91 – The Women of Troy
The Silence of the Girls was a touching book on a topic I have found to take up a disproportionate amount of my reading time. The Women of Troy is less compelling, but also somewhat more promising because it moves the story from the overly explored shores of the Trojan War and onto the more intimate impact of the imminent homecoming of the Greek soldiers. Trailing behind them will be the women captured as prizes and taken to foreign lands to live in servitude. It’s a time of tension and fear and trepidation, with the ruined city of Troy behind them both dominating their pasts and casting a shadow over their futures.
Except, as we know, the homecoming is delayed. Poor winds prevent the fleet from casting off and the tensions of the camp grow in the wake of Achilles’ death and the fracturing of purpose that brought everyone there in the first place. If the Silence of the Girls was Greece versus Troy, then the next book is Greece versus Greece and it benefits from losing the omnipresent influence of some the especially notable figures of the war. Achilles is dead. Patroclus is dead. Priam is dead. The A-Team of glory have moved on to the Elysium fields and it’s the B-Team left to mop up the blood and keep the situation from bubbling over.
That said, it feels like this is a kind of placeholder book – an exploration of something that, in the end, is best kept as a footnote in the mythological record. There’s not enough meat on them bones, and for all its exploration of the emotional aftermath of the siege I’m not sure it does a great job in adding anything to our understanding of, as the title says, the women of Troy. It’s beautifully written, but those words are in service to the exploration of largely uninteresting landscapes. There’s no great excavation of the psychology of the women, nor of the intricate politics being hinted at in the larger story. It’s a book that takes a lull in the action and turns that into a plot. It feels listless because that’s what this part of the tale is supposed to be – listless and frustrating.
Again, this criticism doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It still ended up as 3.5 stars in my spreadsheet. However, one thing that is interesting when rating books in Goodreads versus Storygraph is the precision of the rating. Goodreads only allows full star ratings. Storygraph allows fractions. So whenever I rate a 3.5 star book in Goodreads I basically need to ask myself ‘Is this closer to three stars than it is to four?’. And here, my Goodreads rating was 3 because we’re talking a generous 3.5
However, once more I return to the point I’ve made several times – this particular war, and these particular characters, are massively over-emphasized in the books I have read this year and as a result the dull thump of over-familiarity has perhaps robbed some books of their shine. I think it’s certainly possible that another reader, coming to this part of the story fresh, would have a much more charitable interpretation of the book.
92 – The Bell Jar
Urgh, what a tedious chore of a book. I get Sylvia Plath is a tragic figure and this tragic book is a tragic suicide note that illuminates her tragedy. But it’s also a tedious chore of a book. Committing suicide was the absolute best business move Plath could have made, because I’m convinced that’s the reason anyone is even still talking about this turgid tome. For all its occasional haunting imagery and deconstruction of insanity, it takes about 250 self-indulgent pages to say about ten pages worth of things.
Don’t @ me.
93 – The Calculating Stars
This, the first in the Lady Astronaut series, was pretty good! It’s kind of an agreeable mashup between Rise of the Rocket Girls / Hidden Figures and the television show For All Mankind. Imagine that the space race was a bigger priority than history made it. Imagine women were able to force a wedge into the program earlier than they did. What might the world have looked like if every decade treated space the same way the 50s and 60s did?
In For All Mankind, it’s because Russia beat the Americans to landing men on the moon. In the Calculating Stars it’s because a massive meteorite in the early 50s hit the planet and humanity is going to need to become a multi-planetary species sooner rather than later. In both cases, the space race never ends – it grows in importance and intensity exactly at a pace with the ambitions of those running the programs.
I’m on record as saying that I love the romance of space travel. And that I think astronauts – full of human failings and all – are amongst the greatest heroes humanity has ever produced. The sheer nerves of steel required to sit atop an exploding rocket to be propelled into the unknown, for the pure goal of exploration… yeah, that gets me where I live. I do feel diminished that space travel has become a dull commercial outpost of Capitalism.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks or work. Instead, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea’. If the love is there, the boats will follow.
I’ve always felt that way about the stars. They glimmer like lighthouses in an infinite darkness, each saying little more than ‘Hello! We’re waiting for you’.
The Calculating Stars is set in a world where spaceships are life-boats in construction. Since the eventual goal of the program is to move humanity into space the women make the reasonable point that if that’s going to work, they’re going to have to be part of every phase from now until then. They still need to overcome entrenched attitudes of sexism and racism, but overcome them they do. One of the compelling features of the book, in fact, is in how deftly it addresses contemporary social issues with the framing of the story.
I enjoyed this a lot, but I also feel that it reads a bit like the prequel to a more interesting book I’m yet to read. It feels like a lot of scene-setting without an equivalent amount of scene-stealing. It’s a confident first entry into a series I’m looking forward to exploring.
94 – Jade Legacy
Jade Legacy concludes the Green Bone saga with an absolutely flawless dismount. There isn’t a single week book in this trilogy, and I’d go so far as to say they don’t even have any real weak moments. This is the Godfather by way of Bruce Lee with a stopover at Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and it’s glorious. Brutal action scenes intercut with sophisticated political manoeuvring within a story about imperialism, isolationism, and the precarious independence of small nations that sit between larger power blocs.
In the earliest episode of the Sopranos, Tony says to his therapist ‘It’s good to get in on the ground floor of something. Increasingly though I feel like I came in at the end’. Jade Legacy has the poignancy of watching something noble and important pass from reality into history, on its way to becoming myth. It’s the melancholy transition from an age of warriors bound by rules of honour – even if we are basically talking about a bunch of Yakuza who ended up in House Asskick after a tense interaction with Hogwart’s Sorting Hat. It’s always been the privilege of the old to decry ‘kids today’, but the flow of modernity is corrosive. Few things survive a brush with exploitative capitalism and Jade Legacy – much as its title suggests – is about hanging on to tradition in the face of an ever more tenuous link between the present and the past. Things fall apart. The centre does not hold. And jade is too powerful for its ownership to be controlled forever.
I can’t really say too much about what happens since it builds its story upon a foundation made from about a thousand intricate pages through the previous novels in the series. Suffice to say it’s tense, it’s taut, and it ends with a catharsis that is simultaneously satisfying and saddening. Fonda Lee has done a remarkable job with these books.
95 The Sirens of Mars
This is a popular science book that feels like it’s been percolating in the bowels of a perpetually online influencer’s sea of self-obsession. On one hand, it’s a pretty good discussion of the search for Life on Mars. On the other, it’s also part memoir. Sadly, I don’t know the author. I haven’t heard of the author before I picked up this book. And, as a result, I don’t care about the author. All the biographical details was so much filler, constantly making me whine ‘When are we getting to the fireworks factory?’
I don’t mind a splash of biographical detail in a book. I really don’t. But I do have a deep aversion to biographies and memoirs for the most part. I make exceptions for biographies of remarkable people. Most people though don’t lead lives interesting enough to carry a memoir. It’s actually spectacularly arrogant of most people to write one, I think. One traumatic thing happens to them and they think that experience can carry a 300 page book.
Thankfully this book is only part memoir, but – apologies to the author for saying this – I don’t think her life is remotely as interesting as anything happening on or to Mars. I didn’t pick this up for a lengthy exploration of Sarah Johnson’s inspiration to take up her career. ‘Space is interesting’ is something I can accept without additional annotation. You know how people get annoyed when they just want a recipe for making some soup and they end up having to read about the author’s grandmother’s trip through Ellis Island? Yeah. I don’t want that. And that’s what this is.
The bits that are about Mars are interesting, and occasionally fascinating. They’re just swaddled in a self-indulgent biography that I never in a million years would have even begun to read on its own merits.