Month: April 2025

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.