I was home all of June, we had Scintillation here in Montreal which meant lots of friends were in town that week, so I had lots of excellent hanging out and live conversation, in addition to the convention, which was great. I read seventeen books, and this month’s crop turned out to be an odd mix of books I liked very much and books I didn’t like for various reasons.
At the Feet of the Sun, Victoria Goddard (2022)
Direct sequel to The Hands of the Emperor, read that first. But do read it first and go on to this, because that’s good and this is better, or at least it’s doing more of the things I liked in the first one. It’s not just that nobody else is doing UBI in a fantasy world, it’s that these books are very earnest and very readable and doing a whole lot of interesting things nobody else is doing in this kind of way.
I can see reading these as comfort books or fantasies of things going right, because they are fun and gentle and assume most people have goodwill. But they’re also doing a whole lot of textured worldbuilding, and they have kinds of characters and clashes of societies you don’t often see done well in genre. This book has people literally sailing a canoe through the sky and bargaining with the actual sun, and those sequences are full of sense of wonder, but what it’s really about is the significance of what Goddard here calls “fanoa” and Plato and I call agape, and which English mildly calls “friendship” and so often seems to think is only for kids that I am delighted to find a whole long grown-up fantasy novel focusing on the significance of a close non-romantic friendship.
Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy, Hannah Marcus (2020)
Very interesting book that looks at how medical works were and were not censored by the Inquisition in Italy, with lots of fascinating detail on applications for licenses and actual required crossings out in books. Some zoomed-in case studies, some zoomed-out general cases, all really interesting. Well written, too. If you’re interested in this kind of thing at all, really worth it.
Winter Holiday, Arthur Ransome (1933)
Re-read. This is one of the ones I read over and over as a kid. It’s winter, and the Swallows and Amazons are playing at being polar explorers on the frozen lake, and two new children join them. This book centers on Dorothea, who likes telling stories, and through her eyes we see all the familiar characters and her neurodivergent brother. The children are quarantined for mumps and have extra holidays though most of them spend them outside flying yellow quarantine flags on their sledges. Same warnings as with the earlier volumes for unexamined colonialism and racism, except this time with a more polar flavour.
Ymir, Rich Larson (2022) Retelling of Beowulf on another planet, fast moving, interesting, well-thought-through, good worldbuilding and pacing of revelation, but relentlessly grim. This is a book where we never leave the tight third point of view of a nihilistic, traumatized drug-seeking man who is on a planet he doesn’t want to be on, surrounded by people who hate him, coping with really unpleasant events in a terrible climate. This is a really good book, but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading it. Larson has written a bunch of really interesting and exciting short fiction in varied registers, so I have hope for future books that are perhaps a tad more cheerful.
Pirouette, Susan Scarlett (1949)
Re-read. I never like an older romance where the heroine has to choose between the hero and her career, because she always chooses the hero and gives up her own life. These days people are at least subtle about this. However, if you want to read one example of this subgenre, read Pirouette. Our heroine, Judith, has been in ballet for years. She has a mother who is obsessed with her daughter’s career and neglects the other children. Judith is on the verge of success and independence; she is finally being chosen to dance solo roles. Peter, the hero, is one of those dominating men who is sure he knows what Judith needs better than she does, and it’s him.
He can’t settle down to his office job after the excitement of WWII, and is going to go off to start a new life in the offworld colonies. It’s as if the book has a tragic sequel hanging over it, because he’s heading off to make a new life (which the book approves as a happy ending) in Rhodesia, land of the future. So for one thing, the characters have nothing in common except sexual chemistry, no shared interests, no shared background—they come from different classes, and Judith knows nothing except ballet, which Peter dismisses as insignificant.
Then, they’re White British people with zero experience of farming, or Africa, about to go to farm in Rhodesia. I have read Doris Lessing’s autobiography of growing up the child of essentially these people, who will shortly come to hate and resent and blame each other, while failing to farm and being vile to the Indigenous people. But it’s worse than that, because Lessing was born in 1919, but this is 1949. Consider the history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe after this. Likely they will die horribly or flee penniless. It seems they are heading for a life almost as grim and terrible as that of Ymir, and the weight of that reality rather tears through this slight romance. The background story of Judith’s family is very realistic and well done, which actually makes things worse.
Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy, Nicholas Terpstra (2013)
This is a really interesting book about how charity worked in specific cases in a specific place—Bologna, in Renaissance Italy—and how people thought about what they were doing and what good it did. It’s not just the idea of the deserving poor, but also of the deserving rich, who deserved the (heavenly) benefit of doing charity. They tried a lot of things in Bologna over time, and some of them worked better than others. Really good, thought-provoking, well written, also really specific and specialised and most people are probably less interested in the subject than I am.
Julia, Sandra Newman (2023)
This is a retelling of Orwell’s 1984 from Julia’s point of view that doesn’t understand either Orwell or dystopias. Dystopia is, I’ve argued, a mainstream genre, but it does need some ability to do consistent worldbuilding. Having said that, this could have been a decent short story or novelette, there is a point to be made about Orwell’s shortsightedness about women and the fact that Julia in the original is totally a manic pixie dream girl. But this book, while vividly and compellingly written, doesn’t get it in really fundamental ways. There isn’t a lot of love or hope in 1984 but making the choice to have absolutely none here meant that the book has less contrast and therefore less impact. Increasing the length and detail of the torture similarly seemed to me unnecessary. But it is also much more focused on the specificity of Stalin and the 1940s than Orwell was, the idea that there could be any present-day applicability to the cult of a leader’s personality seems to be entirely absent from Julia.
Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino (1993)
Short story collection, mostly of very short stories, some genre and some not, some in a space of surrealism where genre is arguable. At his best these are amazing, vivid, unexpected little stories from directions nobody else would think of, but some of them drag things out too long. I’m delighted to continue discovering Calvino.
Shadows of Athens, J.M. Alvey (2019)
A young playwright’s comedy is going to be produced at the Dionysia in Athens, and when a body is found dumped on his doorstep, he wants to clear up the mystery as quickly as he can without getting in the way of what’s happening in the theatre. I was very much on his side, as the theatre stuff was more interesting than the mystery plot. Not bad, but not great either. I don’t know how well it would work for someone less familiar with the history.
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1815)
Version in the Harvard Shelf edition. Re-read, sort of, but I haven’t read most of these in a long long time. It’s funny what a mix they are of absolutely canonical and really offbeat and unknown. Some are retold all the time, some feel as if they’d just been freshly assembled from the random motif bag. I was also surprised how long this was, how many, many stories are in this collection.
False Value, Ben Aaronovitch (2020)
I think I missed a novella? Don’t start here, you would be confused. I was a little confused, especially at the unnecessary shuffling of time at the beginning. I’m still really enjoying these, but this felt fairly slight and less focused on what I’m interested in. It’s also becoming less and less possible to talk about them without spoilers for things in earlier volumes that really should remain unspoiled. I don’t know whether these are going anywhere or if they’re just soap opera magical police procedurals at this point, but I like them anyway.
A Tuscan Childhood, Kinta Beevor (1993)
Child of eccentric aristocratic English parents who lived in a farflung castle in Tuscany between the wars and allowed their children to grow up half wild, then sent them off to boarding school and expected Kinta to become a young lady. I now want to say she’s related to Janet Ross and Diana Cooper as if I expect you to know all these people. You don’t need to know them to enjoy this pleasant memoir, scarred across with fascism and WWII. The book suffers slightly from being made up of retold anecdotes, events smoothed into good stories, but nevertheless an enjoyable read.
A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge (1992)
Re-read for bookclub. I wasn’t actually planning to re-read it, I was just going to talk about it, but everyone was talking about it beforehand on Discord and it made me want to read it, so I did. I’ve written a lot about this book here before, I really like it. Useful insights from bookclub to do with Ravna’s agency and character (she may be more of a support character than I’d previously read her), Tine psychology and the clever way it is written, the threading of the different plots, and Vinge’s ability to make something feel like a happy ending. Several people were reading it for the first time and enjoyed it. I still think it’s a science fiction masterpiece. Also it reads very differently depending on whether you have or have not read A Deepness in the Sky (2000) set earlier and written after, and reflecting interestingly in both directions. I believe almost everyone who reads these posts would like this book.
The Little Venice Bookshop, Rebecca Raisin (2023) Romance novel set in Italy, and in a bookstore, that nevertheless failed to grab me. I’m very unconvinced the author has ever been to Venice—mentioning places as if they are far apart, and the Bridge of Sighs as if it was a bridge you could be seen on, and not mentioning any of the things that immediately strike one as weird about Venice. I didn’t enjoy this. Venice isn’t like that, the Nineties weren’t like that, running bookstores isn’t like that, and worst of all people just don’t behave like that.
Tasting Light, edited by A.R. Capetta and Wade Roush (2022) Absolutely brilliant anthology of ten SF stories, somewhat aimed towards YA and the readers of the future, but well worth everyone reading. There were some terrific stories in here, the best one from the always incredible Will Alexander, and hardly a single dud. The general quality of this anthology is sky high, I wish I’d read it before award nomination season. Highly recommended.
A Scatter of Light, Malinda Lo (2022) So, this book came recommended by a friend, and I put it on my list, and then the ebook was discounted one day and I bought it and started reading it. By that time I’d forgotten who had recommended it and why, and was going on my memories of Lo having written a Cinderella retelling and the cover and title of this book, which seem kind of astronomical and SFnal… Anyway, it was great, and I was loving the characters and especially the strong connection between the teen protagonist and her grandmother, but I kept thinking the genre plot was kind of slow getting going… until about a quarter of the way through the book I realised this was a mainstream book and I am very silly sometimes.
This is a mainstream book about self-discovery, growing up, and coming out in San Francisco in 2015, very precise in time and place, all the characters and relationships are very real, and I’m excited to read more by Lo. Really phenomenal. If you know teenagers you buy books for, buy them both this and Tasting Light.
The Sacred Band, James Romm (2021) A history of the Sacred Band of Thebes, an army corps made up of gay men who swore oaths to Eros, with some very interesting information about the historiography and reimagining of the history. Indeed, the way history has been written about them has been very weird, to say the least, and I do feel for the nineteenth-century historians who were arguing for them as another model of homosexuality. This isn’t so much a history of the army as a Thebes-centered piece of history they were there for, before Alexander the Great killed them all, and a contextualising of their history and memory. I do not like military history much even when it is as interesting as this and written by James Romm (a great writer, whose Seneca book I really love) so there were battles in this that dragged a bit, but overall it is a very good book. If you like military history or queer history you will enjoy this a lot.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and fifteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her novel Lent was published by Tor in May 2019, and her most recent novel, Or What You Will, was released in July 2020. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.
