Books read in January 2020

Definitely recommend

Laughing All The Way To The Mosque, Zarqa Nawaz (re-read). A memoir by the writer of Little Mosque on the Prairie, funny without being superficial.
Daughter of the Bear King, Eleanor Arnason. I love the protagonist's love for bathrooms! The writing is quite idiosyncratic in places, with lots of short choppy sentences (I recall complaining about this in another book, but somehow it works here). I like that the protagonist is a 40-something woman, and that the author explicitly set out to write a fantasy that wasn’t good vs. evil.
Swordheart, T Kingfisher (re-read). Yep, still like this, and it does bear re-reading. I'd forgotten that it was going to be a trilogy! Though there seems to be no news of the second one yet.
The Star Side Of Bird Hill, Naomi Jackson. Three generations of women in Barbados and Brooklyn (mainly Barbados). I liked this and will probably re-read it.
Swallow, Sefi Atta. The lives of a mother and daughter in rural and urban Nigeria. Some parts are a bit distressing, but overall it’s a positive story.
Smallbone Deceased, Michael Gilbert. I loved the dry humour in this, and had several actual LOL IRL moments.

Maybe recommend

Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City, K J Parker. I like the idea of this very much — a fantasy-like (albeit no-magic) setting with an engineering focus — but there are too many random sexist and homophobic parts, and although the author seems to be trying to address racism, he doesn't seem to have a very nuanced understanding of it.
Stoner, John Williams (DNF). I stopped about halfway through this because I just really disliked the viewpoint character. It’s fine to sleepwalk through your life if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not OK to mistreat other people along the way (e.g. he doesn’t seem to have considered that if he stopped raping his wife then maybe she’d be less depressed). The writing is good, though.
Shadows Of Athens, J M Alvey. A detective story set in Ancient Greece. I liked the inclusion of details like contraception and clothing, but I didn’t find it really drew me in.
Gone, Min Kym. This wasn't bad, though it did seem to contradict itself in places, and also I'm sceptical that the author can really remember so many details from when she was seven. I wished there had been more technical details, like the stuff about flying staccato and the modifications she made to her violins. (I also wish she'd left her manipulative boyfriend a hell of a lot earlier, but that’s for her benefit, not mine, and if she had done then there probably wouldn’t have been a book.)
Instantiation, Greg Egan. Not sure what I think of this collection. A couple of them stop instead of ending. I was amused to discover that he ended up doing two sequels to the one he wrote specifically to make fun of Adam Roberts.
Slow Bullets, Alastair Reynolds. This was OK, but it felt more like there were six people on that ship than 600. Also the villain was very one-dimensionally villainous.

Wouldn’t recommend

Monday Begins On Saturday, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (DNF). Got 37% of the way through and there'd only been two or three brief parts I actually found interesting, and it felt like it was taking a very very long time to get anywhere, so I stopped.
Fall, Or Dodge In Hell, Neal Stephenson (DNF). This started out pretty interesting, with some nice noodling about how consciousness works and so on (though quite a lack of clue about how social media works), but about 20% of the way through it cut to a near-future where regressively-Christian parts of the USA are referred to as “Ameristan”, and that just bugged me so much I had to stop.
Annex (DNF). Post-alien-invasion story with a teenage trans protagonist. I’ve tried reading this a few times now, but it just doesn't feel plausible to me either in terms of the worldbuilding or the tone of the children’s POV.
Children Of The Star, Sylvia Engdahl. There's a lot of rather unpleasant ideas in here: individual genius saves the world, subjugating the masses for the good of the masses, a genetic basis for intelligence, disgust at intellectual disabilities. I also found it pretty tedious to read at times — it would have been better if it had been less long. (And a lot of it felt like the sort of job interview that Ask A Manager says you should not put up with.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

miss_newham

I like the sound of 'Laughing All the Way to the Mosque' - will put it on my reading list!

nou

Hurrah!

doseybat

Interesting, I found Stoner quite moving, and remember it better than most books I have read since. Wonder whether the Russian cultural-specific humour failed to come across or work in the translation of the Monday Begins on Saturday.

Re Stoner, I just couldn’t get past how badly Edith was treated by both the protagonist and the author. That really was the only thing I disliked about the book, but she was treated so poorly that I couldn’t carry on with it. I’ve downloaded a sample of his Augustus, though, and will see if I get on better with that.

I think probably my main problem re Monday Begins On Saturday was that I find most humour in writing to be something that, at best, avoids getting in the way. It’s not quite as bad as fight scenes, which I actively dislike, but there does have to be a lot more than humour in something for me to stay engaged.

I might be experiencing something similar with trying to read The Calculating Stars. Finding the sexism towards the main character so distressing that I just really don't want to pick the book up again at all. Maybe I should allow it to become a DNF. Even though the quality of writing is top notch.

Think I feel similarly about both humor and the violence. Why does so much fiction, especially of the video variety, insist on lengthy violence constantly?? It a struggle for me.

I think I didn’t find The Calculating Stars as bad because I had no reason to believe that the author agreed with the sexism. I didn’t find it a great book overall (though as you say, the writing is good) so would vote for DNFing it and picking up something else :)

Violent scenes in films/TV are such a turn-off for me. They also feel somewhat wasteful, like I’m sure the choreography and filming must have taken loads of time and expertise, and stuntpeople do get injured while making these scenes, yet I’m generally fastforwarding them or picking up a book until they’re over. But a lot of people do love them. Almost everything

bob watches has violence in it.

I am sad we both seem to be such a minority the entertainment industry doesn't cater :(

Interested what you didn't like about Calculating Stars

I just didn’t find it very interesting. It dragged a bit, and I found it quite hard to care about the protagonist.

The other book by the Strugatsky brothers I was attached to in my early teens is It Is Difficult To Be A God, and a have a copy in Russian. But somewhat hesitant to recommend it because it might have both racism and imperialism, probably with plenty of unconscious misogyny. Their books are sort of cultural cornerstones for my parents' social group and I am not sure to what extent that actually correlates with quality or how you might see them.

There seems to be a film of the book, so I might give that a go since I’m trying my own version of

liv’s world film project, and Russia is coming up soon.

Mum happens to be here and she says that film is awful and doesn't have much in common with the book which she loves.

Ah, thanks for the warning!

Mum thought about it and sent extra info in case you may find it helpful:

Her top Russian film rec for non-Russians:
"Москва слезам не верит" - sctraight forward melodrama, got Oscar in 1981.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Does_Not_Believe_in_Tears

I can also recommend another good novel by Strugatski:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)

Thank you! I’m following

liv’s extra rule for the world film project, which is that the films should be from the 21st century, but I’ve added Москва слезам не верит to my Letterboxd watchlist for the future.

I’ve also downloaded a sample of Definitely Maybe!

Remembering that I didn't mention the Strugatsky classic which I love and you probably know already: Roadside Picnic and it's film Stalker

Thanks! And no, I didn’t already know that one :)

Glad to be able to introduce you then! Roadside Picnic is good quality classic scifi, not Russia specific, probably sexist in the same way most of that generation of literature is, haven't reread for a while - but have reread more than once. The Tarkovsky film I think is actually a lot more famous than the book but also a very different style, surreal existential depressing slow arts film.

Apparently personal experience of the life in Soviet Russia is an essential prerequisite to appreciate Monday Begins. Like it is for Master & Margarita which is why it doesn't export well either

I’m currently around 75% through John Williams’s Augustus and I like it a lot more than Stoner. Unless it deteriorates rapidly in the last 25% it’ll be going on my “to re-read” list.

Ooh! How is it similar and different?

OK, so I think at least part of the reason I like it is that it’s a telling of a story I’ve already read/watched several tellings of, and I do like that sort of thing.

The epistolary format is not one I generally enjoy, but again I think knowing the overall plot in advance helped there.

Having Julia as a POV character is a big advance on the misogyny of Stoner.

The writing is tight and very good — everything is there for a reason. The pacing is also just right.

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