What I’ve been reading

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I adored this! Full disclosure, I didn’t start out adoring it: Harrow’s cruelty to Gideon in the opening chapters was so wretched and pointless that I had to pause and look up spoilers, because the difference between me loving her and hating her in a not-even-fun-to-hateread way was going to hinge entirely on the backstory that motivated it. Without passing on those spoilers, let’s just say she passed the backstory check and is now my poor little meow-meow.

Aside from that initial speedbump, everything about this book seems almost tailor made to appeal to me. The basic sales pitch that everyone throws around is “lesbian necromancers in space”, and that’s accurate, but doesn’t convey just how gloriously, unrestrainedly gothic the whole thing is. The lesbians live in Space Gormenghast! They dress in thick layers of decaying black and paint their faces to look like skulls! Their jewellery is made of human bones! Their rosaries are also made of human bones, because they’re ultramorbid Death Catholics with an actual religious obligation to be as creepy as possible at all times. I know Muir’s writing style can be a bit polarising, but the fusion of lush gothic prose with quippy modern slang really worked for me. It was vivid, visual and atmospheric in the way of a classic gothic horror novel, but as relatable and semi-ironically dorky as my tumblr dash. The scariness level was also calibrated perfectly: the whole thing is suspenseful as fuck with some truly chilling moments, but also periodic releases of tension (of both the answer-to-tantalising-mystery and silly-comic-relief varieties) that stopped the stress becoming un-fun, which tends to be a problem for me with a lot of horror because at heart I’m a giant wimp who deserves to have her goth card revoked.

So yeah. I love this book a lot. I love it so much that I bought the second book of the series in hard copy - the cover art is so good omg, I need it on my shelf - and am now fuming because my order is days late and I want it noooow.

Unruly: a History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell. Yes, David Mitchell the comedian. I have to start on this one with a disclaimer, too: British royal history is super not my area, and this is pop history of the glibbest, most minimally sourced kind, so I have absolutely no idea how trustworthy it is. It could be! It could be a brilliant distillation of rigorous scholarship into a more appealing vernacular style, but it could also be riddled with misinformation and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Honestly, though, I don’t care. Life is too short to try and be an expert on everything, and this book is a damn enjoyable foray into a subject that doesn’t interest me much for its own sake but that becomes equal parts gripping and hilarious in Mitchell’s hands.

The book spans from the earliest years of post-Roman Britain to the reign of Elizabeth I. To make up for its huge chronological span, it’s quite narrowly focused; contemporary events and culture are treated only as far as strictly necessary to make sense of the story. What really seems to interest Mitchell is a) understanding each of the monarchs as people and b) tracing the evolution of British monarchy as a concept, from the early days when kings were basically just successful warlords to the eventual notion of special sacred dynasties chosen by God to hold supreme executive power. He has no strident anti-monarchical agenda as far as I can tell, but finds joy in highlighting the absurdities of the system and being generally as irreverent as possible (he has an absolute field day with King Cnut, whose name apparently suits him best if you read it as a typo).

But while his political sympathies are mildly expressed, his personal empathy is keen - and it’s that, ultimately, that kept me absorbed in this book. In treating all these long-dead monarchs with gossipy flippancy, Mitchell humanises them - I imagine he’d write exactly the same way about modern political leaders. He’s never slow to point out how alien their cultural context was from anything we as his readers will have experienced, but at the end of the day they’re all just people, and the core business of being human doesn’t meaningfully change across time, space or culture. Mitchell makes ordinary human figures out of people who worked extremely hard to hand themselves down to history as somehow special. He’s also just really, really bloody funny. He hasn’t changed my mind about my general lack of interest in this subject, but in his hands it was well worth the time.