september 2025 reading roundup
Oct. 25th, 2025 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanel
Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan #2) (2025) I’ve probably reached a saturation point with this series (it’s only been two books). The mystery is adroitly constructed, but I don’t feel like Bennett has much to say about empire, even though this installment takes place in a colonial satrapy whose absorption into the empire is imminent. This is the part that Bennett captures well: ordinary people are imbued with uncertainty because where there is regime change there are always winners and losers. What is lacking is any coherent thesis about what the empire itself stands for, or how the reader should feel about it. You can valorize the empire or you can assail it (the inclination of most contemporary SFF) but what you cannot do is evade the question. Oh, and to return to the plot, the book’s main antagonist— Ana’s archnemesis, the Moriarty to her Holmes— is built up to be a criminal mastermind and he is just not that interesting. Bennett is adamant that the divine right of kings is dumb, and I don’t disagree with him, but I have to wonder, who in this room really needs to hear that? I am not sorry I read this but I’m unlikely to continue with the series.
Robinne Lee, The Idea of You (2017) When they cast the 2024 film adaptation the discourse was IS ANNE HATHAWAY TOO HOT FOR THIS ROLE? I put it to you, if Harry Styles were twenty years old and still in One Direction and he were to fall for a forty-year-old MILF, could you imagine him going for anyone less than smoking hot? Absurd. So, Solène Marchand owns an art gallery. Her ex-husband has acquired backstage passes for their teenage daughter to meet the boyband she idolizes. Ex-husband flakes, leaving Solène holding the bag. Nobody in this book has ever worried about money—which is as it should be. The allure is it’s straight-up escapist fantasy for hetero ladies between 30 and 50. It’s an incredibly horny book but what surprised me was how much it has to say about the darker side of celebrity, and hierarchies of taste when it comes to art, and being a second-gen immigrant.
It would have been easy to make Solène’s ex the bad guy. I mean, he left her for a woman ten years younger! He admires her beauty and her brains but he’s never been all that interested in her, as a person, the way her boyish new paramour is. But it becomes clear that Sòlene herself shares many of her ex’s preoccupations with keeping up appearances. I found Hayes, the Harry Styles analog, with his floppy hair and his “you could bottle this and sell it” charisma and his abject devotion to Solène, captivating. He learns enough about art to impress her colleagues at dinner (these are bourgeois middle-aged folks who don’t follow pop music and have no idea how famous Hayes is). What this book needed, however, was less Art Criticism 101 and more of a role for Solène’s daughter, Isabelle.Solène doesn’t have to choose between Hayes and art curation, she has to choose between Hayes and the way being with him paints a target on Isabelle’s back. What do you think they’re saying over at Isabelle’s school about her mom’s relationship with a celebrity twenty years her junior?
Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands (2017) Do you want to read a fantasy where the existence of child soldiers is totally, categorically morally suspect? Welcome to Border Camp! Elliot Shaefer has a smart mouth and a strong set of pacifist convictions. He instantly befriends the two most martially inclined kids at camp, Serene and Luke. They forge a golden troublemaking trio and hijinks ensue. If you, like me, have ever been a precocious child who reads well above grade level you will identify easily with Elliot, and it is only later that you will detect the trauma concealed beneath his weapons-grade snark. During school break he goes home and we meet his dad and I’m like “ohhh, this is emotional abuse.” Previously it had not occurred to me to wonder how a thirteen-year-old slips through a portal into a fantasy land and no one either 1) files a missing persons report or 2) shows up to move him into his new dorm. Anyway, Elliot is very smart but very bad at separating the structural from the personal and when to privilege which. This is how he ends up hurting his friends. I appreciate that Elliot gets to experience the whole gamut of romantic relationships, from casual hookup (you’re an ass and that was a mistake) to casual hookup (you’re cool but we’re not right for each other) to true love. I did grow weary, by the end, of the elves’ reverse sexism; the first few instances held up a mirror to our own sexist society but by the 200th instance I was done. Plus, I have never before found it a chore to finish a Sarah Rees Brennan book. I adore the central trio of characters but it read more like a serialized tale than a novel with a beginning, middle and end. This book will make you want to do two things: watch Leverage (2008-2012) for the teamwork and read The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) for the little shit of a child protagonist.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories (2022) (tr. from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz) I don’t know how she does it but Lahiri plants a fishhook in me at the beginning of every. Single. Story. Seriously impressive, this is the literariest of fictions, there is basically nil happening plotwise. I got the texture of Rome as a place, and the voyeuristic tingle of peering through a dirty window at other people’s lives. Many of Lahiri’s characters are marginalized people, immigrant housekeepers and the like, but she has plenty of compassion for the more privileged ones too, ie. the expat housewife who’s dreading a big surgery. She’s so good at sketching the emotional chasm that opens up between empty nesters and their grown children, although I could wish she was a little less interested in infidelity lol. These are backwards-looking narratives that give you that palimpset feeling like you’re sorting through a sheaf of memories. It’s been a long time since I read Interpreter of Maladies (1999) or The Namesake (2003) and I am glad to find Lahiri still has it. Fun fact: she wrote this collection in Italian (a language she only began studying as an adult) before she translated it into English, because some people like to live life on hard mode…
Jane Harper, The Survivors (2020) This was fine but it was not the same caliber as The Lost Man (2018), which was my number one read of last year. I was poleaxed by that book, and it was perhaps unfair to come into this one expecting Harper to pull off the same trick. I’m not even a big mystery/thriller reader! Harper continues to excel at the placeness of place--this one is set in a small coastal town tyrannized, physically and spiritually, by the sea. She tackles the recurring theme of how to be a “good” man when we live in a culture of casual violence against women. Sure it doesn’t usually end in a woman getting murdered but Harper forces us to confront how easy is it for a man, a completely average man, to ignore off-color jokes and low-level harassment and abuse directed against the women in his life.
Timothy Zahn, The Icarus Job (Icarus Saga #3) (2024) A neat puzzlebox of a mystery with very little soul. We’re mostly in space, jetting around to planets whose names I couldn’t keep track of. Our smuggler protagonist takes on a job that turns out to be much less straightforward than it seems; there’s assassins and there’s enigmatic alien artifacts; but I could not have cared less about what happened to any of these characters. Excuse me while I go reread Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (1991-1993) for the fortieth time.
Paul McAuley, Pasquale’s Angel (1994) An alternate history of Renaissance Florence that is cinematic in its chase scenes, raunchy in its bawdy jokes, and geometric in its symmetry. I have never been so invested in woodcuts vs copperplate engravings! There is this sense of standing on some hinge of history, like I wandered into a slightly off-kilter dream in which Leonardo Da Vinci invented… what kind of superweapon that sunk half the Spanish fleet in Mesoamerica?! Natural philosophers who will not use their real names in case demons should learn them: quacks, or merely prudent practitioners of science? Enter Niccolò Machiavelli, our hardboiled noir detective. This is a MURDER MYSTERY. Our POV is his assistant, Pasquale. By day, Pasquale is an apprentice in the painters’ guild (a dying industry given the ascendance of the “artificers”). By night, he and Niccolò have been tasked with investigating a series of politically radioactive murders. This book does a really bang-up job at showing us the upheaval engendered when social change lags technological change. Chapter one and I’m bursting with questions like: is the painter whom Pasquale is apprenticed to in fact a “good” master or is he a lecherous drunk who exploits our dewey-eyed protagonist? Is this trained monkey supposed to be a cute exotic pet or is he a menace to society? Should artisans be considered grunt labor or dignified professionals? I confess I finished the novel more out of duty than desire, the plot having grown so dense it was interfering with my enjoyment of the underlying emotional beats, but I don’t think you’re going to find alternate history better done than this. If you’re here to hunt for worldbuilding easter eggs I would try Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts; if you’re here for the mystery element I would give Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series (1973-1979) a whirl.
Agustina Bazterrica, The Unworthy (2023) (tr. from the Spanish by Sarah Moses) This book was probably lying facedown in a bog until it emerged to stroke you with a slow, sensuous claw. It didn’t really do it for me but that may be because it’s the second terrifically Catholic book I read back-to-back. Our setting is a post-apocalyptic cloister/convent/cult; I don’t know what’s going on and neither does the narrator, who suffers from memory loss. If a story is a slab of meat, this one is all gristle—if you can think of a trigger warning, it’s probably in here. Bucketloads of bodily effluvia and gore galore. All this mortification of the flesh is in service of larger questions about purity and sacrifice and shame and sin and expiation, and is there power in suffering? What about pain? By the end I was halfway delirious, but did not find it particularly revelatory.
Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times (2017) (tr. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) A country manor mystery in which our narrator races to solve his grandfather’s murder over several time loops, the old man being offed by a different family member in each iteration. What I found fresh about this scenario is that it’s a congenital condition of the protagonist’s, not tied to a specific event or action, that just happens to activate the day of his grandfather’s death. I was immediately taken by our narrator’s chummy, confiding tone. I was equally put off by the rampant gender essentialism: here we have all our candidates convened in one place, everyone kitted out in garish tracksuits to satisfy some whim of Grandfather’s, and every one of the male characters is spineless (including the narrator); every one of the women is insufferably catty (with the exception of the Love Interest). What I would have liked more of is some indication if the family—or indeed, the corporation helmed by Grandfather—is even worth preserving. Because of course there is an inheritance at stake. Maybe I should just rewatch Knives Out (2019, dir. Rian Johnson).
Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip (2023) Right guy, right place, wrong time. This is a contemporary romance featuring one teensy magical realism element: an apartment that transports you seven years into the past. I was grumbling about the slow start until the plot hit me at a dead run at 10%, and then I understood why everyone’s been gushing about this. It’s a book that obviously owes a lot to The Lake House (2006, dir. Alejandro Agresti) starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, which utilizes the same time-slippage premise. What The Seven Year Slip crystallized for me is why if there are two timelines it is imperative the man is the one stuck in the past. The project of romance as a genre is to make the woman and by extension the reader feel seen and feel cared for. The man has to wait for her. He has to know she’s there, occupying the same physical plane as him. He could look her up in the phonebook if he wanted to, but to get the version of her he’s in love with, he has to knuckle down for seven years. Gosh golly it was so good! It made me feel positively buoyant even if I usually prefer a bit more bite in my romances.
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Date: 2025-10-25 06:27 pm (UTC)she has to choose between Hayes and the way being with him paints a target on Isabelle’s back. What do you think they’re saying over at Isabelle’s school about her mom’s relationship with a celebrity twenty years her junior?
I have not read this book, but what you wrote here made me think that "have you ever actually had a teenage daughter" has become a suspension-of-disbelief-breaking point for me to a stronger degree than most other things, lol. It bugged me a lot in that selkie story that won the Hugo fro Naomi Kritzer, and there was something else I read (/consumed?) recently that I'm blanking on where that was also my principal complaint.
If you, like me, have ever been a precocious child who reads well above grade level you will identify easily with Elliot, and it is only later that you will detect the trauma concealed beneath his weapons-grade snark
Now that you've met both of them, allow me to share my extremely strong crossover feelings: Elliot and Avicenna from Some Desperate Glory. The two of them are so interesting to me as two sides of the same coin, where both are precocious but physically unimpressive children who stand out in some way and get bullied for it, who don't fit into the militaristic societies they find themselves in -- and it's SO INTERESTING to me how their moral conclusions are basically diametrically opposed, with Elliot's pacifism and determination to see all "monsters" as human and Avi's conclusion that, hey, we just have to be BETTER monsters. Avi is such a perfect dark mirror Elliot, basically. (This may not be entirely a coincidence, because I know that Emily Tesh wrote some In Other Lands fanfic in her pre-pro days.)
But Christopher Chant is also a wonderful little shit of a child protagonist, of course, no argument there :D
I did grow weary, by the end, of the elves’ reverse sexism; the first few instances held up a mirror to our own sexist society but by the 200th instance I was done.
Yeah, I got tired of that running joke long before the end of the book.
I adore the central trio of characters but it read more like a serialized tale than a novel with a beginning, middle and end.
Funny you should say that :p It did begin life as a serialized story that was meant to be much shorter than it is. SRB was originally posting it as "The Turn of the Story" on LJ. I think it was meant to be a short story sequel to her published "Wings in the Morning" short story (which is a Luke POV short story in which he discovers his harpy heritage, and is pretty adorable), and then just kept getting onger and longer. I'm sure In Other Lands was cleaned up (and I think expanded?) for publication from that initial version, but I agree with you, I think you can see its origins in the shape of the story and the weird pace.
Fun fact: she wrote this collection in Italian (a language she only began studying as an adult) before she translated it into English, because some people like to live life on hard mode…
WHAT XD I mean, respect! but WHAT XD
Enter Niccolò Machiavelli, our hardboiled noir detective.
Ahaha, OK, that does sound intriguing XD
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Date: 2025-10-27 02:22 am (UTC)i'm not great at picking up clues but even i could see the shape of the antagonist's Master Plan from a mile off. i don't think it's badly done but i also don't think he needed 500 pages. 300 tops. plus there is all this offscreen personal backstory/drama of Din's, idk if you've gotten to it yet--basically he would not have chosen this career if he'd had better options but he was under a lot of pressure at home and this was the most lucrative option. that's fine but i wasn't feeling Bennett's decision to introduce all the personal stakes for Din on page 50, then go into sleuthing mode for 400 pages and never hear about it until we're tying up loose threads on p450! ymmv ofc i was talking to someone on the TI server who had just started the book and pinged me to ask if Din's "angsting" ever let up and I assured her it was a very minor element of the book lol
"have you ever actually had a teenage daughter" has become a suspension-of-disbelief-breaking point
ahhh i can see that. I think I phrased it badly in my writeup, i do think Robinne Lee has (in this lifetime) interacted with an actual teenage girl! she probably has one or more of her own, i'm too lazy to look it up. the beating heart of the book is the scene when Isabelle finds out about who her mom's dating, and ofc it's by accident bc Solène's been putting off telling her and putting it off and putting it off and when it happens you feel BAD. Isbaelle is a three dimensional character, i just don't think the narrative gives her enough WEIGHT. instead we spend all our time that we're NOT having sex just traipsing to all these art shows, was what i was getting at.
both are precocious but physically unimpressive children who stand out in some way and get bullied for it, who don't fit into the militaristic societies they find themselves in
ohhohohohoho this is why we're friends. well we're friends because you collected me like you did the others, ;-) but this is why i love talking to you about books-- you see all these connections. Putting this together with SRB's comments on that panel where she gave us Elliot's Narnia origins, i'm thinking about how Avi is decidedly a second-tier character--i mean he steals the show every time he walks onstage but it's not HIS story ykwim? and how SRB is being quite meta as she usually is by making this character who woudl usually be a side character in someone else's story, the main POV.
t did begin life as a serialized story
when i saw that in the Acknowledgements it made a lot things make sense! but also when i read K's (excellent) fic I noticed the fandom tag contained the original seriazlied story title as well, i like how archivally minded our tag wranglers are haha gotta preserve every version for posterity~
Luke POV short story in which he discovers his harpy heritage
see this is what i mean! luke is the hero, elliot knows it and the reader knows it.
WHAT XD I mean, respect! but WHAT
wikipedia says she has a PhD in Reanissance studies and her dissertation was entitled Accursed Palace: The Italian Palazzo on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625). also her first son's name is Octavio and he was born in 2002, ten years before she moved her whole family to Rome. some people are just superstars
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Date: 2025-10-27 02:29 am (UTC)