![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dec. 26th, 2020 11:15 am
Some Books I Read and Liked this Year
This was the year I discovered that fantasy and science fiction will never run out of great women writers. The following is a list of my favorite books of the year, but it was only after setting them down this way that I realized they have something else in common…
Maria Dahvana Headley, trans., Beowulf: I reviewed this in my last blog post. Gorgeous writing, startling takes on some of the characters, gutsy choices, and very readable.
Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire: Mahit Dzmare becomes Ambassador to the planet/ city Teixcalaan, the center of a vast empire. Something has happened to the last Ambassador, Yskandr Aghavn, but no one on Lsel, the space station where she lives, is sure what. Yskandr’s imago, a record of his knowledge and memory of Teixcalaan, has been implanted in her brain, but unfortunately it’s from fifteen years ago and out of date. Even worse, it stops working when imago-Yskandr learns something shocking about his life.
There’s a lot of intrigue, which I always enjoy, especially when Mahit pretends to be a simple barbarian from the provinces, and the Teixcalaanlitzlim let their guard down around her. The characterization is great — we meet the people around Mahit at the same time she does, knowing nothing about them, so their personalities are revealed gradually, by the things they do and not by an initial expository lump.
There’s more to the book than that, though. Mahit arrives on Teixcalaan already half in love with the culture, based on the poetry and planetary epics she’s read as a child. But she is also a Stationer, and the empire has their eyes on Lsel Station as their next conquest. And in a sense Lsel has already been conquered, by the cultural artifacts they receive from Teixcalaan. How do you hold on to your sense of mission, to yourself, when faced with the splendor of the empire, when the Teixcalaanlitzlim call you “barbarian” and insist that they have the only civilization?
And how do you hold on to yourself when you have the memories of someone else inside your head? Do you start to believe the same things? Which thoughts are yours, and which are the other person’s?
A Memory Called Empire does a lot with the concept of identity. I don’t mean that people wander around having long, boring discussions on the subject, but that the question is woven through the book and turns out to be vitally important. Mahit, for example, has to examine her feelings closely before she does anything, including fall in love.
I read reviews where people hated the Teixcalaanli names, which are of the order of Three Seagrass and Two Calendar. To me they sound like Aztec or Mayan naming systems, with their different calendrical cycles of names and numerals, so that a person gets a unique name based on the day they were born: Seven Crocodile or Twelve Flower. The people of Teixcalaan look sort of Mayan too; classical features include “lush mouth, low forehead, perfectly hooked nose, eyes like deep brown pools.” If there is some Mayan connection, I have to say I love the modern updates, like Six Helicopter or Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.
The writing is somehow straightforward and poetic at the same time. I had a very minor quibble with it, which is that way too many words are italicized. “It was nevertheless very much a place someone had lived in…,” to take a random sentence. How can the concept of “lived in” be heightened beyond what it already is? But this is a tiny problem, and I can’t imagine too many people even noticed it.
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth: For a book about reanimated skeletons and grisly deaths, this is a lot of fun. Harrow, the heir of the Ninth House, and Gideon, her cavalier and the best swordswoman on the planet, are summoned by the Emperor, who is looking for replacements for his Lyctors. Then people start dying. Meanwhile, Gideon and Harrow have to work out their difficult relationship, made more complex by the fact that Harrow is a necromancer and can raise armies of the dead when she gets annoyed. Longer review here.
Muir’s Harrow the Ninth is on this list only provisionally. It raised a lot of questions, or, to put it another way, it confused the hell out of me. Based on Gideon, Muir seems to know exactly what she’s doing, so the second book in the series will probably turn out to be as brilliant as the first, but I’m waiting for the third book before I commit myself. Longer review here.
———
Weirdest character name of 2020: A cop named Marcel Duchamp in Stephen King’s "If It Bleeds."
