Book round-up: June 2023

[sixthlight]

 

Absolutely impossible to believe the year is half gone already, AND YET here we are. Looks like I’m still on target to hit a hundred books this year (including re-reads, which is my usual target) but we’ll see how that goes once I’m back at work. 

Fiction

Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)

I was only mildly entertained by Tesh’s novellas to date but holy shit, this is a contender for my book of the year, the kind of bildungsroman space opera that starts out very tightly focused in one location and spirals out and out to the level of the galaxy. Your tolerance for Space Nazis needs to be pretty high, because this is a book about Space Nazis and the protagonist starts out as one, but it is astonishingly good and painful and humane in all the right ways. A somewhat glib summary would be “Iron Sky x Gideon the Ninth by way of Fury Road IN SPACE” but it’s really its own beast. DO give it a go at least. Should be nominated for all the awards. 

The Red Scholar's Wake (Aliette de Bodard)

Space opera sapphic romance in the author’s existing Xuya universe; an engineer is captured by a pirate fleet and has to enter into an arranged marriage with its leader (who is also a spaceship) For Reasons. Leaned a bit heavily on some romance tropes I am not super into but otherwise fine. 

Witch King (Martha Wells)

Demon prince Kai wakes up in a tomb designed to trap him, along with his best friend - but how long has he been there, and what’s really going on? This is a very tight-focus travelogue which is the spiritual sequel to a non-existent epic fantasy trilogy that is glimpsed only in flashbacks, which might be frustrating if you’d rather have the epic fantasy trilogy but I enjoyed a lot. It’s also much closer to Wells’ Raksura novels than Murderbot. If two books can be said to constitute a genre, this and Water Horse by Melissa Scott have created a new genre called The Evil Gay Sorcerer King Is Very Tired And Would Like To Chill With His Friends, But The Patriarchy (Literal) Won’t Let Him. I would like this to be a genre. Make it happen. 

Season of Skulls (Charles Stross)

Stross’ take on Regency Romance, which is as cynical as you’d expect from a man who has written multiple theses on how The Past Sucked For Everybody Who Wasn’t A Very Rich Straight White Man Actually But Particularly For Women. Eve Starkey, sister of Imp (the protagonist of a prior book in the series) has to travel back in time (not exactly but close enough) to fight her evil maybe-not-dead boss Rupert, who is an amalgam of every horrendous UK Tory turned up to a million. Not actually bad as a romance but I shall never forgive Stross the author’s note (you’ll know when you get there). 

The Bone Shard Daughter (Andrea Stewart)

Something something epic fantasy, there’s some sinking islands, bone magic, multiple protagonists, etcetera; I tapped out from sheer boredom about 10% of the way in, having uttered the eight deadly words to myself. Clearly has an audience but it isn’t me. 

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix)

Went in knowing nothing really about this but as a long-time fan of Nix and particularly his later career commitment to writing what entertains him, whether that’s Heyer pastiche or a lesbian AU of The Three Musketeers, and this did not disappoint. It’s a gonzo period urban fantasy romp (the period is the 1980s, wither into dust with me) about booksellers charged with mediating between the mundane and magical worlds, complete with the traditional Nix resourceful young female protagonist, who is appropriately called Susan. The love interest is a nice young man(?) who is very good with guns and also very good-looking in a dress, in a completely supportive and un-comical way. I would like Nix to continue down this path, it’s clearly fun for him and it’s definitely fun for me. There’s a sequel and I am impatiently awaiting its arrival from the library. 

Non-fiction

Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)

A quasi-academict thesis arguing that one of the main issues with the modern world is the rise of ‘bullshit jobs’, that is, jobs which do not actually produce anything and thereby make their holders unhappy. To be fair to Graeber, he has a very broad definition of ‘produce’ and his case studies definitely encompass some bullshit. To be unfair, he’s probably less savvy than he could be about the management of complex systems. I think this would be a very cathartic read if you’d ever held one of those jobs, though. 

Exactly (Simon Winchester)

The history of precision and its measurement. I find Winchester’s writing somewhat lacking in context (he manages to do a detailed and loving rundown of Henry Ford’s career and never even mention the antisemitism; somehow almost every single person relevant to the history of precision is a white man) but he’s in his element on this topic and if you’re the sort of person who cares about the minutiae of why the Hubble Space Telescope had to be fixed after launch, you will have a GREAT time. I am at least 50% that person so I had a good one regardless. 

Comments

[labellementeuse]

also I LOVED Some Desperate Glory.