Books read, late April

Sue Hyon Bae, Truce Country. Poems on and around a Korean immigrant experience, vivid and sure-handed.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption. For my money, this series is the best combination of fantasy and mystery, in genre terms, that I think I’ve ever seen.

Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons, Death on the Nile, and The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side. These sure are books written by Agatha Christie, and I sure did read them. And it’s pretty obvious why Death on the Nile is the most famous, and happily it does not really attempt to deal with actual Egyptian people.

Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot. Reread. Honestly I had been putting off reading this for years, because it was so important to my formation as a teenage/early twentysomething writer, and I was so frightened that it, uh. Might not be where I left it. Thankfully it is. It’s still terribly terribly earnest–but you haven’t been around here very long if you think I object to that really–and it still has a previous era’s attitudes toward homelessness and mental health. De Lint does tend to get worse the farther from his own demographic his intended perspective is. BUT BUT BUT they are still mostly charming stories with a lot of heart and I will not be quite so slow to reread them another time.

Emily Deibert, Bea Mullins Takes a Shot. The titular character has been nudged into playing hockey when she really doesn’t want to play a sport at all, only to find herself with a crush on a teammate. And their team is chronically underfunded compared to the boys’ team! Bea has a lot of problems to juggle and manages to figure them out as best a middle schooler can, with a lot of humor and heart.

Martin Espada, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002. I wish I’d been able to give this to my grandfather, because he loved Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tilbury town poems, and this is…a hundred years in the future from that, Latine characters rather than white, but the same kind of sharply observed human character poems. I like his later work better, but this is entirely good enough to go on with.

Margaret Frazer, The Midwife’s Tale. Kindle. This is a short story, and like a lot of mystery short stories it’s very linear–there’s not much room to be anything else. But it gives her a chance to observe another segment of village life in her chosen period.

Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective. In the late 17th century a Livonian man was put on trial for being a werewolf in league with Satan. He found this truly offensive because, he said, he and the other werewolves were not in league with Satan, they were on the front lines of fighting against Satan, and it was really wrong for the court to claim otherwise. This is a work of nonfiction, with translated court transcript and discussion between these two scholars about how it does and does not connect to other werewolf lore elsewhere in Europe in this period. Vivid, fascinating, in places hilarious.

Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World. Very much a book that does what it says on the tin: if you want to know the history of this particular kind of botanical transport, with its pros and cons, this is a book that will tell you.

Jordan Kurella, The Death of Mountains. A gently fantastical novella with the perspectives of several kinds of Death and also a Mountain. Each of the narrators is a natural storyteller, presenting their experiences together in ways that are sometimes wistful and always deeply felt.

Joanna Miller, The Eights. This is a nice book in which nice people make friends with each other and sort out their lives nicely. I don’t mean to make it sound insipid, it’s not insipid. But generally if there’s a better and a worse consequence, this is a book that pulls back from the worse ones for its protagonists. Since it’s also a book about women in the 1920s getting an Oxford education in the aftermath of the Great War, there’s a certain amount of “these people have already been through enough” going on here, and a) this era and setting combined are absolutely my jam and also b) who could argue. Just go in knowing that this is not a book for the heights of melodrama, and that’s okay.

Margarita Montimore, The Dollhouse Academy. I think writing thrillers, or specifically writing satisfying endings to thrillers, must be harder than I think. This is briskly written and interesting, scathing about some of the abuses of the modern entertainment industry, but the ending more or less falls apart, and that’s very frustrating to me.

Garth Nix, Across the Wall. Reread. I’ve been trying to figure out some good short story recs for a favorite 15yo, and I enjoyed this volume immensely and will not be using it for that purpose, because what I want is short stories to show them how to make a short story work as its own thing, and the most successful story in this volume in my opinion is the titular story, which is very much in the “short story as outtake or side quest from longer work” subgenre. That said, it’s an extremely satisfying one of those, and I’m glad to have it.

Sharyn November, ed., Firebirds Rising. Reread. Some really good stuff in here. I particularly liked the stories by Diana Wynne Jones, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, Patricia McKillip, and Pamela Dean, but it’s in general a fairly high-quality anthology.

Lucy K. Pick, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. The inheritance laws in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula were not strongly gendered and were very much skewed against leaving everything or even most things to one child or one sibling. The results are a very interestingly different set of power dynamics in late antiquity/early medieval era than immediately adjacent regions. I’m really glad to have these insights.

Cherie Priest, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Reread. I had been talking about Gothics, so I decided to revisit this one, and it continues pacey and well-written.

Emery Robin, The Sea Eternal. The second in its series–if the first was Julius Caesar in Space, this one is Antony and Cleopatra in Space. With lesbians. For me that made it a reasonably fun read; I know that for some of my friends the reaction will be much stronger. Themes of memory and cultural preservation continue from the first book as you would expect.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Water & Salt. A beautiful book of poems, starts and ends with absolute bangers and does not let up much in the middle. Tuffaha’s background contains threads from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and the US, and all of them matter deeply in her poems.

Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. An accounting of this fictional character’s context and enduring appearances in literature from the time Chaucer invented her to the present day. Possibly the most fun you’ll have with a volume of literary criticism in a while. You do not need to be a very dedicated Chaucerian to get a lot out of this.

Katy Watson, A Very Lively Murder and Seven Lively Suspects. Second and third in their series, should be entirely readable without having gotten the first one but I believe it’s in print so you might as well. Three actresses who, in different eras, have played the same iconic fictional detective are now solving murders themselves, with a movie set and a literary festival as the settings. Reasonably good fun, so far not a genre-changer for me but very few things can be or in fact want to be.

Katie Williams, My Murder. What was it I was saying about how it’s hard to write thrillers. Sigh. This is a science fiction thriller, again very readable–a bit on the more literary end of that subgenre, in ways that I enjoyed–but if you’ve read genre science fiction at all, the ending resolves with the sort of thing that you would have asked yourself “wait, is it possible that they just” on page 2. Sigh.

Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. This is a memoir written in the first-person, but the “I” of this book is not Yang herself but her mother. It’s an extraordinary thing to do–an act of literature and an act of love at the same time, I came to feel–and one that many people, no matter how much they love storytelling or their mother, would not want to try. Yang’s mother has had not just a hard life but a complicated interesting one, and Yang situates it well in its context. Very much worth having, even if I doubt that there will be a sea of imitators.