RogerBW's Blog

2024 in Books 02 January 2025

In 2024 I read 186 books (most novel-length, a few separate novellas and short stories); after a strong start to the year I slowed down a lot later, for no obvious reason.

Books that particularly impressed me:

  • Jodi Taylor, The Nothing Girl
  • Ada Hoffmann, The Outside: the whole series in fact.
  • Stephanie Burgis (in general but particularly the Regency Dragons books starting with Claws and Contrivances)
  • Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir
  • Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (though I'm finding the earlier Daevabad series slow going)
  • Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow
  • T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace
  • Kemi Ashing-Giwa, The Splinter in the Sky
  • Bethany Jacobs, These Burning Stars

Of this year's Hugo-nominated novels, I've read three: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Translation State, and Some Desperate Glory, the eventual winner and by far the most "Hugo"-feeling book (by my vaguely-defined subconscious standards) to come up for several years. (I gave up on The Saint of Bright Doors, see below; I don't even plan to try Starter Villain, having hated my previous experiences reading Scalzi; and I will get to Witch King when my reading of Martha Wells reaches that point.)

I am indeed continuing with my chronological reads of everything by Martha Wells and T. Kingfisher, and still enjoying them. No non-fiction apart from the unfortunately pseudo-academic Thematic Integration in Board Game Design. I did get to the end of Patricia Moyes' detective fiction, and can thoroughly recommend… well, there are a few duds, but for the most part they're excellent and I continue to think she deserves to be better known.

Books I didn't finish, which therefore didn't get individual reviews:

Christine Falls, Benjamin Black (2006) [Quirke #1]: it's 1950s Dublin and everyone is miserable. If this had been packaged as a gloomy literary novel and I'd been in a mood for that, I'd probably have read more, but it was presented as a detective story and on that level it really didn't work for me. A young woman has died in unusual but specific circumstances: there's only one thing that could mean. And it's pretty obvious who the father was. What happened to the baby is mentioned in interstitial scenes which remove any possibility of suspense. Well written but nobody here gets any enjoyment from life.

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (2023): this is a literary novel disguised as fantasy, based loosely on the life of Rāhula, son of Gautama Buddha, and set in a fantasied-up version of Sri Lanka. There's a lot being said about the nature of colonialism and compliance and how people gradually come to accept mass executions as just one of those things, but oh boy it's hard work to plough through. This writer thinks we care each time Fetter gets an erection. Talking about "strings of haecceity" on an ID card is pushing it a bit once, definitely too much if you do it twice. "The book says the devils of Acusdab are fading away, perhaps repelled by the highway and the modernity it brings, and without possession, nine-tenths of the lore are already lost." is a jolly good joke but it's really not worth the long flabby paragraph of setup. "The compellence of the drums is powerful", OK this isn't what that word (on the rare occasions it's used at all) actually means. "She's short, muscular, grim; her hands are callused, perhaps from a lifetime of drummery." Oh, what's the point? I can muster up no enthusiasm for this.

Tidelands, Philippa Gregory (2019): it's 1648, the King is in prison but there's still fighting. Not on the deeply rural Sussex coast, though, where a widowed (or is she?) midwife and herbalist will fall in love with a disguised Catholic priest. All very promising, and the history seems well-researched, but it doen't half drag with foreshadowing, and it's very evident that the whole thing won't end well. I can see the pieces thudding into place for a witch-trial; but more seriously, these two people have nothing in common except a basic physicality and so I can't even believe in their love story. It does not help that I listened to the audio read by Louise Brealey, who plods through historical background, daily life and scenes of passion alike in the monotone of a schoolchild being forced to parrot for the class. (And "drily" is usually not pronounced "diwily".)

Drifters' Alliance Book 2, Elle Casey (2015): OK, I don't have a problem with Firefly with the names changed, found family, everyone has secrets, all the rest of it… if it's done well. And I probably shouldn't have started with book 2 because there's absolutely no effort made to get me to sympathise with any of these characters. But then there's a "vacuum cycle" to clean the ship, that apparently doesn't require the people on board to put on suits. Then we have "Romanii", space Roma with the exact same set of prejudices against them as the modern day ones, but apparently they're happy to live and work long-term on other people's ships (and they all have compulsory recognisable full-torso tattoos but must refuse to tell anyone that they are Romanii); and then a drifting ship turns up and nobody has ever heard of transponders, and rather than just double-talking about distances there's a coordinate system which strongly implies (though I bet Casey doesn't realise it) that there are beacons every few tens of kilometres throughout inhabited space… look, if you don't want to engage with the big numbers that come with space, fine, but then maybe don't set your story in space, or at least don't talk in real distances.

Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018): Juliet Armstrong did some secret work in 1940, transcribing recordings of German sympathisers who thought they were talking to a Gestapo agent, in a version of Fifth Column with slightly different people; in 1950 she's a producer at the BBC, but bodies thought long buried start to float back to the surface. (And in a framing story in 1981 she's just been severely injured by a car.) But flipping between the time periods steals what narrative momentum builds up, and it's very obvious that the unforgivable thing that she clearly remembers doing won't be revealed to the reader until much later. Too literary, too synthetic, too heavy-handed with the "look at my research" moments; the actual writing is decent, but this is not for me. (But I enjoyed Atkinson's Case Histories much more.)

Love Bites, Cynthia St Aubin (2019): I don't expect a great deal from paranormal romance but I do expect something beyond decorative spun sugar. Yeah, divorcée cat-lady heroine is suddenly surrounded by impossibly beautiful men (and a few ditto women) all of whom take her seriously, I realise who the target audience is here and it's not I.

The Seer-ious Business of Murder, Ada Rayne (2023): Faye Constantine abandons her PhD in neuroscience without a backward glance to take over her dead aunt's occult bookshop on the California coast. Everyone is lovely, there's a Hot Guy, and someone gets murdered so that she can solve it. But my goodness the writing is simplistic in the extreme, simple thudding declarative sentences, whole scenes of clue-finding skipped, names of what might be significant players introduced as though everyone already knows them… first draft?

However, they needed clarification on why Isis was here late at night.

"Isis," Luke said sternly. "What are you doing here?" Luke struggled with his words. "It's pretty late at night."

To Have and To Heist, Sara Desai (2023): Simi Chopra is a directionless millennial who runs into a professional thief, and romantic shenanigans ensue. But the long "Simi is a loser" introduction just dragged for me, reminding me of Janet Evanovich's later Stephanie Plum stories when the inspiration had gone and "gosh isn't Stephanie a screw-up, ha ha" was all that was left. Basically it's a comedy much more than a romance, and as everyone knows I have no sense of humour. Also Simi only has two aspects to her personality, she wants but doesn't get lots of sex with gorgeous guys, and she babbles on. And on.

The Heiress of Linn Hagh, Karen Charlton (2012): Napoleonic-era whodunnit. An heiress has vanished from her bedroom in a tower, even though it was barred on the inside. But very nearly everybody here is self-interestedly horrid, including the detective, who is supposed to be a grown man but cheerfully fantasises about the beautiful woman opposite him in the accommodation coach; and the heiress's half-brother and sister clearly wish her ill, so it's extremely obvious that she has run away until she reaches her majority, but she doesn't think of sending a letter to say "don't look for me, all is well" so that the law would have an excuse not to get involved. It's all thuddingly predictable. And even though the author is English, she unblushingly puts phrases like "I guess she has remained at Linn Hagh to cook their dinner" into the mouth of her educated Engliush detective. Also, in the audio version I heard, Michael Page sounds as though he's one perceived insult away from beating someone to a pulp—as most of the characters and in his narration; and he gives the locals a variety of "comic" regional accents. And insists on pronouncing the nearby small town of Bellingham "Belling-Jam".

The Voice of Bees, Elizabeth A. Reeves (2020): some bees are spirit messengers and the protagonist is a "bee witch" who carries their messages, OK, I'm up for that, and then whump it's all urban fantasy with "shifters" (who are not the same thing as were-creatures) and alphas and pack dominance and ghaaargh. Reeves is no Ilona Andrews and can't make this kind of garbage interesting.

See also:
The Nothing Girl, Jodi Taylor
The Outside, Ada Hoffmann
Claws and Contrivances, Stephanie Burgis
Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty
Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao
Paladin's Grace, T Kingfisher
The Splinter in the Sky, Kemi Ashing-Giwa
These Burning Stars, Bethany Jacobs


  1. Posted by Chris at 01:18pm on 02 January 2025

    Michael Page may be right about that pronunciation: I was once taken as a child to a village called Bellingham (near Hexham) to see a nearby waterfall, and remembered it as "Bellinge-am", so I have just checked, and Wiki gives "bɛlɪndʒəm/ BEL-in-jəm". This "small town" might be based on that village, perhaps? I remember it as quite a big village.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 01:19pm on 02 January 2025

    Fair enough, and thanks. I don't think that's enough to salvage the thing, though.

  3. Posted by chris at 02:16pm on 02 January 2025

    I am simply following the excellent example set by the Vicar of Huckley, in "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat"; no scholar, but a lover of accuracy, as he proclaimed himself.

    I am not about to listen to the thing to establish for myself how bad it is. Thanks for the warning.

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