96 – SPQR
Man, this sure is a book that delves deeply into a topic I almost entirely forgot as soon as the page flitted before my eyes. Mary Beard writes well and manages to build an entertaining book around some truly remarkable scholarship. But also I don’t remember a single thing I read.
SPQR strikes me as the kind of book you keep on your shelves because you want to be able to reference it. Perhaps people smarter than me can hold the narrative of the book in their heads, but personally I can’t tell my Ciceros from my Aureliuses. The history of Rome is so full of rich and interesting characters that it is weird that I can’t hold any of them, even briefly, in mind.
Still, I did pick up a fair bit of context about Roman history – the power of the plutocrats, and the bribe of citizenship. The spectacular wealth of the political class versus the austerity of the slaves. I learned a lot about origin myths and the political intricacies of the time. And I was surprised just how ‘modern’ the city of ancient Rome was. Or rather, how antiquated much of our modern view of liberty really is.
Still, if you asked me to name a single senator discussed in this book, I’d have to pass.
97 – The Astronauts Wives Club
I didn’t hate this book, but I have to say I did find it something of a whiny chore. Covering a lot of the same territory as Rise of the Rocket Girls and Hidden Figures, it shifts the perspective away from the forgotten geniuses to the forgotten wives. I don’t know if this was the intention of the book, but these wives don’t come across as the supportive rocks of the space race. They come across as money-grubbing and status-obsessed scolds. The older generation is cliquey and unwelcoming to newcomers, largely because as new astronauts become nationally prominent it cuts into the pool of money and attention for the wives of the others. They’re enablers (admittedly, not something that can be held too much against them given the mores of the time) allowing a bunch of occasionally terrible men to hide behind the façade of decency represented by a supporting, loving home life.
I say I don’t know if this was the intention of the book, but really I know it wasn’t – I don’t expect anyone goes into the writing of a book like this, with the breezy tone of the text, with the intention of presenting the unvarnished truth of its subjects. It feels like a piece of light entertainment that is at odds with the tone, if not the presentation, of the book itself. Imagine if you sent a fashion correspondent from Grazia to report on the atrocities of the Gaza strip – someone that seemingly had no grasp on the meaning of the conflict but insisted on presenting it as light entertainment. The Astronauts Wives Club felt a lot like that to me.
To be fair, it’s not a terrible book. But if you’ve already read Rise of the Rocket Girls and Hidden Figures then you can pretty safely skip this one. And if you haven’t read those instead.
98 – Circe
I liked the Song of Achilles, although I felt that – like many books of this nature – it would have benefited from an original premise rather than plundering and distorting the source material. It was a good enough book though that Madeline Miller went onto the list of authors I would dig more into for the future. Circe followed, and I loved it.
As part of my ‘100 books by women authors’ projects, I read a weirdly large proportion of books about the siege of Troy and the wider tropes of Greek mythology. I don’t know why it was so fashionable, but looking through my list of books from 2023 I can see that it was about 10% of all the books I read, and by the time I was done I was pretty much exhausted with the whole topic. Circe is a welcome relief though because it centralises a character that is only peripheral in the whole Trojan saga. Odysseus, upon leaving Troy for Ithica, is waylaid along the way and put through many trials. One of them is his encounter with Circe, and it’s her history and life that is the core of the book. The Odyssey is a peripheral tale to the Siege of Troy, and Odysseus himself is only a peripheral character in the life of Circe. It makes for a tale that is refreshing even if it can’t escape the fringes of the gravity of modern fiction. Sure, it’s about Greek mythology. Yes, it’s a ‘feminist retelling’ in the style of all the other books. But it actually fulfils the promise set by A Thousand Ships all the way at the start of the project – it offers a perspective that is illuminating, and uplifts the narrative of a character that is only really portrayed as selfish and villainous in the original tales.
I really enjoyed Circe.
99 – The Just City
You may remember that Among Others was one of the books I read to which I gave a favourable review. The Just City is by the same author, and… yeah.
One of the elements of Among Others I didn’t like was that it constantly seems to be showing off its author’s familiarity with the titans of classical science-fiction. It’s a book that feels like it’s farming similar territory to things like Ready Player One – it’s trying to endear itself to you by stoking fires of familiarity so that you get a little glow of ‘feeling seen’. The Just City is exactly the same except it is doing it with Greek philosophy, and it is unwilling to trust that you know anything about the subject. It’s constructed like a Socratic dialog, except without the weight of history behind it. As such, it comes across as pompously didactic, with ponderously, self-satisfied exposition taking the place of anything as accessible as a plot, or as relatable as characterization.
The premise itself isn’t actually bad – the Gods of Olympus bring together great philosophers and thinkers in an attempt to create, in the ‘real world’, a version of Plato’s Republic. I can imagine a book that actually does that well – a deconstruction of the inapplicability of thought experiments to real world complexity. That’s not what this book is though – it’s almost unthinking in its commentary upon Plato and his ideas.
At the core of neoliberal economics is a strong sense of faith in the markets. If markets fail to operate perfectly, it’s because something is stopping them doing so. The solution to all economic problems is to deregulate. Just believe harder, goddamit, it’ll all work out. There is no injustice, and no economic catastrophe, so large that it cannot be solved by removing all the constraints and protections built into government regulation.
The participants in The Just City feel like economic fundamentalists in that sense, in that all the flaws and imperfections in the Just City are perceived to be a result of insufficient piety to the principles of Plato. The Just City is pitched as a science experiment, but one in which the conclusions are already set in stone because how could someone as wise as Plato be wrong? And as the edifices are constructed and their foundations are revealed to be shaky, at no point do any of these ‘best and brightest’ of history say ‘You know what, maybe Plato was full of shit.’
It’s an odiously smug book and I don’t think it’s worth your time.
100 – Ancillary Mercy
Ancillary Mercy is a very good conclusion to a trilogy that is rocky both in structure and in style. Like the other books it is written in an intentionally opaque manner that makes it difficult to follow parts of the narrative, but by this stage in the trilogy one has to assume the reader has made their peace with it. It brings the arc to a meaningful conclusion, and as such if you made it through the first two this is must-read.
But…
I did like this trilogy of books, but honestly I don’t really feel as if it’s quite up to the reputation it has. It has plenty of ambition, but the relative intimacy of the plot feels claustrophobic. I compare the series every so often to the Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine because they cover very similar themes but Martine’s books do it much more elegantly. The Imperial Radch books, of which Ancillary Mercy is one, create the context for a sweeping, complex political saga and in the end focus the story so tightly on one tiny corner of the universe that they feel myopic and inconsequential.
When I first heard about the many-worlds interpretation of the infinite universes theory many, many years ago, I felt such a profound sense of disempowerment that it knocked me out of action for a while. If the universe branches every time a particle interacts with its environment, then every possible outcome of every possible situation happened, in which case our choices – in a universal sense – mean nothing. Sure, you rescued that drowning puppy but in a universe right next door to this one you didn’t do a damn thing. I feel the same way when contemplating the possibility of an infinite universe. Infinity does weird things to the human mind – people have gone mad studying it. People sometimes talk about the idea of ‘an infinite number of monkeys working at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the work of Shakespeare’, as if that’s something remarkable. No, that’s nothing because in fact they’re producing infinite flawless copies of Shakespeare, and they’re doing it immediately. In an infinite universe, there is someone who looks exactly like you, orbiting a sun exactly like ours, on a planet indistinguishable to ours in every respect. And they’re doing the exact same thing you’re doing now.
And that doppleganger is only one of an infinite multitude – mirrors reflecting mirrors all the way into insanity. Monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare? Mate, that doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. On any of us.
That’s quite a digression, so let me bring it back to the topic of this book. Some books feel like they’re placing you in one of the more consequential positions in a story. They make you feel like you’re meaningfully connected to the action. The Imperial Radch books don’t feel like that for me – they feel like of all the infinite universes to which my attention could have been focused, I was given a ring-side seat for one of the least impactful ones. The setup for these books is marvellous. The actuality of the story is like being told of the downfall of society from the perspective of one service station on a little-traversed road of an unnumbered motorway. The leg of the trousers of time into which I am being stuffed feels inconsequential when set against the breadth of the premise.
I say inconsequential, but I stress that’s not the same thing as uninteresting. The books are well worth your time.