Book round-up: February 2024

[sixthlight]

 

February 2024

Read some decent non-fiction, two very good new novels, and revisited a Problematic Fave which I have never talked about in these reviews (so apologies in advance for the reminiscing). 

Fiction

The Nobleman's Guide To Seducing A Scoundrel (K J Charles)

Second in a duology of MLM romances set in the English fens during and after the Napoleonic wars, and unlike the first one, emphatically a Heyer pastiche (this time of The Unknown Ajax). Plus there’s like, a murder mystery and some fun hot sex but I would pay so much cash money for Charles to work her way through the entire Heyer oeuvre this way. She’s so good at it that I had to go re-read Band Sinister (Venetia) afterwards to enjoy how good at it she is. 

All the Hidden Paths (Foz Meadows)
Also the second in a MLM secondary-world fantasy romance duology, though unlike the KJ Charles this is (mostly) the second half of the same couple’s story. This is a story about what happens after you come out, and it made me like the first book better in retrospect (you really couldn’t read it without the first, I think.) Rough going if you don’t want to deal with two books of ongoing trauma recovery - these are not books where traumatic events are easily shaken off - but overall, I think, cathartic. 

Non-fiction

End Times (Rebecca Priestly)
Memoir by a NZ researcher about her excursion into fundamentalist Christianity as a teenager, combined with an adult road trip along the West Coast (Te Tai Poutini) contemplating climate change and other imminent disasters. Generally interesting though held together a bit tenuously between the two strands at points. If anything I found it somewhat light on the detail about the fundamentalist Christianity but that’s probably a very specific way to read the book. 

The Brilliant Abyss (Helen Scales)

Another popsci book about the deep sea; there seem to be a crop of them these days, or maybe they’re just coming to my attention. In general I thought it was good and accurate, although I did side-eye somewhat that the only researchers she mentions who I know personally are also, um, absolutely terrible human beings. I want to hear about people I know and like! There were about 3 totally extraneous chapters but I assume she had to deliver a book of a certain length, and that isn’t terrible for a popsci book.  

Erebus: the Ice Dragon (Colin Monteath)
A history of a mountain. There’s a couple of good chapters on its geology and discovery (which made me go ‘oh hey my blorbos in law’ when the Erebus and Terror sailed into the scene) then a very tedious set of chapters on various people who climbed it which can all be boiled down to “some white men climbed it and got very cold and then they climbed down again”. Then there’s a chapter on the Erebus disaster which is horrifying and excellent, and a good chapter on art and writing about the mountain hampered only by the fact that none of the pieces they got the rights to reproduce are shown on the same page where they’re discussed. Could have been shorter and sharper but probably just not meant to be read cover to cover. 

Re-reads 

The Empire Trilogy (Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts)
Technically I drifted away part-way into the third one, but let’s call this a re-read of the whole trilogy. It is IMO immensely superior to the series that it is technically a side-excursion from, following a young noblewoman in a sort of mash-up East Asian/Central American fantasy world (it was the 1980s, ok) as she rises to power. A lot of it has not aged terribly well but the stuff that is still good is very good if you’re a fan of epic fantasy political shenanigans, and I think there are probably still not a lot of SFF series that follow a female lead from teenager-hood to late middle age the way this one does. I would kind of love to see it adapted in that it would probably be a hot mess but it might be a fun hot mess, especially if it got given to people who loved the books.

Comments

[ravurian]

I'd be interested to see an adaptation of the Empire Trilogy, but as you say, I don't know if it could be done without some substantial decolonisation of the source material and unlinking the cultures of Kelewan from their barely-veiled real-world analogues, otherwise you'd just get a mishmash of what might quickly come to be some quite racist tropes. You'd also have to change a whole bunch of character names for a start, because IIRC there are a whole load that are Asian place names with one letter changed eg Nacoya/Nagoya etc, but that's the least of it. It is frustrating because there is a lot that's good in the series - I reread them recently too, and I found much more to like in the third book than I remembered, particularly the stuff re: the magicians and the lands outside the Empire.

I've been so nostalgic since the WoT adaptation started that I've been rereading a lot of old faves. The Fionavar Tapestry is apparently getting an adaptation, which I'm profoundly sceptical about already because it sounds like they hate the books, IDK. I understand that people feel they want to update things for modern audiences, but if I were adapting those particular books, I'd make it a period adaptation and set it in the time period the books were set, because that would be much more fun than trying to set it now with modern kids and modern sensibilities. I'd also leave the real world action in Toronto, but I think I read somewhere they wanted to move it. Why? Stuff can happen outside of America, FFS. Clive Barker's Weaveworld is also apparently getting an adaptation, and ditto, that's being modernised, and the main action there is also being relocated outside the UK. No idea why. Personally, I'd love to see Julian May's Intervention adapted, and make that a period adaptation too - an alternate history starting in the 60s. That would be grand.

Erm. That got away from me a bit!

[sixthlight]

I think the ONLY way to do the Empire Trilogy well would be to hand it to East Asian (diaspora, probably) creators (c.f. the recent ATLA live-action adaptation and the Shōgun remake). Similarly to ATLA, knowing where the series ends up would let them seed a lot of stuff early on that would render the early bits less lazily Orientalising...but it would still be a hell of a mission and the Discourse would be loud and long (especially the slave romance storyline, ahahahahaha.) Arguably the world would be better off with other stories getting the high-budget live-action treatment. But damn, the good bits are good.

Completely agree about a period adaptation for Fionavar - I didn't enjoy the books much but they are extremely of a time and place and Canadians deserve to have stories that are about Canada specifically, not Canada-as-America-lite. It's also a book series that is responding to fantasy as it was in the 1970s/1980s, not as it is now.