Book round-up: March 2024

[sixthlight]

 

March 2024
Had a bit of a broody, ‘nothing I am reading is quite to my taste except stuff I’ve read before’ month, so please consider with all of these new-book reviews that it might be me, not the books! 

Fiction
Magic for Liars (Sarah Gailey)

This is basically a literary novel about a private investigator trying to reconnect with her estranged sister while investigating a murder, except that technically it’s fantasy because it takes place at a magic school except that its concerns are so firmly centred in the literary genre that the magic school bit is borderline irrelevant. I’m not sure I enjoyed it but I think it was well-written.

The Coroner's Lunch (Colin Cotterill)

Murder mystery set in 1970s post-Communist revolution Laos about an elderly coroner who unexpectedly gains the ability to talk to the dead, and also solves some murders. As a cozy murder mystery (male writer edition) it’s pretty standard, not bad but no outstanding new twists on the genre. The setting is definitely different, but it’s written by a white Australian man who seems to have spent a lot of time in Laos and sometimes it is very evidently written by a white Australian who has spent a lot of time in Laos, IYKWIM. Not a waste of my time, won’t rush to read the sequels. 

The Waking of Angantyr (Marie Brennan)
Very different to what I thought it was! The blurb sort of posits it as a rollicking Viking-fantasy adventure about a woman who can speak to the dead. It’s…I’m not gonna spoil the plot but let’s just say it’s the author rewriting a Norse saga she read during university as the gory, dramatic tragedy she wanted it to be. She does a very good job of this but, like, you definitely need to be in the mood for a Norse saga. 

Non-fiction

Crossings (Ben Goldfarb)
Popsci book about ‘road ecology’; the intersection between nature and roads, usually to the detriment of nature. It’s fairly heavily focused on North America (though it does venture occasionally to other locations). Not a bad read but I did find it a bit glib, and on at least one occasion I looked up a cited paper to find that IMO it had the opposite conclusion to the one the author drew from it, so…I don’t think you’d be misinformed reading it but I suspect there’s areas left unaddressed.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Isabel Wilkinson)
This is fairly self-evidently an attempt to de-fang the current discourse around racism in America, specifically towards Black Americans, by re-framing it as a caste system and racism as ‘casteism’. Enough of it has filtered through the Internet to me over the last 3-4 years that I think it must have been reasonably successful. However, as an academic project about caste I think it isn’t very successful (the author is a journalist, not an academic, to be fair) and in particular her knowledge about the history of Black Americans, which is extensive, makes the extremely light treatment given to European antisemitism and the South Asian caste system look worse by comparison. But very much an instance where I’m not the target audience. 

Re-reads

Three Parts Dead (Max Gladstone)

I hadn’t re-read this since I bought it in 2014 (I still had an airline ticket as a bookmark tucked in the back) but it’s such a banger of a first novel; law as magic, capitalism as religion (or religion as capitalism?), an academic bad guy who I disliked as a PhD student reading it and makes me apoplectic now because I’ve encountered too many more examples of the type in the decade since. Also, you can’t convince me Shale and the Guardians of Seril aren’t partially inspired by Moon and the Raksura (see below). 

The Books of the Raksura (Martha Wells)
A secondary-world fantasy series - really a trilogy and a duology - about an orphan finding out where he’s really from and learning to fit into his original culture, except he’s in his forties and he’s not human because this is a world with many species none of which are exactly human, but particularly not the shapeshifting dragon-lion-ish Raksura that he is one of. Not at all like Murderbot but Wells was a great writer long before Murderbot, just under-recognised. The trilogy, which is of the ‘story in three acts’ type, is very good and the follow-up duology is fine when you’re already invested in the characters but not quite as good as the first three. I said this was fantasy - there’s shapeshifters and straight-up magic, and a world full of abandoned ruins - but it feels extremely sci-fi in vibe, and I couldn’t work out why until it hit me like a tonne of bricks that the Fell (bad guys) are the Wraith (Stargate Atlantis) and then it all made sense (Wells wrote some SGA tie-in novels shortly before this). The books even keep going back to abandoned high-tech floating cities! ATLANTIS I TELL YOU. It is not at all SGA-fanfic like, certainly not in terms of the characters* but the vibes are there. 

*now I think on it further the Arbora/Aeriat division among the Raksura has more than a few echoes of the scientist/military division on SGA…I just want everybody to understand how right I am about this 

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

you don't think Moon, Jade, and Chime map onto John, Teyla, and Rodney? 😂

I like the duology just as well as the trilogy because of trying to complicate the Fell and moving to the multiple POV; the third book felt a little repetitive emotionally to me. the books of short stories and novellas are also fun though inessential.

[sixthlight]

Hmm. I can see the argument for the character mapping, but I guess I feel like it doesn't have any explanatory power the way the Fell-Wraith connection does for me because they're all very much their own people - my slightly cynical take is that SGA took off so strongly as a fandom because it had that balance of identifiable character *archetypes* but fairly bland/non-existent deep characterisation, so people could project almost anything they wanted on there (and did, and I enjoyed a lot of that fic too!).

I read the short stories some years ago but don't retain anything from them. I did really like the way the duology complicated the Fell! It just didn't work quite as well for me as the original trilogy.