What I've Been reading Recently

It's been over a month since the last one, so here are the books that have kept me ticking over since.

The Conservative Party after Brexit by Tim Bale
Fools by Pat Cadigan
Our Bloc: How We Win by James Schneider
Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
Wifedom by Anna Funder
The Darkness on Diamondia by AE van Vogt
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood
The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
Count Zero by William Gibson
We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Shall we get the non-fiction out the way with first? Many thanks to Tim Bale for kindly sending me a review copy of the second edition of his latest book on the Tories. I will write about it soon, promise! The appearance on this list of Baudrillard's final book marks not a descent into nihilism, but a side project that has quite a bit to do with hegemony. In The Agony of Power, he refers to simulation, simulacra, and their logics as hegemony. But untangling it meant going back to Symbolic Exchange and Death and his other key subsequent works. They will get featured on the next round up, but I will say they were all enjoyable as well as useful reads. On the subject of the H-word, I also read James Schneider's short book answering the perennial 'what is to be done?' question. And his argument was for a coordinating organisation that could network across and facilitate solidarity between an array of protest and social movements. Apparently this influenced Jeremy Corbyn enough to set up the Peace and Justice project, and you can see parallels between his remarks on what the new party should look like and the arguments in this book. Though, as we know, the practice has fallen somewhat short. Last here is Anna Funder's Wifedom, an excoriating expose of how George Orwell and his biographers have suppressed Eileen Blair, his wife, out of his writing and accounts of his life. It somewhat undermines the saintly pedestal sundry centrist writers have put him on.

Two works of mainstream fiction cropped up thanks to book club commitments. The Reader is probably best known for the 2008 Kate Winslet flick, and it was good group fodder. Plenty in there about post-war trauma, war crime blindness and forgiveness. It was a very easy rid. On a not dissimilar theme, Han Kang's We Do Not Part was dreamlike, chilling, melancholic, and beautiful. A meditation on a series of massacres that prefaced the Korean War, it is an elegant piece of writing.

On the science fiction, at the bottom was van Vogt's tedious tale of slow-burn alien rebellion in Darkness on Diamondia. Do not recommend, and not ideal for a first foray into his oeuvre. Better but not great was Tade Thompson's Far from the Light of Heaven. I do like Tade and follow him on social media, but this - again a first try of his work - did not sit with me. Pat Cadigan's Fools began with promise and fizzled out amid a mess of melding personalities and confused memories. And, I'm sorry to say, William Gibson's follow up to Neuromancer didn't leave much of a lasting impression. I remember Count Zero being entertaining enough, but it didn't stick. Nick Woods's Azanian Bridges had promise: an alternative South Africa where apartheid had persisted to the mid-2010s, someone invents an empathy/mind-reading machine. A well-constructed piece but, I don't know, it just missed something. Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, with a lovely Ken MacLeod intro doing the contextualising, was also interesting but I didn't find the speculative dimensional physics babble in the last third that gripping. Perhaps I'm getting harder to please and going off hard SF? To Sleep in a Sea of Stars was a thick chonker of a space opera, and paused before giving it a go. And it was a bit mid. Christopher Paolini's background as a fantasy writer shows through with SF analogues of magic items and lich lords, but also dump in Cthulhu-style aliens, mutated zombie hordes, periodic down times for exposition, and the sorts of battles that read like a first person shooter/end boss fight narration - that should give you a flavour of what to expect. Only one SF novel properly stood out, and that was Peter Heller's The Dog Stars. The plague has come and gone, nearly everyone is dead, and what's left has to get by in a brutal and nasty world. Somewhere between The Road and Station Eleven in the violence/brutality department, it was well written enough to earn a recommend.

The highlights then? Undoubtedly the two mainstream novels, and the Baudrillard. What have you been reading recently?