I haven't been posting book reviews since March. It is not like I'm reading that much this year. About 4 books a month and many of them are novellas. But for some reason I just haven't been posting about them or getting the energy to post about them. I really want to catch up and since it is a very quiet day at work, right before a Labor Day weekend, I figure I should get started and maybe gain some momentum. Not even sure how much I will remember from these books already! But just for general idea, I do want to set some thoughts down. So here are the books I finished in March and April of this year:
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch, 128pp (audiobook) [Rivers of London novella]
October Man is a Rivers of London novella that takes place in the same universe but in Germany. It doesn't have any of our familiar characters, except Peter and Abigail are referenced - German characters certainly heard of Peter and the chaos he causes, but this story is about the German way of dealing with magic and river spirits. This book was just available of audiobook for me, so I listened to it instead of read it, which was probably a good thing since it felt different to me. I usually have trouble paying attention to audiobooks so I had to concentrate more and probably go more details out of it.
Tobias Winter is a very practical German policeman who works with magic and who is sent to investigate a situation in Trier involving a very dead man and a weird crime scene. The narrator of the audiobook was older so it was hard for me to see Tobias as young, but at least he did feel pretty German with all the procedure. He is assigned a local cop Vanessa Sommer (Winter and Summer, hah) who is very competent, helps with the investigation and is also interested to learn about magic. There are river gods including a little girl one who latches on to Vanessa and Tobias needs to make sure Vanessa doesn't get taken. Investigation itself was interesting. And I did like to see other countries' approach to magic.
Overall it was a nice novella and I didn't mind spending some time somewhere else in the universe. Rivers of London is the series I like and often like a lot, but I don't love it so as long as the book reads well, I'm good.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, 214pp [Booker Prize]
I have been reading the winners of the Booker Prize for a while now and most of the time the books are excellent and deserving. And this book was certainly excellent. It is not an easy book emotionally and not something one would want to reread but as a book it is excellent. It is the writing style. The way the book is written, it really conveys the slow buildup of terror that surrounds the family and their world. Something, which was never explained, happened that lead the government of Ireland to declare an emergency and become a totalitarian state. Slowly but surely freedoms are taken away; there is a war against the rebels and everything just falls apart. Normal democratic ideals and lives and expectations are stripped away. The writing makes you feel like you are a frog in a slowly warming water and before you know it is boiling. And how do you react to that. The writing style makes everything so unsettling. The main character is a mother with three children, three teenagers/pre-teens and a baby, and early on she could have left for Canada to her sister but by the time she realizes she should have rushed and left, it is too late. Things just deteriorate in this kind of government and political situation with tragic results.
I grew up in the late Soviet Union. I was eleven when it broke up so I had some awareness of the political situation. And even though I left for US at twelve years old and was just a child, living in the Soviet Union even as a child does impact the way you are and how you see the world and what you expect from it. It was like reading 1984 - a very familiar environment and less surprise of how things can go. Reading this book also reminded me of a non-fiction book I read in grad school that explored why some Jews left Nazi Germany in the late 1930s before it was too late, and why others stayed. What prompted people to leave, to move as things got worse and worse and what made others stay. The characters in the Prophet song started in a much more naive place, thinking these kinds of things can't happen in a civilized society to tragic consequences but with a bit of hopeful ending.
Excellent book, highly recommended but also hard emotionally. As the main character realizes by the end, the end of the world is always happening somewhere to someone, and this book is about that.
Нас украли. История преступлений.[Kidnapped: a story in crimes] by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, 344pp [in Russian].
My Dad gave me this book for New Year. Took me a while to figure out it was not a sci-fi book but a farce. Two boys go visit their father abroad and their mother is giving them warnings about their father, whom they don't really know. When they go board the plane, these two brothers have the exact same name on their passport, but they look very different from each other. What follows is the story of how that happened and then what happens when they go visit their father. It is a story of switched babies, and they are switched several times for variety of reasons, two mothers who meet in the hospital to give birth to them and their lives and various characters around these families. It is a soap opera plot with a lot of absurd things happenings but also with characters you want to succeed badly despite the circumstances. You really root for Alina, a college girl who has to deal with unplanned pregnancy from a boy who abandons her and you want things to work out for her. Nothing evil actually happens but there is a hanging possibility that adds to the tension.
Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold, 150pp [Penric and Desdemona 2].
The second book in the Penric and Desdemona series. Four years after Penric gets his demon (so he is 23 now), a locator Oswyl need a help of a sorcerer to locate a person accused of murdering someone. That person is Inglis, the shaman of the title, and we see his perspective as well. Penric is assigned to this duty and travels with Oswyl through mountain passes on Inglis' trail. Along the way he figures out another mystery and helps a former local shaman as well and starts to get interested in shamans. Since I read the Bujold World of Five Gods novels before these novellas, I encountered shamans before, so all this was familiar. Oswyl is a typical straightlaced dignified person and it takes a while for him and Penric to understand each other. But I liked that no one was really a bad guy here and they were also able to help Inglis once they find him. It was a very nice story overall and I enjoyed the interactions between all the characters.
Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold, 152pp [Penric and Desdemona 3]
I was pleasantly surprised that we see Oswyl and Inglis from the second book in this third book as well. I like them as a trio, a nice buddy set up and I like all three of them being besties basically, investigating a murder of a sorceress in the woods and trying to find her demon before someone else does. The mystery was well done and overall I was just enjoying the three of them investigating. In the end Penric wants to study shamans more and there seems to be a set up for something but I read the next book and it pivots so I'm not sure what happened with that plot.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, 219pp
I read this book in March and did like it as I was reading it, as I generally do of all Mandel books, but I am already blanking on the plot and had to look it up to remind myself. There are several main characters who live in different times and places from past to future, who come together for a few seconds in an anomaly that points to simulation hypothesis (I read a book last year that also deals with the simulation hypothesis, so I guess this type of sci-fi is going around. That and multi-universe seem to be very popular lately). There are time travel shenanigans too with a loop kind where it all makes sense at the end. One of the characters is Olive, an author who lives on a Moon colony in 2203 who wrote a bestseller book about a pandemic and is on Earth touring with a book while her husband and young daughter wait at home. As she is touring an actual pandemic breaks out on Earth. Olive is so clearly Mandel and her experience writing Station Eleven and then living though Covid-19 lockdown. Very thin layer of separation there. It was interesting to get her thoughts on both having a popular book and her experience with the actual pandemic. And there was also a character whom we meet in "Glass hotel" book - her books all seem to be connected in some ways.
The only thing that bothered me is that the anomaly seems so minor, just a few seconds of feeling transported to somewhere that is seems silly that people in the future put it together - the evidence is very tentative and can be easily dismissed as something else. As always, this book is about the characters and Mandel's easy writing style. Her books are interesting, but it always feels like it could be more. (I watched Station Eleven TV series this year and I feel the TV show made the story better even though they changed the Prophet and the ending in some way).
When I read the modern literature books, they are often apocalyptic it feels like. One of the points of the Prophet Song book was that the end of the world is always happening to someone. In the Sea of Tranquility, the end of the world has been happening for a long time. It is always headed there.
Dark Waters by Katherine Arden, 198pp
This is a second book of the middle school horror book series. Three kids who survived some kind of horror supernatural event in the first book are still haunted by it and know that Smiling Man from the first book is still coming for them. They end up on a boat trip on a lake in Vermont and get attacked by a Lake Monster and stranded on a weird island with no way out (with another kid and their parents but those parents are hurt and not aware of the supernatural nature of it).
Olivia picked this book up in the library because of the seas monster on the cover and I was reading it to her for a while, until we got to the part in the middle of the book where the kids discover a cabin in woods the middle of an island and there was a skeleton of an old captain on the bed. And that actually freaked her out and she didn't want me to read anymore. Sea monsters were fine, being stranded on a spooky island was fine, creepy atmosphere didn't bother her but this did. Since I was more than half way through the book, I just finished it to see what happens.
I'm not a big fan of horror generally so this is not what I like to read. And this is certainly a middle book in the series since it does depend on reading the previous one and the next one. You can work out what happens but still. it was an ok book. I probably would have liked it more if I was younger. I do like that the kids didn't just shrug off what happened in the previous book - they started reading up on ghosts and other library materials. And I liked how supernatural was treated. And there was real danger. But this is not the sort of book I would choose to spend time on.
Unruly: the ridiculous history of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell, 405pp
Recommended by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
christinafairy, a funny look at English rulers from Anglo-Saxon kings to Elizabeth I, by a comedian with a very modern lens and a lot of humor at the very ridiculous ways these kings and queens lived. I have a masters in Medieval English history (ABD - all but dissertation - really as I never finished my PhD), as I studied it in grad school, so for me it was more of a review of very familiar subjects (except Anglo-Saxon kings whom I don't know as much in detail). That made this book funnier really as I already have preconceived notions about these kings and queens, their lives and their motivations. And I did laugh a lot reading this book. It was great. I do think at the end, Mitchell is judging them too much with modern values, but it was still very entertaining.
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch, 128pp (audiobook) [Rivers of London novella]
October Man is a Rivers of London novella that takes place in the same universe but in Germany. It doesn't have any of our familiar characters, except Peter and Abigail are referenced - German characters certainly heard of Peter and the chaos he causes, but this story is about the German way of dealing with magic and river spirits. This book was just available of audiobook for me, so I listened to it instead of read it, which was probably a good thing since it felt different to me. I usually have trouble paying attention to audiobooks so I had to concentrate more and probably go more details out of it.
Tobias Winter is a very practical German policeman who works with magic and who is sent to investigate a situation in Trier involving a very dead man and a weird crime scene. The narrator of the audiobook was older so it was hard for me to see Tobias as young, but at least he did feel pretty German with all the procedure. He is assigned a local cop Vanessa Sommer (Winter and Summer, hah) who is very competent, helps with the investigation and is also interested to learn about magic. There are river gods including a little girl one who latches on to Vanessa and Tobias needs to make sure Vanessa doesn't get taken. Investigation itself was interesting. And I did like to see other countries' approach to magic.
Overall it was a nice novella and I didn't mind spending some time somewhere else in the universe. Rivers of London is the series I like and often like a lot, but I don't love it so as long as the book reads well, I'm good.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, 214pp [Booker Prize]
I have been reading the winners of the Booker Prize for a while now and most of the time the books are excellent and deserving. And this book was certainly excellent. It is not an easy book emotionally and not something one would want to reread but as a book it is excellent. It is the writing style. The way the book is written, it really conveys the slow buildup of terror that surrounds the family and their world. Something, which was never explained, happened that lead the government of Ireland to declare an emergency and become a totalitarian state. Slowly but surely freedoms are taken away; there is a war against the rebels and everything just falls apart. Normal democratic ideals and lives and expectations are stripped away. The writing makes you feel like you are a frog in a slowly warming water and before you know it is boiling. And how do you react to that. The writing style makes everything so unsettling. The main character is a mother with three children, three teenagers/pre-teens and a baby, and early on she could have left for Canada to her sister but by the time she realizes she should have rushed and left, it is too late. Things just deteriorate in this kind of government and political situation with tragic results.
I grew up in the late Soviet Union. I was eleven when it broke up so I had some awareness of the political situation. And even though I left for US at twelve years old and was just a child, living in the Soviet Union even as a child does impact the way you are and how you see the world and what you expect from it. It was like reading 1984 - a very familiar environment and less surprise of how things can go. Reading this book also reminded me of a non-fiction book I read in grad school that explored why some Jews left Nazi Germany in the late 1930s before it was too late, and why others stayed. What prompted people to leave, to move as things got worse and worse and what made others stay. The characters in the Prophet song started in a much more naive place, thinking these kinds of things can't happen in a civilized society to tragic consequences but with a bit of hopeful ending.
Excellent book, highly recommended but also hard emotionally. As the main character realizes by the end, the end of the world is always happening somewhere to someone, and this book is about that.
Нас украли. История преступлений.[Kidnapped: a story in crimes] by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, 344pp [in Russian].
My Dad gave me this book for New Year. Took me a while to figure out it was not a sci-fi book but a farce. Two boys go visit their father abroad and their mother is giving them warnings about their father, whom they don't really know. When they go board the plane, these two brothers have the exact same name on their passport, but they look very different from each other. What follows is the story of how that happened and then what happens when they go visit their father. It is a story of switched babies, and they are switched several times for variety of reasons, two mothers who meet in the hospital to give birth to them and their lives and various characters around these families. It is a soap opera plot with a lot of absurd things happenings but also with characters you want to succeed badly despite the circumstances. You really root for Alina, a college girl who has to deal with unplanned pregnancy from a boy who abandons her and you want things to work out for her. Nothing evil actually happens but there is a hanging possibility that adds to the tension.
Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold, 150pp [Penric and Desdemona 2].
The second book in the Penric and Desdemona series. Four years after Penric gets his demon (so he is 23 now), a locator Oswyl need a help of a sorcerer to locate a person accused of murdering someone. That person is Inglis, the shaman of the title, and we see his perspective as well. Penric is assigned to this duty and travels with Oswyl through mountain passes on Inglis' trail. Along the way he figures out another mystery and helps a former local shaman as well and starts to get interested in shamans. Since I read the Bujold World of Five Gods novels before these novellas, I encountered shamans before, so all this was familiar. Oswyl is a typical straightlaced dignified person and it takes a while for him and Penric to understand each other. But I liked that no one was really a bad guy here and they were also able to help Inglis once they find him. It was a very nice story overall and I enjoyed the interactions between all the characters.
Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold, 152pp [Penric and Desdemona 3]
I was pleasantly surprised that we see Oswyl and Inglis from the second book in this third book as well. I like them as a trio, a nice buddy set up and I like all three of them being besties basically, investigating a murder of a sorceress in the woods and trying to find her demon before someone else does. The mystery was well done and overall I was just enjoying the three of them investigating. In the end Penric wants to study shamans more and there seems to be a set up for something but I read the next book and it pivots so I'm not sure what happened with that plot.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, 219pp
I read this book in March and did like it as I was reading it, as I generally do of all Mandel books, but I am already blanking on the plot and had to look it up to remind myself. There are several main characters who live in different times and places from past to future, who come together for a few seconds in an anomaly that points to simulation hypothesis (I read a book last year that also deals with the simulation hypothesis, so I guess this type of sci-fi is going around. That and multi-universe seem to be very popular lately). There are time travel shenanigans too with a loop kind where it all makes sense at the end. One of the characters is Olive, an author who lives on a Moon colony in 2203 who wrote a bestseller book about a pandemic and is on Earth touring with a book while her husband and young daughter wait at home. As she is touring an actual pandemic breaks out on Earth. Olive is so clearly Mandel and her experience writing Station Eleven and then living though Covid-19 lockdown. Very thin layer of separation there. It was interesting to get her thoughts on both having a popular book and her experience with the actual pandemic. And there was also a character whom we meet in "Glass hotel" book - her books all seem to be connected in some ways.
The only thing that bothered me is that the anomaly seems so minor, just a few seconds of feeling transported to somewhere that is seems silly that people in the future put it together - the evidence is very tentative and can be easily dismissed as something else. As always, this book is about the characters and Mandel's easy writing style. Her books are interesting, but it always feels like it could be more. (I watched Station Eleven TV series this year and I feel the TV show made the story better even though they changed the Prophet and the ending in some way).
When I read the modern literature books, they are often apocalyptic it feels like. One of the points of the Prophet Song book was that the end of the world is always happening to someone. In the Sea of Tranquility, the end of the world has been happening for a long time. It is always headed there.
Dark Waters by Katherine Arden, 198pp
This is a second book of the middle school horror book series. Three kids who survived some kind of horror supernatural event in the first book are still haunted by it and know that Smiling Man from the first book is still coming for them. They end up on a boat trip on a lake in Vermont and get attacked by a Lake Monster and stranded on a weird island with no way out (with another kid and their parents but those parents are hurt and not aware of the supernatural nature of it).
Olivia picked this book up in the library because of the seas monster on the cover and I was reading it to her for a while, until we got to the part in the middle of the book where the kids discover a cabin in woods the middle of an island and there was a skeleton of an old captain on the bed. And that actually freaked her out and she didn't want me to read anymore. Sea monsters were fine, being stranded on a spooky island was fine, creepy atmosphere didn't bother her but this did. Since I was more than half way through the book, I just finished it to see what happens.
I'm not a big fan of horror generally so this is not what I like to read. And this is certainly a middle book in the series since it does depend on reading the previous one and the next one. You can work out what happens but still. it was an ok book. I probably would have liked it more if I was younger. I do like that the kids didn't just shrug off what happened in the previous book - they started reading up on ghosts and other library materials. And I liked how supernatural was treated. And there was real danger. But this is not the sort of book I would choose to spend time on.
Unruly: the ridiculous history of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell, 405pp
Recommended by
christinafairy, a funny look at English rulers from Anglo-Saxon kings to Elizabeth I, by a comedian with a very modern lens and a lot of humor at the very ridiculous ways these kings and queens lived. I have a masters in Medieval English history (ABD - all but dissertation - really as I never finished my PhD), as I studied it in grad school, so for me it was more of a review of very familiar subjects (except Anglo-Saxon kings whom I don't know as much in detail). That made this book funnier really as I already have preconceived notions about these kings and queens, their lives and their motivations. And I did laugh a lot reading this book. It was great. I do think at the end, Mitchell is judging them too much with modern values, but it was still very entertaining.