Edgar's Book Round-Up, January 2023

My immediate superior at work remarked a while back that “twenty-twenty-three” really feels like a future date. We’re here! It’s the ‘20s and the similarities to the last go-round continue to be striking and troubling. To that end, please keep an eye on what your state might be trying to do to trans and queer people, support the defense of the Weelaunee Forest, and, I guess, read some stuff? Links, as usual, go to Bookshop.

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This collage of older paperback covers comes from this insightful review by Ryan Yarber.

I led off the month by finally finishing Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, having briefly touched on it here. The classic tetralogy, often reprinted in two volumes, purports to be the memoirs of Severian, an apprentice torturer, as he traverses a strange and shattered land, discovering his own part to play in its survival. Urth lives under a dying sun in a far, far-off future; Severian writes as a denizen of this land, raised by the guild of torturers, which I can only describe as sort of… leather Catholics? He maintains that his memory is perfect and lies; he relates little stories that feel like tales familiar to the reader but none of the words are right; things are revealed to have happened some time ago while the narrative was looking elsewhere, and I mean that very much in the sense of sleight-of-hand and misdirection rather than offscreen. Wolfe writes from his setting: Severian is an emergent property of Urth, and as such, he takes things for granted that the reader might not; meanwhile, Wolfe offers some infuriating but often very funny afterwords about his “translation” process. Of course, all this begs the question: is this pointless obscurantism, or literary genius? My inclination is to say the latter, but “bondage friar with sword” is very much a main character I would like regardless. I’m glad to have read them, and I may get back to the Book of the Long Sun as well sometime soon.

Next up, in audiobook form, we have The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which Cameron discussed here. We follow a disaffected young woman through the Pacific Northwest of the 1990s; she’s a vampire and experiences drug-induced ESP; insofar as there is a plot, it’s her attempt to survive “the highway that eats people” and find her sister’s killer. But this is not a book about plot, and to approach it seeking plot is to do it a disservice. This is very much a voicey, style-oriented, surrealist undertaking, which Krilanovich manages quite well. I don’t know that I was necessarily in the mood for it when I read it, and I don’t think audio was the right format: the narrator’s desperation and the generalized terror she and her cohort experience, filtered through whatever the literary version of “painterly” style might be, was more unpleasant than useful. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I also wouldn’t say I wasted my time, and would definitely be interested in revisiting this in print.

The cover; the blurbs alone suggest that this should have been even more My Shit than it maybe was.

Next up, in ebook form, was Leech by Hiron Ennes. I wanted very much to love Leech, and to a certain extent, I did and do: in the frozen wastelands, a young doctor comes to work at the chateau of a dying baron and his family. The doctor, however, is an operative of a parasitic hive mind that is also every doctor; while distinctly gothic, it rapidly becomes clear that this is a post-collapse sort of society. My problem, essentially, arose when things started being explained — which is not to say that the explanations were bad, only that they brought the story as a whole into much normal-er territory than first-person parasitic hive mind narration, for example. That said, I may give it another go-round at some point, and I’m certainly excited to see where Ennes’ writing goes from here.

The next three books I finished were all in audiobook form, and the first of these was Flannery O’Connor’s posthumous collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. This collection covers similar territory to her first collection, which I discussed here. Where A Good Man… was remarkably consistent in tone and quality, Everything That Rises… was, for my money, a little more uneven: still extraordinarily good, but some stories just didn’t land for me, while others — “Parker’s Back” stands out especially — really, really did. And again, O’Connor’s prose is difficult to beat for sheer impact, as well as her facility with motives (both of her characters and as the plural of “motif). It’s quite the collection, and of the two, the one I’m more inclined to revisit in future.

The cover, showing that Alwyn is now 90% less grease by weight.

Anthony Ryan’s The Martyr came next. The sequel to The Pariah, reviewed here, continues Alwyn’s adventures with religious zealot Evadine Courlain, and his continued attempts to present himself as sort of a quippy, cynical wiseguy while behaving in a very lawful good kind of way. It was fine? If anything, this entry in the Covenant of Steel books (yes, really) improves on the first volume: there’s something going on with time travel; there’s something happening with what magic there is in this setting. I also appreciate that Ryan at least addresses ongoing class-based discrimination that Alwyn faces as a child of the lower classes who now consorts with lords and ladies, which is more than can be said for many similar fantasies. Unfortunately Ryan’s prose continues to be turgid, larded with aphoristic asides and repeated references to Alwyn’s “skills of an outlaw,” and I would have to read some of Ryan’s other work to figure out if this is a character choice or if he just writes like that. But hey: I wanted a book with cool swords and some magic stuff, and I got what I came there for. It’s good enough!

The third of these successive audiobooks was The Between by Tananarive Due. The January selection for a Discord-based book club, I had already been planning on reading this one after thoroughly enjoying The Good House. This, Due’s debut novel, is a taut supernatural thriller, following Hilton James, a social worker who survived a near-drowning in his youth. But when his wife is elected as the first Black judge in Dade county and begins receiving racist threats, Hilton begins experiencing his childhood nightmares once again — and they’re creeping into his already-fraught waking life. Due tells this story, which could have been extremely straightforward, from deep in Hilton’s viewpoint: when he begins losing time and mistaking details, it’s truly unsettling; his horrifying nightmares are both believable as nightmares, operating fully on dream logic, and viscerally upsetting. I really can’t oversell the understated mastery of Due’s prose, and I’m very excited to delve deeper into her catalog.

The cover, which, of the three, I like the least.

Next up, in ebook form, we have The Last Hero, the third and final installment in Linden A. Lewis’ First Sister trilogy. I enjoyed the first two books, and was very excited to see how the story wraps up. In short: extremely well! It’s a very satisfying ending to the story, though there’s a kind of liberal (as opposed to leftist) quality to Lewis’ writing that can strike a bit of an off note — but that’s a personal issue of mine, and those qualities generally make sense in the context of the characters doing the actions. I hesitate to say much about the plot, because almost anything I could say would spoil elements of the first two books, but suffice to say that it all felt pretty right. And I stand by my prior assessment: if you like both the Locked Tomb books and the Expanse series, but would like something that is somewhere in between the two, the First Sister trilogy is what you’re looking for.

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World is the second and last print book in this round-up. I read this alongside a coworker who also wanted to read it; while we differed on Morton’s approach initially, we both ended up enjoying it in different ways. In it, Morton expands on their concept of hyperobjects, introduced in one of their earlier works, demonstrating first the qualities they assign to hyperobjects and then exploring the human posture towards them and how it needs to change, as well as what that might look like. Throughout both sections, Morton peppers their explanations with pop-cultural references, including a really lovely passage about listening to My Bloody Valentine. It’s not a difficult read, but it is an intense one. I plan to discuss it further in an upcoming article, but suffice to say, it’s a hell of a book.

Charlres Vess’ endpaper illustration for the collected volume, linked in the text.

We close this round-up with the culmination of my read through another towering classic of children’s literature: the Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. Beginning with A WIzard of Earthsea, which appeared in 1968, LeGuin published six books set in Earthsea, an archipelago peopled by dragons, hedge-witches, wizards, and kings — but also, never out of focus, plenty of craftspeople and farmers and other “common” folk. The first three books appeared in relatively quick succession, followed, twenty years later, by Tehanu, which is hands down one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. After Tehanu, another ten years or so elapsed before the publication of the final two books, the cycle concluding with The Other Wind. The books are, to a one, incredibly strong: weird as they are structurally, and only by convention truly children’s books, LeGuin’s prose runs like slubbed silk, her characters emerging complete yet unspoken, somehow. I should also note that, with the exception of Tehanu, I read all of these as audiobooks, and they worked extremely well. Once again, I mourn only that I am coming to LeGuin so late in life, but am thrilled to have her oeuvre before me.

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That’s all I’ve got for now. Follow me and Cameron on Twitter if you want; we’re also on Tumblr (somehow the superior social network).