Book round-up: March 2021

[sixthlight]

 

In a weird coincidence, I read exactly the same unusually small number of books in March 2021 as March 2020, but this time it’s because I was freakishly busy with non-work commitments on top of big work deadlines, instead of my brain freezing up under the looming threat of mass death. That’s….better? I think? 

Fiction

A Pale Light In The Blackness (K B Wagers)
Gentle sci-fi in the mode of The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, but unfortunately without that book’s level of charm or coherency; I didn’t think it was bad, I just didn’t care very much about any one character, and gave up when the plot had failed to kick into gear in any appreciable way by halfway through. Also had the tell-tale signs of an author who really wanted to depict a utopic queer-friendly future but had, uh, not entirely thought through all their world-building choices in that regard. 

Seven of Infinities (Aliette de Bodard)
Arsene Lupin as a sentient spaceship in a Vietnamese space future. This is the second Lupin adaptation I’ve encountered this year; at this point I’m going to have to read the original. Very much in the de Bodard mode of f/f romance, loving food descriptions, nervous scholarly ladies Trying Their Best, and murder mystery. 

Non-fiction

18 Tiny Deaths (Bruce Goldfarb)
The life of Frances Glessner Lee, the woman who more or less kickstarted modern forensic police investigations in the USA, most notably (though not at all solely) by building eighteen incredibly detailed 1/12th scale dioramas used to teach American police officers and medical examiners to observe crime scenes. The author reveals in an afternote that he became fascinated with her story after working as curator for the dioramas; knowing this makes it a much better read and I wish the afternote had been a forenote, but it’s good anyway. I also wish it had done a little more to dig into how profoundly unscientific police investigations still often are, but it does a good job of portraying how much worse they used to be.  

The Children of Ash and Elm (Neil Price)

If you are at all interested in “the Vikings”, read this book. It’s an incredibly well-written summary of what we know about them in 2020 by a leading archaeologist of the era, at once hugely sympathetic to the people he studies and grimly clear-eyed about the less savoury parts of their culture (mostly: slavery). It’s really really good on questions of gender and queerness, on seeking to debunk the bits of Viking ‘history’ that attract neo-Nazis, on drawing together historical accounts and evidence of Scandinavian travel from Newfoundland to North Africa to the Ukraine, and on keeping in mind that the past was a different country. I really can’t recommend it enough.