Happy New Year! I’m so pleased we’ve finally shrugged off 2024, completed the first quarter of the 21st Century and moved into the real future: 2025. Now that’s proper space numbers, get me a flying car that runs on soda cans stat!
I knew going into 2024 that it was going to feel like a bit of a holding pattern. I signed my book deal back in April 2023 and it seemed like an incredibly long time to have to wait. I tried to make the most of the last year; writing my next book, working hard at my day job and spending as much time with friends and family as possible – but it still feels incredibly exciting that 2025 has arrived and my book baby is almost here!
If you’re reading this then you probably already know that Greenteeth is available for pre-order at all good bookshops, and I encourage you to do so! If you’re one of the kind souls who have already pre-ordered it and sent me your receipt for gifts I am happy to tell you that I ordered the prints and bookplates last week and should be posting them out by mid Jan. If you know anyone who wants them but hasn’t pre-ordered then now is the time as I will be closing the incentive campaign a week before publication.
Well I think that’s all the housekeeping settled, let’s move on to the main topic of this post: Books I Read in December!
I had a bit of a rushed start to the month, where I spent a lot of time driving to and from site, so by 11th December I had only finished one book – the audiobook I read in the car. Happily my site work finished shortly after this point and I was able to settle into a happy twenty days of reading – wherein I finished another eleven books. Here is what I thought of them.
Last Argument of Kings – Joe Abercrombie
Audiobook re-read – but I had completely forgotten what happened. I am loving the First Law books so much more on this go around, but I think this is actually one of the weaker ones. The balance of the story felt a bit rushed, after the slow pace of TBI and BTAH this book really packs in another 2-3 books worth of plot, just to finish the story. I wonder if this is because Abercrombie had committed to a trilogy, as is the modern standard for fantasy books. I think a 4-5 book series to cover this storyline would have suited it better. Regardless I still enjoyed this book very much, I liked the final reveals even if they were a bit mashed together and I started listening to the next standalone book straight away.
Some Desperate Glory – Emily Tesh
A book I had been meaning to read all year and finally got around to. Some Desperate Glory tells the story of Kyr, a girl raised in a decaying spaceship populated by the last vanguard of human separatists in a future when earth has been destroyed. She runs away rather than join the breeding program, taking a captured alien with her to try and exact revenge on the aliens that destroyed her planet.
So! This is a fascinating book, and I can see why it won the Hugo. It is taking inspiration from all sorts of classic SF tropes and inverting them. I thought I knew what was going to happen from about two chapters in and I was somehow both right and wrong which I enjoyed very much. I did like how Kyr was portrayed as unlikable, Tesh really doesn’t pull back on writing her as Little Miss Fascist in the first half of the book. However I thought there was still something missing for me. The writing, combined with the teenage protagonist, made the book feel a bit too YA for my tastes and I did think that the villains tended to be a bit too strawmen in order to make Kyr’s choices more clear cut. I would have liked a messier moral maze to really bring the whole story up to a five-star read. On the whole, I thought this was a really interesting book and am excited to see what Tesh does next.
The Dreaming Vol 2 – Queenie Chan
This is the second in Queenie’s The Dreaming manga series and I enjoyed it as much as vol 1. The story gets darker and twistier and the drawing is as lovely as ever. Definitely pick this up if you’re looking for a manga set in Australia.
Adventures in Volcanoland – Tamsin Mather
The only non-fiction book I read this month and I think I was probably not the target audience! This is basically Volcanology 101, interspersed with case studies and stories from Mather’s field trips around the world. If you didn’t know the subject matter I think it would be very enjoyable and interesting. Unfortunately as a geologist I did know almost all of it and was looking for a slightly deeper take on the topic. I would still recommend this to anyone looking to learn more from a standing start though!
Y/N – Esther Yi
This one is on me. I clearly misunderstood the blurb and was expecting a really fun soapy/crime caper about a K-Pop stan who writes deranged fanfic and stalks the object of their adoration to Seoul. That would have been a really fun book. Instead, Y/N is a contemporary and IMO overly intellectual attempt at the same basic story. If this is your thing you will love it. It is not my thing. I finished it and that was the best I could do.
Vigilance – Robert Jackson Bennett
OK now we’re moving back to some good stuff! I loved this incredibly dark short novel about an America maybe 4 years in the future, where mass shootings have been gamified into a victim-blaming, gun worshipping orgy of violence. This was really well written and felt horrifyingly realistic. It reminded me a bit of Chain Gang All Stars (review coming in the Jan blog post) which I mean as a great compliment.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
Next up is a modern classic. I have never read any Shirley Jackson and the closest I have come to her work is from watching The Haunting of Hill House between my fingers. I can definitely see what Jackson is doing and while I think it is very good, it’s been so often repeated that reading this original story doesn’t feel as fresh and exciting as it must have at the time. Unfortunately I think this is the inevitable burden of the trailblazer!
Red Smoking Mirror – Nick Hunt
I picked this up in a bookshop in Auckland last month (Shout out Unity Books, what a delightful store!). I was immediately interested when it was listed as Alternate History (an underrated microgenre). Red Smoking Mirror is set in a Tenochtitlan that trades with Moorish Spain and is narrated by a Jewish merchant married to a freed Nahua slave. I loved this book, it really felt as if I was walking around medieval Mexico City with the smell of xocolatl and dust in the air. I liked how Hunt was clear about the gorier human sacrifice parts of the society, whilst still showing what an advanced and graceful city it was. It felt very balanced: neither demonising nor patronising. A really good read.
Liberty’s Daughter – Naomi Kritzer
I love Kritzer’s writing, from her short stories to her political blog but this was my first foray into her novels and I was hopeful that I would enjoy it. I did. Liberty’s daughter follows Beck, who lives on board a seastead platform constructed and run by a group of libertarian separatists somewhere in the pacific. Beck does odd jobs that take her all over the seasteads and as she does she uncovers the grimier parts of the new society she lives in and starts trying to do what she can to untangle them. A very easy and entertaining book that still manages to say some interesting things about class and society.
The Good Wife of Bath – Karen Brooks
Read this in a single day! I half liked this retelling of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath’s tale. The first half of the book was very good, focusing on the day to day life of Eleanor and her various husbands and friends in medieval England. The second half of the book takes a bit of a turn and I liked that less. I also found it pretty difficult to sympathise with the way that Eleanor KEPT MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES. She marries five times and three of those men have basically the same character flaws. Every time one dies she is happy to be free of them but then almost immediately marries another dud. This was a well written book though, so I’d keep an eye out for other works by Brooks.
Best Served Cold – Joe Abercrombie
Goodreads tells me that I have read this book before, but I had absolutely no memory of it. Honestly what a treat! Abercrombie is really cooking with gas here with the brilliant Monza Murcatto and her search for vengeance on the seven men who betrayed her. Also present are soft-hearted Northern warrior, Caul Shivers, treacherously loveable mercenary Nicomo Cosca, a pair of poisoners and a whole cast of equally brilliant side characters. In Abercrombie’s world nothing is ever simple or straightforwardly right or wrong and I just loved how the story unfurled. Continuing excellent audio narration from Steven Pacey.
The Butcher of the Forest – Premee Mohamed
Short novel to close out the year. A villager must trespass into the dangerous fae-adjacent northern woods to retrieve the children of the Tyrant who rules over her land. This was…okay! I loved the cover and I thought there were some interesting ideas in there but for some reason it just didn’t click for me. I will give it another try in the future to see if I was just done with books for the year!
So there we have it: the last 12 books of 2024. If you’re interested in everything else I read this year you can check out the backlog of posts on the blog and please stay tuned to see what wonderful reads I have in store for 2025. It’s gonna be a good year I can feel it!
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