106 – The Jasmine Throne
I haven’t just been mindful of the number of books I read by men versus women. I have also been making a (lethargic, admittedly) attempt to seek out themes and settings and cultural inspirations I may not normally find myself gravitating towards. So, the Jasmine Throne – heavily influenced by Indian sensibilities – got added to the rotation. It’s essentially the story of two young women, forced into roles and responsibilities by virtue of the men around them, who grow comfortably into those positions and beyond the influence of the societies in which they function. They find themselves, at first, structurally in opposition – the coloniser versus the colonised, the freedom fighter versus the usurper. And then, predictably, their antipathy becomes something warmer as they find themselves at the mercy of each other’s kindness as events conspire against them.
It’s well written, but not remarkably so. It’s well paced, although it follows utterly predictable grooves. The characters are likeable without being particularly notable. The romance is almost stereotypically TikTok, but it’s not played up in the way that is often so annoyingly ‘look how progressive we are’. It’s just a good, enjoyable book that I liked enough to immediately buy the sequel.
107 – Stone Blind
I did not massively enjoy A Thousand Ships, which is the book that kicked off this project. I felt that for a book aiming to tell the story of the forgotten women of Greek mythology, it was too slavishly in service to its source material. It was though well-written enough that I didn’t immediately give up on the author and I quite happily picked up Stone Blind in the hope it would wow me.
And it did. It absolutely did. Not only that, it marked a kind of epiphanic shift in how I viewed certain characters from Greek mythology and how we, as a society, have monstered Medusa. I never saw the #MeDusaToo tag during the MeToo movement but I get it. I totally get it.
When I was young, one of my favourite movies of all time was Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion classic, Clash of the Titans. I still think it’s astonishingly good even if it does shit all over the source material. One of its very memorable sequences though is the demigod Perseus, son of Zeus, stalking through the bone scattered halls of Medusa’s lair. He knows that to look upon her is to turn to stone, and so he uses a mirrored shield – gifted to him by the goddess Hera – to locate her and decapitate her. That head is that what allows him to save the princess Andromeda from the Kraken (which, by the way, is from Norse mythology and the creature in the movie is far more akin to Cetus than it is anything else). Medusa’s symbol would become the Gorgoneion – a protective sigil that Athena carved into her shield, a sign of her terrible power over foes.
All standard and straightforward, except all of this is bullshit if you actually just lay out the bare bones as mythology would hand them to us. Medusa was one of the Gorgon sisters – a kind and beautiful maiden known for her good heart and benevolence. She entered into the service of Athena, one of the virgin goddesses of the pantheon. Poseidon became enamoured with her, but she spurned his advances each and every time. During one of his many spats with Athena, Poseidon entered the temple where Medusa was to be found and he raped her.
Athena, incensed by the violation of her temple, levied a terrible punishment – on Medusa. Unable to take her anger out on Poseidon, she instead cursed Medusa (the victim of a sexual assault) by turning her hair into snakes and made her visage so monstrous that it would turn all who see her into stone.
So she retreats to a remote island with her Gorgon sisters, where she became the target of ‘heroes’ and adventurers seeking to burnish their myths. These she and her sisters fend off until Perseus, the ultimate entitled Chadbro of Greek mythology, comes along and kills her so he can get laid.
Spoilers, I guess?
But Stone Blind is a sympathetic and convincing recasting of Medusa, not as the foul monster of modern conception, but as a rape victim who was punished for the sins of the powerful, and who in the process became a trophy to be sought out. A scalp to be claimed for the edification of men. I found it very moving, and not a little upsetting, because ever since Clash of the Titans I’d say I had been a fan of Perseus. Not a fanboy or anything – like, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about him. But when I did, it was with fondness.
We were in one of Copenhagen’s fine museums a short while ago, and right there in the middle of the Ancient Greek display was a triumphant statue of Perseus, his fingers grabbing Medusa’s scalp, with his sword triumphantly raised. Perseus the hero vanquishes the monster.
#MedusaToo indeed.
108 – The Dragon Republic
The Dragon Republic, the second book in the Poppy War series, is just as much a banger as the previous one. R.F. Kuang can write like nobody’s business – I think I said for the first of these books I basically inhaled it in a single sitting, and I had the same experience with this one. Books this long are only rarely snappy – the longer a book is, the more the author is indulging themselves. I won’t go so far as to say there are no wasted words in this, but I will say that every word has value.
A plot synopsis won’t provide much context for the second book in a series, but suffice to say it’s largely a story of PTSD and trauma in which the perpetrator of a war crime of phenomenal ferocity finds herself so mired in self-loathing that her solace is in a revenge fantasy fuelled by religious fervour. Rin, the main character, isn’t exactly easy to like – for all her positive qualities, and there are plenty – she is an unrelatable zealot; she’s naïve to the point of frustration; and let’s not forget she’s the trigger for a genocide. Not an appealing CV it has to be said. And yet she is still a sympathetic character trying to reconcile impossible hopes with improbable plans. That’s really the beauty of Kuang’s writing – she doesn’t rely on the trope of lovable, scrappy heroes or black and white morality. It’s easy to like an underdog with good motivations, and they can hold up the weight of a plot without real difficulty. A fragile mess also has to shoulder the weight of your judgement.
The whole Poppy War series is fantastic (spoiler alert).
109 – The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Oh wow, I loved this book so much. I had mostly written off V.E. Schwab as the author of young adult books in which I wasn’t remotely interested but I heard so much praise for this one I gave it a go – risky, when you consider just how unreliable BookTube and BookTok are when it comes to allocating praise accurately.
The premise of this is unconscionably cruel – a woman, cursed by dark forces, is doomed to be forgotten by everyone she meets as soon as they take their eyes off her. At first, I thought ‘yeah, that’s the dream’, but it turns out when you pair that to immortality it makes for a curse nasty enough to make you wince. Addie LaRue is that woman – never able to make connections with people for longer than a one-night stand, and doomed to have her contributions to the world appropriated by other people as they forget that she was part of the creative process. She doesn’t walk the world lightly, but she leaves no footprints. I’d say it brought a tear to my eye, but in reality it unleashed the full waterworks.
Imagine though – the only evidence you were ever here is third or fourth hand. You meet a song-writer in a bar. You inspire a song. You help him write it. And then you’re gone. And the next time you see that song-writer, he’s forgotten you and assumed he wrote this song himself – why wouldn’t he? So you help him workshop it. And then that workshopping is forgotten and he thinks he’s been perfecting it alone. The only satisfaction you get is when you hear the song on the radio and that you alone know your role in its creation.
Lincoln once said that much can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit. Lincoln and LaRue are clearly better people than I am. I mean, even leaving aside freeing all the slaves and whatnot.
But it’s not just a lovely premise, it’s a beautifully written book that is so poignant and well-observed that I fell for it, hard. Imagine in a world where you’re used to being forgotten, one person notices you and remembers. Imagine what that might do after a lifetime of loneliness. And then if it turns out that this might actually be a loophole – a fundamental flaw in the nature of your curse? It’s rare a book manages to marry together hope, despair and fatalism quite so effectively.
Absolutely loved this one. A highlight of the year.
110 – Elektra
Urgh. It’s fine. It’s yet another retelling of Greek mythology. Why are there so many of these books and what is it that compels me to keep reading them? I don’t know.
Anyway, this one has an interesting approach in that it’s told entirely from the periphery of the Trojan War. It’s just that it turns out this territory is too well-trodden to be remotely engaging. At this point, it’s like Season Twenty of the Simpsons and nobody has anything fresh or interesting to say.