What are you reading?

[Jubal]

Books 10-12 have been read!

I read The Whalebone Theatre, a slightly sad tale of people, theatrics, and the impact of the Second World War, wherein multiple members of a family start a little theatrical company and, later, end up doing undercover operations in France. It's an interesting and complex piece of historical fiction, one that felt a lot less heavy than The Glass Palace but still very interesting. It's also beautifully written which helps a lot.

Then my Christmas reading consisted firstly of a much lighter read, Death at the Sign of the Rook, a rather silly but neat detective story featuring weary down-to-earth detective Jackson Brodie, a lot of stolen art, and a couple of murders, but generally in a very light read sort of way that works out for most of the characters in the end.

Finally, a year of mostly rather grim reading was rounded out with The Love-Girl and the Innocent, by Solzhenitsin. It's a short play set in a gulag, and has got that very slice-of-life realism thing of mid C20th Russian literature, though it's unsparing in picking at the moral and social decay of the prison camp systems. I found the portrayal of the system as a whole really interesting, and it ends on an uncertain albeit sorrowful note rather than as a grand tragedy, which felt appropriate.

Perhaps that's been the theme of this year's books: endings are imperfect, from Nemo to Nemov, we don't really know what happens next. And there's something in that which is a pity, especially for those of us who want everything to be a story, want our climaxes and victories and defeats rather than just slow slides into more or less rest, joy, or pain. On the other hand, there's also hope inherent in uncertainty - dum anima est, spes esse. Onto the next turn of the year.

[Jubal]

2026's first reading - Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. It's very very good, especially if you like frame narratives, unreliable narrators, Byzantium and imaginaries of the medieval east. Niketas Choniates as a major character is an inspired choice. Honestly it's really really weird that I hadn't read this book before, I'd been given it years ago and it's effectively tailor-made to my interests. Genuinely one of those that's going to be part of my favourite books I've ever read canon. Not really sure what else to say that isn't spoilery - there's a certain tragedy to it all, but the mix of playing with truth and hope along with it makes it a bearable sort of tragedy. And whilst there's something indulgent about storytelling about storytelling, it's also very very good if one likes that sort of thing. Which I very much do.

[psyanojim]

2026's first reading - Baudolino, by Umberto Eco.

Hmm, interesting choice. I love Umberto Eco but haven't read that one, its sitting on my bookshelf staring at me right now in an accusatory fashion.

Maybe it's time to promote it from my bookshelf to the giant pile of unread books sitting next to me.

[Jubal]

Maybe it's time to promote it from my bookshelf to the giant pile of unread books sitting next to me.

Would very much recommend this course of action. I've read remarkably little Eco (of his fiction at least, I've read some of his essays and other works) but I should remedy that.

I've got too many options for the next book, we'll see what ends up getting to the coveted top of the pile position!

[psyanojim]

Would very much recommend this course of action. I've read remarkably little Eco (of his fiction at least, I've read some of his essays and other works) but I should remedy that.

Fun fact, looks like I bought my copy of the book in Hong Kong.

So it has followed me all around the planet, and I still haven't got around to reading it!

Yeah, maybe the time has finally come.

[Phoenixguard09]

I don't have time to read all that much these days, but I have been enjoying re-reading Tigana, by one of my all-time favourite authors, Guy Gavriel Kay.

[Jubal]

I read the Wolf and His King, by Finn Longman. I partly picked this book up out of surprise at seeing the name of someone I at least sort of know on a book in a random Viennese bookshop - I mean, it's not like I didn't know Finn was a writer, we overlapped at university so I've met them a few times, but seeing the actual book and going "huh I know that name" still made me stop, pause, and pick it up.

Picking it up was absolutely the right call: it's spectacularly well written. There are some genuinely beautiful turns of phrase, and the whole text has a poetry to it that is (for me) far too often lacking in more modern writing. The book is a modern retelling of the tale of Bisclavret, a werewolf legend from Brittany. It's a very explicitly queer retelling with some of the male characters' devotions to one another recast as much more explicitly sexual and romantic, and manages to achieve this well without dramatically modernising how the characters think in any other ways: in their faith, their interactions, and so on, the characters remain well rooted in medieval courtly romance traditions.

The writing about transformation and the 'wolf brain' segments felt very well written too: the whole book, despite having a very sparse, fairytale quality to its narrative, has an enormous physicality to it and its character descriptions which is extremely important for getting across the sense of who Bisclavret is and how deeply embedded in him that struggle has to be. Chronic illness was explicitly part of the inspiration for Longman's portrayal of Bisclavret, and whilst my own joint problems are rather the opposite of these - I'd have to find a legend about someone painfully turning to stone to get my own muscular-skeletal issues across - I nonetheless found that part of the writing profoundly compelling.

Things I particularly like also include the small, sparse character palette and almost stock-like character writing, wherein only the book's central character even has a name. This took me a little while to get used to, but actually helps it retain a certain fairytale feeling. That's juxtaposed with a bunch of very un-fairytale concerns: as the king grapples with war, sex, or baronial politics, one of the things the book emphasises is the sense that this both is and is not a fairytale. It is from that tension that the book manages to elevate Bisclavret's condition and transformations: they are in a world too real and too brutal for the cosiness and assurance of a simple children's story of black-and-white morals, but they also break through that world, creating a window of awe and emotional truth that tests the world around it and finds it - too often - wanting. Bisclavret's story thus becomes not a fantasy story, but more accurately a miracle story: it is difficult to make such a story work but this is a genuinely masterful example.

If I had some very small nitpicks, they're mostly bits I'd have like us to have seen but didn't: the book does a very, very good job of writing antagonists whose fears and character arcs are largely understandable, and who are quite sympathetic in their initial outlooks and motivations (to the point where if you'd have stopped me after the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the book and gone "which character do you like and empathise with most here" I'd have picked one of the antagonists). I'd have liked to have seen a bit more of them, both interactions before their major crime takes place and a bit more vignette at the end as they leave. I'd have also liked to spend a bit more time with all the things the King does outside his infatuation: it's a difficult line to write a romantic infatuation that drives and dominates a character without the wallowing dragging on the reader, and that's mostly done very well here but there were one or two places where I'd like it to have been broken up with a bit more.

Anyway, I enormously enjoyed it and I would hugely recommend it to anyone: it's a very good medieval story that feels much more like a rich retelling of a medieval story than the average modern "medieval" tale (most of which owe much, much less to medieval literature than this does). The rootedness in the medieval doesn't prevent it being its own thing, though, in part due to the use of character persepectives and development and in part because Finn is a genuinely brilliant prose stylist. I hope they write more of this sort of thing in future!

Tigana, by one of my all-time favourite authors, Guy Gavriel Kay

GGK is another of those authors I'd probably really enjoy but have never read much of!

[Phoenixguard09]

I'm going to try and get my hands on The Wolf And His King based on this recommendation.

GGK is fantastic. Lions of Al-Rassan is one of my top 5 books of all time. Incredibly influential for me.

[Jubal]

I read modern hard SF classic The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin.

I have mixed feelings on this book. Liu is at his best when writing about big abstract physics stuff in a beautiful way, and there are some great chunks of that. This especially happens in the 'video game' sections of the book, which allow him to write in giant abstract ways that he's very good at, and pursue the beauty and interest of giant mathematical models and astrophysics. I probably enjoyed these weird abstract sections the most, and they're the bit where the writing really tends to shine.

For me, the difficulty largely came when the book accelerated beyond this point, and essentially used the physics problem (which Liu writes about extremely well) to set up a much more humanistic set of problems, with Liu does not write about so well. His world of conspiracies and power feels hollow in places - I do not get the impression that Liu Cixin is a man who has ever had to run a committee meeting that he didn't want to leak information. His exploration of despair, which is the most fundamental emotion explored through the book, is also rather over-efficient and works fast towards its telos, that despair in the collective power of humanity leads to, in essence, treason against the collective. The core characters all struggle with despair, but their reactions to it feel dictated by their role in the plot at times rather than the plot feeling like it naturally emerges from them. Curiously this lack of depth in human affairs also affects his very inhuman villains: despite their wildly different biological systems and experiences, culturally they are surprisingly like humanity.

It was an interesting book nonetheless, and there are some fun characters and some really brilliant bits of conceptual writing. I do want to read the others in the trilogy, and the pacing is effective. I think I'll read something else before jumping to the next book though.

[Jubal]

Fourth book of the year was She Who Became The Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan. It's very good fun, a melodramatic fantasy set in an alternative end of the Yuan/start of the Ming dynasty China: the main character is the future Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Chongba, a peasant who later becomes a monk, then a rebel, then a major player in Chinese history. In Parker-Chan's version, though, the real Zhu Chongba died in a plague - the Hongwu Emperor is his sister who attempts to claim his destiny through her iron will to survive and, later, her desire to achieve fated greatness.

It's a flamboyant book full of deeply melodramatic characters and does a good job of exploring some sexual/gender issues in a way that still feels like it works rather than papering over the premise. It's definitely pulpy, and the author states at the start that it's more based in the world of over the top costume drama than history or mythology per se. I like the fact that it's an "uncomfortable protagonist" book - the protagonist is sympathetic in her desire for survival, but increasingly murky in her desire for power, particularly by the end of the book. We're left in a world where we can still somewhat root for the lead characters - everyone else is worse - but the book doesn't shy away from the really very large death toll and cold blooded killing involved in that sort of medieval Chinese dynastic power politics.

Would recommend - there is a second book, He Who Drowned The World, and I will try and pick that up and read it sometime.

[Spritelady]

That sounds really interesting, I'll have to add it to my list of books to read! If you like Chinese alternate history fantasy, I can solidly recommend The Poppy War trilogy by R F Kuang, if you haven't already read them!

My reading this year is going pretty well, I'm over halfway towards my (unreasonably large) goal of reading 104 books this year.

Most notable recent reads:
The Folk of the Air series by Holly Black. YA fantasy based on classic Celtic mythology about Faerie. The plot follows Jude, a mortal girl who is taken to the Realm of Faerie along with her twin sister Faryn and older sister Vivienne, who it turns out is actually fae herself. They're taken to Faerie by Madoc, a redcap and Vivienne's father, when he murders their human parents. Very enjoyable read, but then I almost always like Celtic mythology based fantasy.

Katabasis by R F Kuang (yes the same author I recommended above. I think she's brilliant). A Cambridge PhD student goes to hell with a rival magician in order to rescue their PhD supervisor after he is killed in a magical accident. Borne out of the notion that 'academic is hell', I feel a lot of people here might appreciate the general take on the life of an academic. It should be noted that she wrote this while studying herself for a PhD at Yale and preparing for her wedding. Some people are almost too productive.

Malice by John Gwynne. This one is a classic medieval fantasy, where dragons and giants are awakening and the fate of the world hangs in the balance...Much more complex than some of the other books I've read lately, which was actually rather welcome for me, but I wouldn't recommend getting into this unless you're willing to commit to quite a long book with a complex cast of characters.

[Jubal]

I keep meaning to read Katabasis, not done so yet.


As it is, I have read, uh, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, which sure was a decision on my part. I genuinely wanted to give it a fair hearing, having had so many discussions about Romantasy and even made my Romantasy blurb generator. And... uh. Spoilers ahead?

I groaned a little before I got to page one, when I looked at the map, the product of someone who has evidently spent just long enough looking at maps to pull some veeeery slightly serial-numbers-filed-off names from them but not long enough to work out what borders are or how they work. The world-building generally follows this pattern: it's enough to deliver the front-end trope as long as you don't think about it, but as I was cursed with the apple of knowledge like the rest of humankind, this didn't work out so well for me. We open with Feyre, our protagonist, out hunting, which she does to feed her noble family who have fallen upon hard times and apparently live on equal terms with commoners now. Whilst we get quite a bit through the book on fey politics, humanity conversely just seems to live as some sort of vague anarcho-capitalist collective. The family are shunned by other nobility for being poor, or something, which leads to lots of questions that remain unanswered. Feyre is fanatically devoted to her sisters, Benevolently Useless and Mirror Of The Protagonist But Useless, and her father Mister Useless, who in turn take her for granted completely.

Anyway, she kills a faerie in the form of a wolf, gets stolen away to Faerieland rather than killed in response for complicated reasons that a working-class faerie is later going to have to spend a whole chapter giving us exposition on which in turn will also undermine a bunch of characterisation work - not something there was much of to go around anyway - and the plot starts. It's Tam Lin, we're doing Tam Lin! In all fairness, that much is good, I like folk tale retellings and reimaginings. Fairport Convention managed to do this in about seven minutes with slightly more panache, though.

Most of the rest of the book is a slow burn (to put it gently, as a Tolkien fan I very rarely complain about slow pacing but here we are) as it turns out that Tam Lin is Ferocious And Bestial But Protective And Sexy, in really shocking characterisation news. Also everything we know about faeries was a lie (gasp), which actually makes them on balance less interesting and makes the whole world setup make less sense. We also meet characters like Working Class Exposition Deliverer Faerie and Snarky Lancer Who Is More Of A Talker. Feyre does exciting things like spending several chapters trying to write a letter and wrestling with feelings about her family, who we are reminded she is Devoted To on a regular basis. I think this was the bit that most dragged. The juxtapositions of grief and romance are not super well handled, and Feyre's internal monologue, which is the lens through which we get the whole story, is not exactly a piano sonata of nuance, she has about four character traits which Maas hits repeatedly with all the joy of a small child who has been given a gong and let loose with it.

The book then pivots as things get more dangerous, we get a brief human world interlude in which the author somehow manages to make her protagonist's family feel a lot more interesting than the protagonist and then we go back to The Plot, which now becomes an actual plot. It turns out that the main love interest has an enormous ulterior reason for this relationship, which changes a ton of the earlier parts of the book in ways that are half acknowledged but never really commented upon in emotional terms.

The book accelerates in its last hundred pages to a set of fey trials, which somehow include zero references to the actual story of Tam Lin except insofar as the ultimate opponent is a faerie queen. They even included that Tam Lin can shapeshift but didn't include the classic story of him being turned rapidly between forms as his love holds onto him, which felt like a missed goal. Instead, there's a riddle that can solve everything, and the trials are otherwise more reminiscent of the Hunger Games than anything especially fey, interspersed with a lot of sexual harassment (something which felt like it was played too cheaply throughout this book) and a few murders and dark bargains. Fortunately our antagonist is an idiot, unfortunately for the several people who die between the contest being set up and the resolution, our protagonist and her allies are not the sharpest tools in the drawer either. It's not a very difficult riddle insofar as I knew the answer immediately, and poetry is not Maas' strongest suit, which kinda took the wind out of the sails of the setup a bit. Another big bad villain who's presumably being set up for future books is mentioned at one point to be upset that the Faerie Queen has staked her whole court and her life on doing some silly trials with a human, which, honestly, is an entirely reasonable position on his part given he turns out to be completely correct that this is a Bad Idea.

I know some fans of the series say it improves a lot after book one, and they are quickish reads so I may sit down with the second book at some point. There are some bits and some characters I like, but the lack of groundedness and the awkward underexplored twining together of prophecy and will, and of grief and romance, the faeries who are Just Shiny And Cool Because Magic rather than anything that feels deeper or more connected to the things they nominally represent... eh. I'm definitely asking the wrong questions of a book that isn't trying to answer them here, but I don't think I wholly understand what it was trying to do either. Other than show me hot dangerous faeries, which it did accomplish.

[Jubal]

On a complete literary tangent I picked up The Distinctly Competent District Councillor by Jonas Jonasson while passing through Vienna airport a couple of weeks ago.

Jonasson is a comic novelist best known for writing The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared - this one of his is a very sweet little romantic comedy about a young town mayor trying to save her town by persuading a big German company to open a bed factory there instead of in Stockholm, while the firm's young but widowed-with-children CEO is also interested in moving to Sweden and a slimy financial consultant is trying to thwart them.

It's the kind of plot that could just be a very over saccharine romance, but this absolutely isn't that: the real life of the book is in the absurdist, often increasingly criminal measures that the protagonist and her motley collection of followers - including a laid off tyre worker, a retired archeologist, the town clerk, and a ten year old schoolboy named Peter who is the only one with fluent German - engage in to try and win the contract. The result is Shenanigans, and if there is one thing Jonas Jonasson knows how to do, it's writing shenanigans.

It's only about a hundred pages, very nice little read.

[Hufflescruff]

The Blazing World

[Jubal]

The Blazing World

As in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World

What's it like?


I meanwhile read Space Dragons and then More Space Dragons, or to give their proper titles Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew and Space Dragons: Cosmic Survivors, both written by Veo Corva of this parish.

I like V's books and I liked these, the main character is a dragon, the setting has dragons in space, it's very cool. They contain a lot of traits common in V's work, including found family dynamics, main character who thinks of themself as much worse at people than they actually are, a very gender status diverse main cast, a cool SFF premise, villainy largely appearing in the form of Very Stressful Bureaucracy, and so on. They're great and you should read them.

Luxorian's Crew, the first book, I think does a slight sleight of hand with its blurb (though not one I minded), insofar as the pitch makes it sound more like a book that's fundamentally about external tensions with gaining the trust of a crew, but I felt that it actually really comes over as a character study of Lux first and foremost. The tension comes less from the actual crew members having tensions with the slightly unusual way their dragon is doing things, and more from the expectations in Lux's mind of how things have always been done, their previous relationships, and so on. I think it's cleverly and kindly written, and contains a lot of ideas that help set up the world for future books.

Cosmic Survivors takes the series to some slightly more difficult topics. Some of it's pretty on-the-nose stuff, with the Cosmic Defenders, the galaxy's anti void horror task-force, becoming more specifically antagonists. The threat is actually really well pitched here: the Defenders don't become moustache-twirling villains, they're not visibly out doing ICE style raids, and actually the result is a much better deconstruction of the day to day problems of authority systems. Sometimes it's a stressful bureaucratic appointment, sometimes it's needless stops, a lot of the time it's what the system promises to do in theory and lets people down on in practice. Again, I really liked the plot here and I'd happily read more stories in this world, which book two develops pretty well. The way gender transition is written was clever to me, in that V successfully writes a book in which gender transition is widely socially accepted and understood without making it a meaningless shrug event that nobody actually cares about which can happen in post-scarcity type writings pretty easily.

A couple of things I reflected on after reading: one is what 'cosy fiction' is and means and does, because I think it's a tricky label. I think there are very divergent ways of seeing it, and too many people basically think that it involves stories where nothing happens at a coffee shop and everything is happy and nobody has a bad time. With cosy gaming, the idea of 'capitalistic comfort' has been raised in academic discussions I've seen recently: the idea that a lot of these games involve a society that looks very like ours but without the most major stress and pressure points despite an economy etc that operates basically the same and logically implies a lot of underpinnings that are swept out the way. I don't think this is inherent to the idea of cosiness though at all, and I think what V does with cosy fiction is something very different and arguably antithetical to that. The cosy element here is a promise that this isn't going to turn ultra dark without warning you and is going to derive a lot of its plot from a small social-circle set of characters. A chat at Exilian-pub when I raised this involved poc8rg pointing out that the label is probably derived from cosy mysteries, in which there is usually a murder, so hardly just marshmallows and fluff with nothing underpinning them: the cosiness is about having plots that wrap up and social situations that don't try to be gritty and which focus on cleverly written character sketches that try to understand rather than be horrified by people. I think that's a pretty good analogy for V's approach in some ways. Sometimes there are moments when people crochet, and the fact that comfort is a real human need is taken seriously in these books (something that e.g. Tolkien actually understood very well but a lot of SFF discards in favour of More Gritty Swordsing), but the core of 'cosy' is in the way that the book rests for its plot on observations about the subtleties of the natures of sapient beings.

It also made me curious that in the end of Cosmic Survivors V writes that they keep telling themselves that the next book will have mainstream appeal, defined as a 'nice, generic concept with a unique twist and a protagonist everyone can relate to' (and then not doing that). I'd guess I'm probably at the 'mainstream' end of V's readership: I'm a straight cisgender man who likes Tolkien and le Guin and a lot of other big SFF stuff, and I don't necessarily have some of the key life experiences that V's core characters share. However, I don't think that a more everybeing protagonist would increase the appeal for me: one of the delights of V's writing is the character studies and the way that characters are very much themselves. I think there's maybe a separate question of whether it'd be interesting to include some of the types of character who are, because they're so overwhelmingly common in the rest of SFF, relatively absent in V's work: in Space Dragons or another V book I think I would genuinely be interested to see V tackle writing e.g. a straight cisgender character as a more major secondary character precisely because their observation and thinking about gender are really interesting and I think tackling writing a character like that from a gentle cosy-queer starting point would be a really healthy approach. V is very good at writing subtle complexities of feeling about one's identity and that sometimes comes through really well when writing about people who have not yet fully thought through what they'd like to identify as and what that means to them (a state that I think ironically includes a lot of cis people: the process of thinking through your gender identity and realising it consciously is something trans people have to go through and many cis people never do). But the thing I'd value in that would be as much seeing someone more like me through Lux's eyes more than seeing V's worlds through eyes that see more like mine. I guess I'd say for me part of the interest of reading these sorts of stories is the way they help explore what these categories do or can mean.

All that said, in case V reads this, V should also not take any musings like the above seriously as in any case they know what they write better than me and are a better writer than me to begin with. And I'm sure I will enjoy the next book whatever it turns out to be. Would absolutely recommend the Space Dragons books if you think the above sounds interesting: you can find out where to get them here.