Book round-up: April 2024

[sixthlight]

 

Am I...back up to date with reviews? Astonishing. I’ve started reading my way through the Hugo novels for this year (as I generally try to do) and wow, it’s shaping up as a good line-up. I also did the fun accidental thing of reading an author’s very early work immediately followed by her latest and it’s always such a joy to see someone be good to start and get a lot better. 

Fiction
A Fire Born of Exile (Aliette de Bodard)

The Count of Monte Cristo but in space, and lesbians, a part of de Bodard’s Xuya space opera setting but not closely linked to any of the other books and novellas (although I think there’s a couple of references). Good, and I particularly like the work she does to translate the various plots around marriage and family to a setting with wildly different gender norms, but I think I would have got more out of it if I was more familiar with what it was riffing on. 

The Saint of Bright Doors (Vajra Chandrasekera)

Secondary-world fantasy about a young man in a large city trying to move on from his childhood as an assassin trained to kill his prophet father (mostly via group therapy), but of course his past is less left behind than it seems. This emerges very intimately from the recent history of Sri Lanka, with all that entails, and it’s probably the first book I’ve read which engages with pandemics (and the pandemic) as a part of life without being about that at all (there’s way too much else going on.) Ambitious and interesting and a lot to chew over. Would be an extremely worthy Hugo winner. 

Exordia (Seth Dickinson)

Tom Clancy-esque (in that there are way too many loving enumerations of jet fighters and the world’s nuclear stockpile), but it’s about an alien invasion, ft. emotional plots such as ‘can two-thirds of the most divorced polycule in history save their relationship and also the planet’ and ‘can you reconcile with your mother after the literal worst things possible happened to you both and you did one of those things’, and ‘what if Earth is, galactically speaking, the equivalent of Kurdistan’. I read it because I know I would hate Baru Cormorant but I wanted to give the author a go. I will probably not read more of his work because the body horror quotient was way, way, way too high for me, but bits of this will live in my head rent-free for years. Hopefully not the body horror bits. Let me know if he writes anything less in that line. 

Death in the Spires (K J Charles), and also the Magpie trilogy

Death in the Spires is a cold case murder mystery set just before WW1 in Oxford, about a man bringing his old friend group back together to solve the murder that drove them apart (that one of them definitely did). Probably some of the author’s best work to date. She’s spent a lot of time on social media emphasising this is not a romance, and it’s not, but there ARE romantic subplots and it is NOT a tragedy (which I was sort of expecting based on how hard she was pushing ‘not a romance’). Coincidentally I had just re-read her Magpie trilogy as a palate-cleanser, and it was really nice to see how far she’s come as a writer - I love that trilogy (Victorian urban fantasy/MLM romance) but the characters in Death are MUCH more developed and the setting is much more vivid.  

Non-fiction

Experimenting With Religion (Jonathan Jong)

Outlines a series of psychology experiments attempting to get at the foundations of why people have religious beliefs. The author is an Anglican priest as well as a psychology researcher and it’s well-written - I suspect it was intended as, and it would do fabulously as, an introductory text on the topic for undergraduate students (it’s published by a university press). Unfortunately it turns out there just haven’t been that many statistically significant psychology experiments on religious belief (vs observational studies) so it ended up feeling very light and somewhat unsatisfying. Hopefully inspires more people to do more work in the area! 

Black Flu 1918 (Geoffrey Rice)

A summarised version of his longer and seminal work on the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu outbreak in Aotearoa New Zealand, which killed comparably many people on a population level to World War One (and a lot of soldiers from AoNZ died in World War One.) This version was published just before COVID and there are of course a lot of echoes between the two pandemics; we did a hell of a lot better with COVID than with the flu. I wouldn’t have wanted to read it any closer to 2020 than now. The only really sour note is that the chapter on the impacts on Māori, while I understand groundbreaking at the time he did the work, now reads as extremely lacking in Māori perspectives and voices, though to be fair it’s not claiming to represent those.