Summer reading, you say? More like, “The second hellish summer we have endured while in an active pandemic, under an ineffectual national government and a malignantly stupid state government, now with an even greater likelihood of heat stroke due to accelerating climate change,” am I right?

I am, unfortunately, right. Here’s what I’ve been reading. Book-title links go to our Bookshop.

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The cover, which is one of the better things about The Maidens. — The cover, which is one of the better things about *The Maidens*.

We lead off this book round-up with one of the worst books on it, The Maidens by Alex Michaelides, which I consumed in audiobook form. To be very clear, I say that I “consumed” rather than “read” it as a sign of disrespect. Readers may recall that I recently read and disliked Michaelides’ debut, The Silent Patient; I’ll admit, I allowed myself slightly higher hopes for The Maidens, given a general propensity towards dark academia. Which is, essentially, what The Maidens aspires to: Mariana, a group therapist, Cambridge graduate and recent widow, is drawn back into the ivory tower by the murder of her beloved niece’s close friend. She learns that the friend was part of an elite study group, which gives the novel its title, who coalesce around Edward Fosca, a charismatic American classicist and, Mariana rapidly feels sure, the friend’s murderer. And as more girls are murdered, so Mariana’s certainty grows.

Which sounds fine, I guess. Promising, at least, and apparently not related to The Silent Patient — so much the better, given that book’s overwhelmingly, pointlessly dislikeable protagonist — so I figured I’d give it a go. And very rapidly, my thoughts on the novel went from, “This is very stupid and I hate it” (derogatory) to “This is very stupid and I hate it” (gleeful). The novel reads like someone read The Secret History and thought it would be cool to rewrite it as a psychological thriller, but with only a cursory knowledge of classics as a discipline, and little awareness of its level of cultural penetration. I laughed out loud when Mariana’s mentor — a long-tenured professor of English literature, with no apparent interest in ancient Greek drama — is able to immediately identify quotations in ancient Greek from Euripides. My amusement only grew when we finally experience one of Fosca’s lectures, which are apparently so compelling that students from many disciplines will attend them, even if it means waiting in line or sitting on the floor to do so: after a bizarre memorial note, commemorating the dead friend, Fosca launches into a lecture on “The Liminal in Greek Tragedy,” in which he passingly mentions two plays and also talks about the Eleusinian mysteries for reasons that are present but not explored.

Are there English professors who can recognize Euripides quotations in Greek with no context? Probably. Are there things to say about “the liminal in Greek tragedy”? Sure. But in order to suspend disbelief (or whatever I do instead), I need some justification in the text for the former, which is never given, and some, you know, baseline coherence in the latter, which also fails to appear. I know that the world of Cambridge is a different one from, for example, the state university where I did my classics degree, but I also read plenty of fantasy novels, and I know them when I see them. This one didn’t even have the decency to include anything stranger than lots of people giving a shit about classics, and the eventual twist —there’s apparently always a fucking twist with this guy — felt pointless. I enjoyed The Maidens less for its merits (it’s constructed well enough for my tastes, at least, and I did genuinely like the English professor) than for the amount of gleeful bitching it enabled me to do.

After that, I finished Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber, the praises of which Cameron has sung elsewhere. It’s a hefty book, offering exactly what it says on the tin, but it took me only two weeks to finish and it would have been faster, except for the whole having-a-day-job angle. Beginning from some of the earliest records we have of humanity — accounts from Babylonian temple complexes figure heavily — Graeber puts forward a history of human interactions that does nothing less than realign human history. As Graeber notes, the concept of a pure barter society is simply that: a concept, an idea, an imagined past that never existed, anywhere, ever. What did exist, and has existed for a long time, is debt. And while to us, at the burning end of experienced time, the very word strikes fear into our hearts (let’s see if the Biden administration does something about that student loan situation, eh?), that wasn’t always the case.

Because as Graeber demonstrates, debt — between craftspeople and farmers, between friends and family members, between subjects and governments — has held a variety of conceptual and practical roles in human life, acting as everything from social glue to a tally of violence (calculating the worth of things in slave girls, for example). Graeber also does not shy from the violence of many of these interactions, either: if anything, his discussion of European colonization only deepens the horror of what was done and why. But one of his many gifts as a writer is keeping his story straight, so that even in the depths of discussions of medieval banking practices, for example, I never felt adrift. Another gift, of course, is his real sense for human kindness. I loved, especially, his appreciation of the “non-industrious poor” at the end of the 2011 version of the text (my copy includes a 2014 afterword), and his pervasive, passionate sense that when we quantify and monetize every interaction, we lose untold measures of our humanity. It was a genuinely earthshaking read for me, and one to which I will, I suspect, return often.

This cover illustration is just lovely, and really serves well to capture the tone of the novel.

The Library of the Dead by T.L Huchu was my next audiobook, and no points for guessing that I fucking loved it. As if the title weren’t right up my alley already, the novel follows 13-year-old Ropa, who earns rent for the trailer she shares with her grandmother and younger sister as a ghostalker, mediating for the (paying) dead in a shattered, post-collapse Edinburgh. Accosted by the ghost of a mother seeking her missing son, Ropa sets out to investigate and is soon initiated into the titular library, which promises to help her deepen her magical skills — but at what cost? And can she find the missing boy, make rent, and avoid capture by the dark forces that seem to mass around her?

This one landed for me in a major way: redolent of the Borrible trilogy and other British classics of children living gloriously (when read by other children), terrifyingly (when read by adults) on the margins, Ropa is a ferociously charming heroine, continuing her education through podcasts and audiobooks as she makes her nightly rounds through a city rife with dangers and delights (but mostly dangers). Huchu’s future history, seen from the prospective of someone just barely old enough to remember a Before, feels very believable, and his approach to how magic works and what it does in society is thoughtful and, often, hilariously realistic. I found the story completely gripping; the fact that it has at least one projected sequel thrills me. I really can’t praise this one highly enough, and I’m excited to share it with the children of my acquaintance.

The cover, which, while good, doesn’t quite do the novel justice.

Finally, my local library’s app got The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk, and finally, my hold came through. And Polk, whose Kingston Cycle I loved very deeply, delivers another novel of social scheming, circumscribed magic use, and romance. The novel follows Beatrice Clayborn, a would-be sorceress pressed into her first Bargaining Season, when the most powerful families — temporally and magically — come together to marry off their daughters to their sons. The sons will become Magi, powerful magic users; the daughters will be locked into a warded collar, preventing them from accessing magic to ensure that their children are not born with rampaging spirits in them. Beatrice, needless to say, is having none of that, and is determined to become a Magus in her own right — at least until she meets a beautiful, wealthy young man from a more progressive land, and his sister, who shares Beatrice’s own ambitions.

Polk’s setting here is, of course, fabulous: costume descriptions suggest eighteenth-century splendor. Said costume descriptions are also fucking delightful to a fashion history nerd like me, and certainly helped to make the obligate-childbearing angle easier to stomach. The magic, too, is fun as hell: while many people (except, of course, women of childbearing age) can do small magics, larger workings are handled by making deals with spirits of varying size and importance. It’s a dangerous business, since spirits that are too powerful can overwhelm the Magus. The Midnight Bargain was part of the list for Canada Reads 2021, and it richly deserves its position. I highly recommend it to American readers, as well.

I followed it with two print books in quick succession, the first of which was John Berger’s About Looking. The essay collection, which spans several years, covers precisely what it says it will cover: the act of looking at stuff. But of course, it’s not just looking — it’s seeing, perceiving, beholding, experiencing, and being changed by the act. Beginning with a (rather too long, for my taste) piece about looking at animals, the collection then shifts to discuss the works of several individual artists, with the bulk of its focus on European classics, and concludes with a lovely meditation on the act of being in a field.

The first view of the Isenheim Altarpiece, which is much more interesting than the cover of the book, via Wikipedia.

Niche? Kind of, I guess, arguably. It’s less all-encompassing than Ways of Seeing (discussed here), less sustained in its focus, unsurprisingly, than The Success and Failure of Picasso, which are the only other Berger books I’ve read. While I intend to remedy that shortfall as swiftly as possible, it’s not exactly a surprise that a collection of disparate essays should be a little uneven. But honestly, it was worth the price of admission for the essay, “Between Two Colmars.” In it, Berger reflects on the act of visiting Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, the visits distanced by ten year on either side of 1968. The piece is not long, but its reflections on pain and history and situating the self between these things, and catching the light just the right way, is more moving than I can fully express. I did almost cry reading it, and I have come close to tears all the subsequent times I’ve read it (which is like at least two or three). If nothing else, that essay makes the rest of the book worth reading, and reading again.

The other print book in this slot was Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Auge. Like any denizen of the internet, I love a liminal space, and Auge discusses them (eventually) with care and concern. What do these spaces — airport terminals, big-box stores, gas stations — do in our society? What do they do to us?

Auge, unfortunately, takes his goddamn time getting to any of these questions — let alone answering them — preferring instead to clarify the vagaries of ethnography, and how it works with respect to contemporary western culture, as well as anthropology in general, like as an entire field. It’s oddly long and dense for a book that isn’t even 100 pages. While in the last 10ish pages Auge does, eventually get to the point, the whole undertaking is badly addled by French academic style. Ultimately, this is its downfall: while it does contain some useful ideas, they never progress past the realm of ideas, mere passing fancies, that are not especially useful to people wishing to define the feelings of being in a liminal space. Nonetheless, it constitutes a useful jumping-off point.

My next read was an ebook from the library: A Psalm For the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, whose works have been highly recommended. Also, as a huge nerd, the series title, “Monk and Robot,” speaks to an itch I haven’t had scratched since Ken Scholes’ Lamentation. The story follows Dex, a young monk in the cult of Allalae, the god of small comforts, who embarks on a journey to become a tea monk — basically a public therapist-cum-confessor — but eventually grows weary of that task. They leave the area set aside for human inhabitants in the long-post-collapse world they live in to journey into the wild, where they meet Mosscap, one of the robots known to roam the land but intentionally severed from humanity after they became sentient. Mosscap is on a mission to check in with humanity, and asks that Dex help with that goal. But Dex is on a quest, of sorts, and before they return to the human world, they will need Mosscap’s help to complete it.

I mentioned that I read this in ebook form because I suspect that informed my feelings towards the book: for a story concerned with comfort, care, and the wonders of the observable world, reading it with my hands cramping around my phone felt inappropriate. Probably better read with the tactile joys of the page, reading it as I did only underscored the book’s place as the first in a projected series. I liked it enough that I will probably seek to read it again — wanted to like it enough that I will probably, in fact, purchase it and its sequel, when that releases — but as it stands, it got close to cloying in places. Also the fact that I could not drink it with a nice cup of tea to hand, preferably in bed, settling instead for coffee at work in a break-room chair, made it much more difficult to enjoy the depictions of creature comforts in the novella. I could only imagine them with envy. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, and it offers a truly compelling look at a generally-actually-utopian world, which I always appreciate. I think I might have just read it wrong.

The cover, which sums it up pretty well.

In any case, I next completed The Witch King by H. E. Edgmon in audiobook form. The novel presents us with Wyatt, a runaway from the land of the Fae, where, prior to beginning his transition, was betrothed to the future king of the fae, the beautiful Emyr North, but also a hated witch. Needless to say, he is scarcely thrilled when Emyr appears in the back yard of the household that has taken him in, telling him that he needs to return to Asalin, the fae kingdom, at once. But go he eventually does, and rapidly learns that Emyr was not exaggerating when he said that Wyatt needed to return to save the kingdom. Does Wyatt have what it takes? And does he still have feelings for Emyr — feelings that seem to be very mutual?

All in all, it’s pretty fun. Wyatt is a compelling, if sometimes annoying, protagonist, and the setting is well-built; the relationship between fae, humans, and witches is complex and layered, Asalin growing deeper and more lived-in the longer the characters spend there. That said, some of the more YA moments (there’s a longish section where Wyatt causes problems on purpose to get people to hate Emyr, for reasons) were a little tiresome after a while, but I elected to read a YA novel, so that’s on me. And Wyatt’s annoying qualities were honestly perfect for an 18-year-old thrown back into a bad situation. I’m glad I read it, and if paranormal romance is in your wheelhouse, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The cover. I’m not saying they’re aiming for the MORK BORG market, but I’m not saying they’re not, either, nor would it be a misguided idea to do so.

My next read, also an audiobook, was The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. Buehlman, already a fairly established horror writer, here presents us with Kinch Na Shannock, a professional thief still working off the debt from his education with the Takers Guild. But highway robbery is below his skills, so when the Guild sends him to accompany the knight Galva, on a quest she won’t tell him about, it’s an excellent opportunity to work his way out of (some of) that debt. As they journey across several human kingdoms, all ravaged by years of war against the anthropophage goblins, as well as by rogue magic and general fuckery, it rapidly becomes clear that the Takers Guild is responsible for much more than people’s stuff getting stolen — it might, in fact, be at the root of many of the terrors that plague humanity.

The audiobook itself is worth remarking upon: it’s narrated by the author, who apparently also enjoyed a robust career in the Renaissance Festival circuit, which adds to the overall level of gleeful nastiness throughout the story. A robust example of what I think of as the grimsnark sub-sub-genre of fantasy, it meets its many horrors with swagger and cackle, rather than dour, stoic resignation; the picaresque structure was fun and rambling enough to allow the characters room to breathe. Kinch’s romance with Norigall, the apprentice to a witch popularly known as Deadlegs, is honestly quite sweet, and provides a breath of fresh air in the otherwise reeking and horrible crapsack world of the novel. There is, however, a big caveat: in this, a book published in two-thousand-and-twenty-one, we have a played-straight example of the evil race trope, in the form of the goblins. It’s established that they have magic, language, and long-distance sailing — a fairly well-developed culture, in other words — and they’re literally all evil. Obviously, this can be justified via Thermian logic, since the novel is narrated in the first person by someone from a world with no apparent reason to really attempt to get to know goblins, nor any incentive to offer them sympathy, but there’s also little indication, except for one throwaway line near the very end of the novel, that this will be interrogated at all. It’s the first in a trilogy, and I liked it enough that I’m willing to read at least one subsequent book to see if this idea is addressed at all, but it’s fucking weird to see, especially in a book published by Tor, whose list skews more progressive. It’s fun as hell and I really enjoyed it — but that rankled like, as Kinch would probably have it, a chicken shit in a peach pie. Or, you know, something like that.

Not sure which edition this cover comes from, but I quite like it — which is not to say I dislike the edition that I have, only that I hadn’t seen this one.

Anyway, that brings me to the last book I finished in July, which was a print copy of Severance by Ling Ma. Given to me by a dear friend, as part of a secret-santa gift exchange in a Facebook group we’re both in, I finally actually picked it up, and was, largely delighted. The novel follows Candace Chen, drifting back and forth between her life with a cult-like group of survivors after Shen Fever decimated the globe, and her life prior to the pandemic, detailing her experiences in New York, her life with her parents in Salt Lake City and with her grandmother in China.

The plot isn’t really the point; Candace’s character and narration are paramount, and they are extremely good. Her sense of alienation, from her family, the cultures she was raised between, and her day-to-day life in New York as the fever spreads, feel very true to life. Ling Ma also manages to pull off the difficult trick of having a narrator whose art work, when she does it, is in a non-literary medium, and you can tell in the narration: Candace tells the story like the photographer she is, with limpid, flat-affect style that feels like writing by a photographer. I kept trying to compare it to Station Eleven (since they’re both post-apocalyptic novels from literary, rather than genre, imprints and writers) but if anything, it’s the inverse of that novel, which I read last year — Station Eleven sprawled in space and time, across many lives, while Severance goes deep, plunging into Candace’s life and perception with abandon. It was really very beautiful, though it is worth noting that I find tales of plague and ruin strangely comforting right now, and if you, dear reader, do not, perhaps tread carefully here.

Worth noting: I read another ebook in here somewhere, but failed to note it on Goodreads, which I use to keep track of this stuff. It was It Takes Two to Tumble by Cat Sebastian, which is a terrible title for a quite tender and unexpectedly horny romance set in the Regency era, between an unconventional village vicar and an emotionally-repressed ship’s captain. This is the first real, honest-to-god romance novel I’ve read, and knowing nothing of the genre, I don’t feel qualified to comment much further. It was good, though.

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That’s enough of that; this piece is already late going up and I want to do other stuff. Enjoy, if you take any suggestions from this post, and do what you have to to keep yourself sane.

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, July 2021