Books read in February 2018

[nou]

As per last month, I'm not writing reviews or even mini-reviews, but just stating whether I'd recommend the book (yes/maybe/no), whether I decided not to finish it (DNF), whether it's a re-read, and whether I have any content warnings (cw). Please don't take the content warnings as definitive — most of them are done from memory and I may have forgotten some.

Recommend:

• Durians Are Not The Only Fruit, Wong Yoon Wah translated by Jeremy Tiang
• Incandescence, Greg Egan (re-read)
• The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows Of Time, Greg Egan (re-reads) (cw: incest, child death)
• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (cw: child abuse, domestic violence, fatphobia)
• Beasts And Super-Beasts, Saki (re-read)
• The Sword Smith, Eleanor Arnason (re-read) (cw: slavery)

Maybe recommend:

• When William Came, Saki (cw: anti-semitism, fatphobia)
• Whose Turn For The Stairs, Staying On Past The Terminus, and Last Dance At The Wrecker's Ball (cw: domestic violence, racial slurs, child death)
• Hild, Nicola Griffith (re-read) (cw: slavery, rape, incest, child death, graphic violence)

What have you recently read and enjoyed? (Feel free to point towards posts on your own journal.)

Comments

[miss_newham]

I read and enjoyed 'Concretopia' by John Grindrod which has a fair bit about New Addington in it!

[nou]

Oooh, yes, that’s a good one, and yes, I particularly enjoyed the New Addington parts. I was telling someone about New Addington when I was in Glasgow, I think because we were having a disagreement over whether trams are a good thing or not.

[damerell]

The Mira Grant with the anthropophagic mermaids and the latest-ish inCryptid book, Magic for Nothing [1].

GURPS Imperial Rome, for possible game-running, and bits of Mary Beard's SPQR (which I've read before).

[1] I say latest-ish because McGuire writes at a phenomenal speed, like Fanthorpe only good, and may have cranked out another three while I wasn't looking.

[nou]

She does indeed publish at quite a rate! Who’s Fanthorpe?

Would you recommend SPQR? I’m a bit frowny about Mary Beard at the moment, since she posted actual White Women’s Tears on Twitter, but she certainly sounds like she’d be an interesting author.

[damerell]

http://www.peltorro.com/intro.htm is as good a guide to Fanthorpe as any, but a potted summary is that during the 50s he wrote most of a pulp publisher's SF output, cranking out books in under a fortnight each. I think that link may even underestimate his output since he says he used also to crank out some crime and Westerns. His purple prose style is highly distinctive.

He is a fascinating chap IRL - he used to attend DWcon and is quite cheerful and amusing about the Badger days. He does some very good stuff about conspiracy theories (from the POV of someone who occasionally ran Call of Cthulhu) - in particular he doesn't make my sceptical teeth grate because it's always carefully phrased in the form "wouldn't it be interesting if this was an ancient Templar ruin?" and not "this is ...".

Apropos of which I didn't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Glasby - the other half of Badger and apparently even more prolific than Fanthorpe, although his peak output may have been lower (and one is less likely to have read a Glasby since he did less SF.)

Without getting into the rest of it, I would strongly recommend SPQR if you're interested in that kind of thing. It only gets up to Caracalla in 212 AD; since I also enjoyed Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life Of A Medieval Empire and for complex disorganisation reasons tend to see both books lying around, I somewhat feel I'm waiting for someone to write the middle volume in the trilogy.

[nou]

Thank you! Fanthorpe sounds amazing. That tooth-brushing scene is something else.

SPQR added to to-read list, thanks!