Book round-up: July 2022

[sixthlight]

Most of July was spent traveling for work, preparing to sell our house (!!!), and dealing with very stressful medical stuff (all resolved and fine now) which I do not care to discuss in further detail at this juncture, but was a profound time and mental energy sink for the entire month. Somehow I still read some books??? Not actually sure when I found the time.

Fiction

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels (India Holton)

Fantasy Regency/Victorian (?) het romance. I was a little bit eh about the very visually evocative but otherwise deeply nonsensical worldbuilding - of the type where it’s supposed to be funny that people are trying to murder each other while holding strong opinions about etiquette, which I don’t think is intrinsically funny - but DNF’d when the heroine required help to get out of her corset which WAS EXPLICITLY DESCRIBED AS HAVING A METAL BUSK. We all have our breaking points.

Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances (Aliette de Bodard)

Second spin-off novella from the Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, featuring Thuan and Asmodeus (earnest bisexual dragon prince/gay pet sociopath fallen angel) babysitting a bunch of Thuan’s cousins while someone tries to murder them, As You Do. No children are harmed in the making of this mystery. A lot of tea is drunk. Delightful.

I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown (Terry Pratchett)

I finished the Tiffany Aching series and continued to wish I had read them seven years ago. Aside from the evident decline in his writing abilities, what Pratchett is trying to do here in terms of gender and social commentary is much less interesting and thoughtful now than it would have been then, and much less heavy-hitting again than what he was doing in the 90s/early 2000s. In particular, a complete lack of discussion of contraception and abortion - services you cannot tell me his witches would not provide - in a book about a thirteen-year-old being pregnant was…a really weird lack. And the whole ‘boy becoming a witch’ plot in The Shepherd’s Crown was SUPER underbaked and glass-elevator-esque. There’s some fantastic scenes and lines in these books but they’re uneven as whole works. Cements my opinion that there’s a clear peak in the Discworld books and it’s from about Feet of Clay through Thud!.

Water Horse (Melissa Scott)

Secondary world political/low-tech military fantasy about a Celtic/‘pagan’-coded culture resisting invasion from a Christian-coded culture. A little bit heavy-handed in terms of the good guys being queer and poly and having women in positions of authority and the bad guys being sexist and homophobic, but still does a good job of not categorizing all the people in those cultures into Good Guys and Bad Guys, and in particular the main character is a fun twist on some classic character archetypes - an androgynously good-looking, facially scarred, bisexual/poly man famous for his cunning as an opponent, who is nevertheless clearly the hero and a good father, friend, and person.

The Language of Roses (Heather Rose Jones)

Novella re-telling of Beauty and the Beast as a lesbian love story/asexual search for belonging, while resisting domestic abuse and control from men. Also cleverly pulls in elements of other fairytales and, as I would expect from the author, while it’s not a historical story per se the detail of the setting feels very historically grounded.

Non-fiction

Thinking Better (Marcus du Sautoy)

Book club book, billed as a book of ‘shortcuts’ to thinking smarter but actually just a mathematics professor expounding about his favourite bits of mathematics. I don’t know that I learned a whole lot but it was a perfectly pleasant read and I would land on the side of blaming the publisher for the framing.

Make Mend Sew (Bernadette Banner)

Got this out of the library as the author is getting a lot of buzz in my circles for cosplaying Moiraine Damodred from the WoT show. The ‘mend’ section had some OK tips but 80% of the book is essentially ‘sewing and hand-sewing for people who haven’t sewn before’ and I skimmed through a lot of it, which is knowledge I already have contained in books I already own. Would recommend for beginners to the hobby though.

Fresh Banana Leaves (Jessica Hernandez)

Pitched as an introduction to the concepts and importance of Indigenous environmental science. In reality this is a book centered very, very closely around the author’s own family history and experiences as a Maya Ch’orti’/Zapotec woman studying in North America, which is fine? But…absolutely did not introduce me to a single general concept I had not encountered before (and left me feeling like the author is not very familiar with the existing literature here), on top of being very didactic and somewhat poorly edited. It’s possible to write radically and challengingly on these topics and still be engaging outside your target audience, whoever they are. That is not this book.