September was an excellent month, beginning with Chicon 8, Worldcon in Chicago, and then flying to Florence immediately afterwards, where we stayed for a couple of weeks before taking the train up through the Alps (so beautiful!) to Riom in the centre of France for the excellent festival Aventuriales, where I was guest of honour and had a really great time. Then we went back through the Alps on the train to Turin, where Ada was a guest at Italian Tech Week. With all this dashing about and being with friends, I only had time to read eight books, mostly on trains and at bedtime, and here they are.
Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch (2012)
Rivers of London book 3. Definitely start with book 1, but these are continuing to be gripping and good. There’s no sign of missing anything because of not engaging with other media yet, thank goodness, so thank you to all the readers who reassured me on this point. This book had the same terrific voice and well-thought-through worldbuilding as the first two, with signs of a bigger plot developing, and less blood—this is only a good thing. There’s a way in which this book is reminiscent of Moorcock’s London Bone but thinking about that makes me realise what a fantasy series for this millennium Aaronovitch is giving us. This is today’s London, growing out of all the layers back to the first settlement on the banks of the Thames, and every wave of settlement since, and all the cultural mix of the capital.
The Three Dahlias, Katy Watson (2022)
Cosy mystery about a murder at a convention for fans of a cosy mystery writer, solved by the three actors who have played the sleuth Dahlia Lively. This is an odd book that was highly recommended and which I really wanted to like but which never quite warmed up for me. We have the points of view of the young, middle-aged, and older women who have been Dahlia, we have suspects and blackmail, a manor house, revelations, lost heirs…but it just didn’t engage for me. Taking away people’s phones isn’t quite enough to get the right feel, and the character development felt forced—a little too signposted, a bit too much “Look how I have developed my character!” Sadly, only OK.
Centers of Gravity, Marko Kloos (2022)
Powerful, exciting, well-thought-through conclusion to Kloos’ eight-book Frontlines saga. If you don’t like military science fiction you won’t like it, because this is very much MilSF, but if you’ve ever wondered what MilSF is about beyond Bujold, it’s definitely worth picking these up. I bought the first ones when Kloos declined his puppy-promoted Hugo nomination in 2015, and kept on buying them because I was enjoying the heck out of them. The worldbuilding on Earth doesn’t quite make sense, but the rest of it is great. Kloos knows how to make conflict exciting in a way almost nobody does. And he manages to make the arc of the series work.
There are moments when I was on the edge of my seat trying not to breathe, and there were other moments when I was noting the neat disability stuff—the protagonist’s prosthetic half hand from several books ago that used to match perfectly no longer does because his real skin has aged in the interim. I’d have been happy reading these forever, but he has a new better series, and it’s good to see Kloos carry off such a satisfying conclusion.
Babbacombe’s, Susan Scarlett (1941)
Another Noel Streatfeild romance potboiler written under a pseudonym during WWII but set in the Thirties. In this one a girl who works in a department store and the son of the store’s owner—I mean, you know the way this kind of story goes and there aren’t any surprises. There’s a villainous cousin with no redeeming points, which is very unusual for Streatfeild, but her real strength is, as always, the quotidian details of the life of the heroine’s family. Too similar to Clothes-Pegs, which I wrote about last month.
Letters to a Friend, Diana Athill (2011)
Letters from English editor Diana Athill to American poet Edward Field, written over decades, about their lives, their work, their successes, getting older, their friends and connections. I always enjoy reading letters; I like the intimacy and the way they’re written to a specific audience. But because I tend to read one letter at a time in between chapters of other books, they often take me ages to read. I feel as if I’ve been reading this forever, and I’ll miss Athill’s friendly but caustic voice now that I’m done.
Kiki’s Delivery Service, Eiko Kadono (1985), translated Emily Balistrieri
A Japanese children’s book about a young witch who goes to live in another city for a year and starts a delivery service with her broomstick. I believe it has been made into a film. It’s always interesting reading something from another culture like this, and seeing the assumptions and expectations of stories. After reading the brilliant Tatami Galaxy recently I was looking around for more Japanese translations. This is definitely a children’s book, and has the charm and quiet good humour of something written for young readers. It’s whimsical rather than surprising, but it was a fun, gentle read.
Complete Poems, Anne Sexton (1981)
Very good, very powerful, extremely vivid imagery, but largely about depression and suicidal ideation, so content warning.
Brunetti’s Venice, Toni Sepeda (2008)
Walks through Venice quoting Donna Leon. Mildly enjoyable, but it would have been better to just re-read the books and read something else about Venice. This might be useful for someone who actually wanted to use it for walks. Venice is great. But I didn’t need this book to tell me that.
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.
