Favorite Reads: September 2017

I’m thinking of renaming this blog “Me & My Garbage Opinions”.

Catchy, no?

Also, thinking of starting a patreon where every month I talk about all the books I didn’t like enough to finish, or simply thought kinda meh. Because there are always some.

But here are some books I thought pretty great! You should check’em out!

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson: Vellitt Boe is a professor at a Woman’s College in Ulthar in the Dreamlands of HP Lovecraft fame. One of her students runs off with a man from the waking world (our world) and it falls to Vellitt to find her. Of course, not everyone wants the girl found and various forces set out to keep Vellitt from succeeding in her quest. Okay, I’m a big fan of Lovecraft’s Dreamland stuff and the recent spat of self-aware returns to Lovecraft’s work by contemporary writers. Vellitt Boe’s a great character and as the story progresses and she learns more about the waking world there’s a great sense of why someone from a fantastic world such as hers would become captivated with ours.

The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell: Last month I talked about Anne Charnock’s SF exploration of the future of reproduction technology in Dreams Before the Start of Time and mentioned how it set aside conflict to get deeper into the ramifications of the technology she investigated. Like Charnock’s book Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones explores the future of reproductive technology, but it’s all about the conflict that technology will produce. In a plague ravaged future Inez might be the answer to the world’s problems, but she has a lot on her plate, not the least of which is making sure her cloned daughter manages to get into a good school or not. I can’t really describe this except by saying it’s Flowers for Algernon meets The Road except the Road guy had it easy compared to Inez.

Hercules, My Shipmate by Robert Graves: I think Graves’ The White Goddess stuff is a bit horseshit and what happens when Edwardian Public School educated Brits discover magic mushrooms and want to justify their serial infidelity with 19 year olds. (“Is it really cheating if all women are aspects of the same goddess?) On the other hand, The White Goddess is great world-building for a fantasy novel, and that’s what we have here in Graves’ retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. While I prefer Mary Renault’s Theseus retelling The King Must Die, this book has its wild and weird moments. I’m also happy that Butes the bee-guy survived.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison: This was fun. More importantly I think it was perfectly pitched. In a world where Goblins and Elves are the same species, a half-goblin son of the elf emperor finds himself appointed emperor when everyone before him in the line of succession gets killed in an airship crash. Thrust out of exile and dropped into the elven court the goblin emperor quickly proves himself if not prepared than capable of learning how to rule in a just and noble fashion. If I have any criticism it’s that our hero is too likable, which isn’t much of a complaint because it’s not that kind of book.

Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell: This is a killer book, beautiful, violent, and lean. Set during the American Civil War on the border between Kansas and Missouri, the novel follows Jake, son of German immigrants, as he and his friend Jack join a group of Confederate irregulars (terrorists) as they wreak havoc upon the Union. As the war progresses and the atrocities mount, Jake’s idealism gets stripped away until  the realities of what he and his associates are slowly dawns on him. A week after reading this I realized it’s A Clockwork Orange as if written by Mark Twain.