It’s been a long time since I blogged, mostly because I felt like I had already said everything there was to say about my writing process, about The Wolf and His King, or about the delicate dance of balancing PhD and fiction, and anything else I wrote on the subject would be a repeat. Until something more interesting happened, I was post-less.

But, well, it occurred to me that I could resolve this by simply not talking about myself, so here are a few of the books I’ve been reading recently. I get most of my recommendations via friends at this point, but a couple of these have been things I’ve seen people posting about on social media — even just as a “currently reading” with a one-line summary that I spotted in passing — so this is a regular reminder that if you like a book, you should post about it, so that other people can check it out and read it :)

A couple of these were also impromptu buddy reads with a friend, so some of their opinions probably rubbed off on me, but only because I agreed with them.

[All UK Bookshop.org links in this post are affiliate links, so if you buy these books via those links, I will earn a small commission. But, you know, buy them wherever, or get them from your local library, etc. The self-pub titles in this list aren’t available on Bookshop so I’ve linked elsewhere.]

The genre of “magical academia” (often with a subtheme — or primary theme — of grappling with colonialism and exclusionary hierarchies of knowledge) is an increasingly large one, and I’m both a sucker for it and incredibly fussy. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at an impressionable age, and unfortunately it set my standards for nerdy magic to a height that few books can live up to. The trouble is that my interest is really in the academic side of the magic, and so often this is a bit of an afterthought, playing second fiddle to the aesthetics of scholarship. (I’ve also spent far too much of my life living and working in Cambridge, a popular location for many of these books, and frequently bounce off their depictions of this city or am warned off them by equally nitpicky friends before I can get angry about them. It’s a common affliction, if my friend group is anything to go by.)

However, there were a couple of books in this genre that I’ve read recently and which pleasantly exceeded my expectations. First, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry, which had a satisfying amount of actual academia and research, and characters who seemed genuinely interested in the topic they’d dedicated their life to. It also wrangled a clever setting get-out clause by creating a magical university outside of normal space/time that is connected to both Cambridge and Oxford, thus allowing it to borrow aspects of both universities’ vibes and setup without being set at either, saving it from any accusations of inaccuracy by annoying pedants like me. This setting is pretty crucial to the overarching plot and themes, too, so it’s not just a gimmick.

Next, Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang leans more heavily into the fantastical elements with a fully secondary world rather than a magical one that otherwise resembles ours, and deals with, essentially, a magical postdoc — the first woman to achieve her position, but it’s more of a glass cliff than a groundbreaking step forward, and now that she’s on the inside she’s able to see better the system she’s complicit in. While I didn’t entirely love how this book tackled gender, I thought it did some interesting things with colonialism and power, some of which were effectively achieved by having a deeply unlikable and flawed character: a woman fixated on the gender inequality she’s disadvantaged by, to the point of ignoring the other privilege she experiences and the violent power structures she’s helping to perpetuate, including the power she holds over racially minoritised men. Her flaws and unpleasantness, as much as her gradual improvement, provided a nuanced narrative challenge to her simplistic ‘Girl Power’ narrative, though I still would have liked to see a less cisheteronormative world to further dig into intersectional power structures. The ending surprised me as I’ve grown overly used to books pulling their punches, which this one doesn’t.

On the subject of unlikeable characters, Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake provides plenty of those, but manages to keep the reader’s attention and investment with a lively and engaged narrative voice that proves not to be quite as objective or omniscient as it claims at the start. I’ve read a few of Blake’s books now; The Atlas Six didn’t entirely win me over, but I enjoyed both Masters of Death and Alone With You In The Ether, and those along with Gifted and Talented have fun approaches to narrative form that luxuriate in the ability of prose to Do Something for the story, rather than function only as the “invisible” glass window type of prose that seems to be fashionable these days. I like a book that knows it’s a piece of writing and is doing something with that, playing with form and style, rather than only trying to represent in sentences what you might see on a screen and thus offering itself as a poor imitation of a camera. (I’m thinking of going back to The Atlas Six, since it might just have caught me on a bad day. I’m also not sure if I read the self-pub version or the revised trad-pub version, but I think it was the former, so perhaps the latter would have resolved the issues that meant I didn’t love it as much. It was certainly enough years ago that my opinions might have changed even if the book hasn’t.)

Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin was a chance Libby read, but one that got me right in the feelings — possibly more than I was entirely prepared for. (It even came in with a hot take about Comrac Fir Diad that made me cry, not that that’s too hard, because everything about Comrac Fir Diad makes me cry and I’ve been thinking about it more than usual recently due to the particular stage I’m at with my PhD.) It’s the kind of book that probably hits particularly hard if you’re (ex-)Catholic, Irish, or both, and I’m notably neither, but I spend enough time around people in those demographics that enough of it has rubbed off not to need to google the references and allusions. I really liked how this one uses Hiberno-English, too; it’s a very Irish-feeling book, an effect exacerbated by having just read something beforehand that was ostensibly set in Ireland but in which all of the dialogue sounded extremely English. But if you’re not mentally in a position to be reading about dead siblings or Feelings About Religion (especially feelings about the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the twentieth century, but also about faith itself), then this one might be too much.

I’m exceptionally late to the party with Heresy by S.J. Parris, first published in 2011, but despite the slightly overwhelming sense that the protagonist is the Specialest Guy around whom all great events revolve and in whom everybody is unduly interested, I had a good time with this historical mystery; I liked the sixteenth century setting, and how it engaged quite deeply with the intellectual and material culture of the period without over-explaining every little detail to readers, as some historical novels do. I also find that not enough historical novels actually grapple with religion and philosophy of the period, but that criticism definitely can’t be levelled at this one (as the title suggests). I’ve got the next book waiting for me on Libby.

Over in the more romantic corner, I enjoyed Edge of Nowhere by Felicia Davin for an m/m romance with a bunch of weird and interesting sci-fi worldbuilding along with it: teleportation with a complex twist. I particularly enjoyed the cats named after physicists. I confess that I read this one very late at night when I was failing to go to bed, so my thoughts are less analytical or coherent than they might have been, but I’m very much looking forward to diving into the sequels to this one too.

It was from Felicia Davin’s newsletter that I heard about the ‘Wisconsin Gothic’ series, with the first book being Dionysus in Wisconsin. The blurb mentioned ghosts, which are generally a hard no for me (Creeping Dread is my least favourite reading experience, so haunted houses are right out) but I got the impression they were a sufficiently small aspect of the story that it was worth taking a risk. This paid off — I read the first three books in this series within 24 hours — I actually paused writing this post because I’d started the first one and knew I was going to end up including it — and only in the third one did ghosts really start to pay a significant role, but even there, they weren’t the type that strongly bother me. (The spiders, on the other hand… I didn’t love the spiders!)

The ‘Wisconsin Gothic’ books could probably have come under my ‘magical academia’ heading, though they’re down here in the romantic zone because there’s a central m/m relationship and also because it was a nice segue from Davin. They’re a different subgenre of magical academia than the two above, though: rather than a story about academia that’s actually about colonialism, represented by some kind of magical force, system, power source etc, it’s a story in which academics, some of whom are researching magic, use research (and magic) to deal with magic problems, and also research. This is actually my favourite variety of magical academia, particularly when the characters are intensely knowledgeable about things like rare books and the challenges of translating medieval texts, both of which this series delivers. It’s set in the late 60s/early 70s in (you’ve guessed it) Wisconsin, so there’s some interesting background tension about the Vietnam War and other politics of the period. This is not a setting I know much about, being a 90s-born Brit whose historical knowledge generally skews a few centuries earlier, but it makes for a refreshing setting, as I don’t think I’ve read any other paranormal books set around then. There were a few … not exactly plot twists, but character twists, I guess, that I found strangely predictable and was confused that the characters didn’t seem to be joining those dots, but on the whole I’ve been racing through these and the fourth book is already on my Kindle.

Finally, I started, but bounced off, Looking for Group by Alexis Hall, but I think this was squarely about me and not about the book: it is a book aimed at an extremely specific audience, to which I don’t belong. I’m including it here nonetheless because I have a lot of respect for it as a book that engages with a niche interest (online multiplayer roleplaying games) and does it uncompromisingly and without over-simplifying it for outsiders. I like when I’m out of my depth with a character’s hyperspecific interests, because it makes them feel real; too often characters only seem to have the most surface-level engagement with their ostensible passion. However, I was just a bit too out of my depth with this one, and struggled to keep on top of all the gaming terminology and acronyms. It does make it very clear that it’s a gaming romance, for the record; I figured I’d give it a try because I’ve enjoyed other books by Alexis Hall, but I anticipated potentially not vibing with it. I think I was poorly served by reading it in ebook, where I couldn’t easily consult the glossary at the beginning, and where the annotations/footnotes (authorial commentary on the re-issue) were a distraction rather than an asset. But if you did play these kinds of games in your younger years — or still do — and were not merely, like me, casual Runescape players who only ever fished or mined and never did quests or killed anything larger than a spider, this one might be for you. May we all be able to find the hyperspecific nerdery that corresponds exactly to our own interests.

That’s all for now, I think, but let me know what you’re reading at the moment. Let me know, too, whether you’d like me to do more of these kinds of round-ups in future! I can’t guarantee doing it on any kind of regular schedule, since while I read a lot I am exceptionally fussy and sometimes go a fair while without reading anything I would like enough to include in a post like this, but I’m open to the concept.

---

The Wolf and His King comes out in under a month in the UK (on 27th November) and under three months in the US (27th January). Have you pre-ordered yet? Now’s a great time.