Kake

This is going to be the last time (for now, at least) that I post about the books I’ve read. I need to decrease the number of small recurring tasks on my schedule, because they add up to a lot of time that I’d rather spend on larger tasks.

(Also, the below might seem super-negative, but that’s partly because I’ve recently been trying out lots of books I was dubious about in order to get them off my “I should see if I like this Kindle sample enough to buy the full thing” list.)

Definitely recommend

• Nightingale Wood, Stella Gibbons. I wasn’t quite sure about putting this in “Definitely recommend” because I Really Do Not Like what the author did to Hetty, and the only gender-non-conforming character is a terrible person, but overall I think it’s well worth reading. And if you liked the dry humour of Cold Comfort Farm, you’ll find some of it here too.
• The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows Of Time, Greg Egan (all re-reads). After much disappointment with recent Greg Egan, I retreated to the classics. He is of course perfectly entitled to change his mind about the sort of books he likes writing, but I wish there had been someone else to take over from him when he stopped writing about universes with different fundamental laws, and what it means to be a person instantiated in different media, and how science works when people really care about it. These three also possibly shouldn’t be in “Definitely recommend” because they certainly include discussion of some very distressing things, and if you’re going to read them then you need to be prepared for (a) many diagrams and (b) physics that will likely in part go over your head. But it’s OK to skim the parts you don’t understand, and every time you re-read them you’ll understand more. (A hint: if you’re struggling to understand how something works in 1 time + 3 space dimensions, try visualising it in 1 time + 2 space.)

Maybe recommend

• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, Farah Mendelson (DNF). This was well-researched and well-written; I'm just not interested enough in Heinlein to have kept reading.

Wouldn’t recommend

• Paladin’s Grace, T Kingfisher (DNF). This was... OK I suppose. I wasn’t a fan of the “jealous man with violent thoughts” parts, and there was nothing about the story that made me want to keep reading.
• The Long Earth, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (DNF). Gave up at 20% through because I wasn't finding it interesting.
• Cold Magic, Kate Elliott (re-read, DNF). I think my main issue with this is the writing, which is focused so heavily on a particular style that it both gets in the way of comprehensibility and occasionally ties itself in knots that it never quite gets out of. I think I’ve previously read the whole trilogy? But this time I just couldn't face any more of those over-elaborate clauses.
• Behind The Throne, K B Wagers (DNF). Again I thought the writing got in the way of itself — in this case there were just too many forced metaphors. Also I felt the book perhaps started in not quite the right place — there was a bit too much backstory exposition being squeezed in between the action.
• Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan (DNF). A collection of short SF. I got halfway through and had either DNFed or not enjoyed every story so far, so stopped.
• The Throne Of The Five Winds, S C Emmett (DNF). I didn't get past the second page of this, by which point I'd already encountered three footnotes, a misused semicolon, and descriptions of things the viewpoint character couldn’t possibly have seen. (To be clear, those weren’t the only reasons I stopped reading, but they didn’t exactly incline me to continue. I like footnotes but I feel they should provide extra, optional information, rather than worldbuilding that would be better placed in the actual story.)
• At Bertram’s Hotel, Agatha Christie (re-read). There are things I like about this — the descriptions of the hotel and its procedures — but I don’t like the overall moral that the author wants to get across. This is hilarious though: “Miss Marple awoke early because she always woke early. [...] glanced at her clock, half-past seven”. Oh for the leisured life of the middle classes.

Definitely recommend

• The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie (re-read). Yes. I still like this. I will probably re-read it again.
• The Palace Of Illusions, Chitra Divakaruni (re-read). I liked this the first time I read it — a woman-focused retelling of the Mahabharata — and I liked it even more this time, possibly because remembering some of the names and plot from last time made it easier to follow. And it manages to have a climactic battle scene that I didn’t find tedious! (See below.)

Maybe recommend

• The Once And Future King, T H White. This is a strange book which feels very much of its time, i.e. the 1950s. It has hardly any women in, and one of the minor characters is super-racist. Approximately 0.1% of it is hilarious (the dispensary for sick armour! Uncle Dap's fury over the “horrible furrows” of over-ornate armour design!), and every so often there's an interlude of interesting technical stuff about jousting or diving or something like that. But also there are huge long boring rambly sidetracks, and everyone in the story is terrible except King Pellinore, Elaine, and possibly Sir Ector and Gawaine. (King Pellinore is adorable, and I wish to imagine that part of the reason he loves that feather bed so much is that Sir Grummore sneaks into it every night.)
• Master Of The Five Magics, Lyndon Hardy (re-read). It's not impeccably well written, and I'm sure I remember it being more hard-fantasy than this, and there's a tedious battle scene at the end (I find almost all battle scenes tedious, though see above). But I do like the new afterword.
• The Summer We Got Free, Mia McKenzie (DNF). Judging by the Kindle sample it seems to be about a dark family tragedy, and that’s not something I’m keen on. It seemed well-written and interesting aside from that, though.
• The Lark, E Nesbit. I find the ignorance of class privilege in books like this is a little wearisome, and reading about people who're anxious about being caught in a lie makes me anxious too. But the latter part didn’t go on too long, and overall I didn’t regret reading it.

Wouldn’t recommend

• Dignity, Chris Arnade. This just felt a bit pointless and repetitive.
• The Ten Thousand Doors Of January, Alix E Harrow (DNF). I didn't even get to the end of the Kindle sample on this one. From what I did read, it seemed like it was going to be extremely clumsy about race and colonialism, and also that it was going to be one of those stories where only one woman gets to be both alive and a fully realised character.

Written by friends

• Favours Exchanged, L A Hall.
• Mistress In Her Household, L A Hall.

I decided to have a month of re-reads, which I mostly stuck to except for also reading the recently-released sequel of one of my re-reads.

Definitely recommend

• An Accident of Stars and A Tyranny of Queens, Foz Meadows (re-reads). Realistic portal fantasy. These can be a bit heavy-handed in their right-on-ness and Lessons In How To Not Make Neurodivergent People Feel Uncomfortable, but there's a good story and some good writing and some complex characters and I'll likely re-read them again.
• The Steerswoman, The Outskirter’s Secret, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein (re-reads). These are so good! They’re very cleverly written, but in a way that makes me feel the author is doing her absolute best to give me a puzzle I’ll enjoy, rather than showing off how clever she is. Knowing the overall answer to the puzzle doesn’t spoil enjoyment of the gradual reveal, and indeed there’s no one point where you “should” get it — different people will get it at different points, and it honestly doesn’t matter when you figure it out. There will eventually be more in this series, and I’m really looking forward to them.
• Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell (re-read). A very sweet story about a fanfic author in college, with plenty of friend/family relationships as well as romantic ones.

Maybe recommend

• Carry On (re-read) and Wayward Son (sequel), Rainbow Rowell. I enjoyed Carry On the first time I read it, but found it less interesting to read while knowing what happens. It’s also very obvious that it was written by an American despite being set in the UK. I do like the multiple viewpoints though. I feel as if I should have liked Wayward Son, but somehow I never found it particularly absorbing. There’s nothing actually wrong with it; maybe it just suffered from association with my disappointing experience with Carry On.

I have a new policy for these book posts — from now on I’m going to have a completely separate section for books written by friends/acquaintances. It just feels a bit weird making judgments on them in public. (Even though everything so far, including this month, has been either “Definitely recommend” or “Definitely recommend if you’ve read the previous ones in the series”.)

Definitely recommend

• The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley. Quite gory in places, and I did occasionally wonder if it was going to breach my (very low) “too much horror” threshold, but it never actually did. I wasn’t surprised to see a copyeditor thanked in the acknowledgments — the whole of the text was just beautifully finished, with no rough edges getting in the way of the story.

Maybe recommend

• Earthseed, Pamela Sargent (re-read). I read this when I was a kid, and decided to re-read it as part of working out which of my paper books to keep and which to send to the charity shop (to make room for other books). I’d either forgotten or not realised it was YA, which isn’t really my thing now. I remember enjoying it when I was younger though. (Also, I started this in February and only finished it in August. I’m not very good at remembering to finish reading paper books.)
• Binti (re-read), Binti: Home (re-read), and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor. The way mathematics is used in these novellas bothered me the first time I read them, but this time round I just accepted that the word in the Binti universe doesn’t mean the same thing it does in the real one. Mathematics in Binti isn’t a matter of creatively and rigorously working out the properties of abstract structures; it’s a sort of meditation based on mental repetition of integers and simple formulae. But I don’t understand why their smartphones astrolabes don’t have backups! In any case, I’m unlikely to re-read these. They’re fine for what they are, just not something I feel drawn back to.
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers. I don’t like the implication that long nails are hideous and make your fingers useless, nor the assertion that that your average academic does nothing other than “teach the past”. I liked the framing whereby the narrator explained things from their time (which is in our future) “in case they’ve become obsolete” — a good way to get around infodumping. But why don’t disabled people get to go into the astronaut gardens? I find this author’s books a little frustrating since they’re overall very close to things I really want to read, but they all have aspects that somewhat spoil it for me.
• Flowers At Dawn, Singai Ma Elangkannan translated by A R Venkatachalapathy. There’s a lot to like about this! It’s set among Tamils in Singapore during the Second World War, and it talks about food (including being creative about it during shortages) which is always a bonus, and the author really gets you to care about the main characters. But I could have done without the storyline of a man aggressively and damagingly pursuing a woman who’s not interested.

Wouldn’t recommend

• 84K, Claire North (DNF). DNF mainly because of the really annoying fragmented sentence thing that made it unnecessarily hard to follow what was going on and who was saying what. It’s set in a dystopia, and it struck me as somewhat unrealistic that people were still allowed to pay for things with cash.
• Utopia Five, A E Currie. That’s not how games work; you don’t just set up a world and put people in it without designing an actual game. Also I don’t think defibrillators work like that. And it seems really implausible that a world where a climate change incident had killed billions of people would really decide to organise its future around storing and processing massive amounts of data, like electricity generation doesn’t have a carbon cost. The idea that ubiquitous security cameras can entirely prevent crime seems very strange, and if they don’t have crime, why do they have prisons? (I didn’t appreciate the prison rape joke either.) I wished there had been some exploration of the negative effects of universal surveillance, and some acknowledgement that not everyone is happy to release the data they produce into the public domain for companies to profit from.
• Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard (DNF). Captures the “women aren’t people” vibe of On The Road surprisingly well. Also I love how Naomi Klein used her introduction to plug not one but two of her own books. I got 20% of the way through, disliking the author/narrator more for every page I ploughed through, and gave up after he asserted that his company “needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family”.
• Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. People went to university at 14! I’d forgotten that this is where “big-endian” comes from. The author is obsessed with poo, the narrator is a massive sycophantic grump, and sentences should not contain 137 words.

Written by friends

• Incalculable Diffusion, L A Hall. The latest in the series.

Definitely recommend

• The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker. This was very good, if emotionally difficult at times, and I would recommend it with a warning for fatphobia (dear authors, please stop doing this, it doesn't make your books better). There's also a lot of violence and misogyny, but that's an in-universe thing rather than bigotry leaking in through the fourth wall.
• Lent, Jo Walton. I didn’t find the first part of this particularly gripping, but because I trust Jo Walton I persisted, and I'm glad I did. I'm looking forward to re-reading it now I know what happens in the later parts. And I'm not saying the first part was boring, either — I don't know a lot about that period of history but I re-watched The Borgias last year and it was interesting to see another retelling of the events. It was kind of the opposite of Robert Graves’ King Jesus in a way — King Jesus gives real-world explanations for supernatural events, whereas Lent gives supernatural explanations for an individual’s real-world behaviour. The ending was... I won't say a let-down, since I thought the tone was just right — matter-of-fact rather than overly dramatic - but I did find it a bit underwhelming.

Maybe recommend

• Efuru, Flora Nwapa (re-read, DNF). The dialogue is often very awkward and stilted, which is a problem when it’s the way that most of the story is developed. I liked this the first time I read it but didn’t finish it this time — perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood.
• In The Last Analysis, The James Joyce Murder, and Poetic Justice, Amanda Cross. I didn't actually realise how long ago the first one of these was published (1964) until I googled to check — nothing felt dated to me except some stuff about telephones and the reference to someone as “colored” (though I suppose the uncritical acceptance of Freud as a "genius" also comes under this). I was a little baffled by the idea that the baseline for analysis is that you go every day — was that really a thing? The second one has a couple of shockingly homophobic passages, equating gay men with paedophiles so casually that at first I didn't quite twig what I'd just read. The third one seemed to be assuming a lot more background knowledge about American universities than I actually have, and I struggled to stay interested. Overall it looks like a good series, though, and I’ll continue with it.
• Terra Nullius, Claire G Coleman. This kind of dragged a bit, and some of the writing and plotting felt a bit clumsy. There was a Very Obvious Twist, and I found myself quite grateful that the author didn't make me wait too long before revealing it.
• The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal. This was OK. I kept waiting for it to get interesting but it never really did. I'm unlikely to read the sequel.

Wouldn’t recommend

• In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan (DNF). The worldbuilding is paper-thin, the protagonist is unrealistically good at things, and the structure is non-existent. And the whole “portal fantasy with a genre-aware viewpoint character” has been done before and better. I also got a strong feeling that it was going to do that “bisexual man dumps a woman for a man who’s actually been the love of his life all along” thing, which I do not like. But if you're after some light reading that goes on for a very long time and doesn't tax your brain, you might find this useful.
• How Not To Run A Club, Peter Hook. There's an interesting story buried in here, but it's constantly being interrupted by dry recitals of facts, none of which ever seem to be referenced again. The structure is also very confusing, with large passages told in the third person and set in italics for no obvious reason. Also, the thing about being off your face is that it makes meaningless chaotic events seem interesting, but this effect doesn’t carry over when you write them down in a book.

Another book post, rather more timely than the last one.

Definitely recommend

The Healers’ Road and The Healers’ Home, S E Robertson. Low-tech low-violence fantasy with a sprinkling of magic. I enjoyed the first one but wasn't sure whether to read the second until I saw a review (spoilery for the first one) talking about how it starts quite slowly with the protagonists repeatedly wandering around town, choosing furniture and buying food, and then I knew it was a book for me.

Slow River, Nicola Griffith. A near-future sort-of noir, sort-of thriller, sort-of romance with excellent queer representation and an interesting exploration of future sewage technology. (One of the reasons I liked this was the same reason I liked the potato book — it gives details of ways of solving technical problems instead of handwaving it all away. But far from the only reason.)

Maybe recommend

The Woman Who Fooled The World, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano. This was... OK, I guess? It kept me vaguely entertained while I was reading it, but it hasn’t stuck with me, possibly because it’s a story I’ve heard lots of times before (both with this particular woman and with others).

The Binding, Bridget Collins. This was kind of annoying, in that the premise was known to everyone except the protagonist for no apparent reason except to add mystery and suspense to the first few chapters. And then there was the gratuitous infanticide. Ugh and also the whole thing about being chosen. Also I'm fed up of m/m romances that work out well for the protagonists at the expense of a woman. But if you can overlook all that, then it’s quite a good read!

The Compleet Molesworth, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. A klassick of eng. lit. hem-hem. (Though full of casual racism etc.)

The Ironmaster's Tale, L A Hall. This would be in “Definitely recommend” except that if you haven’t read The Comfortable Courtesan it won’t make sense (please read The Comfortable Courtesan and then mentally move this to the top category). I love seeing retellings of previous stories through other characters’ eyes and with extra detail of their activities and thoughts, and that’s just what this is.

Perihelion Summer, Greg Egan. I love Greg Egan’s earlier work but found this kind of meh. Even a kind-of-meh Egan is a decent read though.

Wouldn’t recommend

The Slynx, Tatyana Tolstaya translated by Jamey Gambrell. DNF. Bit too stream-of-consciousness for me, and the style got in the way of working out what the story was about. This might have been the fault of the translator — it did feel a bit clumsily translated.

Artemis, Andy Weir. Second novel by the author of the potato book. There was all this sort-of fake diversity, where characters are described as being Saudi or Vietnamese or whatever, but speak and act exactly like early-21st-century Americans (a contrast to his stereotypical ja-saying German of the previous book). Also, their law-enforcement system is terrifying. DNF, partly because I lost interest in the plot and partly because I lost patience with the clumsy characterisation.

A Big Ship At The Edge Of The Universe, Alex White. Generic future-fantasy with magic crowbarred in. DNF.

Rien's Rebellion, C Z Edwards. Confusing and somewhat exhausting to read, and too many storylines left hanging. I realise it's the first in a series, but that doesn't mean it should just stop in the middle of everything.

Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett. This felt quite clumsy: the made-up swearwords (I love made-up swearwords, but these were so clumsily motivated that every time a character used one it annoyed me enough to pull me out of the story), the shoehorned-in exposition, the plot contradictions (literally in the space of two pages, a conversation went from “I tried to kill you, come to return the favour?” to “Ha, yes, of course I can't kill you because your mum would be annoyed”). Also, the default gendering of a sentient object to “he” really bugged me. DNF.

As previously, by default I’m 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 can remember there being any content that needs to be warned for (cw).

I’m wondering though whether it would be better (as in, more interesting to those of you reading this, and more likely to inspire comments) if I stopped doing the content warnings and instead wrote a sentence or two about what I thought about the book. (I don’t have the energy to do both.) What do you think?

Definitely recommend:

• Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower (cw: suicide, murder)

Maybe recommend:

• Once Upon A River, Diane Setterfield (DNF) (cw: suicide)
• The Breath Of The Sun, Rachel Fellman (cw: miscarriage, descriptions of dead bodies, reanimated dead bodies)
• The Rig, Roger Levy (DNF)
• The Overstory, Richard Powers (DNF) (cw: domestic violence)
• Shades Of Grey, Jasper fforde
• Murder At The Vicarage, The Body In The Library, The Moving Finger, A Murder Is Announced, They Do It With Mirrors, A Pocket Full Of Rye, 4:50 From Paddington, A Caribbean Mystery, At Bertram’s Hotel (all re-reads) (cw: racism, classism, ablism, homophobia, fatphobia, murder)
• The Edge, Dick Francis (cw: suicide, animal death/mutilation, violence)
• To The Hilt, Dick Francis (cw: violence, kink-shaming)

Wouldn’t recommend:

• The Synapse Sequence, Daniel Godfrey (DNF) (cw: vomiting)
• Origamy, Rachel Armstrong (DNF)
• Icefall, Stephanie Gunn (DNF)
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (cw: “really intense fatphobia that the author definitely agrees with”, child death, murder, violence, torture, rape, suicide)
• Concrete Faery, Elizabeth Priest (cw: cultural appropriation, dubious consent)

As per usual, by default I’m 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 can remember there being any content that needs to be warned for (cw). I’m happy to expand on the reasons for my opinions if anyone is interested though — just comment and ask.

Definitely recommend:

• The Comfortable Courtesan, volumes 1–12, L A Hall (re-read) (cw: racism, racial slurs, anti-semitism, colonialism, rape, violence, murder, animal death, forced institutionalisation, miscarriage, child death)

Maybe recommend:

• The City Of Brass, S A Chakraborty (cw: slavery, torture, racism, genocide, violence, possession, mutilation)
• Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata (cw: misogyny, ablism, emotional abuse)
• Rickshaw Boy, Lao She translated by Howard Goldblatt (cw: coercion to drink alcohol, implied rape, misogyny, child death)
• The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gipsy Britain, Damian Le Bas (cw: racism, racial slurs)

Wouldn’t recommend:

• After The Party, Cressida Connolly (cw: anti-semitism, POV fascists, fascist apologism, animal death)
• Just One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor (cw: violence, voyeurism, animal death, pointless heterosexual drama)
• Mr Fox, Helen Oyeyemi (DNF) (cw: murder)
• The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway (cw: animal death)
• Onyx & Ivory, Mindee Arnett (DNF)
• Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner (DNF)

I also tried to read State Of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang (cw: child abuse), but by the time I got to the end of my sample it had become unavailable in the Kindle store! Maybe one day it will come back.

What have you recently read and enjoyed? (Feel free to point towards posts on your own journal.) Do you have any opinions (good or bad) on the books above?

As per usual, by default I’m 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 can remember there being any content that needs to be warned for (cw). I’m happy to expand on the reasons for my opinions if anyone is interested though — just comment and ask. This month’s selection was a bit more diverse than last month’s!

Definitely recommend:

• Ammonite, Nicola Griffith

Maybe recommend:

• Surrey Killing Fields, Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society (cw: animal death)
• Pulchritude, Ana Mardoll (DNF) (cw: mild body horror)
• The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (DNF) (cw: slavery, rape, murder)
• Deluxe, Dana Thomas (cw: racism, classism, child abuse, violence)
• Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Kelly Robson (cw: extreme body modification, murder) (extra warning: if you buy this on Kindle, when you get to the end it shows you an author page which includes a disturbing cover image from one of the author's other books)
• The Wrong Stars, Tim Pratt (re-read)

Wouldn’t recommend:

• Watchmaker of Filigree Street (cw: internalised misogyny, casual racism)
• Empress of a Thousand Skies, Rhoda Belleza (DNF)
• The Dreaming Stars, Tim Pratt (DNF)

What have you recently read and enjoyed? (Feel free to point towards posts on your own journal.) Do you have any opinions (good or bad) on the books above?

As per last month, by default I’m 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 can remember there being any content that needs to be warned for (cw). I’m happy to expand on the reasons for my opinions if anyone is interested though — just comment and ask.

Recommend: Nothing for a “definitely recommend” this month!

Maybe recommend:

• The Armor Of Light, Melissa Scott and Lisa A Barnett (possession, discussion of paedophilia)
• Eat Up, Ruby Tandoh
• All Systems Red, Martha Wells
• So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo (DNF)
• Semiosis, Sue Burke (cw: violence, murder, rape)
• Senlin Ascends, Josiah Bancroft (cw: murder, violence, slavery)
• Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (re-read) (cw: classism, racism, torture, slavery)
• A Burglar's Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh
• Daggerspell, Katharine Kerr (cw: child abuse, violence, incest, slavery, possession, whorephobia, possibly femmephobia)

Wouldn’t recommend:

• Free Food For Millionaires, Min Jin Lee (cw: dieting, domestic abuse including violence, sexual coercion, ablist slurs) (DNF)
• Resistance, BR Sanders (DNF)
• Unidentified Funny Objects 2, edited by Alex Shvartsman
• The Boy Who Loved Too Much, Jennifer Latson (cw: ablism, own-voice-erasure, fatphobia, Simon Baron-Cohen)
• New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson (DNF)

What have you recently read and enjoyed? (Feel free to point towards posts on your own journal.) Do you have any opinions (good or bad) on the books above?