Book round-up: January 2021

[sixthlight]

I was on holiday for the first third of this month, so got a bit of summer reading done (yay). I re-read Reaper Man, because it’s always worth re-reading a Discworld novel now and then, and the only non-fiction book I read was The Year 1000 by Valerie Hansen, a study of pre-colonial globalisation. It was quite narrowly focused on economic history, but a very easy read and had a decent amount of new stuff for me (which pop history doesn’t always). It’s largely focused on everywhere except Europe and makes a decent stab at North American and African trade routes as well as the more familiar Silk Road stuff; I’d recommend it to Old Guard fans interested in thinking about how the world looked in terms of travel, trade, and economy around the time Joe and Nicky died.

Below the cut: fiction!

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (H G Parry)
DNF; I knew it was going to be about the French Revolution in an AU with magic (obvious) and bought because I knew the author was a Kiwi. I was not expecting it to be 90% William Wilberforce & William Pitt the Younger RPF. When Robespierre being a necromancer makes me yawn, I know I am not caught up by the narrative. For someone; not for me.

Daughter of the Moon (Effie Calvin)

I will read anything this author writes because she exclusively writes delightful secondary-world-fantasy wlw romances. This one is fifth in an ongoing series (but they’re mostly standalones) and I loved the slow worldbuilding/big plot hints and the nerdy werewolf/exiled reforming villain romance. Just fun.

Floodtide (Heather Rose Jones)
A ‘lower decks’ novel in her Ruritanian fantasy/romance Alpennia series, following a maid who loses her position after being caught with another woman, and eventually ends up in the household of the noble protagonists of previous books. Not a romance, more of a bildungsroman. As always, the worldbuilding and historical detail is superb, and it sensitively balances the real dangers and difficulties of being queer (in a number of ways) in a world that doesn’t like queerness, and poor in a world where poverty is immediately life-threatening, without slipping into grimdarkness.

Upright Women Wanted (Sarah Gailey)
A novella set in a post-apocalyptic US Southwest, following a teenager who runs away to join the travelling all-female (supposedly) Librarians, who take Approved Materials from settlement to settlement, in hope of getting over her queerness. (Spoilers: she is not with the right group for that.) I enjoyed it but I think if you had a particular attachment to Westerns, and wanted a queer/non-cis-male lens on them, you would love this.

Unnatural Magic (C M Waggoner)
Picked it up on a friend’s recommendation as one of her top books of 2020 knowing nothing else, absolutely adored it. A murder mystery is unravelled from two ends by a young woman determined to train as a wizard, and two unlikely allies. It’s a secondary-world fantasy in a Victorian-esque milieu (but crossing multiple cultures), in a world where there are two sentient races: humans and trolls. The trolls’ gender system is entirely orthogonal to the binary, physically-determined human gender system and uh I love everything the book did with this culture clash. Really reminded me of the difference between different-gender romance and *heteronormativity* (had plenty of the former, zero of the latter.)

Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross)
First in a new series in his Laundry Files universe, following a group of queer would-be supervillains trying to survive under the New Management (Nyarlthotep, who is managing to edge out Boris as Worst UK PM but only by executing a lot of people). A bit more gruesome than some previous entries in the series, which relied more on implied horror than specifics. Angry in the mode of Pratchett, fiercely for people loving and supporting each other in the face of both mundane and cosmic horrors; I liked it but not an easy read. Absolute laundry (hah) list of content warnings, happy to expand if people want.

The Relentless Moon (Mary Robinette Kowal)
Side-entry in her Lady Astronaut Series; while Elma York was travelling to Mars, her friend Nicole Wagner was hunting terrorists on the moon in what is largely a tense spy thriller. Much longer than the first two in the series and unintentionally smack in the zeitgeist, given it would have been finished in 2019; there’s a polio pandemic and a (domestic) terrorist attack on the US Capitol, not to mention this universe’s accelerated climate change that will render the Earth uninhabitable within a century. So very much not an escapist read, despite its AU space race setting, but very worthwhile.

The House on the Cerulean Sea (T J Klune)
Recommended to me by several people as up my alley, and unfortunately...not, a DNF. It’s about an agent for a dystopic government department to regulate magical young people who is sent to review a very unique orphanage (the children include a sentient jellyfish(?) and the Antichrist(?)) and the man running it. There was clearly a gay romance looming but I didn’t get that far; the book’s sense of humour was very laboured for me, and I just didn’t like the main character (and by the time I quit nobody else did yet either.) Plus it did the worldbuilding thing I find super fucking annoying where it kept referring to real-world things but it was totally unclear if it was even set in our world or an AU thereof, let alone what decade it was set in. I don’t do well with that sort of refusal to commit. Sorry, recommenders, I promise I gave it the old college try!

Comments

[sixthlight]

oh GOOD I'm so glad I'm not the only person who had that reaction. it was one of those things where I can 100% see why people recommended it to me but NO THANK YOU