Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the first book in a duology, and it’s the kind of duology that’s really one book split into two volumes. The end of this book is merely the stopping point of this book, not in any way an ending. If that bothers you, wait around until the other half is out.

Honestly I can’t tell you why I didn’t love this book. I wanted to love this book. It’s a secondary world fantasy where one of the central relationships of the book is an aunt and nephew, and that kind of non-standard central relationship is absolutely up my alley. It’s a fantasy world where magical environmental contamination is a major threat, which is also of great interest to me. Sensitive yet matter-of-fact handling of trans characters, check. Worldbuilding that deviates from standard, check. And there wasn’t anything that made me roll my eyes or say ugh! It was just fine! But for me, at least, it was just fine. Honestly if this is your sort of thing I kind of wish you’d read it and tell me what you think might have been going on here, or if it’s just…that some books and some people are ships passing in the night.

Yukito Ayatsuji, The Labyrinth House Murders. The first of two books I read this fortnight whose ending made me actively quite angry. The ending did not work for me at all, leaning hard on two twists one of which frankly did not work for me logistically. Yuck.

Peter Beinert, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a great example of a time when it’s good to be aware that I am not the target audience for everything, because I think Beinert’s main target audience is the overlap of his fellow Jewish people (I am not) and people who need convincing that being concerned for Jewish safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) and being concerned for Palestinian safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) do not have to be opposing concerns (I already believe that). It was still interesting to see how he approached this topic writing to people who are not me, and it’s a very short book, but it’s not any more cheerful than you might think, especially as he is willing to discuss recent deaths in this region from both/several groups in some detail.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Complete Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. It is what it says on the tin: all her stories, arranged chronologically. They are the sort of slice of life vignettes (and somewhat longer sometimes) that I don’t often like, and I liked these enough to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of them. Why? I’m not sure. I think because the slicing of life was done with a firm, wry hand? I think most people would enjoy this more in small bites, and maybe I would too, but I was traveling and had limited book supply, so this is where we landed.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 25-26. Kindle. This is the end of this book, and it has an ending entirely in keeping with its genre, so it likely won’t surprise you if you parcel out the reading like this, but it will satisfy inasmuch as the boarding school story can satisfy you. If you’re not a boarding school story fan, this is definitely not the story for you.

Adrienne Maree Brown, Ancestors. I can verify that it’s okay to read this without the two that precede it in its series because that’s just what I did. You’ll get all the incluing you need about what has happened (a plague, Detroit being enclosed behind a wall) and who these people are (a diverse bunch of people with intermittent super-ish powers), and their personal problems entwine satisfyingly with their science fiction problems. Also there is a bunch of sex and gender, in case you want some. Also, and importantly, there is a quite good dog.

Willa Hammitt Brown, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack. This is lavishly illustrated though a bit repetitive–it’s definitely for the general/casual audience. (We live in a time when a book interrogating the masculinity of lumberjacks can be for the general/casual audience. What a world.) I learned some things that apply to my own ancestors as well as more general things about the lumber camps and their later mythologization, so that was interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, How to Write Romantasy. Kindle. This only gets categorized as “books” because it was an individual ebook. What it is actually is an essay, and I picked it up because I am not fond of romantasy as a category but am fond of Steph’s work and the work of a few others I know she also enjoys, and I thought I would learn more from someone doing it in a way I like and respect than from people whose work doesn’t connect with me. This did turn out to be the case–there were thoughts about subgenre and relationship arc that are useful to me even as I write things that are definitely not romantasy.

A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. Reread. This is the wrong end of the series, this is starting at the ending, but I still find these characters fascinating, and this is the one I could–with some joy–find used, that I was missing. (I still need a copy of the first one but I can reread the middle two any time I like.) Midcentury women struggling to lead meaningful lives, love to see it.

Antonio Carbone, Epidemic Cities. Kindle. A quite short monograph on the various handling of different plagues by different cities, probably will not be much new if you think about this topic a lot but a good intro.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Kindle. I said sarcastically to my niblings, “You’ll never guess how it ends.” But there’s a lot that comes for the archbishop before death, wandering around the American Southwest in an era that…look, Cather doesn’t have what we’d call modern consciousness of colonialism, but she has better awareness of Native people as people than I would have feared for this era.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Kindle, reread. Reread this for my book club, glad to discuss the stories in more detail with other interested people.

C.S.E. Cooney, Saint Death’s Herald. Second in its series, and just as lovely in its writing and characterization and combination of whimsy and seriousness, no one else is quite like Cooney in that combination. Very happy to have this, you might be too.

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This contains comparisons of art/archaeology to literary portrayal in this era, which is interesting, but also you will know just from the title whether you are the audience for this book or not. It is an absolutely lovely thing that it is, but it’s not some other secret thing that will surprise you. I got it off a shelf labeled “history of WHAT???,” and you will know whether that shelf is your heart’s home or not.

Francis Dupuis-Derland and Benjamin Pillet, eds., Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom. A series of interviews with people who have very different relationships with this term–gave me a lot more questions than answers, which is I think a good sign in this kind of book, especially when the people being interviewed have more writings available elsewhere.

Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away. Reread. Unfortunately I was not immediately aware that this was a reread and more or less didn’t notice, because it was not particularly notable either time. Had I read this already, or was the plot and characterization that predictable? We now know the answer, but at the time either seemed plausible. (Again, traveling. Limited book supply.) It’s not offensive, it’s fine, it’s just…gosh I hope to remember not to read it a third time.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth. Kindle. This is my least favorite Gaskell novel so far. This is the sort of book that you read and think, ah yes, we had to go through this to get to where we are, but…unless you’re a Gaskell superfan (which, fair, hi, hello), I feel like a book whose thesis is “maybe we should treat women who have sex like they are fellow humans rather than demons from the lowest pit of hell, at least if they’re otherwise completely angelic” is–hmm, I wanted to say that it’s not something most of us need any more, but I think what I would rather say is that it’s unlikely to reach those who need it in quite this form these days.

Bill Hayton, A Brief History of Vietnam: Colonialism, War, and Renewal: The Story of a Nation Transformed. On the up side, this introductory history of Vietnam contains a great deal of pre-20th century stuff that sometimes gets skipped over in Anglophone histories, and it’s a quick read. On the other hand, it’s an entire country, you may well find yourself dissatisfied by a treatment this short, and it surely was not consistent about things like providing pronunciation or defining terms, sometimes doing so repetitively and sometimes not at all. I hope there’s a better starting place for this.

Mohamed Kheir, Sleep Phase. A short dreamy novel (yes) about emerging from being a political prisoner in Egypt in this century, readjusting to life outside and its changes. Glad I read it but will not want to reread it.

David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1773-1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. So on the up side, Kirby is very solid about paradigm shifts like Sweden sometimes being central Scandinavia, in political terms, and sometimes being the northwest corner of the Baltic. Unfortunately his focus of scholarship (I’ve read his history of Finland) and the timing of this book (basically right at the end date in the title) tipped the balance towards him being one of the people of that generation who felt the need to come up with explanations for why it was inevitable or just or…something, why it made sense for the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to be conquered when Finland was not…without reference to bloody geography for heaven’s sake get it together my dude if your explanation does not lean heavily on “Finland is a frozen swamp and the others less so,” what are you even doing. Ahem. Okay. Anyway, it’s in some ways a useful historical reference and in other ways a cautionary tale for not trying to make history more just and sensible than the world actually is. (Please note that I say “frozen swamp” with the deepest of affection.) (It’s just, look, I know you all wanted to have impeccable reasons why it couldn’t happen to you, but it could bloody happen to you, of course it could, that’s why we had to let the entire Baltic into NATO ffs, it could happen to you any day of the week, victim blaming for your own comfort is not a reasonable worldview thank you and good day to you.) (The thing is that not a lot of people read Baltic history with no strong feelings about the Baltic, I think, and I am no counterexample.) (If more of this book had been about the Winter War, would he have…no, he’s an historian of FInland, he ought to already have.) (Harumph.)

Ann LeBlanc, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. Kindle. A delightful novella about the lengths a genetically modified cheesemaking clone will go to in order to protect outer space’s most perfect cheese cave. I had a good time with this.

Rose Macaulay, Told By an Idiot. Kindle. This is a family novel that follows its characters from the late Victorian period through the postwar period although since it was published in 1923, it’s not very far into the postwar period. It’s got her characteristic humor and observations of humanity and its foibles, and she’s very explicitly talking about how The Young Generation is perpetually being credited with all sorts of new traits that have in fact been in humans the whole time. I love her, and this was a fun one for me, albeit with somewhat less plot direction than some of her others.

Charlotte McConaughy, Wild Dark Shore. This was the other book I read this fortnight with a catastrophically disappointing ending. It was going so well with climate change and botany and repairing families, but the ending upset and frankly really offended me–this is not an “I don’t like sad endings” problem, this is an “I don’t like what the shape of sad ending once again implies about the worth of women” problem. Not recommended despite copious botany and several seals.

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi. Discussed elsewhere.

Candace Robb, A Gift of Sanctuary. I managed to finish this medieval mystery novel without attaching to any of the characters even a little bit. There was a lot of “which one is he? oh right that one” going on in my head. I finished it, I left it in a rental apartment, I can’t say I recommend it but it probably won’t do you any harm.

Rosália Rodrigo, Beasts of Carnaval. Discussed elsewhere.

Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Kindle. Explorations of how the carceral criminal justice system feeds the carceral immigration system, sure-handed and angry where it needs to be.

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World. The fourth full-length book, fifth story, in the Dr. Greta Van Helsing series, and this one goes to the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell for its monster medical drama, and also to [gasp] New York. I would not start here, because there are character implications and because the previous ones are still in print, but I actually think you could. But also the previous ones are still in print.

Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. This was brilliantly done, pointing out that even the histories of the Age of Revolution that make an effort to include people of color are mostly still extremely focused on the Atlantic world, and things of interest were absolutely going on in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well. Interesting, well-written, hurrah.

A.G. Slatter, The Path of Thorns. A very classically formed governess novel but with a ton of magic stuff in it. Yay, enjoyed this.

Sarah Suk, Meet Me at Blue Hour. A sweet novel about two Korean-American teens in Korea coping with the results of a memory removal clinic while one of them has a grandfather in the early stages of dementia.

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. I’ve read several of this genre of book, which is case study of an ecological region and the humans who live in it being ravaged by particular companies who know exactly what they’re doing and attempt to lie about it. This is probably the best one I’ve read so far, as it has very solid grounding in both disability theory and ecology, as well as the politico-historical chops for the research, and also the personal disabled/community connection to the subject, so if you only read one in this genre, read this one. (And hey, read one in this genre sometime, maybe, huh? You might think you already know how bad it is, and I promise it’s worse.)

Sienna Tristen, Hortus Animarum. Kindle. A glorious collection of botanical poems paying tribute to loves that are not necessarily sexual or romantic but are definitely queer. One of the best indices I’ve seen in years, for friends who are index hounds.

Mai Der Vang, Primordial. The saola, a rare bovid native to Vietnam, is Vang’s central metaphor here about the Hmong refugee experience. Some of the poems about it are stunning, brave, and vivid, but the whole is rather more monofocus on the one image (the saola) than I prefer in a collection of this length.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight. Kindle. This is a very silly book about a German princess who runs away to live in England in a little cottage and learns to appreciate being a princess. At no point does anyone consider that she is not inherently superior to all who surround her. It’s briskly written and got me through waiting for an airplane, but I can’t say it was wonderful enough that I recommend it more generally.

Neon Yang, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame. Okay, so there are books where the twist is the point, and there are books where you see the twist coming from a mile away and the journey is the point. This is definitely more in the latter camp, but unfortunately it meant that I started to find the protagonist frustrating for not also seeing the twist coming. Possibly this is because it’s much harder to be in a fantasy novel than to read one. If you want a well-written sapphic knights-and-dragons story and don’t much care about the plot, here you go.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sofía has been waiting for years for her twin brother Sol to return. He was taken away by their former owner, now employer, to serve as his valet during a stay at an expensive resort, and neither of them has been heard from since. Adalina, her owner’s daughter and her best friend, insists on accompanying her–which means Sofía has access to the absolute most lavish and decadent aspects of the resort while she’s searching for her father.

This is, however, a fantasy novel. So the resort is ominously not the paradise it seems. Instead of having her questions answered, Sofía gets lost in a jumbled spiral that even her scientist mind can’t make sense of. No one around her seems to notice that anything is wrong, but the one thing she can hold onto–she hopes–is that she is there to find Sol, or at least find out what happened to him.

Most of the other specifics I could give here would be major spoilers, so I will just say some more elements of this book: intense grappling with the interpersonal ramifications of colonialism. Aro-ace heroine. Stubborn, imperfect, caring community members whose vision for their community doesn’t always line up. Deeply weird magic happenings. And, of course, the titular Carnaval, in all its vivid glory.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I like books that don’t follow a standard hero’s journey or quest narrative, and wow, is this in that category. This one has–and this by itself should tell you a large part of whether you want to read it–a gigantic whale of space–in space? but also comprising space? and multiple worlds inside the whale, that part is certain. Doors into unfolding different worlds, all inside the whale.

The whale used to be something else, but *what* else is a spoiler.

So there is more worldmaking than worldhopping here, and the titular sisters–there are two pairs of candidates for the title–are trying to figure out what madness means in their context. It is not a book that is trying to make a commentary on mental health in our own context, or if it is, it’s being very roundabout and obscure about it. But there is a lot about how cultures construe madness, sanity, fitting in and not.

And there are indeed sisterhoods, very strong sororal relationships. And also space whale. Which you might like, and if so, step right up, here it is.

Sonja Arntzen and Ito Moriyuki, trans., The Sarashina Diary: A Woman’s Life in Eleventh-Century Japan (by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume). This is brief but delightful. Its author is one of the most relatable historical figures I have ever encountered, book-obsessed and delighted by the written word.

Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. The modern world, the Korean-American experience, a dozen other things in a score of emotional ranges. Sometimes I find it interesting to contemplate which volumes of poetry resonate me and which with similar descriptions leave me cold. This one resonated.

Christopher Hale, A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia: Multiculturalism and Prosperity: The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers. A bit too much Singapore in the balance for my taste–I have no objection to Singapore, but if you’re putting both Singapore and Malaysia on the cover, I want both. This is more a starting point than an ending point in the history of this region, but that’s valuable too.

Reginald Hill, An Advancement of Learning, An April Shroud, Bones and Silence, Child’s Play, A Clubbable Woman, Deadheads, Exit Lines, A Killing Kindness, A Pinch of Snuff, Recalled to Life, Ruling Passion, Underworld, and The Wood Beyond. Rereads. And here we come to the reason this is one of the easiest book posts I’ve written in ages: I’m 2/3ish of the way through rereading the Dalziel and Pascoe series, and I find them more or less where I left them–the early ones are fine, and now I’m into the part of the series that’s quite good, with the best yet to come. Gosh I’m glad I read them out of order originally. The exception to finding them where I left them is that three times through is enough for me on A Pinch of Snuff, I do not expect to find it worth my time for a fourth go-round.

Natalie Shapero, Popular Longing. This is also poetry engaging with the current moment. Like the Franny Choi collection, it is frequently angry. For some reason it doesn’t resonate for me nearly so well–I find it more grating in places but most often it’s just that Shapero’s gears and mine don’t mesh. Ah well.

Tom Stoppard, Plays: 5 (Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood). Rereads. I’m passing this on to a young theater-lover in my life and read it on the way out. One masterwork, one mid-century adultery play (YAWN), two attempts at reckoning with colonialism very much from a colonizer viewpoint, and a spy thing that is less clever than he thinks about quantum mechanics. I have another copy of Arcadia, I’m not sorry I read the others, but I’m also not sorry to hand them on.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor writing as A. Merc Rustad, So You Want to Be a Robot. Reread. Remains varied, wrenching, and brilliant, one of the best debut collections of our generation, yay.

Sue Hyon Bae, Truce Country. Poems on and around a Korean immigrant experience, vivid and sure-handed.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption. For my money, this series is the best combination of fantasy and mystery, in genre terms, that I think I’ve ever seen.

Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons, Death on the Nile, and The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side. These sure are books written by Agatha Christie, and I sure did read them. And it’s pretty obvious why Death on the Nile is the most famous, and happily it does not really attempt to deal with actual Egyptian people.

Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot. Reread. Honestly I had been putting off reading this for years, because it was so important to my formation as a teenage/early twentysomething writer, and I was so frightened that it, uh. Might not be where I left it. Thankfully it is. It’s still terribly terribly earnest–but you haven’t been around here very long if you think I object to that really–and it still has a previous era’s attitudes toward homelessness and mental health. De Lint does tend to get worse the farther from his own demographic his intended perspective is. BUT BUT BUT they are still mostly charming stories with a lot of heart and I will not be quite so slow to reread them another time.

Emily Deibert, Bea Mullins Takes a Shot. The titular character has been nudged into playing hockey when she really doesn’t want to play a sport at all, only to find herself with a crush on a teammate. And their team is chronically underfunded compared to the boys’ team! Bea has a lot of problems to juggle and manages to figure them out as best a middle schooler can, with a lot of humor and heart.

Martin Espada, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002. I wish I’d been able to give this to my grandfather, because he loved Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tilbury town poems, and this is…a hundred years in the future from that, Latine characters rather than white, but the same kind of sharply observed human character poems. I like his later work better, but this is entirely good enough to go on with.

Margaret Frazer, The Midwife’s Tale. Kindle. This is a short story, and like a lot of mystery short stories it’s very linear–there’s not much room to be anything else. But it gives her a chance to observe another segment of village life in her chosen period.

Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective. In the late 17th century a Livonian man was put on trial for being a werewolf in league with Satan. He found this truly offensive because, he said, he and the other werewolves were not in league with Satan, they were on the front lines of fighting against Satan, and it was really wrong for the court to claim otherwise. This is a work of nonfiction, with translated court transcript and discussion between these two scholars about how it does and does not connect to other werewolf lore elsewhere in Europe in this period. Vivid, fascinating, in places hilarious.

Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World. Very much a book that does what it says on the tin: if you want to know the history of this particular kind of botanical transport, with its pros and cons, this is a book that will tell you.

Jordan Kurella, The Death of Mountains. A gently fantastical novella with the perspectives of several kinds of Death and also a Mountain. Each of the narrators is a natural storyteller, presenting their experiences together in ways that are sometimes wistful and always deeply felt.

Joanna Miller, The Eights. This is a nice book in which nice people make friends with each other and sort out their lives nicely. I don’t mean to make it sound insipid, it’s not insipid. But generally if there’s a better and a worse consequence, this is a book that pulls back from the worse ones for its protagonists. Since it’s also a book about women in the 1920s getting an Oxford education in the aftermath of the Great War, there’s a certain amount of “these people have already been through enough” going on here, and a) this era and setting combined are absolutely my jam and also b) who could argue. Just go in knowing that this is not a book for the heights of melodrama, and that’s okay.

Margarita Montimore, The Dollhouse Academy. I think writing thrillers, or specifically writing satisfying endings to thrillers, must be harder than I think. This is briskly written and interesting, scathing about some of the abuses of the modern entertainment industry, but the ending more or less falls apart, and that’s very frustrating to me.

Garth Nix, Across the Wall. Reread. I’ve been trying to figure out some good short story recs for a favorite 15yo, and I enjoyed this volume immensely and will not be using it for that purpose, because what I want is short stories to show them how to make a short story work as its own thing, and the most successful story in this volume in my opinion is the titular story, which is very much in the “short story as outtake or side quest from longer work” subgenre. That said, it’s an extremely satisfying one of those, and I’m glad to have it.

Sharyn November, ed., Firebirds Rising. Reread. Some really good stuff in here. I particularly liked the stories by Diana Wynne Jones, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, Patricia McKillip, and Pamela Dean, but it’s in general a fairly high-quality anthology.

Lucy K. Pick, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. The inheritance laws in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula were not strongly gendered and were very much skewed against leaving everything or even most things to one child or one sibling. The results are a very interestingly different set of power dynamics in late antiquity/early medieval era than immediately adjacent regions. I’m really glad to have these insights.

Cherie Priest, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Reread. I had been talking about Gothics, so I decided to revisit this one, and it continues pacey and well-written.

Emery Robin, The Sea Eternal. The second in its series–if the first was Julius Caesar in Space, this one is Antony and Cleopatra in Space. With lesbians. For me that made it a reasonably fun read; I know that for some of my friends the reaction will be much stronger. Themes of memory and cultural preservation continue from the first book as you would expect.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Water & Salt. A beautiful book of poems, starts and ends with absolute bangers and does not let up much in the middle. Tuffaha’s background contains threads from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and the US, and all of them matter deeply in her poems.

Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. An accounting of this fictional character’s context and enduring appearances in literature from the time Chaucer invented her to the present day. Possibly the most fun you’ll have with a volume of literary criticism in a while. You do not need to be a very dedicated Chaucerian to get a lot out of this.

Katy Watson, A Very Lively Murder and Seven Lively Suspects. Second and third in their series, should be entirely readable without having gotten the first one but I believe it’s in print so you might as well. Three actresses who, in different eras, have played the same iconic fictional detective are now solving murders themselves, with a movie set and a literary festival as the settings. Reasonably good fun, so far not a genre-changer for me but very few things can be or in fact want to be.

Katie Williams, My Murder. What was it I was saying about how it’s hard to write thrillers. Sigh. This is a science fiction thriller, again very readable–a bit on the more literary end of that subgenre, in ways that I enjoyed–but if you’ve read genre science fiction at all, the ending resolves with the sort of thing that you would have asked yourself “wait, is it possible that they just” on page 2. Sigh.

Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. This is a memoir written in the first-person, but the “I” of this book is not Yang herself but her mother. It’s an extraordinary thing to do–an act of literature and an act of love at the same time, I came to feel–and one that many people, no matter how much they love storytelling or their mother, would not want to try. Yang’s mother has had not just a hard life but a complicated interesting one, and Yang situates it well in its context. Very much worth having, even if I doubt that there will be a sea of imitators.

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.