I just logged in to blog my November 2024 reading and realised that I’d neglected to blog my October reading. So, here goes.
My first book of the month was Geoff Ryman’s ‘The Child Garden’. It’s an old book and an old favourite. It’s been so long since I read this book that all I remembered was the name, Milena. After a while, I remembered ‘Milena / Ma’.
I’m not sorry for my poor memory, I’m grateful for the fresh eyes that I could bring to this book, thirty five years or so after I first read it. I wasn’t long out of Uni that first time, and fond of Ryman’s adventures in the ‘new’ discipline of genetics. The fact that this was a climate change story probably also contributed to me buying it way back then.
What struck me this time round was the mastery of story telling that brought us to different parts of Milena’s strange life but brought everything together in the last few chapters. I very much enjoyed this book, and its characters.
From one sf classic to another, my next read was China Mieville’s ‘The City and The City.’
First of all, the idea behind this book is bloody amazingly brilliant. The concept of two cities existing as they do, geographically occupying the same place, but politically and psychologically separate, is genius. Utter genius. Then add the idea of a third group, policing these same cities against any potential Breach of the heavily constructed barriers between them, and you really do have something to play with.
For fans of crime novels and police procedurals who can also hack this very sf background, this book must be a dream come true. For someone like me, who finds most crime novels very dull, the experience of reading this book was very strange indeed. I was delighted with the world building, the concepts, the sheer fun of inventing weird situations and watching the characters deal with them, but I was increasingly bored by the plot. I raced through the first third of the book, absorbing and having my sf mind blown by the ideas in it. The second third was slower, as the characters got moved around to solve the crime. The last bit, the resolution and the reveal, was even slower, and I found myself not caring at all about who did it and why. The characters were OK, I’ve met worse, but not one of them grabbed me enough to care about what they were doing and why they were doing it.
So, I was ‘don’t care’ by the end of the book, the characters left me cool, but I’m five starring this book because oh my the CITIES. The worldbuilding is going to stay with me. It’s changed my brain in that subtle way that readers of great books recognise. And a book that can do that gets five stars, even when I’m glad that it’s done with.
My third book of October was Christopher Paolini’s ‘Eragon’. It’s an inoffensive YA fantasy novel by numbers, well executed, definitely a ‘boys own’ read. It gets mentioned so often in fantasy circles that when I saw it in the charity shop I had to pick it up.
I went off piste with my fourth and last book of the month, Maggie Thornley’s ‘One of My Kind’. As you probably know I usually read from the horror / sf / fantasy genres. I bought this book directly from the author at a writing event last week. We have similar backgrounds, and the extract that she read intrigued me, so I bought the book and was very happy that I did so. The story is a fairly simple one, I won’t go into details but it’s about two sisters growing up in unfavourable circumstances in 1970s Bolton. It’s not dreary, but it is disturbing in places, it’s not a cosy romance by any means. I liked the slow build up of the story and the plot, the careful reveals and the sense that the story will be told at its own pace. This is Thornley’s first published book, and it’s masterful. I hope it is the first of many.
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