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April

13 - The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling 14 - End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami 15 - City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett 16 - East of West: The Apocalypse, Year One by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

May

17 - Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle 18 - Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera 19 - The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine 20 - Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

June

21 - Cinder House by Freya Marske 22 - The Starlit Wood (ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) 23 - What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 24 - Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi 25 - The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar 26 - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky 27 - The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Picked this up because I generally like Vo’s work and the library happened to have a copy. Despite the high fantasy setting and aesthetics, it’s probably closer to her urban fantasy/magical 20th century works in tone and feel. Which is not at all a complaint – I genuinely enjoy those books, and I thoroughly enjoyed this as well.

Vitrine is a demon, though of the less malicious and more soft-hearted variety. The city of Azril is her beloved and her masterpiece, carefully and discreetly shaped over centuries from dilapidated pirate haven to glittering metropolis – wild and decadent and absolutely, positively teeming with every sort of delightful sin. So much so that some invisible line is crossed or limit breached – the book absolutely refuses to give an exact cause – and a choir of angels descends from on high to reduce it to a field of salt and ash. Helpless to stop them, Vitrine can at least put all her rage into a curse on a particularly unlucky angel, barring him from Heaven and trapping him in her orbit until she releases her hold. Something she’s often less than happy about, as she grieves amid the ruins for years on end. It’s only as generations pass, and through both their efforts something new begins to grow and flourish in the ruins of Old Azril, that her hatred begins giving way to something more ambiguous.

This is a shamelessly sentimental and introspective story, and a bit of a dreamlike one at that – it’s about Azril and the slow romance with the angel as well, but the heart and soul of the story is Vitrine and her emotions. Going by the afterword, this was written as a lockdown project and – while it was simultaneously the least obvious about it and by far the best of those I have yet read – it is not hard to see the feeling of the world collapsing beneath your feet and processing the losses in near-total isolation animating it.

As a dramatic, exaggerated study of grief, the book works very well. The mythic-feeling prose and register suits the tone and subject nicely, and Vitrine’s internal monologue is more emotionally affecting than the vast majority of things I’ve read recently. My only complaint is that I wish Vitrine had been allowed to be a bit uglier and less sympathetic in her wallowing. She’s tempted to lash out and do something cruel or destructive from despair or rage at the idea of old Azril being forgotten at several points, but the only really questionable things she does on the page are all directed at her angel. It feels a bit oddly squeamish, given how exaggerated the story’s emotional palette is and the fact that she’s literally a demon.

This is I suppose probably best called a romantasy novella? Because there is absolutely a slow-burn (insofar as it can be, given the page count) enemies-to-lovers angel-and-demon romance that makes up the spine of this book and is the core of its ending, but it’s still intertwined with a broader plot and only secondary so far as themes and emphasis go (the fact that Azril will always be Vitrine’s first and greatest love is even kind of key to the whole climax). Hardly my wheelhouse, but the romance more or less landed as far as emotional beats went, and was even compelling at points. I’m not quite sure where I land on the complete lack of any actual conversation about the whole city-destruction thing – in a sense it feels accurate that any sort of continuing relationship after one party’s horribly wounded another does involve talking around it and politely acting like you’ve forgotten after a point. But I do find it rather unsatisfying, especially insofar as you treat the angel as an actual character. Being an active participant in massacring (at minimum) tens of thousands is treated almost as a given for him, something he had no thoughts or feelings about and which occurred before he was any actual moral agent, but which he still inherited the moral debt for. You could do something where angels really are divine automata and it’s only Vitrine’s curse that made him a person, but the book doesn’t, really, and the result feels superficial.

The other way it tracks that this was a pandemic book is that its dearly in love with crowds, cities, festivals, and the great heaving mess of humanity in general. The actual meat of the narrative is a twinned history of Azril, both it’s first rise to greatness and the new city which grows up in the ruins of the old. The snapshots of each city we get across the generations are more tourist guide than urban planning study, but I am one of roughly ten people in the world who think ‘fantasy city urban planning case study’ sounds like a fun read so I can hardly blame the book for that. Those snapshots are vivid and compelling, and do an excellent job selling a living (or dying) city that you could easily fall in love with.

This was my nonfiction book for May, and one I’ve been looking forward to for some time. I mostly know Wyman as a podcaster, but he’s a good podcaster and I would consider myself a fan, and his last book (The Verge) is probably one of the best pop-histories I’ve ever read. Lost Worlds doesn’t reach those same heights – by turns overambitious and a bit hindered by choices of format and framing – but that really just means it’s only very good instead of excellent.

The book claims an incredibly broad scope for itself, stretching across almost a myriad of years from the end of the last Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse near the end of the second millennium BCE. This is in Wyman’s telling the foundational period in which humanity began developing the technologies and modes of organization (agriculture and animal husbandry, cities and villages, states and religions, etc) which framed and set the terms for everything that followed and for the ever-compounding complexity that defines both our modern world and whatever it will develop into.

Specifically, Wyman positions the book as a counterargument against the received grand narrative of just how this occurred, the linear and schematic rise of agriculture, villages and hierarchical states in the Fertile Crescent and China (plus one or two tardy or stillborn other examples). Ideas and technologies which then spread across and conquered a primitive world. Wyman’s thesis is that the Meso- and Neolithic world (let alone the Bronze Age) was far busier and more complicated than that, and that the package of ‘civilization’ inherited from Mesopotamia, Egypt and northern China isn’t much of a package at all, with ‘pristine’ sites of development containing different combinations of the qualities and signs of social complexity bundled together in it appearing all over the world. Drawing from case studies across the globe, he makes as strong a case as he can to discard the teleology that most (probably inevitably) bring to the period, and argue that nothing about what we tend to locate as the actors and protagonists of (pre-)history was unique or even uniquely impressive – that similar things were tried and failed utterly, and that different modes of organization achieved results just as great for centuries at a time. It’s only looking back from millennia later, when both structural advantages and a great deal of contingency and chance have left Uruk and Anyang the meta-cultural ancestors of basically every aspect of global human civilization, that they seem inevitably victorious or in any way the most important sites of their eras.

As mentioned, I’m a regular listener to Wyman’s podcasts (currently Past Lives), which I feel may actually have damaged the experience of reading the book. Unsurprisingly (given what he’s been spending his time researching), the current season is about paleopathology and what we can learn from prehistoric remains from the dead and the culture they hailed from. Beyond the general thematic overlap, a lot of the book is dedicated to case studies that have also been the subject of an episode of the show, and cover essentially the same information in a very similar lens. At least a few times (especially with chapter introductions and conclusions) I’m pretty sure the book text is just an edited version of the podcast script (or vice versa). Which isn’t any sort of ethical issue – they’re both his work, obviously – but does make at least a few sections in every chapter end up feeling redundant to me personally.

I can’t confidently blame this on the same thing, but I suspect one of my bigger structural gripes with the book has the same origin. Each chapter feels a bit as if it’s an essay or episode of its own, to be read at some remove from what came before and after – or, at least, that’s the explanation my mind jumps to. Whatever the reason, the introductory and concluding text for each clearly and explicitly restating the thesis of the book for a page or two in every one might have some didactic value but when you’re reading this in a short stretch it gets old. An unfortunate fraction of the reading experience was spent going “okay I get it already!”

This would be less of an acute issue if the book wasn’t already far too short for its subject matter. To be fair, it never claims to be a definitive survey of late prehistory, and clearly positions itself as being more a corrective to the existing popular narrative than providing anything but the broadest strokes of a replacement for it. Still – the world is very big and 10,000 years is an absolutely indescribably long time. Even fitting a couple handfuls of the most prominent and well-researched sites and cultures to exist during it requires draconian limitations on how much time can be spent with any given case study, let alone the neighbours and rivals mentioned offhand in relation to them. The result is that many of the book’s case studies feel a bit perfunctory, a few pages of interesting introduction just crying out for more detail (or, at least, a further reading section at the end of every chapter).

So, having spent the last 500 words complaining, allow me to clarify that this is in fact a very good book. Even being entirely up to date with Wyman’s other work, there was plenty here that was entirely new to me and fascinating discussions of the food production complexes that emerged in different areas and how they supported (or necessitated) the societies which relied upon them. The book takes a mildly Pollyanna-ish perspective on several of the examples of different models of ‘civilization’ it discusses, but that’s easy enough to look past and the actual content is reliably interesting – I certainly know far more about a lot of Neolithic and Bronze Age societies than I did before reading this (such as that they existed), and the broader discussion of human development and migration and the (incredibly relative) explosion of population growth and social complexity as the climate shifted after the last Glacial Maximum and (moreso, and more consequentially) the Younger Dryas cold spell.

Beyond the thoroughly reiterated thesis of the whole book, there were a few conceptual takeaways that have now thoroughly lodged themselves in my brain. The line drawn between the (roughly contemporaneous) intensive expansion/development of the first traditional and fully-formed states in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley and the extensive expansion/development of the (proto-)Indo-Europeans across the Eurasian Steppe and the (proto-)Polynesians across the Pacific, especially. Four different examples of novel technologies and modes of social organization being used to increase a given region’s carrying capacity by orders of magnitude, and in so doing shape the course of human history, all beginning within a few centuries of one another.

Running through all of this – through basically every paragraph – is the book’s other unifying thesis: archaeology and especially paleopathology are incredibly amazingly cool, and the past couple of decades have given them one revolutionary advance after another. Our ability to analyze the artifacts and physical remains of people who died millennia ago is so advanced and in-depth it verges on necromancy. A mummified body gives us their age and cause of death and whatever other injuries they might have had, sure – but also how generally healthy they were, where they grew up, how often they travelled in their life, what they had been eating for the period before they died. The revelations to be wrung from ruins and buried villages are scarcely less impressive. Wyman is clearly a bit awe-struck and deeply enamoured of the potential of all this, with numerous lengthy digressions into the exact tools and techniques used to glean this or that piece of information. It’s hard to blame him.

The structural experiment jumping across the timeline for the eleven scenes is blunt and clunky, but also does serve a real purpose in terms of resolving all the running plots in an order that carries some momentum and thematic cohesion.

Which could really have been avoided entirely by just actually resolving any of these half-dozen threads and character arcs before the finale. You really don't need to do them all at once! Especially when you're splitting reader attention between so many side-villains with them all. The resolution to the lenslight plot works but felt very rushed and unearned, and to a lesser extent the same thing's true of how Morcant was dealt with (a shame, because it's a very cool beat in theory).

(The student association scene worked really well by contrast, just because it felt like there was enough groundwork for it laid.)

Every month, I try to read one book that is one of a) written before the turn of the millennium, b) in translation or at least c) written and published in a different cultural and commercial context than the vague Anglo-American ‘international standard’ morass. This is partially out of a vague drive towards self-improvement, and partially because this is a great way to read some real gems I’d never have heard about or gotten around to otherwise. The Mayor of Casterbridge is not one of those. I am truthfully not sure how it ended up on my TBR list – it’s been at least a year or two since it was added – but it’s not like it’s a work I can really recall ever having heard of before. For good reason, as it turns out. Some consolation can be found reading it as a historical text and primary source, but mostly it was just a big heap of wasted time.

Originally written and published as a serial in the latter 1800s, the book follows the turbulent life of the eponymous mayor, one Michael Henchard, and his household. Which is far more melodramatic than you might expect the affairs of a wheat-merchant and small-town notable to be, beginning as it does with him at 21 drunkenly selling his unhappy wife to a sailor at a market fair. The resulting shame makes him swear off liquor for twenty years, and instead dedicate himself to diligent industry. Well over a decade later, he is a wealthy merchant and a mayor, and on one eventful night his long-lost wife and his almost forgotten daughter arrive in Casterbridge, seeking a safe haven after the sailor was lost at sea. Michael welcomes them back, especially when he realizes that his daughter does not know of his great sin and thinks him some distant relation by marriage to her mother. What follows are several years of what’s hard to summarize except things happening – ruin, redemption, romance, one unlikely episode after another, and most of all an achingly detailed and vibrant world for it all to take place in.

If the extensive foreword and prelude by the folks at Oxford World Classics are to be believed, Casterbridge is quite transparently based on Hardy’s home town, down to the geography and architecture. If so, this is quite the remarkable guidebook to how such towns in England’s rural southwest were laid out and functioned in the period. No detail is spared when describing environments or the rhythms and routines of everyday public life. The town and populace of Casterbridge are both more sharply drawn and more compelling as characters than several key actors in the narrative. In painting a vivid picture of how a place like Casterbridge functioned and what it was like to live there (at least for the classes Hardy considers humans and not a sort of mildly malevolent goblin – which is to say I have some doubts about the accuracy of his idea of lower-class life), it’s actually both informative and even pretty interesting.

It’s just not a great sign for a melodrama when the most interesting parts are the exposition about how modern townsfolk now used the old Roman amphitheatre just outside of it. The actual plot is less one coherent narrative than a long string of overlapping episodes, the seams of being first written and published as a serial often painfully obvious. The general gist of it is Michael slowly being humiliated and undone by the weaknesses of his own character and his poorly treated daughter and the diligent striver of a Scot he hires as a manager needing to find their ways in life, with and despite the elder generation’s help and ‘help’.

It is also to no small degree a character study of Michael, who is deftly drawn and comes across as a very real (if mildly exaggerated and more melodramatic than usual) kind of guy. An insufferable ass on several fronts, but of a type that has continued to thrive up to the modern day. The rest of the cast fairs less well, rarely growing much more complicated than or really developing beyond the personality and character they are introduced with. Which is something of the underlying theme of the whole story – there’s a fundamental core to you, it might be messy and conflicted and self-contradictory but it’s never going to change, and in the end the exigencies of life will balance out and it is that character which will determine how you live and how you die.

This is also just a relentlessly and unselfconsciously Victorian book. I’ve heard it said that to get a sense of a culture’s self-conception it’s better to study its mediocre and commercial art than the work of its geniuses and savants. The former will give you a much clearer picture of the common sense and worldviews actually common among (at least) the creative classes and their audience. The Mayor of Casterbridge seems a fine example of this.

I won’t type away my fingers going over too many examples of how, but for one – I can’t say this is the most sexist book I’ve ever read, but it’s certainly sexist in a very distinct way. Three of the book’s five really narratively significant characters are women, and the book views all of them on a strict scale from condescending approval to contempt. It doesn’t hate women, or really hold much anger or malice towards them at all, but it is simply taken for granted that they are a simpler and more fragile form of life than men and that attaching themselves to a good one is really the only great aspiration any of them should (or indeed does) have. And one of the three really does faint and then shortly after die after from a shock and social humiliation, which I hadn’t previously realize actually happened in Victorian literature and wasn’t just a hyperbolic cliche describing it.

One unexpected point of interest was the extensive foreword written by the Oxford World Classics people about the process of actually assembling this edition of the text, which required going into some detail about its publication history and how both minor word choices and whole chapters and subplots changed between print runs, as well as the number of unintended errors which slipped through seemingly every time a new run was set. I did not even slightly appreciate how fraught the whole business was, or how difficult keeping a book consistent across multiple editions was in the analogue era. Fun and unexpected bits of trivia, anyway.