Book round-up: August and September 2021

[sixthlight]

Lockdown half-way through August proved once again to be MURDER on my fiction brain but I was rescued unexpectedly by a 1980s portal fantasy, and also got a lot of reading done during travel/a short holiday the week before Level 4 hit us. Unfortunately some of that travel was to Auckland where the outbreak has been centred, and I then developed a cold immediately on getting back, which meant I got to spend the first week of lockdown at home and miserable, in possession of a negative COVID-19 test, but still waiting nervously to see if anywhere I’d been came up as a Location of Interest. (It didn’t and the outbreak is slowly, slowly subsiding, because fucking Delta, but: BAH.)

Fiction

What Abigail Did That Summer (Ben Aaronovitch)
It was fascinating to come back to the London of Peter Grant & co in what now seems like a bygone era for the UK (the summer of 2013) from an entirely different point of view. Abigail knows much less than Peter suspects, but Peter is of course privy to whole swathes of things she isn’t, too. I loved the foxes, I loved the scale of the mystery Abigail has to solve, I did not love Nightingale [doing a violent thing not directed at a person as an expression of frustration] but it’s interesting as a character note.

The Hands of the Emperor (Victoria Goddard)
A self-published magnum opus which is sorely, sorely in need of a thorough edit (crucial scenes straight-up repeat themselves, could have been an easy 30% shorter) but was still incredibly engaging, about a middle-aged bureaucrat in a magical empire who persuades the Emperor to take an undercover holiday. Shenanigans - and eventually slow, bureaucratic revolution - ensue. It exists at a weird intersection of an incredibly moving depiction of the struggle to retain your culture while operating within a dominant one that is not yours, and, uh...extremely white person depiction of Fantasy Polynesia. And don’t even ask me about the bit with the cannibals because I have Opinions. IDK, I liked it a lot but I also found it very frustrating but! But. If someone expounding on the benefits of Fantasy UBIs for ten pages is your thing, especially if you are a middle-aged queer bureaucrat, I think you will like this a lot.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built Becky Chambers)
On a solarpunk moon far away, a monk goes into the wilderness to Find Themself and meets a robot. Very much in the Chambers mode of gentle story about friendship with zero percent in the way of plot and one hundred percent in the way of optimistic worldbuilding. Read with a cup of tea.

The Darwath Trilogy (Barbara Hambly)

1980s portal fantasy trilogy about a female PhD student of medieval history and a guy who rides a motorcycle and airbrushes vans, both of whom get pulled by a wizard into a world facing a deadly crisis. She discovers an unexpected talent for fucking people up with a sword; he discovers an unexpected talent for magic; I loved the major plot resolution but it’s a big spoiler even to gesture to it, so let me just say despite aforementioned sword up-fuckery, Gil (our medieval scholar) still gets to deploy her scholarly skills in important ways to save the day. Does a lot better by its women in general than I originally expected, unfortunately heterosexual, very much in the ‘80s vibe of People Wander Around Hostile Landscapes For Weeks And Goddamn Weeks. Even more unfortunately, extremely un-examined in its fantasy land of Noble White People In Castles, Raiders On Horseback Who Definitely Aren’t Native Americans, and Decadent Multicultural Southern Empire Which Is Somehow Both Decadent And A Theocracy. That just...is what it is.

Machinehood (S B Divya)
Near-future (~2100) dystopia sci-fi about a soldier turned bodyguard hunting down the mystery of who is attacking the technology the world depends on. Does a good job of extrapolating modern trends to a believable future and telling a story in a global (well, India and the US) setting; unfortunately buys into post-2001 American Islamophobia in its world construction in a way where it’s impossible to discern whether it’s meant to be a facet of narrator bias or authorial bias.

Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
1920s fairytale fantasy following Cassiopea Tun, a young woman stuck as a servant to her wealthy relatives in the Yucatan until she opens a chest and frees a trapped god - and accompanies him on a journey to restore his power. Vividly realistic and dreamlike at the same time. I would love to read about Cassiopea’s further adventures.

Sword Dance (A J Demas)
A friend has been recommending Demas for a while; I picked this up because it was free on Kindle. M/M country house mystery in the fantasy ancient Mediterranean. It is kinda unashamedly ripping off the plot/vibe of K J Charles’ Think of England but that’s not necessarily bad, it just meant I knew largely where the story was going. I wasn’t fully convinced the leads actually liked each other but an enjoyable enough read.

Non-fiction

Decolonising Methodologies (Linda Tuhiwai Smith)
The seminal textbook on research with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial countries; I should have read it years ago and we should probably just be handing it out to every PhD graduate in Aotearoa. I can’t really recommend it unless you have a need for the eponymous methodologies in your research (it is a textbook), but I can say it’s extremely accessible and practical, and very much worth your time.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Samin Nosrat)

Cookbook which is more about general principles than recipes; I found lots of incredibly good tips and will refer back to it for many techniques, but it drove me absolutely bonkers by insisting that iodised salt was not only bad but should be removed from your kitchen with prejudice. This is just flatly wrong and in many places dangerous to your health. For fuck’s sake, Ms Nosrat.

Beyond Infinity (Eugenia Cheng)

What, exactly, is infinity? A breezy read as far as theoretical mathematics can be such a thing, with lots of metaphors referring to everyday life; cw for quite a lot of weight/food talk, but I enjoyed it having not contemplated calculus seriously since I finished secondary school.

Ngā Kete Mātauranga (Linda Nikora and Jacinta Ruru)

A series of autobiographical profiles of Māori researchers working in Aotearoa. No enormous surprises in terms of how systemic prejudice is continuing to work within the academy, but very good to get such a range of viewpoints and experiences in the words of the researchers themselves.

Nature and Farming (David Norton and Nick Reid)

Biodiversity and how it can be supported in the pastoral agricultural environment, with a strong focus on Aotearoa and Australia, largely through profiles of individual farms. Extremely thorough except - and this is a large exception - for its more or less total lack of discussion of Indigenous land and land management practices.

The Master and his Emissary (Iain McGilchrist)

For my book club, a six-hundred-page tome on the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Marking it as DNF even though I will continue to plow through for the sake of book club because absent that motivator I would have not put it down lightly, as the saying goes, but hurled it away with great prejudice. The author may be an experienced psychologist but he insists on making sweeping assertions about humanity and the function and structure of the brain based purely on Western psychology, education, worldviews, and languages. The thesis (that society has moved from right-brain domination to left-brain) is so fatally undermined by this I can’t take it at all seriously, despite his evident expertise. Plus it needs an editor even more desperately than The Hands of the Emperor, and given it was published traditionally it presumably had one!

Comments

[caprices]

Darn, Nature & Farming sounds right up my interest-alley, and the same problem as the other books of that ilk. (Ex. Nature of Oaks is a great book, very focused on how awesome oaks are and how they sustain many species. Same author's new book, Nature's Best Hope, repeatedly declaims the virtues of the pristine, untouched-by-human-hand wilderness, and. Just. No.)

I've seen the Darwath books recommended several times now. They seem to be having a Moment, albeit a somewhat obscure one.