2025/016: Jessica Jones: Playing with Fire — Lauren Beukes, Vita Ayala, Sam Beckbessinger, Zoe Quinn, Elsa Sjunneson: narrated by Fryda Wolff

The only thing I'm better at than beating myself up is proving people wrong out of spite. [chapter 11]

Audiobook, well-narrated with excellent sound effects and a personable narrator. I enjoyed the TV series, and this has very much the same ambience: Jessica Jones is superpowered (though the book doesn't go into the details of how she acquired her powers) and suffering from CPTSD due to horrible things in her past (again, not explained here: Kilgrave is mentioned a couple of times in passing). She investigates crimes. Her therapist, Mel, suggests that she take on a straightforward case with low stakes, so Jessica begins to investigate a missing person -- Jamie Green, twenty years old, formerly estranged from his father due to his powers, but turned up missing when they were supposed to reunite. Needless to say, the case is not straightforward and the stakes are high. Jessica's usual approach of drinking whiskey and hitting things may not be enough.

I really liked this, though I do find audiobooks harder to keep in my mind than ebooks or physical books: something about not being able to page back and forward, or highlight key passages. Still, the story flowed well despite each chapter being written by different people: this is the Serial Box model and it worked very well here. I'm no more than vaguely aware of this corner of the Marvel universe, but that plus the contextual material in the novel was sufficient for me to make sense of character interactions. The story was packed with dark humour, gritty realism, alternative lifestyles and well-rounded characters. I liked it a lot, and will try more Serial Box audiobooks, especially if they're in the Audible Plus catalogue!

2025/015: A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians — H G Parry

The National Assembly of Magicians had risen up, exactly as Robespierre had hoped. They had issued a proclamation declaring it the right of all citizens to be free to practice their own magic: a Declaration of the Rights of Magicians. Within a day, the Temple Church in Paris had been stormed... [p. 179]

Having enjoyed Parry's more recent The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door, I bought A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians when it was on offer: I love it, and am currently reading the second book in the duology, A Radical Act of Free Magic -- which means I don't yet know how the overall arc resolves.

Set mostly between 1783 and 1794, this is a novel about an Age of Enlightenment complicated by magic. Briefly, this is a world where some individuals have magical powers, connected with but not reliant on heritage; generally, aristocrats are allowed to use magic and commoners are not; 'blood magic' (a combination of mesmerism and vampirism, apparently uniquely European) is banned, a ban enforced by the Knights Templar who slew the monstrous Vampire Kings who ruled Europe centuries before, as well as every blood magician they could find. 

There are three strands to the novel: William Wilberforce and William Pitt the Younger, trying to abolish the slave trade and (in Pitt's case) come to terms with magical heritage; Fina, an escaped slave in Jamaica, fleeing to Toussaint L'Ouverture's rebel army; and Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre working towards revolution in Paris. Each of these subplots is as much concerned with friendship as with magic or revolution. Parry's version of history adheres closely to our own, but with additional magical elements to amplify the horror: the guillotine's victims are transformed into an army of the dead; the slaves in the colonies are kept obedient by a potion that renders them unable to speak or move of their own volition.

And behind the slave revolt, the Revolution and even the repeated failure of British attempts to abolish the slave trade, there's a hidden force, known to Robespierre as his benefactor, to Pitt as his enemy, and to Fina simply as 'the stranger'.

This is a long, slow, dense novel, and I found it a compelling read: the blend of fantasy and history felt credible, and I very much enjoyed the friendships, especially that between Pitt and Wilberforce. I also found myself warming more to Robespierre than ever before. Though the history and worldbuilding are quite lightly sketched -- we learn little of the world outside Britain, France and Haiti -- there are plenty of little details, such as the laburnham-and-silver panels in the House of Commoners that respond to the speeches with sound and harmony, which make this world feel real.

I'd have liked more female characters, but can understand their absence. (There are more women in A Radical Act of Free Magic, including Pitt's awesome niece Hester Stanhope.) And I did find some of the scenes of Parliament rather long-winded. But this, for me, was an utterly splendid read, and the very first thing I did after finishing it was to buy the second volume of what's effectively one long narrative.

2025/014: The Athenian Murders — V J Randle

He agreed, of course, that murder was most terrible. But she had not used the modern Greek word, tromeros, instead using the Ancient Greek, deinos... [p. 60]

Sergeant Michail Mikras of the Athenian police is assigned, with his partner Katerina Galanis, to the investigation of a gruesome murder with mythic undertones: the body was arranged to suggest the birth of Athena, who was freed from the head of Zeus by an axe wielded by Hephaestus. It's Mikras who finds the axe, hung from Hephaestus's temple -- a fact that fascinates the tabloids. And a group called The Awakening is claiming that Athena has arisen to cleanse the city of Athens. Michail Mikras's superior, Sofia Sampson, is unimpressed with his suggestion that they consider other Athene-related myths to 'locate' further crimes. Nevertheless, Michail and Katerina identify the next target...

Like many crime novels, this is more about the detectives than about the crimes. Michail Mikras is neurodivergent and bad at people, but familiar with mythology and Ancient Greek; Katerina is trying to separate from her husband Theo, also a police officer, because of his involvement with far-right, anti-immigrant groups; Sofia Sampson has personal history with one of the ringleaders. Two retired British classicists are also involved in the case, providing some scholarly input as well as some red herrings.

This was a quick and easy read, and I was interested by the depiction of modern Athens (a city I know better from historical novels and non-fiction set in the ancient world). The characters were likeable, if somewhat stereotyped, and the crimes were complex and unusual. I don't feel compelled to read more in the series, but I think I might revisit this author if I were to visit Athens.

2025/013: A Line You Have Traced — Roisin Dunnett

...when we talk about time, we should really talk about history, because that's the only element of time that we understand. ... some parts of time are actually thinner than others ... what wears it thin? Stories, narrative, expression. [loc. 2422]

A Line You Have Traced is the story of three women living in East London, in three different centuries: Bea, a silversmith's wife, in the 1930s; Kay, devoting her life to partying in something like contemporary London; and Ess, living in a near-future collective which believes that humans will soon be extinct. (All the character names in this novel are letters of the alphabet, from Bea's husband Ade to Ess's friend Zizi. This became annoying until the story really got going.) The three are related by more than blood. There's an angel whose appearances Bea records in a small red notebook, Kay's fantasies about being watched by time travellers, Ess's friendship with an elderly man whose vast personal archive of photographs and documents holds the key to an ambitious plan. There are also three cats, named Tuna, Mackerel and Sardine, who may also be related...

Each viewpoint was fascinating, though perhaps Kay's less so (because more familiar) than Bea's or Ess's. Bea's story includes the story of her husband's friendship with a novelist, who presents a warped and misogynist portrait of Bea in his account of Ade's life: it also includes the Battle of Cable Street and the rise of fascism. Kay's account is a portrait of contemporary queer life, with the looming climate emergency and a lack of direction. And Ess's future, with its antique Tupperware and acceptance of doom -- and its radical solutions -- feels horribly credible.

Dunnett's prose is fluent, and each voice is distinctive: she's very good at dialogue, and her depictions of the changing face of misogyny -- especially in the context of female fertility -- over the three narratives is acute. I'm still not clear about the novel's resolution: Dunnett presents us with possibilities rather than a definitive event. But that's the nature of the beast, that's the multiverse, that's history for you.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 15th April 2025.

2025/012: Someone You Can Build a Nest In — John Wiswell

...if her biting off a bunch of people’s heads was how Homily learned her identity, it would probably stifle their relationship. Romance was awful. She couldn’t even do something as simple as murdering rude people anymore. [p. 69]

Shesheshen, an amorphous shapeshifting creature, lives in the cellar of a ruined mansion. She is woken by the latest set of monster hunters, who are keen to slay the Wyrm of Underlook (Shesheshen, apparently) who has cursed an entire family. Poisoned by a rosemary-anointed arrow, Shesheshen flees ... and is rescued by Homily, a healer who turns out to be a scion of the Wulfyres. Homily does not get along with her bellicose, golden-armoured siblings, but still: a family curse is a family curse. It's love at first sight for Shesheshen -- masquerading as a human -- who fantasises about laying her eggs in Homily's lungs, and wonders how Homily will receive the revelation of Shesheshen's true nature.

I am still not sure what I think or feel about this novel. On the one hand, it's a delightful romance between Homily, a woman who is abused by her family, and Shesheshen, a gelatinous blob who likes killing at eating people. On the other hand, it is full of therapy-speak about identity, parenting and abuse. On the third hand (Shesheshen probably has a few hands to spare, given her fondness for removing them from humans) it is an intriguing horror-romance about disability, toxic families and boundaries. It's often very funny, and the violence, though extreme, is rather cartoonish and not especially shocking or cruel. Seen through Shesheshen's eyes -- or whatever she is using to perceive the world with -- the humans seem ridiculous (can confirm), and what is a poor lonely monster, the last of her kind, to do?

I'm puzzled by how Shesheshen became so good at identifying and describing psychological and physical abuse amongst humans, and I'm not comfortable with the relationship's foundation of lies. But this was fun, albeit uneven, and I shall look out for more by Wiswell.

2025/011: The Surfacing — Cormac James

Worse, he had never known, and could not imagine. This is the worst moment of my life, he promised himself, counting everything to come. It would be a useful memory, he knew, if he survived. [loc. 2242]

Echoing some themes from recent polar reads... The Impetus is one of the many ships searching the Arctic, in 1850, for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. Captain Myers is stubbornly determined to continue the search, though it's late in the year: 'matters as they stand do not quite suit his convenience, and must therefore change'. Lieutenant Morgan, the second-in-command, has a lightly-sketched (but possibly shady) history and a mutinous streak. Ashore in Greenland while a broken rudder is mended, he briefly becomes involved with Kitty, the sister of the local governor: some weeks later, he discovers that the chaplain, Mr Macdonald, has smuggled Kitty aboard the Intrepid. She is pregnant.

Over the course of that pregnancy, the Intrepid heads north, under sail and then trapped in the ice. There is heroism, and there is violence. The crew -- DeHaven the doctor, Cabot the cook, Petersen and Brooks and Banes -- become distinct individuals. Morgan's relationship with DeHaven (friends since childhood) is strained: his relationship with Kitty is cool and distant. James' prose is also cool, distant, formal. His dialogue is unpunctuated, which made me pay more attention to distinguishing it from the surrounding prose:

I heard about your passenger, Austin said...
I think everybody has by now.
Unfortunate.
For me or for her? Morgan said.
For you both, I presume. Inconvenient too.
That's one way of putting it.

I found Morgan absolutely fascinating, perhaps because his past is so indistinct. One has a sense of scandal, of melancholy, of a man always in search of a fresh start. Hidden in The Surfacing amid the ice and the masculine environment and the beautiful terror of the high Arctic, between the moments of peril and the days of boredom, there's the story of Morgan's redemption, of his re-engagement with the world. A slow, quiet novel, in which actual events take second place to the characters', and especially Morgan's, inner lives.

One aspect of the story that seems strange to me is Kitty's, and Morgan's, confidence: they never seem to consider Kitty to be in danger (and especially sexual danger) from the crew. Does her social status make her invulnerable, or is it her pregnancy? 

I bought this in August 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2025/010: Thin Air — Michelle Paver

Being on a mountain forces us to confront the vast, unsentient reality that’s always present behind our own busy little human world, which we tuck around ourselves like a counterpane, to keep out the cold. No wonder that when we trespass into the mountains, we create phantoms. They’re easier to bear than all this lifelessness. [loc. 1325]

Reread, after reading Into Thin Air: my review of Paver's novel from 2017 is here. Paver's 1930s team are climbing Kangchenjunga, rather than Everest, and the novel is as much about the rivalry between two brothers as it is about the technical and emotional demands of the climb. But there's a lot of resonance. The topography of the mountain, with icefalls and buttresses and peaks, feels familiar after Everest. And the ghost story at the heart of Thin Air is rooted in the experience of a man left to die.

This is still one of my favourite ghost stories. Yes, period-typical racism; yes, classism; yes, an overwhelmingly masculine cast. But I love it, and it is terrifying.

2025/009: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster — Jon Krakauer

The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace. [loc. 1952]

Krakauer's decision to join one of the Everest expeditions in 1996 was professional rather than personal: he was initially only going to climb as far as Base Camp, and report on the commercialisation of Everest. Having been a keen mountaineer in the past, the prospect reignited his enthusiasm for climbing, and he decided he wanted to make the ascent to the summit.

What sets Into Thin Air apart from other survival / mountaineering works is Krakaeur's examination of his own culpability. Despite a somewhat defensive afterword, he's very much aware that his presence on the expedition may have influenced decisions made by the team leader, Rob Hall, and that his own actions and attitudes likely caused at least one death and perhaps more. Because, through sheer bad luck^*, Krakauer was making the final ascent in May 1996, when twelve climbers died: 'the worst single-season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago' (now the third worst, due to the 2014 avalanche and the 2015 earthquake).

Krakauer writes clearly and evocatively about the joys and miseries of climbing: he portrays interactions objectively, for the most part, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions: he describes the history and sociology of Everest ascents, and the ways in which the climb has become a commodity. I had a strong sense of the heroism of some individuals, and the appalling behaviour of others (refusing to loan a radio to help coordinate rescue; not stopping to help climbers in mortal danger). Krakauer does point out that 'lucid thought is all but impossible at 29,000 feet', due to altitude sickness and hypoxia: and more recent studies have shown that the lack of oxygen was worsened by the weather: 'atmospheric oxygen levels fell by an additional 6% as a result of the storm, resulting in a further 14% reduction in oxygen uptake' (source).

In some ways 1996 is a very long time ago: reading about 'technological limitations' brought home how much things have changed since then. "E-mail was received in Kathmandu, printed out, and the hard copy was transported by yak to Base Camp. Likewise, all photos that ran on the Web had first been sent by yak and then air courier to New York for transmission. Internet chat sessions were done via satellite phone and a typist in New York..." [loc. 4551]. One of the climbers was attempting to 'live-blog' her climb, which seems ... ambitious. And the mountain itself has changed: the Hillary step, a major chokepoint for climbers, is no longer there.

In some ways an inspirational read, in others a reminder that the heights of Everest are inimical to human life. Either way, Krakauer's account engaged and compelled me.

^* And bad decisions by several individuals, and poor communication, and other factors...

There is an opera...

I bought this in October 2014, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2025/008: The Greatcoat — Helen Dunmore

It seemed as if she could put out her hand and touch thousands of lives which had never ended but had broken off into a silence that hung more heavily than any noise. [p. 56]

Set in Yorkshire in the 1950s, this short novel is, I suppose, a ghost story: except that the ghost is more alive than most of the living.

A prologue set on an air base during the Second World War shows us the crew of a Lancaster bomber preparing for their twenty-seventh mission, with all their superstitions and songs and the knowledge that if they survive this and the next three missions, they'll be stood down. The body of the novel, though, focuses on Isabel, newly married to Philip, living in a rented flat in a town where Philip is the new GP and Isabel knows nobody. Their landlady, Mrs Atkinson, is a malevolent grey presence, her footsteps audible overhead all night: Isabel suspects that she noses around the flat when Isabel is out. It's a cold winter, and Isabel, looking for another quilt or blanket, finds an old RAF greatcoat in a cupboard. She spreads it over her bed. Then there's a tapping on the window...

The shadow of the War hangs heavily over this novel: Isabel's parents died in a Japanese labour camp, Mrs Atkinson lost her whole family, and everyone is accustomed to bad food and not enough of it. The old 'hostilities-only' airfields are running wild, overgrown with brambles. Isabel, lonely and isolated and inevitably self-centred, is as lost as Alec, who was tapping at the window. 'He had missed so much. He’d been outside for so long, in the dark and cold. Why not let him come in?'

Dunmore's prose is clear and unsentimental, and she doesn't attempt to explain everything, simply sets out the story with an implacable inevitability. I should ration her novels -- there will be no more -- but I've read three in the last year (The Siege, The Betrayal and The Greatcoat), all very different, all set in WW2 or its aftermath. And I think I own all the others...

2025/007: The Ministry of Time — Kaliane Bradley

The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. [p. 271]

The near future. The British government has a machine which allows a limited kind of time travel: the Department of Expatriation extracts doomed individuals from their own times -- just before their deaths, so that their removal won't impact history -- and studies them to learn about the side-effects, if any, of time travel. The unnamed British-Cambodian narrator of The Ministry of Time is recruited as a 'bridge', a person to act as companion, supervisor and teacher to one of the ex-pats. She's assigned to Eighteen Forty-Seven -- Commander Graham Gore, formerly of the doomed Franklin polar expedition.

Gore finds the 21st century challenging, but acclimatises fairly well. He and the bridge smoke a lot of cigarettes (and some recently-legalised cannabis), ride bikes, and explore Spotify ('Any music? Any performances, any time, whensoever you wish it?'). They interact with Sixteen Sixty-Five (Maggie, who is an Absolute Delight) and Nineteen Sixteen (Arthur, who starts off thinking he's a prisoner of war, and ... is not exactly wrong). There is bureaucracy; there are spies; there is romance, and comedy, and hand-wavy science, and hints of a grim future. There are short chapters of Gore's last days in the Arctic, in 1847. And there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it a Wilfred Owen cameo.

The Ministry of Time explores colonialism, Empire, refugees and exiles, the nature of history, racism, and loyalty. That it does so with humour, pathos, and some truly hilarious scenes is a triumph. Our unnamed narrator is burdened with her refugee mother's experiences in Cambodia (she'd 'witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded'), with her own place in the mechanism of the British civil service, with her dual role as friend and as observer. She's constantly (and perhaps rightly) critical of her actions and choices, sometimes well before we're shown their consequences: this maintains tension throughout, and even the ending is less definite than one might wish.

I love this novel. It engaged me so much emotionally that the flaws (uneven pacing, some threads left dangling, that ending) don't matter. It is fun as well as inventive, and I'm looking forward to a future reread.

‘What happens if they survive?’ I asked.
‘Then you will have the lovely warm glow of having contributed to a humanitarian project.’
‘And if they die?’
‘Then you will have contributed to a scientific project.' [p. 38]

2025/006: The Terraformers — Annalee Newitz

...researchers found the H. sapiens germline in a seventy-thousand-year-old biobank that had been moldering in the museum basement. Nobody is really sure what the biobank was for, but archaeologists think it probably had some kind of ritual use. Back then, people had all kinds of superstitions about their genomes. They would send their genetic material to this biobank, and analysts would tell their fortunes by grouping them into categories like ‘West African’ or ‘European’ or ‘Indigenous American.’ [loc. 5568]

Told in three parts, The Terraformers is set in the far future, on a planet known as Sask-E. The terraformers are employees (or perhaps slaves) of Verdance, an interstellar corporation whose goal is to recreate Pleistocene-era Earth -- before the Great Bargain which endowed some non-human animals with human-level intelligence (subject to certain controls) and averted ecological catastrophe. It was at this mythical time that the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT) was formed, its remit to manage ecosystems.

The first third of the novel, 'Settlers', is the story of ERT Ranger Destry and her companion Whistle. (Who is a moose. Who can fly.) Destry and Whistle discover a subterranean city inhabited by the original terraformers, all Homo Diversus -- a generic term for customised hominin builds who were designed to perform the earliest stages of the terraforming process. They prefer to call themselves Archaeans, and they're unimpressed with Verdance.

The second part of the novel, 'Public Works', is set some centuries later and deals with a team trying to design a public transit system, despite Verdance's best efforts to keep the unwashed masses at bay. 'There would be excuses about how trains messed up the Pleistocene purity of Sasky, but really it would be about not wanting to deal with the class of person who took public transit.' (The moral of this section of the novel is 'always read the appendices to the planning reports'.) And the final third, 'Gentrification', deals with corporate greed and 'cleansing' of undesirables -- mostly non-human people, an ever-broadening category that includes the section's protagonists, a cat named Moose who works as an investigative journalist and a flying train named Scrubjack. Verdance has always intended Sask-E to be a place where H. Sapiens can reign supreme, just as it was before the Great Bargain...

There is a lot in this novel. Many of the little details of worldbuilding (such as swearing and profanity being scatalogical rather than sexual; such as robot kink bars) have stuck with me. But The Terraformers is not only a novel about the far future, it is a novel about now: what makes a person a person? Does a small vocabulary -- Whistle can only speak in one-syllable words, as per design -- mean a person is unintelligent? Can people be owned? How do revolutions happen? Is authenticity another name for prejudice? Are all corporations evil?

For me this was an engaging and richly detailed novel -- or rather, three linked novellas -- though I did not engage with (or like) all the protagonists, and some of the plot turns seemed to depend on people making improbably poor and/or draconian decisions. Newitz, who's also a professional science journalist, presents scientific ideas clearly, and the relationships at the core of each part of the novel are just as vivid as the futuristic sciences. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of many geoengineering epics, told me (jokingly) that he would permit me to write about terraforming as long as I included a character named Kim, and so I have. [loc 5939]

2025/005: The Shock of the Fall — Nathan Filer

He was everywhere, and in everything. The smallest parts of him; electrons, protons, neutrons. If I were more perceptive, if my senses weren’t so blunted by the medicine, I’d be better able to decipher, understand what he meant by the movement of the leaves, or the sideways glances of patients as we sucked endlessly at cigarettes. [p. 196]

Matt's brother Simon died in August 1999, while the family were staying at a caravan park in Dorset. Simon had Downs syndrome, and Matt was devoted to him. He blames himself for Simon's death, and he's struggled with mental health issues ever since. The Shock of the Fall is presented as Matt's therapy, trying to make sense of it all by (as his medical notes have it) 'engaging in writing behaviour'. His typed account of life in a secure ward, his difficult relationship with his mother and the comfort he gets from his nan, his theories about the interconnectedness of everything, is punctuated by letters from health workers, collaged words, little sketches. And while we know from the start that something terrible happened that August night, the truth of that night's events don't become clear until very late in the novel.

Matt's black humour and the vividness of his perceptions make this a fascinating read. I don't know if it is an accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, but it feels like an honest account of life with a mental illness, life in an institution. Filer is, or was, a mental health nurse and I assume some of the details -- like the plethora of drug-company promotional mugs, mousemats etc -- is from life. I'm pretty sure Matt's refrain of 'there is nothing to do' is the experience of many.

Sometimes the novel is a bit sentimental: sometimes I found Matt's emotional shifts overwhelming. But overall I liked it: a witty and accessible account of mental illness, and of grief, and of guilt -- subjects that in a more serious narrative would be hard to read.

In the novel, Simon's death took place on 15th August 1999, and when I saw that date I wondered if the family were in Dorset to see the 1999 eclipse ... it's not mentioned, but surely would have been experienced, if only as 'much more traffic on the roads than usual'. And young Matt did seem to be interested in the world around him.

I bought this in February 2014, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2025/004: The Fox Wife — Yangsze Choo

A hundred years ago, the family might have called in an exorcist and then I might really have been in trouble, but as it was, his steward could only regard me with nervous suspicion. [p. 209]

Manchuria, 1908. A woman known as Snow is searching for a Mongolian photographer; an elderly man named Bao has been asked to discover the identity of a woman found dead outside a house. Complicating the story is Snow's dual identity (she is also a fox, though she remains in human form throughout the novel), and Bao's ability to recognise when somebody is lying. There is also a family curse that's falling due, a long-lost childhood sweetheart, and a trio of youthful revolutionaries.

Snow's story is a tale of revenge, told in the first person; Bao's story, more reflective and more mundane, is the hunt for a murderer, and is told in third person. This, and their very different concerns and perceptions, make their voices distinct and complementary. Choo's depiction of Manchuria in the last days of the Qing dynasty is vivid and believable, though occasionally she over-explains some aspect of that place and time. The slow adoption of twentieth-century technology and culture was fascinating, too. I liked the two protagonists very much, and in general the story was well-paced, though towards the end the revelations and explanations came rather too quickly. I'm looking forward to reading more of Choo's work.

For the 'A book with white in the cover design' prompt of the 2025 #SomethingBookishReadingChallenge.

For the 'title is ten letters or fewer' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

2025/003: number9dream — David Mitchell

The fortress-grey mountain-faces, the green river snaking out of the gorge, the hanging bridge, mishmash of roofs and power lines, port, timber yards, school soccer ground, gravel pit, Uncle Orange’s tea-fields, our secret beach, its foot rock, waves breaking on the shoals around the whalestone, the long island of Tanegashima where they launch satellites, glockenspiel clouds, the envelope where the sea seals the sky. [p. 45]

Eiji Miyake is twenty years old and has grown up in rural Japan: the novel opens with his arrival in Tokyo, in search of his father. Eight chapters later, he's made contact with a parent, witnessed some appalling violence, fallen in love, benefitted from the kindnesses of others, and had (or dreamt) a conversation with John Lennon about the song 'Number Nine Dream'.

It's fair to say that number9dream is something of an emotional rollercoaster. It's stylistically exuberant, springing from cyberpunk to thriller to murder mystery to family saga to gang warfare to surreally fantastical -- with Goatwriter, who is a writer and also a goat. (Like all writers he devours his drafts.) There is a lot going on, and not all of it is reliably narrated. Eiji is prone to daydreams and fantasy, and he's naive in some ways and melodramatic in others. He has a difficult family history (sister dead, for which he blames himself; mother alcoholic and absent; father married to someone else and absent) and he once sawed the head off a thunder god with a hacksaw from a junior carpenter set.

I found some of the violence difficult to read, but I enjoyed the rapid switches of mood and genre, and the depiction of life in modern Tokyo. And I greatly appreciated the ways in which Eiji was open to kindness -- both in acts of kindness towards others, and in being able to gracefully accept help and support. Mitchell's writing is dense and allusive (everything is connected! but not always in obvious or even realistic ways) and often very funny, though I think I like his landscapes best. And there is an actual cat.

I bought this in October 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

For the 'title starts with letter N' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

I imagined there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who I really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake. When I went to sleep and dreamed, he woke up, and remembered my waking life as his dream. And vice versa. [p. 407]

2025/002: The Bride of the Blue Wind — Victoria Goddard

"Never once," said Sardeet, "did he ask me my name." [chapter 5]

I started reading this expecting a novel: it's a novella, the first in Goddard's 'Sisters Avramapul trilogy', featuring the three daughters (Sardeet, Pali and Arzu) of the Bandit Queen of the Oclaresh. This is the story of how Sardeet became the bride of a powerful spirit, the Blue Wind, and how Pali and Arzu rescued her. It's a version of the Bluebeard story with an Arabian Nights flavour, intense and poetic. 

I think I would have liked it better if Sardeet (later to be known as the most beautiful woman in the Nine Worlds) had been older, but she's fourteen when the Blue Wind makes her his bride -- and yes, she's consenting and happy (or thinks she is), but I couldn't help thinking of her as a child.

I'm looking forward to the other two novellas in the trilogy, though. Possibly I will like Pali more if I read about her youth: and I know so little about Arzu, the Weaver...

For the 'A book with an adjective in the title' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge. Blue!

2025/001: The Masquerades of Spring — Ben Aaronovitch

Later, when I told Lucy about the love that dare not speak its name, he held me close and said that it may not speak its name, ‘But it sure as shit sings the blues.’ [loc. 263]

New York in the Roaring Twenties, the height of the Jazz Age: a city where an expat English magician can listen to the best jazz in the world, seek out the company of like-minded (i.e. queer) men, and avoid the attentions of the Folly, who took a dim view of his youthful japes. Augustus Berrycloth-Young, man about town, has a Black lover (Lucien, or Lucy), a Black valet (Beauregard, who arrives under mysterious circumstances), and a taste for the finer things in life. But he's loyal to his country. When the Folly's chief fixer, one Thomas Nightingale, arrives from London on the trail of an enchanted saxophone, Gussie rises to the occasion and assists, financially and esoterically, with Nightingale's investigations.

This was immense fun, a great start to 2025, and features a drag ball, the Harlem Renaissance and a tantalising catalogue of (sadly fictional) volumes in 'The Further Adventures of the Remarkable Beauregard', which seem to have a Jeeves and Wooster vibe, and make me suspect that there's much more to Gussie's valet than meets the eye. I'd love to read them...

For the 'Set in Spring' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

For the 'Seriously Long Series' prompt of the 2025 Speculative Fiction challenge. This is part of the 'Rivers of London' series, though it's a side-story rather than the main arc.