Charlie Jane Anders, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. Discussed elsewhere.
Chaz Brenchley, Rowany Goes to Summer School. Kindle. Chaz continues with his exploration of the Mars-that-wasn’t, and also genres-that-sometimes are, and this one was spy training, and if you love a good training montage, why, here we are, at novella-ish length.
Susan Cooper, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. Rereads. Okay, so I was going to keep wandering through this series as slowly as I had the previous three volumes, but when I posted about Greenwitch in my last book post, I got to talking to Sonya about it, and then there was a poem that needed writing, but I had to read the other books with Jane in them first, so these two got read much more quickly than I’d planned. I remember The Grey King being more plot-coherent than it is. There’s quite a lot of “and for reasons of their own” and “and for some reason” and “the Light has its ways” and so on in this book, and even apart from that there’s “and then someone happened to tell the eleven-year-old completely age-inappropriate things about how the neighbor tried to rape his friend’s mom and oh there’s the neighbor now.” Yeah. Wow. Huh. And it leans very hard on threat and eventually carrying through with the threat to the dog. There’s still the part where they teach at least one and possibly up to three generations of Anglophone nerds how to pronounce Welsh, but it’s structured extremely weirdly; I have a much harder time understanding why she made the choices she did with Will’s memory loss and abrupt return now that I ask questions like that. Silver on the Tree was a relief after that–it has some of the horrible gender aspects of the rest of the series (Jane is such a blank slate that she is not even allowed to look down at her clothes while time traveling–lest she have an opinion about them?), but it also does some really lovely things with the Wild Magic and the Lost Land, and it hangs together as a mythic book. I also am now old enough to notice that Stanton Drew is the location of a major stone circle, so: heh, all right, Susan. Glad I read them, despite noticing a lot more things that were off about them than I did as a kid.
Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra. Speaking of training montages, this is not a bit like Chaz’s. It’s one of those books where the universe and the authority figures in it are both hostile and violent and everything around magic is unbearably nasty–both on the macroscale (will kill you and your family!) and on the microscale (everything rather squalid, will mess with your college plans and romances). My tolerance for that kind of approach is usually fairly low, but under these circumstances I can rather see why Ukrainian authors would feel that way about the world sometimes, and the very ending was aiming for something better.
Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. Hutton is very clear that primary source material about the druids is minimal. What he’s doing is talking about what various eras have wanted to use the druids to mean, and he’s very thorough and interesting about that, for good and for ill.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion. Discussed elsewhere.
Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala. Translated by Keith Bosley. People often ask me what translation of the Kalevala I recommend, and now I’ve read the major English translations and can say definitively: good Lord not this one. Stick with Magoun, Magoun keeps the weird in, Magoun is dated but delightful, Bosley is dated but dreary. Friberg if you can’t find Magoun but ugh, not Bosley. I hate the syllabic unmetered lines he made up for himself, I hate a great many of his translation choices (g–sy is not a good choice for “transient laborer” for so many reasons, sir), cultural quirks do not need smoothing out, they’re what we’re here for, this is the bloody Kalevala, you wind in the back staircase. Which is an insult you will not find in Bosley. Which is part of why you should not read his translation. Where is our modern translation, where. But even Bosley can’t entirely dim my delight in the source material, and anyway now I know.
Rose Macaulay, Staying With Relations. I ordered this more or less at random from mid-period Macaulay. I did not expect it to be set in Guatemala. There is a plot twist that is a plot twist only if you do not trust Macaulay to be better than the average white person of her era about whether Guatemalans are so-called savages, but that’s okay because there is still how it unfolds and all the stuff after it. I don’t know why it annoys me less when Macaulay writes about writers than when other people do, but it’s absolutely true that it does. This is once again a book that does all sorts of things differently than other people, and even knowing that it’s Rose, I don’t know all of where it’s going, and I love that, I love her.
Andri Snær Magnason, The Casket of Time. This disappionted me. It was an environmentalist fable, a combination fairy tale and children’s science fiction novel, with very heavy-handed messaging, and there wasn’t a lot to it except the messaging. There were enough charming bits that I stayed on through the end hoping for more and did not find them. I enjoyed one of his adult books and will try another, but this was not really worth the time, alas.
Thomas J. Misa, Digital State: the Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry. Wow, this is why people think they don’t like nonfiction. Because it is delivering the data that it has and no more than that. There are not charming stories here, no anecdotes, no side tales–and there are opportunities for some, which I know, because I know some of the individuals involved in this. This is a reference volume. Refer to it if you want the stuff it refers to.
Alexander McCall Smith, What W.H. Auden Can Do For You. This is a slim volume, and good thing, because Alexander McCall Smith is fairly determined not to go into the ways that Auden can exasperate you and make you tear your hair, or even gently say, “Oh Uncle Wystan, oh my darling no,” or the ways that Auden can make you stare at the wall and maybe go for a walk when it’s too cold to go for a walk and you don’t feel good but something has to clear your head after the bit of W.H. Auden you just read and anyway I begin to think that Alexander McCall Smith has only the very edges of an idea of what W.H. Auden can do for you, or possibly a limited concept of who you might be. But if you want someone to say to you in bracing tones, “isn’t he neat? isn’t he just keen?” then by God Sandy’s your man. And you know, I actually did, for a bit; it was nice, it was like having someone I don’t like very much also like my favorite aunt’s paintings, it’s good that he does, I’m glad I’m not the only one, and I’m glad that person has gone home now. He has, right? oh good. Whew.
Anton Van Der Lem, Revolt in the Netherlands: The Eighty Years War, 1568-1648. Did I spend this entire lavishly illustrated volume thinking of it as Panic in the Disco? I’ll never tell. But it is, it is absolutely gorgeously illustrated, full color on most pages. If you want to know lots of things about the Low Countries and how they got their freedom from Spain, here you are. If you just like looking at weird old maps and pictures of people wearing ruffs, this is also a good volume for you.