#vorkosigans

colour code

blue: all new reads

pink: all rereads

orange: non-white authors

green: country deep dive (authors from Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora)

120 (reread): Brothers in Arms - Lois McMaster Bujold. I reread this pretty regularly despite the plot not being as chunky as installments either side (wild that it was published before TVG, early vk publication order is such a time) because it is such an early turning point in characterisation and themes. My best beloved Ivan is still early in the character development, but my other best beloved Duv is a gem from the outset; the lightbulb conversation remains one of the best extended scenes in the whole series (Miles, what have you done with your baby brother?), but I also love Miles’ first conversation with Mark so so much. choose again, and change.

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121 (reread): Superior: The Return of Race Science - Angela Saini. Picked this back up due to [gestures vaguely at everything] - I previously thought I’d only ever got halfway in, but based on my ebook annotations I did actually finish it soon after it came out. anyway, it’s still very good - mostly on the combination of some academics who never quite broke away from eugenics/scientific racism and the rising-again wave of white nationalism, though also a chapter and a half on politicised research in India for Hindutva mobilisation. A lot of scientific and historical detail but also just a really thoughtful, sometimes personal, examination of how ideology and science mix and where some of the motivated reasoning comes from.

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122: The Legacy of Arniston House - T. L. Huchu. back on my bullshit in the readthrough! I am engrossed in these enough that I’m still noticing some structural issues - this book has big shakeups of character loyalties and it would have been more satisfying and feel like more confident plotting if Ropa were mistaken about anyone’s intentions for more than a few pages each, and there are several potential shadowy Big Bads mentioned in the last few books while being v light on direct encounters - but enjoying the ride anyway. and this one does answer some questions I’d had for a while!

125: Secrets of the First School - T. L. Huchu. was going to wait a bit to finish this series but the previous ended on a cliffhanger, boo. I really did enjoy these and will miss reading through them, but am glad they had a planned and finite run! still have a few notes on pacing, but a great cast of characters. would still have been improved with an epilogue a few years later when Ropa and Priya just date already. get to it, girls!

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123: I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are - Rachel Bloom. This was fine! No, I actually enjoyed it a lot, though largely because I love her comedy - I used to read a lot more comedian memoirs-in-essays and have less time now for the form. Unsurprisingly I most liked the bits about OCD and about behind the scenes of CXG, it gets very affecting at the end. Unusually for me, I would probably have enjoyed it more as an audiobook, I am sure the narration would work really well with her actually reading it.

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124: Homeward Bound - Hamza Yassin. Picked this up after we watched his (excellent) Hidden Wild Isles BBC series - this is similarly charming, though I have to say I didn’t entirely vibe with the writing style. It’s written for adult audiences, but has a very deliberately conversational tone that’s clearly intended to break up some fairly detailed ecological discussion, and probably works for a lot of readers, but which I mostly just found intrusive and distracting. However. He seems lovely and this has a very nice structure, organised by different habitats very roughly south-to-north up to the Highlands.

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126: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? - Temi Oh. I zipped through this very quickly for a relatively long sf novel because it is so absorbing even before the tension in the mission mounts. sometimes to the point of wondering how anyone ever passed psych screenings but that is hinted at later on; a really fascinating book, especially as a debut. Unexpectedly it reminded me a bit of Never Let Me Go, both as a novel focusing on teenage characters but not specifically written as YA, and for the general sense of tension and melancholy - in a very different way, but there’s also an emphasis here on how characters have sacrificed their youth.

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127 (reread): Thief! - Malorie Blackman. I am a little too old to count the better known Noughts + Crosses for this bingo fill - having read that at ~14-15 - but I fucking loved her earlier kids books in primary school and this one in particular. though I really only remembered the first third or so of it, which already goes fairly hard as a bullying story and then takes a science fictional wild swerve. Honestly a really great book I would still give to kids of my acquaintance, slightly wrong-footed both that we’re now only 6-7 years off the dystopian future in the isekai timeline and that I think the text of this must have been partly updated since it was published (there’s a reference to a 1995 school having a DVD player, at around the time the technology was first invented but at least 7-10 years before any UK schools would switch over from VHS. but the other period-typical technology references are left intact. weird choice!)

bingo square: reread a childhood favourite

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128: Numbers in the Dark - Italo Calvino (tr. Tim Parks). this short story collection has been kind of my white whale this year - it’s technically well written and I enjoyed reading a few stories every time I remembered to pick it up, but I also suspect that if I’d been more into it it would have taken less than six months to finish. I think the fact that they’re *such* short stories didn’t help, most of them are just a few pages and often written as fables, so there’s not much to get into in terms of characters (and tbh, some of the writing of women or m/f relationships is very uh generic cishet literary man). there was also a lot I found really beautifully written, though.

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129: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon - Wole Talabi. impressively propulsive heist thriller/mythic fantasy, about a minor orisha as precarious worker caught in the middle of a hostile takeover of his Spirit Company board, and one of the most fun takes I’ve read in forever on divinity-as-a-job. I did like the complexity of Nneoma and Shigidi’s relationship but felt like she never got enough characterisation in the present day sections beyond “sex demon” - she’s the oldest of the major characters and says she’s older than magic(k)! you get flashes of that backstory and the perspective it brings but really frustratingly little! The nonlinear timeline worked very well, though, and I was honestly gripped from the very first page.

bingo square: fantasy

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130 (reread): The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper. Reread book 1 back in April and queued this up to read over the solstice, natch. Such a step up - I’m fairly sceptical of binary light-vs-dark chosen one fantasy narratives (I appreciate I say this as a star wars fan lmao) but this is so conscious about it that it works as something primal and dreamlike. and I love how connected it is to the land and the seasons and old things that go beyond human societies. speaking of, fascinating semi-interrogated conceptual worldbuilding where most of the main characters are devout Anglicans but all the relevant powers in the story are far older and more powerful. genuinely don’t remember how many of the subsequent books I read as a kid but will probably dip back in next year.

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131: Hungry Ghosts - Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose. Got this horror anthology comic on request as a present for my sister’s partner and had a careful sneaky readthrough first. Not necessarily something I would have gone for myself - it’s heavy on body horror - but a cool concept themed around food and Japanese yōkai. Can't really speak to how well it conveyed any of the folkloric themes that inspired it, but it has some research notes and sources at the end I want to check out. None of the stories stood out massively for me but I did enjoy the art, and it comes with bonus Bourdain recipes!

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132: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. counting this as a first read even though I have definitely read some parts of it before and read a lot about it? I don’t read much pre-c19th (pre-1920s, if I’m honest) so it’s always an interesting exercise in what I knew about a book vs the actual experience of reading it. Partly that I forgot how much of it describes life post-enslavement, though obviously still deeply entangled with the system of slavery and racism. also how young he was - probably 20-21 when he bought his freedom, and >90% of the book is about the first 30 years of his life. just a very interesting read on many fronts, including as a travel and religious narrative!

I don’t normally post external sources here beyond reviews, but this description by David Olusoga is a really nice illustration of why it is interesting and important:

bingo square: published before 1950 (I really struggled to think how to fill this for the 🇳🇬 version of the card because so little literature is available in English, but he is largely believed to be born in southern Nigeria - I know there’s some controversy about the historical record on this, IANA historian, but I figure even if this part of the memoir was fictionalised it would likely have been drawing on family history. not gonna solve that one in a book log anyway.)

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133: Rosewater - Tade Thompson. this has been on my list for yearrrsss and I finally squeaked it into the last few days of the year, and loved it. So glad there’s a whole trilogy! a fun reading experience of periodically wondering “I wonder what this implies about…” and getting breadcrumbs a few chapters later that indicated the author was also thinking about these things, albeit not giving all the answers right now. only caveat is that the nonlinear structure was clever, but I’m not sure switching between time periods pretty much every chapter added much to it - I might personally have prefered them to be grouped into chunks, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also a side note, but I loooove that the alien dome is in Maiduguri! I have many beloved books set in Lagos but sometimes you would think when reading that that was the only part of Nigeria anything ever happened.)