It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!
What’s the best book you read in August 2023 and why did you love it?
It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material.
Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.
And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our 5-Star SFF page.
One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:
- a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
- a book from our stacks.
- a $5 Amazon gift card (this is the only option for non-USA addresses).
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My best fiction read in August was either Daniel Mason’s North Wood, which in my review to come I described as a “wonderfully and precisely crafted collection of related short stories that greatly impresses with its varied styles, vividly detailed descriptions, sharp sentence constructions, connecting echoes, and a few unexpected twists and turns.” My other best read was a collection of poetry by Joy Harjo — Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
I am working my way through the 26 or so books in the Serge Storms wacky-Florida series, all about a fun, lovable serial killer who only kills jerks and baddies, often in creatively gross and disgusting ways. I have just finished book #17, “Tiger Shrimp Tango.”
I became aware of the series because many of the books are read by the voice actor Oliver Wyman, whose work I have enjoyed in other series, including wacky fantasy books by Christopher Moore. When Wyman does kids’ voice for kids’ books, a lot of the voices are too cutesy-young-kid, like you’re talking down to a child, but in the “Klawde, Evil Alien Warlord Cat” series (of which, alas, I’ve only been able to listen to the first two books), he does excellent work doing two distinctly different evil alien warlord cat voices, as well as doing amusing work on the weird, simpering vocalizations that insipid, dopey “earthling” cats like to make.
While I was sad that the Serge Storms series started off with a different voice actor reading the audiobooks, I quickly got used to the first voice actor’s work, and it was hard to then switch to Wyman’s work. Wyman’s Serge Storms is an antsy, hyped-up guy. But I feel that the first audiobook narrator for the series, George K. Wilson, really captured Serge Storms’s character well. I think there were some glitchy technical things about some of the Wilson recordings, but his version of Serge Storms had a real charm and streetwise character that was really winning. You could definitely see how you could get swept up by the wonderful serial-killer bonhomie that Wilson evokes.
The best book in genre that I read last month was Barbara Hambly’s The Dark Hand of Magic, the final volume in her Sun Wolf and Starhawk trilogy. Sun Wolf is still trying to find an experienced wizard to tutor him, but the mercenary company he used to command, bogged down in an ugly siege, wants him to use his newfound talents to lift a curse that someone has placed on them. Each book in this series gets grimmer and grimmer, and I think overall it qualifies as “grimdark” (with all the content warnings that implies); so Hambly, along with Richard Monaco (Grail series), Glen Cook (Black Company), and Paul Kearney (Hawkwood), can lay claim to being one of the early grimdark authors, before Martin, Abercrombie, Lawrence, and the other more recent stars took it up. Speaking of the Black Company, Cook’s The Books of the South was also very good, although the third novel in the omnibus was not set in the south and did not feature the Black Company, which was a minus for me (especially after the cliffhanger ending of the second novel). Also good was Daniel Abraham’s Blade of Dream, which had the most polished prose of any of the books I read, but which was very thin on actual plot (some of it already covered in Age of Ash), despite the lovely writing.
The two books I enjoyed the most, however, were not in genre: Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (Amelia Edwards) and The Book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa, translated by Margaret Jull Costa). The Edwards is a travel memoir of a trip the author took (with a female friend and the friend’s maid) through the Dolomites mountains of northeastern Italy in 1872, much of which had to be via mule and in places on foot. The Pessoa is a “diary” in 259 sections, intended order uncertain, consisting of anywhere from one sentence to 4-5 pages of the author’s rambling commentary on life, 1920s Lisbon, and his alienation from both (as supposedly voiced by a fictive alter ego named Bernardo Soares, a depressive, decadent, philosophically minded accountant leading an outwardly uneventful life). I finally finished this (library book) on the third try, and I can’t explain why I love it so much, but I do.
I must read Blade of Dreams. Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys sounds excellent too though, and that one I’d share with my friend Marta. She loves that kind of thing.
I know the post reads best book, singular, but I had five five-star experiences in August, which was great. (1) The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse, 1500s struggles between the Catholics and Huegenots; (2) The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, an absorbing story of a girl who escapes starvation in a colonial community and lives on her own in the wild; (3) Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, rewilding wolves in Scotland, with complications, I need to go back and read her 2020 novel Migrations; (4) The Gatekeeper by James Byrne, simple good guy vs the world and the good guy always wins, no literary value but fun; and (5) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, an ancient hagaddah is found and its story told, the actual book is now in the Sarajevo Library and Brooks covered the Bosnian War there for the Wall Street Journal, very interesting. I regret there’s no fantasy/sci fi this past month but I have a few coming up to read.
In the first part of the second Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novel trilogy, “The Search”, we finally have movement on the question of where Zuko and Azula’s mother Ursa is. Flashbacks show how she was in love with a young man named Ikem and forced to marry Prince Ozai to unite the bloodlines of the Fire Lord and Avatar Roku. In the present, Azula escapes her imprisonment and discovers a letter Ursa wrote to Ikem during her marriage to Ozai that contains a seemingly life-changing piece of information for Zuko that proves to ultimately be misleading.
Scott Turow’s next “Kindle County Legal Thriller” after The Laws of Our Fathers is Personal Injuries, where attorney Robbie Feaver, who works in the eponymous genre of lawyering, finds that he can’t escape consequences for the corrupt actions of his past and is strongarmed into helping set up a complex trap in exchange for leniency, working with FBI agent Evon Miller whose backstory and motivations are a mystery of their own.
Professor Odd #2: “The Slowly Dying Planet” (Goldeen Ogawa, whom my son and I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times at the World Fantasy Conventions years ago). This time, the multiverse-hopping Professor Odd was only after some pizza, but her dimension ship the Oddity brings her and her companions to a world inhabited by Italian-speaking dinosaurs, lit by a red sun, about to be invaded by killer robots. Yes, I realize the premise of the series is similar to Doctor Who, but it still works. Partly because the Oddity travels between universes and not just planets, with a correspondingly higher level of weirdness. The companions, too, include a blob monster and a wolfwoman in addition to the hapless university student from our Earth, and Professor Odd herself is a humanoid with cat’s eyes. Goldeen’s other series include Driving Arcana (yes, it has to do with the supernatural and trucks) and The Adventures of Bouragner Felpz, and I hope they’re equally imaginative.
Definitely Tress of the Emerald Sea! As a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, i was so excited for its release but the book just took me so long to finish. I loved the Princess Bride Vibes and thought it was very well done.
Katharine, if you live in the USA, you win a Fan Lit T-shirt (please specify 1st and 2nd preferred sizes) OR a book of your choice from our stacks, OR a $5 Amazon gift card. If your address is outside of the USA, you will get a $5 Amazon gift card.
Please contact me (Marion) with your choice and a US address. Happy reading!