March was a great month where I was in Florence for the first three weeks and then flew to Chicago to help Ada with the Papal Election of 1492. I read just twelve books, but some of them were awesome.
Tsalmoth, Steven Brust (2023)
New Vlad book, actually coming out in April but I got an advance copy. Brust is one of the people who manages to give me new reading experiences, book after book. This series has a lot going on, and it does interestingly odd things with point of view and structure. This new volume is set waaaay back in the series between Yendi and Jhereg, which surprised me, and is structured around marriage customs. It’s always delightful reading Vlad’s voice, even young Vlad (as he is here). Reading this made me keep thinking about how much he’s learned, which is one part of the interesting reading experience.
The other part is that there are also a number of things that I know and recognise that Vlad doesn’t yet know about, so it’s like re-reading only it isn’t, because there’s a plot and I didn’t know what would happen in it except that at the end we’d be in the position we were in going into the events of Jhereg. But there was a lot of yes, aha, I know where that’s going, where it’s going into other books written earlier and set later. The story itself is a very small-stakes adventure in Adrilankha; we see a lot of Vlad’s friends, a lot of Cawti, as you’d expect. It made me want to re-read all the books again from the beginning. I love this series. I’ve been reading it for a long long time. I can’t wait to look at it from on top as a complete thing, and we’re nearly there.
Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Matti Freidman (2021)
Fascinating nonfiction book that is about a trip Leonard Cohen made to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. This is a history of that war and the people who fought in it, and of Leonard Cohen’s tour, reconstructed from his notebook, one newspaper story, and people’s memories. It also considers Cohen’s later revision of the song he wrote at the time (Lover, Lover, Lover), and revision of what he felt. Well-written and fascinating. Undoubtedly more interesting because I know Cohen’s music and poetry than it would be if I didn’t.
Medusa’s Ankles, A.S. Byatt (2021)
A big short story collection of pretty much all Byatt’s fantasy and SF, many of which I’d read before, so sort of half a re-read. Byatt is a litfic writer, and she’s brilliant at everything to do with character and evoking a situation. She’s less good at the fantastic, and very bad at SF worldbuilding. It’s fascinating to read these stories where she does some things so well and others so clunkily. When she makes it work—when the story is a fairytale, or when she’s layering in a real magic layer into her metaphors—these are great.
I really, really love Byatt’s work, and I am glad she steps over the edges of reality to give us these stories, but it’s interesting to see the missteps she makes because she isn’t a reader of fantasy or SF. They’re not always what you expect. One story here is a satire where a tech billionaire puts a new light-giving satellite up in the shape of his girlfriend and it is torn apart by the signs of the zodiac. What doesn’t work isn’t the fantastical part but the reactions of people on Earth who “watch gravely” night after night. Other times the fantastic works, but the pacing is completely different from the way a genre reader would pace the story. So this was fascinating to read, and it’s excellent, but strange. I prefer Byatt as a mimetic writer, and I commend these to your attention with a certain hesitation.
Lies Sleeping, Ben Aaronovitch (2018)
Last month’s post went up late because the aforementioned being in Florence meant that I didn’t have internet for a large part of the month. This is relevant because it means that I didn’t see people in comments telling me to read one of the novellas before I read this volume until it was already too late and I’d read it out of order. So I was slightly confused, but nevertheless there was a great deal here to enjoy. Do not start here. Start at the beginning. But these continue to be lively, well-written and gripping, with some very neat worldbuilding development here as well as some metaplot resolution. I will go back and read the Abigail novella before reading more novels.
Deck With Flowers, Elizabeth Cadell (1973)
This is a very, very strange book and I had to do some fairly serious worldbuilding to make it make sense (though not as much as the Cadell book for which I had to make up a whole alien species, but that’s another story). This… isn’t England in 1973. Is it 1953? 1933? Or is it some world that never was, with customs and manners that never existed? It’s hard to say. But whatever, this is a fun story about a very implausible publisher who wants to publish the memoirs of an elderly but still famous singer, and the secret of what happened to her first husband, with a light love story. It’s all very light and quite fun, but… imagine if a little old lady with some quite competent writing skills but who didn’t know any young people decided to write a romance set today and got all the details about how the Youths live from rumors and gossip overheard from other old ladies in the hairdresser. Only with 1973. I enjoyed it. But it was weird.
Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome (1931)
There are very few books about accepting a lower quality of life, but this is almost one of them. This is a children’s book about kids messing about in a boat; it’s a direct sequel to Swallows and Amazons and the kids (majority female) have been looking forward to camping on an island and messing about in boats ever since last summer, but (kind of spoiler you might get on the cover) on day one they sink their boat, and have to manage without it right up until the end of the book. This is a very good book, better than the first one, with better characterisation (especially of the adults) and a more solid plot, and I liked it as a child and I like it now. This has the same problematic stuff around calling their mother and the locals “natives” and playing in the colonial context they have unconsciously absorbed. I love that we have two kinds of boy and four kinds of girl, I love that Susan Walker gets respect, I love the whole thing where they climb a mountain and learn that their parents were once kids like them. Deeply readable too.
Mini Shopaholic, Sophie Kinsella (2010)
So Becky has a baby with the same power of wanting, and she does actually seem to be learning a little bit in this book. Very funny. Don’t start here.
The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence, Natalie R. Tomas (2003)
Brilliant book full of insightful reflections and primary research. I wish I’d had it when I was writing Lent. I raced through this and it was terrific. This is a look at four generations of Medici women, including multiple women in the last two generations, what they achieved and how they were viewed. There’s more information about Lucrezia Tournabuoni and Alfonsina Orsini here than anywhere. Oddly, Tomas is limited in her knowledge of stuff that is not the Medici family, and trusts one biased modern source on Pope Julius II, but this book is so good on its main focus that I don’t even mind.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (2008) Bishop and Lowell were poets, and both odd people. Lowell was bipolar, and Bishop suffered from severe asthma. Lowell was a terrible husband, while Bishop had loving long lasting serial monogamous relationships with lesbian partners. They were really different people, but they were both really serious about poetry and the life of language, and they wrote to each other about their lives and their work over a long, long time, from right after WWII until the Seventies when Lowell died. Oddly, when I was reading this I came across a poem I hadn’t known before from each of them in an anthology and immediately guessed who it was by because of the voice. You come to know them very well from reading this long correspondence, which is one of the things I love about books of real letters. I don’t trust Lowell, but I love Bishop.
Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman, Alice Steinbach (2000)
This is brilliant. It’s a nonfiction travel memoir by an American journalist who takes a year off to travel and live in Europe, in France, England, and Italy, after she is divorced and her children are grown. This is the kind of self-examination that really works, with a focus on herself in the places, not retelling funny stories but really talking about the places and the people she met and how she felt. Each chapter starts with a postcard she sent herself from the moment. I loved this book and want more just like it.
A Quiet Afternoon: Low-Fi Speculative Fiction, For a Peaceful Break From a Stressful World, Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold (2020)
Anthology of positive low-stakes SF&F short stories, published in 2020 but planned even before people needed something to cheer them up. It’s an anthology, and therefore inherently mixed, but the editors have a good eye and the vast majority of what’s here is pretty good. The standouts are by Maria Cook and Dantzel Cherry, but I was pleasantly surprised by the high baseline. These are not stories where nothing bad happens, but where the overall feel is upbeat. It took me a while to get around to reading this, and I believe there’s a second volume out now which is probably also worth checking out.
They Were Found Wanting, Miklós Bánffy (1937)
Second volume of the Transylvanian Trilogy, very long, very Hungarian, and a little melodramatic. However, I’m really invested in the characters now. I suspect they’re not going to find happiness any more than the petty squabbling Hungarian politicians are going to find a path to peace, but it’s all so beautifully written and described and it’s such an entirely invisible time and place that it doesn’t matter. The whole thing of refusing to allow a divorce from an insane spouse is so cruel. The love of place in these books is really wonderful. The description of Balint going to see the stag towards the end is amazing.
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.
