It's been a good month, both in pace and average quality of what I've been reading. I find myself halfway through the year slightly ahead of pace to hit the 100 mark by the end of December, though I expect to have a little less time to read over the next few months.
Cumulative Total: 54 (+10)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
1024 pages, published 2004
My completion date: June 11
I read Piranesi a couple years ago, so I knew to have high expectations going in, but JS&MN still exceeded them. At its heart, it's a very skillful pastiche of Regency and Romantic novels while remaining 100% wondrous fantasy and at times feeling like the best sort of pop history. What's more, the genre evolves subtly over the course of the book in parallel to the time period of the setting (and the increasing stakes of the narrative), ending up downright Gothic out of a very reserved start as it becomes clear the narrative had been haunted the whole time.
Those broad strokes have a great deal of potential, but only in the characters is that potential realized. They're all half-likeable, whether as charming reprobates, cheery boors, or pessimistic philosophes, meaning they're always entertaining no matter where on the merry-go-round of ascendancy and despondency they sit. Add to that the couple of truly good and kind people caught in their mix and the potent seeds of adventure and tragedy are duly planted.
JS&MN has also had, without a doubt, an incredible influence on the genre: V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic books are clearly inspired by Clarke, and it's hard not to trace the influence in something like Babel, to name a few. Still, there's nothing quite like it for the simultaneous earnestness of the pastiche and majestic wonder normally reserved for high fantasy.
The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
This one was satisfying to both my pedant brain and story-enjoying brain. Bujold understands better than most the extent to which the politics and fundamental subsistence of premodern states were inextricably connected, which motivates many of the turns of the book even if never explicitly in focus. That frame contains a story that isn't extraordinary, but is a more than competent fantasy. It successfully lulls you into forgetting it's fantasy at all until a well-foreshadowed but still effectively jarring left turn halfway through.
Wizard and Glass, Stephen King
I've been making my way through the Dark Tower books this year, and Wizard and Glass is probably my favorite so far. In some ways it's the least bizarre of them: it's primarily pointed backwards into memory of a time that was more normal, rather than exploration of the increasing strange strangeness of the world, though the sections in the "present" are more than suitably strange. It's fascinating to see Roland's history and how inevitable it feels that he's ended up as the character he is in the time of the main story.
Least Favorite of the Month
Blood over Bright Haven, M.L. Wang
420 pages, published 2023
My completion date: June 4
The premise isn't bad, it's just ferociously heavy-handed. If you've read this sort of book before, it's pretty clear after chapter 2 or 3 how the whole story will play out. The picture it wants to paint about colonialism, gender, and power isn't bad or inaccurate, but it's certainly simplistic and is thinly veiled in ways that squander the strength of the medium to explore that space. Its framework is so closely parallel to the real world that the fantasy dressing weakens the critique, in my view ('twould be better to call a spade a spade and actually talk about the United States rather than its fantasy stand-in). My core take is that it's the orphan crushing machine - the kind of exaggerated caricature of the real world that can be useful for paragraph-length demonstrations, but falls flat at the scale of a novel.
It was the most egregious of the (unfortunate amount of) hetslop I've read recently, in that the core romantic relationship truly makes no sense for either participant.
Viewed solely as a fantasy novel, though, it's not bad. The mechanics of the fantasy are quite cool, and Wang approaches magic from a rigorously physical perspective that I think is underserved even in the realm of hard fantasy.
