Book round-up: June 2020

[sixthlight]

I’m not sure exactly what it was - probably a combination of Alert Level 1 (i.e. normal life, more or less), picking my books better, and the changing of the season - but I started reading fiction again properly in June and once I started I didn’t stop. Having Hugo voting on the horizon definitely helped a lot too - I’m not committing to reading everything but I’m having a fair crack at few of the categories. Hugo nominees have a star by the title.

Realm of Ash (Tasha Suri)
Sequel to Empire of Sand, in a Mughal India-inspired fantasy setting, focusing on that heroine’s younger sister; like that book, concerned mostly with the ways women survive and interact with each other, and I enjoyed it about the same. The author summarised it facetiously on Twitter as “a widow meets a nice young man, they read books and nap a lot, and then go on a life-affirming journey together”. That is almost entirely accurate except for being completely misleading. A wee bit horror-y in some ways, I was fine but fair warning if that’s not your thing.

Stormsong (C L Polk)

Sequel to the highly-acclaimed Witchmark. Impossible to summarise without spoiling all of Witchmark, but I can say it follows a privileged young woman who has recently become the Not Prime Minister of a Not Edwardian England fantasy nation, as she tries to figure out whether change can come from within the system. Found it harder to like than the first because the heroine is so complicit in the badness of book one, but still good.

Not Your Sidekick (C B Lee)
Near-future post-apocalypse superhero shenanigans YA. The heroine is the daughter of minor-level superheroes who accidentally gets an internship with the local supervillains. Just plain (and queer) fun; also spends some time on the complexities of immigrant identity. I need to chase down the sequel.

*The City In the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders)
Sci-fi on an alien planet in the far future with human colonists, and...I presume the plot got somewhere, but I DNF’d when I realised the leads were in mortal danger and I was kinda hoping they’d all die so more interesting characters could take over. Also tries to be clever with language in a way that did not succeed for me, and maybe that was just me? But eh.

Penric novellas (starting with Penric’s Demon) 1-6 (Lois McMaster Bujold)
A good friend suggested I should read these because they’re what Bujold cares about writing these days, and they are MUCH better than her recent Vorkosigan output.One through four were excellent, a lovely expansion on her Five Gods novels, great characters and plots growing out of worldbuilding, just as I like it. Highly recommended to anybody who enjoyed the Chalion/Five Gods books. Unfortunately, 5 (Mira’s Last Dance) ran smack into a bunch of really transphobic tropes involving the lead cross-dressing (like...all of them. ALL of them, played as comedy) and also it became evident she was going to re-do the Miles/Ekaterin romance, practically beat for beat, which is much less interesting a second time around. Oh well, I’ll probably re-read the first four sometime.

The City We Became (N K Jemisin)
An expansion on a short story she published on Tor.com a few years ago (The City Born Great), about the personifications of New York’s boroughs gaining their powers and fighting Lovecraftian (all senses of the word) evil. Compelling, bittersweet, angry, hopeful, unapologetic, beautiful, just an excellent read all around. Not really for white people and not interested in being for them; that’s not any sort of criticism. I want all the sequels ~immediately~.

*The Deep (Rivers Solomon)
Hugo novella about mermaids descended from enslaved pregnant African women thrown off slave ships, coming to terms with their past. I really believed in them as a deep-sea society, but a little repetitive for my taste; might have been stronger as a short story.

The Empire of Gold (S A Chakraborty)
Final book in the Daevabad Trilogy - magic, murder, and politics in a city of djinn, starring a conwoman from Cairo, but much more good-natured than that description implies. As a trilogy-ender it sticks the landing, does a backflip, and takes a victory lap - I haven’t been this satisfied with a series ender since...ATLA, maybe? I like these books so much and want ALL the Yuletide fic. Go and read the first (The City of Brass) and then keep going.

Docile (K M Szpara)
Near-future sci-fi which takes on the Attractive Billionaire Owns Me trope with queer men, makes it sexy, then conducts a clinical autopsy of the whole thing that does not shy from words like ‘rape’ and ‘trauma’ and yet still...kinda ends hopefully? A friend commented that if you read a lot of slash noncon on AO3 it’s nothing new, but it’s certainly new to profic, especially from a queer male author. I liked it, but ALL the trigger warnings, obvs.

From A Shadow Grave (Andi C Buchanan)
NZ urban fantasy; I was really excited to try a book based on a local ghost story (the Mt Victoria tunnel), but I drifted off half-way through. Not bad, just...hard to see where it was going. Lots of description, very little dialogue or real character interaction, so it failed my ‘some of these people need to like each other’ test.

*The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (P Djeli Clark)

Hugo-nominated, very fun novella about a haunting in steampunk post-colonial Cairo after a magical revolution that threw out European imperalism. A tired detective and his Oxbridge-educated, eager new partner hunt a mysterious evil. I was just wondering if there were going to be any women and then a feminist protest showed up, but in the good way. I liked it so much I went and read the original short story immediately.

*To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Becky Chambers)

Queer astrobiologists explore a new solar system, queerly and with lots of astrobiology. Speaking as one, I found it hard to tell whether laypeople would enjoy it, and it’s Becky Chambers so there’s no plot to speak of, but I enjoyed it a lot, and the science is VERY good. If you like philosophy, astrobiology, and people basically being nice to each other, this is for you. If you want ADVENTURES IN SPACE, not so much.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo (P Djeli Clark)
Short story related to (but not a direct prequel to) the Hugo-nominated novella above, about a female investigator of supernatural crimes in magic steampunk Cairo investigating...well, it’s in the title. Fun, snappy, this is a great setting and I would read a whole murder mystery series in it.

 

Non-Fiction

The Trial: a history from Socrates to O J Simpson (Sadakat Kadri)
What it says on the tin, but ‘history’ from a lawyer’s perspective, which means cherrypicking the especially lurid bits and leaving you with no real sense of how trials worked on average at any point. I gritted my teeth through all the torture descriptions largely because I was stuck in a car on a long drive. My book club loved it; we apparently have different sensibilities that way.

False Colours (Georgette Heyer)
IMO one of her most underrated Regency romances, about a diplomat who is forced to masquerade as his identical twin brother, who, whoops, has just got engaged, added to which their kind but frivolous mother is in debt again...peak Heyer in all regards.

Lord Edgeware Dies (Agatha Christie)
I was in the mood for a Christie and this was available through my library app. It’s a Poirot, which I vaguely remember reading but had forgotten the plot of; the American actress wife of a lord is accused of his murder, but has an iron-clad alibi - what’s going on? Fine as a mystery, slaps you in the face with casual antisemitism upfront, which Christie doesn’t always do, so that was...unpleasant.