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lightreadsNotes from the Burning Age by Claire North
4/5. Hard to describe this one without using three words or seven paragraphs. Let's see. In the age after ours, after elemental spirits rose out of the earth and struck much of humanity from its surface for its crimes against the planet (or did they?), a new nature-based religion carefully guards the secrets of our era, like nuclear fusion and automatic weapons and short-selling. But one man wants those secrets to save humanity from a self-imposed life of low-tech harmony with nature.
Claire North (same person as Kate Griffin, for anyone who may find that compelling) is close to a must-read for me. Her books are each wildly different in subject, and yet all share that quality of emersion where setting them down feels like a forceful resurfacing. I like them even when I don't like them. She's just that good at whatever it is she decides to do. This time she decided to do a spy story and a war story and a philosophical argument. The first two are very successful, and the last is interesting, even when I wanted to argue back at it or tell her to please tone down the performative self-consciousness of the sins and stresses of the modern age, and 2020 specifically. (Our main character is one of the few who can read modern English and thus who can decipher relics from our age, so the book is peppered with fragments of warning signs and instruction manuals and Instagram postings that most of humanity can no longer read or culturally decipher, which is effective in places and in other places is making references to PPE that, like, can we not?)
Anyway, it's good, and strange, and thorny. What would you do to protect peace? What wouldn't you do? All played out across the stage of Europe and across a deeply intimate psychological space amongst three people. Some good enemies who love each other shit here. That sort of thing.
Content notes: Accidental death of child, war, torture, captivity.
4/5. Hard to describe this one without using three words or seven paragraphs. Let's see. In the age after ours, after elemental spirits rose out of the earth and struck much of humanity from its surface for its crimes against the planet (or did they?), a new nature-based religion carefully guards the secrets of our era, like nuclear fusion and automatic weapons and short-selling. But one man wants those secrets to save humanity from a self-imposed life of low-tech harmony with nature.
Claire North (same person as Kate Griffin, for anyone who may find that compelling) is close to a must-read for me. Her books are each wildly different in subject, and yet all share that quality of emersion where setting them down feels like a forceful resurfacing. I like them even when I don't like them. She's just that good at whatever it is she decides to do. This time she decided to do a spy story and a war story and a philosophical argument. The first two are very successful, and the last is interesting, even when I wanted to argue back at it or tell her to please tone down the performative self-consciousness of the sins and stresses of the modern age, and 2020 specifically. (Our main character is one of the few who can read modern English and thus who can decipher relics from our age, so the book is peppered with fragments of warning signs and instruction manuals and Instagram postings that most of humanity can no longer read or culturally decipher, which is effective in places and in other places is making references to PPE that, like, can we not?)
Anyway, it's good, and strange, and thorny. What would you do to protect peace? What wouldn't you do? All played out across the stage of Europe and across a deeply intimate psychological space amongst three people. Some good enemies who love each other shit here. That sort of thing.
Content notes: Accidental death of child, war, torture, captivity.