Book round-up: July 2024

[sixthlight]

 

July 2024

Not everything I read this month was exactly to my taste but I think all of it was good, or at least it had good bits. Also, getting the gender balance back on track with zero men (sorry men). 

The Siege of Burning Grass (Premee Mohamed)

A conscientious objector is forcibly conscripted into a secret mission to end a stalemated war, somewhere in the valley between science fiction and fantasy. I think the writing is very good but I didn’t vibe with 1) the amount of body horror and 2) the way the book didn’t actually answer any of the questions it set up in a satisfying way, which…I think was intentional?...but was still really unsatisfying. After two books I’m probably gonna file this author as ‘very good but not necessarily for me’. 

Dragonshadow (Barbara Hambly)

Sequel to Dragonsbane, in which our heroes are called back into action when demons start possessing wizards and dragons…including their teenage son. I loved Dragonsbane but this was such a gruelling read - basically a book-long Trauma Conga Line for both protagonists - that I do not have the heart to tackle its sequel for a while (it’s a quartet). 

One Extra Corpse (Barbara Hambly)

Same author, totally different vibe; we’re back with our I Took My Characters From A Thirty-Year-Old Book, Renamed Them, And Wrote A Different Series Hollywood murder mysteries (look, I enjoy these, but I will never be over that.) Still a fun mix of Hollywood glamour and a lot of realism about what it takes to create Hollywood glamour, also communists because it’s the 1920s, baby! 

Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)

I’d never read a Butler novel before but gosh she is extremely good (yes I am the last person in SFF fandom to knows this). This…not quite post…during-apocalyptic novel set in 2024 California, as imagined in the early 1990s, came to my attention on social media because it opens in July 2024. It’s a very low-concept gritty sci-fi diary/coming-of-age story about a teenage Black girl learning to survive the collapse of her society. What I didn’t expect is exactly how dated and American it was; it’s still good, but the way it talks about drugs and guns (particularly guns) is indelibly of its time and place, in the same way that, say, Pride and Prejudice’s concerns about marriage for gentlewoman are of Georgian/Regency England. For this reason I don’t think it’s as universal a classic as some people seem to, but it’s still incredibly worth reading. 

The Duke at Hazard (K J Charles)

An unassuming Duke goes undercover to win a bet and steal back a lost heirloom, and loses his heart. Despite the title pun this is actually a light pastiche of yet another Heyer (The Foundling) and I’m going to be honest, I really don’t like The Foundling but this will be worth a re-read. Technically in the same universe as The Gentle Art of Fortune-Hunting but you absolutely do not need to read that to enjoy this. KJ Charles can write ‘em, that is all. 

The Master of Samar (Melissa Scott)

Secondary-world fantasy stand-alone; a middle-aged sorcerer reluctantly returns to fantasy Venice as the last heir of his noble house, only to run up against the reason he is the last heir and his home city’s dislike of the fact he has a long-term boyfriend. Sort of halfway between Scott’s Astreiant series and last year’s Water Horse, both in terms of concepts and quality (and to be clear, the lower bar there is high to start with.) 

 

The Deepest Map (Laura Trethewey)

Pop science about the ‘race’ (insomuch as there is a race) to accurately map the deep sea, insert cliche here about the surface of Mars, although to be fair Trethewey deals neatly with that one. I think it would be a lot more interesting if you’d never done deep-sea work, she dedicates long sections to painting a picture of life at sea which I raced through. Very journalistic in style as well. Not bad but I liked the other deep-sea books I’ve read in the last year better. There seem to be a lot of them coming out now or maybe that’s just me! 

A Short History of the World According To Sheep (Sally Coulthard)

I’m not sure that everything in this book is true or accurate but I enjoyed reading all of it and I’m confident that it’s like, 90% true, in a sort of Bill Bryson way (actually that probably makes it more accurate than Bill Bryson.) Mostly it’s a short history of England according to sheep rather than the world, and it is also very weirdly light on sheep-as-food (whence some good recipes?) but it’s very Roger-Ebert-reviews-the-Mummy.txt, yes that’s a compliment. 

The First Fossil Hunters (Adrienne Mayor)

If you’ve ever seen Tumblr posts about the whole conceit around griffins being based on Protoceratops fossils and the Cyclops being based on elephant skulls etcetera, this is the book that start of it; a fascinating work of independent scholarship, originally published in 2003, which has both held up really well and does the ancient world the service of treating its inhabitants as intelligent and capable of hypothesising about their history and environment. The TL;DR is that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean interacted with and dug up fossils on a regular basis, understood them as the remnants of beings and animals that no longer existed (at least locally), and this informed their culture and art. Also has many adorable illustrations done by the author. Highly recommended if interdisciplinary archaeology and history is your jam.