Reading Roundup - October/November 2018

My reading time, which is mostly listening time, took a bit of a hit in October as I became embroiled in the podcast Wolf-359, so I’ve rolled these two months together.

We begin with Solaris, a classic of Russian SF, in which Kelvin, a psychologist, is dispatched to a research station orbiting the titular planet. A scientific anomaly, the planet is covered by a single, self-mobile ocean which somehow regulates its orbit, and has become the subject of its own vast and internally schismatic branch of science, dedicated seemingly to producing a definitive explanation of how and why no-one can actually understand what the shit is up with Solaris. Kelvin has been sent to investigate a breakdown in communication from the station, which turns out to have been caused by the mysterious appearance of replicas of the crew’s – often deceased – loved ones aboard the station, by unknown processes and to unknown ends.

This is SF at its most cerebral. Solaris is a long, slow, rambling discourse on the nature of loss, isolation, guilt and communication. There isn’t a lot of action, and about 60% of the significant conflicts occur entirely within Kelvin’s own mind and conscience. The true nature of Solaris itself is, ultimately, less important to the story than humanity’s inability to understand the true nature of Solaris. It takes some time to get into and sort of… engulfs you like an overeager duvet, especially as a reading, rather than being an instant page turner.

Worth the read, if only for genre completeness, but it can be an effort at times.

Because it was on offer, I moved on to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which if nothing else prepared me for the game’s opening violence against children. Kassandra(1) is an exiled Spartan mercenary (or Misthios, which also becomes her particular nom de guerre,) who graduates from small-time debt collection work when a dodgy individual hires her to assassinate a Spartan general, who turns out to be her own father. On discovering that her employer belongs to the all-powerful Cult of Kosmos, Kassandra sets out to bring the Cult down, helped or hindered by a who’s who of the Peloponnesian War, including Perikles and Aspasia of Athens, Herodotus, Socrates and a slightly anachronistic Pythagoras, to name just the ones that I recognise without having to get all Wikipedia about it.

As fictional adaptations of computer games go, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is pretty good. Okay, that’s a low bar, but the writing it pretty decent, and the author has made a decent fist of reducing a branching storyline to a single narrative (and, incidentally, bypassing all of the Misthios’s potential romance options.) Notably, coming from a game means that the action is both non-stop and punctuated by regular boss battles. The reading is initially a little stiff, but I think that’s mostly due to the contrast between the reader’s primary crisp RP delivery and the more earthy, Greek-accented(2) voice she uses for Kassandra’s first person segments. We open with the latter, so when we shift to the former it sounds oddly formal, but it settles in well enough.

I don’t regret the time invested in this one, although I might feel differently if it hadn’t been on offer when I bought it.

Saga was once the greatest band in the world. They were the Kings of the Wyld, the storied heroes of many a tour of the Heartwyld and countless smaller gigs to take down local monsters. Their names were legend: Golden Gabe, with his blade Velicor; knife-wielding rogue Matty Skulldrummer; the wizard Moog; Ganelon, the warrior born; and ‘Slowhand’ Clay Cooper, the tank. Now, they’re old men, and their profession is in the hands of younger fighters, and in slow decline as the monsters run out. But then a horde of monsters descends upon a neighbouring republic, and Gabe’s daughter Rose is one of the mercenaries trapped in the capital after coming to its defence. The horde is closing in. The city is surrounded, the food is running out, and there’s little chance of an official relief mission. It’s time to get the band back together.

For something that is basically an extended joke about mercenary bands who act like rock bands – monster-fighting ‘gigs’ and ‘tours’ by celebrity bands are arranged by cutthroat agents known as bookers, the bands are as famous for their partying as for their battles, some even have armoured ‘argosy’ war wagons that act as their tour buses, and I suspect that more than half of the background mercs are references to one rock legend or another – with some D&D references thrown in for good measure, Kings of the Wyld has an impressive degree of staying power. In part, this is down to a unique world, with the constant threat of monsters down to the age-old actions of a dying race of immortal, rabbit-eared, dimension-hopping refugees who used to rule the world, and a federation of kingdoms whose wary but stable peace has produced standing armies with little to do but parade and guard things. My main worry with the concept – that things would get laddish in this old boys’ club – proved groundless, as our heroes reminisce about respected female contemporaries and are twice robbed by a gang of female bandits without any sign of wounded pride. With a fair number of women involved in the final battle, the author also doesn’t shy away from casualties among the female mercs. There are signs of cultural homophobia, but as an outlier in a fantasy world with gay marriage.

The world is interesting, and our crusty old protagonists are generally likeable, if dangerous and occasionally inclined towards a pointy brand of conflict resolution. They aren't exactly good people, but they are generally more committed to doing good things than they are inclined to even inadvertently do bad, which is as much as you can ask from what is basically a cross between a hedonistic classic rock band, and a party of D&D murder hobos. The band metaphor manages not to get tired, and the humour and the action both work well enough.

This was a good read, and I have the sequel lined up for future listening.

I’ve been working through The Graveyard Book slowly, not because of any reluctance, but because I’ve read it before and I like to have something with a more episodic structure on hand for when I’m looking to knock down an hour’s listening between novels. Neil Gaiman’s urban undead revision of The Jungle Book has been around long enough that I suspect anyone reading my blog will have read it already. My original review of the book vanished with the website that used to host it, but I received my copy pretty much day of release and I’ve loved the tale of Nobody Owens and his life among the dead ever since. As is usual, Gaiman reads his own work.

Definitely worth the time invested.

Finally, for the months, I checked out Audible’s new musical adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which is weird AF. I really don’t know what went on in the meeting where they decided that they should do a full cast adaptation mostly of the original novel, but with some of the material from Jeff Wayne’s musical version, and using the music from said musical version as incidental music but not including the songs. The failure of the familiar intros to transition into the full lyrics is almost as distracting as Michael Sheen’s narration, which seems to be based on an impression of Tom Baker’s impression of Liam Neeson’s impression of Richard Burton.

Weird, but fun.

(1) The game allows you to choose between playing Kassandra and her brother Alexios; the novel takes Kassandra as the canon protagonist.

(2) I’m not going to pretend I know if this accent is any good.

Reading Roundup - June 2018

So, this past month I’ve been reading through the first two Harry Potter books with my daughter(1), using the large, illustrated editions to keep her from going all pie-eyed at the walls of text. We’ve started on The Prisoner of Azkaban, but after that we’re going to need to wait for the next one to come out next year. She’s not the most focused of listeners, but she frequently surprises me with her acuity and recall. Of course, we’ve hit a bit of a complication as her brain smooshes various media – book, film, LEGO video game – together into a single narrative, but so it goes, and I’m honestly kind of proud of her ability to zone out Gilderoy Lockhart.

My own reading kicked off this month with The Burning Maze, book three of Rick Riordan’s Trials of Apollo series(2). From Indianapolis, Apollo and Meg travel with Grover to California, only to find that the Labyrinth there has become filled with supernatural flame, causing the land to wither. With the aid of old friends, including Coach Gleeson Hedge, Piper Maclean and Jason Grace, Apollo and Meg must walk into the burning maze, knowing it is a trap, and confront the most dangerous member of the Triumvirate, an Emperor who has set his sights on the sun itself.

While none of Riordan’s books are exactly super-fluffy, this is perhaps the first to truly embrace tragedy. Opening with a Lemony Snicket-style disclaimer that more than any other, this chapter of the life of Lester Popadopoulos is one that he doesn’t want to write and doesn’t advise you to read, and I’m not going to lie: for long-term fans of the series, this one is going to sting. However, the tragedy – the book is dedicated to Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy, ‘I hope you’re happy’ – is not gratuitous, but both earned by and vital to the course of the narrative. It’s a part of Apollo’s growth arc, but also very much belongs to the characters more directly involved. People do not die to further Apollo’s story, but in their own stories which stand adjacent to his. In fact, it is this sense that the world is made up not of one story, but of multiple interlocking stories, which is a strength of the Trials of Apollo, a series in which the protagonist is almost a bystander, an observer to the adventures of others.

Next up, one of my rare paper reads, as I shelled out for the Night’s Black Agents sourcebook Dracula Unredacted. This is essentially the text of Dracula, but with some altered and some additional passages, some altered dates, a slightly rearranged timeline and three sets of footnotes to convert the novel into an account of an actual vampire incursion. The conceit is that Stoker adapted the true events of a disastrous attempt to recruit Dracula as an intelligence asset, as part of the cover up of the fallout from that attempt.

Now, the main thing that strikes me about this book is that it is not entirely complete. It says on the back that it is designed to be a player resource for the Night’s Black Agents scenario The Dracula Dossier and that means that the book, and especially the footnotes, contain a whole slew of references that get no pay-off or explanation. The additional material is interesting, but its pay-off is again not always in the book itself. In particular, I feel slightly aggrieved at the inclusion of Kate Reed – a character from early drafts of the novel, now better known for her substantial roles in the Anno Dracula series – only for her to be locked away and forgotten when she proves to be compromised by Dracula, while our ‘heroes’ pursue their single-minded quest to save the incomparable Mina. I mean, I like Mina, but the reverence the other characters show for her borders on the fanatical.

Actually, you know what, it’s not just Mina. They’re the same about Lucy, and what bothers me with the inclusion of Kate Reed is that, by keeping most of the text as is, she is apparently the only living woman in the world not worthy of this obsessive, pedestal-setting worship. When everyone is saying that Mina shouldn’t be involved anymore because of her delicate sensibilities, does anyone give a thought for Kate’s? No. She is apparently unworthy even of condescension.

So, yeah; it’s an interesting, but ultimately flawed work, or possibly just not really intended as a stand-alone novel.

Still on a Dracula tip, Quincey Harker: Year One – or, more precisely, Year One: A Quincey Harker Demon Hunter Collection – is an anthology of novellas following the adventures of the son of Mina and Jonathan Harker, who gained immortality from Dracula’s influence on his parents and has, in the time leading to the present day setting, become a skilled fighter and magician, devoting himself to fighting demons. By the second story he has a unique bond with an unusually badass female detective, and works for Homeland Security as a demon hunting consultant. He also maintains close contact with his ‘Uncle Luke’, aka Dracula, and his super-butler Renfield(3).

Quincey Harker is pretty by the numbers paranormal mystery. We’re in the early phases, so no gratuitous sex, but Harker has some internalised misogyny to work through and Detective Rebecca Gail Flynn is a cookie cutter tough female cop. In addition, there are areas where the novellas contradict one another, or even themselves. It’s not terrible, and avoids some, but not all, of the worst clichés – men and women face violence more-or-less equally, although we do open with a case of a girl drugged to be impregnated by a demon – and is competently written and read.

If that last sounds like slim praise, it is important. My next listen, The Paper Magician, came highly recommended, and I really didn’t like it, and I think a lot of that – but not all – comes down to the reading. This is a danger with audiobooks, of course, and I think also hit me with the highly-recommended Sorcerer of the Crown.

Anyway, The Paper Magician is set at the turn of the 20^th century, in an alternate version of England where magic is, if not common, then at least a fact of life, and where magicians bond with a single, man-made material to work magic. Ceony Twill is an apprentice magician who, due to quotas, is assigned to bond to paper, instead of metal, as she had wanted, because paper is shit and stuff, and her mentor is mental. Anyway, she cooks and cleans and launders for her mentor, Magician Emery Thane, and then he gets his heart ripped out by his psycho ex and Ceony realises he’d look hot in a tux and sets out to rescue him, a process that will involve travelling through his heart and learning how to use paper to fight.

My biggest problem with this novel is that it is set in England in the early years of the 20^th century, but written in an American vernacular, a flaw emphasised by the fact that the narrator is also American. To make matters worse, the narrator’s English accent for the characters is not strong, with Ceony in particular sounding snooty in situations where she is supposed to come off as brave, defiant, or even whimsical. Additionally, while the world intrigued me, the characters did not, and in particular the romance – or rather, pre-romance – between Ceony and Emery was deeply unengaging. This romance really dominated the second half of the novel, with Ceony at one point struck by the sexiness of Emery’s handwriting, and served largely to cast the conflict between Ceony and the excisioner – flesh magician – Lyra(4) primarily in terms of the latter’s jealousy of her ex-husband’s apprentice eliminates any possibility of exploring the philosophical and political aspects of the forbidden magic that she practices. I mean, she animates severed limbs; I’m not sure layering femme fatale on top of that was really needed, and I would rather have learned more about the Magicians’ cabinet and the historical turns that resulted in Westminster Abbey being an unremarkable church merely close to the political heart of a secular nation.

Read, or with a different narrator, The Paper Magician might not be so problematic, but for me at least the rest of the series feels like a pass.

Finally, as I began the series with Arya, I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my own account, which I think is my first re-read. It’s a very different book to the rest of the series, taking the action away from Hogwarts, embracing the intrinsic combative potential of wizards, and seeing our heroes adopt two of the three ‘unforgivable’ curses with barely a batted eyelid. I still think that the Battle of Hogwarts is a missed opportunity for at least some of Slytherin to make good. Snape is honestly rather too vicious in the earlier novels to be fully redeemed by his motives, but it’s not as if any of the other teachers at Hogwarts were natural teaching material. The wizarding world has some issues, is really what I’m saying.

(1) She is capable of reading them herself, but in doing so focuses on the words to the expense of the story.

(2) Using the Greek mythology, so it’s five parts, where other mythologies get three.

(3) A successor, not a descendent.

(4) Or Leera, or Lira; this is the other problem with audiobooks.

Reading Roundup - December 2017

Nothing else in the challenge this time, so I am officially converting the 2017 Challenge into an ongoing push to explore new (to me) literary territory that I shall call Found Horizons.

I did listen to La Belle Sauvage, the first part of The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman's new trilogy set in the universe of His Dark Materials (and, critically, in Lyra's world, which is probably the most interesting part of that universe.) It tells the story of young Malcolm, an innkeeper's son and aspiring scholar, his relationship with aleithiometrist Hannah Relf and his resulting involvement with an anti-Magisterium secret society known as Oakley Street, and his flight with his teenage frenemy Alice and the infant Lyra Belaqua along a flooded Thames Valley aboard his canoe La Belle Sauvage. At first navigating swiftly through ordinary terrain in flight from the charming, yet malevolent scholar Bonneville and his much-abused hyaena daemon, they gradually find the lines between the mystical and the mundane blurring, and the canoe carrying them along the dangerous borders of Faerie; or something like it.

A lot has been said of Pullman's fixation on pubescent psychosexual awakening, surprisingly little of it along the lines of 'that's what fairy tales are all about,' but take that aspect as you will(1) there is no ignoring the fact that his prose is far superior to the run of the mill. It is particularly noticeable because, this being something of an event release, they have got in an A-list reader in the form of critical theatrical and indie darling and mainstream rubbish monster actor Michael Sheen, whose delivery would not have shamed countryman Richard Burton(2). Matched with a pacy adventure, solid protagonists - although, as with His Dark Materials, our heroes are outshone by their antagonists, if nowhere else then in the scene where Malcolm witnesses Bonneville striking his own daemon and the narrative hits the reader with this as hard as the fact of it does Malcolm, who has a lifetime absorbing the implications of what such an action means(3) - and just a smidge of fanservice foreshadowing, this makes for an excellent read.

Speaking of that fanservice, this is the real balancing act of a prequel; to set up a familiar situation without being predictable. La Belle Sauvage succeeds in this, as while Lyra's future is known, and characters like Lord Asriel and not-yet-Fader Coram are guaranteed to survive, Malcolm and Alice's future is unwritten, and it is entirely possible that one or both of them might die to deliver the infant Lyra to safety, or that Hannah Relf might take a bullet for her young protégé, or any number of nuns die for their young charge.

Far more than just a prologue, however, La Belle Sauvage serves to dramatically expand Lyra's world, increasing the reader's understanding of daemons, and even more so of the Magisterium and the power that it wields. Coming back to my Found Horizons project, it's interesting to note that the League of St Alexander - an organisation which recruits children to act as Magisterial informants against their parents and teachers - may be reminiscent of the Inquisitorial Squad in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but having also read Wild Swans this year is terrifyingly plausible in its parallels to Mau's Red Guards.

La Belle Sauvage is not a lightweight read in any sense. The prose is dense and rich, the story straightforward, but layered, and the hardback makes Order of the Phoenix look like a newsstand pulp thriller. It definitely rewards effort and focus, however, in a way that more disposable fiction(4) can only envy.

In some ways - most notably that of technical prose construction - Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead, the final novel in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy, falls far short of the standards set by La Belle Sauvage, but to focus on that would be to deny it its own virtues.

The Ship of the Dead follows on from The Hammer of Thor, with Magnus and his allies from Floor 19 of the Hotel Valhalla preparing to sail across mythical seas to prevent the launch of Njaglfar, the triumph of Loki, and the coming of Ragnarok. In a quest which leads to the halls of Aegir, the Shambles of York, the wilds of Alfheim and the frozen shores of Niflheim, the crew of the good ship Big Banana(5) uphold the great scavenger hunt tradition in search of a means for Magnus to defeat Loki in a flyting; a contest of insults(6).

Now, the most singular achievement of this book is that it realises the potential of the first transgender love interest in a mainstream early teen book, and by extension features what is at best a rare example of a bisexual teen hero, as Riordan establishes without fanfare or show that Magnus is into Alex Fierro both as a man and as a woman. In discussing the coming out of Nico di Angelo in the Percy Jackson series, Riordan explained that part of his reason for teaching and writing was to advocate for children who conventionally lack a voice in society, and he does so splendidly here(7).

In addition, Riordan once more weaves a rollocking adventure yarn from the yarn of myth, and gives bountiful screen time to the previously under-utilised veterans of Floor 19: Mallory Keane, Halfborn Gunderson and Thomas Jefferson Jr. The children of Loki - devout(8) Muslim Valkyrie Sam, and the persistently binomial Alex Fierro - are each in their own way a refreshing break from the norm that would do their estranged father proud if he were less of a dick. As for Magnus himself, since despite possession of the peerless blade Sumerbrandr(9), he essentially takes the role of healer girlfriend and self-confessed coward, which is pretty odd biscuits for a central hero protagonist. There's also something of Caiphas Cain in his self-deprecating narrative, which makes him much more likeable than in his first appearance; or maybe that's the better narration.

Finally, for the month - the last few weeks have been all family time - I went back to revisit Anthony Trollope's The Warden, part of a grand adaptation of the author's Barsetshire and political novels, all read by Timothy West. Now, I'll be honest, I could probably listen to West read the phone book and get a respectable distance into the Bs before it began to wear, and I've been a fan of Trollope's writing for years now, so this was likely to appeal to me. The slightest of the Barsetshire novels, The Warden tells the story of Mr Harding, a well-off and kindly cleric, who finds himself assailed by attacks in the popular press when the administration of the sinecure secured for him by his friends in the senior clergy is called into question by a dear friend. It is at once a rather cosy affair, with no real villains, and a satire of both the clergy of the time - while superficially very much in the corner of Mr Harding's high church, it is notable that the same characters who question what the beadsmen of St Hiram's could even do with £100 a year are aghast at the thought of Mr Harding supporting himself on less than £800 - and the popular press.

Politically it may not have a great deal to say in an era without clerical sinecures and livings, but it remains a warm and bright read (or listen), perfect for cold, wet commutes.

(1) For myself, the central relationship didn't feel particularly off or creepy, but like nearly all m/f romance or semi-romance relationships these days, felt like a waste of a more nuanced and unusual platonic pairing.

(2) The gold standard of voice performances.

(3) Having written fanfiction in which a character had significant conflict with their own daemon, which repulsed the young protagonist, I also felt a little smug at this point in the book.

(4) Newsstand pulps, more than Harry Potter.

(5) Because it is very, very yellow.

(6) Once more, props to Rick Riordan, because this is so totally a thing in Norse sagas.

(7) At least in as far as I, a cis het guy, can tell.

(8) For most of this novel she is fasting for Ramamdan and still taking names.

(9) Or Jack, for short.

Reading Roundup - June 2017

2017 Reading Challenge
Back up to pace this month, as I finished off Wild Swans and moved on to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. In the end, the problem with these two books was that, while the world of China during the Cultural Revolution is definitely a new one to me, the two had almost identical perspectives, being written by literate city children from Chengdou who went to the mountains. They were both excellent, and of course Wild Swans had a much broader scope, while Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress cared far more about character.

It's a sort of horror-western-fantasy mashup. Damn, you'd
have to have been King to get this published in 1982.

With the movie The Dark Tower coming out soon, I thought I'd have another crack at the original, with Stephen King's The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger(1). Full disclosure, I'm not a fan of King's writing in general, although the first two volumes of the series have been the exception so far, in that I got off the first page and, indeed, through the first two (or maybe three) books before the library failed me. Maybe it was the contemporary setting in the other books - I wasn't much into modern day until I was... well, ever really; even my crime reading tends to be old noir - but the western/post-apocalyptic/horror/fantasy mashup of The Gunslinger really hooked me. Or perhaps it was the opening.

“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”(2)

The Gunslinger kicks off in media res, with the titular pistoleer-paladin in pursuit of the Man in Black, a wizard and corruptor seemingly set on bringing ruin to what is left of a blasted, dying world, having already overthrown the Gunslingers' kingdom of Gilead(3). Death follows in the Man in Black's wake, wrought by him and delivered by the Gunslinger, with a young boy from modern(ish; the book is old) day Manhattan the latest in the crosshairs. The Gunslinger is the hunter, but the Man in Black has all the power, at least at this point in their cat and mouse. It's an intriguing opener, much stronger on set-up than on payoff, but there it goes; it is the start of a seven book plus two novella series, so you wouldn't expect it to wrap everything up neatly.

Oddly, the Red Riding Hood persona is only
mooted in this volume.

Next on my list was The Rules of Supervillainy, a semi-parody set in one of those worlds where superpowers are fairly commonplace. Gary Karpowsky is a happily married white collar worker who receives the magical Reaper's Cloak after its previous 'partner', superhero the Nightwalker, dies. Gary sets out on a career of crime as Merciless, the Supervillain without Mercy(4), but his idea of supervillainy is more that of a kind of anti-establishment heroic outlaw than an actual villain (or as he puts it, he's a villain, not a jerk.) This outlook brings him into conflict with actual villains - most of whom have a serious hard-on for murder, rather than wanting to buck the system that keeps the little guy down - as well as superheroes and 'antiheroes'; that subset of vigilante murderers whose targeting of villains seems to excuse their monstrous, murderous behaviour, but whose methods are a large part of Gary's motivation for eschewing straightforward heroism.

Superhero parody is ten a penny, but The Rules of Supervillainy kicks off a series with a certain something. Gary is an appealing protagonist, combining well-meaning family man with his dedication to an almost non-existent code of noble supervillainy. The superpowered action is perhaps a little lacking, with Phipps seeming more assured with the comedic and dramatic aspects of the story, but those other aspects are deftly handled and Gary's tragedy - the loss of his ex-supervillain brother, and the collapse of his previous relationship with a superheroine - complements his comedy well.

Winter Tide is a Lovecraftian novel with a twist. Growing out of the short story 'The Litany of Earth', it takes as its premise the idea that the Deep Ones of Innsmouth were a persecuted minority, rounded up by the government thanks to lies like those in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Aphra Marsh and her brother Caleb are the last surviving land-bound children of Innsmouth. Aphra lives with a Japanese family who were interned with them during WWII, works informally with an FBI agent seeking to foster greater ties with the Aeonist(5) community, and has begun teaching magic to the owner of the bookshop where she works. Caleb, meanwhile, has been trying to recover a vast wealth of books from Innsmouth that have been claimed by Miskatonic University. Agent Spector offers a means to access MU's 'Innsmouth Collection', if the Marshes can help him to track the possibility of a Russian spy using body-switching magic as a tool of espionage.

Devoted, yet fully woke Lovecraft fan Ruthanna Emrys brings a sincere affection to the mythos, even as she deconstructs its underlying assumptions and horrors. Through Aphra's eyes, the time-travelling, body-snatching Great Race of Yith are the sole legacy of a world whose destruction is preordained, and the one certainty that someone takes note of human(6) affairs in this uncaring universe. Innsmouth was a town of pagan fish-people minding their own business, and Miskatonic University is a bastion of elitist, intellectual snobbery. Ancient religions respect the balance of natural and unnatural forces, while the federal forces I shall call Schmelta Green are a bunch of dangerously amateur hacks(7).

Winter Tide is a melancholic novel of the search for a world long lost, as well as a threat new established. It blends Cold War uncertainty with Lovecraft's Yog-sothery to almost(8) entirely reinterpret the latter. Most of its horror, such as it is, comes from the human world, and the unchecked power of the government in dealing with 'the other', and notably most of Aphra's allies are in some sense 'other', be they Deep Ones, cripples, Jews, gays, blacks, Japanese or descendants of other human strains.

Finally, and in a similar vein to The Gunslinger, The City of Shifting Waters is the source material for a forthcoming movie, specifically the first in the Valerian and Laureline series of scifi comics, which are the basis of the forthcoming Luc Besson extravaganza Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets(9). Spacio-temporal Agents Valerian and Laureline are sent to the 1980s, the start of an historical dark age from which no records remain until the formation of the great, world-spanning civilisation that will arise from its ashes. Valerian is in pursuit of an old nemesis, Xombul, across a flooded New York. Teaming up with smuggler Sun Rae and scientist Schroeder, Valerian and Laureline must prevent Xombul establishing control of history and forever altering the timeline in his own favour.

The City of Shifting Waters suffers somewhat from a slightly haphazard Kindle conversion, but in many ways the narrative itself is ahead of its time(10). Laureline is a slinky red-head, but seldom sexualised, and Valerian admits that his problem with allowing women in the service is that they outshine old hands like him. It might be nice to assume that in the 28th century the inclusion of women in a space-time agency wouldn't raise an eyebrow, but it was written almost fifty years ago. The story is reminiscent of some of Strontium Dog's time travel stories, and it's hard to keep in mind that in fact this predated those by decades. It's impossible to see any of this in the trailers for the movie, mind you, which looks to be all about the spacio and not the temporal.

(1) A book that, in its original short story form, is almost as old as I am.
(2) Frequently listed among the best opening lines ever.
(3) I couldn't help drawing comparisons between the macho Gunslinger kingdom and The Handmaid's Tale's fascist state, but I suspect they are just drawing on the same Biblical source.
(4) It's a work in progress.
(5) Anyone who ascribes to the religion or philosophy that the Earth will host a range of dominant species through Aeons catalogued by the Yith.
(6) A category that here includes Deep Ones, who are merely a branch of humanity that sought refuge in the waters during the great population crunch.
(7) Okay, nothing revolutionary there.
(8) Only almost. The events of 'The Thing on the Doorstep', for example, are pretty much as described in the short story, but with the added note that seeking immortality by switching bodies with first his daughter and then her husband made Ephraim Waite a criminal to the Deep Ones as much as to anyone. All in all, the impression is that much of the conventional mythos fiction represents the actions of bad elements in the Aeonist community.
(9) Laureline apparently doesn't rate a mention.
(10) 1970; this one is older than I am.

Reading Roundup - Mostly May 2017

So, it has been a terrible month for reading. To get even one proper book I've had to extend into early June. There are several reasons for this:

1. I've spent a lot of time not just commuting in and out, either being off sick or taking days for childcare or gaming, which means I lose about 2.5 hours of listening time per day.
2. My current Challenge book is Wild Swans, which is dense AF and I can't do it justice if I'm half out of it.
3. I lost a gang of listening time to Gladiator (Volume 1 of Wolf's Empire,) which was ultimately so meh I haven't managed to finish it.

That being said…

Saga is an ongoing series by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples about – more or less – the child of a pair of star-crossed lovers, one from either side of a techno-magical space war, and the various forces that want to eliminate/aid/capture them all. I came to it via Wil Wheaton's use of the character Lying Cat to respond to statements from the Trump administration. Volume 1 features the birth of our neonatal lead, a cadre of genuine ghosts putting the Scooby Doo on invaders, a spaceship grown from wood, and a six year old sex slave, which last is either going to be a bold move or a complete deal breaker. In this opening segment, bounty hunter The Will learns that his 'it's complicated' is working the same bounty and decides instead to visit a space brothel, and on discovering said slave girl determines to rescue her against seemingly impossible odds.

So, it's not a narrative without its problems, but overall it seems to be a largely hopeful story, and so I have hope.

Also, it has Lying Cat, who is pretty nifty.

My other read – in and out around Wild Swans – was Rick Riordan's The Dark Prophecy, book two of The Trials of Apollo. The now-mortal Apollo travels west with Leo Valdez and the (also mortal) ex-sorceress Calypso to Indianapolis, where the second emperor of the Triumvirate has his stronghold. The self-styled New Hercules is determined to remake the city as a monument to his own glory, but to do that he needs Apollo to help him fulfil a prophecy. Apollo, meanwhile must find another oracle in order to secure the second stage of his quest to reclaim control of prophecy and fate from the Triumvirate and so, hopefully, reclaim his godhood.

The Dark Prophecy sees the return of Apollo and his pre-teen master Meg, as well as Leo and Calypso, but there are also plenty of new characters. The Trials of Apollo are, despite the singular self-love of their narrator/protagonist, more truly ensemble works than most of Riordan's other works, which tend to focus on 3-5 individuals. Between the nails-hard lesbian moms Hemithea and Josephine, a frenemy goddess of nets, and Yoruban warrior-demigod/accountant Olujime, the novel continues to open out a world which originally seemed almost entirely focused on Camp Half-Blood. Apollo, meanwhile, remains an engaging narrator, despite his fluctuations between arrogance and self-pity around flashes of genuine humanity, and Robbie Daymond once more provides excellent voice work, despite some oddly stilted editing in the early sections.

Reading Roundup - April 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

I dropped a book this time round. April was a very slow month for some reason (mostly Easter, I think,) and I only got through one of my challenge books (which is why I've swapped out 'Big French Novels' for 'The Luke Cage Syllabus' in August.) That book was Irvine Welsh's unrelenting Trainspotting, a brutal and unromantic slice of life from the drug-addled youth of Leith. On the other hand, I have made a decent stab at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the next month's books include the very short Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I kicked off this month with Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Ancillary Justice and the second book of the Imperial Radch trilogy. Having precipitated the militarisation of the schism in the manifold clones of Anaander Mianaai(1), the Lord of the Radch, the rogue ancillary Breq is assigned as captain of a Mercy - smallest of the Imperial Fleet's ship classes - and to command the defence of a world that helps to fuel the Radch's inexhaustible thirst for tea.

Without her overwhelming thirst for revenge, Breq has more time to muse on the psychological impact of her losses in this novel, leading to a slower narrative with less focus on action and more on character. In addition to herself, Breq struggles to integrate Seivarden into the modern fleet, and to help a copy of Anaander Mianaai to become her own person after having her ancillary implants removed. As she bonds with the common folk of the Radch and butts heads with the great and the good, Breq's character emerges as, to paraphrase another work, a great sympathiser for cripples, bastards and broken things.

Adjoa Andoh once more provides a strong reading, and if not much happens in comparison to Ancillary Justice, the novel is never slow. I've got a bit of a backlog to work through, but Ancillary Mercy is definitely on my list for reading in the near future.

Next up is the second book in Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, as dead boy walking Magnus and Muslim Valkyrie Sam attempt to track down the missing Mjollnir on behalf of it dim-witted owner. Their best option appears to be to try to follow a dangerous ploy set out by Sam's father Loki halfway, then pull a fast one at the last minute, but can you truly pull a fast one on the God of Mischief? And can their new ally be trusted?

I was going to open by saying that Magnus Chase and the Hammer of Thor has little in common with Ancillary Sword, but that's actually not true. The Imperial Radch trilogy's calling card is its almost universal use of feminine pronouns to represent a virtually genderless society, while The Hammer of Thor introduces Alex Fierro, transgender and gender fluid child of Loki, whose greatest fear on arriving in Asgard is that the eternal form of an Einherji would mean sticking in one gender. Embracing the power of Loki in order to own it, Alex is not only an unusual example of a heroic non-binary character... well, anywhere, but especially in mainstream children's adventure fiction(2), but possibly - if it goes the way it's looking - perhaps the first children's adventure transgender love interest.

Kieran Culkin provides a far superior voice for the reading of this volume, as compared to The Sword of Summer's Christopher Guetig, whose performance made Magnus's disaffected narrative voice so unsymapthetic that it put my partner - as great a fan of Riordan's work and listener of audiobooks as I am - off the story altogether until she was able to get a paper copy.

Square cover art = audio only!

Tipped of by my industry contacts(3), I was quick to snap up the free, audio-exclusive short story A Rare Book of Cunning Device, by Ben Aaronovich. It's only thirty minutes long, which is barely a short-story in real terms, but thirty minutes in the world of Peter Grant and the Folly is worth thirty hours of willfully nonprogressive neo-Roman space nazi Scientologists(4). Also, free! And read, as always, by Kobna Holbrook-Smith.

At some point in the Rivers of London chronology, Peter Grant is called in to investigate what seems to be a haunting among the stacks and automated collection systems of the new British Library, the only problem being that it is much too new for ghosts. On the other hand, some of the books are old... Could be a job for Britain's only apprentice magician (assuming an increasingly narrow interpretation of 'apprentice magician',) assuming he can do the business without melting the tech in the book collecting system. The short story also introduces us to a no-nonsense lady librarian who knew Peter's mother, so I can't believe she's going to prove to have been a one-shot.

I don't usually go through the books that I read with my daughter, but then again there are a lot of them. At some point I ought to do a post devoted to some of them, like the alternative princess stories in Don't Kiss the Frog, Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop(5) Knights and The Princess Who Saved Herself, or the bucolic life lessons of Mathias Feldhaus' Frog books. 

For now, however, we're just going to look briefly at Cinnamon, a short story by Neil Gaiman released in a new edition, illustrated by American artist and author Divya Srinivasan. I picked this up on impulse at my FLBS and for two days Arya refused to let me read it, because it was new and uncertain. Then she agreed, if she could have 'The Clumsy Princess' and The Very Hungry Caterpillar as well, and since then she's asked that the story of a blind princess and the man-eating tiger who sets out to teach her to speak be read to her every night. I call that a success.

(1) Advantages of audiobooks: I would never have pegged the pronunciation of this as An-ah-ander Mee-ah'nee-eye.

(2) Up to younger teen target audience, I mean. Obviously in YA pretty much anything goes, most likely because at that point you're selling purely to the reader and not their parents.

(3) I follow Ben Aaronovich's blog, okay.

(4) More on this when and if I finish the book.

(5) "Does that mean that they poop?" - Arya-Rose, age 4.

Reading Roundup - March 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

Once more I've hit my two book target, so I'm a steady one book behind. I may rethink the Big French Summer idea. In March I wrapped up Gothic with White is for Witching and began Mad People with The Bell Jar, which proved to fall alarmingly within my existing headspace. Still no poetry.

I kicked off Audible's Definitive Sherlock Holmes collection, written of course by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and all excellently read and foreworded by national treasure and fellow Old Queen(1), Stephen Fry. It’s fascinating coming back to the Holmes canon as an adult, steeped in the various western traditions of detective fiction, because as detective fiction they are actually a little unsatisfying. It’s the character who is fascinating; his deductions appear more in the manner of a parlour trick, or perhaps the half-technobabbled reasonings of a CSI CSI. A substantial chunk of many of the narratives – especially the first two novels – is given over to the criminal’s own account of their life, and in this too the stories are notable: That a good half of the perpetrators are as sympathetic as their victims, if not more so.

Naturally, the collection begins with A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes novels. This initial foray into the world of the great detective serves to highlight some of the limitations of the formula, especially when it comes to the longer stories, with almost half of the narrative given over to Jefferson Hope's story, and a number of Holmes' deductions based on information not made available to the reader (a complaint which Doyle later owns, with Holmes making the same criticism to Watson, albeit from his perspective of wishing a clear elucidation of his methods.) The story also hinges on a perception of the Mormon faith which buys into pretty much every ill its early detractors thought of it.

A Study in Scarlet is followed by The Sign of the Four, which wraps up the story of Holmes and Watson with the latter going off to get married after what is very clearly only their second case together, whatever later entries may say. Conan Doyle is on firmer ground with the Indian mutiny than the founding of Salt Lake City, but while his Indian characters are very well-drawn for the time, dear lord but the Andaman pygmy Tonga is something else entirely, a near-bestial creature with the same alien ugliness Conan Doyle ascribed to dinosaurs in The Lost World.

This is followed by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first of the short story collections, including such classics as 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' and 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches'. Even at this stage in the proceedings, a certain repetition was apparent in the stories. The Speckled Band and 'A Case of Identity' both feature women grievously misused by stepfathers to control their fortunes, with the latter featuring one of the cruellest devices in the canon, while 'The Five Orange Pips' is notable for featuring the Ku Klux Klan in much the same role as the Mormons in A Study in Scarlet, as a ruthless secret society employing mysterious, inescapable assassins to punish deserters.

'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' is one of the stories in which the conceit of the narrative most conflicts with the narrative itself. It refers to events which Holmes conspired to conceal, as the guilty party was dying and the innocent not at threat, which feels odd given that Watson is apparently publishing this well within the lifetime of most of those involved. It is especially noteworthy as on several other occasions he refers to matters that he cannot discuss, and the untimely death of Helen Stoner freeing him to speak of the events of the Speckled Band.

'The Man with the Twisted Lip', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor' are lighter affairs, with no murder involved in any of the cases. 'The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb' is the first of a number of stories in which Holmes addresses a problem before ever visiting the scene (arguably; he never leaves London in 'The Five Orange Pips' either, but he had planned to.) It is also referred to as one of only two which Watson brought to his attention, although this is soon overturned in the next collection, and features a gang of villains who get away while Holmes is rallying the official force. This is another feature we will see again.

Finally, 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet' is notable for having a female villain (‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ has a female member of the gang, but she breaks ranks to aid the victim.) As is often the case with such characters in the Holmes canon, she gets away scot free, but with predictions of future unhappiness as her comeuppance.

I also managed to clear up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes this month, which means everything up to the death of Sherlock Holmes is covered. As The Adventures begins with the unequivocal classic ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and “the Woman”, so The Memoirs opens with ‘Silver Blaze’; perhaps a less known story overall, but featuring the original curious incident of the dog in the night time. ‘The Yellow Face’ has a similar deal to ‘The Noble Bachelor’, with a young widow and a second marriage, although here it is a half-black child whose appearance disrupts the happy routine, and I can’t believe that it wasn’t pretty progressive that not only Holmes and Watson but the husband in the case accept the child completely. Similarly, ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’ treads similar, but not identical, ground to ‘The Red-Headed League’, with a gang providing a too-good-to-be-true job as a means of getting someone out of the way for a time.

‘The “Gloria Scott”’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ treat of early cases. The first is notable for the solution being entirely provided by the written narrative of the victim rather than by any deduction of Holmes’, while the latter once more features a female villain who vanishes into the distance to a presumed life of doubt and fear. ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’ pits Holmes against the country set, while another classic, ‘The Crooked Man’ returns to familiar territory with an old offence from India leading to a tragic ending. ‘The Resident Patient’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’ each feature a puzzle that Holmes successfully solves, but too late to save a life, and the lack of sympathy for the dead man in the latter story is quite shocking. In both cases, the criminal gang involved vanishes into the wind; by this point it is clear that Conan Doyle has a limited interest in arrest and trial scenes.

‘The Naval Treaty’ sees Holmes act for the good of Queen and Country, and his client, and features one of the strongest puzzles in the canon to this point, with pretty much every step of the deduction available for the reader to follow. Finally, in this collection, Fry brings the vital catch in the voice to the closing lines of ‘The Final Problem’, as Holmes gives his life – or so it seems – to end the career of the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. Given that it recounts the crowning glory of his career as a detective, ‘The Final Problem’ is notable for not giving any details of the chain of reasoning which led Holmes to his nemesis.

In between chapters of Holmes, I caught a couple of short stories by Neil Gaiman which follow the protagonist of American Gods, Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon. ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ sees our hero in Scotland on a roundabout return route from Norway, walking the walks and seeing the sights, when he is offered a lucrative job acting as bouncer for a bunch of posh folks from England having a party in a local manse. The locals are an odd bunch and Shadow is having weird dreams, but he chooses to take the job, against the advice of the enigmatic barmaid Jenny and finds himself caught up in an ancient struggle between men and monsters, with no-one to say truly which is worse. Then ‘Black Dog’ brings him to England, and a rural couple with a secret to keep.

The two shorts have many similarities: The rural settings, the old traditions, and of course Shadow’s relentless bad luck with women. Critically, Gaiman captures the difference of feeling between Britain and America. Assuming by its popularity there that his depiction of the roadside faith of America is accurate, he does the same for British folk beliefs, especially those in ‘Black Dog’, practiced slightly furtively by unassuming folk, almost more as habit than anything else. As always, Gaiman as author and reader is an excellent storyteller and the stories are easy to listen to several times over.

The last book for this month is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which is one I’d been meaning to read for a while. This was the audiobook, but it’ read by Peter S. Beagle himself. As in the Rankin Bass adaptation, it tells the story of a nameless, ageless unicorn who realises that she is the only one of her kind left in the world. She goes in search of the others and learns that a cruel king has imprisoned them all with the aid of a supernatural bull, and with the assistance of an erratic wizard, a cynical romantic and a larval hero she clashes with the King for the fate of magic and her people. In fact, one of the things that really strikes me about the book is just how faithful the animated adaptation (screenwritten by Beagle) actually was. The main difference is Beagle’s cheerfully anachronistic narrative language. Reminiscent of TH White, it takes the novel’s setting from mediaeval fantasy to the same sort of timeless Neverland as The Once and Future King.

Within this Neverland, the story of The Last Unicorn is one of a world of failing wonder. The disappearance of the unicorns leaves a world that, for all its dragons and ogres and heroes, lacks a certain sparkle. Heroing is a job; the tropes of romance are performed in a perfunctory fashion. It’s fantasy as mundanity, and beautifully done; the book is a classic for a reason.

(1) I maintain that this is the correct term for an alumnus of Queens' College.

Reading Roundup - February 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

This month I have hit my two book target, reading Nights at the Circus and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although this still leaves me a book behind going into March, and I haven't done more than flip through The Rose that Grew from Concrete. It turns out that I suck at reading poetry in any systematic manner.

Rogues is not so much a book that I read/listened to this month as one that I finished. It's a collection of short stories curated by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozoir. The stories are written by a wide array of successful and highly-acclaimed authors working in a variety of genres, including contemporary thriller, western, horror, historical, SF and fantasy, united by the common theme of roguery. As is the way of anthologies, it's a mixed bag, with some excellent entries, some less successful, and a few that I can't honestly recall after a few months, although none of them were truly dire. Particular highlights include: Joe Abercrombie's 'Tough Times All Over', a fantasy tale following the path of a package which is repeatedly stolen from a succession of carriers; Scott Lynch's 'A Year and a Day in Old Theradane', in which a team of retired thieves are tasked with stealing a street; Neil Gaiman's 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back'(1); and 'Now Showing' by Connie Willis, a caper of conspicuous consumption set in a near future where a corrupt cinema industry screens non-existent films in vast consumer centres. It's been a useful standby between full novels, and I may look at getting another of Martin and Dozoir's cross-genre collections some time, although for now I think I'll fill that hole with the short stories in the new Definitive Sherlock Holmes.

As the third book in the Last Dragonslayer series, Jasper Fforde's The Eye of Zoltar fails in only one respect; that of actually finishing the story. It turns out that the series is a tetralogy, not a trilogy, although Fforde's website does not have a due date for the book currently titled Jennifer and the Wizard (formerly The Great Troll War.) The book itself follows orphan heroine Jennifer Strange as she is dispatched to the precipitous terrain and treacherous politics of the Cambrian Empire to retrieve the titular jewel, with the aid of newly-minted sorcerer Perkins and pre-teen jeopardy tour guide Addy Powell, while at the same time unmasking a conspiracy and educating the impossibly spoiled Princess Shazeen in the fine art of not being a complete brat. As with the last book, there are a few niggles with continuity, not least that the trolls previously seen to be relatively sophisticated beings who consider humans as a cute but annoying invasive species have apparently reverted to being brutal, corpse-displaying savages. The stakes of the novel end up significantly greater than in the previous books, and it ends on an as yet unresolved cliffhanger, which is a bit of a bugger really.

Jane Collingwood once more provides a fine reading, with a wide array of voices and accents; some better than others. 

Finally for the month, I gave up on Viking epic West of the Moon on the grounds that if I'm going to tell my daughter she ought to change library books she isn't reading, I ought to do the same myself, and instead picked up Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon, on which the film is based. It is a completely different beast, far more interested in joke names about bodily functions than father-son bonding, and featuring a culture in which dragons are ubiquitous in the place of hawks and hounds, but less so as horses. It's not a bad book, and a quick read besides, although I'm in no hurry to plough through the next eighteen of the buggers. I confess, I am probably biased in that I saw the film first and loved it, and enjoyed the second one (although it has its problems, some of which I think I overlooked in considering the films as part of the wider world created in the accompanying TV series,) but in this case I definitely prefer the film.

(1) Although in all honestly I am baffled by the reader, Roy Dotrice's decision to give the Marquis a French accent. Name notwithstanding, I've always considered the Marquis to be a London boy.