Clara Benson, A Case of Intrigue in Islington. Kindle. The latest Freddy Pilkington-Soames mystery, entertaining enough if you’re already reading that series.
Eiren Cafall, All the Water in the World. A post-apocalyptic novel that starts in flooded New York City and ends up the Hudson. It is doing all the things that an eco-focused post-apocalyptic novel does. It does them well, but also if you don’t want another one of those, this is another one of those, it’s not doing something new, it’s doing something established nicely enough.
P. F. Chisholm, A Season of Knives, A Surfeit of Guns, and A Plague of Angels. This is books two through four of the Robert Carey mysteries. I have the first six books of the series in two omnibus volumes, so you’ll be seeing more of these soon, I expect. In the last one they have adjourned to London, which is slightly disappointing because I like the Scottish Border, but I’m hopeful we’ll get there eventually. And for an historical mystery that featured Marlowe and Shakespeare as characters, it was not doing the same thing as several of the others, so there’s that.
Joseph Cox, Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever. I wouldn’t have read this if someone else hadn’t brought it into the house, but it’s interesting though outside my usual interests. It’s crime nonfiction from the last decade with a tech focus. Much of what I got from it was “you’re kidding, they what.” Welp.
Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. This was a book club read, and many/most of the stories traded in stereotypes of Jewish women. Some of them also were pretty stereotypical of Jewish men, while others walked the line of “I’m allowed to make that joke, it’s about myself.” I think there are a lot of interesting Jewish SFF authors and would not start here for which of them to read, but it’s quite an old anthology and was clearly doing something that was not otherwise being done at the time.
Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. The structure of this is a bit weird, because it alternates who is writing each chapter, and Patricia Stephens Due is doing basically a linear memoir, and Tananarive Due is doing…whatever she can to fit the thoughts she has about this topic in a thematic order that informs her mother’s memoir. It is definitely worth reading if you are interested in Civil Rights memoirs, which I am, but the amount that it speaks to any intersection with Tananarive Due’s other writing interests is fairly small.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems. Reread many years later. My late beloved Aunt Judy’s poetry collection is making its way to people who will appreciate it, and this was one of the volumes I got. It’s technically a reread–I know I read this in college, and have revisited pieces of it since–but not coherently, not for many, many years. The thing that struck me this time around was how many SFF titles come from The Waste Land. It’s not all that thematically relevant, as modern poems go! It was almost an, “I went to see Hamlet, it was just a bunch of famous quotes strung together” situation, but for SFF titles.
Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions. Hopkinson notes that she’s published in a wide variety of places, and she’s correct, there are fewer of these stories that were in the “oh, I remember enjoying this somewhere else” category than in most collections by authors I’ve been reading and enjoying for nearly 25 years. More fresh work. Good.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad. Reread. This was the other of the Aunt Judy volumes I got, and I had reread it much more recently. I always feel this bleak protectiveness about Housman, with the Great War bearing down on him and he has no idea, poor dear.
Karl Smari Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, eds., The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627. Nonfiction, sort of a travelogue/memoir, but very much in the “there’s a religious lesson here if we have to turn it upside down and shake it” vein. The thing that weirded this guy out–this 17th century Icelandic pastor who was kidnapped by Barbary pirates–is that Turkish people of the time did not wear socks. I mean, possibly other things weirded him out? It seems likely? But there is a heck of a lot of “we trust in the Lord our refuge” and then “OMG THEY DON’T EVEN WEAR SOCKS.” Bless.
Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures. I wanted to like this. I really loved her book on John Donne. I did not like it. There was a lot of death for a children’s book, and all of it felt off to me, most of it felt absolutely gratuitous. Also some of the references to grown-up literature felt extraneous to the heart of the thing–I could see what Rundell loved and wanted to pay homage to, and I could also see it largely not working for me in this shape of book. Sigh.
Arwa Salih, The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt. Salih was part of the 1970s leftist movements in Egypt and has some interesting and some personal and some absolutely scathing things to say about them. It makes me want to know more of the backdrop against which her stuff took place. Books! They’re self-reinforcing, you read one and it makes you want to read five more!
Dana Simpson, Unicorn Book Club. This is another installation of the running comic strip, which I enjoy. It doesn’t have a lot of book club material, but that’s okay, if you like Phoebe & Her Unicorn or want to find out if you do, this is a perfectly reasonable one of them.
Stephen Spotswood, Dead in the Frame. The latest in the Parker & Pentecost mystery series, and the previous volume and this one both have clear signposts for what the next mystery will be while still solving the one at hand. This one dealt with women’s prisons in general and the House of Detention in New York City in specific as a major element, well-researched, good stuff.
Chris Thorogood, Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers. I would have preferred less of Thorogood in this, but that’s not a reasonable thing to ask someone who is writing a book. I kept reading largely because I was interested in what he was saying about rafflesia, and I don’t expect there will be another readily available book on that topic soon.
Carrie Vaughn, The Naturalist Society. I was enjoying this 19th century fantasy, but it veered off into idiot plot (multiple idiots plot) in ways that annoyed me, and I found the end unsatisfying. I wanted this to be one of her books that I love (see for example Bannerless) but instead it was more in the “well okay I guess” category. I do like 19th century naturalists. Sigh.
Nghi Vo, Don’t Sleep With the Dead. Discussed elsewhere.
Olivia Waite, Murder By Memory. Discussed elsewhere.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Pilgrim Machines. I like a far-future/highly advanced aliens space opera as well as the next person, but the characters in this barely cohered at all, and I couldn’t attach to any part of it emotionally really. I wanted to think that Wijeratne was doing things with Buddhism that I was missing, but the end notes do not seem to point in that direction.
Rita Woods, The Edge of Yesterday. Discussed elsewhere.