Holiday reading roundup

[dolorosa_12]

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?

Comments

[luzula]

I haven't been reading any books the past week, I think! Only Yuletide stories. : )

[dolorosa_12]

That's a perfectly valid way to spend your reading time this week!