Book round-up: June 2024

[sixthlight]

 

June 2024

I enjoyed almost everything I read this month very much, and the one exception is something I still enjoyed bits of, I just have some notes. Well, I have notes on a couple of things, but the others are more in the service of an honest recommendation than anything else. 

 

Bride of the Rat God (Barbara Hambly)

A fantasy/horror mystery set in pre-Hays Code Hollywood, with an emigrant Englishwoman trying to save her Hollywood starlet sister-in-law from a cursed Chinese necklace (tonally much more heavily on the fantasy/mystery than horror, if that helps.) This was a lot of fun - Hambly can write them - but it had two flaws I would be irresponsible not to mention. The first, as you can probably guess from ‘cursed Chinese necklace’, is that this is…not the most Orientalist piece of fiction the 1990s produced…but the Orientalism, it is There. 

Secondly, regular readers may think that ‘emigrant Englishwoman with Hollywood starlet sister-in-law’ sounds familiar and that’s because it turns out for Scandal in Babylon, which I read and liked in January (published 2021), Hambly fully just brought back all the main characters from her award-winning 1994 book (this one), gave them different names, and removed the non-mystery genre elements from their setting. Cannot emphasise this enough; same characters, different names. I thought I was going mad for a bit. I kinda respect the hustle and I guess she was betting thirty years was enough to set them apart but wow. Ironically, however, it has made me want to follow up on the sequel(s) to Scandal in Babylon, because I like these characters…I just wasn’t expecting to find them again like this! 

Dragonsbane (Barbara Hambly)

1980s fantasy, first in a quadrilogy, about a wizard of modest powers and her country squire long-term lover, who once teamed up to kill a dragon, being summoned to the kingdom’s capital to deal with a dragon laying siege to it - because it turns out nobody else in the kingdom has successfully slain a dragon in hundreds of years. Very much still in the hard LoTR-inspired era of fantasy but it’s doing stuff with parenthood, work/life balance for mothers, and nerds getting to be heroic (two of the main characters wear glasses!) that I don’t think anybody else was doing then and not many are doing now. Good stuff. 

Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone)

The Avengers of the Craft Sequence; nearly every single lead character from every previous book is back because it’s the end of the world and someone has to do something about it, and the Craft Sequence is about the kind of people who regretfully end up concluding that ‘someone’ is ‘them’. I would very strongly recommend a re-read of the original books if you can swing it because a lot of the emotional weight hangs on what has gone before, in a way that wasn’t true of Dead Country, but you could get by without and all the balls are being very deftly juggled. Also, I have absolutely no memory of Tara Abernathy being queer (?), especially fresh off a re-read of Three Parts Dead, but you know what, that’s a retcon I will allow. 

The Brides of High Hill (Nghi Vo)

Another novella in the Singing Hills series. Cleric Chih is accompanying a young woman to her wedding with an elderly lord, but strange things are afoot at his mansion…and the greatest dangers are not the obvious ones. Atmospheric, creepy, I must do a re-read sometime because every detail is made to count and all the questions you ask yourself as you go are answered. 

 

Our Moon (Rebecca Boyle)

This is pitched as a history of the Moon and our relationship with it as a species*. The author is a science writer and the bits where she’s focusing on scientific topics (the formation of the Moon, the Apollo missions) are very good. The bits where she’s writing about archaeology and history are superficially also good but she is desperate to make the Moon one of the most important things to humans and it leads her to make some deeply outlandish claims that are not supported by the evidence she presents and I doubt are supported at all; getting from ‘some people in Neolithic Europe made art representing the sky’ to ‘they had a standing army’ is a hell of a leap. Also she leans hard on unsubstantiated claims like ‘the moon controls menstrual cycles’ and ‘the moon is related to human behaviour’ which, let’s be blunt, if they were true we’d know by now, this is not hard data to collect. It’s not, like, bad but probably medically inadvisable levels of salt are needed while reading. 

*as long as your definition of species means Humans Living In Europe And Also Occasionally The Middle East

Emperor of Rome (Mary Beard)

A survey of the position of Emperor, taking into account the historical and archaeological evidence for the lives of the first thirty-odd Emperors of Rome. Beard is at pains to emphasise that she doesn’t think we should be ‘learning from’ Rome, but that how autocracy and dictatorship worked in Rome - and the extent to which it was understood even then as theatrical - have mirrors in how autocrats and dictators operate today. Like all of her writing I’ve read, I’ve found it very accessible and measured. She is also as interested in the lives of the people around the Emperor as in the position itself. Recommended if the topic is of interest to you. 

Feijoa (Kate Evans)

An attempt to understand why an otherwise obscure South American fruit has become core to the foodways of a South Pacific nation (although I’ll be honest, I found her to overstate this a little; it’s truer the further north you go, but nobody in Christchurch has problems with an overabundance of feijoas, or if they do it’s only because they’ve tried.) Very much centred around research journeys she was able to personally undertake, which does make me wonder if there’s some bits missing (there’s several never-followed-up-on references to feijoas in Georgia, for instance) and most of the pictures are very much Snaps I Took On My Holiday, but it’s a sincere and generally readable work. Someone do NZ yams (oca) now! Or even better, a book on the food connections between AoNZ and South America more broadly. 

Romancing the Beat (Gwen Hayes)

Stretching to call this a book; it’s more like a booklet or a document, but it does what it sets out to do very neatly, which is outline the traditional beats of a romance plot for people who want to either write romances or write books with romance subplots. As someone who has written a lot of fanfic that would fall under one of these two banners it was interesting to see how much I had internalised some of this just by doing a lot of reading, and where there were bits I hadn’t thought about. Definitely worth hunting up if you’re keen to level up your game in this area, I think.