Holiday reading roundup

Other than Yuletide fic, I've had time to read my way through a good number of books during this winter holiday. I've mentioned some of them — Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen, These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, and my annual The Dark is Rising reread — in previous posts. The remaining books are as follows:

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson. This is a claustrophobic, pre-industrial dystopia in which conformity and control is enforced by a patriarchal religious cult. The cult itself resembles a pop-cultural blend of fundamentalist Mormonism and witch-hunting American Puritanism. The book itself is very readable, with page-turning prose and a creepy, atmospheric setting, but I feel it suffered from a problem I've noticed in a lot of genre fiction recently: although all the characters are adults and it deals with serious themes (forced marriage, religious extremism, violent patriarchy), it seems to be aiming for YA crossover appeal, and therefore a lot of things which have become fixtures of YA genre fiction (a heroine leading the revolution that overthrows oppressors, a 'forbidden' love interest) are shoehorned in, and the book doesn't go as dark as it needs to. I don't know if it's due to risk-averse publishers, but I've noticed this a lot, particularly in books by Americans — a kind of cautious pulling of punches, and a refusal to allow any shades of grey (even characters who appear complicit in oppression have immediate changes of heart if they're people the protagonists view as 'good').

Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. This novel is the first in a series of epic fantasy in a secondary world setting inspired by the mythology and pre-colonial/pre-Atlantic slave trade history of West Africa. Okungbowa draws on the histories of numerous African empires — Benin, Mali, and Ghana, among others — and the result is a sprawling, plotty doorstopper, filled with political intrigue, shifting alliances, and a fascinating array of supernatural powers. The worldbuilding is excellent, and I'm eagerly anticipating the forthcoming sequels.

The Burning God by R.F. Kuang. I have to admit that this — the third book in Kuang's fantasy trilogy inspired by 19th- and 20th-century Chinese history — was a massive slog. The series took 'grimdark' to new levels, and while the real-world history that inspired it was certainly grim, I felt it wallowed in its bleak outlook partly for shock value. I don't mind bleak settings — in fact, I tend to be drawn to them, particularly stories which do not end in the successful revolutionary overthrow of oppression and injustice — but I need to see characters find moments of joy and kindness in the margins. And while I don't mind stories with female villains, I tend to dislike stories which revel voyeuristically in women inflicting violence and cruelty on others. (Kameron Hurley is another grimdark fantasy author whose authorship is basically an anti-rec for me for this very reason.) I don't deny that this series is extremely good at what it's trying to do, but a series whose central premise is 'what if Mao was a woman, and had massive supernatural power?' was never going to work for me.

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes. This is a reworking of Sophocles's three plays about Oedipus and his children, told through the dual perspectives of Jocasta (the doomed wife/mother) and Ismene (one of the daughters). Haynes is a popular/public classicist — she's done radio programmes and written journalistic articles about Greek and Roman literature, and written several novels drawing on Greek myth and literature. This is the second book of hers I've read so far, and as with her Iliad retelling A Thousand Ships, I'm a bit underwhelmed. Her approach in The Children of Jocasta is to strip all elements of the supernatural from the story and bring it back to Earth, reducing the tragic horror of a cursed, doomed, incestuous family to something more prosaic: a multigenerational struggle for political power in Thebes. I'm sure Haynes feels that in doing so she has breathed new life into these old stories, but I'm generally unimpressed when authors make this choice. It feels to me like they want to be applauded for the cleverness of coming up with a simple explanation (the Sphinx menacing the road into Thebes wasn't a riddling supernatural being, just a gang of mountain bandits robbing travellers; etc) and imply the stupidity of previous versions of the story, and those who wrote them.

I suppose from the above it appears that my holiday reading has been something of a let-down, but that's definitely not true — it's just that I've been getting more enjoyment from the Yuletide and Madness collections, and from the short fiction I've read (on which note, if you have not yet read Rebecca Fraimow's Yudah Cohen series, all available for free online, remedy that situation immediately!). I was deliberately trying to clear my ereader of books I felt I wouldn't fall in love with, so that I could start the new year with things I'm sure to adore: the final book in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, and the final (so far) of Barbara Hambly' Benjamin January mysteries.

What has everyone been reading this past week or so? Any particular standouts?

Quaran-TV, part 15

I think I'll change the name of these TV roundups next year, unless the UK goes back into anything resembling a genuine lockdown, since although my social life is very circumscribed, I can hardly view myself as living in anything close to quarantine. In any case, this month has been a bumper TV-watching time, with shows ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

The sublime

What We Do in the Shadows. The third season of this absurd, slice-of-unlife comedy following a quartet of vampires (and their human familiar-turned-bodyguard) day-to-day in their Staten Island sharehouse remained as hilarious as ever. As always, the combination of sharp writing, brilliant comic timing, and ridiculous, self-referential scenarios was an utter winner, and the final episode pointed towards a fourth season filled with fresh ideas.

It's A Sin. This miniseries follows four gay men (and their straight female friend) over the decade stretching from 1981-1991. It covers both the joy and beauty and sense of community that was queer life in London during this period, and also the misery and cruelty of the AIDS epidemic. It's told with a deep sense of compassion and — because it's a Russell T. Davies show — sentimentality, and does a great job of conveying the sense of solidarity and found family within the LGBT community at a time when the world was telling them they deserved everything they got, and their own families-by-blood were rejecting them or forcing them to live compartmentalised lives, hiding huge segments of their selves from their families of origin. For obvious reasons it reminded me very much of the movie Pride, and it's definitely one of my contenders for TV show of the year.

The Girl Before. This BBC miniseries is a modern reimagining of both Rebecca and Jane Eyre (the former, of course, itself being a reimagining of the latter), with a stellar cast and some inspired twists on the original (for example, Mrs Danvers the housekeeper is now a 'smart' virtual housekeeping system). The show has a great sense of suspense and atmosphere, and does a wonderful job of translating the gothic horror of its source material into a minimalist London flat.

Succession. The third series of this blackly tragicomic story of four mega-rich and entitled adult siblings jockeying for control of their father's media empire lives up to the sense of expectation and anticipation promised in previous series. The writing is sharp and brutal, the sense of secondhand embarrassment is strong, and everyone is awful in a way that remains compelling to watch.

A Very British Scandal. While this miniseries — based on the sordid 1960s divorce case of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll — is pretty conventional in terms of its storytelling and the conclusions it draws, it's elevated by a good cast (led by Claire Foy and Paul Bettany) and a great sense of the atmosphere and mood of the period in which it's set.

The servicable

Impeachment. This is the latest in the series of 'American Crime Story' shows, and, as the title suggests, it takes as its subject matter the Monica Lewinsky affair and the drawn out attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. The series doesn't break any new ground, but it does a good job of showing the monstrous injustice done to basically every woman involved in the impeachment circus (and indeed almost every woman tangentially involved with Clinton himself), and the specific cruelty done to Lewinsky herself by both the media, the political establishment, and the various right-wing activists and opportunistic fellow travellers who attached themselves like vultures to the case. There are a lot of sly little asides foreshadowing the current right-wing trashing of American democracy, and highlighting the hypocrisy of virtually everyone involved in this particular moment in American political history.

Hawkeye. I've always found Clint Barton to be the most uninteresting MCU Avenger, and I actively dislike Jeremy Renner, so I was primed to dislike this Disney+ series. Imagine my surprise when I found it to be enjoyable cheesy fun! I'm sure my enjoyment hinges a lot on the fact that the show wisely decides to focus on Kate Bishop rather than Barton himself, and because it doesn't try to make the series anything deeper than an action-packed superhero origin story set in a chocolate boxy New York at Christmas time. I'm shocked to say that this is my favourite so far of the Disney+ Marvel shows.

Paris Police 1900. Part mystery, part political thriller, this French show follows the titular Paris police as they try to solve a gruesome crime and deal with the fallout of the Dreyfus affair. It had rather too many gratuitously naked female corpses for my liking, but I loved the characters and hope the show returns for a couple more seasons. Due to the subject matter, antisemitism obviously features heavily, so do take note if that's something you'd rather avoid.

Vienna Blood. One of three shows I've encountered in the past few years in which an odd couple featuring a Freudian psychotherapist team up to solve mysteries. Vienna Blood has always been the weakest of the three, although it's a perfectly serviceable buddy cop crime series with a fun cast of secondary characters, and I'll no doubt continue to watch any subsequent seasons.

The ridiculous

The 100. Oh God, why? I don't think any fan of this postapocalyptic YA show liked this final season, and I'm no different. The fact that the show aired early last year in the US but took until November this year to make it to the UK (with at least one switch in channel happening after a release date had been finalised) suggests that the network airing it was less than confident it would find much of an audience, and I suspect they were proved right. Matthias and I watched out of a grim sense of completionism. The show had always been very silly — a ludicrous premise, and what I call a 'CW hot' cast of blandly pretty people in their 20s playing teenagers — but it had a kind of core idea which resonated in interesting ways: on a postapocalyptic Earth, with scarce resources and various communities of traumatised people, the only way to ensure survival is to put aside all differences, no matter how immense, and make common cause. Every season, new communities of survivors were discovered, and the characters had to learn all over again that their survival depended on recognising everyone as human, and working together. The show worked well when it was firmly grounded in this idea — essentially when it found new ways to ask the question, who gets to be human? and answered, we ALL must be human, or else we perish. As soon as it got more supernatural and mystical than that, with tech that basically became magic (cryogenics, generation ships, travel through wormholes, uploading one's consciousness into some sort of transcendental void), I was out of there. This season was particularly stupid, but I felt it jumped the wormhole, so to speak, the instant the characters left Earth for good. Any story that imagines an apocalypse, in my opinion, takes a cowardly way out if it implies any solution — distant terraformed planets, transcendance, Elon Musk's colony on Mars, whatever — that does not keep our feet firmly planted on Earth. For us there is no elsewhere, I believe in the same way that I believe I need air to breathe and potable water to drink, and we must always, always build the Republic of Heaven where we are. Anything else feels like giving up.