First Quarter of 2024 Book Reviews

January

You can also seem them all on my Goodreads

This book has really managed the rare feat of actually making me believe that a protagonist with no shit reality-breaking level magical superpowers is also personally such a comprehensive trashfire of a human she basically lives in the gutter and is consistently behind on rent for it.

I have zero memory whatsoever of who recommended The Dead Take The A Train but fifty pages into it yes very good thank you this is catnip on several different levels.

My bad actually - got the modern and historic names mixed up (fixed now), but was trying to refer to the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs, the social democrat party and one of the strongest political organizations in the late empire.

2024 Book Review #21 – Danubia by Simon Winder

I picked this up because I’ve been trying to read one history book a month, and I happened to scroll past a viral tumblr post with a quote from its introduction as I was figuring out which book that would be for April. Helpfully, there was no one ahead of me waiting for it in the library. A one-paragraph quotation and the book’s cover aside, I went it basically entirely blind. The book took a bit of adjusting to.

The book is a history of Central Europe through the lens of the Habsburg Dynasty, and it is a history of the Habsburg Dynasty through Winder’s extensive travelogue visiting every historical city and museum exhibit in the Danube basin. A roughly chronological sequence of events is followed (common and sometimes extensive tangents and diversions notwithstanding), but nearly every new section is introduced with an anecdote of visiting some town, castle or church that was relevant to the events about to be discussed, and a contemplation of its aesthetic significance to the modern traveller.

Meandering aside, the book does a good job of covering the broad sweep of a millennium of history and hits all the high points you expect it to (Charles V, Rudolph’s Prague, the 30 Years War, 1848, 1866, 1914, etc). The basic dynastic and political history is broken up and intermixed with a surprising amount of time dedicated to the cultural products of each era, which one does very much get the sense are what really fascinates Winder. The painters, composers and architects features get space that’s determined less by their general modern fame or contemporary significance and more because they happened to capture the author’s interest. I certainly came out of this with far more opinions about Vienna’s classical music output across the ages than I expected.

Winder’s voice is strong to the point of overpowering throughout. Which is quite deliberate I’m sure – this is a breezy read full of cute trivia, not a monograph – but even still, it sometimes gets a bit much. Instead of an academic lecture the effect is similar to listening to a guy whose perhaps not quite as insightful or interesting as he thinks he is hold forth over drinks in what only barely qualifies as a conversation. The effect is usually quite charming! But it does wear on you. It also makes getting particularly caught up on the precise accuracy of every bit of trivia feel kind of beside the point.

Winder is also a middle-class guy from southern England, which I might feel bad about saying ‘and you can tell’ if he didn’t bring it up himself quite so much. Anyway, knowing this makes the whole pitch of the book as ‘a walk through the age and region where all the slaving and massacres and depopulation and brutality we associate with Over There happened in Europe too” make so incredibly more sense. Even if it perhaps still shows an ever-so-slightly naive view of what preodern history also looked like in Western Europe.

Still, a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the sheer brutality of early modern religious warfare, both between the Ottomans and various Christian princes and coalitions, and between different sects of Christians. Winder thankfully has no taste at all for grand battles or heroic violence, and devotes as little wordcount to the various epoch-defining wars as he can get away with. He’s more interested in the consequences of them, the brutal and brutalizing violence that led to the depopulation and resettlement of what became the Hapsburg empire several times over across its history.

Which leads into the book’s other main theme. Winder is very much not a fan of nationalism, especially of the kind that made the region’s 20th century such an apocalypse. The book views it as an absurd horror in general, and even moreso in a region where every city and ‘national homeland’ was hopelessly intermixed, and every land continually resettled. The last chapters make the point that the ‘nationality’ of much of the population was, if not arbitrary, then certainly contingent, with massive amounts of assimiliation across national and ethnic lines happening quite late into the 19th century (and before that, historical nationality being more happenstance of language and religion that any primordial cultural essence). It is only as the Habsburg’s legitimizing mythology fell apart that nationalism became the only vital organizing force in the empire, and the grounds on which battle lines were drawn and spoils competed over.

The book does portray the whole latter 19th century as a dialectic between increasingly absurd and ineffectual but (and so) increasingly benign Hapsburg rule to the rising and inevitably exclusionary and vicious nationalisms that would tear it apart. The closest thing to the political left that makes a sustained appearance is Napoleon. Which is somewhat excusable in terms of what the post-Habsburg political situation did end up looking like, I suppose, but given the size and significance of the SDAPO it’s a bit of a gap. One more way the author shines through, I suppose.

The tragic epilogue is of course that Europe now is full of (more-or-less, if you squint) neat and semi-homogenus nation-states. Not because of any peaceful triumph of liberal nationalism and self-determination, but rather one outburst after another of apocalyptic violence, of emptied cities and gore-soaked fields. The book was written before both the current invasion of Ukraine and the most recent war in Gaza, but had either been ongoing they probably would have gotten referenced as further examples of the bloody logic of nation-building (Winder have basically categorized Zionism as the Jewish iteration of the general outburst of homeland-conquering nationalisms in later Austria-Hungary, with the Palestinians in the same unfortunate position as the inconveniently-non-Romanian Magyars in Transylvania.)

Anyway, overall a fairly charming read, and Winder’s steadfast belief that the only real justification for the Habsburg Dynasty is all the weird art they paid for is very endearing. But more entertaining than enlightening, I suppose? And if I hadn’t read it in small daily chunks Winder’s voice would have worn on me until I wanted to reach through the pages and pour a drink on him halfway through the second tangent about his family vacation in Paris.

Okay, finished The Late Americans!

Beautifully written, if more than a bit meandering and incoherent (and only barely possessed of anything you could call an ending).

Mostly though just wow, such brilliantly sketched portraits of people you'd have to pay me to voluntarily spend any time with.

Honestly kind of funny how 19th/early 20th century proponents of liberal democracy sound exactly like modern ones in vague generalities and abstract principles but then when you dig into specifics you find out they were lying about 90% of it instead of idk 15% or 20%.

Casual minimization of the Armenian Genocide aside, From the Ruins of Empire is definitely interesting so far! If a bit of a slog, prose-wise.

That said y'know you can really see the appeal of communism when the two alternatives seem to be a) colonial exploitation and oppression and b) people who say the real issue with European ideologies is how they do try things like 'appeal to the rights of humanity or the equality of social status on an impossible dead level which Nature has always refused to allow'. (Aurobindo Ghose)

The Late Americans is so far in part about people whose orient their whole identities around some particular kind of art being stymied in/incapable of actually participating in/creating it.

But like in particular it very specifically makes 'MFA weekly poetry seminar' seem like a lower circle of hell. At least the pianists and dancers seem to enjoy it a bit.

2024 Book Review #20 – Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

I’ve in theory been a big fan of Bennett for a couple years now, having adored American Elsewhere when I read it. I say ‘in theory’ because I had not actually followed that up by reading any of his other stuff until I happened to see him doing an AMA on r/fantasy and was jolted to go put something of his on hold. The most convenient option was Foundryside so, here we are.

The story follows Sancia, a former slave-turned-magical-experiment who now uses her rather inconveniently always-on sort of object empathy to be a really excellent thief for hire in the hopes of earning enough cash to pay some black market surgeon to make her normal again and then stay quiet about it. That price tag lures her into accepting a job for an eye-watering amount of money from what it clearly one of the merchant houses who rule the city – which she discovers to be an ancient relic, a key that can open any lock. And talk to her. And revolutionize the entire industry of enchanting upon which the city’s fortune and empire are built. She correctly assumes that there’s no way they’re planning to let her live after turning it (him) over, and things spiral out of control from there.

It’s fundamentally a heist story, with all the main action setpieces being about breaking into places and stealing things. And like all good heist stories, the protagonists are totally incapable of winning through anything like brute force, and have to be clever bastards about it – sneaking past guards, not slaughtering them in the night. Those heist sequences are all vividly described and just a lot of fun, almost worth the price of admission on their own.

So this is the rare story where calling it ‘magipunk’ is both accurate and helpful. Which is to say, it is almost literally a cyberpunk story translated into the idiom of vaguely-early-modern fantasy city states instead of corporate arcologies. Scheming oligarchs, overmighty corporate states, miraculous technologies that are only felt by the underclass as news ways of being oppressed and objectified, the works. The most triumphant and hopeful part of the ending involves the founding of a worker’s coop that doesn’t get immoderately crushed. Notably useful and plot-relevant enchanted items include a listening device, trackers, and a powered gliding rig. It’s only when you really get into it that the magic starts feeling at all magical, is what I’m saying – you could translate almost all of this into Cyberpunk 2020 terms in a couple of hours. I think it’s quite fun.

Sancia’s whole backstory – a slave on one of the plantations supplying the city with food and spices, taken as a subject for bloody experimentation in creating perfectly obedient magical cyborgs, surviving and escaping because they got sloppy with occult grammar and reality interpreted ‘be like object’ as ‘be like [INSERT NEAREST OBJECT HERE]’ – is fun on a few different levels. The story definitely leans into a running theme of the reduction of the powerless and subordinate to literal objects and tools wielded by those who control them, both metaphorically and literally. But also there’s an absolutely great beat where she’s explaining her story to the rest of the main cast who are all horrified and disgusted that anyone would do such a thing. To which she reacts very angrily and goes ‘you know that isn’t, like, worse than the whole rest of the chattel slave economy, right? More people get horribly tortured to death as part of everyday operations than creepy magical experiments?”

Sancia as a character is just a lot of fun to spend time in the head of, honestly. Her relationship with Clef (the magical key, the more literal example of being objectified and insturmentalized by one’s masters) is the core dynamic of the first ~half of the book, and it absolutely carries it. Though in the final act it then runs into the very common action/adventure story issue where she starts talking about this guy she’d known for barely a week like a life-long friend she’s shared more good times than she could count with. Entirely forgivable but like, it does stand out.

There’s this whole subtheme of, like, futile misogyny running through the text? It’s never explicitly brought up, and the only character whose actually vocally sexist on the page is the asshole philistine moneygrubbing abusive husband wannabe-coupist you’re clearly supposed to hate. But it’s a repeatedly mentioned point that the culture of enchanting grew significantly more patriarchal in the previous generation (for unstated reasons, possibly just the one epoch-defining genius being a misogynistic ass) and that this was very bad for the career prospects of several major characters. Despite this, important women in the story include a) half the main cast, b) the only competent and attentive head of any of the four merchant houses and c) the enchanting-prodigy wife of aforementioned sexist asshole who turns out to have been feeding him every useful idea he ever had until she could kill him and scoop up everything he’s gathered. This is one of those things that amuses me because it’s clearly deliberate but is never directly mentioned.

This is also one of those books that’s queer rep not in the revolutionary groundbreaking it’s-a-core-part-of-the-tezt way, but in the ‘wow isn’t it great how normal and unremarkable queer representation is now?’ way. Like, Sancia is gay, which is one of remarkably few things about herself she never expresses a single moment of angst, anger or self-doubt about, and she has the sort of C-plot romance subplot every adventure story is obligated to (right down to agreeing to go out for a drink if she survives the last big heist), but with a woman. Her sexuality otherwise basically doesn’t matter. When people ask for queer SFF book recommendations I’m never sure if offering stuff like this is missing the point or exactly what’s desired.

As mentioned, the only other book of Bennett’s I’ve read is American Elsewhere. Which was an absolutely horrible way to set my expectations going into this. Foundryside is fun adventure fantasy, but it has far fewer literary pretensions. The prose is incredibly readable – it’s absolutely a page turner – but that’s basically all it aspires to be. Elsewhere had several different passages I stopped and reread just for the pleasure of it, Foundryside I went back and reread only when I skimmed past some important detail and got confused.

But it’s a really fun fantasy heist story, and the sequel promises to be about a rampant artificial intelligence clockwork djinn which turned against the ancients who made her. So I’m sure I’ll get to it sooner rather than latter.

Third try at grabbing litfic this year and after accidentally grabbing one historical fantasy and one dystopian scifi, finally reading a contemporary drama about a bunch of miserable queer artists in Iowa City!

But no, 100 pages in and The Late Americans is quite a lovely read so far. If just relentlessly downbeat in a mundane way. I'm not yet sure if it's a very funny joke or a kind of apology for the premise that the book seems to have far more aesthetic respect for the work of preparing a meal in a hospice kitchen or separating out cuts of beef than it does any of the actual Fine Art its protagonists work at.

So I'm about 100 pages into From the Ruins of Empire (ostensibly an intellectual history of 19th century Asia's response to European material superiority and imperialism) and it's a fun read so far.

But also this extended biography of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is just reminding me how much I enjoy the whole globe-trotting polygot intelligentsia professional revolutionary as just, like, a Type of Guy. Endlessly compelling archtype.

2024 Book Review #19 – Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the third book I’ve picked up as part of my whole aspirational ‘read a piece of non-SFF capital-l Literature every month’ New Years resolution. Of those three, it is the second I opened only to discover it actually is science fiction and/or fantasy after all. Which is just a very funny thing to happen twice, and also meant the book was significantly less outside my comfort zone than I’d expected. Which did make it quite a pleasant read.

The story follows Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend, a companion robot for children) in a broadly sketched and mildly dystopian future America. At first it just follows her life in the shop where she’s kept, observing the world around her and interacting with the store manager and the other AFs, but the meat of the book is her life with the family who buys her. Over time you learn that Josie, her child, suffers from severe and increasing health issues as a consequence of being ‘lifted’ (genetically enhanced, in some unclear way) in the womb. Klara, being solar-powered and having quietly developed a one-robot religion underpinned by a firm belief in the power and benevolence of Mr. Sun (and a moral opposition to Pollution, which obscures and drives him away) does her best to invoke his help in nourishing and restoring Josie. At the same time, she learns that her job is not just to comfort Josie but, should she die, to be her mother’s replacement goldfish and imitate her perfectly.

The setting is broadly sketched and never really exposited upon – it’s just not something Klara is particularly interested in – but it’s a very modern sort of dystopia. Much of the populace, even among the American professional elite, have been left ‘post-employed’ by robotic automation. The remaining meritocratic elite have embraced novel and risky genetic enhancements for their children, as the only possible way of ensuring they get into a good school and one of the few good careers left. There are fascist militia compounds off in the distance somewhere. The overall feeling is that of a society dimly aware it’s midway through collapsing, but with no ideas of how to arrest its fall. But since Klara has no interest at all in either politics or economics, we only see this as it directly intrudes upon the story, with nary a lecture or manifesto to be seen.

I’ve only ever read one other book by Ishiguro, so I really don’t know how much this generalizes, but the similarities to Never Let Me Go really were striking. Both books are set in really rather horrifying societies, but portrayed in an utterly normalized way by someone who never even thinks to question the real rules they live under. Which is even more striking because in both cases the protagonist is seen by society as only quasi-human – like a person, but existing only in relation to and for the benefit of the people who really matter. And in both cases the story follows the protagonist who lives their life moving through the role they were made for without ever really resisting it, let alone changing it. Not that the roles of ‘friend to sick child’ and ‘mandatory organ donor’ are exactly comparable but, you know.

A definition I’ve always kind of liked for what makes literary fiction, well, literary is that it’s as or more concerned with the beauty and presentation of its prose than it is on the information the prose is conveying. Not at all true in terms of how the term’s actually used (genre is marketing), but it works for me, and lets this book count as literature quite handily. The whole story is told quite tightly from Klara’s point of view, and it’s a pleasure to read. Even if it took me more than a few pages to really understand how she described scenes, always foregrounding the ways they were divided by grids or patterns of the sun’s light.

Portraying the normal human society through the eyes of a naive and somewhat alien narrator to get away without explaining everything is a classic sci fi trope for a reason, but it’s overall used really well here as well.

I’m still not entirely sure how to interpret the sudden intrusion of magical realism with the ending. But otherwise, really quite a good read.