Mario Alejandro Ariza, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. Ariza has some weird ideas about what personal resilience might mean, but other than that this is a passionate and thoughtful book that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Clara Benson, The Body on Archangel Beach, A Case of Perplexity in Piccadilly, The Scandal at 23 Mount Street, and The Shadow at Greystone Chase. Kindle. Look, here’s how the last three weeks have gone: I show up at the hospital or the hospice, I read a mystery novel more or less straight through while waiting for Grandma or a member of the medical staff to need something, which they mostly did not. Some days I read two. These sure are mystery novels in the series they’re in, and I sure did read them. I hate the love interest in the Angela Marchmont series. HATE. So that made the back half of the series less fun for me. But basically? they still functioned as historical mysteries when I needed them to. Would I have read them eventually? Certainly. Would I have read all of them in a fortnight in other circumstances? I sure would not, and that will apply to some of the rest of this post as well.
Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 14-16. Kindle. The middle of a serial that is doing some fun school tropes on Mars. I’m not caught up yet, but I’m closer.
P.F. Chisholm, A Famine of Horses. Thank heavens this is the first one in its series and I like it, because the strategic mystery novel supplies have been pretty endangered here. This is an historical with Sir Robert Carey on the Scottish border during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. If that sounds like fun to you, it probably will be.
Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery, Elephants Can Remember, Murder in Mesopotamia, Ordeal By Innocence, Sleeping Murder, and The Hunter’s Lodge Case (Kindle last one only). These are as varied as hers generally are, from a nice enough puzzle story to a really loathsome book I recommend that you not read. (That one would be Ordeal By Innocence, which manages to be toxic about suicidality, adoption, incest, and probably a few more things I’ve forgotten in recoiling from its horrors.)
Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Kindle. The emphasis on the necessity of respect for solving social problems is an interesting thread through this book. As her selection of Ferguson as the titular example indicates, this book predates a lot of recent developments, and it’d be interesting to see what, if anything, she would say or analyze differently now.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Three interesting women of different religions and nationalities, and an analysis of what their gender did to shape their lives in the same era but very different contexts. Interesting stuff.
Giorgio De Maria, Twenty Days of Turin. Dark Italian surrealism, I didn’t really resonate with it but am always glad stuff gets translated.
Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All There Is. This is kind of a weird book, because it’s very much a memoir of Gretel Ehrlich–not an autobiography, it doesn’t have the comprehensive structure of an autobiography–but there isn’t really a clear memoir throughline either. Home, maybe? I don’t know, if you’ve liked Ehrlich’s work before (I have), this is more of it, just don’t expect a cohesive work.
Margaret Frazer, A Play of Heresy, A Play of Piety, A Play of Treachery, The Sempster’s Tale, The Simple Logic of It. Kindle. I feel like I could see the shapes of two different things she was setting up for herself and then didn’t have the chance to do, which is a shame. I also feel like she got to see how she really really liked doing political mysteries late in her career, which, more power to her.
Yoel Hoffman, ed., Japanese Death Poems: Written By Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. This had very strong “edited by a white guy when I was in grade school” vibes to its surrounding materials, which were copious, but the poems themselves were interesting.
Togzhan Kassenova, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. I particularly liked how this went into the nuts and bolts of activism and both national and international politics that went into this decision. Fascinating stuff. This is the book I bought myself for my grandpa’s birthday this year, and it was a great choice, he would have called me at least four times to read passages out.
Rose Macaulay, I Would Be Private. This is one of Macaulay’s lesser novels, a satire on shallow publicity. It’s about a family that unexpectedly has quintuplets and their attempts to flee the press. Some of it is very very funny. Some of it is attempting to be non-racist and not hitting the mark. Some of it is not attempting. I would not recommend this to anyone but completists and people studying media saturation/personal publicity, but I am one of the former, and I’m glad I’ve read it.
Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season. Discussed elsewhere.
Noel Streatfeild, Dancing Shoes. Reread. This is one of the lesser ones, I think–weirdly I also think it’s the first one I ever read. The thing that’s interesting about it to me now that I’ve read Streatfeild’s adult novels is that I think this is the children’s book where she attempts to acknowledge the kind of low-brow characters who show up fairly often in her adult work–Hilary is a good dancer but has no ambition in that direction, would much rather have fun in the chorus, will grow up to be a chorus girl and ideally find a nice man and raise babies. She does not gain depth over the course of the book because the plot is not about that, it’s about sisters accepting themselves and each other for who they are. Which I like a lot actually. “Everyone has to do the thing you value” is not okay. What I don’t really like is the ending–I feel like Rachel would be happier if she had some other talent and interest, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t except that this is what a happy ending looks like for a lot of Streatfeild’s children’s books.