Book round-up: May and June 2022

[sixthlight]

May and June have - happened. Somehow. I don’t even know. There’s a lot going on in Chez Sixthlight, is all I feel like saying for the moment. Sometimes, occasionally, it is reading books!

Fiction

Wintersmith (Terry Pratchett)
I liked this less than the first two Tiffany Aching books, if only because I couldn’t get over reading it as a text where a thirteen-year-old girl is made to bear the entire responsibility for stopping a man (a god!) who is stalking her. All the usual good Pratchett bits were there but that overshadowed it for me, and I’m sure that wasn’t the intended reading, but…that was how it hit me. Interested in alternate opinions here!

Machine (Elizabeth Bear)
A follow-up of sorts to her space opera Ancestral Night, set firmly in the same universe but with an entirely different cast of characters. The narrator is flawed and tired and very good at her job, and the setting is a loving pastiche of a famous 1960s sci-fi series about a space hospital (which I haven’t read but know of). The ethics questions really dig into how utopias break, but in an…ultimately upbeat way? I liked it a lot, would read a bunch more in this universe.

A Marvellous Light (Freya Marske)

Edwardian-plus-fantasy mlm romance. I had this recced by several friends and it was fine, but only that for me; it suffered hard from “none of these people really like each other very much or have any friends” syndrome. Big slashfic vibes in the writing style, no surprises as I believe the author is in fandom. Won’t run to read any sequels.

The Tensorate Series (Neon Yang)

Four secondary-world silkpunk fantasy novellas, two linked ones about a pair of twins who end up pitted against their tyrant mother, one epistolary horror mystery, one backstory-as-tale-told-by-the-fire for a background character in the first three. I liked the way the style changed between them, I loved the magitech worldbuilding, and I liked the balance it held between “you can’t keep your hands clean in revolutions” and there still being right things to do and characters with strong morals. Good stuff.

Light from Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki)

A Hugo nominee, which I picked up on that basis; didn’t finish, as it lost me entirely for two separate reasons. The first was that it foregrounded a trans character whose trauma about and experiences of transphobia were front and centre of every scene, which is just…not something I enjoy reading…, and the second was that it was asking me to accept some very big worldbuilding assertions in a literary fiction kind of way where they were not explained at all. The people running this donut shop are aliens, that’s just how it is; this other lady has sold her soul to Hell for violin skills; how does this all…work…metaphysically? Who knows! Simply not a book for me.

Blood Red (Mercedes Lackey)

Another Elemental Masters book, vaguely Red Riding Hood adjacent, about a werewolf hunter who is Not Like The Other Girls. About as averagely bad as all the late entries in this series so I cannot possibly recommend it, but something something that Roger Ebert quote about The Mummy (except not nearly as good in any way as The Mummy, let’s be clear.)

Defekt (Nino Cipri)

Sequel to their Hugo-nominated novella Finna; this time the hapless Sci-Fi Ikea employee finds out he’s a clone, and has to band together with a bunch of other clones to fight monsters on overnight stocktake…but who are the real monsters, in the end? Mercilessly nails retail hell. A++++ would have flashbacks again.

The Thousand Eyes (A K Larkwood)

Sequel to The Unspoken Name, secondary-world fantasy about eldritch gods and escaping destiny (if you can), which I thought was perfectly OK but wasn’t massively excited by. To my very great surprise I loved this one and it retrospectively made me glad I’d read the first one so I could get here; it’s a story of people who love each other despite themselves, in all sorts of ways, and what you do after the world has ended. I laughed, I cried, I cheered when [X] got [their] comeuppance. Immensely satisfying.

Last Exit (Max Gladstone)

Supernatural crossed with Mad Max Fury Road, if either story was about a rag-tag bunch of misfits who met each other at Yale and discovered eldritch powers, tried to be heroes, fucked it all up, and then a decade later have to get the gang back together to save the world. It is extremely about America so you have to be in the mood for that, but in a hopeless, hopeful, clear-eyed way for a country built on bones and ashes, asking how you build something worthwhile on those foundations. Gladstone is always good and this is excellent.

Non-fiction

Gathering Moss (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Read this for book club; Prof Kimmerer and I are simply not destined to get along. I love about 30% of her writing, find 40% fine, and the remaining 30% drives me batty. Read it if you like moss and poetry in your science.

Green Meat (Ryan M. Katz-Rosene and Sarah J. Martin (eds))

A series of essays on the ethics and future of meat as a food, from a variety of perspectives. Heavily on the academic side, be prepared for that. I found it worthwhile overall but would have liked a couple of essays from harder scientists, this was very social science heavy.

Feathers (Thor Hanson)

A history of the feather as a natural object, a part of fashion, a byproduct of bird agriculture, and an evolutionary mystery. Extremely easy to read and left me with a much increased appreciation for feathers. They grow in spirals! Who knew! (Lots of people obviously, just not me)

Re-reads

I re-read Sprig Muslin, an underrated Heyer in my opinion largely about babysitting overexcitable teenagers, and An Unnatural Vice by K J Charles, a fun enemy-to-lovers Victorian mlm romance about a medium and a journalist. Always a solid re-read.

Comments

[caprices]

Adding Machine and Last Exit to my read list immediately.

I suppose Wintersmith is indeed the story of a girl being stalked and the narrative going "you brought this upon yourself, you know," except the author is so hopping mad at how unfair it is? And gives her the tools to work her way out of it. For whatever reason, I somehow got it in my head that there's an extremely veiled metaphor for climate change tucked into that book also, though I don't know if that makes it better.