sixthlight

Book round-up: February 2025

Fri, 02 May 2025 08:38:06 GMT

It isn’t February! It is, in fact, May. This is because 2025 has continued to Happen in large quantities (and not even as much as in some other places.) However, the only way to get back on the horse is to get back on it, so let’s see what I can dredge up from my brain about my February reading.

Fiction

The City In Glass (Nghi Vo)

A history-spanning tale of a destroyed city and the demon which loves it. It opens with the apocalypse (local) happening and then says ‘so what happens next’? Nghi Vo is a really good writer and I think this might be her best work to date. The acknowledgements made me cry. In the dark times there will also be singing, etcetera.

The Pomegranate Gate (Ariel Kaplan)
First book in a fantasy trilogy based on Sephardic Jewish folklore, about two young people fleeing the Inquisition who become entangled with a magical world and its dangerous inhabitants. I liked it well enough but was mildly disappointed to realise that it was the first book in a trilogy when I got to the end. I am also really itching to know if it’s set in our world (but with Ladino placenames which I don’t recognise) or a fantasy secondary world very closely based on the Inquisition-era Mediterranean - I couldn’t figure it out and that bothered me. That’s not a criticism of the book, I just like to be able to categorise fantasy in that way and I couldn’t!

Also, I totally caught one plot twist because of Tumblr, thank you Jewish Tumblr.

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport (Samit Basu)

The story of Aladdin and the lamp (about 60% the Disney version, interestingly) but it’s set in a sinking city on an Earth which is a backwater in a wider galaxy and there are as many bots inhabiting it as humans. A nice balance of enough of the original story that you know where some of it is going, but plenty of twists that keep it fresh - and it gender-flips Aladdin and Jasmine for a much queerer story. Very worth your time.

Post Captain and HMS Surprise (Patrick O'Brian)

Continuing my gentle voyage through the Aubrey-Maturin series - I haven’t had a lot of time for reading so I’ll take them as I get to them, they’ve waited twenty years and they’re not going anywhere (although I had to rely on a dear friend to get me these two for my birthday as the library inexplicably has the whole series except them). They continue to be very funny, very well-paced, and to paint an incredibly rich portrait of a specific time and environment. I was also most entertained to find out in these two that people get to say ‘fuck’. Nobody told me people in these books get to (very occasionally) say fuck! It’s fascinating how hard swearing hits when it’s unexpected.

Non-fiction

Employment Relations in New Zealand (Emile Rasmussen et al)

Literally the only reason you would read this book is if you were studying it for a university course or you had a very pressing reason to understand the history of employment relations in Aotearoa New Zealand but it’s an accessible history/guide, and useful given I’ve spent way too much time of the years reading Ask A Manager (which is a fun and interesting advice blog but expressly American in its context.)

A City on Mars (Kelly and Zach Weinersmith)
Seems like every billionaire these days is talking about Mars - so where are we at in terms of actual technological capacity to build a city on Mars? Spoilers: way further away than Elon Musk wants you to think. The book starts out very strong but then tries to keep going into the social/legal aspects and the authors are either not equipped or not interested enough to handle those well. It’s also dated extremely fast, in that it describes Musk (who gets mentioned frequently for obvious reasons) as someone with “weird social views” and, well, here we are in 2025 and he’s a full-blown white supremacist fascist. I would argue that this was obvious when the book was being written but I assume the publisher’s lawyers had something to say about a more accurate description.

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Book round-up: January 2025

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 07:52:46 GMT

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 )

( Non-fiction )

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Book round-up: December 2024

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 07:53:52 GMT

I spent a lot of this month re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings because some friends were doing a read-through and you know what, it was not time wasted. Also re-read another old favourite and one new fiction book that I liked and finished and, well, 2024. At least I made it to the end.

Fiction

The Hobbit (J R R Tolkien)

I have obviously read The Hobbit before, like, more than once but the mild twist here is that this was a comic book edition first published before the Peter Jackson movies (any of them) and it was really neat to see the familiar story in the art style of an earlier era. It really is a lovely children’s tale and I look forward to reading it to the kiddo once he’s old enough.

Rakesfall (Vajra Chandrasekera)

I really enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors but this book was even weirder and more experimental, genre-spanning in an impossible to define way, and by the time we got to the third set of PoV characters who were kind of the same characters but also not I had to concede that this was not the right book for me at this time. It was a very interesting kind of weird and experimental though, and I’d like to come back to it one day when I have the brain space for it.

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloane)

This was published in the early 2010s and is now through the magic of the world moving on a paean to a place and time that definitively doesn’t exist anymore (San Francisco when people thought don’t be evil was a motto Google took seriously), a cozy unchallenging non-murder mystery about a bookstore and the intersection of history and technology. It’s been just long enough that I can take its optimism about Silicon Valley as a period piece instead of being annoyed by it, YMMV.

The Lord of the Rings (J R R Tolkien)

I think I last re-read the trilogy in about 2013 and did you know that it’s very good actually? I’m serious, I think Tolkien is often overlooked because he’s so foundational to so much of modern Western fantasy literature but these are actually beautifully written and paced books and some of the things they have to say about fascism and compromise and despair are, frankly, way too relevant to the present moment. Also they’re funny, they’re not comedies but the humorous moments are real. Probably if you’re reading this blog you’ve either read these books or decided they’re not for you a long time ago, but if for some reason neither of those is true: hand on heart, it’s worth it.

The Christmas Mystery (Jostein Gaarder)

A magical realism-ish story about a Norwegian boy finding a magical Christmas calendar that contains a story about a young girl travelling backwards in time from Norway to Palestine to witness the birth of Jesus Christ. It is, obviously, a pretty religious text but (as a life-long atheist) I find it fun some years to read it one chapter per day through December. Some bits of it have not aged well (the book is about thirty years old now) but nothing’s aged appallingly. I probably won’t read it again for a few years, or maybe ever, but it was nice to revisit this year.

Non-fiction

No Shortcuts (Jane McAlevey)

A series of case studies about unionising and winning fights with employers in 21st century America, and what factors lead to success. The American union scene is, uh, wildly different to the NZ union scene in very many ways, legally and culturally (I knew someone once who was doing a PhD comparing them; one day I should track down her thesis) and I mostly found it interesting in terms of understanding the differences, but I think there’s still some solid general advice here for anybody who wants to organise membership-based groups with the aim of making change. It’s very much in conversation with Rules for Radicals so I’m glad I read that first.

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Book round-up: October and November 2024

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 07:57:58 GMT

Mostly sequels in fiction across these months but one new and utterly delightful mystery series. The non-fiction was a bit of a mixed bag.

( Fiction )

( Non-fiction )

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Book round-up: September 2024

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 08:15:13 GMT

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.

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Book round-up: August 2024

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 07:34:18 GMT

Started full-time work for the first time in eighteen months (life tip: getting laid off very shortly after you give birth is sub-optimal, avoid if possible) at precisely the same moment everybody in the house became various degrees of sick for two weeks and I think quite understandably reading a lot of books was simply not on the agenda in August. Reviewing has also fallen by the wayside but I will catch up again. This month is an easy start on account of having read three (3) books, all fiction, all new to me.

Mirrored Heavens (Rebecca Roanhorse)

Final book in her Between Earth and Sky epic fantasy with pre-Columbian North/Central America vibes trilogy; I think she stuck the landing but I’m still not convinced this needed to be a trilogy instead of a duology. I suspect it would read better all in one but it’s long enough that I’m probably not going to do that anytime soon. As a side-note, has several worldbuilding elements which made me go “oh THAT’S where Robert Jordan stole that from” (the WoT fandom, including me, has historically been better able to recognise when he was pulling from European history than Indigenous cultures.)

The Dawnhounds (Sascha Stronach)

First book in a SFF (New Weird flavour) trilogy about a cop in a biology-punk (if that’s not a word it is now) Singapore-esque city who dies on the job, and then things get really weird. NB: this is extremely not copaganda, even insomuch as you could accuse something like Discworld of such. It's a grim and visceral (often literally) world, everybody in this book is a queer mess making mostly terrible decisions and not many of them like each other very much, but it is nevertheless very compelling. The author is throwing a lot, and I mean a lot of stuff at the wall and I am interested to see what ultimately sticks. I’m reading the sequel as I write this, which came out this month, and it's hard to say more than this without talking about it, which I think is cheating when I haven't finished it. (Stronach is also the author of that essay I linked to on Tumblr a while back about writing in non-American English dialects; if you liked that, read this.)

Alien Clay (Adrian Tschaikovsky)
Firmly science fiction rather than the messy SF/F boundary The Dawnhounds straddles, but equally concerned with biology, body horror, resisting fascism; gosh I wonder why those are popular themes these days. An academic is sentenced to the gulag a work camp on an alien planet where the native ecosystem is out to get everybody…or is it? A good read but not Children of Time. I am permanently a little frustrated by Tschaikovsky’s tendency to set his works in what is meant to be the future of Earth but in a way where everybody is so utterly divorced from the actual history of Earth it might as well be an entirely secondary-world setting. In a book which is all about how and if you can resist fascism, this feels a particularly sterile choice - the main character makes a number of statements about the history of this and I can’t tell whether he’s meant to be deliberately ignorant of popular resistance movements (because of the fascist government) or just wrong or what. It means that a moral of the book seems to be 'you can't effectively organise against oppression without [a genre conceit which does not exist in the real world]' and like. I have some problems with this, philosophically! Tchaikovsky also hits a naming nadir here with a guy called “Vertegio Keev”. Come on.

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Book round-up: July 2024

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 07:49:32 GMT

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).

( Fiction )

( Non-fiction )

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Book round-up: June 2024

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 02:30:14 GMT

June 2024

I enjoyed almost everything I read this month very much, and the one exception is something I still enjoyed bits of, I just have some notes. Well, I have notes on a couple of things, but the others are more in the service of an honest recommendation than anything else.

( Fiction )

( Non-fiction )

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Book round-up: May 2024

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:59:11 GMT

May 2024

Starting to conclude I am reading too many books by men this year; luckily this is a solvable problem. So concluding because many of the men this month were a bit disappointing (and in one case flatly infuriating).

( Fiction )
( Non-fiction )
( Re-reads )

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Book round-up: April 2024

Tue, 14 May 2024 20:42:24 GMT

Am I...back up to date with reviews? Astonishing. I’ve started reading my way through the Hugo novels for this year (as I generally try to do) and wow, it’s shaping up as a good line-up. I also did the fun accidental thing of reading an author’s very early work immediately followed by her latest and it’s always such a joy to see someone be good to start and get a lot better.

Fiction
A Fire Born of Exile (Aliette de Bodard)

The Count of Monte Cristo but in space, and lesbians, a part of de Bodard’s Xuya space opera setting but not closely linked to any of the other books and novellas (although I think there’s a couple of references). Good, and I particularly like the work she does to translate the various plots around marriage and family to a setting with wildly different gender norms, but I think I would have got more out of it if I was more familiar with what it was riffing on.

The Saint of Bright Doors (Vajra Chandrasekera)

Secondary-world fantasy about a young man in a large city trying to move on from his childhood as an assassin trained to kill his prophet father (mostly via group therapy), but of course his past is less left behind than it seems. This emerges very intimately from the recent history of Sri Lanka, with all that entails, and it’s probably the first book I’ve read which engages with pandemics (and the pandemic) as a part of life without being about that at all (there’s way too much else going on.) Ambitious and interesting and a lot to chew over. Would be an extremely worthy Hugo winner.

Exordia (Seth Dickinson)

Tom Clancy-esque (in that there are way too many loving enumerations of jet fighters and the world’s nuclear stockpile), but it’s about an alien invasion, ft. emotional plots such as ‘can two-thirds of the most divorced polycule in history save their relationship and also the planet’ and ‘can you reconcile with your mother after the literal worst things possible happened to you both and you did one of those things’, and ‘what if Earth is, galactically speaking, the equivalent of Kurdistan’. I read it because I know I would hate Baru Cormorant but I wanted to give the author a go. I will probably not read more of his work because the body horror quotient was way, way, way too high for me, but bits of this will live in my head rent-free for years. Hopefully not the body horror bits. Let me know if he writes anything less in that line.

Death in the Spires (K J Charles), and also the Magpie trilogy

Death in the Spires is a cold case murder mystery set just before WW1 in Oxford, about a man bringing his old friend group back together to solve the murder that drove them apart (that one of them definitely did). Probably some of the author’s best work to date. She’s spent a lot of time on social media emphasising this is not a romance, and it’s not, but there ARE romantic subplots and it is NOT a tragedy (which I was sort of expecting based on how hard she was pushing ‘not a romance’). Coincidentally I had just re-read her Magpie trilogy as a palate-cleanser, and it was really nice to see how far she’s come as a writer - I love that trilogy (Victorian urban fantasy/MLM romance) but the characters in Death are MUCH more developed and the setting is much more vivid.

Non-fiction

Experimenting With Religion (Jonathan Jong)

Outlines a series of psychology experiments attempting to get at the foundations of why people have religious beliefs. The author is an Anglican priest as well as a psychology researcher and it’s well-written - I suspect it was intended as, and it would do fabulously as, an introductory text on the topic for undergraduate students (it’s published by a university press). Unfortunately it turns out there just haven’t been that many statistically significant psychology experiments on religious belief (vs observational studies) so it ended up feeling very light and somewhat unsatisfying. Hopefully inspires more people to do more work in the area!

Black Flu 1918 (Geoffrey Rice)

A summarised version of his longer and seminal work on the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu outbreak in Aotearoa New Zealand, which killed comparably many people on a population level to World War One (and a lot of soldiers from AoNZ died in World War One.) This version was published just before COVID and there are of course a lot of echoes between the two pandemics; we did a hell of a lot better with COVID than with the flu. I wouldn’t have wanted to read it any closer to 2020 than now. The only really sour note is that the chapter on the impacts on Māori, while I understand groundbreaking at the time he did the work, now reads as extremely lacking in Māori perspectives and voices, though to be fair it’s not claiming to represent those.

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Book round-up: March 2024

Wed, 01 May 2024 08:27:23 GMT

March 2024
Had a bit of a broody, ‘nothing I am reading is quite to my taste except stuff I’ve read before’ month, so please consider with all of these new-book reviews that it might be me, not the books!

Fiction
Magic for Liars (Sarah Gailey)

This is basically a literary novel about a private investigator trying to reconnect with her estranged sister while investigating a murder, except that technically it’s fantasy because it takes place at a magic school except that its concerns are so firmly centred in the literary genre that the magic school bit is borderline irrelevant. I’m not sure I enjoyed it but I think it was well-written.

The Coroner's Lunch (Colin Cotterill)

Murder mystery set in 1970s post-Communist revolution Laos about an elderly coroner who unexpectedly gains the ability to talk to the dead, and also solves some murders. As a cozy murder mystery (male writer edition) it’s pretty standard, not bad but no outstanding new twists on the genre. The setting is definitely different, but it’s written by a white Australian man who seems to have spent a lot of time in Laos and sometimes it is very evidently written by a white Australian who has spent a lot of time in Laos, IYKWIM. Not a waste of my time, won’t rush to read the sequels.

The Waking of Angantyr (Marie Brennan)
Very different to what I thought it was! The blurb sort of posits it as a rollicking Viking-fantasy adventure about a woman who can speak to the dead. It’s…I’m not gonna spoil the plot but let’s just say it’s the author rewriting a Norse saga she read during university as the gory, dramatic tragedy she wanted it to be. She does a very good job of this but, like, you definitely need to be in the mood for a Norse saga.

Non-fiction

Crossings (Ben Goldfarb)
Popsci book about ‘road ecology’; the intersection between nature and roads, usually to the detriment of nature. It’s fairly heavily focused on North America (though it does venture occasionally to other locations). Not a bad read but I did find it a bit glib, and on at least one occasion I looked up a cited paper to find that IMO it had the opposite conclusion to the one the author drew from it, so…I don’t think you’d be misinformed reading it but I suspect there’s areas left unaddressed.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Isabel Wilkinson)
This is fairly self-evidently an attempt to de-fang the current discourse around racism in America, specifically towards Black Americans, by re-framing it as a caste system and racism as ‘casteism’. Enough of it has filtered through the Internet to me over the last 3-4 years that I think it must have been reasonably successful. However, as an academic project about caste I think it isn’t very successful (the author is a journalist, not an academic, to be fair) and in particular her knowledge about the history of Black Americans, which is extensive, makes the extremely light treatment given to European antisemitism and the South Asian caste system look worse by comparison. But very much an instance where I’m not the target audience.

Re-reads

Three Parts Dead (Max Gladstone)

I hadn’t re-read this since I bought it in 2014 (I still had an airline ticket as a bookmark tucked in the back) but it’s such a banger of a first novel; law as magic, capitalism as religion (or religion as capitalism?), an academic bad guy who I disliked as a PhD student reading it and makes me apoplectic now because I’ve encountered too many more examples of the type in the decade since. Also, you can’t convince me Shale and the Guardians of Seril aren’t partially inspired by Moon and the Raksura (see below).

The Books of the Raksura (Martha Wells)
A secondary-world fantasy series - really a trilogy and a duology - about an orphan finding out where he’s really from and learning to fit into his original culture, except he’s in his forties and he’s not human because this is a world with many species none of which are exactly human, but particularly not the shapeshifting dragon-lion-ish Raksura that he is one of. Not at all like Murderbot but Wells was a great writer long before Murderbot, just under-recognised. The trilogy, which is of the ‘story in three acts’ type, is very good and the follow-up duology is fine when you’re already invested in the characters but not quite as good as the first three. I said this was fantasy - there’s shapeshifters and straight-up magic, and a world full of abandoned ruins - but it feels extremely sci-fi in vibe, and I couldn’t work out why until it hit me like a tonne of bricks that the Fell (bad guys) are the Wraith (Stargate Atlantis) and then it all made sense (Wells wrote some SGA tie-in novels shortly before this). The books even keep going back to abandoned high-tech floating cities! ATLANTIS I TELL YOU. It is not at all SGA-fanfic like, certainly not in terms of the characters* but the vibes are there.

*now I think on it further the Arbora/Aeriat division among the Raksura has more than a few echoes of the scientist/military division on SGA…I just want everybody to understand how right I am about this

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Book round-up: February 2024

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 08:16:34 GMT

February 2024

Read some decent non-fiction, two very good new novels, and revisited a Problematic Fave which I have never talked about in these reviews (so apologies in advance for the reminiscing).

Fiction

The Nobleman's Guide To Seducing A Scoundrel (K J Charles)

Second in a duology of MLM romances set in the English fens during and after the Napoleonic wars, and unlike the first one, emphatically a Heyer pastiche (this time of The Unknown Ajax). Plus there’s like, a murder mystery and some fun hot sex but I would pay so much cash money for Charles to work her way through the entire Heyer oeuvre this way. She’s so good at it that I had to go re-read Band Sinister (Venetia) afterwards to enjoy how good at it she is.

All the Hidden Paths (Foz Meadows)
Also the second in a MLM secondary-world fantasy romance duology, though unlike the KJ Charles this is (mostly) the second half of the same couple’s story. This is a story about what happens after you come out, and it made me like the first book better in retrospect (you really couldn’t read it without the first, I think.) Rough going if you don’t want to deal with two books of ongoing trauma recovery - these are not books where traumatic events are easily shaken off - but overall, I think, cathartic.

Non-fiction

End Times (Rebecca Priestly)
Memoir by a NZ researcher about her excursion into fundamentalist Christianity as a teenager, combined with an adult road trip along the West Coast (Te Tai Poutini) contemplating climate change and other imminent disasters. Generally interesting though held together a bit tenuously between the two strands at points. If anything I found it somewhat light on the detail about the fundamentalist Christianity but that’s probably a very specific way to read the book.

The Brilliant Abyss (Helen Scales)

Another popsci book about the deep sea; there seem to be a crop of them these days, or maybe they’re just coming to my attention. In general I thought it was good and accurate, although I did side-eye somewhat that the only researchers she mentions who I know personally are also, um, absolutely terrible human beings. I want to hear about people I know and like! There were about 3 totally extraneous chapters but I assume she had to deliver a book of a certain length, and that isn’t terrible for a popsci book.

Erebus: the Ice Dragon (Colin Monteath)
A history of a mountain. There’s a couple of good chapters on its geology and discovery (which made me go ‘oh hey my blorbos in law’ when the Erebus and Terror sailed into the scene) then a very tedious set of chapters on various people who climbed it which can all be boiled down to “some white men climbed it and got very cold and then they climbed down again”. Then there’s a chapter on the Erebus disaster which is horrifying and excellent, and a good chapter on art and writing about the mountain hampered only by the fact that none of the pieces they got the rights to reproduce are shown on the same page where they’re discussed. Could have been shorter and sharper but probably just not meant to be read cover to cover.

Re-reads

The Empire Trilogy (Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts)
Technically I drifted away part-way into the third one, but let’s call this a re-read of the whole trilogy. It is IMO immensely superior to the series that it is technically a side-excursion from, following a young noblewoman in a sort of mash-up East Asian/Central American fantasy world (it was the 1980s, ok) as she rises to power. A lot of it has not aged terribly well but the stuff that is still good is very good if you’re a fan of epic fantasy political shenanigans, and I think there are probably still not a lot of SFF series that follow a female lead from teenager-hood to late middle age the way this one does. I would kind of love to see it adapted in that it would probably be a hot mess but it might be a fun hot mess, especially if it got given to people who loved the books.

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2023 reading in review

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 07:01:27 GMT

Looking back on 2023 I really did read some wonderful books but it also seems like I read some of them a million years ago, which I think is just what happens when you have a baby; time does funny things. What I read was very largely dictated by what I could get out of the library, either physically or as e-books; I only noticed this year but I have transitioned almost entirely to reading library books (an easy 70-80% of my reading) and I buy very few books, and none in hardcopy. I would like to buy more in hardcopy this year, I think, because I do enjoy the physicality of reading them; I might make that a goal for 2024. I would also like to make a recommendation for physical books as a GREAT hobby for when you have a small kid. Extremely portable and stop-startable. Alas for my fibrecraft hobbies, which are going to have to wait patiently a while longer.

Also NB: picking a top 5 in some categories was VERY hard this year - there are many books I gave excellent reviews which aren't here because the competition was just too stiff.

Non-fiction

The top five non-fiction books I read were Pompeii (Mary Beard), Debt: the first 5000 years (David Graeber), Exactly (Simon Winchester), The Matter of Everything (Suzie Sheehy), and The Underworld (Susan Casey). The latter three are all a few years old now, the latter two published in 2023; all of them are extremely accessible and shed new light on things which are both conceptually familiar and little-understood at once.

Honourable mentions
Fen, Bog, and Swamp (Annie Proulx), essays on wetlands; Otherlands (Thomas Halliday) on prehistoric ecosystems; and How Far The Light Reaches (Sabrina Imbla), a memoir themed around marine biology.

Fiction (series starters)

To Shape a Dragon's Breath (Moniquill Blackgoose) is far and away the best series opener I read this year, simple in theory but with so much going on underneath. Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman), the Scarlet Pimpernel with poor people and vampires, was also good but they don't really compare - no offence to Ms Cogman who is a fine writer, and the same goes for The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix). The other series openers I would recommend I've dumped in a different category because I read the whole series.

Fiction (series continuations)

He Who Drowned The World (Shelly Parker-Chan), The Ivory Tomb (Melissa Caruso), Furious Heaven (Kate Elliott), The Faithless (C L Clarke), and The Oleander Sword (Tasha Suri) finished (the first two) or continued excellent trilogies/duologies. My cup overfloweth with fucking great queer specfic narratives (although being fair the Radiant Emperor duology is more historical fiction with genderfuckery).

Fiction (whole series)
The God-King Chronicles (Mike Brooks) and The Merchant Princes (Charles Stross) are a trilogy and trilogy of trilogies which are smart, fun, involve massive death and destruction, but are ultimately optimistic about humanity (even if Stross fully admits that was just he couldn't stand to end a series on a downer mid-pandemic).

Fiction (stand-alones)

Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh), Witch King (Martha Wells), Untethered Sky (Fonda Lee), Translation State (Ann Leckie), and A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys): sometimes a specfic book can just be a book. I would be remiss not to state that Some Desperate Glory is jaw-droppingly, astonishingly, if-it-does-not-win-many-awards-I-shall-be-outraged good - and consider the company in which I'm stating that!

Honourable mentions
Mammoths at the Gate (Nghi Vo), The Mimicking of Known Successes (Malka Older), Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz (Garth Nix), The Keeper's Six (Kate Elliott), and Cassiel's Servant (Jacqueline Carey). ~~OK, fine, I probably read technically better books not mentioned than that last but it's an honourable mention TO ME~~.

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Book round-up: December 2023 and January 2024

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 08:04:53 GMT

Summer + Christmas turns out to be EXTREMELY busy when you have a small child approaching toddler-hood so less lazy summer reading than in previous years, but the quality was probably higher on average.

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Book round-up: November 2023

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 21:28:55 GMT

ssh I know it's January I'm getting there. Don’t even ask about the Daycare Illness situation (which reduced my reading time significantly because looking after a sick child while sick is exhausting, my recommendation is: don’t.) I did read three books I really liked though! That was good! And one I thought was fine, and one I wanted to like but found too slow-paced to finish in the time allotted by the library. And because it's the future I can say that the Daycare Illness situation DID improve dramatically in December, thank god for summer.

Fiction

To Shape A Dragon's Breath (Moniquill Blackgoose)
This is one of my top two books of the year so far, and given that I’m writing this on December 20th there won’t be many other contenders. It’s a fantasy/alt-history boarding school novel about a young woman from a Native-owned island off the coast of our-world-New-England who finds a dragon egg and is required to attend an Anglish boarding school on the mainland to learn to be a ‘proper’ dragon-keeper. There is a lot of very very clever stuff going on with the worldbuilding and language and the way the story is told (the chapter titles form their own short story!) and having lived in Massachusetts for five years, it was really good to read a novel about the area by someone with mana whenua (as would be said here). Even if ‘boarding school novel’ is not your thing, really worth a go.

He Who Drowned The World (Shelley Parker-Chan)

Second half of the Radiant Emperor duology, a historical fantasy about the rise of the Ming dynasty (only loosely historical, based on some Wikipedia skimming). Continues to do interesting stuff with gender and sexuality and court politics and the question of what it means to have a fate, and what people do when they believe they are fated to achieve something. I think both books would benefit from being read in succession, though I managed fine having read the first last year.

The Archive Undying (Emma Mieko Candon)

Sci-fi/fantasy (sci-fi trimmings of Big Mechs and AI, but fantasy vibes) about raiding ruins for lost technology, making bad/good choices about your casual hookups, and…I can’t tell you much more because I didn’t manage to finish it before it was due back to the library. This is definitely a Me problem but also it’s a slow-paced book and I’m trying to be kinder to myself about not being able to keep attention on slow-paced books when I am stressed and tired. Genuinely hope I will come back to it some day but that probably won’t be soon as there’s a bit of a queue in reserves.

The Circumference of the World (Lavie Tidhar)

Literary fiction about science fiction more than sci-fi, about a fictional scifi novel that formed the basis for a fictional cult which Isn’t Scientiology (but is also Scientology, you know how this goes) and is now legendary but impossible to find, and various people who encounter it or are trying to find it. I felt a bit cheated because the blurb describes the main character as being a woman from Vanuatu and then she’s only really in it for the first few chapters and the PoVs all shift to various less interesting men. Also it was very funny every time in her section she told people she was from a far-off place they wouldn’t have heard of (the character is living in London so…I guess…but also to ME this is not true at all.) I think it was very well-written but firmly in the camp of Literary Fiction Is Fine I guess (also a Me problem, or at least quirk.)

Non-fiction

The Underworld (Susan Casey)

About the various crewed submersibles which travel to the deep sea, mostly following the author as she gets closer to (and eventually achieves) her goal of travelling in one. I found this fascinating because as a deep-sea researcher it touches on a lot of places and people I know of or have secondary connections to, and also because the author is SO obsessed with actually getting in a submersible herself. As a researcher I am firmly convinced that they’re fun but very much secondary to remotely operated vehicles (ROV) for getting actual science done (see also: space). Just going to sea for weeks at a time is enough for me! But not for the author, so you know what, good for her for making her dream happen. Also the book is very evocatively written and not inaccurate on any major points, things many science-related books do NOT accomplish.

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Book round-up: October 2023

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 06:08:00 GMT

The daycare lurgy train rolled on into October, and there was also an election (don’t ask). At least I read some nice books where the bad things were happening to other people.

Fiction

The River of Silver (S A Chakraborty)

A collection of short stories in her Daevabad trilogy universe. I was a little disappointed to realise I’d actually read a lot of them on her website a few years ago - I thought there’d be more new content - but there was lots of fun stuff here and some interesting insights into scrapped/early versions of the main books in the trilogy. Worth a look if you’re a fan.

Cassiel's Servant (Jacqueline Carey)

It genuinely never crossed my mind that Carey would give the legendary Kushiel’s Dart the Midnight Sun treatment (rewriting it from the PoV of the male love interest) nor if you asked me would I have said that it was at all necessary, but this is…actually a lot of fun? Carey has an excellent grip on who Joscelin is as a person and it was very funny to realise exactly how Extra Phedre is when you’re not viewing the world from inside her head. This may not have been a necessary book but I’m quite glad it exists. Plus it got us this sweet thoughtful discussion of how her understanding of gender has evolved since the series began.

The Iron Princess (Barbara Hambly)
Secondary-world fantasy about the impacts of and resistance to colonialism for resource extraction, also the main character is very clearly an expy of Elizabeth I of England (and the same for the rest of her family) but that has absolutely no bearing on the plot or anything, it just amused me to note. Lots of Hambly’s standard fantasy themes - burdened old wizard, interdimensional evil - and a bit grimdark for my taste overall. I also think it’s very tacky to have clearly Indigenous characters/cultures - specifically coded as Native American even - and base their suffering on real-world evil and then describe them as white people, it’s not clever or a new twist, it’s just tacky.

Non-fiction

Magnificent Rebels (Andrea Wulf)

History of a very specific time and place; the town of Jena in Germany where for a short but intense period in the late 18th century the Romantic movement blossomed. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t finish this because I missed book club due to illness and it is VERY long, so I wasn’t motivated to finish it once I didn’t have the goal of discussing it in a group, but Wulf is a very good writer and if you enjoy the minutiae of gossip about people in a small town having big ideas and big drama this is quite fun.

The Matter of Everything (Susan Sheehy)

Covers twelve major experiments which helped us understand the nature of matter (hence the punny title), from splitting the atom to the Large Hadron Collider not destroying the universe. A surprisingly easy read for the content, although I would have killed for a table of all the major subatomic particles as one does lose track of them after a while! Highly recommend if you’re interested in learning more about what subatomic particles *are*, other than something physicists like a lot.

Precious Little Sleep (Alexis Dubief)
I have largely spared you reviews of the various baby sleep books I have read (and yes there have been a few, in varying levels of desperation) because my honest belief after the better part of a year is that babies kind of do what they’re going to do vis a vis sleeping (or not), it inevitably gets better with time even if not nearly as fast as you’d hope, and most of the advice out there just encourages parents to torture themselves with the idea that they have much agency in the situation. But this one is both to my taste in terms of the writing style and sense of humour, and reasonably practical, or at least its advice came at the right time for me.

Otherlands (Thomas Halliday)
A series of vignettes of ecosystems past, each based on a major and well-studied palaeontological site, stepping back in time from the Pleistocene (tens of thousands of years ago) to the Ediacaran at the dawn of the age of multicellular life on Earth. The writing is very beautiful, although the amount of overlap at points with last month’s “The Rise and Reign of the Mammals” suggests to me I’m personally reaching the limits of what current pop science has to say on these topics. If you think palaeontology and the history of life on Earth are cool and interesting topics you will have a great time. If you don’t you might be persuaded that they are.

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Book round-up: September 2023

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:36:58 GMT

September 2023

As I mentioned in my last post, September this year was just a haze of being miserably unwell (not COVID) as well as like…five other things going on at once. I’m genuinely surprised I read five whole books. Otherwise my principal recreational activities were 1) misery and 2) Baldur’s Gate III.

Fiction

The Ten Percent Thief (Lavanya Lakshminarayan)

Satirical speculative fiction novel (it’s more literary than SFF in its concerns to my eye) about inequity and revolution in a future city-state but really about social media and how technology can divide us. To my personal tastes a bit lacking in characters to give a damn about, but I wasn’t bored.

Winter's Gifts (Ben Aaronovitch)

Another Rivers of London novella outside of Peter Grant’s sphere; this time FBI Agent Kimberley Reynolds is trapped in a snowy town on the Great Lakes and evil spirits are afoot. As usual well-plotted and executed, and I thought it did a fairly good job of handling the Native American/Indigenous elements of the story, in terms of both characters and invented history, which the worldbuilding/setting kind of requires but which would be very easy to muck up. As always it’s very fun to see glimpses of Peter through other people’s eyes, too. I think I like it the most of the three non-Peter novellas so far.

Non-fiction

Prehistoric Australasia (Michael Archer et al)

Lavishly illustrated coffee-table book showing prehistoric ecosystems of mostly AoNZ/Australia, as well as a couple of Pacific islands. Unfortunately they used only one palaeoartist and I am not a huge fan of his style; it’s a bit muddy and lifeless except when he’s drawing crocodiles. Someone please commission this man to do a whole book of crocodiles.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals (Steve Brusatte)

Fairly comprehensive account of the evolution and divergence of mammals in the post-Cretaceous world. I don’t retain a lot of detail (I think the aforementioned illness is responsible for that) but it was a very easy read, if this is a topic that interests you.

Takahē: Bird of Dreams (Alison Ballance)

Natural history of the takahē and conservation efforts since its rediscovery in the 1940s. Also a coffee-table book with many beautiful photographs. Obviously a work of love with extensive effort spent interviewing many of the people involved in takahē conservation over the years. The major takeaway for me was that the recently re-founded wild population in Kahurangi National Park is not actually doing very well, not disastrously but it’s a long way from being self-sustaining - I don’t think that’s been particularly well-covered in the media, although since it’s neither a success story nor a disaster that’s probably not surprising.

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Book round-up: July and August 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 01:14:01 GMT

I read a lot of books in these two months but writing them up was derailed comprehensively by the whole family being stricken with illness for most of September, just the worst kind of horrible lingering cold where you’re not very sick but you are unquestionably sick and it gets only fractionally better day by day. Do not recommend. Coming back to this now, I was going to do two posts but actually I spent most of these two months reading three series so I might as well discuss it all at once.

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Book round-up: June 2023

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:55:50 GMT

Absolutely impossible to believe the year is half gone already, AND YET here we are. Looks like I’m still on target to hit a hundred books this year (including re-reads, which is my usual target) but we’ll see how that goes once I’m back at work.

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Book round-up: May 2023

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:54:28 GMT

NB: Thought I posted this in June! Apparently did not!
Basically everything this month was a real cracker or not for me; luckily they fell more on the side of real crackers. Less time for reading though as the long breastfeeding sessions got shorter and the baby has got more awake. Not that I’m missing being on the couch or in bed 24/7, mind you!

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Book round-up: April 2023

Thu, 04 May 2023 05:22:45 GMT

Still on parental leave, still managing to read a decent amount (slightly less at 2am as the baby has got his middle-of-the-night feeds down to one or two max/I have learned to doze through once he’s got going). Walks to the local library are also proving to be a reliable baby sedative, and since the central library was closed for earthquake repairs our library system lets you reserve/request anything in the wider system to be delivered to your local library for free, which is incredibly helpful.

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Book round-up: March 2023

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 23:05:16 GMT

(It's April 1st in NZ, shhh.) One thing dominated this month and it is, of course, the fact that I produced a small human and am now trying to recover from that experience/keep the small human alive. However, turns out this leaves a lot of time for reading because it’s one of the few things that can be easily done while breastfeeding, and my entire life right now is essentially breastfeeding, sleeping (hah), and futilely attempting to do the occasional other thing like “cook/eat a real meal” or “shower”. (Actually that’s not quite true, we’ve also watched a lot of Babylon 5 and I'm starting on 9-1-1.) In any case! I sure have read some books, not infrequently at 2am.

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2022 reading in review

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 01:44:56 GMT

2022 was just…a weird, weird year (as if any of these Plague Years have not been), and that had a real hit on my reading. I had a hard time getting into books I wanted to read, I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to read, there were a lot of times where reading felt like a chore and yet not reading didn’t feel like an escape either. Nevertheless! I still read a bunch of things I really liked and that will stick with me - I just suspect that none of them will be re-reads for a while. In that spirit: my top recs of the year.

Non-fiction

The top five non-fiction books I read were Orwell's Roses (Rebecca Solnit), This is How the World Ends (Nicole Perlroth), Feathers (Thor Hanson), Plastic Fantastic (Eugenie Samuel Reich), and The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow). It’s a pretty eclectic set - climate essays, cybersecurity, the detailed history of a biological structure, the structure of a scientific fraud, and the question of how we understand our cultural history - but there was something meaningful to take away from all of them, plus they were all extremely well-written.

Honourable mentions
The Great Pretender (Susannah Cahalan), deconstructing a famous psychology 'experiment'; Too Much Money (Max Rashbrooke), on inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand; Bi (Julia Shaw), on the history of bisexuality.

Fiction (series starters)

Turns out I didn’t start a lot of new series this year! The two absolute standouts were The Obsidian Tower (Melissa Caruso) - a political-epic fantasy trilogy which is now complete - and A Free Man of Color (Barbara Hambly) - a historical mystery series in 1830s New Orleans which is ongoing but episodic.

Fiction (series continuations)

Jade Legacy (Fonda Lee), The Untold Story (Genevieve Cogman), and The Thousand Eyes (A K Larkwood) all stuck the landings on their respective series, but particular credit to The Thousand Eyes which made me like the first book much better in retrospect. And of course Nona the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) completely unhinged me in the best way. A FREEZING WORKS IN GREYTOWN.

Fiction (stand-alones)

Machine (Elizabeth Bear) is not technically stand-alone but only tangentially connected to the other book in its setting; love a space hospital. Last Exit (Max Gladstone) and Water Horse (Melissa Scott) were both profoundly good and hopeful in the face of despair.

Honourable mentions
Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (Tamsyn Muir); The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samatha Shannon); Amongst Our Weapons (Ben Aaronovitch); the Tensorate novella quadrilogy (Neon Yang). All solid but did not push the boat out for me in quite the same way.

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Book round-up: February 2023

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 05:26:50 GMT

A Month That Occurred. Floods! Cyclone! My wife got COVID! I had a bunch of pregnancy bullshit (spoilers: it worked out OK) that I didn’t need! Read some good books though, and both fiction books were cracker series-enders which is always very satisfying.

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Book round-up: January 2023

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 04:34:36 GMT

January was nice! I read a bunch of books and mostly chilled out. It was particularly nice when I look back on it from February, which I am not yet emotionally prepared to discuss (to quote our new PM, and Jesus that's still a weird thing to say in itself, the swarm of locusts is the last thing missing and there’s still a week to go).

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