Book round-up: August 2022

[sixthlight]

August 2022

August was also a really high-travel month by my current standards (very different from when I was traveling one week in three in my previous job), and halfway through we moved in with my parents so our house could be staged for open homes. I let two fiction books I’d been really excited about expire on my library app because I couldn’t face starting them, and by the end of the month couldn’t do anything except non-fiction. Fortunately then I remembered that this meant I needed some comfort re-reads and hit up the Astreiant series.

Fiction

Sea of Tranquility (Emily St John Mandel)

Picked this up because I knew the author had written a very famous pandemic book and thought it might be nice to read something by her that was not about a pandemic. Friends. Do not make my mistake. This is a good litfic/sci-fi novel about time travel and regular travel and, yes. Pandemics. So many people are in lockdown. One character is a novelist famous for writing a book about a pandemic, in lockdown for a separate pandemic. I enjoyed it but you gotta be in a headspace where you’re prepared for fiction about 2020 and the Plague Years that have followed it, because this is fiction about 2020.

A Prayer for the Crown Shy (Becky Chambers)

Second in her Monk and Robot series basically asking ‘can you be depressed if you live in utopia and what should you do about it if you are? Also, can a robot friend help?’ There is tea and slow travel and food porn and some light economics and absolutely nothing, like, happens, plot-wise. It is On Brand. I liked it, but I like the brand, so.

Non-fiction

Plastic Fantastic (Eugenie Samuel Reich)

Recommended to me by a physicist colleague who is old enough to have been around when the scandal broke. This is an absolutely gripping account of how one desperate to please young scientist perpetuated a long-term fraud that got him fifteen Nature and Science papers and made almost everybody working in superconductors look very dumb. It is also, frankly, a searing indictment of how glam mag publication (and some aspects of modern science) work. I loved it. Read it if you care about research being, IDK, in some objective way true.

The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow)

An enormous tome by two anthropologists attempting to recontextualise the entire history of human society in light of (primarily North American) Indigenous cultures as equally valid and modern examples of how humans might choose to organise themselves rather than in some way more socially ‘primitive’ than European and Asian societies. I don’t know if it’s entirely right in its speculations about the societies of pre-historic Europe and the Middle East, but it makes fascinating arguments for human history as a series of patterns rather than an arc towards anything in particular. Its main flaw is that it is written very much as a reaction to the anthropological literature and so talks about Indigenous cultures rather than with them. I need to go read some reviews by Indigenous scholars, I think.

Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality (Julia Shaw)

What it says on the tin; a very up-to-date book which has an emphatically inclusive definition of bisexuality. I was surprised by how much I related to some of the discussion of the ways being bisexual can impact your relationship to your gender (cis or trans). I generally feel pretty affirmed as a bisexual woman day to day because I have such a large friend circle of bisexual/asexual/generally queer people, but it still felt good to have a solid book like this documenting how (and that) we exist.

Re-reads

Point of Hopes and Point of Dreams (Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett)

Secondary world early modern fantasy police procedurals/murder mysteries which I am now reliably informed are fairly clearly serial-numbers-filed-off Professionals slashfic in origin, which tickles me but has no bearing on my enjoyment as I’ve never seen the show. I first read them in 2017. As with much of Scott’s work these are books about queer characters who engage in a relationship but they’re emphatically not romances; the tension is never ‘do we like each other’ or ‘will we sleep together’, it’s ‘can a long-term relationship fit into our existing personal/professional lives’. The focus on astrology-as-real-magic still niggles me a little even on a re-read (sorry astrology buddies but it is fake and the implications are DIRE!!! although at least this book kinda tries to engage with how it WOULD be to live in a world where your time/date of birth really DID control your destiny in a real way) but the worldbuilding is so much fun, and the mysteries are genuinely very good. Exactly what I needed.

Comments

[profiterole_reads]

The Astreiant series is very good.

[white_aster]

>There is tea and slow travel and food porn and some light economics and absolutely nothing, like, happens, plot-wise. It is On Brand.

Oh gawd yes. I find Chambers' books interesting, in that they have taught me that though I like cozy, there is uh...there's a limit to how much cozy I like at the expense of Things Actually Happening. I really liked the first book in Monk and Robot, and then Book 2 hit me the same way some of Chambers' scifi does, where I was violently shaking the book up and down, hoping that some plot (ANY PLOT) would fall out.