On my personal blog I used to do an annual books post, partially for my own benefit to round up what I'd read in the year and see if any of it stuck. So I figured I'd do the same here.
Before getting to that, on an organizational note, I've started the process of integrating World of Wonders into my personal site--tjradcliffe.com--because as Ken White (Popehat) has said, being on substack is maybe a bit like holding a big family event at a venue that is always fully booked on April 20th. Sure, you're not actually sharing the room with NAZIs (April 20th is a well-known German chancellor's birthday) but you're maybe a bit closer to them than you'd like. I'm not totally sure what the end state of all this is. But I want to set myself up so if things here go totally sideways I'll be able to react to them in a timely way: I had a Mastodon account for almost six months before I completely left Twitter, for example. For someone who isn't great at planning, I'm pretty good a preparation.
Nevertheless: on to books!
I read a lot of Roger Zelazny this year, who was an American writer of mostly SF and fantasy. His best work by far is "Lord of Light", which I really recommend: it's about a distant world colonized by Earth where the ship's crew set themselves up as gods, and a man named Sam--nominally short for Mahasamatman--sticks a spoke in their wheels. If it were written today there might well be cries of "cultural appropriation". It won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1968.
That wasn't one of the ones I (re)read this year. Instead I ran through the "Amber" series, which like much of Zelazny's work has a cool idea but to my mind comes up short in the execution. Or maybe I'm just not his audience. The idea of Amber is that there is one real world, Amber, and all the rest--including our Earth--are shadows. The five books of the original chronicle--each of which would probably count as a novella today--follow Corwin, prince of Amber, on a journey from our shadow-Earth back to the real world, after a series of accidents. King Oberon, ruler--and possibly creator-- of Amber, and father to Corwin and gaggle of other princes and princesses, has vanished. Succession wars loom, as they do.
The books are good enough, but suffer from the a kind of extreme ironic detachment that was no-doubt very cool in the 1970s when they were first published, but which has not aged well. Zelazny seems to struggle in coming up with an answer to "Why does any of this matter?" Where "this" is, like, "existence". Is it really that hard a question? Self-consistency alone suggests a robust response.
I read a few others by him over the course of the year--"Dilvish the Damned", "Today We Choose Faces", and "Doorways in the Sand"--but remember little to nothing about them. I was hoping to learn something from his style, but don't think it was what I was looking for.
Another author I read a bunch of is Robert B. Parker, as I'm slowly working my way through the "Spenser" books. They're entertaining and follow the changing mores of 1970s and 1980s America in an interesting way, at least for someone who lived adjacent to it. Any private eye series tends to be about someone who doesn't mesh well with the ordinary world, which I can appreciate. Although Spenser leans toward that style of American mystery in which--as Isaac Asimov put it--"the hero shoots everyone and then pins the crime on the last person left alive" the series is not without redeeming qualities: humour, friendship, honour, and even love are all on display, as well as sex and violence.
Stephen Spotswood's "Pentecost and Parker" books are a more sedate mystery series. I read "Secrets Typed in Blood", which I think is the third (and most recent). The whole series is worth a look, set in New York City just after the war. Pentecost is a detective who takes on Parker--a circus runaway--to aid her in her investigations, as she's suffering from multiple sclerosis. Checking up on it, I see there's a fourth book just published, so 2024 is already looking up.
Robert Harris is an historical novelist whom I find variable. I read three of his this year: "Pompei", "Enigma", and "Ghost". The first of these was hard slogging. I've often observed that the more true to their time characters in historical novels are, the less sympathetic they will be to modern readers, to the extent that in reading Sharon Kay Penman's "When Christ and the Saints Slept", about the Anarchy, I was able to identify the one non-historical character simply by the fact that he wasn't a raging asshole.
I've gone so far as to say that from a modern perspective pretty much everyone born over a hundred years ago is a monster. And lest anyone think this is some kind of faddish wokeness, I first made this observation in the early '90s. Historical progress and the lack of deductive closure around Enlightenment principles will make monsters of us all, in time.
But the Romans were pretty monstrous by almost any standards. Their empire was based on power and forcible extraction of taxes from subject kingdoms. The moral justification for all this was quite simple: because they could.
Harris' "Pompei" is the story of a Roman hydraulic engineer who is sent to investigate why the aqueduct serving towns around the Bay of Naples--of which Pompei is one--is not delivering water, which in the late Italian summer is a huge emergency, leading to immediate civic unrest. The main character and all the secondary characters behave like Romans, which means that every one of them is vain, violent, status conscious, grasping, and either arrogant or servile as the immediate power relations require. You kind of end up rooting for the volcano, which is responsible for the aqueduct being blocked, and eventually does send its pyroclastic flow down to ruin everyone's day.
One of my criteria for reading these days is: do I enjoy spending time with these characters? If I'm going to spend quite a few hours in the (virtual) company of a group of people I need to like or admire or respect at least a few of them. In the case of "Pompei", I didn't, but to be really clear: that's probably because of how well written it is, authentically depicting alien and unpleasant people.
"Enigma", on the other hand, I enjoyed a lot. It's familiar territory to readers of historical/spy/war fiction: Bletchley Park, German weather reports, internal politics, awkward relations with the Americans, the lot. The characters are well-drawn, the action varied and interesting, and the kind of thing cryptographers do is nicely evoked. Like the other WWII-era Harris I've read--"V", about the V2--it was a really enjoyable read.
"Ghost", about a political ghost writer who has learned Things Men Were Not Meant to Know, reads like a thinly veiled hatchet job on Tony Blair, who no-doubt deserves it. The mystery element felt clunky and the politics made the book feel like it wanted to be a satire when it grew up. Enjoyable, but maybe better for someone more deeply mired in the mud of UK kakistocracy.
"Death at La Fenice" by Donna Leon is not an historical novel... yet. It was published in 1993, which is somehow 30 years ago. This may be the first year when I've started to feel like stuff that happened well within the scope of my adult life is "history". This feeling is probably exacerbated by the violent return of the ding an sich in the Fukuyama-ist sense in recent years, as the post-War international system strains under the weight of various pusillanimous idiots, but it might also have something to do with me starting to get old, and I can't say I'm particularly enamoured of the concept.
"Death at La Fenice" is the first book in the Commissario Brunetti series, and the author claims it was just something she wrote as a joke and then submitted to a Japanese literary contest on a lark and it just happened to win. Yeah, sure. Whatever the actual facts of the novel's origin, it's a fairly readable story, and since the author knows Venice personally it has a nice atmosphere of authenticity. I've not rushed out to buy the rest of the series, but will keep it on my list for a rainy day.
There was, as always, some pure pulp on my reading list. Zane Mitchell's "Drunk on a Plane" delivered what the title promises, although "Drunk" is the protagonist's name as well as his occupation. It was slight and entertaining enough to ease my mind a bit in a bumpy period, of which I have a few now and then. Some people's lives are manicured golf courses, although they still risk falling into sand traps if they don't stay on the fairway. Despite being practically perfectly situated by any reasonable external standard, my life is lived in the rough, on the inside, and I'm fortunate to have friends, family, and books to help me through the more heavily thistle-covered bits.
Other pulp included "A Perfect Marriage", which was not good, and "Rich Blood" by Robert Bailey, which was OK.
There was a also a diverse bunch of pretty interesting fantasy/SF books from authors I've not read before. A quick rundown:
"The Space Between Worlds" by Micaiah Johnson is an interesting take on parallel worlds fiction in which people can only travel to worlds in which their equivalent has died (or maybe has never been born). "Nearby" worlds are the only ones we can reach, and rich people tend not to have died in them, so members of the underclass get recruited as travellers in a post-climate-catastrophe society where human civilization is reduced to a remnant. Parallel worlds have been done to death and beyond, and this was an original take with some depressingly plausible social commentary on top.
A different kind of alternate history is found in "Moriarty" by Anthony Horowitz, a Holmes-ian romp that's pretty good up until the twist ending, which didn't work at all for me.
"The Blacktongue Thief" by Christopher Buehlman takes place in a well-realized secondary world, following a bunch of misfits on a quest into goblin country after a war against them has been lost. Good modern fantasy explores the incentive structures that keep the imaginary world working, and unsurprisingly none of them resemble anyone's idea of a just society, any more than real engines resemble perpetual motion machines. Between wildly silly "Looking Backward" style fantasies and equally ridiculous Orwellian dystopias, books like this aim to imagine more plausible scenarios, and throw light on our world in the process. This one does a good job while having a lot of adventures along the way.
"The Green Man's Heir" by Julia E. McKenna is a fun bit of... rural fantasy? It's fantasy set in the contemporary world, but definitely not urban. It took me a while to warm up to it, but it manages to tell a new and interesting story about the fae lurking in the interstitial spaces of the modern world.
"Breaking the Lore" by Adam Redsmith is another entry in the same genre, although actually urban, and I enjoyed it a good deal. My paternal grandfather was born just outside Manchester, and while I've never been there I have kind of a theoretical soft spot for the place.
"Magic and the Shinigami Detective" by Honor Raconteur (presumably a nom de ordinateur) is one of those stories where someone from our world is dragged by magic, science, nature, or narrative causality into another place, and thrives there either due to greater opportunities--often due to the kind of wise and enlightened leaders who exist only in fiction--or to some property or capability they have by virtue of their unusual origin. This one was OK, but once again: I didn't rush out to buy the rest of the series.
Tim Powers' "Alternate Routes" was typical of what Tim Powers has been writing in the past couple of decades: LA-based urban fantasy that doesn't really engage me. It may well be that it's my deep-seated loathing of LA that's the problem, because I think he captures the (awful) place pretty well. I miss '80's-era Tim Powers, and happened upon a paperback copy of "The Anubis Gates", which as an exemplar of pure plot-driven fiction stands up pretty well.
On a more science fiction bent, "To Each This World" by Julie E. Czerneda is a run at the "humans explore the universe and find remnants of alien civilizations" genre. I liked the characters and the conflicts between them. The aliens did less for me, and the general incuriosity of the humans pushed my suspension of disbelief too hard. It's all very well to say, "Bad things happened, humans pulled back to safety," but we're not really like that.
"The Ninth House" and "Hell Bent" by Leigh Bardugo were both good, imagining magic behind the secret societies at Yale. The second is slower to start but it does a good job of introducing complexities and resolving them. The treatment of race is interesting: maybe I missed it but there are a couple of characters whose race doesn't become apparent until the second book. Although it wasn't a surprise when it did, so I dunno.
Jim Butcher finally produced the next book of the Cinder Spires series, "The Olympian Affair", which was much as expected, although I found the relationships increasingly repetitive. The main conflict was satisfactorily resolved, and the characters stayed to true to themselves. I'm not sure as readers we have a right to demand anything more than that, and Butcher does deliver.
"The Marlowe Papers" by Ros Barber is an award-winning novel in formal verse, with the additional challenge that the poems are letters, written by Marlowe himself. Some of the verse is extremely good, and speaking as someone who is currently writing somewhat satirical summaries of Shakespeare's sonnets--covering them in batches of about thirty at a time--I have to say it takes some audacity to voice one of the truly great Elizabethan poets, and while not every line quite hits the mark, an astonishing number do. This is not damning with faint praise: for a poet to be in the same ballpark as Marlowe and to genuinely nail it on occasion is an incredible feat.
"Tsalmoth" is Stephen Brust's latest Vlad Taltos book, and is true to form. I've long felt that Brust kind of ruined the series when he gave us the stratospherically good "Teckla" as the third book. Everything else has seemed almost a footnote to that, at least to me. "Teckla", which follows "Jhereg" and "Yendi", both of which are required to understand it, is the story of a man whose mode of life comes into violent conflict with what he'd like to think he believes. These first three books in the series have sometimes been compared to Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" novels, which I can kind of see. Many of the subsequent books have been experiments in form and voice as Vlad tries to put the pieces of his life back together, or we flash back to his earlier days, as in this entry.
Mrs Wonders and I watched "The Thin Man" last year, and so this year I read the Dashiell Hammett novel it was based on, which is very much of its time.
Mick Heron's "The Secret Hours" is not to be missed. It's not exactly a "Slow Horses" book, but then again, it's not exactly not a "Slow Horses" book. Late-late Cold War spy fiction, reminding us that Faulkner was right when he said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
And Robert Jackson Bennett's "Vigilance" is a satire that's a little too close to home: the whole of the US has been turned into a playground for a televised game that sets mass shooters loose for ratings. The shear stupidity of people who think they are capable of being "a good guy with a gun" in such situations is mind-boggling, and of course you can't convince them otherwise: if they weren't complete idiots with no experience in actual emergency situations they would have realized by the age of twenty or so that such imaginary heroism is almost entirely, well... imaginary. The probability that they fall into the tiny category of extremely well-trained, extremely alert, and extremely lucky people who can actually do more harm than good with a gun in their hands is so close to zero as to be not worth arguing about, but they think it's 100%.
I had a bunch of DNFs, including things bought for Mrs Wonders, whose taste differs a bit from my own. They included "The House on the Cerulean Sea" by TJ Klune, which everyone else seemed to love.
That is, I think, about it for e-books. Paper books are harder to track. I've just finished Lavie Tidhar's "The Escapement", which is brilliant, surreal, and deftly executed, but which I struggled with for personal reasons related to the "this world" plot.
I'm about half way through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and have been for quite a while. I'll likely finish it soon just to get it out of the way.0
Stephen King is a genius, but I'm not a big horror fan so I'm selective about what I read from him. "Fire Starter" was the only one this year, I think, which I enjoyed: well-paced, likeable characters in real jeopardy, and a satisfying ending.
"The Riddle of the Sands" by Erskine Childers was published in 1903 during one of the many invasion scares concomitant upon the series of crises that eventually gave us the World War One (see Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace" for an excellent history of this period). Come for the spying, stay for the sailing, as the book covers weeks of sailing in deteriorating autumn weather off the coast of Friesland and environs, in both the North Sea and the Baltic, crossing Denmark by canal and working the tides around the string of sandy shoals and East Friesian Islands off the German coast. If you want the feel of what it's like to work a small boat in difficult inshore waters, this is it. I can't speak to the authenticity of dodging German security forces bent on no good, but the rest is the real deal.
Otherwise, my reading was mostly nonfiction in paper, which maybe I'll write about in another post later. Or not.
Happy New Year!