tethered to a burning sphere

Excluding the novelette, here are three novels that got me thinking about the desire to inhabit books and that also contained whole passages that I deemed quote-worthy.


• The Astral Library by Kate Quinn (audiobook): At first this contemporary fantasy seems like a departure from Quinn’s recent historical fiction, like The Briar Club. Alix is having a spectacularly bad day, including losing a job, being locked out of her bank account and needing a new place to live, when she opens a door in the Boston Public Library and finds herself in a completely different library.

The Astral Library offers sanctuary to desperate booklovers, allowing them the opportunity to live inside a book as a minor character – provided said book is in the public domain. And from this point it becomes increasingly clear that Quinn is an author of historical fiction and she has found ways to incorporate her research into even this fantasy. (I am not complaining, in case it wasn’t clear.)

I really enjoyed this story! ( “Libraries and librarians are gatekeepers, protectors of the written word. If you aren’t allowed to copy, reproduce, quote, or print an author’s book without legal permission, why on earth would you be allowed to live in it?” | “I am positive this particular situation is not covered by copyright law,” I stated. )

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• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine: A moment to check my Libby history – it turns out that I first put a hold on this book in 2020. I borrowed it three different times in 2023 and twice in 2025, and each time I returned it, unopened. I was too busy reading other things, or I decided I didn’t have the time, or the headspace, for this sort of science-fiction. I didn’t remember anything about it or why I’d wanted to read it.

This time when I borrowed it, I actually forced myself to open it – and forced myself to read beyond the first few pages – it did not take me very long to realise why I had put a hold on it in the first place. While some aspects of this book are not quite my cup of tea, in all other respects this is absolutely the kind of science-fiction I like. At times I was almost giddy reading this.

Mahit is sent to the City, the “heart-planet and capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire”, as the new ambassador from Lsel Station. She doesn’t know what happened to the previous ambassador – is he dead, disgraced or disappeared? According to her station’s customs, Mahit has been implanted with an imago-machine of her predecessor but this record of Yskandr Aghavn’s memory is fifteen years out of date.

( I was fascinated by the ramifications of the imago technology. I wasn’t surprised to find an exploration of empire and of the problems of empire but I wasn’t expecting the exploration of having grown up outside the empire with a fascination for the empire’s literature )
( ‘It was hard for HER to wrap her mind around—the very idea of Teixcalaan not being permanent, irrevocable, eternal. And she was a barbarian, a foreign particle, just a thing that loved (did she? Did she still?) the Empire’s literature and culture, it wasn’t home; it had never been the shape of the world for her like it must be for Three Seagrass, only the shape that distorted the world out of true, the warp of heavy mass pulling at the fabric of space.’ )

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• “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells: This novelette is part of the Murderbot series and takes place after Artificial Condition, but instead of focusing on Murderbot, it is about humans who connected to the university research ship ART aka Perihelion.

This was interesting – maybe it would be more so if I had reread Network Effect, but by the end, I would have been happy to see it continue as a longer story.

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• Mrs Tim Gets a Job (1947) by D.E. Stevenson: This is set after the war and I think it must be 1946 as it’s six years after Mrs Tim Carries On. Hester’s husband is stationed in Egypt, her son is away at school and her twelve-year-old daughter is about to start boarding school too. One of Hester’s friends suggests that Hester should get a job and puts her in touch with a Scottish woman who has turned her family home into a hotel. Tocher House is near Ryddleton, the fictional Scottish town in which various of Stevenson’s other novels are set (like Celia’s House or Anna and Her Daughters).

D.E. Stevenson is one of those authors whose books make me think I’d like to visit the place described therein, even though I know that the reality of living there would perhaps be less comfortable than the books suggest. As with the previous books, I really enjoyed spending time in Hester’s company and appreciated her observations and her perspicacity.

( ‘I examine my own reaction to reports from scholastic establishments (reports upon the attainments and behaviour of my offspring) and am bound to admit that I have usually received them with a grain of salt.’ )