#sffbookclub

Bones & Runes was the #SFFBookClub January 2025 selection. It's a modern mythological quest of three friends trying to recover something stolen and grow as people and friends along the way. Overall it was a bit of a disappointment.

@eldang's thorough feelings after stopping reading sums up the majority of my thoughts. I'll try to get at a couple of other thoughts past that.

This book is attempting some interesting things by trying to mix together African, Irish, Hindu, and Greek mythology all at once. I can understand a story that is trying to stir together a variety of myths and methods of accessing the divine, but overall there's too many ingredients and everything is weaker for it.

Subjectively, I was disappointed by the writing. For a book that is so thoroughly rooted in South Africa and Durban in particular, I did not come away with much of a sense of place in most of the scenes. Part of this is that the characters are driven around by Ganesh from place to place in a way that makes it feel like the cast is teleporting between scenes.

But this isn't some seven stages of hell, Dante. These are African gods. The hero doesn't always survive. Forget heaven and hell. We've got no time for the devil here. Here, in this land, on this rock, we've got so many aspects of evil that one being doesn't suffice to hold its might; it's true strength. Maybe in your western worlds where everything is black and white, where you can afford one being to hurl your hatred at; one place that is good and one that is bad. This is Africa, baby. Here the good can be both bad and good at the same time.

I quoted this because this whole statement is repeated twice in the book almost word for word, but it feels all talk and no show. There is precious little ambiguity in this fantasy quest. There are a number of dangerous and neutral characters who deal in bargains or seem chaotically neutral, but the main players all seem fairly clear cut and shallow.

This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.

I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.

What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining in the mouths of its characters--kind of Legend of Zelda style--while at the same time throwing a lot of Bantu (I'm not sure which specific language[s]) vocabulary at the reader without notes or translations - in at least one case, about 1/4 of a page. I have a lot of time for using the languages that cultural references come from, without necessarily translating ( outside.ofa.dog/book/146782/s/david-mogo does this to good atmospheric effect), but it made the over-explaining all the more jarring.

I then learned that the author is white, which bugs me for a story so heavily rooted in Bantu mysticism. He clearly is knowledgeable about the subject, but these aren't his stories to tell, and in this light the over-explaining feels like a white man showing off how cool he is because he knows about the subalterns' culture. I think the "Runes" character (a jumbled Celtic / New Age Druid wizard in Durban) is meant to be self-deprecating, but he's so secondary to the "Bones" character (the Bantu wizard) that I'm still left feeling that the wrong person is telling this story, in ways that are definitely to the book's detriment.

I enjoyed reading most of this book, but as I went on from one story to the next I noticed I was taking longer and longer breaks between the stories. In the end I stopped a couple short of the end just because I was about to head out on a trip and I realised I wasn't finding it compelling enough to bring the physical book with me. I'll probably read them eventually, but I'm not in a hurry so I'm just considering this shelved for now.

The basic premise is that all the stories are pieces of the history of what appears to be one empire which has waxed and waned in size and power over a very long time, possibly millennia. But I'm not quite sure if I have that right, because the stories are generally not connected to each other - I think I caught one ruling dynasty's name getting repeated but that's the only explicit link I've picked up so far. Which I don't necessarily mind in itself--after all I've enjoyed plenty of collections of totally unconnected short stories--but it seems to have constrained the author just enough for the stories to start to feel samey even though they're about clearly different eras and take a variety of narrative points of view.

I noticed somewhere that this book was originally published in Spanish as two separate volumes. I might have enjoyed it more if I'd read one volume and then set it aside for a while as I tend to do with successive instalments of a series. The repetitiveness didn't really start to bother me until some way into the second volume.

#SFFBookClub

This novella is a story about memories, transformation, and love; it follows the demon Vitrine, whose best love is the city Azril that she writes about in a book kept in the glass cabinet of her heart. When angels raze the city to the ground, she curses one of them with a piece of herself, and gets to the work of rebuilding the city into what she remembers.

This is an interesting book to pair with Kalpa Imperial from the #SFFBookClub this month. The way Vitrine remembers the ghost of the old city interspersed with what the new city is becoming feels like it could be a chapter from Kalpa Imperial. Subjectively, there's sort of a similar lyrical style between the two as well.

I continue to love Nghi Vo's writing, and the way this book juxtaposes the fantastic with the literal rebuilding of a city brick by brick. However, the emotional crux is the relationship between the angel and the demon and this just wasn't my jam.