Clara Benson, A Case of Murder in Mayfair. Kindle. Second in its series, keeps the 1920s upper class England vibe up, if you liked the first one you’ll like this one but you can also start here, it’s the kind of mystery series that will fill you in on who’s who and what’s what when you need to know.
Agatha Christie, Nemesis and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. The latter of the two is a fine enough Christie mystery, not one whose solution provides enough information to try to guess it but a reasonable read if that’s not what you’re looking for in mysteries. The former has a few absolutely vicious moments of sexism, including a firm fixation on repeating a really horrid view of rape, and it reminds me why I was letting other people filter my Christie reading for a while until I got impatient. So I’ll have a bit of a break before getting more of these.
Gwynne Garfinkle, Sinking, Singing. Discussed elsewhere.
Susanna Gibson, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement. The middle of the 18th century was a fascinating time for a lot of things, and this history (group biography?) does a beautiful job of combining larger themes and fascinating nuggets of trivia. The organization of it is occasionally a bit scattered, but not enough to ruin the book.
Rigoberto Gonzalez, ed., Latino Poetry. Four hundred years of American Latine poetry, organized chronologically, gets to poetry I consider “recent” quite quickly but then is hundreds of pages of that from highly varied voices. Really worth the time, will almost certainly introduce you to at least a few poets you didn’t know before (and possibly several, depending on your reading habits). And as with most large poetry anthologies, if you don’t like one, you’ll be on to another soon.
Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness. Second volume in its mystery series, grimmer and darker than most of the mysteries I’ve been reading. This one has child injury and child death very much front and center, so if that’s not something you’re interested in coping with in a novel, this one isn’t for you. Hilary seems to be grappling in fiction with what we currently think and know about post-partum psychosis.
Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance. Two ballet dancer sisters deal with the mental health crisis one of them has while the other attempts to maintain her career. Beautifully written, but almost all the characters are absolute jerks, so if you don’t like reading an entire novel about jerks trying to work in the arts, this will not be for you.
Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection. Kindle. This one did not work for me. I’m not sorry I read it, it’s in a series I like and it was not a terrible read, but it featured a lengthy (lengthy, pals) Sherlock Holmes pastiche in the middle, that was treated as if it was a good pastiche, and I didn’t think it was. I know her Mary Russell mysteries are quite popular, but the few I read of those (I prefer this series, the Kate Martinelli series) were attempting to go on and do their own thing, not just neatly pastiche Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The interesting part was that it was a contemporary novel from just long enough ago that a few things made me gasp with remembering what it was like then.
Lydia Moland, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life. This is a really good biography of a writer and activist who is not as well known as she might be, and whose abolitionism led her to feminism without letting go of its focus. Moland does an excellent job at liking but not lionizing her subject, making Child’s flaws clear but also placing them in their larger historical context. Recommended.
Ben Orlin, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. This is my friend Ben’s latest effort in the direction of helping people who aren’t as comfortable with math understand it a bit more, or perhaps in the direction of helping those of us who are super-comfortable with math understand some different ways to talk to people about it. Amusing and not a big time commitment, towards goals I support.
Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil. This is one of the recent trend of portal fantasies where the protag is the villain in the fantasy world. It’s tropey and snarky, but I think the thing that makes it stand out from the other tropey snarky books in this sub-genre is that Sarah Rees Brennan draws on her own experience of critical illness in ways that go counter-trope, in ways that are completely and heartbreakingly real. In with the villains having a dance number from the musical version.
Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast. Lots of stuff about Veronese’s painting, lots of stuff about Napoleon’s relationship with the material goods of the lands he was attempting to conquer. Not a particularly long book but interesting.
Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. John Stuart Mill and William Whewell did not agree on a lot. Snyder points out some of the stuff they did agree on, and for the most part also points out how they did not acknowledge even those points of agreement. But in any case it’s a lot of interesting stuff about what science even is, how it is supposed to work or has to work, all kinds of stuff where everybody was wrong (at least by our current, probably also wrong, standards), but it was interesting to see how we got here from there.
Noel Streatfeild, Caroline England. Kindle. Do you want a novel-length thing with the same theme as Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”? (You know, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad….”) Because that’s what this is. It predates the Larkin by several decades, but yeah: “wow do people’s family relationships and childhoods mess them up in varying ways.” Okay, I guess, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Sara Imari Walker, Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. The main thing in this book that I didn’t already have a solid grasp on was assembly theory, but that was a very cool thing to be exposed to. I think it’s a well-written popular history that should be clear to people at a wide variety of levels of prior knowledge of biophysics and astrobiology. A trivial but interesting feature of this book is that Walker decided to use the convention of referring to people by their given names instead of their family names after first reference–I would have said “Sara decided” if I’d been writing it the same way she did. So Mary Shelley became Mary, Albert Einstein Albert, and so on. Very cozy and collegial but I can’t see my way clear to doing it; not only am I entirely too comfortable with the distinction between “I had the nicest chat with my friend Fran” and “Wilde’s prose really shines in the jewel stories” distinguishing the personal from the analytical, but many of the eras I like to consult have a dozen and a half of Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne, with never a respite into Rotrude or Jennifer, and having to resort to Mary A. and Mary S. to distinguish whether we’re talking about fossils or novels would make me feel like I was back in Mr. Habrock’s kindergarten class. Still, it was fine for a book worth of someone else doing it.