Jesus Christ. Anyway: abortion funds and trans orgs could use some help right now. I could also use some help right now, but that’s just because we are once again setting heat records, so let’s talk about books instead. Title links go to our Bookshop, as per.

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First up this month is Sundial by Catriona Ward. I had somewhat mixed feelings about her debut novel, and I cannot say that Sundial clarified those feelings much at all: as Rob’s marriage collapses and her husband’s abuse escalates, she flees with her oldest daughter to her own childhood home, the titular Sundial, where she and her deceased twin sister were raised amidst ethically-questionable science experiments carried out by their parents and a parade of grad students and weirdos. But Callie has her own troubles, and mother and daughter will both have to confront a past that doesn’t want to stay buried — so more or less what you’d expect. I found the sections detailing Rob’s childhood most compelling (I guess I’d loosely characterize them as Jhonen Vasquez’s Men Who Stare at Goats), but the ending dragged for me, especially because the inevitable conclusion was telegraphed from fairly early on. Ward’s style is, again, the saving grace of the novel: I’ve described it as psychedelic realism, and Sundial leans into that style even more than Last House on Needless Street did. I would stop short of saying I liked the novel, but I could see why others might.

Although I’ve already mentioned it elsewhere, this is when I finished Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness. Combining memoir and popular science writing, O’Rourke details her own experience of chronic illness, a ten-plus-year journey to some kind of relief, but also looks at the treatment and diagnosis of chronic illness and, more specifically, autoimmune disorders. O’Rourke discusses recent advances in managing chronic illness, and elegantly brings in the developments since COVID-19 appeared and rapidly turned out to also be a source of long-term systemic illness for many. But throughout, her style and self-awareness — I appreciated her intermittent reminders that, as a white cisgender woman from the upper-middle class, she has access to some of the best (and, occasionally, the fringiest) treatments available — carried the book, bringing energy, empathy and even humor to what might otherwise have been a proceeding as dreary as chronic illness itself.

I next finished, in print, Dwight Farrow’s Ethics, an entry in Continuum’s well-written but poorly-edited Key Concepts in Philosophy series (I discussed the entry on aesthetics here). Honestly, it’s kind of right there on the tin, what this one’s about, but Farrow does an excellent job of exploring various aspects of ethics as a philosophical discipline, incorporating thinkers from the ancient Greeks up through the late 20th century Anglosphere. He notes at the beginning of the text that his own proclivities fall under the general heading of “ethics of care,” a term I had encountered passingly but hadn’t explored before now; I’m certainly excited to read more about it. And unusually, for something like this, Farrow’s style really lends itself to popular reading: approachable, passionate, and often, dryly humorous (“… but you have a philosophy test you haven’t studied for,” is a common element in his thought experiments). If you, like me, enjoyed The Good Place but felt that the show should have included more of Chidi’s lectures, this is a good place to start.

The cover of the first edition, via Wikipedia.

In my continuing quest to be fucking insufferable at all possible moments, I next wrapped up rereading William Faulkner’s classic novel, As I Lay Dying, which I read initially in my teens, and loved enough that my avatar on Gaia Online was named Vardaman. (I said I loved it; I didn’t say I got it or was in any way self-aware.) In light of that fact, it was definitely time to revisit the novel, and I’m glad I did: Faulkner’s language is ecstatic; his characters are both horrible and deeply compelling; his gothicism is simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and bruising, and couples with his keen eye for the racism and poverty of the American South in the early twentieth century to earn and outclass its reputation. There’s not a lot I can say about it that other people haven’t said better, so I’ll leave it at that, but goddamn.

At this point, I finished rereading the first two books in Mackenzi Lee’s delightful Montague Siblings trilogy, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue and The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy. I’ll discuss them further when I come to the third one (I wrote them up here previously), but they were a delight to revisit.

I next finished, in ebook form, Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath. I’d heard only excellent things about Onyebuchi’s work previously, so I was excited to dig into this one. And “dig in” is very much the appropriate word here: told from a variety of viewpoints and in a stunning array of styles, the novel explores gentrification in a nearish future, in which Earth is ravaged by climate change, but the satellites to which the white wealthy fled are scarcely more tenable — so they’ve begun to return, buying houses in communities to which they do not belong, and bringing with them, ultimately, tragedy for the largely Black and brown people who had to choice but to remain there, while also turning an eye to the future of white-supremacist, Christian-dominionist fascism, which has led to a renewal of slavery, with a detour through a prison uprising prior to the central events of the novel. It’s heavy reading, not only for its subject matter but also its style. Onyebuchi blends near-third and first-person passages with longread-style journalism and oral history, moving through many different characters, all of whom are in some way linked to Bishop, a community leader and brickstacker in New Haven, Connecticut. In a round-up already heavy with rereads, Goliath emerged as one I will definitely need to revisit (I don’t think the ebook form served it well), but I can say with certainty that it needs to be read.

Another reread: The Magicians by Lev Grossman, discussed initially here. More next time, probably, but still good.

All three books, photo by me, because I didn’t feel like trying to find one.

And here we have The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, the third Montague Siblings book mentioned above. This third installment, released two years (I think) after the second follows the third and youngest sibling, who was a infant or toddler (it’s unclear in the text, and he’s not even mentioned in the second book) and was raised without knowledge of his older siblings. But when young Adrian’s mother dies, leaving behind a cryptic note and a shattered spyglass with a mysterious inscription, Adrian shakes off the comforts of his life (already a double one — he’s been writing pamphlets that run counter to his father’s financial interests) to find answers and, eventually, build connections with the siblings he never knew he had. Like its predecessors, The Nobleman’s Guide is best characterized as a fun romp, in the most compelling way possible: while Adrian, at 18 or 19, is an anxious wreck, utterly lacking in self-confidence and worldly wisdom, his siblings have led lives of relative adventure, but also self-fulfillment, and Lee depicts the three siblings’ relationships with real care and tenderness. And again, it’s just really nice to have central characters who are full-grown adults with lives and loves and — in the case of Monty, the oldest, especially — literal wounds they have learned to live with. While scarcely a challenging read, the Montague Siblings novels are a lot of fun.

I close this round-up with a disappointment: A Conjuring of Light by V. E. Schwab. Long-time readers may recall my similar dismay at the two books preceding this one in Schwab’s Shades of Magic Universe series, and so may question my decision to bother finishing it at all, but I’m nothing if not a completionist, so when the audiobook became available during a gap between anything I had planned, I picked it up. And man, A Conjuring of Light has the exact same problem as its forebears: every now and then, there are glimmers of a much better, more interesting story, fully-realized world or worlds, and characters who don’t feel like they have only slapdash backstories better suited to a one-shot TTRPG than a moderately lengthy trilogy. But that’s not what Schwab wrote; what she wrote was the wrangling of those characters against the contrivances of a plot about which I struggled to care, with a lot of rule-of-cool where I wanted deeper exploration. If those fleeting glimpses of something much more interesting hadn’t been there, paradoxically, I might have liked it more; as it was, I was left endlessly frustrated. I have heard that Schwab’s subsequent work is quite good, and compared favorably to some other novels I really liked, but we’ll see if I follow up on that.

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That’s all for now. You can follow me and Cameron on Twitter, if you want.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, April 2022