Books: January and February 2024

Inspired by Throne of Salt’s bookposts, here’s what I’ve been reading in the first two months of the year.

January

The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera

What a book! A brilliant second-world fantasy about a super-powered protagonist trying to live a normal life in a city poised to explode. It’s a city novel, it’s a coming of age novel, it’s a fantasy novel. It’s about parental abuse, it’s about dating shitty rich men, it’s about border violence and incarceration. It also loses a lot of narrative momentum in the third act, and leaves behind the parts of the novel I found most compelling. I still come away strongly recommending it.

Moon of Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

Read this because a friend liked it, but unfortunately it didn’t click with me. The prose and dialogue did nothing for me, and the characters were just fine. Events moved too slow in the beginning and too fast at the end. It was short and propulsive enough that I got through the whole thing though.

Empress of Forever, by Max Gladstone

DNF, bailed after three chapters. The back-of-the-book comparison of the protagonist to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk should have tipped me off. 2019 was a different time but not that different of a time. I hope that the book subverts this whole benevolent billionaire thing later in the story, but I’m not going to find out.

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

Read the whole thing. Didn’t like it. None of the characters grabbed me and the prose was unremarkable.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki; Volumes 6-7

It’s wild how much of this manga there is, and how little of it shows up in the movie adaptation. The manga is every bit as evocative as the film, with a far expanded story and scope. I just wish the art was a little more readable; there are one too many characters who I have trouble telling apart, and action quickly becomes a mess of characters with no relation in space. (I would say the same thing about Berserk’s fights, though; take my opinion with a grain of salt.) Overall I found the film more compelling because it was tighter and easier to follow, but I am tempted to re-read this whole manga at some point.

The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb

DNF, but I might come back to it. My partner took this out from the library and I decided to read it after xyr. It’s not an easy read by any means, and I stalled out about halfway. Partly this is because I’m working with a middling knowledge of Indian history. When the narrative jumps to Bhopal in November 1984, I need to check whether the Union Carbide disaster has already happened or is due to happen in the future. During an anti-Sikh race riot, a crowd is exhorted to “Go answer the five shots from Bean Singh’s revolver, the twenty-five from Satwant Singh’s carbine.” I had a pretty good idea that this violence was related to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even consider that they were the assassins. These bits of implicit knowledge were constant low-grade stumbling points for me. The second POV character is also gut-churningly vile, which prompted me to put the book down for a while. I hope to come back to it in March.

February

Free People’s Village, by Sim Kern

This is a book I bought on a whim from a local bookstore, in the employee recommendation section. The premise hooked me: in 2000, Al Gore wins the election. His presidency is defined by a “War on Climate Change” which transforms the landscape of America into a superficially climate-friendly future. (He also prevents 9/11). In the distant year of 2020, our protagonist stumbles into a boiling-over conflict between local leftist elements and the neoliberal administration of Houston.

Unfortunately I don’t think either the story or the speculation live up to my expectations. The characters felt pretty one-note and thin, which bothered me my whole way through. Also, the transformation that occurs in alt-America is totally backwards to me. In the story, Americans don’t drive cars anymore. Instead they use mag-lev transit to and from the suburbs, or ride bikes for intra-urban transport. The dirty secret is that most power is still supplied by petro-chemical means. Isn’t that backwards? I think the ultimate faux-environmentalist America would be solar panels and electric cars, without any abatement of car culture. The cost of rare earth minerals to build batteries or the damage of pouring asphalt to make roads then provide that dark secret the narrative needs.

How High We Go In the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu

DNF. Picked this up because I saw it at the bookstore and the author had blurbed The Saint of Bright Doors. The second chapter is about euthanizing children who have contracted a lethal virus. Maybe I’ll pick this back up if I’m ever in the right headspace.

Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

I picked up some Sally Rooney at the library because I wanted to get outside my comfort zone. Usually I’m knee-deep in speculative fiction, and rarely venture into “literary” fiction. My January detour into McCarthy didn’t work out well, but Rooney proved a much better pick. I devoured the book over the course of two days, barely putting it down. The characters are painfully real, total disasters flailing through life and deeply anxious about their future. Reading the Wikipedia page for the Bronze Age Collapse while anxious about climate change? They’re just like me fr

Circe, by Madeline Miller

Miller’s previous work, The Song of Achilles, was super popular. I read it and thought it was decent, but a little bit… thin? Where Song feels like a retread of The Iliad, Circe takes a side character from The Odyssey and traces her entire life. Along the way we get a look at familiar gods and demigods from an outside, disempowered perspective. The actions and attitudes of these heroic figures are horrific, which was a real shock for someone raised on Percy Jackson books. Soon I began to dread seeing a familiar name, or recognizing a mythological story as it was told.

It’s just such a good book. The witchcraft is great. The characters are heartbreaking. It makes me care about a mythical figure I haven’t thought about in years. Easily the best mythological fantasy novel I’ve ever read.

Echopraxia, by Peter Watts

The sequel to Blindsight (though sort of a prequel? the end of Blindsight references events that occur during and after Echopraxia) which builds on one of the weirdest sci-fi settings I’ve ever encountered. A rundown: vampires used to be real, they were a hominid species that preyed on humans, and they have a totally different brain architecture than humans do. While they can’t see a right-angle without suffering seizures, they are also hyper-rational and extremely intelligent. It’s a lot.

One thing that Blindsight excelled at was creating a sense of incredible menace. The vampire and post-human crewmembers feel well beyond the capability of the baseline human, but even they struggle to comprehend the first contact they’re supposed to investigate. It is their competence that sells the creeping horror of the situation. Echopraxia struggles a little here for me, because our protagonist is totally lost for most of the narrative. When the book reveals who has been orchestrating the events and why, I sort of shrugged in a “sure, why not?” way. In a similar moment in Blindsight, I think I physically leapt to my feet in electric surprise. That’s sort of how I feel about the novel as a whole: like its predecessor, but less.

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins

What is this book? It’s a fantasy novel. It’s set in a hazily contemporary America. It centers on nigh-immortal beings in titanic struggle for control of the world. It’s a family drama about cycles of extreme abuse. It was compelling, strange, and I’m not sure I recommend it.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Reading Rooney’s work backwards does it a disservice, I think. Beautiful World, Where Are You achieves heights that Normal People doesn’t quite for me. Judged on its own merits, I still fell in love with the characters and felt my heart break at their avoidable-yet-inevitable tragedies. Also someone pointed out to me that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has like, the exact same structure as this book? Which is also the weakest part (imo) of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but it works really well here.