Some Books I Read This Year

[marianainthemoatedgrange]

At the encouragement ofsaltedpriv, and because I kind of want to start posting in a semi-public location a little more in coming times, here are some books I read in 2022 and what I thought about them. I haven't put down all of them (especially since I would have to recap/review almost all of the Whybourn and Griffin series and that would get very repetitive very fast) but today I decided to get drunk and post my five greatest hits, plus the top five that still made a big impression even if I didn't exactly enjoy the whole reading process:

Loved It, Loved It, Loved It:

Redder than Blood, Tanith Lee: This is Lee's newer collection of fairytale retellings in short story form, and I devoured it over the space of two days while vaguely resenting the time I wasn't spending reading it. Obviously as a short story collection there were some that didn't super work for me, (the Swan Lake one kind of overstayed its welcome and I ordinarily love Swan Lake riffs) but I fucking loved both the Snow White ones, (especially the title story, because I'm a sucker for Renaissance-era fantasy) both the Rapunzel ones, (especially Open Your Window, Golden Hair, which was both an amazing conceit and a great balance to the fluffiness of its counterpart) and Into Gold (which kiiiind of leaned on some of her reoccuring Gothic Orientalism sensibilities but at least seemed to be making an effort to undermine the ~exotic Eastern woman~ angle and was an incredibly cool take on the story in questionh. Especially what I *think* was a reference to the Hymn to Demeter, which did please my inner armchair Classics nerd.)

Jane Steele, Lindsay Fayhe: This one I picked up upon receiving a glowing recommendation from lebateleur, (from a review several years ago, but still) and was another one I was mad about having to clean chicken thighs at work instead of reading. It also made me want to reread Jane Eyre, which has not been achieved since I read it for school in ninth grade and found it interesting enough but not crazy engaging. I feel like any praise I could give it would sound insufficient, so alls I can say is that if you like nineteenth century novels that are inclusive without being presentistic while also being gleefully Gothic and sensationalist as fuck then this may be the book for you.

Base Notes, Lara Elena Donnelly: You know that Perfume: Story of a Murderer book/movie? This is basically that but starring a 21st-century nonbinary New York resident and it's amazing. I don't think I quite understood the term "love to hate" before I encountered the character of Vic Fowler, and while they are not the sole reason I reread this book three times this year (Donnelly's prose definitely appealed when I was reading the Amberlough trilogy but here she's gotten the lush and descriptive to a razor fucking edge) they were definitely up there, even for my cinnamon roll-loving ass. (A note: possibly don't read this book if you're depressed about being an artist or craftsperson under late capitalism. Or maybe do if you want to get your righteous indignation on. I'm not here to judge, just recommend.)

Decadent Stories, Brian Stableford: This guy was the editor for both volumes of The Daedalus Book of Decadence, the first of which I picked up during my class on Decadent writing in undergrad and ended up buying a copy of after I loved it so much. His own riffs on weird fin-de-siecle fiction felt both extremely in the spirit of the originals while also bringing a new slant without being *straight* pastiche, which is always nice. Again, it's short stories so obviously there were some I was less into but the Belle Dame Sans Merci one and the end one (which involves mushrooms, animal transformations, music, and a lot of the nihilism one tends to need to be up for wallowing in where Decadent lit is concerned) were worth any clunkers.

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of Germans and their History, Simon Winder: See, I do occasionally read nonfiction! This was basically the entry-level information I tend to require as a dumb American who never really got any history except US history, and while Mr. Winder did kind of tend to lean hard on his "obviously trying to be Bill Bryson" schtick I feel like he struck a good balance (for me) between personal anecdotes, general speculation, and hard facts, at least enough to keep me sufficiently engaged right up to 1933 where the book stops dead because (another thing I appreciated) there is far, faaaaaar too much literature about what follows out there to need Winder's further analysis. One thing I did love was his both complete contempt *and* lack of respect for Hitler. Obviously the guy comes up sometimes, but Winder's basic treatment is "this was not a man who did great things, no matter how awful, this was a pathetic, shrieky demagogue who was in the right place at the right time to cause some of the worst atrocities in history" which I appreciated for a variety of reasons. It mostly just kept making me think of dril tweeting "issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding [hitler]. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to [him.]""


 

 

Passionate Ambivalence:

The Etched City, KJ Bishop: The main plot of this book follows an ex-army doctor and her mafia enforcer frenemy from her army days experiencing some sort of dimensional conjunction that's making weird magic shit happen to a much greater degree than usual in the titular city which I kind of read as a combination of 1920s New Orleans and Raj-era India. The worldbuilding made me want to roll around in it and not stop, but all the characters were such terrible (but compelling and reasonably relatable) people and the narrative was so grim that I kept having to take breaks to look at pictures of kittens and shit. It kind of reminds me of Ursula Vernon's assessment of China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, which was along the lines of "someone showing you around the most beautiful, grotesque, fascinating things you've ever seen only to occasionally pause to punch you repeatedly in the face." Anyway, I'm glad I read it and I feel like it did good things for the Blades in the Dark game I'm running right now but IDK if I'll have the intestinal fortitude to read it again anytime soon.


Certain Dark Things, Silvia Moreno-Garcia: This is about vampires in near-future Mexico and I loved it but mostly just put it here because the glossary of in-universe terms after the book suggested that Moreno-Garcia had this entire vampire world mapped out and I wanted so much more of that even though the extant story was one of the most atmospheric and engaging ones I've read this year. (I know that writers going into that much detail about their worldbuilding can be a dicey proposition, but god dammit, I was raised on Tolkien, I know the downsides as well as the upsides, just give me all the global vampire stories!)

Monster's Chef, Jervey Tervalon: The story of a culinary f just out of prison who goes to work for a basically unveiled Michael Jackson expy as his personal chef, written with the help of a Chopped finalist who provided accompanying recipes for each chapter (though not ones that are being cooked in the book, for a variety of reasons.) I basically blasted through this in one afternoon at the library and am not 100% sure if the sharp turn into maybe-magical-realism at the end was as abrupt as it felt or if I'd just missed any and all foreshadowing due to reading it in like three hours (or if it was just the mild drug trip the MC was on at the time) but I guess it still felt a little drafty to me overall. Possibly I will reread it in the coming year in more depth - if nothing else I want to get the creme brulee recipe it had.

The Grief of Stones, Katherine Addison: I guess this is where I finally stop lying to myself about Thara Celehar being able to take the place of Maia Drazhar in my heart. I'm so happy that The Goblin Emperor was a standalone and that the surprisingly sizeable fandom is able to take over while Ms. Addison writes the continuing adventures of everyone's favorite sad gay forensic necromancer, but the two books about him have just not grabbed me in the same way that TGE did. It doesn't help that I haven't been able to listen to the audio books and kind of get to know everyone's names by how they sound rather than how they look on the page like I did with TGE (a huge contribution to my being able to actually spell half of them without having to refer to my copy at all times) but there is a part of me that feels genuinely bad. I love you, Thara, really. v._.v (I just love your emperor more. And I hate the fact that you can probably relate, lol.)

Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse: I read this in high school after seeing it namedropped in a bandslash fic I'd read (and because for... related reasons I'd already been reading a lot of Hesse that year) and really enjoyed it. Rereading it now, I frankly don't feel like I really engaged much more with the philosophy apart from the surface level of "well, I'm not completely withdrawn from the world or completely engaged in it, therefore this all seems more or less academic to me." I remember being initially annoyed at the conflation of Goldmund with "down-to-earth hedonism=feminine=unsuited for pursuits of the mind which is a masculine sphere even if it isn't necessarily more important than more feminine worldly spheres" but I was sufficiently able to put that aside to at least enjoy reading the rest of it even as a lot of somewhat-benign sexism kept cropping up. Maybe Hesse's right and I'm just a sensualist who doesn't GAF what the worlds say even if it's antithetical to my modern and enlightened views on the innate bullshit of gender roles.

Comments

[lebateleur]

Jane Steele! I'm so glad you read this, and liked it! It is one of the books that I've been evangelizing about since I first read it, because yes, it is one of the books for me and I'm happy whenever that's the case for someone else too. :D

Thanks as well for the reminder that I still need to crack open Base Notes. I am so horrifically behind in the reading I meant to get done this year.

As someone who also felt that way about Bas-Lag, your thoughts on The Etched City Intrigue. I think "all the characters were such terrible (but compelling and reasonably relatable) people" also describes the cast of The Doctrine of Labyrinths--another rec of yours that landed perfectly for me because of/despite the darkness; would you say that Baker's stuff resembles Monette at all?

I guess this is where I finally stop lying to myself about Thara Celehar being able to take the place of Maia Drazhar in my heart. Yes. The thing about Maia is that his internal monologue is an open book, which just had me flag waiving for him so hard. Celehar, by contrast, is suppressing-->lying to himself about his emotions all the time, which just doesn't make my heart soar. That combined with the somewhat sloppier writing is enough to make me enjoy, but not love these books. (Also, I've shipped Celehar hard with Azhanharad since before WftD even published, which I think would have most of broader TGE fandom at my door with torches and pitchforks if they were to ever find out...)

TL;DR - hurray for your book thoughts, and for posting to DW more regularly when you're inclined!

[marianainthemoatedgrange]

Wow, I was really obviously drunk when I wrote all that, lol. Anyway, addressing your points:

I think where The Etched City diverges from DoL is that while basically every DoL PoV character is a woobie to some degree, the TES characters are... not less sympathetic per se, but a whole lot less pitiable in that classic woobie sort of way. At least that was how they read to me. I also feel like the worldbuilding was a lot more... self-contained than Sarah-Katherine's, (or indeed China Mieville's) if that makes sense? Like, there's there's definitely a sense of history and other places and the fact that the story doesn't exist within a vacuum, but there's a lot less of S-K's sort of sprawling Okapi Butt style with tons and tons of references to places and things you'll never know about beyond that one mention that raise as many questions about the sheer logistics of everything as it adds to the general feel. So to answer your question I'd say they're, like, siblings or cousins rather than twins but if you're in the mood for generally downbeat but very baroque and cool fantasy in the same vein then I'd say definitely give it a shot.

That combined with the somewhat sloppier writing is enough to make me enjoy, but not love these books. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly where I'm at. I think a part of it might also be how disconnected the narrative overall is from itself - like, I know A Lot of people who love the Thara books are into the "series of interconnected vignettes with one sort of main murder mystery as the major thread" feel, but that's really less appealing to me than how hard TGE goes on both the very close, almost claustrophobic focus on Maia and his own world. I enjoy the look outside court (though I'm still trying to sort of mentally reconcile it with the U. Court worldbuilding to a degree) but it just hasn't completely captured my heart the way TGE has. I do hope that the completion of the novel trilogy will make things feel a little more complete and cohesive, but even if not... well, I can always just reread TGE for the five hundred billionth time.

Anyway, thank you so much for the rec for Jane Steele, which improved my, like, last week of May absolutely immeasurably and I'm super stoked to hear what you think when/if you get to Base Notes. And I'm glad you had a good Xmas. <3