Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, eds., We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage. I picked this up from the library’s new book display, and it contains poems by a lot of poets I have liked before. Unfortunately I re-learned that love poetry is not very central to my preferences, that I enjoy it more when it’s a handful of love poems in among other kinds of poems. Ah well.
Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Blade Doth Rust. Discussed elsewhere.
Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time. This was a fun time travel book, though it had one of the plot twists I find tedious in time travel fiction. The relationships are strong, and the central time traveler characters are vividly of their times. The focus on the government program running the time travel situation is very well done and compelling–the title is not metaphorical, it actually is a government department–and I was happy to just dive into this.
Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. This is intended to be a primary sources compendium with minimal commentary from the editor. It’s all regionally grouped along the Atlantic coast. If you read this period and focus of history, you’ll have read several of these documents, but here they are all in one place.
Miriam Darlington, Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World. A charming volume of natural history about observing and spending time with wild otters in the UK and how that’s been handled previously in literature etc. Not particularly long, very smoothly done.
Justine Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. Ah, the Capetians. So many jerks, so many centuries. This is an interesting account of this dynasty, if you’re interested in the transition from the Frankish to the French, if you’re interested in dynastic politics at all, if you like the kind of history where the historian is very clear that the past only looks inevitable to us because we can see it from this distance and in the lived reality it wasn’t inevitable at all.
Margaret Frazer, The Murderer’s Tale. Kindle. This is one of the less pleasant reads in this series simply because of the time in the point of view of the titular character. He’s not merely a murderer but an arrogant jackass, and you get to spend a lot of time in his head. Also Dame Frevisse is having a cranky book, and one can’t entirely blame her with the amount of death that’s been surrounding her. But it’s just a very prickly entry in this ongoing series.
Jodi Meadows, Bye Forever I Guess. Discussed elsewhere.
Premee Mohamed, The Siege of Burning Grass. A weird fantasy meditation on pacifism, war, and how we justify ourselves, lots of beautiful tiny details of magic/tech that are not genre standard, very much fun to read, recommended.
Gennarose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. Kelly Link blurbed this book, and you can see why: a lot of its themes and stylistic concerns overlap with Link’s favorite types of short story work. I found it generally quite charming, though the illustrated title story was not really my jam.
Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family, and Kingdom. It was entirely coincidence that I read this and the book about the Capetians in the same fortnight, but it was a lovely coincidence, because it detailed how two very different polities had evolved toward similar(…ish) governance from very different places. Raffensperger and Ostrowski are very careful not to frame their work as giving credence to contemporary Russian nationalist ideas about the proper boundaries of Russia, using Rus and other relevant terms so as to be clear which entities were when. An interesting resource for this era and region.
Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. This is very centered on England with a little bit of France and the rest of Europe. It’s got a lot of interesting detail about practical magic, how it was used, how it was regarded, how it was not regarded though modern people assume it was. It’s short and interesting, so if you have any inclination towards this topic, it’s not going to be a big commitment.
Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. This is more or less a work biography of Jansson. If you want more about her interiority, you’ll need her own work. There’s not a lot of depth of emotion, but there sure is a lot of information about what she did when, and that’s interesting and useful in itself.