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.