Tag Archives: Harry Potter

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What I was Reading in August – November

Unmotivated to blog / write about what I’m reading, I didn’t even do an annual Books of The Year thing in October — and I’ve been doing that for ten years. “Life Project” and all (still quoting Emile on that), so … change and shit, I suppose. Still reading though, at a much diminished rate, partly because lack of time and energy and eyes needing a rest. Books have been read and are being read. No particular order.

Miri Song’s Multiracial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race, ’cos I’m trying to understand myself, my family’s history, and all. You’d think by the time you’re in your forties, you’d have this somewhat nailed, but nope, thanks to family secrets and family aspirations to whiteness, or some shite. Like my middle name never blew that fantasy up.

Charles Stross’ The Labyrinth Index, nth book in a series I’m long over. I keep reading like an old lover whose time has passed and, yeah, Lovecraft mythos is really creaking on its Zimmer frame these days.

JY Yang’s The Descent of Monsters. Very much a favourite author right now. South-East Asia is slaying it in the sci-fi / fantasy lately. I wish these were longer and JY Yang would write more. The so-far trilogy for some reason reminds me of The Water Margin (水滸傳, Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn), which is, I dunno, about as high praise as you can get from me.

Nick Hubble, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Joseph Norman’s The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks. Only two references to Feersum Endjinn. I was broadly disappointed. More so because trying to divide Banks’ work up into skffy / non-skiffy, or sci-fi / non-sci-fi, is never going to work (and I’m not even going to start on the glaring errors referring to The Hydrogen Sonata). Ken McLeod’s essay was beautiful.

Ben Aaronovitch’s Lies Sleeping: The Seventh Rivers of London novel. Still holding fast to ‘Harry Potter, a black cop from London estate’. Glad he finally dealt to the Faceless Man, and hope he moves on a bit from this narrative arc (apparently, yes, he is planning to). I’m likely to re-binge this series rather soon, while listing to proper LDN Grime.

Ruth Pearce’s Understanding Trans Health: Discourse, Power and Possibility. Not fun reading. Considering lending to my endocrinologist because he gives a shit but I swear it’s like the last 30 years of ‘progress’ hasn’t happened in Germany. Primarily focussing on the UK and NHS, but I’ve dealt with health systems in several countries around the world (either Euro, or influenced by / aligned with Anglo models), and “Tru dat” was said a lot. Also “Fuck cis people”.

Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few: Wayfarers 3. Reading a lot of series, me. This is the series where nothing much happens, in a rather large universe (of the world-building type, I mean; mostly takes up a small bit of a small bit of a galaxy). I’ll keep reading because for some reason I like the story.

Kevin Martens Wong’s Altered Straits. Currently reading, and had been waiting for this for an age. Trans-dimensional, time-travelling corporeal horror. Once again, South-East Asia, and Singapore bringing it in the sci-fi / fantasy.

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. I’ve been reading her blog for years. I kind of talked back to her a lot while reading, particularly of the, “Well, if you’d read history, and get outside a euro-centric model of science and philosophy, maybe some of these ‘intractable’ problems wouldn’t be there in the first place?” A frustrating like.

Tiffany Trent and Stephanie Burgis’s The Underwater Ballroom Society. Plus for the cover, plus also for Ysabeau S. Wilce, a stack of really good stories, probably going to have to read some of these authors.

Victor Mair’s translation of Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. He of the blog Language Log. Also been reading that for years. And I knew he was all about this stuff, but somehow blind spot assisted me in missing this. I like Zhuangzi heaps, my 404 is not complete without.

I also re-read a bunch of other novels, some Iain Banks, and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy for the second time, even better than the first.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Rivers of London Series (Again)

Binged the entire seven of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels again, ’cos sometimes a girl just wants a black Harry Potter and a Muslim Hermione — even if they are cops.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — The Hanging Tree

Let’s get the car out of the way first: PC Grant and The Folly score a Ferrari 288 GTO. Hashtag Merking. (And I’m taking this a poignant homage to Iain Banks’ The Business, also, yes, again, “Brutal.”, also no, I’ll never not “Brutal” if a Ferrari turns up in a skiffy or fantasy novel.)

And, youse who read me regularly all know my pruneface when a cis author attempts a trans woman character, so pruneface, I called it a Trannyphant, ’cos it’s the trans elephant in the room, ’cos none of you authors were doing it 10 years ago and it’s only ‘fashion’ (or ‘trans tipping point’) that you’re doing it now, and fuck me your obsession with genitals and surgery and medicalisation of trans women’s bodies is nasty — and it’s almost always trans women, and playing us for laughs? So, here’s a lesson in how you do it right:

Guleed passed me the completed IID on Caroline Linden-Limmer and pointed out a note which registered that she’d been granted a Gender Recognition Certificate when she was eighteen — changing her legal gender from male to female.
‘So …’ I started, but was cut off by the vast silence emanating from Stephanopoulos behind us.
I looked over at Nightingale, who looked quizzically back, and decided to explain the implications later. Surprisingly, when I did, his reaction was outrage that someone had to apply to a panel to determine what gender they were — he didn’t say it, but I got the strong impression that he felt such panels were intrinsically un-British. Like eugenics legislation, banning the burka and air conditioning.
I thought of the little girl in the blue dress — you can’t get a certificate until you’re 18 — it must have felt like a long wait.
Her mother, when I met her, didn’t strike me as someone who liked to wait.

The tall bit in an earlier section can go either way, and there’s plenty implicit in characters in the scene which doesn’t get conveyed here. But Aaronovitch has already done BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic — I know, it’s a clunky term, but working with what’s available here) and queer, and Muslim — and all wrapped in Police, and it reads believable to me (and if anyone’s all, “Frances, fam, you’re being taken for a ride there, and not in a 288 GTO.” I’ll own that), and that’s it. A few lines, and we move on with a real person who has a full life and this is one of the least remarkable parts about her.

Meandering elsewhere, Aaronovitch does police acronym soup and gadget geekery with the casual humour of someone who knows a story isn’t the equipment, but loves throwing in a bit anyway. I criticised this in recent Laundry Files novels, where technical paraphernalia overwhelms the story, inducing a fast-forwarding through the pages. So far, Aaronovitch hasn’t fallen into this, though contra that, the pace of his novels, and what he’s set himself up to get through in a novel-length work, leaves some character development or response hanging. Like how PC Grant’s partner, PC Leslie May takes up with the Faceless Man and betrays him. Grant muses it’s because the Faceless Man knows how to repair her destroyed face, but this feels a little unsatisfactory. It may be Aaronovitch is playing a longer game with May here, or that this in fact speaks directly of Grant’s poor emotional and interpersonal development (he did have a junkie for a father) which, along with his habit of getting lost in details instead of focussing on the larger issues, may denote a disconnect between how he sees himself — and the stories are told in first person — and the actual liability he is as both a person and PC.

Or maybe it’s that May is a white woman and like so many of them has little moral compunction in selling out her not-white mates if that gives her a leg-up. Aaronovitch makes it delightfully clear that the Faceless Man, Martin Chorley, is one of those rich, white supremacist types, who thinks British Empire is the natural order, which doesn’t paint May in a good light:

‘So apart from the face,’ I said, ‘Why are you working with this guy?’
Lesley ignored me, but the question obviously irritated Martin Chorley.
‘Because she’s properly British,’ he said.
‘And I’m not?’
‘No, ’ he said, ‘Not that I blame you for it, you understand. Your mother was no doubt enticed over to fill some vacancy in the NHS or to drive a bus, or some other job that the working man was too feckless to do himself.’
[…]
‘But Lesley is a proper Brit,’ said Martin Chorley, who I realised had probably been waiting years for an audience. ‘That wonderful blend of Romano-Celt and Anglo-Saxon with a flavouring of Dane and a pinch of Norman French. That happy breed that conquered the world and could again if all their children were kind and natural.’

As the UK stands, on the brink of a racist, white supremacist, elitist-driven Brexit, with 60,000 Nazis gathered in Warsaw yesterday, and every day feeling the tide of the genocide they want to bring rolling further in, I love this simplicity in Aaronovitch’s writing. We’re long past pretending white supremacists are anything more complex. And anyway, all this was known and clear if not in the first Rivers of London novel, then certainly in the second, Moon Over Soho. Aaronovitch has never written anything other than London, the real London.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Foxglove Summer

City boy goes to the country. Country things happen to city boy.

Taking a breather from Ben Aaronovitch’s on-going story of the Faceless Man, and giving PC Peter Grant a break after having his partner, PC Lesley May turn traitor and join with said Faceless Man to drop a brutalist high-rise apartment block — the story of Grant and architecture right there. Off to Herefordshire.

About half-way through Foxglove Summer, I opened Maps and traced the story, based in Leominster, following the River Lugg up to Mortimer’s Cross, up the gorge to Aymestrey, into the parks and forests of Croft Castle and Gatley Park, where the land folds in long, north-east to south-west ridges, all the way to Raymond Erith’s Folly, with its domed roof, full of bees. It took a while, but worth it.

This could almost be read on its own, if you were prepared to let references to past events slide, and characters arrive with little or no establishing scenes. Sometimes I like that, an antidote to the plodding literalism of much genre fiction which has to tell and explain every step. So we have fairies, retired wizards (with granddaughters with said bees), unicorns, Roman roads — and Romans, countryside relationships (even queer ones, ’cos rural doesn’t mean parochial), Beverley Brook, goddess of the same river in London, who arranges for a small stream near the Lugg to be reborn (with help from Peter) kidnapped children and changelings, and the original forest of Britain. Just the kind of diversion he needs — and just the kind of opening up of the series so it doesn’t become one tiresome slog to nail a singular evildoer.

And if I could not like this series more, there’s a quiet love of hoonage throughout, from PC Grant’s Ford ASBO, to Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale’s Jaguar Mark 2 with the 3.8 litre XK6 engine, to the Utes of Herefordshire, and a Ferrari 288 GTO in the next novel (which I’m taking as a poignant homage to Iain Banks’ The Business, also, yes, “Brutal.”). He’s got my heart here, Muslim ninja cops and hoonage.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Broken Homes

Book 4 of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, that I’ve been smashing the last six weeks. This one goes firmly back into the grand narrative of the series, the Faceless Man, the big, tectonic forces moving PC Grant, and goes from the underground of Whispers Under Ground into the council housing towers of South London’s Elephant and Castle.

Spoilers all over here, PC Leslie May turning traitor and working with the Faceless Man was not what I was expecting at all, and still hurts, two novels later. Aaronovitch is dealing with the superstructure of London here, class divisions, the rich using the poor, immigration and racism. It reminds me of straight people’s unwillingness to see or read queer or trans relationships and identities in fiction (“Oh, they’re just good friends, good friends hold hands sometimes.”) — you could get through (almost) all his novels and pretend this is not what it’s about, but if you’re reading from another side, it’s so gloriously obvious. That’s why I’m reading them. Like being in Peckham with Onyx, Carly, and Naretha, and we’re all saying, yeah, this feels like home here, this feels right.

And if it’s not abundantly clear by now, Aaronovitch’s main characters are the rivers of London, the architecture, the underground, what Onyx called density, history layered and compressed on itself, and capriciousness, one day in love with you, the next, ruins. There’s this idea that genre fiction of the sci-fi and fantasy type is about ideas; contrasting that to literature or whatever, ‘nice’ novels, which are about people. This shows an impoverishment in understanding genre, as well as — again — a classist, elitist devaluing. The best sci-fi and fantasy is only about people (not devaluing a different ‘best’ ripping a banging adventure). Sure, people wrapped up in things that don’t happen in the world right now, but stories of people nonetheless, who we come to know across the pages, who we follow as they grow. And when I say people, unlike so often those nice novels, I mean anything which has subjectivity and agency: a ship’s Mind, or the landscape of a planet in Banks’ novels; or the rivers in Aaronvitch’s, all people as well.

So, devouring these novels here and trying to say something worthwhile about each. Read if you liked Harry Potter or Charles Stross’ Laundry Files but wanted more, wanted a London like Peckham.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Whispers Under Ground

After reading Moon Over Soho and Rivers of London, books 2 and 1 respectively of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, I ordered the lot (except the latest, it seems), and read them. And I was in London! So I was all, “I love this city!” and felt like I knew it so much because of these novels. What I call “Harry Potter if he was a black cop in London, played by a young Idris Elba, or Stormzy, and Hermione Granger was a Somali Muslim cop on the Murder Squad.”

I slammed the whole series over the last two months, as they arrived, and usually in a couple of days per novel, except when I was on tour — so they’re also firmly bound with the joys of travel and rivers for me now, the Danube and Thames, which is fitting. Whispers Under Ground doesn’t obviously follow the larger story of the Faceless Man, which almost makes these first three stand-alone works. It does introduce a whole pile of characters, locations, peoples, who fill out the world of the series in this and later novels.

I’m probably going to re-binge the whole series in the coming weeks (just need to re-buy Rivers of London first), which tells how much I’m enjoying these. Funny that they’re a series too, ’cos I’m always reluctant to commit, but cheers to Gala for introducing me to this. Best joyous fantasy read of the twenty-tens.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Rivers of London

Just as Gala handed off Moon Over Soho to me, so do I hand off Rivers of London. I finish it beside the Danube, just upstream from Ottensheim. It’s been my book for the week I’ve been there. I bought two because I’d mostly finished this, but that’s how much reading time I had. I pass it on to Kali Rose, I say, “I think you might like it,” ’cos as much as we’re all at reading the theory and non-fiction for what we’re up against, part of it is seeing ourselves, or just seeing representation in fiction. It’s a political act to write fiction, and to read it. (Also ’cos I didn’t have room in my bag to bring it back on the plane, which means I’ll have to buy it again.)

I’m way behind on my writing about reading at the moment, so this isn’t going to be a slab of text like I wrote for the Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch’s second novel in the PC Grant series. Rivers of London is the first, and is probably better. Whether that’s because of the foreshadowing hanging over it because I know where the story is going with face-mangling magic, and what it means for PCs Peter Grant and Leslie May. Equally a lot of the river story and characters in the second novel — which we’re supposed to know what he’s talking about with, ’cos we’ve read the first, eh? — take on their proper form. Still, yes, you can read second before first and it’s solid and stand-alone enough to not feel disappointment and confusion.

The crime story of Rivers of London is perhaps more grandiose — and goes on some real, deliberate trips — than that of Moon Over Soho — possibly because I was crossing the Danube multiple times a night and had only its waters for company, some of which is still in my lungs. Moon Over Soho, on the other hand brings PC Grant’s family into play, and that was what grabbed me so much, though there’s enough of growing up Black and BAME in London in the first novel that if I’d only read that one I’d still be ordering the whole set.

All of them. All seven of them. All large typeface so I can read them while I fall asleep and pretend I don’t need glasses. Better than Harry Potter? Yeah. Better than Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series? Yeah. All I want to do is order the rest and take a week off, shack up on a nice sofa in the autumn sun (in Berlin, Frances?) and read them all. Are you going to read them too? Yeah. Should they be movies? Yeah.

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Reading: Ben Aaronovitch — Moon Over Soho

“What’s an Airwave?”
“umm … dunno. What’s the context?”
“‘I bunged a spare airwave in with my backup laptop just to be on the safe side. ’”
“Maybe a portable Wi-Fi hotspot?”

“… something something Hogwarts …”
“Gala, what are you reading?”
“Moon Over Soho, it’s by Ben Aaronovitch. Sort of magical police?”
“Never heard of him. Off to the Wikis, I s’pose?”
“I’ll give it to you when I’m done.”

And my backpack — which I can legit get at least a week of living out of if I don’t take climbing shoes — had just enough room in the front mesh pocket for me to take it on the plane. I began in the airport, stupidly early because I read boarding time as wheels up, kept going that evening, finished it off with peanut butter and jam on toast and accompanying coffee — which is how I want to go out (if I’m denied my, “What happens if I—oops,” moment somewhere high in the Central Asian mountains), because there is nothing better than PB&J, coffee, and a boffo novel.

Moon Over Soho is the second of Aaronovitch’s PC Grant Mystery series, currently numbering seven — but did you know he wrote for Blake’s 7 audio dramas? Blake’s 7! The best sci-fi series ever made. And Doctor Who, and Jupiter Moon (I dunno about that last one either). But his PC Grant series is him doing novels proper. Coincidentally (or not), Gala got me up for us watching Luther, starring Idris Elba as the PTSD’d detective. It was shite. Utter fucking cringe-inducing shite. But Elba would make a brilliant PC Grant, except he’s too old. Second novel, then. Doesn’t matter, I picked up most of the carry-over from the first novel, and it’s self-contained enough to make it enjoyable not knowing all the backstory. Enjoyable enough to order all seven? I reckon.

It reminded me plenty of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series (and somewhat of Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People trilogy) — and obviously plays with post-’00s Harry Potter —so much I had to look to see who wrote what when, not convinced at first there wasn’t some heavy borrowing going on. But similarities are unavoidable lately. Everyone’s influenced by Potter in the same way previous generations were by Tolkien; Cthulhu Mythos accounts for a chunk of fantasy, post-Twilight for another, and for police procedurals of the British type, there’s 25 years of The Bill to contend with. So if I’m reminded so much of other novels, why am I all, “Woo! Gonna throw Euros at the whole series!”?

’Cos it’s good. ’Cos it’s the series I wish Stross had listened to. It’s the series for a London where the Mayor is the son of working-class bus driver, whose Muslim family immigrated from India to Pakistan post-partition and then on to South London; a London where Stormzy says, “I’m so London, I’m so South,”; the London of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, where centuries of diligent, ceaseless effort could not stop Brown, Black, South Asian, everyone who is ‘not-white’, who was colonised, who came to the UK, becoming British and Londoners and making the place so, so much more and better than it could ever have been without. It’s a London of those clunky words that I still love for what they aspire to: diversity and multiculturalism.

It wasn’t until I read Moon Over Soho that I could articulate what’s been bothering me in Stross — as much as I like his novels, and as much as I’ve already articulated at length on his problems with representation. It’s the difference between describing a character’s skin colour or sexuality or gender, and leaving it at that, having them move through the white world as anyone else who can, and having a character like PC Grant, who goes home to his mother with all that entails as a child of a working-class, jazz musician father, and a Black British Fula mother of a very extended Sierra Leonean family. And there was a series of short scenes, introducing a recurring character, with a very much tough, butch dyke detective as the intermediary:

She clicked her fingers and a couple of Murder Team detectives came padding down the stairs with gloves and evidence bags. Stephanopoulis pointed at the staff door and they dutifully trooped past me to do a more thorough search of the cloakroom. One of them was a young Somali woman in a leather biker jacket and an expensive black silk hijab. She caught me looking and smiled.

“Muslim ninja,” she whispered.

[…]

Stephanopoulis lent me the Somali ninja girl whose name was Sahra Guleed and who turned out to be from Gospel Oak, which is just up the road from where I grew up—different school, though. When two ethnic officers meet for the first time the first question you ask can be about anything but the second question you ask is always, “Why did you join?”

“Are you kidding?” said Guleed. “You get to legally rough people up.”

This, I like. I get anxious when I pulled in like this, as with Legend of Korra, or Orphan Black, or quite a few others where the writers are doing necessary work, where they’re explicitly repping. What if they’re not, though? Or what if they fuck up? What if I’ve missed something obvious and it’s actually embarrassing how not good it is? What if it’s appropriation instead of representation? The appearance of ‘diversity’ so they don’t have to do the actual hard work, in art and their lives. What if the — so far — cisgender and hetero and male PC Grant comes to signify an entire world prioritising such characters and perspectives? I expect a shitload of effort once a writer reaches a critical mass of Getting It Right. I’m not saying they’re not allowed to fail, I’m not acting as an infallible arbiter, rather that the consequences for screwing up hurt me more as a reader than for the great wash of bollocks, inconsequential because firmly within the derivative norm. If I care about a novel and the characters and the story, it’s because it means something. I don’t want to trawl through a novel for morsels, scraps, and glimpses of representation, I want that to be the core, ’cos that’s the world, that’s real, it always has been.

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Reading: K. T. Davies — Breed

Doing this all in the wrong order. I read K. T. Davies’ Breed before I read Steph Swainston’s The Castle Omnibus, and definitely before I did my annual Reading … thing. As usual, no idea where I heard about her or it, presuming the usual sources (author blogs, author Twitters, Charlie-Jane Anders’ monthly ‘Read the Shit Outta This’ list on io9). Have not read her before, but 10/10 Would Read Again!

It’s basically Oglaf! Breed (that’s his name) is a character in a fantasy book, which means the author gets to do shit to him for Teh Lulz. (Ours and hers. His? Not so much.) After the first few pages it becomes a running gag that something bad is about to happen. In the end, the joke’s on us/the world he lives in (either/or/both) because it turns out Breed is The Chosen One (rather, a descendant of magically bred brawlers used to kill demons, subsequently erased from history), who when asked to “Pretty please save us!” is all “LOL, no! Also Fuck off!”

If you’ve read Harry Potter—wait! Of course you have. You’ve read Harry Potter. You know who Dobbie is. Imagine Dobbie the size of Hagrid with a penchant for drinking and fighting, who gets treated like shit one end of Wizardland to the other. Yeah, the more I think about it, Breed is Hagrid. If Hagrid was Conan the Destroyer. And Oglaf. Good? Yup! Read while drinking.