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dolorosa_12) wrote2020-07-30 08:27 am
dolorosa_12) wrote2020-07-30 08:27 am
The books of July
This month was a bit of a slow one for me in terms of reading, but it started off well. My problem now is that I'm in a bit of a reading slump, don't want to just indiscriminately spend money on new books, but can't borrow anything from the public library (they're doing click and collect, but you can't choose the books — instead you have to tell the library the genres you like to read and they'll make a selection for you). In any case, this is what I've read in July.
The Mimosa Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu: the fourth in a series of mystery novels set in 1930s-40s Singapore. I hesitate to call these books cosy mysteries, as they're set against the backdrop of British colonialism, and, in this book, the Japanese occupation of Singapore, but they have a focus on the domestic, and an unflappable, practical narrator who views the larger scale political things going on around her as a bit ridiculous. (By which I don't mean that she is unafraid for her safety or that of her family — indeed, her choice to solve the mystery in this book is driven solely by her concern for her family's safety — simply that she has a talent for puncturing the pretensions and delusions of the petty political authorities, both British and Japanese.)
Ireland's Immortals by Mark Williams. This is an academic book written for a non-specialist audience. The author also happens to be the internal examiner of my PhD (and indeed I can see expansions of some of the things we discussed during my viva in the book), and it is about literary representations of supernatural beings in Irish literature. The book is in two parts: the first is about medieval literature, and the second is about the Irish literary revival in modern times (essentially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), and how beings and tropes from the medieval period were reinterpreted (and in some cases completely invented from scratch) by the literary establishment in Ireland and Britain. The book was a great way to ease myself back into academic writing on Celtic Studies subjects, without the pressure of being an academic myself! It helps that I wholeheartedly agree with the broad point it was making, which is that Irish supernatural beings — whether they are represented as pagan gods, demons, fairies, or something else — are not the residual remnant of pre-Christian beliefs. They are the product of the learned, medieval Christian literary elite in Ireland, found in literary works that were produced in ecclesiastical establishments, and they were used in those literary works for a variety of religious, political, philosophical, and cultural reasons. Just as contemporary literature has its own range of tropes, motifs, or mythological figures that appear repeatedly, utilised in different ways by different authors, so too did medieval literature, and this book makes a persuasive case as to why. It's always infuriated me that in popular culture, there is this perception that 'Celtic' mythology represents some ancient, unchanged, unbroken line going back to the pre-Christian past — and that the manuscripts in which this mythology can be found were the work of uncritical monastic scribes who passively copied the content without understanding what it was about. It's insulting to medieval literary figures to assume they lacked the sophistication of modern authors to adapt, and create.
Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma. This is a collection of uplifting short fiction, written to raise money for one of the London NHS Trusts. As with all anthologies, the quality is variable, but the standouts for me were Aliette de Bodard's (another story in her Xuya universe with sentient mindships and Vietnamese people in space), and Stephanie Burgis's (an epistolary f/f love story about a human and a fairy flatmate, and their various cultural misunderstandings).
I then embarked on a reread of all of Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series, and all of Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. As I have read those books before, I will not recap them again, but simply link to my reviews of Aliette's and Samantha's series.
I also read Kate Elliott's genderswapped Alexander the Great IN SPACE!!!! novel, Unconquerable Sun, but I want to talk about it at length in its own post because I have thoughts.
The final thing I read this month was one of the short stories on Tor.com, 'The Ones Who Wait', by Katherine Duckett. This is a science fiction story set in an ostensible utopia in which people are able to upload their consciousness into a paradisacal afterlife and therefore live forever, but whose narrator uncovers the horrific reality of things. It's the story of 'the women who can't help seeking, and bring destruction when they do,' with conscious evocation of mythological figures such as Pandora, Lot's wife, and Eve. I really loved this.
What have you all been reading?
The Mimosa Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu: the fourth in a series of mystery novels set in 1930s-40s Singapore. I hesitate to call these books cosy mysteries, as they're set against the backdrop of British colonialism, and, in this book, the Japanese occupation of Singapore, but they have a focus on the domestic, and an unflappable, practical narrator who views the larger scale political things going on around her as a bit ridiculous. (By which I don't mean that she is unafraid for her safety or that of her family — indeed, her choice to solve the mystery in this book is driven solely by her concern for her family's safety — simply that she has a talent for puncturing the pretensions and delusions of the petty political authorities, both British and Japanese.)
Ireland's Immortals by Mark Williams. This is an academic book written for a non-specialist audience. The author also happens to be the internal examiner of my PhD (and indeed I can see expansions of some of the things we discussed during my viva in the book), and it is about literary representations of supernatural beings in Irish literature. The book is in two parts: the first is about medieval literature, and the second is about the Irish literary revival in modern times (essentially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), and how beings and tropes from the medieval period were reinterpreted (and in some cases completely invented from scratch) by the literary establishment in Ireland and Britain. The book was a great way to ease myself back into academic writing on Celtic Studies subjects, without the pressure of being an academic myself! It helps that I wholeheartedly agree with the broad point it was making, which is that Irish supernatural beings — whether they are represented as pagan gods, demons, fairies, or something else — are not the residual remnant of pre-Christian beliefs. They are the product of the learned, medieval Christian literary elite in Ireland, found in literary works that were produced in ecclesiastical establishments, and they were used in those literary works for a variety of religious, political, philosophical, and cultural reasons. Just as contemporary literature has its own range of tropes, motifs, or mythological figures that appear repeatedly, utilised in different ways by different authors, so too did medieval literature, and this book makes a persuasive case as to why. It's always infuriated me that in popular culture, there is this perception that 'Celtic' mythology represents some ancient, unchanged, unbroken line going back to the pre-Christian past — and that the manuscripts in which this mythology can be found were the work of uncritical monastic scribes who passively copied the content without understanding what it was about. It's insulting to medieval literary figures to assume they lacked the sophistication of modern authors to adapt, and create.
Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma. This is a collection of uplifting short fiction, written to raise money for one of the London NHS Trusts. As with all anthologies, the quality is variable, but the standouts for me were Aliette de Bodard's (another story in her Xuya universe with sentient mindships and Vietnamese people in space), and Stephanie Burgis's (an epistolary f/f love story about a human and a fairy flatmate, and their various cultural misunderstandings).
I then embarked on a reread of all of Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series, and all of Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. As I have read those books before, I will not recap them again, but simply link to my reviews of Aliette's and Samantha's series.
I also read Kate Elliott's genderswapped Alexander the Great IN SPACE!!!! novel, Unconquerable Sun, but I want to talk about it at length in its own post because I have thoughts.
The final thing I read this month was one of the short stories on Tor.com, 'The Ones Who Wait', by Katherine Duckett. This is a science fiction story set in an ostensible utopia in which people are able to upload their consciousness into a paradisacal afterlife and therefore live forever, but whose narrator uncovers the horrific reality of things. It's the story of 'the women who can't help seeking, and bring destruction when they do,' with conscious evocation of mythological figures such as Pandora, Lot's wife, and Eve. I really loved this.
What have you all been reading?