between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Not because of the books, I hasten to add. Just because this time of year is always disheartening to me.


Books 2014: 230-231


230. Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince. Arthur A. Levine, 2013.

Read for the column at Tor.com. An excellent novel.


231. Carrie Vaughn, Kitty in the Underworld. Tor, 2013.

A fun installment in the series, if not as fun as I was hoping.

Books 2014: 211-215


211. John Scalzi, Lock In. US: Tor, 2014; UK: Gollancz, 2014. Copy courtesy of Gollancz.

So, remember the last time I was writing up my books, I asked myself, "Have I forgotten something?" And it turns out that I had, because the night beforehand I'd read Lock In and it had not made enough impression to last. This is in many ways a very forgettable book: competent, but of the stuff of which airport paperbacks are made. A whodunnit with a couple of Sufficiently Advanced Technology elements. I really don't have very much at all to say about it, and I'm damned if I can even remember the characters' names.


212. Sharon Lee, Carousel Sea. Baen, 2015. e-ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Third installment in small-town fantasy series. Will include in future SWM column. Interesting, soothing, pulls all its punches.


213. Elizabeth May, The Falconer. Gollancz, 2013.

Debut novel. Fairies. Violence. Scotland. Steampunk. It is crack and it is terrible and it is actually quite a bit of fun.


nonfiction


214. William Dalrymple, The Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan. Bloomsbury, 2013.

New history of the first British Afghan war, and one that makes liberal use of sources in the local languages. A fascinating read.


215. Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: an Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. Verso, 2013.

Rediker writes good history. This one is relatively short, for him, and very accessible: an account of the Amistad slave mutiny and the long struggle of the survivors to return to their West African homes. Solid, informative, compelling.

Books 2014: 186-208


186-187. Laurie R. King, To Play The Fool and With Child. Picador, 2014 editions.

The second and third installment in King's Kate Martinelli series. The interesting thing about these novels, I realised as I read her standalone books - discussed next paragraph - is how much more King is interested in character, in suffering, in relationships, than she is in the intellectual puzzle of whodunnit. Crime might be the frame, but it's not the focus. Which makes these novels fairly powerful examinations of emotions and relationships and characters.


188-190. Laurie R. King, A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. Various publishers, various years.

These are King's standalone contemporary novels - though Folly and Keeping Watch are loosely connected - and it's here where I noticed her concern with character rather than mystery most strongly. A Darker Place ends on an unfinished note, but it's a study of one woman's guilt and obsessions and drive, a drive that leads her into danger again and again; Folly is concerned with one woman's struggle to rebuild her self and her life while struggling with a heavy burden of grief and mental illness - she's a mother, a grandmother, an artist: her sickness places heavy burdens upon her relationships but doesn't, ultimately, define her - while Keeping Watch is about how one man's experiences in Vietnam (and his addiction to adrenaline) shaped his entire life. They are brilliant, fascinating novels, and well worth reading.


191-195. Mary Balogh, One Night For Love, A Summer To Remember, The Proposal, The Escape, and The Arrangement. Ebooks.

Formulaic historical romance. Diverting, but not really engrossing. Did not hit nearly enough of my narrative kinks.


196. Catherine Asaro, Undercity. Baen, 2014. Review ecopy courtesy of the publisher.

Read for review for Tor.com. My strongest feeling about this book is "meh." It's good enough, it does what it sets out to do, but it's not stylish or innovative or particularly gripping. It has not enough flare and joie de vivre. I found it hard to say much about it in my review.


197. Sarah Zettel, Palace of Spies. Harcourt Brace & Co., 2013.

Read for inclusion in SWM column. An excellent and intelligent YA novel. Much recommended.


198. Liane Merciel, Dragon Age: Last Flight. Tor, 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

By far the best written of the Dragon Age tie-ins to date: it manages to tell a full and complete story without feeling like someone's write-up of their roleplaying campaign, and does it smoothly. Interesting characters, solid BOOM. Would read more in this setting by this author.


199. Gail Simone et al, Legends of Red Sonja. Dynamite, 2014.

I said of Gail Simone's first Red Sonja volume that it reminded me in the best possible way of Xena: Warrior Princess. Legends, a compilation collecting efforts from Simone and a variety of other authors, including Kelly Sue DeConnick, Tamora Pierce, and Marjorie M. Liu, feels very much like it too - without Xena's levels of whimsical ridiculousness, but still. I really enjoyed this, and recommend it very much.


200. Erin Lindsey, The Bloodbound. Ace, 2014.

Red for inclusion in SWM column. Meh. Tone and concerns remind me a little of Mercedes Lackey or Tamora Pierce, though without their particular brand of... didactic feminism is not quite the term I need, but it may be close. Armies, threats to nations, heroine bodyguarding king. Briefly diverting, but not exactly compellingly great.


201-206. Anthony Riches, Wounds of Honour, Arrows of Fury, Fortress of Spears, The Leopard Sword, The Wolf's Gold and The Eagle's Vengeance. Hodder & Stoughton, various dates.

Discussion of narrative pattern of sexual violence follows.

Feeling low and brainless, I read through all of these in a single night and day. They are, to use a term of art vouchsafed to me, "Roman bollocks," set during the reign of Commodus (the Commodus of whom Dio gives us such a lovely picture beheading ostriches in the arena). A Roman of good family takes service with an auxiliary cohort in Britain under an assumed name because his family has been condemned for treason, rapidly becomes a centurion, hack slash march curse shield-bash male homosociality. Details of military equipment and the political landscape are well-researched; details of the Roman social world and the Roman mindset, rather less so: Riches has imported the mindset of a more gleefully brutal modern infantry regiment into Roman clothing. (Hack, slash, march, curse, march.)

An interesting pattern emerges over the course of six books. Riches has chosen to deal with a primarily masculine world, that of the Roman army on campaign, but in Wounds of Honour he introduces Felicia, a Roman married woman of good family with medical training who will be the Only Notable Named Woman for three books. (And one of Damn Few for the next three.) Not only does Felicia take up with a centurion after her first husband dies, she doesn't even bring a female servant with her, or acquire one. Most of her time on screen is spent being menaced by rape, only to be rescued at the last moment - at least once, and sometimes more often, in each book.

In book four, The Leopard Sword, Riches introduces a second notable named woman, Annia. Guess her profession. I'll wait.

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If you guessed "prostitute", top marks, well done. A presumably successful businesswoman, Annia is victimised regularly by her business partner, who is the local equivalent of an underworld kingpin, and does not seem to realise that the men who work for him as her guards could turn on her at his order. Annia is also threatened with rape in the course of this novel! But instead of one of the last-minute rescues experienced by Felicia, she gets to have the completed experience. She is rescued from death but not from penetrative violation.

The nice mostly-respectable Roman matron, in the course of six books and multiple close calls, has not experienced a completed rape. The woman who has made a career out of selling her body, on the other hand?

Hmmm. Hmmm. *side-eyes*

In the fifth book, to round off the well-rounded array of female characters, we're introduced to an Evil Woman Who Manipulates Men Through Sex, by the way.

So that's an interesting pattern of sexist thinking and unexamined sexism on display.


nonfiction


207. Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter With Tokugawa Japan. Columbia University Press, 2014.

A fascinating and immensely readable account of how the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) was stymied in its attempts to treat the Tokugawa Bakufu like the other nations and kingdoms the VOC succeeded in dominating in South East Asia. The VOC ended up, in fact, using the rhetoric of a vassal of the shogun, and being called upon to perform the duties of a vassal. It's far from my period, but it feels like solid research - although I'd have preferred more emphasis on how the Japanese conceived of the Dutch.


208. Judith Herrin, Margins and Metropolis: Authority Across The Byzantine Empire. Princeton University Press, 2013.

A collection of essays on various aspects of Byzantine authority from across Herrin's long career. Interesting stuff.

Books 2014: 156-168


156-157. Mavis Doriel Hay, Death On The Cherwell and Murder Underground. British Library Crime Classics, reprinted 2014.

Had I read Murder Underground before Death On The Cherwell, and not the other way around, I would have been inclined to dismiss Hay's scant handful of 1930s murder mysteries as tedious and possessed of little redeeming value. Yet for all the back-and-forth boredom of Murder Underground, Death On The Cherwell is a minor delight: it breathes the Oxford of its setting, and Hay here possesses more in the way of sympathy and humour for her characters. And yet neither are mysteries in the usual sense, being more concerned with the lives of the characters than the resolution of the murder. But that makes them interesting in a different fashion.


158. Jack Campbell, The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword. Ace, 2014. Copy via Tor.com.

Read for review for Tor.com. Very similar to all previous Campbell books.


159. Jacqueline Carey, Poison Fruit. Roc, 2014. Copy via Tor.com.

Read for review for Tor.com. Satisfactory conclusion to trilogy.


160. Rebecca Levene, Smiler's Fair. Hodder, 2014. Copy courtesy of publisher.

Read for review for Strange Horizons. Three quarters of the book is prologue, and I'm none too satisfied with the rest, either.


161. S.M. Wheeler, Sea Change. Tor, 2013. Copy courtesy of publisher.

Read for column. Reminds me in many ways of The Last Unicorn, though its emotional beats affect me more.


162. Jacey Bedford, Empire of Dust. DAW, 2014. Galley copy courtesy of publisher.

Read for review/column. Strikingly old-fashioned space opera. Psionics. Telepathy. Women who take their husbands' names on marriage as a matter of course. I had only just reread Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword, mind you, so its failures of imagination were clearer by comparison. Perfectly readable adventure, nothing particular about it to make it stand out.


163. Jo Walton, The Just City. Tor, 2015. Copy courtesy of publisher.

Read for review for Vector. A peculiar book, and less self-indulgent than it seems at first glance - though Walton takes a rather more charitable view towards both Apollo and Sokrates than I ever would. It is immensely readable, and its major thematic arguments emerge slyly from the narrative (although it actually states up front on the first page what it is going to be). In many ways, this is a book about consent, and the abuses thereof: informed consent, consent after the fact, refusal of consent, the power to compel - cunning concealed under explicit arguments about justice and arete.

It is also, at times, rather like reading one of the more enjoyable Sokratic dialogues.

Appropriately so.


164-167. Laurie R. King, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, and A Grave Talent. 1993-1998 variously, Allison & Busby and Picador.

Excellent mystery novels. All of them.


nonfiction

168. Judith Herrin, Unrivaled Influence. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Collection of essays on women in the Byzantine empire from throughout Herrin's (long) career. Very interesting.

I've probably forgotten a good half-dozen things from this list: I know I made a foray into regency romance for a couple of days during the last month.

Books 2014: 137-150


137. Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart. Orbit, 2014.

The fifth installment in Stross's "Laundry Files" series. Rather more episodic than its predecessors, with an approach to pacing that staggers rather a bit in the middle, it never quite transcends the sum of its parts. But it's a fun story with an interesting twist in the climax that clearly sets up some New Changes in the life of its protagonist, and I enjoyed it a lot.


138. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword. Orbit, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of Orbit.

It is space opera, and could have been written JUST FOR ME. I love it as much as I loved its predecessor. Read this one for review for Tor.com: expect to hear more about it from me soon.


139. Roz Kaveney, Resurrections. Plus One Press, 2014. Review copy courtesy of the author.

Third in series, and what a fantastic bloody series it is. Kaveney isn't afraid to make ambitious messes with mythology, genre furniture, and your own expectations. Structurally it's not an entirely successful offering, but I love it incredibly much, and hopefully I'll get to talk about it at length in a review somewhere else.


140. Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, The House of the Four Winds. Tor, 2014. Copy courtesy of the publisher.

A competent if not particularly exciting fantasy novel set in a version of our world sometime in the 1700s - with all the names of the countries changed, but still with things called "French doors." It has pirates and the high seas, and doesn't fuck up shipboard life entirely, but you can call the plotpoints in advance pretty easily.


141. Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel. Severn House, 2014. eARC courtesy of the publisher.

The latest Benjamin January novel, and in my opinion one of the best. (Mind you, my two favourites are Graveyard Dust and Sold Down The River.) Here, death and threats and an old family secret lead Ben and Rose - accompanied by Hannibal Sefton - to Cuba, and thence to Haiti. A fantastic, powerful, atmospheric novel.


142-143. Sharon Kay Penman, The Queen's Man and Cruel As The Grave. Ebooks.

Two mysteries set in 12th-century England from an acclaimed historical novelist. Fun mysteries, diverting but not particularly stunning.


144-147. Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, Legacies, Conspiracies, Sacrifices, and Victories. Ebooks.

Four novels in a Young Adult series called "The Shadow Grail." Which was fun, until it became reincarnated Arthurian mythos nonsense.


148. Shea Godfrey, Blackstone. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Lesbian fantasy romance. The prose is competent enough, but there's not a lot of plot to hold the attention in between fairly unimaginative sex scenes. It is probably fairer to describe this as "romance, subtype erotic" than anything else, and that's not exactly my style.


149. Kim Baldwin, Taken By Storm. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Lesbian romance. Bunch of Americans and a handful of other nationalities (who don't have characterisation) get trapped in a train carriage during serious avalanches in the Swiss Alps. There is some interesting ice climbing stuff. Mostly it is more competent than not, although the lack of attention paid to non-USian characters is deeply annoying. Not particularly special, but good enough if you're looking for more women having relationships with women while adventures happen.


150. Jaime Maddox, The Common Thread. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Novel in which the lives of twins separated at birth come to intersect after a murder. The idea for the narrative is ambitious, but the execution is lacking. For all that, it is a perfectly readable book, if ultimately a little too... well, trite.

Only three this time.

Books 2014: 133-135


133. Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal. 2014. Kobo ebook.

Another excellent historical romance, this time set in the 1870s, from Courtney Milan. One of her best to date, I suspect.


134. Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs. St. Martin's Griffin, 2013.

Read for inclusion in the column. Debut, lyrically written, very decent book.


135. Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling. Bantam Press, 2014.

Read for inclusion in the column. I have conflicted feelings about this novel. On the one hand, I enjoyed the story, and the characters, and on the whole it cheered me up on a day where I was feeling rather gloomy about reading anything. But once I'd finished it, I realised the story took place in a very white, straight, cisgender world - and that made me sad all over again.

Books 2014: 118-127


118-119. Richelle Mead, Gameboard of the Gods and The Immortal Crown. Penguin, 2013 and 2014.

Bah. These started out promising and rapidly descended into annoying - and in The Immortal Crown, nasty evil-religion kidnapping-and-selling-pubescent-girl-children-into-life-of-abuse because... religion? I dunno, mate, I just work here. Also Odin and Loki show up - how do you make the Norse gods boring? People seem to be managing it left and right these days - and oh, yeah, I almost forgot, there is rape by deception.


120-121. William C. Dietz, Andromeda's Fall and Andromeda's Choice. Titan, 2014. Second book: review copy via publisher.

I want to talk some more about these books - remind me to talk some more about these books - about what parts of them work really well and what parts of them don't work at all. But I largely concur with the Book Smugglers' review of Andromeda's Fall - it's not a very clever book, but it is a fun one.


122. Michelle Sagara, Cast in Flame. Mira, 2014. Review copy via author.

Read for column. Good, fun next installment in series. If you like the series, read this book! It is a return to the city of Elantra, and lots of things go boom.


123. Django Wexler, The Shadow Throne. Ace, 2014. ARC via Tor.com.

Review here at Tor.com. Very fun book!


124. Mike Shepherd, Vicky Peterwald: Target. Ace, 2014.

Awful horrible sexist problematic WTF BOOK. Read for review for Tor.com, though heaven knows if they'll publish my expletive-laden review.


125. Marianne De Pierres, Peacemaker. Angry Robot, 2014.

A fun book that mixes science fiction and the fantastic. Not entirely tightly plotted, though.


126. Ilona Andrews, Magic Breaks. Ace, 2014. ARC via Tor.com.

Latest series installment. Read for review for Tor.com. Fun.


127. Eleanor Arnason, Big Mama Stories. Aqueduct Press, 2014.

Read to talk about in a column. Interesting collection.

Books 2014:106-111


106. Patricia Briggs, Shifting Sands. Ace, 2014. ARC.

Read for review for Tor.com. A collection of short fiction set in Briggs' urban fantasy world. Entertaining, but nothing particularly special.


107. Antoine Rouaud, The Path of Anger. Gollancz, 2013. Translated from the French by Tom Clegg. Copy courtesy of the publisher.

Read for review for Ideomancer.com. Ambitious and not entirely successful epic-style fantasy novel. Lacks decent female characters. Mixed feelings overall. Jared Shurin has a good comprehensive review of it at Pornokitsch.


108. Nicola Griffith, Slow River. Gollancz, 2013 (1995).

An excellent meditative book about identity and growth and never being the same person you were before. Brilliant. Highly recommended.


109. Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Djinni. Harper, 2013.

Read for the column. A fable about immigration and loneliness. Not without its problems, but overall a gorgeous, accomplished debut. Recommended.


Non-fiction


110-111. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680, two vols. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1988-1993.

I believe I heard of these books when Kate Elliott mentioned them on Twitter: they are exactly what they say in the title, and very interesting the history of that time and place is, too. It does bring home to me how little I know about Southeast Asian history in general: I'll be skimming the bibliography for available titles to add to my store of knowledge, I think.

I'm pretty sure I can't remember everything I've read while under the influence of tooth extraction and cold meds, so let's go with the ones I do.

Books 2014:99-105


99. Tobias S. Buckell, Arctic Rising. Tor, 2012.

This is an excellently constructed near-future thriller, starring Anika Duncan, an airship pilot for the United Nations Polar Guard, who gets caught up in a tangle of conspiracies when she uncovers a nuclear weapon being smuggled into the Arctic Circle. It doesn't untangle its conclusion well enough to be entirely successful, but it is really good - and with an appropriately diverse cast.


100. Mike Shepherd, Kris Longknife: Defender. Ace, 2013.

Kris Longknife versus the giant alien fleet. Plus friendly aliens and a long-lost human colony. The unexamined neocolonial assumptions in this series annoy me more the longer it goes on, but the boom is still fun enough to make it worth ignoring - for me, at least.


101. Sandy Mitchell, Warhammer 40K: The Greater Good. The Black Library, 2013.

The latest Ciaphas Cain novel, which is the only Warhammer 40K series I actually really like, for the most part. Despite the constant war and grimness of the Warhammer 40K universe, the Cain novels are always fun romps through a combination of military, exploration, and espionage adventures. BOOM LIKE THAT. Yep. I enjoy these books - even if this one is rather lacking in the "features female characters" department.


102. Marjorie Liu with artist Daniel Acuňa, Black Widow: The Name of the Rose. Marvel, 2011.

An interesting, dark graphic novel - but one that relies on familiarity with the rest of the continuity for its impact. And I've read three other Black Widow collections and none of the rest of Marvel's superhero universe, so.

Still. Fun.


103-105. Kim Harrison, Pale Demon, A Perfect Blood, and Ever After. Orbit/Ace, 2011-2013.

I realised after reading Pale Demon that, although I enjoy the novels while I'm reading them, I won't actually reread them. And I don't feel very pushed about reading subsequent volumes. But I'd Pale Demon on my shelves for a while, and I borrowed the other two, and these installments in the Rachel Morgan series make rather fine reading for the drugged-up-on-cold-meds sort of person. Entertaining urban fantasy, even if it seems that lots of competent people like Rachel Morgan and keep bailing her out for very little reason that I can discern.

So I took four days off in a row, and it looks like today might be number five. I haven't done anything useful, not even housework, and there are important library books waiting for me in the library - including an ILL request that I have to get to and read by the 25th and an early printed book whose handlers will be annoyed at me if I don't come and see it by the beginning of next week - and somehow, I just can't make myself care.

I've been hiding from all human contact.

It probably doesn't help that today is the second day of the menstrual period and all I want to do is sleep and consume fluids. But I'm starting to be a little worried about how little I care about doing work right now.

---

Books 2014: 72-80


72-74. Zoë Ferraris, Night of the Mi'raj, City of Veils, and Kingdom of Strangers. Little, Brown & Co. 2008, 2010, 2012. Library books.

A series of mysteries set in Saudi Arabia. The protagonist of the first novel is a young devout Palestinian called Nayir; in the following two, more of the protagonist duties are taken over by Katya Hijazi, one of the few female lab technicians with the Saudi police.

I heard of these via first mrissa and then swan_tower. They're really enjoyable books, although the mystery element is not always entirely well developed: the interest and the tension is in how the cultural norms and laws of the kingdom constrain the characters' behaviour. It is rather difficult to investigate a crime when women and men are not supposed to speak to each other unless they're related, and Katya could lose her job at any time for any perceived violations of the virtue policy of her employers. But the characterisation is excellent, and both Saudi Arabia and Islam are treated with a depth and a respect I haven't often seen in fiction.

Recommended.


75. Kelley Armstrong, Sea of Shadows. 2014. ARC.

Read for review for Tor.com.


76. Douglas Hulick, Sworn in Steel. Tor (UK) and Roc (US), 2014. Review copy.

Read for review for Tor.com.


77. Stephanie Saulter, Binary. JFB, 2014. Review copy.

Read for review for Strange Horizons. Interesting sequel.


Nonfiction

78. Paul Roberts, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum Oxford University Press in conjunction with The British Museum Press. 2013.

Discussed previously.


79. Sun-Tzu, The Art of War (with a selection from the Chinese commentaries. Penguin, 2009 (2002). Edited and translated by John Minford.

An interesting and very readable translation. Minford has chosen to use short lines and line breaks after phrases, giving a feeling of aphoristic poetry to Master Sun's work. I enjoyed reading it.


80. John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime. University of Chicago Press, 2006 (1976).

A brief history of torture as a legal instrument in Europe prior to the 19th century. It could have done with a little more explanation of the difference between the Roman law systems of Europe and the law system of England, but it explains very well why those two systems had different approaches to torture as a legal instrument, and how changes in the standard of proof required for punishment led to a reduction in the use of torture to coerce confessions.