Author: Marissa Lingen

Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. This book is thinking quite intensely about the points of commonality among kinds of coerced work in the US, particularly imprisoned labor, “workfare” programs, and the graduate student and student athlete labor associated with the American university. Hatton is being very careful about the ways in which these types of labor are dissimilar as well as similar, and there are lots of interesting thoughts on how this impacts the labor, the laborers, and the larger labor pool in which we exist.

Andrew Hiller, Hornytown Chutzpah. Discussed elsewhere.

Mark Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph that, among other things, goes into some detail about considering what meaning the “Bronze Age” has beyond the geographic region where it originated. Revising thoughts about trade and tool use based on new information about this era is pretty cool, the idea that the future is not arriving linearly anywhere is usefully exemplified here.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. Kindle. Rereads. The latter is an ongoing favorite I’ve read many times and find delightful; the former is my least favorite Moomin book, and there’s a reason I haven’t reread it since I was about 8. Basically it’s Moominpappa Explores Mildly Toxic Masculinity. He pouts whenever he doesn’t feel other people are centering and deferring to him enough; he stomps around making other people clear up after his messes; he is just generally an extremely unpleasant version of his previous self, and I hope I remember not to go back to this one again soon. Especially when November is always there. And the others.

Shay Kauwe, The Killing Spell. This is an own-voices post-climate-apocalypse fantasy whose use of languages is, I think, much closer to what many of my friends wanted in Rebecca Kuang’s Babel. Its character is part of a complex family and community whose relationships with each other did not ever get oversimplified. I really enjoyed it and hope it gets attention, because frankly I don’t think the title and cover are doing it any favors.

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth. I sure hope that Keefe has a good therapist and personal life, because he so consistently writes about such awful people. And one of the things that makes him very good at what he does is that he doesn’t get drawn into the “glamor” of horrible rich people. But oof. Criminals and Russian oligarchs in contemporary London, terrifying but interesting and well done.

Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. This is a single essay in a beautifully published edition. It was published as a book because this is a former poet laureate, not because it in any way counts as an entire book. It’s a reasonable enough essay but I’m glad the library had it because it would have disappointed me to spend money on it only to find the number of blank/ornamental pages.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death of an Author, Fell Murder, Post After Post-Mortem, and These Names Make Clues. Kindle. Lorac continues to write quite good Golden Age puzzle mysteries. The one I thought succeeded least here was the last of them. When your pen name is openly known to be an acronym (this is an author who is secretly a lady named Carol!!!), and then you title the book These Names Make Clues…having the names literally as clues is not a good mysterious mystery premise.

Sujata Massey, The Star from Calcutta. The latest in this series, and I think it’s flagging a little but still worth having. This time it’s gone into early filmmaking in India for its setting, which is fun and interesting.

Jo Miles, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit. A really cool exploration of this fruit throughout its range in the US, which does not include where I am, so it’s interesting but from one step over. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in how produce gets bred and marketed and/or local fruits, definitely of interest.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Frankly much more useful in terms of interesting and provocative/inspiring essay writing about creative work. Lots of writers should read this and think about it.

D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Kindle. I continue my slow-motion comparison of epics from different parts of the world. This one was somewhat defensive about its tradition–but a lot of writing down of oral epics does come out that way.

Emmet A. O’Brien, Both Your Houses and Ever Vexed With Storms. Discussed (both books, separately) elsewhere.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Daughter Who Remains. Kindle. Coming full circle in this series, and for heaven’s sake don’t start here; you’ll know if you’ve read the rest of the series and want this conclusion, and if you do I think it’ll be satisfying.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. No actual centaurs were harmed in this Renaissance Italy fantasy novel. It’s the second in its series and worth reading the first if you think you might be interested; artists and powerful families and religious figures abound. It’s non-fantastical except for a divine possession that might be literal or might be a really intense metaphor. I like this kind of big historical novel and would like to find more.

Rebecca Roanhorse, River of Bones and Other Stories. Oh gosh am I glad this exists. Several favorite things and also some new-to-me things, hurrah for having them collected, hurrah.

Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There. This is a reasonable collection but not one of her absolute barnstormers. If you like her essays previously, you’ll probably like this; if not, probably try another thing first to find out.

Kory Stamper, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–From Azure to Zinc Pink. I thought this was going to be about colors, pigments, and dyes, and it is not, it is about the Merriam-Webster 3rd edition dictionary and the people who figured out how to define colors in words to their particular standards. Stamper is a vivid prose stylist, and this was interesting and not terribly long.

D.E. Stevenson, The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces. Kindle. These two are marked third and fourth in a series, but I would call them third and vaguely-related. They’re both light middlebrow midcentury novels, and I enjoyed both, but only one is really stand-alone.

Molly Tanzer, And Side By Side They Wander. Molly’s deep knowledge and love of art history really shines through in this novella, and she sets up her characters to ring changes on her theme very skillfully. It’s one of the many novella cases where I wanted more room for them to do so, but I don’t read the ending as very open to a sequel? I could be wrong. It’s marketed as a heist and then the focus is very much elsewhere, which was fine with me, but if what you’re looking for today is center-of-genre heist fiction, maybe read something else and come back to this a different day.

Jessie L. Weston, trans., Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four lais rendered into English Prose. Kindle. Weston did a bunch of translations of Arthuriana and similar eras of heroic poetry, and this volume is four Breton examples. If you’re interested in more examples of that, here are some. If you’re not, I wouldn’t recommend them as the place to start or as particularly good exemplars.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

Zamyatin is a Recusant world. Its people have considered the advantages of membership in humanity’s great interplanetary Hegemony and decided that oh gosh, no thank you, they’re washing their collective hair that day. But there are dangers in the universe that do not play by the Hegemony’s rules, so sometimes careful diplomacy with the Recusing worlds is required. Enter our heroine.

Corin Oshima is still outrunning the timewave resultant from altering the timeline around the horrible events of Rossem (before this series begins), but she is also dealing with the fallout from more recent events on Eisenhower (in Both Your Houses). Gangster Charlie Salamanca has gotten away, and in a world with extensive body modifications available, he could be anywhere–or anyone. But Corin can’t focus on that right now. She’s busy trying to make sure that neither Zamyatin nor its already-shaky relationship with the Hegemony is destroyed.

This series continues to be really excellent at its balance of thought and action. If you want space opera that considers the nature of the universe both morally and physically–now! with cool aliens!–this is the series for you. This is volume two, and I happen to know there’s more to come. Yay.

Review copy provided by the publisher, who is also my publisher, and Jo is a friend.

Ada is the heir not only to a duchy on another planet, but also a tradition of portal fantasy, beloved by many and written by her ancestor. She has spent her life striving for her stern, authoritarian grandfather’s approval. The planet outside and its biological wonders have been last on her consideration list.

But when she runs into an old classmate who is trying desperately to get his botanical research in before the alien habitat is destroyed, she starts to question her assumptions about the planet outside–and about her ancestor’s research for her beloved novels. What has she been missing all this time–and what did he miss generations ago? The richness of alien life is far beyond what she’s seen before. Ada enters into a desperate race to convince her grandfather of the importance of beings beyond his assumptions and join in her classmate’s efforts to find out more. If you love Narnia or rhizomes–or especially if you’re like me and love both–this is for you.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend of decades standing.

This is the first book in a sweeping space opera series (Vega Victrix), but many readers will be relieved (may even throw parades or dance in the streets) to discover that this volume has an ending rather than merely stopping for a minute until the next one. Also, the second one will be out at the same time! More on that in a few days.

Corin Oshima is afraid of her past catching up with her–literally. After her horrible mission on Rossem, she traveled away at more than the speed of light. So when Rossem’s history was altered, so was Corin’s, and it’s only a matter of time (again, literally) until the information wave traveling at the speed of light reaches her and obliterates her past, providing her with a new one–or, if she is too untethered to the current world, taking her out with it.

But she’s not just sitting around waiting for time to make fools of us all. As all of us conscientious souls know, there’s always work to do–and unfortunately there are always exploiters trying to spend their time treating people and lands as profit sources instead. Further complicating Corin’s life are aliens who are rational but very much not human in their priorities, political complications among the human “Houses”…and the person she least wants to see in the universe right now. Even a well-educated and interestingly modified future human like Corin has her hands full!

I have read this entire series to date in draft and am thrilled to see that it’s going to be available to the rest of the world so you all can talk to me about it. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the author, who’s a convention/online buddy.

Sometime in your life, you’ve probably met a smartass who always has a joke for every occasion–and then gradually realized that this person was genuinely kind. That they were not punching down, and mostly they weren’t punching at all, instead focusing their jokes on wry incongruity or situation rather than mocking individual people. That there was a core of tenderness behind the wisecracking. If you know the kind of person I mean (let’s be real: several of you are the kind of person I mean), you will understand Sol, the narrator of Hornytown Chutzpah pretty much right away. He’s not just called Solomon the Wise Guy for a wry historical reference. He’s definitely a wiseacre–but not as dumb as he might joke that he is. He’s coping using a very specific kind humor–in this case, the instantiation of it that shows up in a lot of American Jewish culture.

And boy, does Sol have a lot to cope with. I knew I was hooked all the way when the guy who is enough of a smartass to earn the nickname Solomon the Wise Guy can be brought to action with a reference to tikun olam. Look, friends, I’m not Jewish, but I know that one. A call to repair the world? those are lyrics everyone can enjoy. And having it be a touchstone, a point that rings our hero like a bell? I’m in, I’m all in.

The Hornytown of the title is an incursion of Hell into the Washington, DC, area, complete with hellfire around it and sin-eating demons within (and sometimes without). It’s run by a figure that will look unfortunately familiar, but rest assured that our hero is all-in against him. I was frankly worried by the title, because my interest in “city of people who would like to have a lot of sex” is pretty minimal, but it’s not that kind of Hornytown at all. Whew. Is there chutzpah, though? There is chutzpah to spare. Which is a good thing, because the literally hellish nature of the problems Sol faces will require it.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Dark Sight Dare. Kindle. This is a very nice novella. It is not twisty, it is not startling, it is a very kind story about people doing their best with difficult circumstances. I don’t think it’s the best place to begin the series, but it’s a pleasant addition thereto.

William Dalrymple, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. Kindle. It’s a really useful and thoughtful book, but what it is not is uplifting. Great Game my arse. Anyway it’s still worth knowing this stuff, it affects the modern world and remains interesting.

Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. Oh this was so good. Oh my goodness, this was so good. Again not with the uplifting, except that in some ways it was, that people’s determination to free themselves and their families was actually pretty wonderful, and hearing the details of how they did it–this should be taught in more schools all over North America, this was absolutely great. Some people fled completely naked! They just got out, and reading about their communities and lives was really neat.

Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Kindle. I was on vacation! I’m so much fun to take on vacation! This is a book about the early AIDS epidemic in Haiti and featuring Haitians abroad, and it does actual math and science about how the Haitian people were far, far more sinned against than sinning here. Not fun times but useful to know–and Farmer wrote a new preface about dealing with new pandemics, alas that he should have to.

Margaret Frazer, Shakespeare’s Mousetrap. Kindle. The supposed secret history of Titus Andronicus and its role in (fictional) actual murder; I think this is my least favorite of her shorts, and probably I should just stop reading them, completeness is not an unmixed virtue.

Sarah Gristwood, Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Kindle. Queens and princesses and what they did and where they went, not enough breadth in my opinion but still better than nothing.

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. Kindle. This is a book from about ten years ago, and it’s heartbreaking how real and deadly these problems already were then, and how much worse now.

W.F. Kirby, The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country. Kindle. You can probably tell from the way this is titled that it is a quite old book. It maddeningly is not the Kalevipoeg but rather a sort of summary of the Kalevipoeg. Kirby blithely informs us that he has omitted many irrelevant passages, some of which might have been of great interest to me, but this is very much a beggars/choosers situation. It exists, I could read this much at least, welp.

E.C.R. Lorac, Murder in Vienna. Kindle. Golden Age puzzle-type mystery. I did not bond with any of the characters, but it rattled along reasonably well and I will keep reading this author.

Casey McQuiston, The Pairing. Kindle. I continue to explore the boundaries of what romance I might like, and the answer here is: eh. It was briskly written, it was amusing, it was fine on a train…and I continued to want the character relationships with other people to matter.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. Second book in her “Botticelli trilogy,” historical fiction set during the Italian Renaissance. This is mostly not fantasy (no centaurs were harmed in the making of this book) except for the bit where someone might be possessed by a deity from antiquity. I think it will work better if you’ve read the first one, so you know what she’s doing with her fictional central characters in the middle of all the real historical figures.

Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. I didn’t set out to have a slavery theme in the nonfiction reading in this fortnight, but I found this in the Museum of Archaeology and History in Montreal and knew I wouldn’t find it again readily. It was really good at nuance and variation in ways that were extremely informative.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle Married. Kindle. The second in its very light series, and don’t start with this one; you’ll enjoy the central characters more if you have the perspective on where they started. Short. Fun.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Monday Starts on Saturday. Kindle. A reread technicality: this is a very different, and much better, translation than the one I read a few decades ago. I feel like this is particularly crucial for speculative satire. Luckily for me, this edition translates the title as “starts” whereas the other translates it as “begins,” so it will be easy to keep track of which one I want. Surreal and funny.

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys. Kindle. I read this because I trust Claire Tomalin as a biographer, not because I have a particularly keen interest in Pepys, and it did not disappoint. Her sense of context, her ability to be thoughtfully positive where possible without losing track of her subject’s flaws–she’s one of the best in the business, and this is an interesting book even if you’re not completely fascinated with Pepys.

Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne. Kindle. The ending spelled itself out in such clear detail from the outset that I can’t really say it’s one of my favorite Trollopes, but it’s not one of my least favorites either, as he wasn’t notably bigoted in any particular direction–and in fact he seemed to be arguing for acceptance of “illegitimate” children as full members of society. It was a reasonable thing to read on a plane.

Vanessa Walters, The Lagos Wife. A thriller set in Nigeria among the foreign-born wives of wealthy Nigerians. While the twist ending wasn’t my favorite, the multiplicity of cultural perspectives was exquisitely well-done and nuanced. I’ll keep an eye out for anything else Walters chooses to do.

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it’s time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it’s doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I’ve read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all “new histories of the world.” I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don’t have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it’s rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write “the thrilling conclusion.” I really do. Don’t start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won’t know how nicely if you don’t read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say…Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you’ll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She’s part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw’s, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don’t remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it’s a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like…it feels like it’s got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I’m all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that’s the case here. And…good? that many people should have seen the best of what’s in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn’t have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don’t all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author’s interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope’s own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. “She was tired of the Eustace diamonds.” “He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds.” Shh, it’s okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that’s only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that’s fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It’s just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it’s the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it’s the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others–so if you’re reading this series in order and wonder if it’s going downhill, no, it’s just that it’s quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. Reread. I’m going to be on the Plains of Abraham in May, and I would like to be able to know what I’m looking at. Also I really love this book. He’s so good at the spots where different cultural assumptions clashed disastrously, and he managed to notice that that was happening between colonists and metropolitan British and between different Native tribes from very similar regions as well as between those groups with theoretically larger differences.

K.J. Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda. Kindle. I had to get a new ereader this month, and one of the up sides (down side: I just want to buy things once and have them work forever) is that this one accepts library books. So I went through my wishlist and found bunches of things that the library had in ebook but not in physical copy, hurrah. This was one of them. It was fun, it was…if you wanted the kind of action-y thing that The Prisoner of Zenda was but with modern sensibilities and LOTS of gay sex, this is that. It’s not more than that, but it’s also not less.

Peter Dickinson, Some Deaths Before Dying and The Tears of the Salamander. Kindle. Two very, very different books in genre terms–the former is a meditation on old age with a crime or two here or there, the latter is a kids’ fantasy painted in generally bright colors. What they have in common–what a lot of Dickinson has as a common point–is the willingness to let some people just be rotten, to just go with that and have other people have to oppose it or work around it, and to know that it isn’t necessarily the people they’d have expected would be. Neither will be a favorite but I’m glad I read both.

Nicci French, What Happened That Night. I feel like the subgenre of “college friends back together after at least a decade [in this case three], probably with some murder” is bigger now than it used to be, that in some ways it’s taking the place of “high school reunion, probably with some murder.” I have room for both, but I admit I prefer the college friends because of the element of being able to choose for yourself for the first time, and not always choosing wisely but understandably either way. I also feel like the college friend version tends to be more individual, less dealing in archetypes, both for the friends and for their college experience. I didn’t find the very ending of this one particularly satisfying, but it also wasn’t bad enough that I won’t try more of French’s work.

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief. Okay, so I did not expect to like Tennyson ever, and then my dad died and now I do like Tennyson, I’m as surprised as anyone really. But this sort of thing, where there is a person working in the arts and someone traces the influences of contemporary science on their work: I could read this kind of thing all day. Yes please.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death on the Oxford Road. Kindle. An older British mystery, with a really delightful older woman character who has muscular dystrophy and a history nursing in the Great War. Just the sort of thing I like when I’m in the mood for this sort of thing, will seek out more of her stuff.

Sarah Gold McBride, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. I was happy with how this book handled race and gender, but I was a little disappointed it didn’t go into more detail about subcultural signaling with the infinite varieties of facial hair that were au courant at various times in the stated period, and I felt like there were a lot of questions where more comparison with what was going on in the outside world would have been illuminating. And it wasn’t terribly long, so I felt like there was room for it. Ah well.

Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate: Poems. Sometimes I’m very glad to have encountered one thing before another, and this is one of those cases: I found Venice far more resonant than Distant Mandate for reasons I’d have to go through with a fine-toothed comb to figure out. Not sorry to have read either, but I’ll likely return to the other one and not to this.

Solvejg Nitzke, The Elegance of Ferns: Portrait of a Botanical Marvel. This is very brief and lavishly illustrated–I went around the house singing “Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about ferrrrrns” for the whole time I was reading it, but luckily for my family that was not very long. (Nirvana joke, sorry, don’t worry about it.) It’s not what I’d call a deep dive, but if you have days in these parlous times when you could benefit from reading a nice quiet book about plants, complete with pretty pictures–and I know I do–then this is that.

Gin Phillips, Ruby Falls. There is a character in this called Ruby. She does not fall. It’s just that that’s what the place is called. If I was from the South I might have taken that for granted, but I’m not, so I wanted to warn you. Anyway it is about the Tennessee waterfall and all the adjacent underground caves and trails, and it is very, very claustrophobic and full of grim natural danger (underground caves are not safe, buddies!) as well as the more tiresome human kind. The plot hinges on one of the most obvious questions of identity that one would ever think to not mistake, and Phillips makes it clear that it is in character for the person who is an idiot to be an idiot, but…still an idiot plot in that sense. Luckily there is a lot more cave stuff to think about instead. Again willing to try more from this author, again not fabulously impressed by the ending.

Anthony Price, The Alamut Ambush, Colonel Butler’s Wolf, October Men, Our Man in Camelot, Other Paths to Glory, War Game, The ’44 Vintage, and Tomorrow’s Ghost. Rereads. This is about half this series (not quite half), and I didn’t read it all in one go like this the first time through. I have clear favorites and unfavorites, and there’s a pattern to them: basically I think that Price is at his best when he’s writing about British men, and the more he’s trying to do something else the worse the book was. I’m not sorry to have reread The Alamut Ambush (not actually the better for exoticizing both Arab and Israeli characters approximately equally) and Our Man in Camelot (his Americans are SO BAD), but I also won’t have any need to do it again, and Tomorrow’s Ghost left a bad taste in my mouth (THIS is what you’re doing with your first female protag in the series, Price? really?). On the other hand, Other Paths to Glory and War Game were really good at what they do. I didn’t stop here because of lack of enthusiasm, I had library books intervening.

Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown. I’m not at all sure why this is a separate book, except that it had its own strong effect in 1938 and its author didn’t do other things to collect with it? It’s an epistolary short story about the breakdown of a friendship as one of its members is swallowed as an Aryan into the Nazi regime and the other stays safe as an American Jew. It is harrowing, and one can only imagine its effect at the time.

Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Kindle. I really like how she gives the political and cultural background for what these scientists were working around in getting to appropriate locations with useful equipment to measure the Transit of Venus in the mid-18th century. It was a good book to read in close proximity to Crucible of War, lots of stuff proximate to each other but not covered in both volumes. Also I find the early assumptions that each new method will work well and give great answers right away extremely touching. Science: it takes a minute, and you learn different stuff than you expected.