The Best and Worst Books of September
Monday, October 13, 2014
The monthly round-up of praise and shame, as I use a public forum for my half-baked notes.
A busy month, with a lot of books. Most of which (happily enough) were pretty good. Three personal trends:
1. I've started tackling a couple of the classic Gold Medal series properly: Edward S. Aaron's Sam Durrell and Stephen Marlowe's Chester Drum. After a flurry of eBaying, I've actually got mostly-there collections of both. As an excuse to complete the collections, I'm going to try and read both series in order from the beginning. There will be reviews. Maybe.
2. I've taken to the Project Gutenberg "Latest" page. Which is a seriously weird addiction, but I'm finding all sorts of strange treasures.
3. Frontlist time! I had somehow forgotten that October was mega-month for SF/F releases. Which makes September a very exciting time for the Year's Big Books. There's the temptation to blitz through those (a temptation I'm not resisting very well), but it seems more Just and such to mix that up with older books.
Anyway, on with the highlights and lowlights...
Best Books of September
Honourable mentions: Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk, Lloyd Alexander's Westmark, Adam Roberts' Bête and Kirsty Logan's The Rental Heart. The latter two I even reviewed!
That said, two hands-down favourites: Deji Olukuton's Nigerians in Space and Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Both of which are a) brilliant, b) reviewed later this week and c) 2014 debuts, which makes me feel pretty good about the future.
Most Unbest Books of September
Nothing totally terrible this month, but a couple mediocrities of note:
X-Women by Chris Claremont and Milo Manera. In the furore following Manera's Spider-Woman cover, I remembered that the artist had also done a sort of special one-off X-thinger. (Also, according to Wikipedia, one of the sections of Sandman: Endless Nights, which I cannot remember AT ALL.) Anyway, curiosity got the better of me, and hey - X-Women was pretty much exactly what you might think. The female members of the team go clubbing and wind up kidnapped and have to fight evil in their underwear and/or soaking wet. There's a lot of not-being fully clothed involved, and if you've ever wanted to see all your favourite mutant heroines in even less than they normally wear, this is your chance. Or, you know, Google some fan art.
Claremont - who once pioneered writing proper female characters in comic books - condescends to add some sort of vague hand-wavey plot so Marvel can pretend this is experimental fiction and not cheesecake. Fortunately, the clever reviewers of Amazon saw through this ploy.
The Atom Curtain by Nick Boddie Williams. Sometimes I reach for the Ace Doubles instead of the Gold Medals when I'm looking for a comfort read. And more often than not, I regret it. The Atom Curtain is a weird little lost world novel with a post-apocalyptic twist. The USA, in the hopes of averting a world war, raises an impregnable nuclear shield around the entire North and South American continents. The rest of the world sort of... gets on with things. Our hero is an English jet fighter (but of fine American stock!) who gets sucked past the curtain in a fluke storm. There he discovers that radiation has scientifimatically unevolved the American people, so they're now... cave people. Also, there are creepy mole people. With a supermind. It is transparently, lazily based on The Time Machine, but with the added bonus of meandering social theory. Special perk: because everyone is, like, radioactively unevolved and stuff, our jet fighter spends most of the book having sex with his 12 year old cavewoman bride. BUT, YOUR HONOUR, SHE LOOKED AN EVOLVED 18.
John D. MacDonald's The Long Lavender Look. Yup. Still disappointing.