dolorosa_12 | Holiday reading (Reply)

My book logging dropped off the face of the earth during the last month or so, and it's one of the things I'm particularly pleased to start up again now that things have settled down after a very busy summer.

As you can possibly tell from my last post, I've spent a lot of time this summer on trains, and that's given me a lot of time for reading. In the most recent trip to Austria and Slovenia, I read four books and three novellas, mainly while travelling.

The books were:

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty), a fantastic piece of voyage literature set in a fantasy version of medieval Yemen and the Arabian Sea more generally. Our titular heroine is a former pirate who left the seafaring life to become a mother, tempted back to the seas (and to get the old gang back together) for one last mission which swiftly becomes more complicated than expected. I liked Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy, but I felt it suffered from an either self- or publisher-imposed constraint to write to the market, meaning things like a YA love triangle and consequent angst had to be included. In this new novel, Chakraborty is given much more freedom to let her nerdy love of history, mythology, and the history and mythology of the Islamic world run wild, and the result is delightful. I cannot wait for the next book in this series.

Terciel and Elinor (Garth Nix), a prequel to his Old Kingdom series focusing on the young adult lives and first meeting of Sabriel's parents. In this period of their lives, they are in the process of becoming who they ultimately will be — Abhorsen and Clayr — and it's fun to come along with them for the ride, spending more time in Nix's world, with side characters familiar and new. It's a good addition to the series, but although it comes chronologically before the original trilogy, I probably wouldn't recommend reading it without reading the original books first.

The Chatelaine (Kate Heartfield) is a reworking of a previous short story called 'Armed In Her Fashion', in which a mysterious woman rises from Hell with an army of demons and sets about trying to conquer various parts of medieval Europe. A motley crew (impoverished mother and her adult daughter, fleeing plague-ridden and besieged Bruges, a widowed woman whom the aforementioned mother served as a wet-nurse, and a trans man who served as a mercenary across the breadth of the continent) ends up thrown into a situation in which they must confront this chatelaine of Hell — but as with many stories that involve exile, flight and travel, the journey to get to that point is almost as interesting as the destination itself.

The Gates of Europe (Serhii Plokhy), which is a history of Ukraine from prehistoric times up until the small-scale Russian invasion (i.e. the annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of the Donbas region as opposed to the full-scale war which started last year). This is one of the most well-known recent books on Ukraine in English and aimed at the general public, so when it was available cheaply on the Kindle I made a point of buying it, even though most of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century material was broadly familiar to me, and even though recent events obviously mean the book is somewhat obsolete. But it's written with both depth and accessibility, so I'd recommend it if this is a topic with which you'd like to become more familiar.

I also read the first three of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January short stories ('Libre,' 'There Shall Your Heart Be Also,' and 'A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven') to tide myself over before the next full-length novel is published. I always like short fiction that reads like professionally published fanfic by a series' own author — stuff that enables them to focus on characters, relationships, or lower-stakes events for which there isn't room in the series' main novels. These short stories certainly fit the bill — as it is a mystery series, these are all the equivalent of casefic, happening in missing moments in the main series. I particularly enjoy the third story, in which Rose has to solve a case while Benjamin is away, and works with Dominique — plus the entire network of free Black women in 1830s New Orleans — to do so. As might be expected from this cast of characters, both Rose's scientific knowledge, and Dominique and her friends' extensive knowledge of the soap operatic gossip of both the Black and white communities of New Orleans play a role in solving the mystery.

All in all, a very satisfying bunch of books.