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mafiabadgers's reviews
132 reviews
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
It's very well handled. There's a delightfully playful postmodernist sensibility to it, that even as the book claims to "bow to the strict rules of realism", it tacitly admits that this cannot ever be a realist novel. "Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can't be entirely sure about any of this." (p. 9) There is no pretence of plausibility here. It looks the reader dead in the eye and asks, belligerently, 'what are you going to do about it?' I would have liked to see Cal adopt that sort of attitude himself, but then, radical self-confidence doesn't win Pulitzers. Insecure, introspective, inter-generation American epics do. So maybe I can't be annoyed at it. It's not entirely fair to dislike a Pulitzer-winning novel for being the sort of novel to win a Pulitzer. I would have happily given it three or four stars, if it weren't for the fact that I didn't like it. Perhaps by the same metric, you shouldn't expect an inter-generation American epic novel hater to like one of said novels simply because it's good.
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
First read 01/2025 for Farnham book club
I was thinking a lot about the American inter-generational epic novel as I read Middlesex. It always seems to do well with (American) critics, but I don't particularly care for it (at least, I certainly wasn't in the mood for one when my book club selected Middlesex). It occupies an outsize place on the American literary landscape, and I think the reason for this, as succinctly as I can put it, is that American history is settler history.
The history of England begins in the Dark Ages. Never mind that England, as a geo-political entity, didn't exist. Never mind that we had the Stone Age and the Romans. Never mind that the historians say otherwise. I'm talking about English history as it exists in the minds of the wider population. This is a model of history that divides it up into periods of interest, and gives roughly equal weighting to the Egyptians and the [Golden Age of] pirates. This is a model of history in which each period has a corresponding glut of historical fiction (and usually a related fantasy subgenre, to boot). The Dark Ages rumble along until we hit the Shakespeare times (not the Renaissance, which is European), and then jump to the Industrial Revolution, by which we really mean the Victorian period, a time when Sherlock Holmes chased Jack the Ripper down smog-shrouded streets lined with Dickensian orphans. This is also the Age of Empire, and usually what people are referring to when they talk about 'the olden days' (though this can also refer to the mediaeval period). Somewhere in the middle is the Regency period, which, thanks to the efforts of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, is about people falling in love in fancy houses. The Napoleonic Wars barely register on the English psyche. World War One gets overlooked in favour of an obsession with World War Two (when Churchill and British Pluck saved the world from evil Nazis), and that brings us to the present day. What does America have that can compare with that?
Well, there's the Wild West. And perhaps the Racism Times, the Antebellum South and the Civil War. But that's it, really. They try to compensate for it by coming up with snazzy names like the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Swinging Sixties, but they're all pretty paltry in comparison to sweeping mediaeval centuries. I will grant that the Cold War was notable, but the spy thriller subgenre it spawned is the property of a Mr James Bond, of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And the reason Americans conceive of their history in this way is very neatly bounded up in the concept of the Wild West. It's a genre about taming and claiming a wild land. What it most decidedly is not is a genre about murder and land loss—effectively, an invasion. If American history was a history of the land, then Americans would have to admit that the settlement of America is only the most recent phase in a long, distinguished history. It would chip away at the fragile legitimacy of the United States as a geo-political entity. It would reframe that vaunted colonisation as an invasion. In order to avoid this, America must therefore be conceived of in the broader cultural psyche as a young nation, as an offshoot of Europe, as the natural result of a Manifest Destiny. This, however, leads to a certain insecurity. Where was America's Shakespeare, their Goethe, their Cervantes? For many years, America was seen as a culturally underdeveloped country, unable to compete with the European heavyweights. Nathaniel Hawthorne brought about a new era, and as I understand it, is still taught in American schools today as the 'first American man of letters', passing on that youthful insecurity to a new generation. It makes itself manifest in other ways, too: Renaissance Fairs, the celebration of the history of another continent, and the bizarre American tendency to name sons after their fathers and call them 'the Second'. (Note that this is never done with the daughters. The patronym must be preserved.) It's popular to say of old money families that their ancestors 'came over on the Mayflower'. Meanwhile, the English upper crust can usually trace their roots back to the sixtenth century.
And so it is in this context that I see the inter-generational American epic as a repeated attempt to shore up a flimsy historical myth. Add onto that the angle of the 'immigrant epic', and I start to understand Middlesex's desire not just to reaffirm USAmerican history, but to write these Greek immigrants into it. Eleutherios 'Lefty' Stephanides works for a spell at Henry Ford's factory, then becomes a Prohibition-era rum-runner. His son, Milton, joins the US Navy during WWII, and plays a small role in the 1967 Detroit race riots, while his grandson grows his hair long and drops acid to Beatles jams. If the Stephanides had only arrived a few years earlier, they would have been written as cowboys and gold rushers. The original immigrants try to cling to their culture; younger generations assimilate more than the elders; sons turn against their fathers; as far as the family is concerned, all the usual clichés structure the over-arching plot. It's not badly done by any means. I just didn't particularly want to read it.
Of course, in addition to being an inter-generation American epic and an immigrant epic, it's also an intersex story. This was the part of the book I found by far the most interesting, and the bit that kept me reading past the sprawling, incestual tale of migration and assimilation. Frankly, I would have been happy if the first half of the book had been cut entirely, and even happier if Cal's life story had gone on even longer. The book mentions Herculine Barbin (p. 19), and I think I spotted an allusion on p. 293, as Cal tells of the cottage in which his all-girls school's female founders had lived: "[fifth graders] filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe)". Callie's relationship and sexual escapades with the Obscure Object may well have been modelled directly on Barbin's story.
At several points in the book, most notably with his casting in a school play, Cal is identified with the mythological figure Tiresias, whom the gods turned from a man to a woman and back again. One moment of the Tiresias myth is conspicuously absent: when trying to settle an argument about whether men or women have more fun in the bedroom, Zeus and Hera ask him for the answer. On the basis of his transitions, Tiresias is positioned as a site of knowledge, unavailable to others, that can nonetheless be disclosed to satisfy cisgender/perisex curiosity. While transgender characters have only in recent years begun to proliferate in fiction, the transgender memoir has been a thriving nonfiction subgenre for years. It is perhaps able to accept transgender/intersex people as fascinating oddities than as significant people in their own right. This, I think, is why the book finds it necessary to use first-person narration; third-person would be too voyeuristic. First-person is necessary in order to create a sense of disclosure, an illusion of consent to the telling of this story, because Eugenides feels that this way he can still get into all the juicy genital details without coming across as pornographic or lecherous.
Naturally, this creates an enormous problem, because Cal wasn't even alive for most of the time depicted in the book, and couldn't possibly have learned all the details he narrated. This results in an intriguingly self-conscious sense of the manufactured:
I was thinking a lot about the American inter-generational epic novel as I read Middlesex. It always seems to do well with (American) critics, but I don't particularly care for it (at least, I certainly wasn't in the mood for one when my book club selected Middlesex). It occupies an outsize place on the American literary landscape, and I think the reason for this, as succinctly as I can put it, is that American history is settler history.
The history of England begins in the Dark Ages. Never mind that England, as a geo-political entity, didn't exist. Never mind that we had the Stone Age and the Romans. Never mind that the historians say otherwise. I'm talking about English history as it exists in the minds of the wider population. This is a model of history that divides it up into periods of interest, and gives roughly equal weighting to the Egyptians and the [Golden Age of] pirates. This is a model of history in which each period has a corresponding glut of historical fiction (and usually a related fantasy subgenre, to boot). The Dark Ages rumble along until we hit the Shakespeare times (not the Renaissance, which is European), and then jump to the Industrial Revolution, by which we really mean the Victorian period, a time when Sherlock Holmes chased Jack the Ripper down smog-shrouded streets lined with Dickensian orphans. This is also the Age of Empire, and usually what people are referring to when they talk about 'the olden days' (though this can also refer to the mediaeval period). Somewhere in the middle is the Regency period, which, thanks to the efforts of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, is about people falling in love in fancy houses. The Napoleonic Wars barely register on the English psyche. World War One gets overlooked in favour of an obsession with World War Two (when Churchill and British Pluck saved the world from evil Nazis), and that brings us to the present day. What does America have that can compare with that?
Well, there's the Wild West. And perhaps the Racism Times, the Antebellum South and the Civil War. But that's it, really. They try to compensate for it by coming up with snazzy names like the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Swinging Sixties, but they're all pretty paltry in comparison to sweeping mediaeval centuries. I will grant that the Cold War was notable, but the spy thriller subgenre it spawned is the property of a Mr James Bond, of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And the reason Americans conceive of their history in this way is very neatly bounded up in the concept of the Wild West. It's a genre about taming and claiming a wild land. What it most decidedly is not is a genre about murder and land loss—effectively, an invasion. If American history was a history of the land, then Americans would have to admit that the settlement of America is only the most recent phase in a long, distinguished history. It would chip away at the fragile legitimacy of the United States as a geo-political entity. It would reframe that vaunted colonisation as an invasion. In order to avoid this, America must therefore be conceived of in the broader cultural psyche as a young nation, as an offshoot of Europe, as the natural result of a Manifest Destiny. This, however, leads to a certain insecurity. Where was America's Shakespeare, their Goethe, their Cervantes? For many years, America was seen as a culturally underdeveloped country, unable to compete with the European heavyweights. Nathaniel Hawthorne brought about a new era, and as I understand it, is still taught in American schools today as the 'first American man of letters', passing on that youthful insecurity to a new generation. It makes itself manifest in other ways, too: Renaissance Fairs, the celebration of the history of another continent, and the bizarre American tendency to name sons after their fathers and call them 'the Second'. (Note that this is never done with the daughters. The patronym must be preserved.) It's popular to say of old money families that their ancestors 'came over on the Mayflower'. Meanwhile, the English upper crust can usually trace their roots back to the sixtenth century.
And so it is in this context that I see the inter-generational American epic as a repeated attempt to shore up a flimsy historical myth. Add onto that the angle of the 'immigrant epic', and I start to understand Middlesex's desire not just to reaffirm USAmerican history, but to write these Greek immigrants into it. Eleutherios 'Lefty' Stephanides works for a spell at Henry Ford's factory, then becomes a Prohibition-era rum-runner. His son, Milton, joins the US Navy during WWII, and plays a small role in the 1967 Detroit race riots, while his grandson grows his hair long and drops acid to Beatles jams. If the Stephanides had only arrived a few years earlier, they would have been written as cowboys and gold rushers. The original immigrants try to cling to their culture; younger generations assimilate more than the elders; sons turn against their fathers; as far as the family is concerned, all the usual clichés structure the over-arching plot. It's not badly done by any means. I just didn't particularly want to read it.
Of course, in addition to being an inter-generation American epic and an immigrant epic, it's also an intersex story. This was the part of the book I found by far the most interesting, and the bit that kept me reading past the sprawling, incestual tale of migration and assimilation. Frankly, I would have been happy if the first half of the book had been cut entirely, and even happier if Cal's life story had gone on even longer. The book mentions Herculine Barbin (p. 19), and I think I spotted an allusion on p. 293, as Cal tells of the cottage in which his all-girls school's female founders had lived: "[fifth graders] filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe)". Callie's relationship and sexual escapades with the Obscure Object may well have been modelled directly on Barbin's story.
At several points in the book, most notably with his casting in a school play, Cal is identified with the mythological figure Tiresias, whom the gods turned from a man to a woman and back again. One moment of the Tiresias myth is conspicuously absent: when trying to settle an argument about whether men or women have more fun in the bedroom, Zeus and Hera ask him for the answer. On the basis of his transitions, Tiresias is positioned as a site of knowledge, unavailable to others, that can nonetheless be disclosed to satisfy cisgender/perisex curiosity. While transgender characters have only in recent years begun to proliferate in fiction, the transgender memoir has been a thriving nonfiction subgenre for years. It is perhaps able to accept transgender/intersex people as fascinating oddities than as significant people in their own right. This, I think, is why the book finds it necessary to use first-person narration; third-person would be too voyeuristic. First-person is necessary in order to create a sense of disclosure, an illusion of consent to the telling of this story, because Eugenides feels that this way he can still get into all the juicy genital details without coming across as pornographic or lecherous.
Naturally, this creates an enormous problem, because Cal wasn't even alive for most of the time depicted in the book, and couldn't possibly have learned all the details he narrated. This results in an intriguingly self-conscious sense of the manufactured:
It's foggy out, and late—just past 3 a.m. To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they can't see a thing. [pp. 110-111]
It's very well handled. There's a delightfully playful postmodernist sensibility to it, that even as the book claims to "bow to the strict rules of realism", it tacitly admits that this cannot ever be a realist novel. "Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can't be entirely sure about any of this." (p. 9) There is no pretence of plausibility here. It looks the reader dead in the eye and asks, belligerently, 'what are you going to do about it?' I would have liked to see Cal adopt that sort of attitude himself, but then, radical self-confidence doesn't win Pulitzers. Insecure, introspective, inter-generation American epics do. So maybe I can't be annoyed at it. It's not entirely fair to dislike a Pulitzer-winning novel for being the sort of novel to win a Pulitzer. I would have happily given it three or four stars, if it weren't for the fact that I didn't like it. Perhaps by the same metric, you shouldn't expect an inter-generation American epic novel hater to like one of said novels simply because it's good.
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber
Leiber plays the 'all women are witches' gag fairly straight; he's not particularly trying to subvert it or find liberating possibilities in it. Nonetheless, there are moments with a definite tongue-in-cheek feel, as though to acknowledge that the whole thing is ridiculous, which go a little way towards ameliorating the sexism. It's mostly of the men=rational/women=intuitive variety, but the generally flattering depiction of Tansy goes some way towards balancing out the demonised desires of the other three witches. Given its age and subject, it could be so, so much worse. Same goes for the passing association of primitive magic with 'Negroes'.
The first two thirds of the book were clearly the strongest part. Norman Saylor refuses to accept the existence of magic, and even at the very end he doesn't entirely concede that it's real. Since readers are likely to be less skeptical than he, this gets a bit wearisome eventually, but in the meantime, it sets up some really good stuff:
Substitute 'superstition' for 'conspiracy' and I think he's pretty much hit the nail on the head. Yes, dear, I'm sure the vaccine really is out to hit you with 5G. There's also a somewhat lenthy spiel about how college students aren't as radical and sexually depraved as everyone thinks, but rather fawning hypocrites, rather conventional in their sexuality. Meanwhile, we're told, college educators are placed on a pedestal and expected to exhibit a morality unexpected of bankers and housewives. Nowadays, I think, educators are rather expected to be leftist radicals, because they make for such a nice target, but as an artefact of its time it's certainly interesting. Some sections on the allure of belief in and practice of black magic lend themselves well to commentary on fantasy and horror:
Anyway, Leiber can certainly write when he sets his mind to it, is what I'm saying. And then to top it all off, he goes and puts one hell of a twist in, the sort of thing that swings the book onto a new path, right when most other writers would have wrapped things up with a happy ending. Unfortunately, I almost wish he'd played it safe, because after that spectacular moment two-thirds of the way through, it loses all its intriguing reflections and becomes a simple adventure-horror about everything Saylor does to beat the women at their own game, mostly by applying his vaunted masculine logic and science to it. Technically the big finale is achieved by the cooperation of husband and wife, which feels like the least sexist ending possible, but much of the cooperation is off-page to maximise suspense, so in practice the focus mostly stays on Norman. Alright, so, it's a long way from perfect. But considering its age, and discounting the last third? It's pretty damn good.
For the interested, there's a good little piece on the evolution of the book's covers over seven decades available here.
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.0
First read 01/2025
I picked this up for the 'Dark Academia' square of the r/Fantasy book bingo; of course, they didn't have dark academia in 1942, so it was just a low fantasy campus novel back then. The way it plays with the question of whether or not witchcraft is real puts me in mind of Theodore Sturgeon's 'vampire' novel, Some of Your Blood, but it swings the real-ness in the other direction; I suspect I'm mostly making the connection because they both feel old-school to me.
I picked this up for the 'Dark Academia' square of the r/Fantasy book bingo; of course, they didn't have dark academia in 1942, so it was just a low fantasy campus novel back then. The way it plays with the question of whether or not witchcraft is real puts me in mind of Theodore Sturgeon's 'vampire' novel, Some of Your Blood, but it swings the real-ness in the other direction; I suspect I'm mostly making the connection because they both feel old-school to me.
Norman smiled. That had been an odd notion Tansy had let slip toward the end—that Evelyn Sawtelle and Harold Gunnison’s wife and old Mrs. Carr were practicing magic too, of the venomous black variety. And not any too hard to believe, either, if you knew them! That was the sort of idea with which a clever satirical writer could do a lot. Just carry it a step further—picture most women as glamor-conscious witches, carrying on their savage warfare of deathspell and countercharm, while their reality-befuddled husbands went blithely about their business. Let’s see, Barrie had written What Every Woman Knows to show that men never realize how their wives were responsible for their successes. Being that blind, would men be any more apt to realize that their wives used witchcraft for the purpose?
Leiber plays the 'all women are witches' gag fairly straight; he's not particularly trying to subvert it or find liberating possibilities in it. Nonetheless, there are moments with a definite tongue-in-cheek feel, as though to acknowledge that the whole thing is ridiculous, which go a little way towards ameliorating the sexism. It's mostly of the men=rational/women=intuitive variety, but the generally flattering depiction of Tansy goes some way towards balancing out the demonised desires of the other three witches. Given its age and subject, it could be so, so much worse. Same goes for the passing association of primitive magic with 'Negroes'.
The first two thirds of the book were clearly the strongest part. Norman Saylor refuses to accept the existence of magic, and even at the very end he doesn't entirely concede that it's real. Since readers are likely to be less skeptical than he, this gets a bit wearisome eventually, but in the meantime, it sets up some really good stuff:
It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realization that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analyzed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to him, an area plunged in darkness, acrouch with fear, blown by giant winds.
Big fan of "acrouch with fear". And there are moments of social reflection that have remained strong:
And what is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I’d welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.
Substitute 'superstition' for 'conspiracy' and I think he's pretty much hit the nail on the head. Yes, dear, I'm sure the vaccine really is out to hit you with 5G. There's also a somewhat lenthy spiel about how college students aren't as radical and sexually depraved as everyone thinks, but rather fawning hypocrites, rather conventional in their sexuality. Meanwhile, we're told, college educators are placed on a pedestal and expected to exhibit a morality unexpected of bankers and housewives. Nowadays, I think, educators are rather expected to be leftist radicals, because they make for such a nice target, but as an artefact of its time it's certainly interesting. Some sections on the allure of belief in and practice of black magic lend themselves well to commentary on fantasy and horror:
The strange thing was that these thoughts were not altogether unpleasant. They had a wild, black, poisonous beauty of their own, a lovely, deadly shimmer. They possessed the fascination of the impossible, the incredible. They hinted at unimaginable vistas. Even while they terrorized, they did not lose that chillingly poignant beauty. They were like the visions conjured up by some forbidden drug. They had the lure of an unknown sin and an ultimate blasphemy.
Anyway, Leiber can certainly write when he sets his mind to it, is what I'm saying. And then to top it all off, he goes and puts one hell of a twist in, the sort of thing that swings the book onto a new path, right when most other writers would have wrapped things up with a happy ending. Unfortunately, I almost wish he'd played it safe, because after that spectacular moment two-thirds of the way through, it loses all its intriguing reflections and becomes a simple adventure-horror about everything Saylor does to beat the women at their own game, mostly by applying his vaunted masculine logic and science to it. Technically the big finale is achieved by the cooperation of husband and wife, which feels like the least sexist ending possible, but much of the cooperation is off-page to maximise suspense, so in practice the focus mostly stays on Norman. Alright, so, it's a long way from perfect. But considering its age, and discounting the last third? It's pretty damn good.
For the interested, there's a good little piece on the evolution of the book's covers over seven decades available here.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
First read 01/2025
Was it a brilliant piece of sci-fi? No. But if the plot holes can be overlooked, then the world is written in such a way that it doesn't feel entirely artificial.
Was it a brilliant piece of romance? No. But the characters were likeable enough, if rather bland. They came into this relationship with certain issues, and slowly worked through them. It's a very linear sort of healing, and they feel disgustingly reasonable. They survive an assassination attempt at one point, and are totally unphased by the experience, because Maxwell is too busy having them deal with their pre-existing personal problems to let them acquire new ones. At the beginning, they're constantly interrupted by reminders that they have to attend some sort of event whenever they begin to have meaningful conversations. They're both oblivious, and it can be frustrating. Still, the premise of two people who wildly overestimate each other's competence is somewhat amusing.
Was it a brilliant story? No. But it gets the job done. In fact, that can be said of most of the book. It's easy to get sucked into, easy not to think about, and easy to enjoy if you like the genres it's playing with.
Was it a brilliant piece of sci-fi? No. But if the plot holes can be overlooked, then the world is written in such a way that it doesn't feel entirely artificial.
Was it a brilliant piece of romance? No. But the characters were likeable enough, if rather bland. They came into this relationship with certain issues, and slowly worked through them. It's a very linear sort of healing, and they feel disgustingly reasonable. They survive an assassination attempt at one point, and are totally unphased by the experience, because Maxwell is too busy having them deal with their pre-existing personal problems to let them acquire new ones. At the beginning, they're constantly interrupted by reminders that they have to attend some sort of event whenever they begin to have meaningful conversations. They're both oblivious, and it can be frustrating. Still, the premise of two people who wildly overestimate each other's competence is somewhat amusing.
Was it a brilliant story? No. But it gets the job done. In fact, that can be said of most of the book. It's easy to get sucked into, easy not to think about, and easy to enjoy if you like the genres it's playing with.
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Dung Kai-cheung
Did not finish book. Stopped at 6%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 6%.
I mean, it looks really good. I'll definitely have to come back to it. But I think I'll need to be a bit more awake.
Song for the Basilisk by Patricia A. McKillip
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
First read 01/2025 for the r/Fantasy book bingo (bards square)
I tried to read Jaleigh Johnson's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter (oof ouch my colon) for the bards square, and it went terribly, but I managed to finish this one! Since I picked it up for the bingo, I didn't really know anything going into it, except that Patricia McKillip was one of those writers who's meant to be Very Good. Not merely in the sense that she can come up with a cool worldbuilding idea, or make a particularly twisty plot, but that she can write, and that problems in her books are unlikely to be solved by a bout of convenient violence. She won the Mythopoeic Award four times, which should tell you something.
This was a more or less accurate impression. The plot is a fairly standard tale of the lost heir returning for revenge, but the opera within the book very neatly pokes fun at this whilst lifting the drama to new heights, so it gets a pass. There was more violence than I expected, but it didn't really provide tidy solutions. In fact, the majority of it happened in the background, and mostly to people who'd done nothing to deserve it; the casual brutality was rather shocking after 250 pages of peace and plotting. Good stuff.
The writing was indeed impressive, but at times it definitely seemed to be trying too hard. There were a number of points when it flat-out contradicted itself in an effort to be poetic, like so:
I tried to read Jaleigh Johnson's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter (oof ouch my colon) for the bards square, and it went terribly, but I managed to finish this one! Since I picked it up for the bingo, I didn't really know anything going into it, except that Patricia McKillip was one of those writers who's meant to be Very Good. Not merely in the sense that she can come up with a cool worldbuilding idea, or make a particularly twisty plot, but that she can write, and that problems in her books are unlikely to be solved by a bout of convenient violence. She won the Mythopoeic Award four times, which should tell you something.
This was a more or less accurate impression. The plot is a fairly standard tale of the lost heir returning for revenge, but the opera within the book very neatly pokes fun at this whilst lifting the drama to new heights, so it gets a pass. There was more violence than I expected, but it didn't really provide tidy solutions. In fact, the majority of it happened in the background, and mostly to people who'd done nothing to deserve it; the casual brutality was rather shocking after 250 pages of peace and plotting. Good stuff.
The writing was indeed impressive, but at times it definitely seemed to be trying too hard. There were a number of points when it flat-out contradicted itself in an effort to be poetic, like so:
She waited for Brio Hood. He came silently, but she heard him before he wanted her to. His shadow, she might have told him, brushed too carelessly across stone. Still, she did not move before he spoke. Then she turned, smiling at him, the brittle collection of bone and cold shriveled thought that no one ever noticed, even after it was too late.
Please don't try to convince me that he's never noticed when you've just told me that someone's noticed him. I'm not quite that thick. The opening was also wildly confusing; being the first pages of a fantasy novel, pretty much anything can happen. If the book tells me that the ash is looking around the room, then crawled out of the hearth, I will believe that this is some sort of sentient ash spirit. If it's actually narrating a traumatised child perceiving himself as dead/ash, I'm going to have to go back and reread it once I figure this out. It would have worked in the middle of the book, once a precedent had been set, but right off the bat? It's too poetic, too fast. That said, the magic was incredibly vague in a really good way, so that I was never quite sure what it was going to do, or what it might be capable of. A lot of the time, the characters didn't know either. It felt very appropriately magical.
I didn't have high hopes for this bingo square, because I worried that a fantasy writer doing a bards novel would produce pretty hackneyed stuff, and it was rather hackneyed, but I'm happy to have read it all the same. Music was given an appropriately large role without ever feeling like it characterised the whole setting, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Caladrius and his adult son Hollis. The book mostly centred around men, but the female characters were varied and interesting, particularly the rather enigmatic Luna Arioso. It wasn't by any means a horny book, but the world had very relaxed attitudes towards sex, which is an uncommon combination in fantasy novels, particularly when the society created remains misogynistic ("I'll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble," says one character.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more McKillip.
I didn't have high hopes for this bingo square, because I worried that a fantasy writer doing a bards novel would produce pretty hackneyed stuff, and it was rather hackneyed, but I'm happy to have read it all the same. Music was given an appropriately large role without ever feeling like it characterised the whole setting, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Caladrius and his adult son Hollis. The book mostly centred around men, but the female characters were varied and interesting, particularly the rather enigmatic Luna Arioso. It wasn't by any means a horny book, but the world had very relaxed attitudes towards sex, which is an uncommon combination in fantasy novels, particularly when the society created remains misogynistic ("I'll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble," says one character.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more McKillip.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
First read 01/2025
I was initially horrified when some monster added a 'Read a book that's going to be adapted' to our library book club bingo, but then I remembered that I'd downloaded this because I'd heard Bong Joon-ho was making it into a film. It took me two years to get round to reading it, but I beat the deadline, so hey! Snowpiercer was good and Parasite was excellent, so as recommendations go, that's not bad. Unfortunately, Mickey7 was... just okay?
The blurb gave me the impression that making contact with the aliens and brokering some sort of peace would be a significant part of the book, but there isn't really any progress made on that front until the very end. The book is divided into present-day chapters, in which Mickey7 mostly tries to avoid being around Mickey8 and spends his time being hungry and somewhat horny, and the flashback/exposition chapters, which tell us about Mickeys One through Six, then deliver important lectures about Why He's Being Discriminated Against All The Time (future religion bigotry), Why Everyone Hates Multiple Concurrent Clones (been there, done that, went bad), and Why Humans Are Colonising The Galaxy (we'll kill each other if we don't spread out). That last one was easily the part with the most wasted potential; if everyone is so concerned with ensuring the survival of the human species at all costs, even though it won't make a difference to their own lives, then mightn't it be possible to make a connection between the finite life of Mickey7 and the infinite replication of Mickey? After all, any individual person is convincingly argued here to be just one person. Mickey, or humanity, is a fairly abstract concept, but seemingly a reassuring one.
Mickey7 has the same somewhat humorous first-person narration as an Andy Weir novel. It's marginally more willing to engage with the philosophical implications, but it's clumsily done. The Ship of Theseus is predictably explicated, rather than being used to inform the writing. It was difficult to care about any of the characters, and Marshall was a dull villain without nuance. There's a story arc in the TV show Farscape in which a character gets unwillingly duplicated, and I have to say that, almost entirely on the strength of the characterisations, the whole thing is much better done than anything in this book. But that's a lot of TV just for a story arc. I would say that if you want to read a story about clones, go for Le Guin's 'Nine Lives'; if you want a story about dying repeatedly and coming back to suffer, play Slay the Princess.
And I've never said this before, but the sex scene needed a lot more detail. 'Would you fuck your clone' is an age-old question, but when it came down to it, Ashton chickened out. I hear Robert Pattinson is starring in the film, though. I trust he won't let me down.
I was initially horrified when some monster added a 'Read a book that's going to be adapted' to our library book club bingo, but then I remembered that I'd downloaded this because I'd heard Bong Joon-ho was making it into a film. It took me two years to get round to reading it, but I beat the deadline, so hey! Snowpiercer was good and Parasite was excellent, so as recommendations go, that's not bad. Unfortunately, Mickey7 was... just okay?
The blurb gave me the impression that making contact with the aliens and brokering some sort of peace would be a significant part of the book, but there isn't really any progress made on that front until the very end. The book is divided into present-day chapters, in which Mickey7 mostly tries to avoid being around Mickey8 and spends his time being hungry and somewhat horny, and the flashback/exposition chapters, which tell us about Mickeys One through Six, then deliver important lectures about Why He's Being Discriminated Against All The Time (future religion bigotry), Why Everyone Hates Multiple Concurrent Clones (been there, done that, went bad), and Why Humans Are Colonising The Galaxy (we'll kill each other if we don't spread out). That last one was easily the part with the most wasted potential; if everyone is so concerned with ensuring the survival of the human species at all costs, even though it won't make a difference to their own lives, then mightn't it be possible to make a connection between the finite life of Mickey7 and the infinite replication of Mickey? After all, any individual person is convincingly argued here to be just one person. Mickey, or humanity, is a fairly abstract concept, but seemingly a reassuring one.
Mickey7 has the same somewhat humorous first-person narration as an Andy Weir novel. It's marginally more willing to engage with the philosophical implications, but it's clumsily done. The Ship of Theseus is predictably explicated, rather than being used to inform the writing. It was difficult to care about any of the characters, and Marshall was a dull villain without nuance. There's a story arc in the TV show Farscape in which a character gets unwillingly duplicated, and I have to say that, almost entirely on the strength of the characterisations, the whole thing is much better done than anything in this book. But that's a lot of TV just for a story arc. I would say that if you want to read a story about clones, go for Le Guin's 'Nine Lives'; if you want a story about dying repeatedly and coming back to suffer, play Slay the Princess.
And I've never said this before, but the sex scene needed a lot more detail. 'Would you fuck your clone' is an age-old question, but when it came down to it, Ashton chickened out. I hear Robert Pattinson is starring in the film, though. I trust he won't let me down.
Tsalmoth by Steven Brust
funny
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
2.0
First read 01/2025
I hate to say it but, well, it's more of the same, isn't it?
I really don't think any series needs to be this long. All the character development, all the really big plot stuff (and there's been little enough of that recently) could fit comfortably into a dozen books, probably less if you were prepared to be vicious. That's not to say I didn't enjoy this one. Mostly, though, I believe that if a series is going to be this long, it has to really earn it. Episodic adventures are simply not the way to my heart.
As for this particular book, it's nothing that hasn't been done before. Vlad is a Jhereg crime boss, he has a minor problem, he spends most of the time being confused about who's doing what to whom, and over the course of his involvement it spirals into a larger problem before having a moderately dramatic dénouement. We're talking Dzur levels of exciting.
My favourite Brust books to date have been the ones where he's gone all in on themes (Teckla, Phoenix) or shown off his technical talent as a writer (Tiassa), but after those the Vlad books work best when he's got his friends around him. This is certainly one of those books, with the focus being mostly on Cawti. Brust isn't a romance writer, and I don't think he wants to be, so their relationship mostly consists of wisecracks and sappy comments, with Loiosh frequently threatening to throw up, as though Brust is worried that this will be very unappealing to his readers and wants to head off any criticism. It doesn't quite do it for me, for some reason. Also,Cawti saves Vlad's life a couple of times throughout the book, which makes it feel really stupid that she more or less divorced him because he saved her life a bit too frequently. Vlad's whole thing is having other people do him favours. Got involved in a Jhereg gang war? Here's 20,000 gold, my boy! Turned into a demon? Let me erase your memories to fix that for you. Criminal organisation hunting you down? Why don't you stay with me for a bit, never mind the risk that I'm taking. It's terribly illogical, but of course people are illogical; I could have forgiven this if Brust had shown how their later problems had sprung from their respective characters, but the closest we get to that is Cawti trying to expand Vlad's vocabulary, which is not quite in the same league.
I hate to say it but, well, it's more of the same, isn't it?
I really don't think any series needs to be this long. All the character development, all the really big plot stuff (and there's been little enough of that recently) could fit comfortably into a dozen books, probably less if you were prepared to be vicious. That's not to say I didn't enjoy this one. Mostly, though, I believe that if a series is going to be this long, it has to really earn it. Episodic adventures are simply not the way to my heart.
As for this particular book, it's nothing that hasn't been done before. Vlad is a Jhereg crime boss, he has a minor problem, he spends most of the time being confused about who's doing what to whom, and over the course of his involvement it spirals into a larger problem before having a moderately dramatic dénouement. We're talking Dzur levels of exciting.
My favourite Brust books to date have been the ones where he's gone all in on themes (Teckla, Phoenix) or shown off his technical talent as a writer (Tiassa), but after those the Vlad books work best when he's got his friends around him. This is certainly one of those books, with the focus being mostly on Cawti. Brust isn't a romance writer, and I don't think he wants to be, so their relationship mostly consists of wisecracks and sappy comments, with Loiosh frequently threatening to throw up, as though Brust is worried that this will be very unappealing to his readers and wants to head off any criticism. It doesn't quite do it for me, for some reason. Also,
Ice by Anna Kavan
When I began my reread, I was determined to pay close attention, to winnow out the real from the vision. At first I felt confident, but then the book threw me; the section I had just finished, that seemed to contain both real and false, may itself have been hallucinated. It was unclear, and anyway it didn't matter. I had been asking the wrong question. It is all a phantasmagoria, and not least because that is the way of fiction. As the pages went by, I let go of my task, let the book carry me along on its improbable patterns.
None of the characters are named. Aside from the narrator, they exist mostly insofar as they can be extrapolated by the reader, though there's enough offered up to make this approach rewarding. Speculative fiction is often judged, at least in part, by the imaginativeness of the author. Here the imagination of the reader is on trial also. The characters can be arranged in various ways to suit analysis: the narrator and the warden are the same person; the narrator symbolises a patriarchal society; the narrator is heroin and the girl, Kavan.
dark
reflective
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
First read 03/2022, reread 01/2025
Armed men came up, pushed me back, seized her by her frail shoulders. Big tears fell from her eyes like icicles , like diamonds, but I was unmoved. They did not seem to me like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.
When I began my reread, I was determined to pay close attention, to winnow out the real from the vision. At first I felt confident, but then the book threw me; the section I had just finished, that seemed to contain both real and false, may itself have been hallucinated. It was unclear, and anyway it didn't matter. I had been asking the wrong question. It is all a phantasmagoria, and not least because that is the way of fiction. As the pages went by, I let go of my task, let the book carry me along on its improbable patterns.
None of the characters are named. Aside from the narrator, they exist mostly insofar as they can be extrapolated by the reader, though there's enough offered up to make this approach rewarding. Speculative fiction is often judged, at least in part, by the imaginativeness of the author. Here the imagination of the reader is on trial also. The characters can be arranged in various ways to suit analysis: the narrator and the warden are the same person; the narrator symbolises a patriarchal society; the narrator is heroin and the girl, Kavan.
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
1.0
First read 01/2025
I've thought about reading this one before, having heard that it was a very winter-y book, but I've never much gone in for stories about the fae, so I let it go. I only picked it up because I stumbled across it at the library. I was 140 pages into it before I realised it would work very nicely for the "A book you don't expect to like" square of my book bingo. Unfortunately, it lived up to my expectations.
Part of the problem is that I've just finished reading Fires' Astonishment, which has wonderfully imaginative prose. The male romantic lead chews on his shirt collar and the female romantic lead has psoriasis and an eye infection. It's terrifically down-to-earth. Here, everyone is beautiful—and forgettable. The prose is merely tolerable, and the Canadian author has no qualms about having her English narrator refer to autumn as "fall".
In fact, the setting is thoroughly disappointing. London is lit by gaslights, and Emily uses an inkwell, but she never seems to have any trouble writing in her notebook whilst on the go (presumably she uses a pencil, but it's never mentioned). The village woodcutter is a lesbian, and this is considered unremarkable. That's not to say that everything with a historical setting needs to be riddled with homophobia, but it ought to at least be remarked upon if the illusion of historicity is to be preserved. Perhaps the villagers have a culture of minding their own business, or a policy to never interfere in the relationships of others, or maybe Lilja spent long enough arguing with the rest of the village before the book started that they've resigned themselves to her ways. But it ought to at least be remarked upon. In a similar vein, Wendell Bambleby has a habit of swinging by the tavern to pick up local women for casual sex. Emily Wilde is annoyed by this, in an 'I'm definitely not in love with you and denying it to myself' sort of way, but it's never thought to reflect on the morals of either the women or Bambleby. The women are never even named or given characteristics beyond their hair colour and good looks (even in a small village, beauty is mandatory), which feels like a missed opportunity, both for some feminist commentary on sex and relationships and also for developing the romance between Emily and Wendell Bambleby. Which is a stupid name. It should at least be Brambleby.
On top of all that, the wintry landscape is not much more meaningful than stage scenery. Oh, the cold is mentioned frequently enough, but Fawcett isn't a good enough writer to capture the feeling of sweating inside your heavy furs even as your lips are going numb, or the constant stomping of boots to knock off snow and restore circulation, or the searing brightness of the winter sun reflecting off the snow, which muffles all noise and makes the world strangely quiet, as if the forests are holding their breath.
The only part of the book I did like was the romance, which always took second fiddle to the adventure; Bambleby didn't even show up until fifty tiresome pages in. The dynamic between the pair was generally fun, and the book was flatter when Bambleby wasn't around. Somehow it managed to both escalate the romance too quickly and not go far enough to hold my interest. I don't think I will be reading the sequel.
I've thought about reading this one before, having heard that it was a very winter-y book, but I've never much gone in for stories about the fae, so I let it go. I only picked it up because I stumbled across it at the library. I was 140 pages into it before I realised it would work very nicely for the "A book you don't expect to like" square of my book bingo. Unfortunately, it lived up to my expectations.
Part of the problem is that I've just finished reading Fires' Astonishment, which has wonderfully imaginative prose. The male romantic lead chews on his shirt collar and the female romantic lead has psoriasis and an eye infection. It's terrifically down-to-earth. Here, everyone is beautiful—and forgettable. The prose is merely tolerable, and the Canadian author has no qualms about having her English narrator refer to autumn as "fall".
In fact, the setting is thoroughly disappointing. London is lit by gaslights, and Emily uses an inkwell, but she never seems to have any trouble writing in her notebook whilst on the go (presumably she uses a pencil, but it's never mentioned). The village woodcutter is a lesbian, and this is considered unremarkable. That's not to say that everything with a historical setting needs to be riddled with homophobia, but it ought to at least be remarked upon if the illusion of historicity is to be preserved. Perhaps the villagers have a culture of minding their own business, or a policy to never interfere in the relationships of others, or maybe Lilja spent long enough arguing with the rest of the village before the book started that they've resigned themselves to her ways. But it ought to at least be remarked upon. In a similar vein, Wendell Bambleby has a habit of swinging by the tavern to pick up local women for casual sex. Emily Wilde is annoyed by this, in an 'I'm definitely not in love with you and denying it to myself' sort of way, but it's never thought to reflect on the morals of either the women or Bambleby. The women are never even named or given characteristics beyond their hair colour and good looks (even in a small village, beauty is mandatory), which feels like a missed opportunity, both for some feminist commentary on sex and relationships and also for developing the romance between Emily and Wendell Bambleby. Which is a stupid name. It should at least be Brambleby.
On top of all that, the wintry landscape is not much more meaningful than stage scenery. Oh, the cold is mentioned frequently enough, but Fawcett isn't a good enough writer to capture the feeling of sweating inside your heavy furs even as your lips are going numb, or the constant stomping of boots to knock off snow and restore circulation, or the searing brightness of the winter sun reflecting off the snow, which muffles all noise and makes the world strangely quiet, as if the forests are holding their breath.
The only part of the book I did like was the romance, which always took second fiddle to the adventure; Bambleby didn't even show up until fifty tiresome pages in. The dynamic between the pair was generally fun, and the book was flatter when Bambleby wasn't around. Somehow it managed to both escalate the romance too quickly and not go far enough to hold my interest. I don't think I will be reading the sequel.
Fires' Astonishment by Geraldine McCaughrean
Things I knew about Fires' Astonishment before reading:
Things I know about Fires' Astonishment after reading:
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
First read 01/2025
The contours of the land channelled him down towards the sea, hanging in folds like a cloak from the collar of white chalk at Worm Head. At the Head the wind was so blustery that it stole all sound from the seagulls, from under the horse’s hoofs and out of the leather tack. It left only the sensation of his cloak cracking and his horse staggering a little as he hurried on down into the arms of Worm Bay. A spring tide was stuffing sea water enthusiastically but clumsily up the estuary, leaving patches of sand bare but swamping dry roots and bushes. A fluke of wind had flexed the sea round the promontory and swelled the basin where the fishing boats were moored. From up on the slopes they looked like dogs straining to get free.
Things I knew about Fires' Astonishment before reading:
- Philip Reeve called it "the spark that set me writing Mortal Engines" in the acknowledgements of Thunder City.
- Geraldine McCaughrean wrote Peter Pan in Scarlet, which I think I may have started but not finished when I was in secondary school.
- She also wrote A Pack of Lies, one of only five books to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
- Stands to reason she's a children's writer.
- That's it.
Things I know about Fires' Astonishment after reading:
- It's good. It's really, really good.
- Imagine someone wrote a mediaeval historical fiction novel about sex and sin and dying and then decided to chuck a dragon in there for good measure. That's Fires' Astonishment.
- It's not a children's book, but I feel like it could be, if children were cool.
- Despite not being set in any particular location, it feels very firmly situated. Do I detect a hint of Alan Garner?
- The characters are not heroes, but feel oh so very people-y. I think this is where the influence on Reeve comes through most strongly, in the humour and heartbreak, because it's a million miles away from madcap cities driving around eating each other. The first description we get of the female love interest emphasises eyelashes crusted with yellow by some slight infection, and psoriasis across the bottom half of her face; it's so refreshing to have non-Hollywood female characters. Reeve understands this also.
- It has that weirdness I associate with books that are more mediaeval than the Tolkien-y fantasy benchmark, though I freely concede that I don't really know enough about the Dark Ages to judge.
- It was published in 1990, the same year as Le Guin's Tehanu, the book that (to me) encapsulates the broader fantasy genre's feminist self-reckoning. Fires' Astonishment has not learned that lesson. The men do just about everything, and the one female character of note who tries to arrange her life the way she wants it, is the villain.
- The ending feels rather convenient.
- I don't care. It's still great.
- It's got probably the best sex scene/description I've ever come across. It's haunting. How the hell do you write a sex scene that's haunting? I'm looking at one and I still don't know.
He put both arms round her, body, breast and elbows all, and threw her, like a log on to the hearth, through the curtainless doorway and on to the big old bed. But her fists were knotted in the skirt of his jerkin and he was fetched off his feet on top of her, bruising his shins on the baseboard.
The weight of his body jerked the air out of her in a cry: he both heard and felt it against his cheek. He heard, too, the bell ringing way over at Saint Bede’s. He heard his servant climb half-way up the far-end steps and presumably reach his head above the landing. He heard the man’s foot miss a rung and slip down to the one below. He heard the withdrawal downstairs, an exchange with the other servant and a snort of dirty, good-natured laughter — laughter tinged with a cheer, such as you hear at a wedding.
Then all he could hear was his own breathing and the blood pushing its way through the flotsam of noise in his ears, like flood-water breaking a dam and cascading into the mainstream; and a drowning man’s cry in the flood that dilapidates the boundary fences of Eden.