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A Wizard of Earthsea ★★★★☆
In my quest to clear out my bookshelf of items that had been gathering dust I started reading The Earthsea Quartet, a book that I had had for years. A Wizard of Earthsea, to start, is a fun and interesting deviation from other fantasy novels that I’ve read but I could also see tendrils of it and how it talked about magic in other things, especially little mini fictions and stories I’ve seen on Tumblr and the like. It also has the feeling of a series more than a single work, with vignettes that feel relatively discrete, but with an overarching shadow hanging over it. That is fitting for the folk-story air the book goes for as well though. I originally gave this a lower score but as I’m writing this I’m remembering more of the feeling I had reading it and warming to it all over again.
The Tombs of Atuan ★★★★★
Perhaps the reason I was going to give a lower rating to Wizard was because I wanted to emphasise how much I adored this, but that’s no reason to undersell the first book. After finishing this the previous book almost just felt like a stepping stone to this one. I love Tenar so much. I don’t even know what to say other than this book was almost overwhelming for me.
The Farthest Shore ★★☆☆☆
This is... it’s okay. I just can’t get over all the good and just king fantasy of it or the idea that death is good, actually. I can get behind rooting for monarchs in A Song of Ice and Fire for some reason but not here. Perhaps because it feels so much more uncomplicated? It doesn’t have the grime and politics of Martin’s fantasy and just feels like more old-fashioned fairytale, while also having a bit where Ged frees Arren from a slave ship but makes vague points about not going and doing anything against the institution of it.
I think Le Guin was starting to rankle against the limitations and ideals of her own setting here, which really starts to come out over the next few books. Ged as a more morally ambigious character does work from the perspective of Arren is part of the story though, and it does work extremely well sometimes. When he forcibly changes a woman true name it is horrific and alien, but he is sure that his is helping. That part sticks with me the most, and makes me question the nature of true names and what wizards do in this world.
Tehanu ★★★★☆
This continues to re-examine the series and the morals of wizards and what we’ve established before in a trend that I think is disastrous for the final two books, but here, where Le Guin drills down into the place of women in the world and the way people can wield and abuse power over others it is devastating. Tenar’s son’s treatment of her and how she blames herself for it is crushing. I bawled at multiple points.
And then post Earthsea Quartet...
Tales from Earthsea: ★★☆☆☆
And now the retcons start. There is good here but something hanging over a lot of these stories is that Le Guin has looked back over the world she defined and found it wanting, but instead of moving it forward she creates a prelapsarian past for it. Actually there were female wizards and everything on Roke was cooler before some guys got sexist about it. Actually the old powers aren’t dark and evil they are a more feminine side of things that has simply been repressed, undermining Tenar’s story quite a bit.
The Other Wind ★☆☆☆☆
Actually the Dry Lands are an afterlife, but one specifically the Hardic people have put as a yoke around themselves that we need to free them of. Honestly this sort of works, at least thematically, better than a lot of the other retcons, but if you’ve just come off reading the other books there are clear blatant contradictions in how true names are presented and work previously and how they are said to work here. And I just still can’t get onboard with the message that death is good. It is inevitable, it is something we have to live and deal with and accept, but I’m not going to be happy about it. A shame to end the series like this, but it also gave me two books I will absolutely not forget.
Spare and Found Parts ★★★☆☆
The Odyssey where Penelope is also Frankenstein set in post-apocalyptic Dublin. I didn’t like it as much as Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke but I did enjoy it.
Wild Geese ★★★☆☆
Decided I should read some books by and about trans women and why not start with an Irish one. I felt called out by it occasionally, which is a novel feeling for a book to elicit in me, but not an unwelcome one. The ending feels like it’s trying a bit too hard to be meaningful by throwing symbols at the wall for a bit before reality reasserts itself and we leave off melancholy, but maybe a little healed in some vague way.
Dracula Daily/Dracula in Istanbul/Powers of Darkness ?????
Hi I read three versions of Dracula this year for some reason. Actually four because I also read the comic adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie adaptation, but that’s for another post, perhaps.
Dracula, the original novel, is written in an epistolary format. Everything in it is meant to be writing that exists as diary entries, letters, and newspaper articles within the story itself. Dracula Daily is a newsletter that sends out the story day by day in chronological order matching the dates for each section of the novel. This is not the order they are presented in the original book and it’s not really the best way to read it, but it creates an interest community experience.
I read Dracula Daily in 2022 and returned to it this year, this time, along with a friend, also reading along with Dracula in Istanbul and Powers of Darkness, two different translations of the original novel that diverged from the original work heavily and then retranslated back into English.
Dracula in Istanbul was a Turkish translation that changed the plot so that instead of going to England, Dracula goes to, as you would expect from the title, Istanbul. The plot is mostly unchanged, but somewhat abridged and with the character of Renfield removed entirely and inserted instead a lot of Turkish nationalism. We get a history lesson on Vlad Dracul’s battles against the Ottoman Empire at one point. It is mostly the same book but it is interesting to see day-by-day the points of divergence.
Powers of Darkness is the Icelandic version. Unlike Istanbul it does not change Dracula’s destination, if you gave a brief summary of the novel it might sound more similar to the original that Istanbul would, but it is much, much diverged. Entire details and characters are made up whole cloth. In fact, Harker’s (Thomas rather than Jonathon) visit to Castle Dracula is much longer in this version that the original. And then entire rest of the book is barely there.
The translator, whose work was serialised in a newspaper rather than being published all at once, clearly got bored with the story after that and the entire rest of the novel reads like chapter summaries of a different book rather than a real story, while still making wild divergences from the original book. The opening section is three quarters again longer than the similar section from Dracula but the book as a whole is less than a third of the length of Dracula. Also Dracula in it is a social Darwinist libertarian cult leader? It’s wild
Also the guy who ran the Dracula Daily newsletter published it as a book with Tumblr posts and fan art from people who were following along in the margins and one of my posts made it in.
Grave Expectations ★★★☆☆
A murder mystery with the twist that the main character can see ghosts and because of this knows that someone has been murdered but not actually who the victim is, when it happened, or where the body is, and, in fact, has no proof that a murder even occurred.
Fight fall into the cozy crime category except instead of being about pensions the main cast is fairly young, one of them is a teenage ghost and one of them is nonbinary.
Nevada ★★★☆☆
Wow these people are a fucking mess lmao. I can see why this would hit hard for a lot of trans women but my background and experiences landed differently, in no small part just from my experiences being rural and urban Ireland, which I think is just very different to growing up or living in rural or suburban American or New York.
Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance ★★☆☆☆
I loved the movie but I am going to be honest I didn’t really get what Jeff VanderMeer was doing or saying here. I don’t really have much to say about any of these novels. I enjoyed them less as it went on, but never fully soured on them. They are compelling, even if by the end I didn’t feel I was compelled towards much of anything.
Eyes Guts Throat Bones ★★★★★
Read this. Now. A collection of short stories, all horror-ish in some way or other and all sapphic but very different from each other. I checked this out from the library on a whim after seeing it in a book shop and liking the cover and then went and bought my own copy as soon as I was done with it.
American Gods ★★★☆☆
There is no part of this book that I dislike but by far my favourites are just the interspersed short stories about the different gods coming to America rather than the main plot, which, again, isn’t bad either.
Empress of Forever ★★★☆☆
Journey to the West as a space opera. It took me a while to get over the main character being a tech genius CEO entrepreneur who invents the singularity but at least she gets sucked into the spacefuture and meets space pirate queen Sun Wukong fairly quickly and it managed to keep that pace going as eventually Vivian Liao learns not to create the torment nexus.
Also it’s just funny that the main character, who again singlehandedly invents the AI singularity at the start of the book, is compared in the official blurb to fucking Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as “inventors”.
Subcutanean ★★☆☆☆
First book I read from a recommendation due to Cohost. It’s okay. Didn’t really find it particularly creepy being honest.
Chase of the Wild Goose ★☆☆☆☆
A novelisation of the lives of two real upper-class Anglo-Irish women who eloped to Wales together in the 18th century. Very interesting premise, very boring book that is seems to be in admiration of upper-class propriety. Even the bit where the author meets the ghosts of the two women is somehow dull as dishwater. Do not expect two radical lesbians telling the system to get fucked.
Manhunt ★★★★☆
Swinging instead to testicle-eating post-apocalypse trans girls killing a murderous TERF army, why the fuck not?
The Dragon Republic ★★★☆☆
I got this as a Christmas preset and it turns out it’s actually the second book in a series but I enjoyed it regardless. Fantasy but based on modern Chinese history rather than medieval European.