the still point of the turning world

17. An Academic Affair, Jodi McAlister - This was extremely delightful! There are also clearly going to be at least three sequels for the siblings and I will buy them all. Anyway. This is a romance, but also an extremely intense love-hate relationship with academia; the modern precariat of the sessional TA, the misery of working in a field where there might only be four or five jobs in your field globally in a given year and dozens and dozens of excellent candidates most of whom are going to fail, the ruthlessly exploitative habits of some senior managers... I loved Jonah and Sadie's dynamic, the way that fighting about academic topics was just so intellectually stimulating for them, that even when they didn't like each other they were pushing each other to be better academics. And the co-teaching-via-argument approach honestly sounded really fun. Most academic articles are part of an ongoing argument between different scholars, so it's already an approach you have to engage with as a student, but this version is more entertaining! I also enjoyed their families and the relationships around them; their disparate backgrounds and the ways those had shaped them; the ongoing awareness from both of them of Jonah's extreme systemic privilege and what he can and can't do about (or with) that... Enormously fun and I'm hoping for sequels!

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18. The Shots You Take, Rachel Reid - This might be my least-favourite Reid so far, although it was still enjoyable enough. I liked the second-chance romance, and the focus on characters who are definitely heading into middle age; the community stuff was a bit on the twee side, but not too badly, and I did like the exploration of the transition from playing into retirement, which is clearly often a really difficult one for these guys who have dedicated their whole lives to hockey from their early teens on (you don't get into the NHL if you haven't!) and then suddenly lose it, and the whole schedule and infrastructure and support structure around their daily lives, and have to work out how to be regular adult people without any of that. Honestly I could have used more of that, but it was nice to see even this much. Fairly forgettable, but still entertaining enough to keep me reading.

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19. The Spy Who Loved Me, Ian Fleming - girlmeetstrouble book - consensus is that this one has aged badly! Which, in fairness I don't think anyone expects good sexual politics from Ian Fleming. Vivienne is an interesting mix; I like how brave she can be in a horrible situation - she really could have gone to pieces a number of times, but she keeps on fighting back. And I rather enjoyed her enjoyment of her own independence, her fancy moped, her sexy outfits, etc; she does actually have quite a lot of agency, considering. On the other hand, she does spend a suspiciously male-authored amount of time thinking about how sexy she is and dressing up in flash 1960s outfits for allegedly her own amusement. And she has excruciatingly terrible taste in men - Bond is, in fact, the best of them by some way, and she still falls in some sort of love with him despite being fully aware that a) he's incapable of actually loving anyone and b) he's going to leave in the morning without saying goodbye or ever seeing her again. But she does still ride off into the new day on her moped to carry on having an adventure, and I like that. I don't think Fleming is for me, but there was some enjoyment available.

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20. Stargazy Pie, 21. Bee Sting Cake, 22. Whiskeyjack, 23. Blackcurrant Fool, 24. Love-in-a-Mist, and 25. Plum Duff, Victoria Goddard - I'd asked for the first of these for my birthday, and then went straight out, bought the rest of the series, and devoured them all in about three days. Also the related short-stories. These aren't quite the same kind of id-tastic delight as Kip's books, and I don't think I'm going to want to re-read them in the same way, but they were very charming, and I enjoyed the gradually expanding world. Jemis is such a woobie, especially at the beginning when everyone in the world is being super mean to him and he's come home a failure to die alone and sad, but I enjoyed watching him get into endlessly ridiculous shenanigans and come out again with yet another largely-unmerited social promotion every time. Also Mrs Etaris, who is clearly the best thing in these books; I'd worked out who she was about half a book before we were actually told, and was extremely delighted. I also enjoyed the sideways perspective on Astandalas and the fall of the empire - it's so central to Kip's books, whereas here it's... not trivial, but very much a background thing that had a serious impact while it lasted but is now mostly a memory and occasional source of minor annoyances (e.g. the inability to buy tea), rather than the world-shaping and world-shaking thing it was elsewhere. Fluffy, fun (despite a substantial amount of mortal peril) and a generally satisfying binge.

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26. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie - Like the Marie Kondo, I thought it would be interesting to see what lies behind the cultural phenomenon! And it was quite fun, a pleasant read, and has a lot of common sense in it. I did, however, spend quite a lot of time arguing with Carnegie. Firstly, there were so many things I recognised from bad sales tactics. Carnegie is extremely clear that his tactics don't work if you're performing them insincerely instead of genuinely meaning them, but of course no one has ever let that stop them for a single minute. I also felt, to be honest, that in most cases it's not really possible for salespeople to be genuinely sincere when they're like "oh no I want to listen to talk about what YOU care about! My sales targets don't matter!". Even if they're genuinely nice people who do care about the client's problems, they're still salespeople and that's what they're there for.

Secondly, a lot of his tactics did seem like things that weren't actually going to work, at least in this day and age. For instance, his belief that writing a letter to a famous person is going to persuade them to do nice things for you! Possibly in 1936 rich and famous people received a small enough volume of post that it could happen, but I'm still sceptical. I'm not saying it never happened, or that his examples weren't real (I mean, maybe they weren't! I don't know! but even if they are 100% true) but I just don't think the approach can scale. I particularly loved his example of the boy who wrote to the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm about how much he admired him and "won" by having the Kaiser marry his mother. Winning support from deposed dictators? Sounds great to me! Also I looked it up, and it sounds like the marriage was actually pretty miserable, with the spouses mainly held together by their shared antisemitism, so, yeah, great example there!!!

But he did say a lot of things that did seem right - be a good listener, let the customer tell you what they want, approach them not from the perspective that you want to sell them your thing but that you're interested in helping them solve your problem... I'm fortunate that I haven't had to do much sales-type work, but when I'm talking to colleagues about the system I look after, that's always been the approach that's felt like it worked best; heres what it does, does that fit your needs, what could I do that would support your use case... But of course it doesn't matter whether I succeed or not! My salary is unaffected. Dated but I think still worth reading.

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27. Holiday in Death, 28. Festive in Death, and 29. Framed in Death, JD Robb - The first two were part of a Robb Christmas collection. Gosh, it was interesting to read a book from so early in the series again! Eve is so spiky, still, in Holiday, and she and Roarke still have such a sharp dynamic, even though it's clear how much they love each other; and there's the start of so many things already, characters and relationships that are going to grow throughout the series. I've been saying all along that it's the background and the community that I love about this series, and this really reinforced that for me. Festive is much more like "normal" in that sense. And then I saw Framed on sale for 99p, and snapped it up; technically I've skipped a book, but it's hardly the first time I've done that in this series. The villain was particularly terrible / pathetic in this one; the discrepancy between his conviction that the murder was filling his art with life and the way the rest of the characters were like "is that supposed to be a hand??" was brutal. I did very much enjoy the takedown of the bail-jumpers at the end; the successful capture followed by the legal stalemate was proper highs and lows, so it was extra satisfying to see them defeated just when they thought they'd got away with it. I always enjoy these - but particularly liked the opportunity to revisit the early part of the series in contrast to the newer state of things!

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30. Derring-Do for Beginners, Victoria Goddard - Goddard's just never actually going to write anything about the Red Company, is she. Probably that's wise; it would be hard to live up to the epic reputations we're told they have! Once I got over this not actually being about the Company as such, I really enjoyed it. Young Jullanar is a delight; she's so normal and scared but also unwilling to back down once she's ended up even vaguely committed to something. Her friendship with Damian is adorable and I really enjoyed the ways they help each other do better in society. The bit where she gives him the glasses is absolutely heart-breaking, and watching him coming to terms with the fact that there's a simple physical reason why he found all those things so hard! Presumably he would always have been impressively good at fighting - it can't just be his eye-sight - but seeing him realise that he really could have other options... And young Fitzroy is hilarious and outrageous and extremely fun. He's just such a disaster. I'm looking forward to seeing whether he can get this off-the-hook post-At the Feet of the Sun (I mean I guess the "making a whole island just for Kip" thing was pretty bananas already, but he's capable of so much more) Watching the three of them career their way through society was a delight. I was hoping for more actual, you know, Red Company, but this was so much fun I can't have too many regrets.

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31. Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin - I've always heard excellent things about Tomalin, and this book in particular is very highly praised - and of course I love Jane Austen's books, so I was excited to read this. In the end, though, I was a little disappointed. I think that's probably mostly Cassandra's fault; we get so little of Jane's perspective on anything, and so much of the narrative is about what relatives and social acquaintances were doing. Which I think is probably inevitable; that's what we can get from our sources. And from that perspective, wow, we really do know an enormous amount about all sorts of random relatives and friends, don't we! I'm boggled by the number of third cousins whose full correspondences are apparently preserved, not to mention the number of people over the centuries who have published books about them. I felt uncomfortably nosy, to be honest.

It was very interesting, though, to learn so much about Austen's background and context; the small society within which she grew up, the school in her home, the constant struggle throughout her life for enough income to keep everyone comfortably... I read Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune by Rory Muir in 2022, which was eye-opening on how vulnerable the younger sons even of relatively rich families were, and that does come through again here. Some people had rich relatives, friends, or patrons, and certainly the Austens were generally good at sharing things around so that the more-successful consistently helped out the worse off, but I can see why Jane felt so strongly when she finally made a profit on one of her books. I also hadn't realised how relatively unsuccessful she was financially, at least within her own generation; her books didn't become classics until much later, despite the fact that she clearly sold well and was notable at the time. Her first editions sold, but she wasn't getting that much in the way of reprints. We do also get at least some perspective on her herself; she seems to have been rather awkward, sometimes more Marianne than Elinor in youth, and with a somewhat mean streak, none of which I had quite expected! She certainly does not refrain from talking smack about her neighbours, even in the carefully-curated letters Cassandra kept.

I did have some issues with Tomalin's descriptions of the books - which is a bit concerning, because that's the part I did know something about! There were some minor factual mistakes (Fanny's cross is amber, not coral; Tomalin contrasts it with a real cross Jane received, which I assume was actually coral, but I can't tell from this!) and I thought several of her interpretations of the books were deeply dubious. Particularly the bit where she argues that Lizzy is angry with Lydia at the end of P&P because she's still jealous that Lydia gets to marry the man that Lizzy liked - which a) I really don't buy that Lizzy actually still likes him at that point! even if she can still see the charm, she's already been seeing how superficial it is, and b) ACTUALLY I'M PRETTY SURE THAT LIZZY IS MAD BECAUSE LYDIA VERY NEARLY RUINED THE WHOLE FAMILY and left her sisters borderline-unmarriageable!!1! which seems to me like a reasonable thing to be mad about!!! But I was also very dubious about some of her thoughts on S&S and MP. Then right at the end of the book she throws in some random classism about how "unbelievably" one of her great-grandnephews drove a bread van which doesn't seem particularly unbelievable to me? three generations is a long time and most of the Austens were relatively precariously middle-class, and besides, driving a 20th century bread van doesn't seem that terrible to me? Possibly I just don't appreciate the full horror. I think this is probably as enlightening as it could reasonably have been, but I was a little disappointed, somehow, despite learning a fair amount. It's not badly-written at all, but it never really won me over somehow.

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32. Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - SFRG book. I have very complicated feelings about this book. I think? that it worked? overall? Some of it I found really effective; some of it was so heavy-handed that it was hard to stay in the flow of the story. The footnotes, in particular, were simultaneously essential context for the point he was trying to make and extraordinarily anvillicious. The US penal system is bad! The treatment of black people in US society is bad! The violence that we enact on each other in all contexts is bad! Mostly it's about the US penal system, but I think there's also something in there about US college football - the system profiting from the lives and bodies of often-black individuals who cannot make money out of their public labours and stardom. Annoying W was convinced it was mostly about wrestling, but that feels completely wrong to me, there's really no sense at all of kayfabe here, of the fights themselves as a show being put on for the audience - obviously the fighters are assembling public images for themselves, but those seemed to be mostly around the entry into the arena and the behind-the-scenes stuff, the actual fights are pretty straightforwardly combat. And the whole book is a horrorshow of suffering and violence - J at book group described it as "gratuitous violence" but I argued with that because the violence is absolutely the point of the story; it's extreme, for sure, but you couldn't tell this story at all without it.

But beyond all the thematic and heavy-handed stuff, I also thought he did a good job with the characters; I believed in Stacker, and Thurwar, and Simon J Craft, and Hendrix Young, and he made me care about them so that the big match between the four of them had real stakes for me as the reader (although I would have been sadder if Stacker and Thurwar hadn't won!). I liked how shaped they all were by violence, both before and after they joined the CAPE program, how aware most of them were of what they had done, the crimes they were imprisoned for and their responsibility for them, and the violence they did in the Chains. And "Low Freed" as a concept, that was something that just kind of... accumulated power for me as the book went on. The outsider views were also generally well-done; I thought that Emily, the wife of a fan who starts out hating the idea and ends up obsessed with it, was a particularly interesting one; I believed in her journey from revulsion through to fascination. I don't think this world is going to actually happen, but Adjei-Brenyah makes it sickly plausible that society could get there, and the ways that the characters justify it to themselves is just horribly familiar. Ultra-violent, really thumpingly Message-y, and strangely compelling; I don't think I'll ever want to re-read it, but I am interested to see where Adjei-Brenyah goes from here.

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33. Blood Sport, 35. The Edge, and 37. Risk, Dick Francis - I was going through a process whereby I was reading about seven books at once, a chapter at a time and then swapping, and then I would get to a Dick Francis and read the whole Dick Francis and then go back to chapter-at-a-time rotating between more books. These are just seriously addictive, and I'm very sad that I ran out of 99p Dick Francises and will have to wait for something else to go on sale. Blood Sport was particularly interesting to me because the main character - in a book written in the mid-sixties - is profoundly depressed, and struggles a lot with that; he gets sent on a mission to locate stolen racehorses in the US mostly because his boss wants him to take a holiday and suspects (rightly) that he probably won't survive the two weeks if he stays at home. I liked the somewhat convoluted racehorse-theft plot the villains have been running, and the desperately-bored borderline-alcoholic wife that Gene persuades to turn her life around by going into interior design, but I was impressed by the handling of mental illness, which was much better than I would have expected for the era.

The Edge has a hilariously over-the-top setting, with a cross-Canada train full of racehorses, billionaires of varying degrees of vileness, and a team of actors putting on a murder mystery play for their entertainment over the course of the trip. I rather liked Tor, and I did enjoy his work on the train, particularly his time working as a waiter and the invisibility it gives him even on top of his own skills; the racehorse owners were pretty compelling in various different ways; I liked the romance, but I really felt that Nell should have waited to find a bit more about him before agreeing. And Mrs Baudelaire was honestly worth the price of admittance all on her own; her calls were such a highlight of the book. As soon as he said he was going to visit her after the trip was done, I knew she was going to die; what a waste. And Risk was quite fun; I love that the hero is an accountant who moonlights as a jockey, it's such an outrageously Dick Francis move. Of course he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Also, how does one person get kidnapped this much!! I sort of liked that the police were totally useless to him, but I am still unconvinced that there's really so little they can do about someone being hit on the head, smuggled out of the country, and locked in a sail locker for, like, a week. I thought the underlying plot did work quite well - and of course all the people who he caught for doing fraud (because he's a good accountant!!) blame him for everything that happened to them and not e.g. themselves for doing giant frauds in the first place, that's absolutely how people like that roll. A trio of delightfully exciting nonsenses; I'm so sorry I didn't discover Francis years ago, but on the other hand at least they are a source of joy for me now.

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34. Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit - This is a much shorter book than I expected! Only 90 pages, according to my ebook reader. Half-a-dozen essays, including the infamous title one, which I have of course read before; it's as enraging as ever. In fact, most of these are enraging. It's interesting how much has and has not changed in a decade. Solnit is an excellent writer, and I am also angry about the things she is angry about, and also she's not just raging but also thinking about what to do about it. But the situations she talks about just make me so angry. Probably a good thing this is so short, honestly. A short but concentrated dose of feminist rage.

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36. Outcrossing, Celia Lake - Recommended by various people. It's interesting because in many ways this is a lot like the Greenwing and Dart books I marathoned earlier in the month, except that I loved those and was deeply "meh" about this one. I wasn't convinced by the sort-of-period interpersonal dynamics, particularly around class; I found a lot of the dialogue horribly stilted, and was fairly sure (although I had to confirm) that the author is not English - the use of "ta" was just... all the wrong vibe. I felt like the characters got sexual too soon, again, given the class and poverty issues and also the kind of people they were introduced as. Goddard's faux-English village life isn't supposed to be set in an actual, y'know, English village, but this is, and so when it feels wrong it throws me out of the narrative. The stuff around the smuggling was reasonably well-done, I thought; I liked the precarity of Rufus' position, and at least the attempt at engaging with the consequences of basically-WWI. And I didn't dislike either of the protagonists. But that's about as enthusiastic as I can get about it. On paper this absolutely should be my jam, but it entirely is not.

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38. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 2, CRC Payne and Starbite - This series is just so adorable! I read it an episode at a time over some months, and I don't remember most of the details (except the one where Babs is wearing herself to death and Dick has to pull her out of it) but it's just so nice! watching the Batfam having mostly-nice times and hanging out! Honestly this is really all I want from a Batfamily comic. I'm never going to read most of canon because I am not here for the bleak grimdark. But I already have vol 3 and am looking forward to it. Adorable. This series is just so fun.

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39. Just One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor - Another series that people have been very positive about! But I did not vibe with it. On the one hand, I'm sad that I didn't love it like all those other people did, but on the other hand now I can cross it off my to-read list and not look back. Anyway. Time-travelling archaeologists sounds fun, but this consistently tipped over towards farce, for me - and it's such appallingly bad archaeology! In fact it's not archaeology at all! It's poorly-done and unsubstantiatable history!! Context is everything in archaeology, and in any academic discipline your argument is worthless if you can't back it up with facts; if the time travel is going to remain secret, you can't supply any of that, and no one is going to take you seriously. There are certain things that can be done - and the shenanigans at the end with the sealed jars of library books is a good choice - but 99% of this book is not about any of those. And, like, the dinosaur film - could it be super popular as a film? Absolutely! Is it any good as science? No! Is anyone in the field going to take it seriously? Of course not. Is anyone who pays 15 seconds of attention going to notice that there are zero actual dinosaur experts, CGI studios, directors, etc, involved in this project? Absolutely. Everything they do is inexplicable and therefore suspicious as heck. Also I was not into the romance or really anything about Max's apparently inability to behave like an adult in really any context. I did enjoy the big table-turning exercise after she comes back, but I didn't believe it. This is a fun concept, but the archaeology / history is worse than in Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel books and that's saying something. I didn't hate it, but I had to disconnect my brain way too much to enjoy it.

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40. Ambiguity Machines, Vandana Singh - Short story collection, and a banger. Singh seems to be exactly the sort of SFF short-story writer I really love, full of ideas and every story going in a completely different direction, original world-building for every new idea... I felt like I should have been completely passionate about this book, but somehow I wasn't, despite everything. But I was really impressed, and will definitely be looking for more of her work; the scope and diversity of her writing was really admirable and, as ever, I liked the way she used non-Western myths etc as the assumed background cultural concept. It's just always so refreshing to be thrown into something from another cultural context and expected to get on with it - it's one of the things I like about Zen Cho's books. A really excellent collection, even though I couldn't muster quite the delight I wanted from it.

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41. Get A Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert - I've seen Hibbert recommended as a romance writer in various places, so I was interested to read this. And I enjoyed it, on the whole! It felt a bit heavy-handed at times, particularly around the handling of Chloe's fibro, and it was sexier than I am really into (IDK maybe I'm just too ace to really appreciate the "he looked at me and I felt instantly horny / wet" thing! but sometimes I do fine with spicy stuff, so...). But I liked the dynamic betwen Red and Chloe, and the almost entire absence of the sort of romance tropes that put me off so much of the genre - they're equals! with different skills that they can both respect! No one is interested in him dominating her with his sexiness! And I thought it did a decent job of setting up their internal conflicts and the impact that was going to have on the development of their relationship. Plus, you know, non-white heroine, non-thin heroine, disabled heroine with a non-sexy disability, she talks about the importance of representation and I absolutely do agree, I just needed it to be slightly less obvious. And I liked the context around the two of them - well, maybe not Chloe's sisters, they were rather annoying, but Red's mother and Vik and the gallery owner and the terrible cook in the other flat and Chloe's awesome grandmother... it was a fun cast of extras around them. I enjoyed this, although I'm not sure if I'll read more Hibbert.