2023/180: Winter's Gifts — Ben Aaronovitch

Magic was not a factor in any of the conflicts with tribal Indians until the British intervened during the war of 1812. [loc. 1029]

My end-of-the-year treat to myself. Winter's Gifts is a novella in the Rivers of London world, but set in North America -- specifically Wisconsin -- and featuring FBI agent Kimberley Reynolds, who's appeared or been mentioned in a couple of the Peter Grant novels. Here, we get more of her story: her Christian upbringing and faith, the 'petty' job she started after leaving college, the much more interesting work she does for the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, and the difficulties of confronting magical beings and phenomena when you're not a magician yourself.

Kimberley is sent to respond to a call from Henderson, a retired FBI agent who lives in Eloise, a small town in northern Wisconsin, and who's called with a coded message that indicates Unusual Circumstances. She arrives to find the town hall levelled by an ice tornado, Henderson's house empty bar signs of a struggle, and Eloise effectively cut off from the world. She also encounters a handsome Native American meteorologist named William Boyd ('not a hobbit'), who explains to her just how freaky the weather is; Sadie Clarkson, a charming Black librarian with a secret and a journal from an 1840s expedition, lost without trace while hunting something magical; and Scott Walker, an ethnographer who may be more than he seems. And then the weird stuff really kicks in.

TThe problem with Aaronovitch's books is that as soon as I read one, I want to reread my favourites. This time I managed not to succumb, apart from the last few chapters of Broken Homes... I enjoyed Winter's Gifts very much indeed, despite its departure from the 'magic-user investigates magical crime' template, and I would like more Kimberley Reynolds: I appreciate her grounded, pragmatic approach, and I'd like to know more about how she reconciles her experience of the magical world with her Christian faith. I'd also like more about the Virginia Gentleman's Company, founded by Thomas Jefferson as one of America's two counterparts to London's Folly (the other was founded by Benjamin Franklin) and their charged interactions with the Native American population. And the Crane from London, who flies everywhere and swaps stories ...

Bonus extra: the longest single Dewey Decimal number, cited by Sadie Clarkson when she's not encouraging local schoolchildren to read A Wizard of Earthsea.

2023/179: Shadow Baron — Davinia Evans

“What do you think about everything that's going on, anyway? ... About the city. About beings coming from other planes. About monsters. About all the other weird things.”
Ehann shrugged uncomfortably. “It's Bezim. Everyone comes here, from everywhere. Why shouldn’t they? We have a lot of strange stuff — alchemy, bravi, a cliff through the middle of the city. I don't know, I've never been anywhere else, but this seems fine. Even if it's getting stranger." [p. 269]

The second in the trilogy that began with Notorious Sorcerer, this is as complex and richly imagined as Evans' debut, though the pace seemed slightly less headlong: or perhaps that's because I'm more familiar with the characters, and more invested in what happens to them next.

In the previous book, street-rat Siyon Velo became the Alchemist and the Power of the Mundane, bringing the four planes back into balance for the first time in centuries. Siyon has achieved the impossible: now he's confronting the merely inconceivable -- the reform of the laws against alchemy, and unravelling the knots of secrecy that surround the quartet of Barons who oversee Bezim's criminal underworld. Siyon is still mourning Izmirlian, the lover he sent into oblivion, and adjusting to very different ways of working as his abilities are affected by his new status.

Siyon is not the only character changing careers. Neglected wife Anahid Joddani's gambling habit brings her an unexpected prize, and a plethora of decisions about its disposal. Assuming she even wants to be rid of it: it offers her a whole new arena for her business acumen and her organisational gifts -- and a kind of freedom not previously available to her. Anahid's sister Zagiri, meanwhile, is pursuing her ambition to become one of the people with the power to make a difference: but is that the thing that matters most, when it comes to the crunch? There are new characters, too, some of them outsiders from beyond the city (I especially liked Mayar, from the Khanate), and some at the very heart of Bezim's aristocracy.

I love the atmosphere, with all the nautical metaphors to remind us that Bezim is a trading port as well as a cultural hub. And I found it massively refreshing that so much has changed, in the city and for the protagonists, since Notorious Sorcerer: I'm sure there could have been dozens of stories about Bezim set within the status quo of the previous novel, but that novel's climax has vast and tangible effects. Eagerly looking forward to the third novel (and hoping that next time I get a review PDF that's not unreadably jumbled!)

2023/178: Three Eight One — Aliya Whiteley

I don't know why I was so obsessed with end points. I think I was still imagining that every story had one. [loc. 2021]

Rowena Savalas is seventeen years of age in body, and six hundred and sixty-three in streaming years. She begins a personal project on 7th January 2314, somewhere on the 'reclaimed Jurassic Coast'. Rowena is studying the Age of Riches (basically the 21st century) which is defined as 'an intense and consuming explosion of digital information'. From her vantage point in the calm and rational Age of Curation, she's attempting an analysis of a document called The Dance of the Horned Road, which dates from July 2024. As her reading progresses, and her footnoted annotations reflect her attempts to make sense of its references, it seems increasingly likely that The Dance of the Horned Road does not describe 'our' 2024 -- that it is, in fact, a work of fiction.

The narrator and protagonist of Dance is Fairly, a young woman who goes a-questing, as many have done before her, on the Horned Road. The world in which she lives is part Bronze Age (the stockaded village in which Fairly grew up) and part Space Age (the Spire in Telezon, from the top of which rockets are launched into space). Fairly's quest begins with her pressing a button on a Chain Device, which changes her narrative from third-person to first-person. There will be more Chain Devices: also a camper van, an ominous and persistent Breathing Man, and a plethora of the mysterious cha.

The cha -- small furry animals, possibly reddish, with pointed ears and long back legs -- are the mystery at the heart of this novel. Sometimes (as painted pebbles) they're currency; sometimes they're friends and protectors; sometimes, to Fairly's initial revulsion, they're food. There's a cult that claims they are ancient cosmic deities who will save humanity. There's a woman who claims they are pigs, and fattens them up to be made into bacon and sausages. The cha absolutely fascinated me, to the extent that when I initially started to write this review I remembered them as the focus of the novel.

But I'm not sure that there is a focus, or an explanation, or a conclusion. Rowena's life -- her physical life -- is changed by reading Fairly's document: Fairly's life changes over the course of that document. But is it a journal, or a work of fiction, or something quite other? Rowena says, near the beginning: "I asked myself the same question over and over and over while reading: What does this all mean? I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question to ask." Perhaps by the end of The Dance of the Horned Road -- or by the end of Three Eight One -- the reader will conclude that 'meaning' is not the only, or even the most important, quest(ion) within a story.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 16 JAN 2024.

2023/177: The Secret Lives of Colour — Kassia St Clair

Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream. [loc. 272]

Seventy-five short essays about the cultural, social and scientific history of 75 colours, from gamboge to heliotrope. St Clair weaves in a vast array of facts, some of which surprised me: 'There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colours'; 'Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant [fuchsia] that now bears his name'; 'French dyers could not touch [indigo], on pain of death, until 1737'. (Copious footnotes and a bibliography support each assertion.) St Clair has a knack for the vignette. Some of the essays examine the history of a specific dye; others explore the associations of a particular hue. (The chapter on 'Kelly Green' focuses on St Patrick.) There's a lot about the history of trading in dyes, about various artists' use of colour, and about the chemical discoveries that led to vivid modern dyes. And there's a surprising amount of etymology: for example, the word 'miniature' derives from the name of an orange-red pigment, minium, via the word for the person applying it -- the miniator.

This was a good read on my Kindle, but oh! the joy of opening it in the Kindle phone app and discovering that the grey bars that frame each chapter are, in fact, bars of the relevant colour! (I'm slightly ashamed that it took me so long to twig...) Apparently the physical book has border-stripes of the colour, so that you can flip through to the colour you're interested in. There's also a brilliant, and very useful, 'Glossary of other interesting colours' at the end, from Amethyst ('violet or purple, from the precious stone') to Wheat ('pale gold') -- again, with coloured circles to illustrate each hue.

Absolutely fascinating, and highly recommended as a book to dip into from time to time. Get the physical book, though, unless you're reading the ebook on a colour device.

Fulfils the ‘essay collection’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge (2023).

2023/176: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

...as we listen, something happens. The words and voice blend so that what he is blends, and he becomes two things at once, a starving Athenian, yes, but something else, hidden, then rising. He's Medea, poor princess Medea from Colchis...[loc. 345]

Sicily, 414BC: two out-of-work potters, Gelon and Lampo, are on their way to the quarry with bread and olives. They'll feed the imprisoned Athenians, recently defeated at the Second Battle of Syracuse -- but only if said Athenians can manage a quotation or two, preferably from Euripides. Some of them do better than others, and after a while Gelon and Lampo hatch a plan to produce Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women, right there in the quarry where the Athenians are surrounded by the tombs of their dead fellow soldiers; with Athenians playing all the roles, and full costume and scenery provided by our two heroes. They may be penniless potters, but they're avid theatre-goers -- and they have connections, including the delightfully sinister Tuireann, from 'the tin islands ... near Atlantis', who funds the production and who may have a god imprisoned on his ship.

The plays are produced; there's tension between Gelon and Lampo; there's a shockingly sudden act of vengeance; there's a daring escape. All fitting neatly into the historical context (which is backdrop rather than foreground: Lampo, for instance, berates a tour guide who's waxing eloquent about the death of Nicias, but barely mentions Nicias otherwise), and all exploring the multifarious shades of tragedy, from the theatrical to the personal. Happily, this is leavened by friendship, love and respect: I think the core of the novel is the friendship between Gelon and Lampo, and the things that make that friendship waver.

Glorious Exploits is the debut novel of Irish author Ferdia Lennon: I confess I was surprised (and initially irritated) by his rendition of colloquial speech as idiomatically Irish, but why not? I'd much rather read working-class characters speaking informally ("Ah, easy there now," says I. "There's plenty of fun to be had without mauling the staff. Right, lads?") than the stilted, grammatically correct dialogue found in some historical novels. Lennon's narrator, Lampo, may be a common man, but he's not immune to the magic of poetry or myth: and his and Gelon's shared passion for Euripides is a joy and an inspiration, however dark the denouement may be.

I'm reminded that I recently read another novel that featured the Sicilian Expedition: Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine. It's easy to imagine Myron, Alexias' father, as one of the Athenians who survives the quarries, who finally makes it home to tell of the Athenians' defeat.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 18 JAN 2024).

2023/175: How to be Human: The Manual — Ruby Wax

‘The brain is Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.’ [loc. 455]

Ruby Wax, long an advocate for mental health, enlists the assistance of neuroscientist Ash Ranpura and Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten in this examination of the impact of stress and informational overload on the human mind. Among the topics Wax examines are emotions, relationships, children, addiction and forgiveness. I found the Forgiveness chapter (where Wax forgives her parents, who fled Europe in the 1940s, for her rough childhood: 'Who knows who they would have been if they hadn’t had to run for their lives? The past was not their fault.') really chimed with me: I've been thinking about my parents as they might be now, as I might relate to them if we could meet as adults and equals.

Wax's sense of humour is never too far away, but she's also very honest and open about her own mental health issues. Her conversations with Ash and Thubten, which are included at the end of each chapter, give solid neurological explanations of some behaviour patterns, as well as ways in which to approach and resolve them. (I found Thubten very likeable and quietly humorous: I didn't get as much sense of Ash as a person.) There's a lot of mindfulness in this book, including a whole chapter of exercises -- varied enough that many are new to me.

I found this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, with lots of brain-snagging ideas: the mind is bigger than its emotions; forgiveness is about releasing ourselves from resentment, rather than letting someone 'get away with' something; we can't deal with abundance ('more people die of overeating than of starvation'), hence addictions; emotional pain activates the same centres in the brain as physical pain. There's a recurrent theme of kindness and compassion, to ourselves as well as to others: I am beginning to think that kindness is more important, personally and globally, than love. And there's a theme, too, of attention: to ourselves, to our bodies, to one thing rather than the plethora of content that's suddenly (in evolutionary terms) available to us via the internet.

I'm inclined to read Wax's other books about mental health issues: luckily there's at least one in the TBR!

Fulfils the ‘By a comedian’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘How To’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/174: Paladin's Faith — T Kingfisher

There was supposedly a whole language to fan signals and where you carried it and how you fluttered it and where your gaze went while so fluttering. Wren had no idea how you learned that language. Her fan had bluntly pointed wooden handles and she was fairly certain that if she held it right, she could jam the closed fan into someone’s eye socket with enough force to break through to the brain. [loc. 2171]

I preordered this, and read it within a day of it appearing on my Kindle: but I confess I was disappointed, and it's taken me a while to work out why.

It would have helped immensely if I'd reread the previous books in the series: Paladin's Grace, Paladin's Strength, and Paladin's Hope. While not a direct continuation, several of the characters in Faith have appeared, with greater or lesser agency, in the previous novels: I could also have done with a refresher on the world of the White Rat, especially as I have been labouring under a misconception regarding the connection between Swordheart and the Paladin series. And finally, the 'it's just me' rationale: I was overloaded with other stuff and found myself reading whole pages (at least!) without retaining much. So, when the next novel in the series is announced, I'll reread all four novels of the story so far.

The plot is fun. Our Paladin for this episode is Shane (a name I cannot take seriously due to a kid at primary school), who has extremely low self-esteem and a connection to the Dreaming God as well as to the mysteriously-deceased Saint of Steel. The Dreaming God deals with demons, and there are certainly demons in this tale, one of whom is rather likeable. Shane is assigned, with his fellow paladin Wren (who is forced to dress up as a noble lady for plot reasons, and does not care for it at all), to guard Marguerite Florian, an accomplished spy who's being hunted by the Red Sail cartel. Marguerite is immense fun and extremely pragmatic. Romance ensues -- though Shane and Marguerite have very different levels of sexual and / or romantic experience -- with typical* obstacles: holes in the ground with teeth, demons with ambition, missing horse urine, unreliable exes, and clockwork sex toys. And an inventor whose machine might change the world...

I think a reread -- including the Clocktaur duology, which I left unfinished after being told a major spoiler -- might be overdue, now I come to think of it.

* typical for T Kingfisher, anyway.

2023/173: Font Psychology: Why Fonts Matter and How They Influence Consumer Behavior — Richard G Lewis

This stylish and elegant typeface is very much suitable for official purposes. [loc. 457]

This book would have been better as a blog post. It's a short overview of font usage on marketing and publicity material, with a focus on web design, and though I'd have found it a useful reference twenty or thirty years ago, it's not saying anything new or interesting.

It would also have benefitted from an editor, or at least a proofreader. 'San serif', 'sans-serif' and 'sans serif' are used interchangeably; Montserrat is spelt three different ways; not all the fonts are illustrated with examples; the author first recommends Arial (yawn) for business purposes but then includes it in a list of fonts (including Comic Sans and Papyrus) that have been 'overused'. The footnotes aren't linked in the main text, and the descriptions of fonts are so repetitive as to be meaningless ('very much suitable for official purposes'... 'one of the most favourite typefaces of all time' ...) Might be a good starting point for a student project but not much use to an industry professional.

Fulfils the ‘Art / Design’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/172: The Empress of Salt and Fortune — Nghi Vo

Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far. [loc. 902]

Chih is a travelling cleric of the Singing Hills monastery, accompanied by a knowledgeable talking hoopoe bird called Almost Brilliant. Entering the ghost-haunted lands which until recently were under imperial lock, Chih and Almost Brilliant encounter an old woman who goes by the name of Rabbit. She is the sole inhabitant of the abandoned imperial residence which was known as 'Thriving Fortune' -- a joke, because it was a place of exile, where the recently-deceased empress In-Yo had lived for many years with a court of unwilling aristocrats. Rabbit was very close to In-Yo, and as she tells the stories of the objects that Chih discovers in the dusty archives of the palace, she gradually (but with definite intent and a storyteller's gift of pacing) reveals her own role in matters of state.

I liked the layered narrative here, the ways in which stories are told and untold: I liked the worldbuilding, which is not detailed but is delivered in a few striking images: I was pleased that most of (or all of?*) the major characters were female, and that not all of them were nobles or courtiers. I don't feel I know Chih or Almost Brilliant well enough, even after this novella, to like them or not, but I understand there are further novellas in the sequence, and I'm keen to read more about this world, with its Asian influences and its mammoth-and-lion Empire.

* I am not sure how Chih self-defines: 'cleric' seems to be a gender-neutral term, and Rabbit at first assumes Chih is female: "Oh, I see I was mistaken. Not a girl after all, but a cleric."