Two books I loved, with lots of quotes.

• Katabasis by R.F. Kuang: I remember being curious about Kuang’s first fantasy novel but whatever I read about it led me to conclude that the book sounded a bit too dark for my taste, and any details I gleaned over the years about her subsequent novels did not encourage me to reconsider.

Last year I kept scrolling past discussions about people’s reactions to Katabasis. I had absolutely no intention of reading about two Cambridge PhD students journeying into hell to retrieve their advisor’s soul, for all that it’s a fantasy novel about academia, so I was not paying too much attention to these discussions. Neither was I trying to avoid spoilers.

I actually didn’t encounter any spoilers. But I started noticing a theme. People who liked the novel said it was a love story. And people who didn’t objected to the academic tone of the worldbuilding. After a while, it occurred to me that that probably wasn’t something I’d object to.

So I looked at the opening chapters on Libby and after the line about how Alice’s preparation for journeying into Hell had included consulting The Waste Land, I was sold. And by sold, I mean I put the book on hold and then waited months and months to borrow it. (I wasn’t actually sold-sold until I was a third of the way through – that was when I bought it.)

I absolutely loved this book!

I love how the story develops. At first, there were things I didn’t know (even if Alice did) and also things that Alice didn’t know yet, and the way these are revealed and explained throughout the book was compelling.

I liked the prose. I loved the intertextuality and the fact that, even though Alice’s field of study (analytic magick) does not exist in my world, Alice’s research involves literary works that were discussed and referenced in my university classes (because, for Alice, these texts are not purely fictional). ( I loved how, even though this story is set in Hell, so much of the book manages to actually be about academia – because there are lots of flashbacks and references to Alice’s experiences at university, and the different Courts of Hell mimic and distort different aspects of academia. )

It has occurred to me that quite a few of my favourite books involve trying to save someone’s soul from Hell. Usually trying to save them before they end up in Hell (e.g. most Tam Lin retellings) but I still came away reflecting that Katabasis is, if not directly in conversation with those particular books, then at least in conversation about many of the same topics as those books. It’s a “This book should be friends with that book!” sort of feeling.

Katabasis is not perfectly to my tastes in absolutely everything, and not only because of those later chapters I mentioned. But it came close.

( ‘To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.’ )

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• A Theory of Dreaming by Ava Reid: When I reviewed A Study in Drowning, I said that Taylor Swift’s “Lavender Haze - Acoustic Version” kept reminding me of this book – not because the lyrics fitted the story particularly but because I’d discovered the song the same weekend I read the book and my memory had linked the two.

So I was somewhat amused to discover that the lyrics arguably fit the sequel.

Staring at the ceiling with you
Oh, you don't ever say too much
And you don't really read into
My melancholia

I’ve been under scrutiny (Yeah, oh, yeah)
You handle it beautifully (Yeah, oh, yeah)
All this shit is new to me (Yeah, oh, yeah)

I feel the lavender haze creeping up on me
Surreal, I'm damned if I do give a damn what people say
No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me
I just wanna stay in that lavender haze

Effy and Preston are both back at the University of Llyr and dealing with the aftermath of the events of A Study in Drowning. Effy is under scrutiny as the first woman accepted into the College of Literature, while Preston – unlike the first book, this is dual POV – is under scrutiny because his family is from Argant, which is at war with Llyr.

I found A Theory of Dreaming stressful in a way A Study in Drowning was not. Throughout A Study of Drowning, Effy (and Preston) are essentially visitors at Hiraeth Manor and I felt like they always had the option of retreating if things became too dark and unsafe. But now they are back at university, a place where they ostensibly belong – this is where they both have their own bedrooms with their own possessions, this is where their friends are. Not only would there be serious academic consequences to leaving university (like not being able to finish one’s degree), neither of them have anywhere safe to retreat to – Effy’s family are horribly unsupportive, and although Preston’s are loving, they are on the other side of a border closed by the war.

Another reason this was stressful is that, unlike A Study in Drowning, what happened didn’t feel safely distant from my own experiences. Effy’s anxiety about attending lectures is more relatable than some of her other concerns, and one scene was like something out of my anxiety dreams about falling behind in my studies. (I have these dreams every so often. They’re weird, because it’s years since I was a student – and I didn’t have them when I was a student.) ( But even though I often did not exactly enjoy reading about Effy and Preston’s experiences at university, it was satisfying to get to read about them. ) I also loved Effy and Preston’s friends. They were a bright spot in this book. The scenes where other people step up to support Effy and/or Preston gave me all the feels.

This book isn’t perfectly to my tastes, either, and arguably it didn’t live up to everything I wanted from a sequel, and yet… I really appreciated this story and reflecting on it has made me want to reread it.

( ‘Was there any way to protect books, poems, paintings from the ugly, banal reality in which they were composed? She had discovered the truth, about Ardor, about Myrddin, but at what cost? It was not just the soul of the nation she had wounded. It was her own heart, her own mind, all of it going to ruin now, because there was nothing left that she could love without a footnote or asterisk.’ )