Recent reading

Last weekend I went to a wedding that had a Wolf Hall book club as part of the celebrations. The other conversations also, naturally, drifted to books more generally. As I enthusiastically swapped book recommendations with people, I thought, not for the first time, that few things are as fun as talking about books. So, I've decided to do a quick round up of my recent reading.

Some Desperate Glory #

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (2023)

It's a fun, fast-paced space opera that undermines the concept of the heroic human holdouts fighting against an alien menace. My favorite thing about it was that humans are the most physically imposing species, big, strong, durable and kind of terrifying to every other sentient they encounter. We are the orcs.

Divisions #

Divisions (The Fall Revolution #3-4) by Ken MacLeod (2009)

Divisions is actually two books in one, The Cassini Division (1998) and The Sky Road (1999). I loved The Cassini Division, which is a space opera about an anarchist army that operates roughly on the principles laid down by Max Stirner. Their mission is to keep the artificial intelligence swarm that has eaten Jupiter from encroaching on earth. It's hilarious, philosophically rich, and fun.

The Sky Road is an alternate history of the same timeline. It imagines what would have happened if the anarcho-primitivists had won the Fall Revolution instead. My favorite thing about it was the imagined economic system, and the way the flashbacks to the historical moment people in the book's present moment mythologized complicated and undermined the myth.

Engines of Light #

All three by Ken MacLeod:

• Cosmonaut Keep (2000)
• Dark Light (2001)
• Engine City (2002)

The central technological premise of this space opera series is that people can travel at the speed of light, but, and this is a central problem the characters try to solve, it is very difficult to go somewhere that isn't already mapped. Naturally, the travel time is instant to the people on the ship while hundreds of years pass to people planet-side, and that causes interesting social problems. Also, there are some very interesting aliens. My favorite part was the conflicts between Soviet hold-over tankies, neo-anarchists, and apparently classical Epicureans. I didn't like these books as much as the Fall Revolution, but I would still highly recommend them to anyone who like space opera.

The Wheel of Time #

All by Robert Jordan:

• The Eye of the World (1990)
• The Great Hunt (1990)
• The Dragon Reborn (1991)
• The Shadow Rising (1992)
• The Fires of Heaven (1993)
• Lord of Chaos (1994)
• A Crown of Swords (1996)

When the Wheel of Time TV show was cancelled, I wanted to know what would happen next. I read the first seven of fourteen books in the series before I fell off. I read them one after another, like I was eating popcorn or cotton candy. I think the series is competently written and has fun world building and--at least at the beginning--good plotting that makes you want to keep reading to find out what happens next. But at length it starts to sag under its own weight and especially at the pace I was reading the flaws began to show.

My favorite thing was the character arc of Mat Cauthon who starts out as the perfect archetype of a D&D rogue. He literally steals a cursed dagger and gets cursed after being told not to take any stuff from the cursed city. Over time, he turns into a reluctant hero, but, at least in the first seven books, his self-image of just being a gambler and schemer never fades. I would happily just read all about Mat. Of course, those kinds of books exist and they're generally classified as sword and sorcery rather than epic fantasy.

Wolf Hall #

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

I read Wolf Hall right after my Wheel of Time spree, and it's some readerly whiplash to go from Robert Jordan to Hillary Mantel. More happens in 20 pages of Wolf Hall than 200 pages of any given Wheel of Time book. Because it's so emotionally dense, Wolf Hall is harder to read. The emotions are almost unbearable. I've never had children, but Cromwell's family dying of the sweating sickness and his pervasive grief feels like my own. His real interiority is almost unbearable. Previously, I read most of Wolf Hall but fell off at around 80%. It is not a page turner. It's dense and beautiful and emotionally painful. I also find it painful to think about how horrible monarchy is. How awful persecution for religious beliefs. How disgusting hereditary nobility.

Wolf Hall is perfect in almost every quality, yet it does not draw me in. It's not that kind of book. You have to choose to go in. In this way, it's a bit like reading or watching horror. You choose to go in to the story knowing in some way you'll be hurt. And you will be hurt, right? That's the point. I knew almost the whole story, both from history and watching the TV adaptation. It ends badly, for everyone. I mean, it's historical fiction. You know everyone dies. That's just the start. I knew about some of the specific events, too. I remembered the sweating sickness, and but I didn't remember how emotionally intense it was to read about the deaths and the grief.

Mantel's Cromwell is such a relatable character. When grief strikes, he fills his time with busyness, with business. I can see myself in him sometimes like that. I love the detail about Polish being worse than Welsh to learn, but he goes for it anyway. Then his wife dies just in that moment.

Story of O #

Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954) translated by Richard Seaver (1965)

I first read this book when I was 19 or so, and upon re-reading I liked it much better. Having read de Sade, as well as a lot of romance, in the meantime helped me place it in its literary context. It's an unrealistic and dreamlike erotic fantasy that evokes a mood and, to paraphrase de Sade's intro to 120 of Sodom might excite the reader even as it horrifies them. It probably deserves a full-length review, and I might get to that one day. When I was 19, I read it too much as a story with a plot, and expected realism and balance and reasons for why characters did what they did. Coming back to it, I had no such expectation, and was impressed by the quality of the prose, which is not normally much of a consideration in erotic romance.

Automatic Noodle #

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (2025)

When I picked it up, I meant to read just a little bit of Automatic Noodle, but I slurped it up in one go. It's a novella about robots who start a noodle shop in San Francisco. Because the action happens in parts of San Francisco I know particularly well, there was an extra layer of fun in seeing how the author imagined the city changing and staying the same in the future.