I had intended to jazz up my monthly post into a proper newsletter: reviewing not just books but music and tv, giving you updates on how Greenteeth is progressing and hints at further projects. Alas I have come up against the unstoppable force of my real life job (Geologist) and have been far too busy looking intently at rocks to step up my newsletter game. So here is an opportunity for you, gentle reader, to tell me what you are interested in hearing me blather on about in next months New & Improved Version! I can chat about my fave books, authors, what being a debut author is like, how I balance work and writing. I could even, heaven forfend, talk about something that isn’t directly related to myself! Drop a comment and I shall do my best to please.
With that out of the way let’s move on to the point of this post, what books I read in November 2024. It was an excellent batch.
I hit a biiig reading slump in early November. I become slumped about once a year, I’m sure most readers can relate. Books you might otherwise love become difficult to wade through and you end up starting half a dozen or so before you admit defeat. I finally caved in about ten days into the month and consulted my bookshelves for the perfect slumpbreaker. It had to be a favourite, but not so beloved that it would set off emotions. Not a skinny book but not so large I got lost and had to put it down again. I considered The Goblin Emperor, an ideal slumpbreaker, but I used it for last years slump. I thought about the Scholomance series, but again, the emotions. My eye landed on two books: The Gargoyle and Enchantment. I decided to read them both.
Enchantment – Orson Scott Card
Unpleasant politics aside, Scott Card truly is a masterful writer. His Enderverse novels have been a lifelong favourite of mine and this lesser known Time-Travel romantasy is just delightful. It follows Ivan, a Russian-American Jew and PhD student of Slavic languages (these are important attributes) as he visits the old country and finds a beautiful woman asleep on a slab, guarded by a fearsome bear. Ivan wakes the maiden with a kiss and is dragged back to the 9th Century to deal with the consequences of rescuing a medieval maiden. It is a really thoughtful and well-paced book and has just the most excellent villain in Baba Yaga. Everything has a purpose, even if you don’t see it until right at the end. I think this is easily the fourth or fifth time I have read it and I enjoyed it as much as ever.
The Gargoyle – Andrew Davidson
From a prolific author to one who has only ever wrote one book, I fear the pressure placed on the Gargoyle by a gigantic advance may have given it impossible expectations and stymied the author. It’s such a shame because I also love this book. The nameless protagonist is a drug/alcohol addicted porn star who drives his car off a cliff during a bender and almost dies in the ensuing inferno. As he lies in agony in a hospital bed, waiting only for death he meets Marianne Engel, an artist who insists they were lovers in a past life. She begins to tell him love stories, from Japan to Iceland to Italy, and always the story of how they met before in medieval Germany. This book is somehow modern lit, fantasy and romance all in one and it always leaves me feeling content as the burned man is brought back to life, first by the doctors and then by Marianne.
Thus ended the slump, broken by a pair of old favourites. I decided to celebrate my return to the reading world by trying something completely different!
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
I had never heard of Elizabeth Taylor before reading about her in Jo Walton’s reading round ups (a common source of TBR inspiration) and I was eager to try her out. This short book follows the lives of Upper Class retirees who live in the Claremont Hotel as they try to bridge the gap between their adult lives and the inevitable spiral into care homes and hospitals. It was an incredibly English (not British) read, full of quiet desperation and the subtle horrors of growing old alone. I thought Taylor wrote this beautifully and finished it in an afternoon.
Wolf by Wolf – Ryan Graudin
A book that has been on my TBR for years, I finally picked up Wolf by Wolf and absolutely devoured it. It is a YA alt-history novel set in a world where the Nazi’s won WW2. Stop, wait, don’t move on! I moan about the only alt-history (a favourite microgenre) being WW2 but this was a really fresh take on the subject. It follows Yael, a death camp survivor changed by the human experimentation performed on her, as she competes in the annual Reich/Japan motorcycle race from Berlin to Tokyo. In between chapters you get glimpses into how Yael survived, and the people she lost along the way. I liked this book a lot, even though I am not much of a YA reader. The one thing I struggled with was the romance. I know romance is par for the course in YA but it was very unbelievable that Yael would consider falling for any of her fellow competitors during the race, given that they are all Hitler Youth. I just didn’t buy that this girl who had fought her way back to life with bloody fingernails would let herself do that. But I suppose love is a strange thing and possibly a teenage girl who had never felt it before might have gotten lost in herself. I am very keen to see where this duology goes and will shortly order the next one.
The Husbands – Holly Gramazio
The flight from Sydney to Auckland is about two and a bit hours. That’s how long it took me to read this delightful book. I zoomed through it, laughing out loud and rubbing my chin in thought by turns. Lauren returns from a night on the town to discover a strange man in her house. Eventually she works out that her attic keeps sending her husbands, tall, short, black, white, architects, rockclimbers, each one resetting her life. Lauren struggles to decide whether to keep them, to swap them out or to give up on the idea of love entirely. This was a really smart sf-y take on the eternal problems of modern dating: stick or twist. When to stay, when to go. I really enjoyed it.
The First Law: The Blade Itself & Before They Are Hanged – Joe Abercrombie
Another reread – this time on audiobook. These are some of my dearest friends favourite books and I have to confess I did not particularly love them first time round. I preferred Abercrombie’s brilliant Half a King series, and his later books, but these were too grim, too dark for me. I heard such excellent things about the audiobooks that I decided to give them another go and have been listening continuously as I drive back and forth to my job site for 3 hours a day. They have been a revelation. The narrator, Steven Pacey, has forced me to slow down and really take in Abercrombie’s world building, to spend time with his characters and get to know them, feel their fear, horror and ambition as they scramble through a familiarly imperfect world. This series has some of the all time best unreliable narrators, that feel so reliable you barely realise til half way through that they are so much darker and lighter than they portray themselves. I am about half way through the third and will probably be listening to this series for months to come.
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