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November–December Reads

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This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series 2024-Reads

2024-Reads

 

Well, here’s the last installment of my 2024 reads. November was a hectic month, so I read less than I’d like—sick kid, couple of translation deadlines—but I still read a fair number of books. I’ll be posting an overview of my favorites from the year in a post in January 2025, but for now, I’ll just cover what I read in the past couple of months. 

I read Roald Dahl‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox to my son. It’s a fun read, even if it does have its nasty moments. The (alcoholic!) rat in the Bean’s Secret Cider Cellar is a priceless little detail, if you ask me, and all of the characters shine in their individual ways. Well, most of them, anyway, the ones who are on the page enough to get that kind of particularization. My son really enjoyed it, in any case. 

Oh, and I think your typical tabletop RPG gamemaster could learn a few tricks from Dahl. For example, Fantastic Mr. Fox “succeeds” in all three attempts to infiltrate the farms of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, and frankly that’s the only interesting outcome: him failing and having to reorient and dig more would just be boring, so it’s better to have him (and his kids, and badger) miraculously hit the bullseye three times in a row, but have to deal with complications when they arrive (like the rat in the cider cellar, and the maid who comes down to get a couple of jugs of cider for Bean). The particularization of minor characters is another thing Dahl is great at: they have personality and cross-purpose motivations that complicate things for Mr. Fox, which is great. 

Little Housewolf by Medrie Purdham was a joy to read, and I’m not just saying that because Medrie’s a friend. (I had no idea I was in the acknowledgements—because we were in a writing group together decades ago—but it was a very sweet gesture.) Ironically, she now lives in the part of Canada I’m from (at least approximately), though we met in Montreal. 

These poems are gorgeous and meticulous, full of surprises and delights—with a lot of moments that just jolt you out of your normal sense of the world, which is something I look for in poetry. I especially loved the poem “For It Is Not the Same River and We Are Not the Same,” a piece about giving her child a distinct, unique bath every day for a year. It’s seriously beautiful, and it was on the strength of hearing that one poem in an online reading that I got excited about the collection. (Sadly, it took a while for me to get my hands on it over here in Korea.) 

It’s exciting to see how Medrie’s poetic sensibility has deepened and broadened since our long-ago year-and-a-bit together in a little impromptu writing group, and she’s developed into a quite remarkable poet in the years since then… which is no surprise to me!

My book club read Stuart Turton‘s The Last Murder at the End of the World this month. As a murder mystery, it works quite well, but as a work of science fiction I think it was only moderately successful. The reasons for my feeling that way are probably beyond the scope of a discussion here, except to say that I feel this way often when I read work by authors who don’t specialize in SF, but who decide to try their hand at the genre. Not to gatekeep—definitely I don’t mean that, and Ithink anyone who wants to should try writing SF—but there’s something about the underpinning sensibility one finds in a lot of what I consider the greatest SF, which I tend to find missing in many mainstream authors’ forays into the field. I don’t mean to be negative, though: Turton’s characters are compelling and the mystery is satisfyingly twisty, even if I struggled to believe in the world in which the tale is set.  

However, it’s very readable and a solid mystery, and it’s very easy to see why Turton is a best-selling author. I also was somewhat touched by his magnanimous and gratitude-filled afterword. I think it might be the first time I’ve seen an author express an appreciation of their readers in quite this way, and the glimpse it provides of Turton’s thinking is quite salutary. 

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken is a novella written from the point of view of a zombie. It’s a meditation on grief and loss, and and a literary zombie novel told from the point of view of a zombie. A zombie with a crow shoved inside her chest, that talks to her.  Who is conscious and half-remembers parts of her life, but cannot remember her own name. I know what that sounds like, but the author pulls it off. It’s a good example of the kind of weird experimentation you can get away with in a novella that maybe wouldn’t work so well at full novel length. I found it engrossing and quite moving, if ultimately also devastating. 

I am grateful to Jenn Reese for the recommendation. 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a shortish novel—a welcome thing these days, even if I rue Clarke’s reasons for writing something shorter—which I’ve heard praised quite a lot. Having read it, I can see why it was so widely praised. It’s wildly inventive, gorgeously written, and hauntingly strange. I found it fascinating and its mysteries and wonders have stuck with me ever since I’ve read it. 

I don’t know who to thank for the recommendation, since so many people praised the book, but I am glad I followed up on them and checked it out. 

The Dying Earth by Jack Vance—I’m referring here to the first volume of the four Dying Earth books—was a spectacle to behold. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to reading this, as I bought it over a decade ago. My edition is the 1999 Science Fiction Book Club omnibus The Compleat Dying Earth, pictured here.

I suppose one reason it took me so long to get around to this book is that for a long time I thought I was burnt out on fantasy. (What I was in fact burnt out on was so many authors aping Tolkien, I think, and for that matter D&D.) These stories, though, are a revelation. Vance manages to build a strange, fascinatingly eerie world filled with troubling and odd people, bizarre places, and a sense of decrepit ancientness. The prose, too, is absolutely riveting: wry and witty, sparkling, and always ready to veer off in a strange direction, especially in the dialogues. I particularly enjoyed “T’sais,” “Ulan Dhor,” and “Guyal of Sfere.” I’m quite eager to dig into the second volume of the series, The Eyes of the Overworld. 

The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar is a dark, weird novella that my friend Justin Howe passed on to me, among some other books. It’s set on a space ship within a mining fleet that depends—quite unnecessarily, I get the sense—on an extremely cruel form of human slavery and debasement, and about the inevitable moment when someone trapped under that boot stands up and fights back. The story doesn’t go so far as to explore whether the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house: the story ends on a bright note where the characters concerned are just discovering they can get control of the master’s tools, in fact. But what it does explore is a kind of dark Omelas-like society with extreme class divisions that are geospatially enforced by the ships. technologically enforced by the kinds of bindings people in different classes submit to, and socially enforced in the ways we’re all by now familiar with—including different castes within the academic community on board the ships, among whom much of the story unfolds. The “chain” in the story is crucial: the bindings meant to restrain people in the story also turn out to be objects that can be manipulated by those who are bound, to some degree or another. It’s far from optimistic in terms of worldbuilding, but it does hold out a glimmer of hope nonetheless… which I think makes it very much a story of our time. 

Premee Mohamed‘s Butcher of the Forest is another novella that came to me courtesy of Justin Howe. It’s a short read, but potent, a lot like a fairy tale as grim and brutal as fairytales used to be before Disney got his hands on them. It’s beautifully written and hauntingly dark, and I recommend it to anyone who craves a creepy, “into the dark magical forest” tale. It’s the second Tor Novella I’ve read in December, and I all but inhaled it, because I enjoyed it so much. 

(I also think that for people who are into Trophy Dark, or dig that vibe, that it’s almost required reading.)

I was also pleased to discover that Premee Mohamed is based in Edmonton: it’s nice to see another author with ties to the Canadian prairie, especially one as esteemed as she is. 

The Eyes of the Overworld is the second book of the Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. It introduces Cugel, an asshole protagonist par excellence, and chronicles his wanderings under the compulsion of one Iucounu. He’s sent on a fetch quest, but of course he attempts to turn every stray encounter to his advantage, often finding himself screwed over in the process… as he clearly deserves. I found the book very entertaining, and am eager to dive into book 3. Indeed, I’ve already started in on it, so it will be one of the first of the books in my list of works read in 2025… 

Along with the above, I also read a number of supplements for the XP edition of the Paranoia tabletop RPG. The books I specifically read were:

That’s a pretty big chunk of the game line, for having read them during just a couple of months. I’ll be posting reviews of these books later, as part of a series on every Paranoia XP book all at once early next year. (I need to work out a series order, though it’ll probably just be publication order.)

Oh, in addition, I read to my son for bedtime quite a few books from the Scholastic Dragon Masters series. (This is the kiddo’s go-to series right now.) 

That’s it for 2024. I hope to read more in 2025, but I guess we’ll see. I’ll post a roundup of everything from 2024 in a few days.

It’s 45 books in all, which is not bad: a good chunk of my reading time is taken up with keeping our son busy (including reading him half of the Dragon Masters series in the past month alone), but he’s turned a corner in his Korean reading lately and I hope in 2025 he’ll do the same with his English reading: we have a ton of wonderful kids’ books waiting for him.  

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