Happy Summer/Winter Solstice y’all! We are already halfway through 2024 and it feels like the days are slipping by faster than ever. I spent most of the month working on the roads around New South Wales, which was a great opportunity to explore the beautiful country but also gave me a little snake-based anxiety! I made it back in one piece and to cap it off I read nine books this month.
What Feasts At Night – T Kingfisher
The second Sworn Sword book. WFAN carries on a few months after the events of the first book. I was lucky enough to hear T Kingfisher talk about this book directly and she described it as (paraphrasing) an interlude she needed to write before she could move on with the story. The protagonist – Alex, needs to face their PTSD, not only from the horrors of the previous book, but from a lifetime at war. There is still a solid plot and it’s a very enjoyable horror read but I think of it more as a bonus chapter or un-deleted scene in between What Moves The Dead and whatever terrors come next!
The Sword Defiant – Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Epic fantasy but from fifteen years after the fall of the dark lord. This is the story of Alf, a surviving hero, and of Olva, the sister he left behind. I very much enjoyed this book. I liked how you could feel the years of fatigue grating on Alf as he struggled to find the right path, and I liked how we saw what he had left behind to go adventuring. It feels very rare to have a lead character be a middle-aged mother and I loved how we saw Olva develop into a hero in her own right. There were some excellent twists at the end and I am keen to jump into the second book!
Broken Stars – Ken Liu (editor)
A collection of Chinese SF short stories. I found this collection rather hit and miss. Some were incredibly well done and some I couldn’t finish. Still a good experience and a great way to try out some works in translation. Favourites were Submarines, The New Year Train, What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear, The First Emperor’s Games and Chen Quifan’s two stories.
Sarah Canary – Karen Joy Fowler
Weird one! This follows the titular Sarah Canary as she wanders around the nineteenth century Pacific Northwest. Multiple people from varied walks of life interact with her; Chinese labourers, asylum occupants, suffragists, Native Americans, but none of them can discover the secret of who she is or where she came from. That’s pretty much it. I thought this was an intriguing idea and the book is listed as a SF classic but I just didn’t connect with it. I struggled to finish and probably won’t reread.
Pied Piper – Nevil Shute
Shute is one of my all time favourite authors, with his classic A Town Like Alice always near the top of my list of best books of all time, but I haven’t read that much else from him. I was delighted to discover his entire catalogue on iBooks for free so I downloaded a stack and dug in. Pied Piper is the story of John, an older gentleman who decides to vacation in the French countryside right at the end of the Phoney War in WW2. No one considers this a risky thing to do and everyone is shocked when the German invasion begins in earnest. John agrees to escort a couple of children back to England and so begins an increasingly dangerous journey across France. This book brought me to tears several times, which was a little awkward since I was reading it on a construction site. It has Shute’s simple yet emotionally pure writing style and I felt for all of the characters. I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to anyone.
On finishing this book I realised it was written in 1942 – well before the end of the war and before D-Day. It seems incredible to me that Shute was able to write this in the midst of the Blitz, and how even back then he understood the dangers the Nazis posed to Jews, he mentions several times the horrible fate that will befall a Jewish child if captured, including listing the words concentration camp. It really gives the lie to the idea that ‘regular Germans’ had no idea of the holocaust if a British author was writing about it as common knowledge in the early 40s.
The Steerswoman – Rosemary Kirstein
The Steerswoman is Rowan, one of a society of questioning wanderers who collect information and distribute it wherever they go. Rowan is on the trail of a mysterious set of gems but discovers a cabal of wizards who will do anything to prevent her from finding out more. I can imagine that this book would have been pretty mind-blowing in the eighties when it was published, featuring two female main characters and a bold approach to classic fantasy. However, I just couldn’t quite connect with the characters and I felt I Could see the twists coming a mile off. I definitely should have read this when I was a kid as I would have loved it, coming at it now I don’t think I will continue with the series.
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller – Italo Calvino
I’m trying to read a few less mainstream classics and this definitely fits the bill! It’s a meta book where you, the reader, go to a bookshop to buy Calvino’s newest book and end up reading the first chapter of ten or twelve different books. Mostly I enjoyed this, with all the different pastiches enjoyable in their own way.
An Old Captivity - Nevil Shute
Another free classic courtesy of Apple Books. The story of an archaeological expedition to Greenland in the early 30's takes a late turn for the fantastical when the main character dreams of Viking voyagers. A solidly enjoyable book although not reaching the heights of Alice or Pied Piper. There's a really excellent enemies to almost lovers romance plot line which is doomed by the shadow of WW2 on the horizon. Definitely made me want to explore Greenland with a dashing aeronaut by my side.
Amongst Our Weapons – Ben Aaronovitch
Reread. Book Nine in Rivers of London. Basically everything I said last month for False Value but I don’t love the side characters quite as much. Great to see more Inspector Seawoll though and several excellent scenes up on the Manchester moors.
Comments