Book round-up: September 2024

[sixthlight]

 

September 2024

Still did not have a tonne of time for reading in September but I did start catching up with one series I last did a catch-up on in 2020, and read a surprisingly fresh take on a historical period I thought was well over-done. 

Non-fiction

The Waiting Game (Nicola Clark)

A non-fiction book about the ladies-in-waiting who attended on Henry VIII of England’s wives, three of whom became three of those wives (and two of whom were murdered for it.) The Tudors were one of my first hyperfixations and the period is of course famously over-discussed, but this did feel like a worthwhile and fresh take to me. It is focused primarily on the huge change that occurred in this period for noblewomen and gentlewomen (rich and high-status but not aristocratic women) between the position of lady-in-waiting to the queen being a sought-after way to find husbands and connections with other women of their own class, and the politicisation of the role as it became a pathway to the throne…but also put women into significant danger as Henry discarded wife after wife. It traces, through letters and household records, the lives and fates of women who survived close to power. For some reason, the first time I have really understood the fact that he went through five wives in just ten years, making this an incredibly unstable period at court. If you’re interested in history that focuses on women’s lives and not quite tired of the Tudors yet I really recommend it. 

Fiction

The Curse of the Mistwraith (Janny Wurts)

After remembering how much I enjoyed the Empire trilogy she co-wrote with Raymond Feist, I thought I should try some of Wurts’ solo work. This is the start of a doorstopper series she began in the early ‘90s, with cover blurbs from Robert Jordan and Anne McCaffrey, and I think it’s still going. Wurts is a good writer generally but unfortunately the stuff that would have been novel and interesting here in the early ‘90s (mostly trying to interrogate light and dark symbolism in fantasy) is not at all novel or interesting in 2024, and the treatment of female characters in particular is…just not great. (We shall not even speak of the politics, or the extremely ‘90s stuff around genetics-as-destiny.) The emo hero would have done huge numbers on Tumblr if it had been around then, though. I do not have the fortitude to pursue further entries. 

How to Be a Dark Lord and Die Trying (Django Wexler)

I seem to remember trying some of Wexler’s work a decade or so ago and thinking it was OK but not great. This raunchy, foul-mouthed, implicitly gory parody of isekai/portal fantasy is definitely, on the other hand, great. Our heroine has gone through hundreds of time-loops trying to save The Kingdom from The Dark Lord (this is not a work that wastes your time on fleshing out tropes you already know) and has decided, this time around, that maybe she should give being the Dark Lord a go instead; she’s been tortured to death by his minions quite enough times already. It’s funny, fast-moving, and doesn’t stint on characters who are believable as people even when they enter the narrative representing the broadest of stereotypes. I am bereft that the sequel isn’t out until next year. Trigger warnings for just about everything but it’s not a text that lingers on the details. 

The Flavia Albia series (Lindsey Davis)

I last caught up on this sequel series to the great Falco novels in 2020, just before COVID, and I happened to spot one at my local library and realised there were a few more. For those of you unfamiliar, Flavia Albia is the adopted daughter of Ancient Roman private informer (i.e. private detective) Marcus Didius Falco. In this series, he’s retired and raising her younger siblings and she’s taken up the family business. The Falco series was always drawing on noir tropes but this ramps up in Albia’s books, which are also set in the reign of the famously tyrannical emperor Domitian rather than his allegedly nicer father Vespasian (who popped up not infrequently in person in the Falco novels; Albia does not move in quite so elevated circles.) In September I read Fatal Legacy, Death in the Tiber, and The Grove of the Caesars (not in order, this is a series where you can dip around a bit.) I find them a little harder going than Falco simply because Albia, as a woman and immigrant, is much less insulated from some of the harsher realities of Roman life; she also deals with things like serial killers in a way he didn’t. The way the series makes Ancient Rome feel simultaneously hashtag-relatable and completely alien is something I enjoy a lot, and Albia is a great abrasive narrator with one of the most likeable Wife Guy husbands in fiction. I’m not sure how many more of them we’ll get but Lindsey Davis still has it and I’m happy to keep going.