Reading Roundup, October 2024: Alternate London Fantasy, Concluding the Aubrey-Maturin Circumnavigation, Notable Media
King Rat by China Mieville (Bookshop|Library)
This was Mieville's debut, and was republished last year as part of the Tor Essentials series in which I've taken plenty of pleasure in the past few years. Given that it's a debut, its flaws are mostly forgivable - some of the secondary characters are fairly flat, and I felt like the plot sagged in the middle - but overall this was a worthwhile traipse around London, and a good introduction to Mieville's brand of Marxist literature. This book came out after Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and it's impossible to not compare the two - this one was much darker overall (at least from what I remember, I last read Neverwhere over a decade ago). But fans of that book and other magical/alternate London fantasy-type books like the Rivers of London series or the Darker Shade of Magic books I think would find this one worthwhile.
The Hundred Days by Patrick O'Brian (Bookshop|Library)
Throughout the Aubrey-Maturin series, our protagonists experience many highs and just as many if not more lows, and wherever they are affects the mood of the work overall. But while some of the books are darker, I don't know if any start out quite as dark as this entry. Of course, this is the famous volume in which Diana's death is announced third-party in the first chapter in an expository conversation between two characters we've never seen before and never will again. How that affects Stephen sets up the mood of the book, but the body count doesn't stop with that carriage wreck, and continues right up to the end of the book when longtime Aubrey coxswain Barret Bonden is dispatched by cannon-fire. Much of this feels like O'Brian working through his own grief - we know his life-partner and first reader/editor of his books died sometime between the publication of The Yellow Admiral and this novel, though to my understanding there is some question as to how much was written when she passed. Either way, O'Brian clearly had death - and possibly his own mortality - in his mind when he composed this one.
Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O'Brian (Bookshop|Library)
For me, the Aubrey-Maturin novels at the highest level are about the rhythms of life, its ups and downs, its slow parts and its fast parts. Reading them is also subject to my own rhythms - since I started rereading them last July, there have been months when I've made it through multiple volumes, and months where I struggled to finish one. It's just the give and take of it. For this last complete installment, I absolutely sailed (pun intended) through it. After the no-holds-barred high body-count exploration of death found in The Hundred Days, this book finds both Jack and Stephen on something of an unexpected upswing in their lives. We find Stephen first proposing, then courting from afar, the widowed Christine Wood, a scenario O'Brian was maybe not-so-subtly setting up from the opening pages of The Hundred Days, and perhaps even as far back as The Yellow Admiral, in retrospect. While Stephen's proposal is rebuffed, it is not outright denied, and he spends much of this novel in a much better place than The Hundred Days in that regard. Jack is officially en route to Chile (finally) in this one, and though he has to remind himself of his loyalties (this is not official Royal Navy business), he ultimately achieves his much sought-after promotion to rear-admiral of the blue (hence the title of the book) in the closing pages of this one. The whole thing feels like either O'Brian had an endgame in mind by this point, whether that was a natural consequence of the story and characters themselves, or upon reflection on his own mortality - certainly he was old enough that he never completed the next installment.
Notable Media
Going forward I intend to experiment with dropping in some of the more interesting non-book reading I've done in a given month, as memory and time allow.
William T. Vollmann Interview
I knew the name, but did not know anything about the man. This profile and interview got me interested to get around to reading some of his work.
George Orwell's Essays
This opinion piece resonated with me as two or three years ago I came across this very nice four-volume set from Godine of Orwell's letters, essays, and journalism and found it incredibly engaging. I bought it volume by volume over a period of a couple months, and while I didn't read them cover-to-cover, I would estimate I read more than half of the pieces in that time, and still return to them fairly regularly. As the author of this piece notes, they give a fuller portrait of Orwell's politics and the development thereof. There are also plenty of non-political pieces, too, including some famous opinions about English pubs, and how to make a proper cup of tea. All well-worth the price tag.
Added to my TBR
The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 by Johnathan Healey (Bookshop|Library)
I'm not sure how I came across this one, except that I'm in a revolutionary state of mind recently and the English Civil War is little heard-of or understood in this country.
Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollmann (Bookshop|Library)
Heard about this one via the above-referenced interview with Vollmann.
Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by William T. Vollmann (Bookshop|Library)
Ditto.
This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City by John Rogers (Alibris|Library)
Heard about this one via the Londonist: Time Machine Substack. Really, I think Rogers' YouTube channel was listed, but through that I learned about his book.
The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London by Thomas Burke (Alibris|Library)
And I learned about this book from watching one of Rogers' videos. Apparently there was a whole subgenre of this type of book around the turn of the twentieth century.