Book round-up: January 2025

[sixthlight]

Got back to new-to-me reads this month (one in particular is extremely not new) and had a good time all around except for one book I got given as a gift a couple of years ago and have guiltily not tackled until now…which led to me giving up but oh well, I tried and can move it off my bedside table. 

Fiction

The Weavers of Alamaxa (Hadeer Elsbai)

Second in a duology following The Daughters of Izdihar, which is a feminist-political fantasy in Fantasy Egypt with the magic system from ATLA (I didn’t mention it in my review but the extent to which it is straight-up the magic system from ATLA was a bit much.) I found that one kind of meh, I was not the target audience, but I liked this one a lot better. It complicated a lot of the very straightforward politics of the first book and grappled convincingly with the costs and risks of revolution as praxis. This is like the third time I’ve had the second book in a duology redeem the whole enterprise for me and I suspect it’s books that would in another decade have been a Big Fantasy Chonk Novel being split in two. Anyway, I do recommend the duology as a whole now it can be read back-to-back. 

The Wood at Midwinter (Susannah Clarke)

Literally a short story that never would have been published as a standalone if the author wasn’t Susannah Clarke, a Christmas tale about a saint, weird and lovely and with some great art as well. Clarke can write, if you like her work you’ll like this, but literally, I cannot stress enough, a short story. 

Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian)

I have been aware by proximity of the Aubrey-Maturin series as books I would probably like for easily a decade or two, and have never seriously pursued reading them partially because I wasn’t in the mood and partially because I suspected they might disappoint. (For the lucky ten thousand they are a famous novel series about an English naval captain and an Irish-Catalan surgeon in the Napoleonic Wars, one of those ‘your favourite author’s favourite series’ works.) 

I am here to deliver the least surprising news of the twenty-first century (given that this series started in the mid-twentieth century, not even the late twentieth century): this book is very very good. The characters are immediately compelling, the picture drawn of life at sea in the Napoleonic Wars is rich and alien enough to be truly believable (I’m no expert on the era but there’s definitely decent research here), the plot is wandering but something interesting is always happening, and lots of it is laugh-out-loud funny. And now I have nineteen other books to read! What a good way to start the year. 

Navigational Entanglements (Aliette de Bodard)

Set vaguely in de Bodard’s wider Vietnamese space empire setting, this is pretty straight-up wuxia IN SPACE: a rag-tag group of apprentices from rival clans are sent to solve a mystery and get into more trouble than they’re supposed to be ready for. I don’t think you need to be particularly familiar with wuxia tropes to enjoy this but you’ll get more out of it if you are. My only real critique is that I don’t think the romance subplot really added anything to the story; it’s a slim novella and that wordcount might have been better spent elsewhere. 

Lady Eve's Last Con (Rebecca Fraimow)

A con artist goes undercover as a debutante on a space station for the wealthy to seduce and rob the man who ruined her sister, but her target’s extremely attractive sister keeps getting in the way…what’s a hard-hearted grifter with a yen for hot butches on space motorbikes to do? This is basically a romance novel set it in space so that the author could do a lesbian romance but still use all the Roaring Twenties tropes her heart desired, but there’s enough work done on the setting that I can fully respect that choice. Good fun.

Non-fiction

The State of Africa (Martyn Meredith)

I asked my family for a good history of Africa for Christmas a couple of years ago and I got this, written by a British journalist. It’s a history of the continent in the post-colonial period, extremely long and well-cited, and I gritted my teeth through a bunch of bad takes until I got to the point where it bemoaned the population growth in this period as just another problem to be dealt with and did not at any point consider, e.g., what this said about changes in healthcare and nutrition. If the author can’t be bothered to understand the well-trodden theory of demographic transitions I can’t be bothered to read his book. Still in the market for some good histories of Africa (any region). 

A Little Queer Natural History (Josh L Davies)

A series of natural history case studies (short, two or three pages each including pictures) about birds, animals, insects, plants, and in one case fungi which are ‘queer’ in some way. Contains many Tumblr favourites (whiptail lizards, seahorses) but also lots you’ve never heard of. Would be great if you were teaching biology courses and needed some examples to hand about the ways nature does not align with human social constructs about gender and sex.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

Interesting set of books. The one that stood out to me was Lady Eve's Last Con--because of course there was a very famous classic 1940s screwball comety about a con artist, one of whose personas is Lady Eve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Eve

I have never read the Aubrey Maturin books myself, but I understand they're very good. Mind the timeline; the first six books follow the events of history, and then the author realized he was running out of war sooner than he was running out of stories, and so for most of the rest of the series it was perpetually 1813. Sort of a time loop situation.