Hello. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I will be reviewing all the books I read in January. This month I only read 4 books. Here are my thoughts on all of them.
1. FANTASY AND LGBTQ+: He Who Drowned The World by Shelley Parker-Chan
This is the second book in The Radiant Emperor duology by this author, and I liked it but I had some issues with it. First, the positives. The writing is superb and it is very easy to pick this book up right after finishing the first. Also, the story shifts a little and we don’t focus entirely on Zhu anymore. And I thought that this was good because political intrigue takes center stage now. The story is, after all, a fictional account of how the Ming dynasty was established in China.
The main character in this one is Wang Baoxiang and he is the antagonist. However, I think the book suffers in how sexually explicit it becomes (specifically in Wang Baoxiang’s chapters) and how often it happens. Yes, he wants revenge for the way people have treated him and he is a very skilled manipulator (and manipulating people with sex is a trick as old as time), but there is too much sexual content for my liking. And later things get even more complicated because it seems like Wang Baoxiang is actually starting to enjoy it. Maybe the author was trying to add more diversity into the story by making Wang Baoxiang gay (or bi)? I don’t know. I just didn’t like how graphically sexual this book is.
I also did not like Zhu very much in this one. In fact, Xu Da was my favorite character of the whole duology. But the reason I did not like Zhu in this book is because she doesn’t hesitate to use the people she loves to get what she wants; specifically, her wife (and the one I had most issues with), who becomes Wang Baoxiang’s concubine at Zhu’s behest. Again, sex is used as a weapon and, yes, this is done in wars, but I was beyond thinking that the amount of sex in this book was too much by now. I also didn’t like that Zhu wasn’t above doing ethically and morally wrong things to become great.
I was disillusioned with this conclusion, and I don’t think that I’ll ever read this book (or duology) again.
2. CLASSIC: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights is a book that needs no introduction, like Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina. I first read this book in college and I loved it. This is the second time I read it, and I admit it wasn’t the same experience. I didn’t finish it thinking that it was one of the best books I’d ever read, like I did the first time. But I still liked it. The only difference is that I know now with certainty what I liked so much about it.
What makes Wuthering Heights so great is not the tormented and unhealthy love story between Heathcliff and Cathy but the writing. Emily Brontë, like Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, is a master of dualities. There are two narrators, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly, two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and two love stories, the love story between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and the love story between Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw. But the duo that stands out the most (to me, at least, and in my opinion the most important one) is that of the two Catherines, Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter Catherine Linton. These two women are complete opposites. After all, Catherine Earnshaw becomes Catherine Linton when she marries Edgar Linton while Catherine Linton becomes Catherine Earnshaw when she marries Hareton.
Heathcliff, though, is this book’s most famous character and I can’t finish this review without talking about him. Personally, I didn’t hate Heathcliff and I don’t think that he’s one of those characters that are easy to hate either. In fact, I don’t think that he’s hateful at all. Yes, he did some awful things but let’s not forget that some pretty awful things were also done to him. But the one awful thing that affected him the most was Cathy’s rejection. And I think that he hated her for rejecting him, but that he hated himself even more for not being good enough for her, like Edgar, whom he hated with a passion for this very reason. Heathcliff is just a tormented soul who never got the chance to be with the person he loved; a torment that got worse after she died and all he wanted to do was die and be with her. It’s kind of sad.
3. FANTASY: Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu
This book is a re-read for me, and I picked it up again because I challenged myself to actually finish fantasy trilogies or series this year. I have a knack of picking the first book in a series and not finishing that trilogy or series, so a lot of books that are not the first book in a series are just sitting there on my shelves and I decided to do something about it this year. And that is, to pick them up.
The main character of this epic fantasy, Çeda, is set on killing the twelve kings that rule the city of Sharakhai to avenge her mother, who died at the hands of one of them. And little by little, Çeda learns that her mother too was trying to kill the kings but her reasons to do so are not entirely transparent. There were a lot of things Ahya didn’t tell her daughter before she died and Çeda has a lot to learn before she can even get close enough to the kings and kill them.
As with all epic fantasies, there is a lot going on. And this book is just the setup. So at times it might feel like nothing is happening and that the book is a lot longer than it should be, but I wasn’t too upset about this. It is just the first book. I just hope that this will pay off later. Let’s what happens in Book 2.
4. POETRY: The Iliad by Homer, Translator Stephen Mitchell
This book is also part of a challenge and it might not appeal to many here. But I’m searching for my favorite translation of The Iliad this year, and this one is the first one I picked up. I’m a lover of mythology and an avid reader of mythological retellings. And I have read several retellings of The Iliad. Among them, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. But most importantly, I love The Iliad. In fact, it is one of my favorite books.
I first read it in Spanish. And at the time I was not too picky on translations. Now I am. I had never read it in English, despite being one of my favorite books ever so I decided to correct that. But soon I realized that there are so many translations in English that I cannot possibly read all of them. So I am only going to read the most popular ones and the most readily available ones. Stephen Mitchell’s translation, however, is not a very popular one but it is the one that I picked up first because I’ve had it for so long on my shelves. Many people don’t like this translation for two reasons: 1) Mitchell excises Book 10 from the poem and says that it is most likely a later addition by another author and so relegates it to an appendix at the end, and 2) he dispenses with character epithets. And The Iliad is shock full of character epithets. In fact, almost every character has one but Mitchell only uses them when introducing a new character and does not refer to that character again by that epithet when he or she is mentioned again.
This, I found, made the text a lot clearer. I remember when I read The Iliad in Spanish and character epithets were everywhere. It took me a bit to get used to them, and I assumed what their purpose in Greek was but they didn’t translate as well in Spanish. In fact, there were so many of them that there came a point where I thought of them as meaningless and just skipped them. But without them, in English, I found that the poem read a lot easier and the verses flowed into one another with a lot more ease. Also, it was harder to lose track of what was happening. So I didn’t mind the dispensation, but I also haven’t read a translation in English that does have them. Others might not agree with me, but I found that it made for a more immersed reading experience. Also, I recommend the audiobook for this translation. Alfred Molina is superb in this one.
Given that this is a challenge, I’m going to read this book several times this year so different translations will appear in these wrap ups throughout the year.
That is everything I read in January. Thank you for reading.
