66 – Book of Night
Book of Night charmed me almost instantly with its street-smart huckster protagonist and its clever twist on the occult. It’s set in a world in which some people are the possessors of quickened shadows – literally, their shadows can do stuff. Sometimes it’s merely cosmetic. Sometimes it’s something else. A shadow can be directed under doors or to peer invisibly in windows. Some shadows are fed on blood and take halting steps on the pathway to sentience. Some, fed with all the hate and negativity of their owners, break free and become independent… and often angry.
Along with the power of a shadow comes a literal black market in their trade. Skilled Gloamists (the occultists of the story) can snip a shadow from its owner and sew it on to someone else. The secret arts of these dangerous mystics are held in jealous selfishness, and a lot of the black market activities of the normal people associated with this world is in stealing the grimoires and codexes that contain the most powerful and hidden rituals.
Charlie Hall is one of these people – or at least, used to be – a normal person with some abnormally useful skills. She’s given up on that life to tend bar, but after an unexpected visit from a powerful Gloamist she finds that her shadowless boyfriend is more than he seems, and there’s a lot about her life that is going to change.
What’s great in this book is the contrast between the low-level con-artistry of Charlie Hall and the supernatural menace of the people she is working with and against. She’s a mundane person accomplishing thoroughly non-mundane things – a kind of love letter to being good at something because you learned your craft as opposed to being preternaturally gifted from the start. She’s a likable protagonist even given her flaws, and the story in which she is embedded is told well – with enough careful manipulation of light and darkness that it’s almost a reflection of its own framing device – it’s a story that does great work with keeping the things you want to see veiled in shadow.
That said, it feels unfinished – understandable given how it’s supposed to be part of a duology – and I confess that mostly I felt frustrated at the end rather than anything else. It was all set up so well, and packaged up in a vaguely noirish twist on the occult, that the lack of real resolution was jarring. It was refreshing to read a book of this nature that wasn’t just riffing on Lovecraft and yet managed to tingle its finger up the spine of cosmic horror. Horror often works best in the juxtaposition between the mundane and the unfathomable. The sudden appearance of a door in a home we thought we knew well. The dead eyes as a loved one turns to reveal they’ve been taken over by a dark force. A familiar staircase that no longer leads anywhere. These are the kind of elements from which nightmares are built.
Book of Night has a great premise then– what’s more familiar to us than our own shadows?
We’ll see how I feel at the end of the second book though, because at the moment this is the narrative equivalent of edging.
67 – Strong Female Character
I enjoyed Fern Brady’s turn on Taskmaster – there’s something refreshing about seeing a Scottish woman on a show where she has absolutely no problem in being Scottish or a woman. When this appeared on a Kindle deal, I thought I’d give it a go even if I do find most memoirs to be tediously self-serving and dull. This was a compelling one though because Brady is autistic and I thought it would offer a good insight into that aspect of her life.
Good news – it does that. Bad news – it does that again and again and again never really varying the script. Repeating familiar patterns is, of course, a trait of autism but I thought her editors at least would have managed to work around that. Sadly that’s all the book turns out to be – ‘This was my life, and it was hard for me as an autistic woman’. And the first few chapters are genuinely fascinating from that perspective. It’s just that every chapter is the first few chapters again.
Early on the book, Brady says she doesn’t want to be known primarily for her autism. That absolutely doesn’t bear out the evidence of the book which is almost entirely about that aspect of her life. She strikes me a fun person (albeit, one that would be something of a handful to be friends with) but much of the book is in the style of a dreary monotone where none of that comes across.
I’ve sometimes said to work colleagues that most meetings could be an email. And that most emails could be a text message. And most text messages could be replaced by an emoji. It would be churlish and uncharitable to say the same of this book, but I think it’s fair to say that this book could have been an article. And that article could probably have been a series of tweets.
That said, there is a charm to the author that bleeds through the repetition and I did learn quite a lot about the lived experience of autism. It’s just that as the book went on, both of those traits ebbed away.
68 – The Poppy War
The Poppy War is a banger. I really enjoyed Babel, which I read earlier last year, and I thought this would be worth my time. During an extended stay in Scotland, I had a look through my kindle to see what books I had available that were also on my ‘to be read’ list. At this point I was already keeping an eye to the future when I might hit the 100 mark and if I’d be able to read all the books I ordered for this project. The answer, at the time of writing this, was a very confident maybe.
Anyway, this was available on Kindle unlimited, and Kindle unlimited was available on a deal, so I started it knowing in advance it was pretty beefy.
I read the whole thing, all 530 pages, in a 24 hour period. It’s a genuine page-turner. A real ‘Couldn’t put it down’ book. A blast from start to finish.
Rin, a war orphan who studies her ass off to earn enrolment in an Imperial War college, achieves her goal and escapes the unwelcome marriage that had been mapped out for her. Her scores, thanks to a regiment of studying that almost kills her, are remarkable enough to gain her entry to the most prestigious institute that exists. Hailing from a minor town that had never sent one of their own to the elite academy, she finds herself an outcast as a result of lacking the tuition and special treatment of her more affluent class mates. She continues to work hard, even in the face of pushback against her intolerant tutors, until she finds a mentor who takes her seriously. The problem is, the academy doesn’t take him seriously. Nonetheless the two find a kinship that blossoms into a productive collaboration, and Rin finds out that much of that which is worth learning is not actually formally taught in the academy. She discovers a latent talent – the one her mentor recognised in her – and carefully nurtures it right up until the point it almost gets her, and everyone she cares about, killed.
There’s a lot going on in this book, drawing as it does from a well of Chinese history that makes a fantasy tale of magic feel like it’s authentic. It’s got a lot of the themes that Babel explores – belonging, the necessity of study as a way to unlock talent, scholastic exclusion, colonial powers and the effect they have on identity and belonging. It also has kick-ass action scenes that remind me forcefully of the Green Bone Saga, but neatly encapsulated into a convincing metaphysics. Rin is a very compelling character, which is not something I thought I might say about a character that is so mired in what is essentially nationalist fervour.
This is a great book. RF Kuang is a great author.
69 – Bunny
What the hell did I just read? This book is weird as shit. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s part Mean Girls and part furry pornography. Part dark academia and part Watership Down fanfic. It’s genuinely bizarre. I don’t even know if it’s good, that’s how weird it is. It reads like a fever dream that someone might have while half-consciously masturbating to an episode of the Gummi Bears.
The Goodreads page refers to this as ‘A spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience’. Look, I’m not trying to mansplain or anything but I don’t think this is a chronicle of the female experience unless that experience is ‘Going to the park while tripping balls on acid’.
That’s about all I have to say about it. Three stars.
70 – The Night Circus
The Night Circus suffers, I think, from the same issue that I had with the Watchmaker of Filigree Street – it’s full of what I know are beautifully intricate and evocative descriptions, but being aphantasic I can’t bring them to mind. As such, a lot of the book is simply wasted on me.
I do know though that what remains when you lift out the ornate imagery is still compelling, because I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much. It’s a love story where the romance is carried out through a kind of one-upmanship of enchantment. Two powerful magicians, engaged in a lengthy gamble through the centuries, take on two apprentices. To them, they teach their respective philosophies and set them against each other. The arena – a circus. The aim – unclear. The endgame – unstated. They simply orbit each other, weaving magic and illusions, each trying to outclass the other. That is, until they realise that they’re having a lot more fun impressing their allocated nemesis than they are winning the contest. The Night Circus itself becomes its own self-sustaining entity – a supremely odd and unsettling place that draws its devotees to it by virtue of its weirdness. It’s an almost happy life, if not for the unappreciated darkness at the core of the contest.
So, you can probably guess from my introductory sentences that this is beautifully written. Erin Morgenstern uses words much like her protagonists use enchantment – she has a beguiling skill with language that she uses to draw you in. I loved the idea of a kind of secret circus that serves a higher purpose than merely giving carnies a place to con city-dwelling rubes. There isn’t much in the way of a plot, if I’m honest – and the surprise reveal isn’t really a surprise or a reveal so much as it is an obvious conclusion. The characters are perhaps a little thinly drawn at times, which is a shame for a book that is so much about the people and the context in which they exist.
But it’s still a really good book. A joy to read. I imagine it must be bewitching if you can actually turn the descriptions on the page into visions in your head.