Book round-up: March 2023

[sixthlight]

 

(It's April 1st in NZ, shhh.) One thing dominated this month and it is, of course, the fact that I produced a small human and am now trying to recover from that experience/keep the small human alive. However, turns out this leaves a lot of time for reading because it’s one of the few things that can be easily done while breastfeeding, and my entire life right now is essentially breastfeeding, sleeping (hah), and futilely attempting to do the occasional other thing like “cook/eat a real meal” or “shower”. (Actually that’s not quite true, we’ve also watched a lot of Babylon 5 and I'm starting on 9-1-1.) In any case! I sure have read some books, not infrequently at 2am. 

Fiction

Vows of Empire (Emily Skrutskie)

Not a bad end to this space opera romance trilogy but it relied much too heavily on an Unreliable Narrator twist that I just…didn’t buy in terms of what was left out of the narration. I thought the actual conclusion to the narrative worked well but how it got there? Clumsy, and in a way that muted the emotional catharsis. 

A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys)
Reading this mostly at 2am while learning to breastfeed was An Experience, given that this is a near-future solarpunk/first contact novel from the point of view of a breastfeeding mother in a cis/trans lesbian relationship. Also it’s very good and grounded in social and lived experiences in a way harder scifi rarely is. Strong recommend. 

Children of Memory (Adam Tschaikovsky)
Third in a loose far-future hard SF series exploring concepts of intelligence through the evolution of different terrestrial species; the first book was You Will Cry About The Intelligent Spiders And Like It, the second was octopuses, this one is corvids (and also artificial intelligence). Not as good as the spiders (though that book was VERY good, so high bar) but better than the octopuses. I didn’t cry but I did tear up a little. 

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (Saad Z Hossain)

Quirky little ripper of a novella about a djinn king and an exiled soldier turning an AI-ruled city upside down through their quests for, respectively, relevance in a confusing future (the djinn) and revenge (the soldier). Just a hell of a lot of fun, and a great mash-up of fantasy and SF tropes and concepts in a way that never feels forced. 

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen  (K J Charles)

MLM historical romance with mystery elements (like most of her books) set in the fens of eastern England. I had a hard time warming up to it because “these people are into banging each other but don’t like/understand each other” is not a starting dynamic I enjoy very much, but I liked it more and more as it leaned into the mystery aspects. Probably didn’t help that as I was reading while breastfeeding I ended up skipping all the sex scenes for sheer mental incongruity - but that wasn’t the book’s fault! 

Non-fiction

Debt: the first 5000 years (David Graeber)

The title sounds dull but this is very very good and you should read it - it offers a profound reconfiguring of how we understand money and economics, grounded in how humans actually interact with each other in societies rather than illusions of Rational Actors. Ultimately still a little hampered by an outsider-view anthropological approach but that’s who the author is. 

The Delusions of Crowds (William J Bernstein)

Blergh, did not finish. Promised to be a study of mass hysteria but ended up being a series of case studies which spent way, way way too much time on petty detail without actually drawing interesting conclusions - plus it covered some of the same material as Debt but much more badly. Also, I know that some of the side-assertions the text made are wrong, which makes me very suspicious about the rest of it. 

Nomad Century (Gaia Vince)

Assuming that we are locked in for 4C of warming by the end of the century, this book lays out a vision of mass human migration from the tropics to the temperate regions as requisite for survival. The trouble is, I don’t think we’re locked in for 4C of warming and I find it very hard to believe that it’s going to be easier to [checks notes] resettle the entire population of Nigeria in Canada than it is to reduce warming. The book also does not give enough attention to the real and meaningful attachment of people to the places they come from. White Lady Has One Big Idea is the vibe and it’s not good. 

Fen, Bog, and Swamp (Annie Proulx)

Three long essays about wetlands and their ecological, economic, and human importance, focusing primarily on Europe and North America. Lyrical and beautiful - I’ve never read anything by Proulx before but boy she can write.

 

Comments

[watersword]

Congratulations on building a human!

I did not know Ruthanna Emrys had a new book out and I look forward to the library providing it unto me.