January 2020 Books

And so here we are, another year of book tracking. My goal for this year is to read at least one book a month written in the past ten years, something which I failed to do this January. Here are some things I read that you might like to track down.

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming: I am not a big James Bond fan and find the character’s continued existence to be puzzling. I can never get around how they keep changing actors without there being an explanation. At least with Doctor Who there’s an explanation behind their regenerations! Still, I find myself fascinated with the Bond novels and the power fantasy they portray. We think about the movies with all their gear and supermodels, but the books are much more about indulging in the ear marks of the jet-setting lifestyle and are full to the brim with lavish descriptions of food and local customs where Bond is never simply a tourist spectator. Bond’s also really good at card games your grandmother plays. Like a whole subplot might revolve around a high stakes Rummikub tournament. Anyways, Goldfinger has Bond attempting to foil the plot of the villainous Auric Goldfinger who plans on robbing Fort Knox. Pussy Galore shows up as does Odd Job and a lot of anti-semitism, misogyny, and anti-Asian racism.

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis: Nothing shatters your national heroic narrative about an event like books written during that event. Lewis served in British Field Intelligence during World War II and his book on the occupation of Naples gives a sobering account of life during wartime. Did you know the US mafia managed to get in good with Allied Command and profit from a flourishing black market? Did you know US soldiers had orders to kill all German soldiers taken prisoner in the war (even being told to beat their heads in with their rifle butts if necessary to save ammunition)? Did you know food was scarce in Italy after the war, but candy was plentiful?  The details are often heart-breaking and anger-making, but they’re just as often blackly comic and absurd. Whether displaying one face or the other, Naples ’44 will shatter any sort of rosy view you might have held about the US’s actions during World War II.

Hospital Station by James White: This is the first book in White’s Sector General series about an intergalactic hospital and the problems doctors face treating alien patients there. It’s a collection of short stories that tend to follow a certain pattern: mysterious alien shows up at the hospital, alien wreaks havoc or does very strange things, doctors try to figure out why the alien is doing what it does, finally the heroic Doctor Conway follows his instincts and discovers the right way to treat the alien. There’s clever stuff here: empathic spider aliens (who work in the children’s ward naturally…), a shapeshifter having a nervous breakdown and wanting to return to the primordial ooze womb of its species, and a surgeon made from pure energy that wants to develop a brontosaurus’s telepathic abilities. White was a self-professed pacifist and these stories make a nice counter to the militarism in a lot of the SF of his peers. That said, and for all the wonderful imagination White exhibits in depicting weird alien physiology, he can’t imagine a human doctor with a non-Anglo name or a woman he doesn’t then go on to describe as “curvy”.