Summer of Stargate

This week I’m reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch, and what initially looked like another completely mismatched pair has turned out to have a surprisingly obvious connection: both have me thinking about the ways history accumulates beneath the present.

The Silk Roads is exactly the sort of history that appeals to the part of my brain that wants to pull back from individual events and look at the connections between them. Frankopan shifts the geographical centre of the familiar historical narrative eastwards, following the routes along which goods, people, religions, ideas, diseases and power moved for centuries.

As a historian, I find that question of perspective particularly interesting. Change the point from which you tell a story and suddenly events you thought you understood can look very different. I'm interested not just in the history Frankopan is covering, but in the framework he's using to organise it - what becomes more important when the traditional Western European centre of gravity is moved elsewhere, and what connections become visible as a result.

Then, at the considerably more local end of the scale, I’m back in London with Amongst Our Weapons.

I’m well into the Rivers of London series by this point, and one of the things I continue to enjoy about Ben Aaronovitch’s world is how thoroughly its magic is embedded in place. Peter Grant doesn't inhabit a generic magical city that happens to be called London. His London has accumulated. Roman London, medieval London, Victorian London and the modern city all sit on top of and alongside one another, and the supernatural elements feel like another layer of that same history.

Peter’s combination of curiosity, methodical investigation and tendency to become fascinated by extremely specific bits of architecture, infrastructure and local history continues to be enormously appealing to me. Give me a magical mystery and then interrupt it for an unexpectedly detailed explanation of a building and apparently I am very happy.

So despite one book spanning continents and centuries while the other follows a magical policeman around London, this week's accidental theme seems to be connections.

Trade routes connect places. Cities connect generations. Stories connect past and present. And neither book treats history as something neatly finished and left behind.

It’s still moving underneath everything.

This week’s vibe: following the threads of history from ancient trade routes to magical modern London.

And I have discovered that this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Not because I can't think of books I love and would happily shove into other people's hands. That's easy. The problem is the “flies under the radar” part.

Because... whose radar?

I don't really pay much attention anymore to which books are popular. Obviously there are some books that are almost impossible not to know about, but I don't particularly follow bestseller lists or keep track of what's blowing up on BookTok, Bookstagram, or anywhere else.

I mostly just wander around in my own little bookish ecosystem, picking up whatever catches my attention.

And judging by the comments I get on some of my book lists, apparently quite a lot of what I read is flying under everyone else's radar anyway!

There always seems to be at least one variation of “I've never heard of any of these books” in the comments, which simultaneously amuses me and makes me wonder exactly where I'm finding all these things. They don't seem particularly obscure to me when I'm reading them. They're just... books I've found and thought looked interesting.

My reading has become increasingly eclectic over the years. I'll pick something up because I spotted it in a bookshop, because another blogger mentioned it, because the premise sounded wonderfully strange, because I've suddenly developed an intense need to know everything about a particular subject, or simply because the cover caught my eye.

I'm generally much more interested in whether I want to read a book than whether everyone else is reading it.

Which makes identifying one particular underrated book surprisingly difficult.

I could enthusiastically recommend something and announce that it deserves far more attention, only to discover that three million people have read it and there's an enormous fandom somewhere I've simply failed to notice.

Equally, I could assume something is fairly well known because I've encountered it several times in my particular corners of the bookish world, only to mention it on the blog and be greeted by a chorus of “Never heard of it!”

Popularity is weirdly relative like that.

And maybe that's one of the things I like about book blogging. We're not all looking at exactly the same shelves. Someone's obscure little treasure is someone else's lifelong favourite, and something completely unknown to me might be a book another blogger has been yelling about for years.

So I'm going to slightly dodge this week's question.

Rather than picking the book I think flies under the radar, I'm going to say that apparently I read quite a lot of books that do — I just don't know which ones they are until I post about them!

And I'd much rather turn the question around:

What's flying under my radar?

Tell me about the book you can't believe more people aren't talking about. Tell me about the strange little novel you picked up on a whim and adored. Tell me about the backlist book you've been recommending to everyone for twenty years.

My radar clearly isn't terribly reliable.

Let's see what you've got.