Novel Gazing Redux

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 23-24. Kindle. Catching up on the latest installment, the rage is back, don’t start here, obviously.

P.F. Chisholm, A Chorus of Innocents. Back to the Scottish borderlands, and I am relieved–the books in this series that were in the London area were fine, but they lacked a lot of my favorite elements of the series. Which have come roaring back here, with more ahead promised. Hurrah. But yeah, don’t start here, this one expects you to know who’s who and what’s what.

Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table, Crooked House, Death in the Clouds, Murder on the Orient Express, Taken at the Flood, and The Body in the Library. It’s not that these are indistinguishable from each other–there’s a reason Crooked House and Murder on the Orient Express were on the author’s favorites list. I’m skipping the ones that are appalling on page one, I’m being appalled by the ones that are appalling on the last page only (seriously, Agatha, you can get through a whole book and then–!!!). But for the most part I’m just reading them as a continuum. They deliver what it says on the tin. I did this with Georgette Heyer when Grandpa died, and now with Grandma gone it’s apparently Agatha Christie. Nor am I done yet.

David C. Douglas, The Norman Fate, 1100-1154. Counterbalancing the urge for reliable mystery, I have had very little urge to read nonfiction lately. This also happened when Grandpa died, it went away, it’ll go away this time, it’s fine. This was one of the few pieces of nonfiction this fortnight, and I was disappointed in it, because it wanted to talk about the Norman spheres of influence in this era but not what the Normans brought to those areas culturally, what was concretely different because a particular region or island was ruled by a Norman ruler instead of someone else. Ah well.

Dan Egan, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorous and a World Out of Balance. Egan’s previous book about the Great Lakes was on my list to give several people a few years back, and he’s quite good about phosphorous and its social and ecological implications as well. Hurrah.

Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s. About the vaguely squalid adults involved with running a theater school for children. If you feel like you’re still a little starry-eyed about child actors from reading Noel Streatfeild’s children’s books and you would prefer not to be, well, here you are.

Amity Gaige, Heartwood. If there’s a third mainstream thriller that has a cover and title to make it look like a fantasy novel, this can be a genre with that and Liz Moore’s God of the Woods. In any case I liked it for what it is rather than resenting it for what the cover made it look like. This is a book about a woman lost hiking the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail, and about the people searching for her, and about mothers and daughters, and a number of other things. It’s quite well done, but my absolute favorite character is Santo, everyone else can sort of make there be enough book to be a book but Santo was my reason for wanting to go on with it.

John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. This is basically a TED Talk about why you should keep caring about tuberculosis and how it affects real, vivid people. There’s historical background, sure, but it is very much a call to arms–or, as Grace Petrie puts it, not a call to arms but a call to helping hands. It’s short and, for its subject matter, quite light.

Elly Griffiths, Now You See Them and The Midnight Hour. Two more in the mid-century British murder mystery setting with the characters who were stage magicians and dirty tricks people in the Second World War. One of the things I’m noticing about mystery series is that the ones that are attempting to be contemporary seem to have to scramble to stay put in time, but the ones that are consciously historical are extremely likely to skip blithely forward through time, changing their characters’ personal as well as social circumstances. I think that’s great, I love it. But I see how it’s easier when you have control over the thing.

Christina Lynch, Pony Confidential. This is a murder mystery with two main POVs, one of which is a vindictive pony. Team Vindictive Pony all the way. The ending made me roll my eyes a little, but honestly, once you’ve signed on for an entire book of vindictive pony, sure, yes, do the thing. I had a lot of fun with this.

Rose Macaulay, The Shadow Flies. A novel about early 17th century English poets and their turbulent world. Its ending was not cozier or more comfortable than any of Macaulay’s other stuff. Gosh I love her.

Colleen McCullough, The Ladies of Missalonghi. As though someone wanted to write The Blue Castle set in Australia, with some historical distance from the period they were writing about. And with the triumphant ending shared out more generally, and…honestly with a better mom, which was a surprise. I still think The Blue Castle is on the whole a better book, but this is worth having too if you like that sort of thing.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems. I have loved her since I was four, and somehow I have not ever read the Collected? Inconceivable. It was time. There were some wonderful things I’d never read before and some wonderful things I’ve had memorized for decades. There were also…let’s say that long public occasion poems were not her forte. But I’m still glad I read the whole thing.

Naomi Mitchison, Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction. This is a lesser Mitchison collection. It was put together as an introductory sampler of her work for teaching, rather than because she really loved these short stories and thought they formed something wonderful as a whole, and you can tell–there’s a sense of outtakes from her more famous novel work. Did I still generally enjoy reading it, sure, but it’s not going to become a go-to Mitchison rec.

Sebastian Purcell, Discourse of the Elders: The Aztec Huehuetlatolli, a First English Translation. This is a translation of Aztec philosophy recorded by a Spanish monk very early in the Conquest. The discourse in the title is very literal: this is discussion of various philosophical questions about life, in a framework that is very much not the Western one. Very cool thing to have and read and think about.

Emily Yu-Xuan Qin, Aunt Tigress. Extremely syncretic Chinese-Canadian fantasy, and prairie Canadian specifically. Love to see a completely different frame on some elements of story I’ve enjoyed before. Will definitely be adding this to several gift lists.

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia Parts I-III (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage). A trilogy of plays about Russian utopianism in the mid-19th century, featuring Bakunin, Marx, Turgenev, all sorts of familiar names. This sequence is not my favorite of Stoppard’s historical plays, but it still has some classic Stoppard moments.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith. The third in its series, and by far the most conventional: this is a political fantasy of a type that I like very much but have also read before. As compared to the previous book in the series, which was not quite like anything else. Ah well, still very readable, not sorry to have gone on with the series.

Michelle Adams, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. This traces what court cases, local government decisions, and community actions led to the map of school situations that is with us until today. As a Black lawyer from Detroit, she’s extremely good at not portraying its rich and diverse Black community as a monolith. She’s also got a lawyer’s eye for making sure she cites her sources and provides graphics. This is one of those pieces of history that happened right before my arrival on the planet that’s really useful to have laid out for me, and I suspect many of you will find the same regardless of whether you were already around for it, news coverage and priorities being what they are.

Agatha Christie, After the Funeral and Evil Under the Sun. These sure are two books by Agatha Christie, doing what books by Agatha Christie do. Yep. No question about that.

Nicola Clark, The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens. What she actually means is not Tudor queens but the wives of Henry VIII; you will not learn about the ladies in waiting who served Elizabeth of York here, and only about the ladies of Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I where they are continuations of their father’s wives’ stories. It’s quite good at that, though, if that’s something you have an interest in–and it’s a dramatic topic.

Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. This fits well with other recent North American Native histories: its focus is on what the Native Nations were doing and how they thought of themselves, rather than the ravages of wars with white empires. Useful to know both, to have Indigenous heroism and Indigenous everyday life as well as Indigenous peril.

Margaret Frazer, The Traitor’s Tale. This is not the last one she wrote in this series, but I think it’s the last one I needed to find to read. It’s got Dame Frevisse in it, as the title structure would imply, but it’s a crossover book with Joliffe and has more of his perspective than hers in it. It’s also one of the more thoroughly political entries in the series. Not a terrible place to end, but it felt very clear to me that Frazer had more to say about Joliffe when she died. Ah well.

Erica Gies, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought. Groundwater and underground streams and other interesting things, cool water book yay.

Elly Griffiths, The Zig Zag Girl, Smoke and Mirrors, The Blood Card, and The Vanishing Box. The first four in an historical mystery series, so yes, I’m still in that mood. This features stage magicians who used to be involved in a WWII dirty tricks unit and are now adjusting to life after wartime, some of them on the stage and one in the police force in Brighton. Fun and readable. The third one is about Romany people and uses the g-word in ways in which it would absolutely have been used in period but seems to be generally culturally respectful, though not every character is.

Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts. This is a very popular-nonfiction sort of book, so it holds your hand through its main points and wants to make sure you get them–not a lot subtle here. On the other hand, “people from Mali were the medieval makers and modern saviors of very cool manuscripts” is something that I think more people could stand to know, and it was done interestingly enough, with the focus on the actual Malian people and no white savior assumptions.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You. Kindle. Short, practical advice about organizing on the left and how to work with people who aren’t in perfect agreement with oneself. Has appendices about legal assistance, gives advice about how to deal with being tear-gassed, generally a useful sort of thing to have around.

Margo Kitts, Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies. Kindle. A short monograph about how people in various world cultures (Ancient Greek, Christian, Aztec, Chinese) regarded sacrifice conceptually and practically. Interesting stuff to ponder, very brief so you don’t have time to get sick of it.

Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings. Very firmly focused on the “Persian Version,” making sure to point out where common Western ideas about this region and period were shaped by having many/most of the texts come from people fighting the Persians rather than the Persians themselves. Ended with Alexander of Macedon as so many things did.

Premee Mohamed, One Message Remains: Stories. A linked collection of secondary world fantasy long-short stories, in a world where imperialism and war are breaking human hearts. In case you feel like that might be relevant to your life….

Téa Obreht, The Morningside. A quiet, weird book that is definitely post-apocalyptic, as opposed to many stories that claim that label but are during-apocalyptic. The titular apartment building is home to an odd collection of people, and their relationships shape them, as humans do. A blend of literary and SF that comes down harder on the former side.

Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4000 Year History. A Classical scholar writes “The Greeks and Romans ain’t all that,” more or less–pointing out the places where other cultures shaped Western civilization in ways that are not always credited or considered central

Karen Russell, The Antidote. A novel about the Dust Bowl, memory, and what a community or an individual can stand to know about itself. The use of photos here is weird and fascinating, the characters well-drawn, and as someone who spent a bunch of time not very far from the setting–oh yes, this is how these people are, even years later. Yes. This.

Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People’s History of Clothing. I would quibble here and say that it’s a history more of cloth than of clothing. You could have called it Kinds of Cloth and Why They’re Terrible and not been too far off; the “people’s history” here implies “how it is damaging to workers and the environment.” Which is not unfair, but it’s not at all the same thing as clothing if you’re looking for a history of how people wear the cloth rather than how the raw material is made.

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Sea Level: A History. Short and to the point: very much about how people have calculated sea level and what we want it for and what it’s doing going forward. Relevant, and it doesn’t carry on too long.

You Yeong-Gwan, The Rainfall Market. This is a short, light fantasy about a magical wish place. I am honestly not at all clear why it was not marketed as a children’s fantasy–it has a very standard structure for children’s fantasy and there was nothing in it that would be objectionable to children. It’s very didactic in its structure of the protagonist learning what she really wants/needs/values in life, in a way that’s also very familiar from children’s fantasy novels but not necessarily my favorite children’s fantasy novels, if you know what I mean. But it was a fine enough fast read if you’re in the airport or whatever.

Lauren Young, Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII. Young clearly wanted to write a book about Unity Mitford, and there wasn’t enough material for an entire book about Unity Mitford, so unlike the previous people in her predicament, she decided to write about fashy aristos in general rather than Mitfords in general. For that originality I give her credit. However, the topic is quite, quite large, and instead of writing a thumping big book, she wrote a very slender one that was mostly Unity Mitford and then a few other things by the way. And the ending is all ominous and upset about how we should be researching these archives more, and you know who could have done that? someone who was writing a book about it. Anyway, the up side of this is that it’s a reminder that the Allies did not win the war because of ideological unity or purity, which is good, because we don’t have it now either. But in general I was not impressed.

Katherine Addison, The Orb of Cairado. A novella in the world of the Goblin Emperor, with a believably flawed protag and neatly fitting together mystery plot. Very happy with this.

Elizabeth Bear, Angel Maker. Discussed elsewhere.

William Blake, The Portable Blake. “I’ve mostly read the much-anthologized, heavily-quoted parts of Blake,” I thought, “I should look at the rest.” Hooooo boy. There is a reason they stop at burning tigers in your early education, pals. I knew he wandered off into (substantially nonsensical) apocalyptic visions, but I didn’t know know, you know? And now I know. In detail. Welp.

Erik J. Brown, All That’s Left in the World. Post-apocalyptic YA with a queer central love story. Brown’s writing is smooth and readable, and the two boys falling in love will be just what some young people need out of a post-apocalypse, so I’m not sorry I read it. The post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and story beats are very much of their genre–this is not a book that is attempting to revolutionize those elements, it’s attempting to recast them for the enjoyment of the reader looking to feel seen in this landscape.

K.J. Charles, Death in the Spires. Absolute catnip for me. This is a murder mystery hinging on the college friend group of the main characters, leaning hard on social dynamics of historical higher education, class, sexuality, etc. If you know more like this, please send them my way. If you’re K.J. Charles and want to write more like this, I will read every single one.

Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry. Discussed elsewhere.

P. F. Chisholm, A Murder of Crows and An Air of Treason. Fifth and sixth in the Sir Robert Carey series of historical mysteries, these go deeper into the politics of the English court–which is all very well but I’m glad there are indications that the series will return to the Scottish border soon. There’s more arc plot here than is standard in a mystery series–I think it’s more important to read them in order than it would usually be.

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Danticat is looking at writing about death from multiple angles, all of them thoughtful and interesting.

Christopher de Bellaigue, The Lion House: The Coming of a King. For me this attempt at writing nonfiction as though it was fiction was not a success. It didn’t go far enough into the fiction territory to be a successful historical novel, and I found it more cumbersome than winsome in the direction of “make this nonfiction easy to read.” I mean, it was easy to read, just less informative per page. Suleyman the Magnificent is considered at length, but there are other works that do so in ways that I found more congenial. Oh well.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. When I have to grieve, I like to do it in company with the art of other people who are grieving. I had never read Joan Didion’s famous books about her grief(s), so I got them this time around, and the first one, The Year of Magical Thinking, was a really beautifully observed book about the loss of her husband while her daughter’s health was fragile. She was specific and personal about her husband and about losing him and what that meant to her. Wonderful. Brilliant. So I eagerly went on to Blue Nights, which is about the subsequent loss of her daughter, and that’s where we went off the rails. I see–I even agree with–the sense that there are fewer consent issues around writing intimately about one’s partner, whom one consensually married as an adult, an equal, than about one’s child, whom one encountered first as a vulnerable infant and who got issued oneself as a parent rather than consenting to it. I see why she wanted to be careful about that. But what she ended up doing was flirting with personal revelation in weird ways that were fundamentally not about her daughter Quintana, dwelling on weird rich person brand name trivia, and getting inappropriately defensive on a number of fronts. Sigh. Well.

Amal El-Mothar, The River Has Roots. A beautiful faerie tale with murder ballads at its heart, short and captivating.

Margaret Frazer, Volo te Habere. Kindle. Even shorter–much shorter–this is one of her murder mystery short stories that’s very much puzzle structure rather than anything else.

Jendia Gammon and Gareth Powell, eds., Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers. My favorite stories in this volume will not surprise you, because you’ve seen the names here before: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Holy Fools” and John Wiswell’s “An Asexual Succubus.” Both are sequels to other works I have enjoyed previously

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. Discussed elsewhere.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. Intensely personal, deeply comprehensive, ferociously angry, more or less devoid of the smug moments that make me roll my eyes at him……unless you read the edition I read, which had the world’s smuggest preface from Madeleine L’Engle, in which she primly observed that she never doubted God and God’s goodness while grieving, she felt close to God, but she supposed people did differ. I am frankly aghast that they let that preface run with this book; it was a different version of “treating a book like an historical object instead of a work of art that a person could interact with personally now, today” than the prefaces that spoil the whole plot of novels for you, but it’s the same thing. The grief Lewis observes (his own, for his wife Joy, in case you didn’t know) is intensely human and unfortunately relevant to somebody every day; skip what L’Engle has to say about it. (Why did they ask her? “Known fellow Christian” is a rather large category, pals, it’s not like there was no one else to choose from.)

H. G. Parry, A Far Better Thing. Discussed elsewhere.

Herman Paul, Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Kindle. A slim monograph on what, exactly, the ideal historian was supposed to be aiming for and how it has shifted over the ages, what it has to say to us today. For history nerds only, but I expect you knew that from the title.

Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant. Rereads. These were massively influential on me as a young writer, as they were for many of the women my age who write fantasy. I could still see all their virtues–the action, the freedom, the ways that Alanna’s sexuality is handled–but also there were some clearer flaws than when I was 11, most notably the handling of the Bazhir (yikes, and Pierce also seems to have moved away from that element of her early work) and the fact that every single dude in Alanna’s life is patronizing as hell. Welp.

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. This is right on that borderline where social commentary shades into political commentary, and I’m absolutely here for it. There were heartbreaking stories in this book, but it was weirdly not depressing, considering the subject matter. And having some details of what things were like in Russia as of the writing of this book a decade ago feels relevant.

Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. A lot about what the Paris Commune thought they were doing and how it’s affected the rest of us since, interesting stuff but not a good introductory book on the Paris Commune if you haven’t read something like Paris Babylon that will give you more of a straightforward who what when etc.

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Tackett, like many authors before him and likely many after, is taking on the question of what the heck happened to move from passing resolutions to The Terror. Again probably not a good place to start on this period but a really interesting examination if you’ve already got the basics.

Gerard Toal, Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hasten Climate Change. This is much better at outlining problems than thinking about solutions, and if you’re the sort of person who might read a book with this title on your own hook, you probably have already encountered the majority of what he’s going to say. So…a book to press on your more neutral relations? I suppose?

Review copy provided by the author, who’s been a dear friend for [mumble] years now.

Karen Memery–the near-titular protagonist of Karen Memory–is back! and since she’s not heading for Hollywood, Hollywood has headed for her. The neighboring farm is the location for filming one of those newfangled moving pictures, and Karen and Priya leap at the opportunity to make a little extra cash riding stunts, wrangling horses, fixing mechanicals, and whatever else needs doing around the set. And there’s a lovely horse called Angel Maker who is practically crying out for Karen’s attention. The movie people think he’s untamable, barely usable, definitely expendable. Karen thinks…he may be the latest addition to their ranch. (I LOVE HIM.)

But that’s only if she and Priya can both get through filming, and with bodies dropping, movie melodrama, and old enemies–not Karen’s this time!–re-emerging, that’s very much up in the air. They’ll need all the help they can get–maybe a mechanical cowboy named Cowboy? Maybe some neighbors they didn’t know very well? They’re not sure who on the set can be relied on, but there’s no way out but through–with some trick shooting and some fancy riding along the way, and a steampunk mecha fight featuring a certain lanky special guest not expected in these parts…. If you’ve been waiting for more of Karen and Priya, you’ve got a treat ahead. If you haven’t, well, now’s the time to find out.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

How much do you like A Tale of Two Cities? Because this is very, very straightforwardly the fantasy version of A Tale of Two Cities. The characters are not renamed, it is about the Manettes and the Evremonds and Carton and Darnay. It’s clearly written by a twenty-first century person rather than a nineteenth century one, in terms of percentage of chattiness/digression, but many of the other virtues and vices of the original are present here.

The immediate premise is: what if Carton and Darnay look so much alike because one of them is the changeling left in the place of the other? The theme of doubles is replicated and reduplicated from the original, with changelings and coincidental connections abounding. If that’s the sort of thing that annoyed you in the original, be braced. Similarly, this is a book set in the French Revolution that is only glancingly about the French Revolution, which is absolutely true to the original.

Most curiously for me, the gender dynamics of the original have been barely disturbed. Parry has a history of doing much better than that, but once you’ve chosen to hew this closely to your model, there’s only so much to be done, I suppose. I’d be interested to hear if it works at all for someone who hasn’t read the original–I wouldn’t think so?–and as a result I think the main audience is people who know the original well–and unless you were in a similar position to mine (I remember it from intense study for Academic Decathlon, not from personally enjoying it), that’s probably going to mostly be people who liked it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is basically a memoir of a queer mycologist’s journey. If you read it as a memoir, it is a really lovely example of the thing, lots of beautiful details of the natural world and personal growth, some interesting facts learned along the way. If you go in thinking that it is going to be a more technical or even pop-sci book that is largely about reproduction and sexuality in the non-human natural world, you will probably be disappointed, because that’s not the focus.

And I think Kaishian is making the case fairly clearly, for those who need to hear it, that queerness is not just about who has what bits for the sex. If you’re not someone who needed to hear it, there’s still enough heart and personal detail to keep things interesting; if you are, maybe a great point of view to pick up and contemplate. But the fact that it’s not a technical book of that sort is not an accident, it was not the goal, a broader sense of possibility is the goal.

Who doesn’t want that, these days?

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I said to a friend that I would likely read this all the way through because it’s Charnas, and I would likely not want to reread it, because it’s vampires. That turned out to be substantially correct, except that it’s just the one vampire.

Charnas apparently wrote this thinking about vampires as predators, camouflaged in part to fit in with their prey herds. Weyland remains a predator throughout, and this is never justified any more than any other being’s need to eat is justified. He undergoes therapy but is reluctant to engage with his reactions to it, to art, to anything that connects him with humanity, because forming those connections makes it harder for him to stay alive. He is not a sexy vampire–he is very nearly an ace vampire. Most of the rare occasions on which he has sex are orthogonal to sexual attraction.

Charnas does not soften this by giving us kind, gentle human foils for Weyland. For the most part his human foils are abrupt, grumpy, panicky, and only in a few instances showing their best selves. Weyland is acting according to his animal nature, but so, in many cases, are they.

The writing remains impeccable throughout. It’s Charnas. She could write a damn sentence; she could write a chapter too. It’s not her fault that I am fundamentally not interested in the vampire question. It maybe is her fault that she flirted with the edge of “okay but what about human predators in larger cultural ways” and then didn’t develop it very deeply. I see why this was worth a reprint, but it’s never going to be a favorite for me.