Book round-up: February 2022

[sixthlight]

Have I done my 'best books of 2021' post? No. Have I at least made a list of what those books ARE? Yes! Progress! In a month otherwise made notable by 1) Omicron and 2) the worst civil disturbance in New Zealand in 40 years, centred approximately 3km from my house and starring anti-vaxxers threatening to hang people I know and like, that counts for something. Also I read some other books, and didn't just scream into a pillow for the entire month, which would have been a very reasonable choice.

 

 

Fiction

The Ruin of Kings (Jenn Lyon)

DNF - in fact, barely started; only including it for completeness. I got two pages in, a female character got described in terms of how sexy she was to men, and I was Not In The Mood. May be perfectly good in other respects, I couldn’t say.

 

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (Tamsyn Muir)

Princess Floralinda is kidnapped by a witch and put at the top of a forty-flight tower, with a monster on every floor; but no knight can defeat them, and winter is approaching. A gruesome deconstruction of fairytale logic, asking what it really means if you have to become a monster to save yourself from monsters. You’ve all read the Locked Tomb books - the setting is entirely different but the tone is much the same. Did I like it? Unsure. Is it good? Yes.

Iterations (Robert J Sawyer)

Got this in my book group’s end of year book exchange. Allegedly Sawyer was one of the top voices in Canadian SF when this collection of short stories was put together (in the late 90s). It’s…fine….if you are interested in time travel, dinosaurs, human evolution, and a version of SF where you can be a top voice by exclusively telling stories by, for, and about white men. Suffers also from lingering in that vexed space (for both the science and the fiction) where it’s clearly outdated, but not old enough to be an interesting period example.

The Obsidian Tower and The Quicksilver Court (Melissa Caruso)

Books 1 and 2 in the author’s “Rooks and Ruin” high fantasy series, in a Northern Italian/German flavoured setting. Ryxander of Vaskandar is cursed with magic that kills most people who touch her and a castle with a mysterious tower that must never, ever be opened lest disaster ensue. Also, a bunch of unexpected visitors have shown up for dinner. Three guesses what happens, but despite the drama and body count this is actually quite an upbeat pair of books ft. a main character who just wants to make some friends actually (and does!), families who love each other (well, mostly), and disaster bi4bi romance (canon). Extremely excited for this to resolve with the third book sometime next year.

The Tethered Mage (Melissa Caruso)

Book 1 in the Swords and Fire trilogy, which from context clues predates the Rooks and Ruin trilogy by a considerable time period. Instead of Vaskandar it’s set in the Serene Empire of Raverra (yes, it’s Venice) where Lady Amalia Cornaro accidentally becomes involved in the system that controls mages in the Empire, and particularly with the fire warlock Zaira, a street girl who wants nothing to do with anyone or anything in authority. This is political fantasy rather than high fantasy even though it’s the same setting; it rattles along at a good pace, weighed down only by a very boring love interest for Amalia, in a way where I 100% believe she as a character is into this dude and would be happy with him but just….Do Not Care. Apart from that, solid recommend.

 

Non-fiction

 

20 Master Plots (Ronald Tobias)

As it says on the tin: 20 plots (in the sense of character arcs) which can form the basis for any number of stories. Some really good writing advice here, and I will come back to the plots, but my god is this written for white Christian American men writing for a presumed white Christian American male audience; I had to grit my teeth through advice like “come up with an issue where there are equally good arguments on both sides to give your story meaty conflict, like homosexuality or whether a woman should have an abortion”. If anybody has some plot-writing advice book recs that…aren’t like this…I would LOVE to know.

The Great Pretender (Susannah Cahalan)

You’ve probably heard about the study which sent mentally healthy adults into asylums in America in the late 1960s and found that, once inside, they could not persuade staff to release them even when they stopped faking their symptoms. This book tracks down the author and the participants in this study to ask whether it really said what pop culture believes it did, and finds - not really a spoiler, from the title - that it’s questionable whether it happened, in the way it was presented, at all. The author is writing from the perspective of having been institutionalised as a young woman for a physiologically-caused severe psychotic break; she is deeply aware of the flaws in mental health care. A very good read.