Book round-up: September 2019

[sixthlight]

I know there's still three months in the year but I think I read the best thing I'm going to read this year in September: run, do not walk, to get your hands on a copy of Gideon the Ninth (if lesbian necromancers IN SPACE is your thing, and why would it not be your thing). Also I read some other stuff that wasn't bad but honestly that's the take-away here.

Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood (Marie Brennan)
Two fantasy novellas I found because I was checking to see if the library had her Lady Trent series sequel book yet. A woman wakes up on an altar with no memories, and is sent to complete a task by the people who summoned her. Simple and self-contained but stronger for it, although I did get very confused because a lot of stuff happens off-page between the first and second novella and I thought I'd missed one (I hadn't).

Midnight Never Come (Marie Brennan)
Since I was on a kick with this author...this is the start of an Elizabethan-era fantasy series, apparently, but I didn't enjoy it enough to follow up. It's fine - Brennan is a good writer - but it doesn't have anything like the originality or grip of her Lady Trent books (there's elves and Elizabeth I and fairly well-trodden material about fae courts). Also, a lot hinges emotionally on a het romance that develops entirely offscreen and we're then supposed to care about the continuation of, which does not work for me. Hmmm, stuff happening offscreen is apparently a Marie Brennan thing.

This Is How You Lose The Time War (Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar)
Epistolary high-concept sci-fi about two (female-pronoun-using) time-travelling agents of rival futures communicating, and then connecting, and then...falling in love? It hit me almost more like poetry than prose; it's beautiful and carefully crafted and I will come back to it more than once.

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)
This book has SKELETONS and DECAYING HAUNTED SPACE RUINS and LESBIAN ENEMIES-TO-LOVERS and surely you have heard about it by now, but if you haven't somehow it's fantastic, it's funny and pragmatic and heart-wrenching and there's a sequel next June but June is a MILLION YEARS AWAY. It's also got a very very very Kiwi sense of humour and I love everything it chooses to be. The first line is "In the Myriadic year of our Lord - the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! - Gideon Nav packed up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth." and it absolutely fulfills the promise of that and more and JUST GO READ IT OK

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (Olivia Waite)
F/F Regency romance set around astronomy and embroidery and I should have loved it but the very drawn out "maybe she LIKES likes me/OH, I just discovered that QUEER WOMEN are a THING" is not what I wanted to read. Also the leads are called Lucy and Catherine and for Personal Reasons this made for a very weird read. DNF.

The Rat-catcher's Daughter and Proper English (K J Charles)
Proper English was technically a re-read but I don't seem to have written it up here the first time? So....anyway, F/F Edwardian country house murder mystery romance, technically a prequel to the author's Think of England, and most definitely what I wanted to read (even if, as a friend pointed out, the author is sadly not as good at same-sex F/F desire as she is at M/M). But the romance is sweet and the murder is the BEST KIND of Midsomer Murders-esque Asshole Victim Gets His murder. Great comfort re-read.

The Rat-catcher's Daughter is a ace romance novella (m/f, trans character) set prior to the author's Any Old Diamonds. It is very much a fill-in-the-gaps story expanding on characters who exist in the background of the other book (and I expect will appear in its sequel), but has a strong sense of character and I enjoyed it.

Timefulness (Marcia Bjornerud)

Book club book, by a geologist, on the necessity of understanding deep time, and how we have come to discover how old the Earth really is. Very well-written and from a scientific perspective everything I quibbled with was complete insider baseball - generally extremely accurate and, I think, easy to understand for people who don't deal with these concepts in their everyday work. Really recommend if you're interested in the history of the Earth. Gets a little bit ranty in the last chapter re: climate change but fair enough, and not un-typical of American pop science works (not necessarily about climate change, but getting a bit ranty in the last chapter.)

Comments

[merit]

I just finished Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood (the latter this afternoon!). It had some interesting elements but Brennan seemed to be edging at a bigger world than was ever explored on page. There hasn't been a third published so I'm curious if the series will be continued.

Currently reading Gideon the Ninth! The black binding is so on them ^^

[sixthlight]

Very much agreed that Brennan had obviously done a lot of world-building that was somewhat frustratingly just off-page - in a way where that (mostly) made sense because the protagonist clearly didn't care that much about it, but...they're both pretty recently published so I think there's a decent chance of others.