the novella square on our book bingo, I read The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. Similarly, there's a lot that's not explained, but you get a really good sense of the world they're building through the different artifacts that main character is documenting. For each item, there's an additional story behind the item itself, and so you learn the history of entire nation by these things that were kept in the empress's cabin in exile.
Andrea: So I really liked it. It's part of what's called The Singing Hills cycle, it sounds like the other books are connected, but they're each meant to be read potentially as a one-off. So I haven't read the rest of the series, but I'm planning to. and I thought it was really well done, so it was a good short book. I would recommend The Empress of Salt and Fortune.
Elizabeth: For novella, the book that I read is called Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. She's Irish, and it's Irish literature. And I originally had that under the square, has a bird on the cover, because the copy that I read had a bird on the cover. Not a publisher logo, like an actual bird in the cover art.
Elizabeth: And then I proceeded to move it over to novella once I realized there was a chicken for the Bantam publisher on the copy of White Fang. But yeah, not sci-fi or fantasy, but it was very good. Claire Keegan, she has another novella called Foster, I haven't read it yet, I've got it on the shelf is taught in high school in Ireland now, even though it's not that old. It wasn't published all that long ago. But Small Things Like These also I could easily see like being taught in like an English literature class. But it is absolutely on the New York Times Reader's Choice Best of the 21st Century. So, that was another reason that I definitely wanted to read that book.
Elizabeth: And it was really good. Interesting sort of historical fiction about Ireland.
Andrea: What was your one-word title?
Elizabeth: Ooh, an excellent book. It was Beartown by Fredrik Backman. He wrote A Man Called Ove and I had heard really good things about it. That was actually the very first book that I read for Book Bingo. I believe I finished the book on June 1st. It was very timely.
Elizabeth: It's about a town, called Beartown, in Sweden. The entire town's identity revolves around hockey, so it's not sci-fi or fantasy. It's one of those books that is about sports, but about so much more than sports, and using sports as a way to talk about: “what is a good life?” and “what does it mean to be a part of a community? and "how do you support each other within a community and how do you be a good person?”
Elizabeth: One of the characters is the old guy coach. He has these one-liners about hockey, but about life and, like, how to be a good person.
Andrea: Did you watch Ted Lasso?
Elizabeth: Yes. It's exactly like Ted Lasso. It's not funny, like it's not a comedy. we sort of,
Andrea: But Ted Lasso is like kind of about soccer, but about so much more than soccer.
Elizabeth: And like how to be a good person and how to be a part of a team, using like the team as like a metaphor for communities. How to be a good team member means how to be a good member of your community, and how to spread that goodness and kindness.
Andrea: So quickly before we go, I wanna talk about a book read in a day, 'cause mine made me really happy. I read Lobster Is the Best Medicine by Liz Climo. It's an older book. It was published in 2015, but I was in a reading slump and didn't know what I wanted to read next, so I was looking at the books on my shelf and I was like, "Oh, I've had that for a long time and never picked it up." and it's a book of comics, so I sat down and started reading it, and I could not put it down and it just made me smile and giggle to myself the whole time. It's a lot of little comics about friendship, and it was so cute. It just made my day, and I'm like I wanna recommend that book. To anyone who's having a bad day, go and read this book about friendship, Lobster Is the Best Medicine.
Andrea: Also thank you to our listeners and followers on Instagram who played our Galaxies and Goddesses Summer Book Bingo.
Andrea: We randomly selected two winners on Instagram who received a $50 gift card to bookshop.org. Bookshop.org helps support independent bookstores throughout the US. You can select a specific bookstore you'd like to support. We also have our own Galaxies and Goddesses bookshop.org affiliate site a portion of that helps support the podcast.
Elizabeth: Unfortunately, that concludes this week's episode. We've reached the end of another cosmic journey on Galaxies and Goddesses. Book bingo is over, but it's not the end of our bookish fun.
Andrea: Don’t worry there are always more stories to explore and more bookish tangents for us to go on.
Elizabeth: If you loved today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the magic.
Andrea: Our next deep dive episode, we’ll be reading Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb, the second book in the Farseer Trilogy.
Elizabeth: And in the meantime, keep your mind fueled by the magic of stories.
Andrea: And never stop chasing. The world's waiting for you between the pages. Thanks everyone.