Book round-up: December 2022
Jan. 12th, 2023 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sixthlightI felt like my brain started to come back online in December after approximately one million years. Helpfully, I also picked up an ongoing series (the Benjamin January mysteries) which 1) I really enjoyed and 2) had a huge back catalogue for me to plow through. But the fact that I had some library reserves I had been looking forward to come up and actually managed to read them, unlike earlier in the year (alas, The Dawnhounds, you will be a 2023 read) was a HUGE shift.
Also I read some pregnancy-related books and had, um, Thoughts.
Fiction
Benjamin January mysteries 1-18 (Barbara Hambly)
Oft-recommended historical mystery series starring a free man of colour, the eponymous January, who returns widowed to his family in New Orleans in 1833 after spending his adult life in Paris. His work as a musician, training as a surgeon, and extensive family connections crossing through the free coloured, Black, and French Creole communities in New Orleans - not to mention the growing and resented white American community - lead him into a range of mysteries and perils. These are very good and I mainlined the whole lot over December as the library had all but one available as e-books (but had to wait for the last one to come in as a hardcopy).
This is the kind of series where Some Of These People Like Each Other, which appeals greatly to me. January has a really extensive social and familial network who act as reccurring supporting characters. I like all of them and their relationships, and January as a lead. I also enjoyed a lot that while January has a dead wife the series stops to flash back extensively to his life in Paris in two separate books, such that she exists very much as a real person on the page (though there’s definitely elements of orientalism in her presentation as a Muslim North African). The books are as much historical novels about the free coloured and Black experience in 1830s New Orleans as they are mysteries; the underlying theme in every one is that despite their legal freedom, the existence of racialised chattel slavery as a system is an unavoidable threat for January and his friends and family. The brutality of slavery is not underplayed and there’s trigger warnings, for the series as a whole, for pretty much everything you can think of; the book that takes January & co to Haiti is particularly gruesome but I am, fairly certain, not historically inaccurate.
I felt like in the later half of the series the author leaned on the “January is in peril of being kidnapped and enslaved” note a little too often, but possibly I wouldn’t have felt like that if I’d been reading them one at a time as they came out. There’s also a little bit of January Forrest Gumping around the US as the series continues, for which YMMV; for example, Jefferson Davis and Edgar Allen Poe both play support in different books, and Marie Laveau is a (lightly used) recurring character throughout the series. I am unfamiliar enough with Significant Figures Of Early Nineteenth Century America that the effect was largely lost on me even if I recognised the names.
What I’d really love to read now is some reviews/criticism (in the neutral sense) from Black Americans about these books; Octavia Butler is thanked as a sensitivity reader (though not using the term) for the first one but the author is white and there’s definitely moments where she tidies up behind herself as the series goes on. I’m not looking for stamps of approval, the series stands and sometimes (in my judgement) stumbles on its own merits; I’m more interested in, from an in-community perspective, what about it works and does not work. Any links/recs appreciated!
Masters In This Hall (K J Charles)
Christmas-themed mlm romance novella about a disgraced hotel detective trying to stop his one-night-stand ruining his uncle’s Christmas party with jewel theft…or is that really what’s going on? Absolutely fine and seasonally appropriate, but the degree to which a cameo from Lilywhite Boys series characters stole the scene for me from the leads is an indicator of how engaging I found them (i.e. I have already forgotten their names).
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (Foz Meadows)
I can only describe this as a hurt/comfort secondary world fantasy mlm romance, following a young man from a very homophobic society who enters into an arranged marriage with a man from a very not homophobic society. Basically 50% political mystery, 50% fairly sweet and well-paced ‘protagonist dealing with sexual assault’ type romance, and ends on what I found a suitably optimistic but not ‘and now we will live happily ever after’ note. I believe a sequel is forthcoming. Love some romance + politics, even if the h/c elements are not my favourite thing, and enjoyed it a lot. There are accurate warnings at the start for the sexual assault (which is on page), and they are well-deserved, but that very much marks the low point of the story and does not represent the overall tone. Honestly I reckon you could skip it and the story would still flow fine.
The Spare Man (Mary Robinette Kowal)
Mystery novel set on an interplanetary cruiser between Earth and Mars, remixing the movie The Thin Man. I have never seen the movie so everything about that was lost on me, and was mildly grumpy that this was not in the Lady Astronaut universe as I’d sort of thought it must be. That plus the story centering around an interrupted honeymoon for a heterosexual couple (with a side note of ‘only bad people don’t like dogs’), things I deeply do not find engaging, rendered this a very mediocre read for me in a way that I do not think reflects the quality of the writing.
Into The Riverlands (Nghi Vo)
Third novella in her Singing Hills series but standalone, like the others; priest Chih and their talking bird companion accompany some chance-met friends through the bandit-infested riverlands and contemplate the power (and truths) of stories. Much more xianxia-flavoured and light-hearted than the other two novellas; do recommend.
Non-fiction
Hypnobirthing (Marie Mongan)
The practice (though not the book specifically) is strongly recommended by my midwife, so I read the book, because I hate watching online videos. The relaxation exercises/breathing stuff is fine and will probably be useful. The other 80% of it, which is heavily based on the author’s frankly horrific and traumatic experiences with birth in a mid-20th-century American hospital setting and therefore rejecting modern medicine in favour of the naturalistic fallacy, is…well, you get it. Mid-late-20th century American hospital highly medicalised birth is terrible! Claiming that before Evil Men Doctors took over everybody just gave birth happily and pain-free is, sorry, ALSO terrible and offputting.
Common Sense Pregnancy (Jeanne Faulkner)
For some reason most of the pregnancy books available through my library are written by Americans and I hate it, thanks. Anyway, this one is otherwise fine, deals with quite a few common fears/myths about childbirth and pregnancy (though as always, just skip the entire ‘nutrition’ chapter), and makes me intensely glad that we made an intentional decision to NOT try having a child while we lived in the US, so that I do not have to psych myself up for things like ‘arguing with my LMC about whether I can eat anything in labour’. Jesus Christ.
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Date: 2023-01-13 12:33 am (UTC)(Also, nutrition-wise, I hope you're looking forward to the best meal you'll ever have in your life. Not the 'I'm not pregnant any more bring me sushi/ham/soft cheese' or whatever. It's the toast and milo your LMC brings you after you've had baby. ABSOLUTE AMBROSIA.)
(ALSO also, because I am hopeless about wanting to give advice: if you have a bunch of snacks for labour and don't end up eating them (because labour is too fast, you don't want to etc) they're unlikely to go to waste, because either the person supporting you will want them, or you'll discover having a stash of muesli bars and mini cookie times and nuts is actually really useful when it's 2am, you've been up with baby for hours because it's cluster feeding time, and between staying awake and needing to feed another human you are STARVING and hey! snacks!)
(Please tell me that your antenatal classes have warned you that a night or two after baby is born they'll want to cluster feed and you will get NO SLEEP.)
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Date: 2023-02-21 08:57 pm (UTC)(and yes antenatal class warned us VERY CLEARLY about The Second Night 😅)
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Date: 2023-01-13 01:09 am (UTC)Same! I've been reading this series for a long time (I'm in a reread now, and worked out that Dead and Buried was the first to come out after I started reading), and while I love the books, I've always noted that it's mainly white people championing them.
(I'd also enjoy reading historical mysteries by Black authors, and hope their relative paucity is not because publishers are going, "Well, Hambly's got that market, we don't need more.")
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Date: 2023-02-21 08:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, I can fully see that happening. I know there's a few Black authors doing historical romances, but not mysteries that I can think of off the top of my head.