sixthlight

Summer + Christmas turns out to be EXTREMELY busy when you have a small child approaching toddler-hood so less lazy summer reading than in previous years, but the quality was probably higher on average.

Fiction

The Nubian's Curse (Barbara Hambly)

The latest Benjamin January mystery. Gotta be honest: even though I had most of a year’s break in between mainlining the series and this one…it felt repetitive. In particular Hambly is absolutely determined to make sure January & his family are never financially secure for more than thirty seconds (presumably to give him reasons to keep getting involved with mysteries) and it’s getting increasingly tedious. I think I’d prioritise a re-read of the early entries over new ones now.

Scandal in Babylon (Barbara Hambly)

A different mystery series by the same author, set in the pre-Hays Code era of Hollywood and featuring a widowed Englishwoman living with her American actress sister-in-law. The stereotypes, they are Broad (esp regarding mobsters) but generally pretty fun! I will probably read the others in this series.

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz (Garth Nix)

A collection of short stories, secondary-world fantasy about an animated puppet sorcerer and his (human) adopted son, who wander the world as mercenaries and secret hunters of evil gods. Very much riffing off traditional swords-and-sorcery tales; the pace is brisk and the world-building atmospheric but it suffers a little from the format in that 1) there are MANY cool women but 2) because it’s That Kind Of Story, Fitz and Hereward are often the only survivors, so…yeah. Don’t let that put you off if you like the genre though because in all OTHER ways, as I would expect from Nix, women are written like they’re people.

Mammoths at the Gate (Nghi Vo)

Latest in Vo’s Singing Hills novella series; Cleric Chih arrives home to finds all is not well at their monastery (there are, as you may have guessed, some mammoths at the gate). A very different kind of story from the others in the series, about grief and home, but no less good. Keen to see where this series goes next.

The Oleander Sword (Tasha Suri)

Second in an epic fantasy trilogy, unlike some others I have read recently NOT here to mess around or retread old ground. Recommended if you: support women’s rights, support women’s wrongs, want the nice lady with the sword on the cover to step on you, want your heart broken, want the possibility of your heart NOT being broken, really enjoy weird body horror plant person shit. I could go on. Start with the first one (The Jasmine Throne) though.

A Stroke of the Pen (Terry Pratchett)
A collection of Pratchett’s early short stories published in various newspapers under pen names, all very much in a Pratchettian style but an early version thereof. Some are fifty-ish years old now and it shows, but not in a bad way, more in a ‘gosh this story is about an old man and he remembers World War One but he’s still active and barely retired only it’s not written as a period piece’ way. OK and in the there’s like 2 women in all of them way too. Certainly not essential Pratchett but it won’t make you sorry to be a completionist.

The Water Outlaws (S L Huang)

Re-telling of a classic Chinese novel about outlaws vs the empire, only now everybody’s a lady and also it’s wuxia, which I am given to understand is not the genre of the original. It feels possibly like a few rough edges were smoothed off to make the leads of this one mostly heroes instead of mostly antiheroes? If you like ladies (broad version) doing wuxia and fighting the government you’re not gonna have a bad time though. The writer is a stuntperson and the fight scenes are good.

System Collapse (Martha Wells)

Murderbot novel! Feels like the series is moving towards some systemic-level consequences (funny that) and that’s cool but also feels like it will fundamentally change the genre? Not sure I’m ready for that. Otherwise, Murderbot. Love a Murderbot.

Even Though I Knew The End (C L Polk)

Noir detective novella in 1940s Chicago but demons and angels and lesbians. It is doing the genre VERY straight (but not straight, you understand me) but still in a way that feels fresh. Lots of similarities to Rebecca Roanhorse’s Tread of Angels but I prefer the mix of bitter and sweet here (Many Of These People Like Each Other). I didn’t want a cigarette after reading it because I can’t honestly say I ever have wanted a cigarette, but I think that’s the appropriate expression.

Non-fiction

Botany of the Kitchen Garden (Hélèna Dove)

What it says on the tin; a good reference if you’re genuinely interested in the botany, as in the science, of common vegetables and fruits, the locus for ‘common’ in this case being ‘in the UK’. It had at least one egregiously misleading fact though (kiwifruit are NOT so-named because they were ‘popular in New Zealand’) and it makes me side-eye everything else.

The Fake History Hunter (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)

The author is apparently some kind of Twitter personality? RIP Twitter. It’s structured as ‘100 things about history that you thought were true but aren’t’ but very clearly she struggled to find a hundred so it’s about 30 things you thought were true but aren’t, 30 things that aren’t technically true as popularly phrased but also aren’t deeply misleading, and 40 photos that don’t show the thing a popular tweet said they showed. 3/10, get better material.

Bright Star (Christine Cole Catley)

Biography of New Zealand astronomer Beatrice Hill Tinsley, who made fundamental discoveries about the cosmology of galaxies and became a professor at Yale before she was forty, before dying tragically young of melanoma. It’s a fantastic biography of her as a person but I actually could have used more science - I came away still not totally sure what her big discoveries were. I think it’s very clear in retrospect that she was neurodivergent though the book doesn’t go so far as to discuss this (it was written nearly twenty years ago; I think a modern biography would.) Very, very well-written.