Book round-up: October 2023

[sixthlight]

 

The daycare lurgy train rolled on into October, and there was also an election (don’t ask). At least I read some nice books where the bad things were happening to other people. 

Fiction

The River of Silver (S A Chakraborty)

A collection of short stories in her Daevabad trilogy universe. I was a little disappointed to realise I’d actually read a lot of them on her website a few years ago - I thought there’d be more new content - but there was lots of fun stuff here and some interesting insights into scrapped/early versions of the main books in the trilogy. Worth a look if you’re a fan.

Cassiel's Servant (Jacqueline Carey)

It genuinely never crossed my mind that Carey would give the legendary Kushiel’s Dart the Midnight Sun treatment (rewriting it from the PoV of the male love interest) nor if you asked me would I have said that it was at all necessary, but this is…actually a lot of fun? Carey has an excellent grip on who Joscelin is as a person and it was very funny to realise exactly how Extra Phedre is when you’re not viewing the world from inside her head. This may not have been a necessary book but I’m quite glad it exists. Plus it got us this sweet thoughtful discussion of how her understanding of gender has evolved since the series began.  

The Iron Princess (Barbara Hambly)
Secondary-world fantasy about the impacts of and resistance to colonialism for resource extraction, also the main character is very clearly an expy of Elizabeth I of England (and the same for the rest of her family) but that has absolutely no bearing on the plot or anything, it just amused me to note. Lots of Hambly’s standard fantasy themes - burdened old wizard, interdimensional evil - and a bit grimdark for my taste overall. I also think it’s very tacky to have clearly Indigenous characters/cultures - specifically coded as Native American even - and base their suffering on real-world evil and then describe them as white people, it’s not clever or a new twist, it’s just tacky. 

Non-fiction

Magnificent Rebels (Andrea Wulf)

History of a very specific time and place; the town of Jena in Germany where for a short but intense period in the late 18th century the Romantic movement blossomed. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t finish this because I missed book club due to illness and it is VERY long, so I wasn’t motivated to finish it once I didn’t have the goal of discussing it in a group, but Wulf is a very good writer and if you enjoy the minutiae of gossip about people in a small town having big ideas and big drama this is quite fun. 

The Matter of Everything (Susan Sheehy)

Covers twelve major experiments which helped us understand the nature of matter (hence the punny title), from splitting the atom to the Large Hadron Collider not destroying the universe. A surprisingly easy read for the content, although I would have killed for a table of all the major subatomic particles as one does lose track of them after a while! Highly recommend if you’re interested in learning more about what subatomic particles *are*, other than something physicists like a lot. 

Precious Little Sleep (Alexis Dubief)
I have largely spared you reviews of the various baby sleep books I have read (and yes there have been a few, in varying levels of desperation) because my honest belief after the better part of a year is that babies kind of do what they’re going to do vis a vis sleeping (or not), it inevitably gets better with time even if not nearly as fast as you’d hope, and most of the advice out there just encourages parents to torture themselves with the idea that they have much agency in the situation. But this one is both to my taste in terms of the writing style and sense of humour, and reasonably practical, or at least its advice came at the right time for me.

Otherlands (Thomas Halliday)
A series of vignettes of ecosystems past, each based on a major and well-studied palaeontological site, stepping back in time from the Pleistocene (tens of thousands of years ago) to the Ediacaran at the dawn of the age of multicellular life on Earth. The writing is very beautiful, although the amount of overlap at points with last month’s “The Rise and Reign of the Mammals” suggests to me I’m personally reaching the limits of what current pop science has to say on these topics. If you think palaeontology and the history of life on Earth are cool and interesting topics you will have a great time. If you don’t you might be persuaded that they are. 

Comments

[white_aster]

:waves little "Otherlands! <3" pennant: :D