Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the publisher.

It’s hard to think of something that’s less “my jam” than very Gothic, very Southern fantasy. (Is it Southern Gothic if it’s Gothic in the sense of a doomed romance between a girl and a creepy house, and also is Southern? I am not clear on that part. It’s sure got the decay and the poverty and–fantastic nightmares, they say? Yes, it has those. Okay. Southern Gothic turned up to eleven.) And yet this is so beautifully done. I kept running around telling people, “I have never seen a better use of Tractor Supply in a fantasy novel.”

Opal has been raising her brother Jasper the best she knows how, out of a shabby motel room in a town that has seen better days but honestly not that much better. She manages to get a job cleaning the enigmatic Starling House, which is beyond filthy and beyond mysterious. Its sole inhabitant, Arthur Starling, is a little bit Byronic hero, a little bit college junior living in way more squalor than he wants to admit to. The rumors about him are intense, the rumors about the house even more so. And rightly so, because this house wants Opal. What Opal wants is tuition to get Jasper to school somewhere far away and better than this. This is the town that killed their mother, and she doesn’t want it to eat her brother too.

She’s not paying a lot of attention to whether it gets her.

Luckily, Jasper and Arthur are. And they’re not the only ones. Over the course of the book, the secrets of Starling House reveal themselves a little at a time, and so does the siblings’ place in the community, which is not quite what Opal had always assumed–except for the places where she’s absolutely, belligerently right. This is acutely observed about small town relationships, families, and the ways we sometimes take care of each other better than we take care of ourselves. Its squalor is purposeful, its decay sure-handed. If ever you want a creepy magic house story from the near South, oh, this is the one. If you think you don’t…you still might.

Jess Armstrong, The Curse of Penryth Hall. Discussed elsewhere.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park. Reread, Kindle. I say reread because I know I read this as a teenager sometime before I started the booklog, but I don’t know precisely when, and my memory of it was rather more general than specific. I like that it was a novel of close calls, and I particularly like Susan at the ending, I like that one of the close calls was that of becoming the sort of person her aunts were, who just forgot what her poor relations were like. Susan was the part that made me happiest.

Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, eds., The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. A friend slipped this into my hand as a random gift, a used copy of a mid-century compendium. The translations held up remarkably well, and it contained a surprising number of contemporary-to-its-publication poems, a surprising number of poems that were not on “nice” topics. The editors seemed a bit bemused by them in the introduction, but they pressed on all the same, bless them. Useful to have about the house.

Chaz Brenchley, Mary Ellen–Craterean! Chapters 15-17. Kindle. Some things being wrapped up and others started, catching up on the installments of this serial as I was doing a lot of Kindle reading.

Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Analyzes a particular uprising in Jamaica through the lens of the pre-enslavement military experience of the enslaved persons in their lives in West Africa, particularly in the Bight of Benin area, really interesting about how those experiences likely informed the way they resisted enslavement intelligently and strategically.

Deva Fagan, The Mirrorwood. A fast, fun children’s fantasy whose heroine considers herself under a curse (and so do the people around her). Her allies and enemies are not always who they seem, and neither are the monsters, necessarily–but there sure are curses and monsters to travel around figuring out.

E.M. Forster, A Room With a View. Kindle. What I really like about this–and what really contrasted to reading Edith Wharton the next day–was that Forster’s characters could see that their social strictures weren’t working for them, and they did something about it. They were willing to make a total mess of things–to run off to Greece, to make mistakes, to make themselves miserable, to play the piano badly in a mood–in hopes of something better, or even not in hopes of something better, but to dodge something intolerable. I don’t know if I was supposed to think that the clergyman and another gentleman were gay from the remarks about people who were better off without a connexion? (perhaps, because I am a sophisticated married woman artist rather than an innocent young girl who knows not of life?), but I’m just going to go with that all the same, nice gay clergyman who only likes young girls if they’re interesting musicians, sure yes, swimming naked in a suburban pond with random young Socialists you’ve just met, honestly how did people ever think this era of literature was stuffy…well, read on, it’s because Edith Wharton convinced them. I’m going to sit over here by Ed.

Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin. Kindle. Wartime workplace mystery, somewhat fluttery, not particularly outstanding to my mind.

Gulchehra Hoja, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival. This was a very strange thing to read, because it was clearly propaganda, and its position was not particularly nuanced, and also…also I didn’t really feel like its position needed to be more nuanced, and I agreed with its propaganda claims, which are that genocide is bad and attempting to wipe out the Uyghur people and their culture is bad. For all that we incline toward nuance, professionally, I feel like when someone points out genocide, “let’s hear whether this might be fine actually” is not actually where we need to go. Hoja manages to also talk about some of the Uyghur cultural traditions she particularly values, which is nice in context. I hope this gets attention among people who don’t know much about the Uyghur people. It’s not very long and quite personal and readable.

S.L. Huang, The Water Outlaws. Discussed elsewhere.

T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge. Discussed elsewhere.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, Flight and Anchor. Max’s blurb on this book compares it to the Boxcar Children, I think amusingly but fairly. Two military-industrial-complex-modified children break out of their complex and try to make a life for themselves, in a novella prequel to Firebreak. Cat-and-mouse with their captor ensues.

Ken MacLeod, Beyond the Hallowed Sky. Space opera about the discovery (time loop discovery?) of FTL, Venus cloud habitats, androids and spies and differently-fragmented/differently-unified Earth politics, and…yeah, this is just the kind of immersive weird crunch I want from MacLeod. We believe in the same kind of nerd conversations, is I think one of the things that makes it work particularly for me–this is how nerds talk politics, I’ve heard them.

Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians, 751-987. A lot of ground I’ve covered before, not a bad introduction if you haven’t, different conceptual areas highlighted under different eras.

Dorothy Sayer, trans., The Song of Roland. I think one of the things that’s astonishing to me about this is how fast Charlemagne passes into the realm of weird legend. Suddenly he’s a 200-year-old man! He was around just 200 years ago! How is this supposed to work! Doesn’t matter, on with the tale.

Margery Sharp, Britannia Mews. Kindle. The plot elements that were the risk of a generation before–marrying your drawing master, oh no!–are the reality of this book, and how they unfold is hilarious in spots, poignant in spots, horrifying, an entire beautifully done range of human emotion. And it’s a book with temporal range as well, Victoriana all through the Second World War. A lot of the Sharp books I’ve read before are smaller, more lapidary, in both what emotion they mean to cover and what time frame they mean to do it in. This is a different beast entirely. Once I realized what I was in for, I liked it quite a lot.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, And Put Away Childish Things. This is an absolutely beautifully done example of how making something darker of things you loved in your childhood doesn’t necessarily mean making something nihilistic or horrid. There’s portal fantasy in this, and reference to children’s books, and it goes some pretty scabrous places–and also the pandemic is a real thing with effects on people’s lives, gasp, go figure–but it is neither hopeless nor mean-spirited, well done that man. Quite a lot of ground to cover in a novella, and he does it neatly.

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset. Kindle. I was in JFK this week, okay? I was in JFK this week, and when I am in an airport going through the throes of horror that a) contemporary airports often go through and b) that particular airport sure was going through a lot this week, what I want is to not have to think about whether my book is going to get me through this trying time, I just want there to quite a lot of be long sentences that are slightly anxious about things (money! and social change!) that I am not personally going through in that very moment, but that will mostly come out okay, except where they don’t. I love reading Trollope in airports, I can’t see why they don’t have big stacks of his books next to the bottled water and the Mets shirts. If you want a Trollope novel, this sure is one. All sorts of people face financial ruin! Some of them are pure of heart! Sometimes in opposite directions! Some people are very sure of their own rightness and are wrong! Lots of people are incredibly stubborn, a bunch of them are clergy, it’s like one of my family reunions up in this thing. One of the interesting points is that Trollope has more sympathy for one of the characters, Mrs. Proudie, than he expects his readership to have, and he admonishes the readership about it. But I have more sympathy for her as well, even though she behaves spectacularly badly in places and only doesn’t ruin some people’s lives by a combination of chance and a lot of work on other people’s parts. But I see how her life options were limited by her society and so does my boy Tony. So that’s why we’re here, right? That’s why we hang with him still. Because he could see that even then. (Even if the bits where he’s scolding his other readers about it didn’t strike me as particularly likely to work at the time.) I also found this one really interesting because he had nothing like a framework for mental health and neurodiversity but he clearly understood that some people’s brains worked very differently than the standard and that you couldn’t expect it to not go like that, it didn’t make them bad parents or bad people or bad at their job, he didn’t have the words for it but he knew that they did not do it the same as the guy next to them and that was going to have to get worked out somehow. (“But WHY is he like that?” people keep asking in this book, and the answer they have at the time is, “Dunno, but he sure is, that’s how he does, and there’s no other way he can do.” Could do a lot worse, honestly.)

Martha Wells, City of Bones. Discussed elsewhere.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. Reread, Kindle. This is another reread from my teens when I remembered almost nothing about it, and gosh I hope I remember to never read it again. I feel like Wharton feels like she’s more removed from these people than she looks from this distance. She’s the one who chose to center miserable, conventional rich people; she’s the one who put the interesting women on the outskirts of a book that could have been about them. Shouting out Middlemarch was a dangerous power move here, because it pointed out how many of the same things Wharton was doing and how much worse she was doing them. And then there was the fatphobia. “Look at how convention binds us, look at how ignorance and innocence are conflated, bound, forced together”: fine yes, I’ve looked, let’s do something else now.

P. G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless. Kindle. This is my new favorite Wodehouse. It’s got musical theater! It’s got a parrot! It’s got all sorts of lovely shenanigans. It doesn’t have as much of the sympathetic servants as one would like, but it’s got some. And it’s got Jill herself and she’s lovely. I feel sorry for the poor man next to me on the plane, because I kept laughing and he was trying to sleep. On the other hand it was the middle of the afternoon so there was no particular reason to think the person next to you on the plane wouldn’t be laughing at her book.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a re-release of a novel first released in 1995. The promotional copy notes that this is the author’s preferred text; I don’t have the original edition, so I can’t make comparisons between the two and say what has changed and whether I like it better or worse than the original. In some senses the question is moot for me. This is the edition in front of me; this is what I’m reviewing.

The titular city is one of desert wastes and technological fantastika. This is a world past its golden age, a world full of relics and mysteries. Khat is from a race of humanoids often not considered fully human though deeply humane in his own instincts; Elen is a Warder, powerful in her own sphere but unable to penetrate some important areas to retrieve artefacts of interest. Together they–well, there appears to be more committing than fighting of crime, from some points of view. But together they muddle through. Get double crossed. And find themselves an unlikely team in the face of a still more unlikely threat.

The role of relics and their forgeries in all of this was the strongest part of the book for me. It’s an engaging enough science fantasy but not my favorite of her works–but then, that’s a pretty high bar to clear at this point, and not a choice anybody should be pushed into making.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a very Gothicy Gothic. There’s a creepy house, there are villagers who know secrets, there is tragic history of various shapes between various characters that is Tainting! Their! Present! Lives! And of course there is a horrible, horrible murder, with supernatural elements that may or may not have anything to do with it.

Ruby is a flapper trying to recover her spirits after the horrors she saw nursing the wounded in WWI. She assists a bookstore owner (there is remarkably little of this, please do not read the book for this) who sends her on an errand…right into the neighborhood of the last person she wants to see. Who is of course someone she does see. And with whose fate hers is inextricably intertwined.

INEXTRICABLY INTERTWINED. Because it is that kind of book. DOOM DOOM DOOM that kind of book. BALEFUL SERVANT that kind of book. Coincidental dream or is it that kind of book. There are a few consistent usage errors I really hope get picked up in the copy edit, since this is an eARC, but in general this was a pulpy fun read and I was glad to spend an evening with it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a retelling of the Chinese classic Water Margin, and if you think you know antiheroes, you don’t know antiheroes until you know classic Chinese lit antiheroes. These people do not let up on the antihero. The author’s note warns you in the front: “gloriously violent,” it says, and that is true. Torture, one attempted sexual assault, cannibalism: yep. It’s all here, and Huang does not look away. If that’s not something you’re up for, this is not the book for you. Take the content warnings seriously here, people.

It’s martial arts fantasy. It’s got a big cast of–not brothers, not quite that, this is sisters mostly, siblings but mostly sisters. It’s queer and female and full of people who aren’t fitting the mold, going off and becoming bandits and challenging the oppressive empire, and some of them would really like to tell themselves that they’re doing it in an honorable, upright way, but they’re not, they’re bandits, they do bandit things, they steal and they maim and they kill, they fight among themselves, they politic and they lie. They mess with alchemical forces beyond their ken, or at least that should have been beyond people’s ken. They mess up a lot, and sometimes they mess each other up. They mess up the work that their healer does, much to her annoyance.

They make themselves heroes. They make the wrong people gods. They make an immense amount of trouble, not least for each other. And there’s nothing quite like them, but you know, there probably should be.

Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky. This is a collection of stories that draw on Arimah’s two-cultures experiences. The prose is lovely, and there’s a forthrightness to the endings, a certain “I said what I said,” and if you missed it, go back a bit.

Michael Bazzett, trans., The Popol Vuh. I’m on an epics kick, and watching the paired heroes and the other cultural assumptions that were like some of the other American origin epics I’d read, and not like many of the European origin epics I’d read, was fun. And also seeing the original (…or at least its translated form) of some of the Land of the Dead things I’ve seen reflected elsewhere was good.

Samuel Delany, Babel-17. Reread. Nearly a hundred years ago people started thinking, “…wait…so…we tell a computer things and it changes the world…how much are our brains like that?” and writing stories around the pendulum swing between “quite a bit like that actually” and “no not like that at all.” This is part of that pendulum, and there’s a great deal in it that has not aged well but you can see the places it was revolutionary when it was swinging.

Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France. Lots of interesting stuff about religion and the average French peasant in the late 18th century. One of the things that I find fascinating is that the French Revolution changed a great deal about what the law said but changed very little about people’s sense that “the law” was whatever their moral sense aligned with; we have lots of examples of people before the Revolution firmly believing that of the King’s law, and just thereafter there are all sorts of examples of people believing it of the people’s law. On basically no evidence. It…tracks interestingly to some modern assertions, is what I’m saying.

Theresa Earenfight, The King’s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. This is another example of history being more dimensional than it gets credit for: there was more than a century in which Queen-Lieutenancy, in which a substantial fraction of the powers of kingship were explicitly delegated to the queen for specific geographic areas and in which her word was the king’s word and her body the king’s body while he was off doing something else, usually in Italy, sometimes elsewhere in Spain. Seven different Queens of Aragon served as Queen-Lieutenants. Once you start talking about all the exceptions to the flattened-out views of medieval womanhood you are left with nothing. Maria of Castile sat her brother, her brother-in-law, and her husband down and said, sort your shit, my dudes, because I’m not leaving this tent until you do. Maiden in a tower my entire ass. Please do write medieval European fantasy, people, because medieval Europe was varied and wild.

Winifred Holtby, Poor Caroline. Kindle. A novel from the early 1930s about a scam company to make Christian films for the British public and all the ways different people got caught up in it. Probably my least favorite Holtby so far, with some of the cast of characters not quite landing. I think they were supposed to be flawed and human and generally get our sympathy, but the degree to which that worked on me varied quite a great deal: the guy who wanted his kid to be able to have a good life without having to pretend not to be Jewish got way more of my sympathy than most of the others, for example. (Good job insisting that the shop clerks should have names, Jewish guy who loves his son. Come hang out with my friends, who like it when people get to have their own names and religions, it’s this weird thing we have.) She was aimed at “look how screwed up motives can still work out all right,” I think, and…okay? but also? eh? I don’t know, go read one of the others maybe instead.

Janet Kagan, Hellspark. Reread. For my translation panel, alongside several others on this list. Better with body language than really just about anything.

Mohja Kahf, E-mails from Scheherazad. Two-cultures poems, a series of evolving meditations on wearing hijab in the US included. One of the interesting things to me is how the connotative meaning of email evolved from when she published this volume twenty years ago (new! modern! high-tech!) to now (formal! established!).

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy (reread) and Translation State. The stunning conclusion of the Ancillary series was one I really liked for how it let people take the brunt of their own behavior on their own shoulders and also make something better from what they’d been given. I thought I wanted more Presger Translator, which Translation State gave me, but I feel like I’m in a strange intermediate state of having too much or not enough of how that’s working now. Maybe more coming? maybe? one can hope.

Arkady Martine, Rose/House. Robot house sentient murder Gothic contemporary architecture yay. No I am not more coherent about this novella than that.

Abbey Mei Otis, Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories. This is one of those collections of short stories that’s like realizing that the kid who’s been messing around in the trash has actually been building really stunning things out of the gum wrappers. Also they are still gum wrappers and still covered in really gross stuff. So yeah, this is not for the faint of heart, it is not a collection that wants you to feel nice.

Andrew Rabin, Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. Sorting out a lot of Norse and Roman and Celtic influences in the law code in this era, good stuff if you know pieces of that and are not clear on which of them are contributing to what.

Mark Russell and Mike Feehan, Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles. What a thing to do, oh my goodness what a thing to do. This is a comic that places a great many of the Hanna-Barbera characters from the mid-century at the heart of the HUAC investigations of theater and literary communities. What if Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, and Quickdraw McGraw were gay and tangled up in all of that. Squiddly Diddly, Augie Doggie, all of them. The art style is on that line between realism and cartoons, with their sad and tired faces, and they interact with humans (including the real artists involved), and it’s heartbreaking and weird and asks a lot of questions about what we’re doing with this stuff and why. It’s one of those things where, if the pitch appeals, the thing will probably appeal, it absolutely nails this strange and wonderful thing, but if the pitch does not appeal, keep going, it’s probably not for you.

Mark Santiago, A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799. This is a moderately interesting book if you like learning more about colonial periods. It’s quite good at distinguishing among the interests of different Apache and related groups and not treating them as a monolith.

Meg Shaffer, The Wishing Game. A mainstream adult novel that is a love letter to children’s fantasies. The strange thing about this book is that most of the choices have already been made before the main action of the book starts, but I still found it really pleasant to watch it unfold. It is a nice book in which nice things happen to nice people, and it is chock full of references to children’s books I like.

Noel Streatfeild, I Ordered a Table for Six. Kindle. This is a World War II novel published during the war, and the difference between it and the previous adult novel of hers I read is striking: she’s trying to make deaths in war meaningful by fiat here in a way that she did not feel she could or had to do in the interwar period. I find it less successful but still a reasonable read most of the way through.

Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe. This was extremely engaging and well-structured, and while I could indeed strategically put it down to do useful life tasks, I kept thinking about it throughout. The betrayals and double-crosses, the travel and books and weather and relationships…it all came through so vividly. I loved this.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This novella is a Sleeping Beauty retelling that asks: why would you imprison someone in a hedge of thorns? and comes up with the answer: because they were very dangerous indeed. Its villain is the beautiful princess, and she is an extremely nasty piece of work as only Ursula–oh, sorry, we’re pretending her name is “T.” today–can write a nasty piece of work villain, and this is only not one of her horror works because she spends most of the novella asleep.

Only most of it.

The protagonist is Toadling, the evil fairy who curses the beautiful princess. She is polite, and she tries hard, and she speaks some very wet languages. Toadling is not quite sure what to do, but she will try things until something works. I love her. I am in the curious position of loving this protag but not actually wanting more about her, because this story is very complete. Anything else would be tacked on. Her life is not complete, but her story arc is, there is a very satisfying beginning, middle, and end that are well balanced at novella length, which is hard to do.

Engin Akyurek, The Hippodrome of Constantinople. Kindle. It sure is about what it says on the tin. Do you want to know more about the Hippodrome? the one in Constantinople? This will tell you.

Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland. This is one of those cases where I learned at least as much about what other places did not have/do as what Finland did, here, by contrast. I kept saying aloud, “Oh gosh, I guess they didn’t do that other places!” Which is also useful to know, and depending on what you’ve spent your time on will probably not be your response, depending on what you know about 20th century nation formation. It’s clarifying either way.

Angeline Boulley, Warrior Girl Unearthed. This was a not-very-closely-related sequel to The Firekeeper’s Daughter, and the protag of that volume is the auntie of this one. Its protagonist, Perry, is fierce and prickly, and she’s having to deal with all kinds of problems, from getting access to a family vehicle back after a teeny tiny little incident to classmates and neighbors going missing. She’s also started to be interested in returning artefacts and bones from her tribe to their own land, bringing ancestors home, but it feels like each step toward that goal is thwarted, each adult throwing up obstacles–even in her own tribe, even in her own family. The tension within Perry’s own heart and in her relationships makes for a really good story–and one that builds on The Firekeeper’s Daughter without following its details too closely.

Giulia Calvi, The World in Dress: Costume Books Across Italy, Europe, and the East. Kindle. An examination of how 16th century people used expanded print capabilities to explore how other people looked and lived across the world. I did not expect this to start with the plates that introduced 16th century Italians to the concept of far-north Scandinavian and Sámi peoples, which was, frankly, amazing. Some of the places where people were attempting to illustrate things they had only heard described in prose were hilarious. There were also glorious and frankly political illustrations of dress in various Ottoman provinces of the time, and much more for such a short monograph.

Jinwoo Chong, Flux. A time loop novel that hits a lot of the same tropes that are very common in the genre but with a queer, biracial protagonist whose intersecting identities do matter to the plot. How much they matter vs. how much the extremely common tropes do will depend on the reader, I think.

Robertson Davies, The Manticore. I honestly don’t know why I enjoyed this book. Its protagonist was loathsome and hardly anything happened. I guarantee that if I’d read it twenty years ago it would have made me very angry. And yet I found it hard to put down, and I’m really interested in where Davies is going with this trilogy, as the relationships of these people will go. The protagonist is telling his life to a psychologist, which is not the format of the third book, as I understand it–so we’ll see what is.

William Elliot Griffis, Swiss Fairy Tales. Kindle. I downloaded this for free when I was noodling around on Gutenberg, and I can’t really recommend that you do the same. It’s one of those turn of the last century books for children where the author felt perfectly free to mingle his own fiction with Swiss tradition and label the whole thing Swiss tradition, so you can’t use it as a source about Swiss folk belief, but also it’s not particularly interesting fiction. I finished it basically as a “he said WHAT next” trainwreck. I’m still going to cherish it for its completely out-of-left-field assertion that the Swiss loved Queen Anne (of England) because she loved yodeling. I mean, sure, she might have, why not. Audience or performer? we will never know.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. Three Sikh sisters are sent on pilgrimage with their mother’s ashes as her final wish to bring them together and in accordance with her own religious beliefs. This works…about as well as you might expect, with fights and secrets revealed at every turn. It is not as unlikely as one might hope, but it’s generally pretty heart-warming–not to the outstanding level of Jaswal’s other books, but a reasonably fun read, albeit with a few genuinely difficult issues addressed.

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface. Late May was loathsome protagonist time around here, I guess, because this was a doozy. It was absolutely beautifully written, and the gap between Juniper’s self-concept and the rest of the world is jaw-dropping. Not a nice book but wow, what a good one.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword. Rereads. I wanted to be able to talk intelligently about the Presger Translator in my 4th Street panel on translators and POV, and so I just reread the whole series, not all of it before the month turned over. I really still do love the Presger Translator, particularly the line, “We are not cousins any more.” (If you know, you know.) Also I kept saying to T, “Well, I’ve gotten to the part where Seivarden is a mess.”

Caroline Stevermer, Magic Below Stairs. Reread. This is also 4th Street programming preparation, and I still am a little wobbly on the ending but really like the beginning and middle.

Noel Streatfeild, Parson’s Nine. Kindle. This is my first adult Streatfeild, and wow, wow, fascinating, wow. It’s in some ways extremely like her children’s books–there are entire sections that could be lifted whole and plunked down in one of her children’s books, probably Family Shoes as that’s the one about a clergy family–and you can see where she chooses where to stop telling the story to make it suitable for children. The story doesn’t last long enough that you’d expect the dog to die unless it was a Horrible Children’s Book Dog Death–the dog has a full long life here, and then it dies, and also WWI breaks out. Yeah. This is not a book that pulls any punches. I would say “this is not your great-grandmother’s Noel Streatfeild novel,” but it totally is, this is from 1932, this is a book that reminds you that expressions about previous generations that way are often wrong. It is very clear about how people coped with the Great War and its aftermath, and exactly how pure sexual purity of the time was not, and how a person of sincere religious faith can, without meaning to, drive children in the opposite direction. It was a bit messy in structure, and the very ending was a bit done, but I was really into it anyway, I’d much rather have her being honest about what happens to the suffragist governess in prison and what narsty things the twins really saw behind the woodpile and…still care about them in that all-right-then carrying-on Streatfeild way where multiple people get to have their own deal. I will definitely read more of her adult stuff.

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is another in the series of novellas about Cleric Chih, and this time they’ve returned home, home to the Singing Hills abbey. But home is not as they expected to find it, because there are two intimidating war mammoths with two cranky mammoth handlers at the gates of the abbey, and inside the abbey–well, inside, one of the clerics they most wanted to see has died, and one of their oldest friends has become mature and responsible in their absence.

And that’s just on the human side. Because at the Singing Hills abbey, the hoopoes must always be considered–sometimes considered first. And Myriad Virtues, beloved hoopoe of the deceased Cleric Chien, is grieving in the way that only a neixin hoopoe with perfect recall can–and none of the humans can anticipate quite what that means. Or quite what it will mean to the angry mammoth riders.

If your favorite part of this series is the hoopoes, as it is mine, this is an incredibly hoopoe-heavy novella. It is, as the saying does not go but ought to, hoopoes all the way down. With some mammoths thrown in. The cover copy indicates that the novellas may be read in any order, and I think that’s probably true? true-ish? I think I enjoyed coming into this knowing the characters (good news, this one comes out in September, so you have plenty of time to read three other novellas, or even just one if you like), but also I think it would have been fun and compelling if I’d picked it up cold. I am still happy to be along for Cleric Chih’s rambles, even–especially–when they ramble home for a minute.

Charlie Jane Anders, Promises Stronger Than Darkness. The conclusion of its trilogy, so please don’t start here, they’re all in print, there’s no reason to start here and every reason to have the full effect of the thing. I particularly like what happens with the universal translator, but there are lots of satisfying conclusion-y things going on, lots of people managing to pull up their socks despite quite a lot of trauma from earlier books and do the things that need doing, with glitter and panache and determination.

Erin Bow, Simon Sort of Says. This is a middle grade mainstream novel about a kid who’s come out the other side of the kind of traumatic event that is all too common right now in the US, and would like to be out the other side. He would like to not be that kid. He would like to just be normal. Do we ever get that? We do not. Sometimes what we get instead, with new friends and experiences and Lego and halo-halo is pretty great, though. As a side note, Bow gets the speech patterns of Nebraskans absolutely spot-on in this book. Chef’s kiss. It’s never the point, but it’s also never, ever not perfectly done. I ugly cried in a couple of places. It’s not an easy book just because it’s for younger readers. But it’s worth doing.

Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride. Lots of fairy tale tropes made to resonate here in what does not turn out to be a very fantastical novel but a very pressed-flower sad one, in two points of view.

Agatha Christie, 4:50 From Paddington, A Murder Is Announced, and The ABC Murders. I needed a break from the other things I read, and not reading will not do, so this is what happened. I was not outstandingly in love with any of these, but they’re reasonably charmingly well written, and while I’ve listed them alphabetically, they’re also probably in order of preference. If you want to read an Agatha Christie, gosh, these sure are some.

James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914. The social structures both of artisan groups internally and of artisans relating to their larger societies. Interesting, right up my alley. Journeymen relating to masters! Religious aspects of the question! Small artisanry and when and how there was a segue into factory work! Yes good.

Meg Howrey, They’re Going to Love You. I absolutely loved the sentences in this book, and I loved the protagonist’s relationship with her work as a choreographer, the place it occupies in her life. I wish there were better ways to signal what a book’s main cultural frame of reference is without sounding snooty, because if you’re not comfortable with using different composers for the piano as characterization, you’re probably not going to love this book as thoroughly as I did, and I don’t mean that as “you are not as smart and amazing as me, you peon,” but it’s hard to not make it sound like that given the hierarchies of art we live with. Sigh. Anyway, there is a substantial portion of misunderstanding plot, so if you have low tolerance for that, this is not your book, and there is also a substantial theme of a young girl growing up with her dad and his partner as gay men in the ’80s in New York, so if you’re going to struggle with a portrayal of grief and the AIDS crisis and how that affected people’s sense of the world and communication, this is not your book either. But I went and added the rest of her stuff to my reading list.

Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Personal/memoir essays centered around, as the subtitle tells you, sea creatures. I found this delightful, though it is not always, shall we say, perky. If you know someone who is interested in queer memoir, biracial memoir, nerd memoir, sea creatures, and/or the intersection of these things, and who does not insist on relentlessly inspirational reading material, this is really well done and not much like anything else. Or if it is please do tell me, I would absolutely not mind having two.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Now You See Us. Mostly a novel about the lives of Filipina maids working in Singapore, but the core plot hook is that one of their number is framed for murder of an employer, and the others have to use what resources they have in their current circumstances to free her. Jaswal, from the author’s note, did a lot of research from people in that situation and tried to make sure that her characters’ solution was one that the women who work those jobs could actually access, so this is not a fluffy girl power narrative, but in some ways is more optimistic and respectful of the strength of the people involved.

Katherine Larson, Radial Symmetry. Poetry with a strong sense of nature and grounding in self, very much enjoyed.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires. Who exactly is this book talking about: that’s inherently going to be a complicated question, but I felt like Mackintosh-Smith used the complication to never really settle, not to the strength of the actual book he was writing. It was not a history of Islam, fine, good, Arabic peoples started before Islam…but that made it a less ideal book for people who did not know, for example, the rise of Sufism in detail. Is Yemen included in this history? Definitely yes. Also definitely no. How about Iraq? Obviously. Also, obviously not. What about the people who lived very much in the middle of the Arabian peninsula and briefly converted to Judaism just before they converted to Islam? Let us mention their existence and never discuss why or how any of that happened. In short this book served mostly to make me want other books that did a much better job of a million things that it waved at with vague impatience.

Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, eds., The Other Side of Never. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library: A Fragile History. This is one of the kind of books that is attempting to be global but doesn’t quite get there: specifically I was really looking forward to more about the libraries of the Himalayan peoples, which these authors do not seem to know existed. Ope. But as far as the western world they are really detailed and go quite far back and it’s very satisfying, basically as relaxing as an Agatha Christie novel in terms of taking a break from a lot of other things in life.

Seirian Sumner, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps. There are some really interesting things about wasps in here, which is good, that’s what you show up for if you get a book with this title. Sumner is also very defensive about how wasps are just as cool as bees, at least as cool, probably cooler, clinging to a description of bees as “only vegetarian wasps” to the point that it comes up at least six times. Probably more. There is also an extended scene where Sumner wants to serve supper to Aristotle so they can talk about bees and wasps and how Aristotle should have appreciated wasps more (and bees less, presumably). This features Sumner showing off research about what food Aristotle would already have eaten rather than just serving him pho and chocolate like a good host. Sigh. Whatever.

Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. A short prison memoir from an Argentinian Jewish journalist who was tortured during the Dirty War. Really detailed and very much a personal perspective, and also very clear on some of the endlessly stupid places Antisemitism can take people.

Marissa van Uden, ed., Strange Libations. Kindle. These flash pieces take the form of recipes. They’re as likely to call for gin as despair, as likely to mix a draught as a spell. Easy to page through, likely to be over before they grow tedious.

Lise Waldek, Julian Droogan, and Catharine Lumby, Feeling Terrified? The Emotions of Online Violent Extremism. Kindle. This is a short monograph about a study of young Australian adults and their attitudes toward online violent extremism they’d personally encountered. It went into the methodology of the study and how they’d attempted to keep it open-ended rather than giving examples that would shape the respondents’ ideas of what things constituted violent extremism and how they ought to respond to it. Some interesting stuff here, went into things like uses for humor and bravado–and also how people who thought they would be preparing themselves to face violence in their real lives volunteered the information that found that they had not actually prepared themselves. The fact that they were Australian was really relevant because they could feel that they were very much at a remove from things like school shootings–this kind of violence could feel impersonal to the people being surveyed in ways that it would not to an American population.

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order–and What We Can Do About It. Interesting, well-written social analysis about how and when people feel that they have gotten bad deals that they “should have known better” about and what they do about those feelings, especially the bad decisions they make about those feelings. Brief, breezy, worth the time.

Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Do you like feeling like screaming and throwing things? Is your blood pressure chronically low? This is a lovely book for you! Especially if you were a young woman studying science in the 1990s and want to see how little things changed from the 1960s, when this book begins, to the 1990s, when it ends, and worry about whether things have changed much to now! Hooray! Seriously, this is interesting and well-researched, but it also covers a lot of the “surely we’ve fixed that already and it’s all a coincidence” nonsense and how incredibly hard it is to dislodge.