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.