I kicked off the month with ‘The Burning Girls’ by C J Tudor. Having read and enjoyed a book by this author fairly recently, I leapt at the chance to buy this book at a fundraising event. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this one nearly as much. I think it was the vampires in the last book, and the main character, that drew me in.
The Burning Girls has a lot going on, with an increasingly obviously unreliable narrator, lots of murders and suspicious deaths, and a very dodgy chapel. By the end of the book I still hadn’t found a character I cared enough about to be invested in. Perhaps that’s the norm in murder mysteries, I don’t read enough of them to know. Anyway, don’t pay any attention to me, this is not my genre, I only bought the book because I thought there might be vampires in it …
Five stars because I’m sure this is a great book if you like this genre.
September was a difficult month, I was spending a lot of time providing hospital transport to a close family member, and my mind wasn’t really working along its usual lines. My book notes for September and October are fairly sparse. My next read was Emily St John Mandel’s ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ which I noted as ‘A slim volume, as they say, but a pleasant and interesting read that drew me in with each turn of the page.’ Looking back, the book deserves more, it’s beautifully plotted and I loved the technique and the characters.
My next read was Geoff Ryman’s ‘Him’, a book that I’d been looking forward to reading since it was published two or three years ago.
I blog my reads primarily for my own benefit, to look back and remember what I’ve read. Hence, this will be spoilery. You have been warned.
Firstly, I loved this book more with each chapter. The characters glowed, they dug into reality with every passing paragraph and will live on in the minds of the readers. The superficial premise is simple, God has been born on earth to a virgin mother. It’s a familiar tale. The twist is that God is born into the body of a girl child. The second twist is that the child, understanding who she is, rejects the life of a Jewish peasant woman and assumes the life of a boy. It’s easier that way.
The mother of God, a well born and intelligent woman in exile, is none too pleased about losing her daughter, who is, of course, the image of her. She grows cold towards the child and finds comfort in her other children, the younger half siblings of God on earth. She thinks of the child as her Eldest, struggling to accept them as male, reluctant to get into yet another fight with them when she refers to them as female. We follow the life of the family in exile, living in poverty in Nazareth, but also finding joy and culture and a growing understanding of the nature of the Eldest. The childhood and adolescence of the son of god is beautifully written, God is learning to be human, to work and sweat, to lose friends, to understand death.
As the child becomes adult, the death of their foster father precipitates an understanding of what is needed from them. They must spread the word of God, and then they must die, because God needs to know what death is, what pain is. The Son must teach the Father, and in doing so, they will change the Universe.
‘Him’ tells a very human story, whilst touching on the the nature of the universe become incarnate and conscious. It refers to multiple universes, in each of which God learns something different from its incarnation in a human body. Sometimes God is even born into a male body. In at least one universe God lives a pleasant life and dies painlessly of old age, surrounded by family. But in this universe, the end comes with pain and anguish.
From a very recent book to one written almost ninety years ago … I read ‘Jamaica Inn’ and it seems that this year was the year that half the people I know discovered this book. I have no recollection of buying it, but it was on my shelves, and I’ve always intended to get round to reading it, so …
Oh
My
God
The gothicness, the romance, the dark moors, the horror …
Loved it to bits.
Another slice of gothic goodness, heavily disguised as a story about hedgehogs. I bought this one (Great Hedgepectations) directly from the author at a Telling Tales event at Chorley Theatre. It’s the third book I’ve read by Pete Hartley, and I can definitely recommend his books. They’re very diverse in their subject matter, and consistent in their excellence.
My reading in September really was all over the place, but Kelly Link’s ‘The Book of Love’ was absolutely the kind of book that I look for and enjoy.
Five stars, because Kelly Link is one of the best short story writers around and even though this is a loooooong novel, it’s still a pretty good story.
I hate to say it, but it would have been a better story if it had been a hundred or maybe even two hundred pages shorter. I liked the characters, I loved the universe building, even though it was fed to us in tiny bits throughout the book, but … well … remember in Buffy, where there was some kind of connection between Ben and Glory? It’s that vibe, and I found myself getting irritated. Irritated is not what I want from a nice thick fantasy book from a very, very good author.
I can’t really say much more without getting spoilery, but basically three teenagers come back from the dead, and the world has been magicked so that nobody really remembers that they went missing, except for the incredibly cool sister of one of the dead kids, she’s kind of got an inkling …
Meanwhile, magical people fight over who gets to have the most power and live / give up their immortality / eat dead souls.
I read a LOT of books this month. Looking back, it was mostly driving, sitting in hospitals and reading. A lot of reading. One of my last books of September was ‘By Light Alone’ by Adam Roberts.
I’ve been reading Adam Roberts books since SALT came out, so … about twenty five years. I always get the impression that they’re pearls before swine, with me being the swine who doesn’t deserve the clever prose and the myriad of references that are probably way over my head.
Still, I enjoy his books, which is why it’s such a mystery that this novel sat unread on my shelves for over a decade.
So, decades ago, some clever person invented some kind of virus or bacteria or maybe even a fungus that allows humans to photosynthesise directly from the sun via their hair. An end to world hunger! But of course this doesn’t lead to heaven on earth, it leads to even greater inequality. We get the chance to see the world from several points of view as a wealthy family suffer the kidnapping of their eldest child.
So, seven books in a month. Looking at the rest of 2025’s reading, I definitely slowed down after this.