Book 34: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

A book club book! This is a vampire-esque story set in modern England, only instead of them surviving on human blood, they eat--you guessed it--books! The story centers on Devon who is on her own and caring for her son, a particular kind of book eater who eats people's brains if they don't have access to a medication. The narrative alternates between following them in the present day and her childhood and young adulthood showing us how they ended up there, and the specific cultural institutions she's fighting against to survive and raise her son. 

There's also a whole plot about the women of each family being controlled and married off in order to strengthen family lines, and the difficulty they have with breeding because women can only have two (at most) children before they become infertile, and a whole lot of nonsense society construction around all of this. The narrator is well-aware of how nonsense it is, because it's not as if the patriarchy is a sensible system, but it's also not exactly an uplifting story. There was a lot to chew on (heh) in this book, but it never quite coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts, for me.

Grade: B  

Revisiting Guy Gavriel Kay Part 1

So most years, in addition to however many new books I succeed in reading, I often reread a fair number of books. In the past I haven't logged those books on this blog, because they seemed outside the scope of this "project," but this year I've decided that I will! This is pretty easy because so far my main rereads have been of Guy Gavriel Kay's canon, leading up to his most recent release from last spring, which I still haven't read because I had wanted to do a reread of his books first.

Here are the books I've reread so far!  

The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy

Possibly the first proper high fantasy trilogy I ever read, which I did before seeing the Lord of the Rings movies and suddenly realized some of the source of his inspiration (which makes sense given the work he did with Christopher Tolkein in the 1970s). It's a portal fantasy that also brings to mind A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and after I read the Lymond Chronicles I discovered another big influence on his work (and a couple of key character types that reoccur throughout his writing). It is definitely a fantasy trilogy written in the 1980s, with some central plot arcs that I don't entirely love, but I also cry every single time I reread these books, because boy does he know what he's doing with these tropes. 

Ysabel

This one is out of publication order, but it also kind of exists on its own. It's the only novel other than the Fionavar Tapestry that takes place in our world, and I don't always buy his mid-2000s modern day POV, but it also brings together a number of his favorite themes in really effective and elegant ways. Also I desperately need to go to Aix-en-Provence. 

Tigana

The big one. His first standalone fantasy and the one he's probably still best known for in a lot of circles, the central conceit of this story is so emotionally resonant and tragically relevant. His character work in particular gets much stronger in later novels in my opinion, but this novel is plotted perfectly, even when you wish it could end in a different way. 

A Song for Arbonne

Boy this book fucked me up when I read it for the first time as a teenager. It's very much his bridge novel between high fantasy novels that are clearly set in worlds based on specific cultures and historical events, and his later novels that are historical fiction about fictionalized versions of cities and nations that also have some magical realism. This one really got to me; it's not as sweeping or just as big as either Tigana or the novel that follows it, but the central battle between a society that wants to have a public role (however flawed) possible for women and one that demonizes them and keeps them subjugated really resonated for me, and there are many scenes from this book that have stayed in my head for decades even if some of the other details had faded since my last reread. 

Next up is Lions of Al-Rassan, and let me tell you that's always a fraught read but it's not going to be easier this fall, sigh. But that's also of course one of its great strengths.

No official grade for any of these but honestly my view of all of his books is that they're just different shades of an A, so take that as read.