Book round-up: November 2023
Jan. 18th, 2024 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sixthlightssh I know it's January I'm getting there. Don’t even ask about the Daycare Illness situation (which reduced my reading time significantly because looking after a sick child while sick is exhausting, my recommendation is: don’t.) I did read three books I really liked though! That was good! And one I thought was fine, and one I wanted to like but found too slow-paced to finish in the time allotted by the library. And because it's the future I can say that the Daycare Illness situation DID improve dramatically in December, thank god for summer.
Fiction
To Shape A Dragon's Breath (Moniquill Blackgoose)
This is one of my top two books of the year so far, and given that I’m writing this on December 20th there won’t be many other contenders. It’s a fantasy/alt-history boarding school novel about a young woman from a Native-owned island off the coast of our-world-New-England who finds a dragon egg and is required to attend an Anglish boarding school on the mainland to learn to be a ‘proper’ dragon-keeper. There is a lot of very very clever stuff going on with the worldbuilding and language and the way the story is told (the chapter titles form their own short story!) and having lived in Massachusetts for five years, it was really good to read a novel about the area by someone with mana whenua (as would be said here). Even if ‘boarding school novel’ is not your thing, really worth a go.
He Who Drowned The World (Shelley Parker-Chan)
Second half of the Radiant Emperor duology, a historical fantasy about the rise of the Ming dynasty (only loosely historical, based on some Wikipedia skimming). Continues to do interesting stuff with gender and sexuality and court politics and the question of what it means to have a fate, and what people do when they believe they are fated to achieve something. I think both books would benefit from being read in succession, though I managed fine having read the first last year.
The Archive Undying (Emma Mieko Candon)
Sci-fi/fantasy (sci-fi trimmings of Big Mechs and AI, but fantasy vibes) about raiding ruins for lost technology, making bad/good choices about your casual hookups, and…I can’t tell you much more because I didn’t manage to finish it before it was due back to the library. This is definitely a Me problem but also it’s a slow-paced book and I’m trying to be kinder to myself about not being able to keep attention on slow-paced books when I am stressed and tired. Genuinely hope I will come back to it some day but that probably won’t be soon as there’s a bit of a queue in reserves.
The Circumference of the World (Lavie Tidhar)
Literary fiction about science fiction more than sci-fi, about a fictional scifi novel that formed the basis for a fictional cult which Isn’t Scientiology (but is also Scientology, you know how this goes) and is now legendary but impossible to find, and various people who encounter it or are trying to find it. I felt a bit cheated because the blurb describes the main character as being a woman from Vanuatu and then she’s only really in it for the first few chapters and the PoVs all shift to various less interesting men. Also it was very funny every time in her section she told people she was from a far-off place they wouldn’t have heard of (the character is living in London so…I guess…but also to ME this is not true at all.) I think it was very well-written but firmly in the camp of Literary Fiction Is Fine I guess (also a Me problem, or at least quirk.)
Non-fiction
The Underworld (Susan Casey)
About the various crewed submersibles which travel to the deep sea, mostly following the author as she gets closer to (and eventually achieves) her goal of travelling in one. I found this fascinating because as a deep-sea researcher it touches on a lot of places and people I know of or have secondary connections to, and also because the author is SO obsessed with actually getting in a submersible herself. As a researcher I am firmly convinced that they’re fun but very much secondary to remotely operated vehicles (ROV) for getting actual science done (see also: space). Just going to sea for weeks at a time is enough for me! But not for the author, so you know what, good for her for making her dream happen. Also the book is very evocatively written and not inaccurate on any major points, things many science-related books do NOT accomplish.
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Date: 2024-01-17 09:34 pm (UTC)I have heard of Vanuatu, but mostly from playing Worldle (not to be mixed up with Wordle).
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Date: 2024-01-17 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-17 10:35 pm (UTC)I got through The Archive Undying as an audiobook, which meant that my mind occasionally wandered and a complicated plot became more so, my grasp of names and who is doing what goes down when I listen.
The Lavie Tidhar I read this year was The Unholy Land, which is about a Jewish state that was created in East Africa, which may or may not continue to exist, so definitely speculative fiction, interesting but not entirely my thing. I'd have been interested in the book you thought you were going to read.
You might be interested in reading Hopeland by Ian McDonald, it starts in London, then goes to Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland so none of the blurbs make it obvious how much of the book is set in an invented central Polynesian country, I think he did a pretty good job of it as an outsider, though I don't know if Pasifika readers would agree. It's a fun book, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it so much. Also one I listened to, but I grabbed a print copy and reread it immediately - turned out I wasn't spelling a single character name correctly.
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Date: 2024-01-18 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 05:17 pm (UTC)The dragon book sounds fantastic, and I hadn't heard about it anywhere. Much thanks for bringing it up!