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Double Reading Retreat - Part Two
Jul. 1st, 2025 02:25 pmFour more books read during my week-long reading retreat!
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older:
This is a sapphic murder mystery set on Jupiter, which sees two university lovers reunited to investigate a death. It's a bit overwritten, with very dense prose, a lot of unnecessarily complicated vocabulary and often quite torturously unnatural dialogue. And it focuses more on plot than character, which is not what I prefer. But I still quite enjoyed it because it raised some interesting ethical questions (the motivations of the bad guys were arguably justifiable, if not their methods) and I liked the viewpoint protagonist.
The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino:
The first of these novellas is about a suit of armour animated by some kind of personality, who has to go on a quest to defend his knighthood when it's suggested the maiden he rescued from brigands may not have been a virgin... It's a clever parody of medi-eval knighthood, but the women in the story don't get very good treatment or representation, which I guess is to be expected.
In the second novella, a Viscount is cut in half on the battlefield. One half is evil and the other half is virtuous, and they clash over their joint love of the same woman, while those living on their estate prove unhappy with both of them, as their extreme views don't lend themselves well to effective leadership. It was very grim at the start, but also very cleverly observed - and the female characters were much better than in the first novella.
Warrior: A Short Story Collection, edited by Antonica Eikli:
This has twelve very diverse, very queer speculative short stories, by different authors, which were all good, but some of which I enjoyed more than others. My favourite was Glass Bones, about a young woman trying to find a way to lift the 'curse' of her brother's brittle bone disease. Some were grim, some were depressing, some were uplifting, some were funny, some were sad - all had impact and all presented very different types of characters in interesting ways.
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich:
This is about a near future where it appears that evolution has started going backwards, so pregnant women are rounded up, confined and studied, and their babies taken away from them. Pregnant protagonist Cedar spends the book trying to avoid capture and protect her unborn child. The book is supposed to be a diary written by her and addressed to the child - so it suffers from the usual 'recorded document' problem of the fact that nobody writes direct actions and fully reported conversations in their diary! That aside, it's very well written with a very strong narrative voice. It dragged a bit at times - but that was in keeping with what was happening to Cedar at those points. It also ended very differently to how I expected, but not in an unsatisfying way.
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older:
This is a sapphic murder mystery set on Jupiter, which sees two university lovers reunited to investigate a death. It's a bit overwritten, with very dense prose, a lot of unnecessarily complicated vocabulary and often quite torturously unnatural dialogue. And it focuses more on plot than character, which is not what I prefer. But I still quite enjoyed it because it raised some interesting ethical questions (the motivations of the bad guys were arguably justifiable, if not their methods) and I liked the viewpoint protagonist.
The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino:
The first of these novellas is about a suit of armour animated by some kind of personality, who has to go on a quest to defend his knighthood when it's suggested the maiden he rescued from brigands may not have been a virgin... It's a clever parody of medi-eval knighthood, but the women in the story don't get very good treatment or representation, which I guess is to be expected.
In the second novella, a Viscount is cut in half on the battlefield. One half is evil and the other half is virtuous, and they clash over their joint love of the same woman, while those living on their estate prove unhappy with both of them, as their extreme views don't lend themselves well to effective leadership. It was very grim at the start, but also very cleverly observed - and the female characters were much better than in the first novella.
Warrior: A Short Story Collection, edited by Antonica Eikli:
This has twelve very diverse, very queer speculative short stories, by different authors, which were all good, but some of which I enjoyed more than others. My favourite was Glass Bones, about a young woman trying to find a way to lift the 'curse' of her brother's brittle bone disease. Some were grim, some were depressing, some were uplifting, some were funny, some were sad - all had impact and all presented very different types of characters in interesting ways.
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich:
This is about a near future where it appears that evolution has started going backwards, so pregnant women are rounded up, confined and studied, and their babies taken away from them. Pregnant protagonist Cedar spends the book trying to avoid capture and protect her unborn child. The book is supposed to be a diary written by her and addressed to the child - so it suffers from the usual 'recorded document' problem of the fact that nobody writes direct actions and fully reported conversations in their diary! That aside, it's very well written with a very strong narrative voice. It dragged a bit at times - but that was in keeping with what was happening to Cedar at those points. It also ended very differently to how I expected, but not in an unsatisfying way.
