Well, so. Here we are again for another book round-up. I will take a moment, though, to plug two amazing organizations that are working to promote diverse literature, found here and here, and also suggest using this handy site to email your local (US) officials about a completely different topic.

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So, after finishing my (re)read of the Southern Reach trilogy, discussed in my previous book round-up, I proceeded to finally finish the Six of Crows Duology by Leigh Bardugo, which concludes with Crooked Kingdom. It is scarcely a surprise that the conclusion was no less gripping than the beginning; one thing that stood out to me through both books was Bardugo’s gift for plotting and plot structure, relying frequently on organically-integrated flashbacks, which often took place when a character was waiting for something to happen. It felt a lot like a really, really good Blades In the Dark campaign, honestly.

The maps are okay, but honestly, I love a dyed fore-edge. Image from here via Pinterest.

Both books follow a group of youthful criminals, a sort of sub-crew in a more established gang. Lead by criminal prodigy and figurative chess-master Kaz Brekker, the narrative moves back and forth between the various members of the group as they attempt to, first, secure the secret of jurda parem, a kind of magic steroid that typically kills the magic-users who ingest it after an initial burst of overwhelming power, and then to prevent it from falling into, frankly, anyone’s hands. The characters are memorable and well-constructed; perhaps obviously, given that I’m the kind of person who is literally wearing black chinos and a black tee-shirt on a 90+-degree day, I loved Kaz, whose brutality masks the fallout of a series of increasingly-horrific traumatic events, but Jesper was a close second — a loveable sharpshooter and gambling addict, he is a little under-utilized in Six of Crows but really takes center stage in Crooked Kingdom. Bardugo’s world-building, too, is rich and lived-in without feeling tired: Ketterdam (not prizes for guessing what that’s based on) is extremely well-realized, its religion, which reveres mercantilism above all else, well-integrated into the story as a whole and the characters’ behaviors.

If I had any complaints about the series, frankly, it’s that they’re YA novels, and as such sometimes features jarring references to the main characters’ ages (you’re 17? Really?). But that is easily overlooked, and knowing it going in takes away some of the surprise. And it is a testament to the strength of the world Bardugo has built that it’s in no way inconceivable that these characters should be that age: Ketterdam, part of Bardugo’s larger Grishaverse, is a rough kind of place. In any case, I hope to read more of her work soon.

And in spite of my griping about the ages of the characters just now, I followed this up with still more YA literature, though for these two, the characters’ ages made sense: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, and its sequel, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, by Mackenzi Lee (which I read in ebook form from Libby), follow the Montague siblings first on Henry “Monty” Montague’s grand tour, and then on his sister Felicity’s adventures, arising directly from the fallout of the first novel.

This lovely photo comes from Katherine Tegen Books on Facebook.

It’s quite some fallout: Monty is an absolute disaster at the start of Gentleman’s Guide. As openly bisexual as the eighteenth century will allow (and essentially a teenage alcoholic), Monty and his best friend, Percy, hope to enjoy a last hurrah of debauchery across the continent — hopes dashed by the presence of Felicity, and the “bear leader” (chaperone) Mr. Lockwood. But all that is before Monty steals a valuable trinket from none other than the Duke of Bourbon, leading to a desperate trek across Europe in severely reduced circumstances for Monty, Felicity, and Percy: from France to Spain, from Spain to Italy (Venice, specifically), and, finally, to Santorini, becoming embroiled along the way with strange alchemy and French politics. It’s a beautifully-constructed romp, and watching Monty grow into a better person over the course of the novel was a delight.

Lady’s Guide opens on Felicity, one year later. She has taken herself to Edinburgh and is trying to gain entry to medical school to become a doctor. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not gone well for her — but then she learns that an estranged childhood friend is supposed to marry an unconventional doctor whose works she loves. It is then Felicity’s turn to lead a chase across the continent and then across the Mediterranean: Edinburgh to London to Stuttgart and Zurich, and then to Algiers, culminating in Gibraltar in dramatic fashion. Felicity’s contentions with sexism and her own beliefs about what “success” truly is are not only charming but exciting, and in both books, Lee handles a fairly broad cast of characters, seen from a first-person perspective, very well. I appreciated, too, Lee’s inclusion of non-straight sexualities: Monty is overtly and gloriously bisexual, while Felicity discovers, in the course of Gentleman’s Guide, that she is asexual. As both a disaster bi and a history enthusiast, seeing Lee’s realistic but never overtly pessimistic handling of the issues that arise from the siblings’ sexualities (or lack thereof) was just really… nice. It was nice. It felt good. And there’s a mild speculative element to each of the novels that, for me, really adds to the proceedings. I’m really excited for the third novel, which is due out later this year.

The rather-predictable cover of the first edition, via Wikipedia.

I think this might be where I began to revisit the Chronicles of Narnia, though I’m not totally sure; in any case, the next book I finished was George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Could I be more of a nerd? Scarcely; I snagged a copy of this from the KU libraries right before everything went into lockdown, and set it down for a while when I was at the halfway point to read Crooked Kingdom. None of that is to say, of course, that I didn’t enjoy it — merely that it’s a long book, and as sensually pleasing as it is dense, and I needed a bit of a break, which is why it took me two months to finish the damn thing.

In any case, After Babel first appeared in 1975, and basically laid out a way of thinking about translation as a discrete activity, rather than as a means to an end. Steiner starts by suggesting that every language act requires translation, because no two parties hold the same connotations, viewpoints, or backgrounds, and then delves into how translation has been used, how it works, and what it does. While he is in the bad habit of not translating languages he knows well (I don’t speak German, but I can limp through French and Latin with the best of them, so I was okay, but forewarned is forearmed), Steiner’s breadth of research and knowledge is staggering, and the fact that he punctuates what is essentially a work of linguistic theory with moments of memoir, or personal reflections on a given work or figure, makes the book not just readable but exciting. The concluding remarks of the 1975 text — I read the revised text, from 1992 — are garbled and wander into some very odd weeds, but I can deal with the last twenty pages of 500ish being a bit odd. It’s an odd book, and frankly reminded me of nothing so much as Douglas Hofstadter’s classic Godel, Escher, Bach: a pleasure to read, and one I’ll have to return to more than once (and it’s worth noting that I have not, in fact, returned to Godel, Escher, Bach yet). But if you, like me, have an almost prurient interest in translation, and want to spend a good long time soaking in the semi-mystical bizarrerie of the act of taking something from language, subsuming the authorial self in the text, and emerging with both of you somehow changed, somehow the same and new again — I cannot recommend it enough.

Which, unfortunately, brings me to one of the worst novels I’ve read in recent years: Codex by Lev Grossman. Long-time readers will recall my adoration of the Magicians trilogy, and it is perhaps not a surprise that I should seek out other works by Grossman — not a surprise, perhaps, but certainly a misfortune.

This is the UK edition, via its publisher.

Believe me when I say: Codex is bad. The main character is a douchey finance bro who is somehow exceedingly wealthy and high-powered despite being (1) not even out of his twenties and (2) the holder of a BA in English; the novel, which deals with a mysterious medieval manuscript, is rife with historical inaccuracies; we have to hear about every single female character’s cleavage and, as sort of an addendum to that, how fuckable our shitlord of a main character is.

All that is pretty awful, so let me just focus on the historical inaccuracies. This book came out in 2004, and Grossman has the gall, the unmitigated fucking nerve, to have a character who is canonically a graduate student studying the middle ages repeat the dumbest fucking shit about how everyone in the middle ages was unwashed and illiterate and died at forty, and they all believed the earth was flat, and on and on and on — which even I, a then-14-year-old with a moderate interest in the topic, knew were all “facts” that were either not true or much more complicated than that. And this lady, apparently a subject expert, is just… saying this shit? Like, look: apparently Grossman really wanted to make sure everyone knew what a fucking LAN party was, but I know for a goddamned fact that fifteen minutes on Google even in two-thousand-fucking-four would have revealed that the things he was saying about the middle ages were not things that a graduate student in medieval studies would have said as flippantly as he has what’s-her-bucket say (and no, I won’t look up her name or the protagonist’s name — they’re so annoying that I want to forget as much as I can about them). Anyway, here’s a fun goodreads review by an actual medieval studies graduate student.

So why did I finish it, and why, for all I have excoriated almost since the first ten minutes of the audiobook, did I finish it? Part of that a personal failing: I struggle to put down a book I have started. But the other part is Grossman’s gift for imagery, which was the absolute best thing about the novel. The titular codex, it transpires, is mysteriously linked to a video game with which our ostensible-hero becomes obsessed, and the way Grossman deploys a combination of the inexplicable landscapes of the video game with the folkloric and often bizarre pseudo-Arthuriana of the codex itself was, honestly, gorgeous. And the beauty of that imagery, the numinous and revelatory nature of it, only served to show how fucking bad the rest of the novel was. It was with the anger and gnashing of teeth engendered by sheer frustration with authorial failure that I finished it, and moved on to better things.

This would be Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. While I was not familiar with Gailey’s work beyond a few passing references to their highly-decorated novella, River of Teeth, which I had greeted with a very characteristic, “Oh, I’ll have to look for that!” and then promptly forgot to do so, Magic for Liars certainly convinced me of their abilities.

This lovely image comes from a glowing review at The Mary Sue.

The novel follows Ivy Gamble, an embittered, hard-drinking private investigator who is summoned one day to the prestigious Osthorne Academy for Young Mages — where her twin sister, Tabitha, is a teacher — to provide a second opinion on a gruesome death, which has already been ruled a suicide by the magic police but which the headmistress of the school believes was murder. The problem, of course, is that Ivy has no magical abilities, and is consumingly jealous of her sister’s talent, a jealousy compounded by Tabitha’s absence during their mother’s losing battle with cancer. Add to that a very handsome teacher and student convinced that he’s the Chosen One, and things get real fun real fast.

But for all the other trappings, and Gailey’s playful approach to genre tropes — simultaneously affectionate and very genre-savvy — and the absolute disaster that is Ivy Gamble kept the story flowing. Ivy is petty and thorough and crushingly self-conscious, and as much as the actual mystery was, I felt, well-wrought, it was Ivy’s reflections on how odd and yet how mundane Osthorne Academy really is that captured me. Ivy’s complex feelings about being judged by literal teenagers were highly relatable to me, and the development of her long-atrophied relationship with her sister was deeply touching. I really strongly recommend this one, and I’m excited to read more of Gailey’s work.

US cover from University of Minnesota Press.

Next up was Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, which Cameron read initially; it was at his urging that I moved it up in the nebulous to-be-read list that I neither keep consistently nor follow. Translated and with an introduction by Peter Skafish, Viveiros de Castro explores the ontological worldview espoused by Central and South American Indigenous peoples, through lenses both anthropological (lots of Levi-Strauss in here) and philosophical (lots of Deleuze and Guattari). Viveiros de Castro’s project is decolonialist and far-reaching, and I especially enjoyed his framing of the book as a book about a book he did not and could not write, which he would have called Anti-Narcissus — Cannibal Metaphysics is essentially presented as a reading guide to that unwritten work, and we all know I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

Unfortunately, I am very bad at reading philosophy of pretty well every stripe (though god knows, I keep trying), and I don’t know enough about anthropology to comment on the field, which is, I understand, part of Viveiros de Castro’s project. I understand that Cannibal Metaphysics presents a perspectivist ontology, and that Viveiros de Castro makes his points about affinity-as-predation very well. But to be quite honest, I struggled to understand what I was reading, in part because — and I’m quite ready to assume, based on the introduction, that this was the fault of Skafish, rather than Viveiros de Castro — the style was so heavily academic, so loaded with words I had to translate for myself to understand, and so enamored of the egregious run-on that I found it extremely frustrating. I wanted to like it, and what I could follow of it, I did like — but it was precious little, and without substantial prompting, I fear I’d be hard-pressed to relate much of it.

It does occur to me to mention, however, that my struggles with both After Babel and Cannibal Metaphysics were in part because the books aren’t mine — they came from the library, that same fruitful trip to the KU campus right before the lockdown — and as such, I could not highlight the text as I am increasingly wont to do. Perhaps each would have benefited from a reading with pencil in hand, rather than simply struggling to remember from one section to the next what had stood out to me about the one before. Frankly, I will probably seek to acquire both for that very reason, and I am very open to the possibility that my opinions of each may change in light of it.

Regardless, I next finished the audiobook of Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. As is pretty normal with these round-ups, I think, I’ll refrain from substantial comment until I’ve finished its sequel, Akata Warrior, but suffice to say I am excited to do so. Okorafor has created a really phenomenal heroine and setting, and I am looking forward to seeing where things go from the beautifully-crafted ending of Akata Witch.

I followed it swiftly with The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin, the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. While I will, again, hold off on more in-depth discussion until I’ve finished the third one, I will say that The Broken Kingdoms was, to me, a much more compelling story than its predecessor (which is saying something, because Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was amazing). I think this is largely because of the street-level focus of the story: rather than following an avowed outsider at court, The Broken Kingdoms, which takes place some years after its predecessor, shows us the world of Oree Shoth, a blind artist who has recently moved to the city that surrounds Sky, the royal court. Oree is dragged into the divine infighting born from the ending of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by means of Shiny, a strange, unpleasant, but very beautiful not-quite-man whom she rescues from the dumpster behind her house. I’m always inclined to respond more to fantasies that involve people other than the nobility, and here Jemisin really delivered: Shadow feels very real, even filled as it is with godlings and cults. I devoured this one in fairly short order, and loved every minute of it.

Which brings us, finally, to the Chronicles of Narnia by Clive Staples Lewis. I counted these as one book, though I read them as a combination of ebooks and audiobooks from Libby (seriously, do yourself a favor), because the books are so short that I was often able to burn through each one in a day or two, and even counting them as one volume, I have now surpassed my Goodreads goal for the year. But the question is, of course, are they still good if you’re a grown-up?

From Wikipedia — the first edition cover of one of my two favorites in the series, and the one I invariably read first when I go back to them because publication order is silly.

Unsurprisingly, the answer is complicated, both by the fact that I saw this video at a time that apparently cemented it into my head forever, and by the fact that Lewis was, to put it very nicely, a product of his time with respect to his imagery. By this, of course, I mean the frankly racist portrayal of the Calormenes, which went from Orientalist in The Horse and His Boy to outright violent in The Last Battle. I had read all but that last one as a child, at one point or another; I had heard how The Last Battle ended and just couldn’t deal with it at the time. In hindsight, however, I’m glad I skipped it: I don’t know that I would have recognized how very far out of line Lewis’ portrayal of the only non-white people in the series was. I realize I’m late to the game in noticing this, though I do feel that, while Tolkien’s racism, at least in his fiction, has been ably discussed, I haven’t seen as much on Lewis’. This piece does touch on it, but it’s nonetheless extremely troubling — definitely something I’d want to have a serious conversation about with kiddos.

But the books that were my favorites — The Magician’s Nephew and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — were every bit as stirring and wild as I remembered them. Here is, for my money, Lewis’ most stirringly alien, awe-inspiring imagery: somehow both inexplicable and familiar, monumental in its implications even as it is incomprehensible in its effects. I’m thinking here of the bell on the pedestal in the ruined city of Charn — of Eustace’s transformation on the island — of the lamppost yanked up from the ground and pitch-dark island of dreams. The placement and impact of these images and symbols is nothing short of masterful, and I aspire to that ability to inspire wonderment.

Also from Wikipedia, the first edition cover of my other favorite volume.

And speaking of Eustace: while Peter and Lucy are rather stiffly virtuous (though Lucy has substantially more character than her oldest brother), and Susan’s unceremonious departure of among the righteous has been discussed at great length elsewhere, the standout characters of the whole series are by leagues Edmund and Eustace. Edmund’s growth from betraying his siblings in the interests of a notoriously-disappointing candy to a thoughtful and circumspect person is well-portrayed, the impact of what he did clearly a lingering weight to him even though he knows he has been forgiven. And Eustace! From his introduction (“His name was Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it,” which just an absolute smack in the face every time) through his adventures on the Dawn Treader and in subsequent books, grows into a really rounded character. Even following his redemptive realization post-transformation that he’s been “beastly” to everyone, his inclination to fearfulness and whinging plays an actual part in what he has to overcome in The Silver Chair and The Last Battle. Both Edmund and Eustace are, you know, actual characters with character arcs and stuff, instead of the types of ostensible conflicts encountered by Peter, which generally boil down to something like, “oh no I should have uncritically believed my little sister but that’s not actually a problem because I’ll just apologize to Aslan and everything will be fine.” (I just really do not care for Peter Pevensie.)

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, May-June 2020