Novel Gazing Redux

Nadine Akkerman, Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts. Akkerman is very, very opposed to calling her The Winter Queen, which is a shame because it’s one of the most awesome regnal nicknames a person has ever had. Other than that I really liked this, it was very thorough and also told you important contextual things like what Christian IV and Axel Oxenstierna were doing at the time, which a great many histories of British and German people forget to do.

Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome. This is not a chronological study of individual emperors, it’s a conceptual study about the experience and trappings of emperorship in Imperial Rome, which is far more interesting than who poisoned whom which day. There’s a reason she’s one of the big popular historians of antiquity at the moment.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 17-22. Kindle. We’ve entered the school dramatics phase of the school story trope!

Tim Clarkson, The Makers of Scotland: Picts, Romans, Gaels, and Vikings. A short and straightforward history of first-millennium Scotland and how it coalesced into an actual country, with attention to several major influential groups as listed in the subtitle. Not flashy but fine.

Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. Kindle. Helpful point of view on history that I lived through on the other side of the planet but was substantially unaware of, really glad to have more context as this seems unlikely to get less important over time.

Joshua S. Levy, Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. Full disclosure: I wanted this to be a Jewish Sal and Gabi, and that is an unreasonable expectation. Instead it is a very nice middle grade science fiction novel about two boys from very different strands of Judaism sorting out their very important weekend in Groundhog’s Day fashion, a good time.

Robin McKinley, Beauty, Rose Daughter, Spindle’s End, and Sunshine. Rereads. It was interesting to watch her develop her fairy tale novel approach, because Beauty was written when novels based on fairy tales were very rare, and it is a very straight-up retelling. And Rose Daughter is a bit later and has a bit more personality, and Spindle’s End is after that and has a lot more personality. Spindle’s End is more of a fantasy novel with a fairy tale structure, rather than just a fairy tale expanded into a (short) novel form. Sunshine…well, I was glad that I intended to do some baking that day anyway. And it’s still got such a weird ending. But worth it.

Naomi Novik, Buried Deep and Other Stories. I found this to be a very mixed bag, which might mean that there’s something for everybody or might just mean that it’s a very mixed bag. I was surprised by how much I liked the crossover between her dragon universe and Pride and Prejudice, because that is usually the opposite of my sort of thing, and while I can’t say it’s in the running for my favorite story of the year, it was a good time.

Morgan Parker, Magical Negro: Poems. Trenchant cultural commentary in very biting poem form, glad to have read this.

Hache Pueyo, But Not Too Bold. Discussed elsewhere.

Arthur Ransome, Winter Holiday. Reread. The most comfort of comfort rereads. The thing about it is that I haven’t reread this since I learned that winter in England–even in northern England–doesn’t mean what it means here, and it’s all there on the page once you know–the idea that the lake freezing is rare, that they’re incredibly lucky to have this grand adventure. The other thing about this book is that it is so entirely pro-quarantine about infectious disease that the rambunctious children do not try to break quarantine. None of the adults seriously considers sending kids who might have been exposed to mumps (but do not in fact end up having mumps) to school to give it to the other children. This is a plot device, but it’s also a deeply held belief that I think will be something of a relief to some of my friends in the current era.

May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1973. I know there was some May Sarton in an anthology I read and reread as a child, but for the life of me I can’t find it here, it just…didn’t stick. And that’s sort of how the rest of this collection went: I could read it, I wasn’t annoyed reading it, there was a stanza here or there that hit what it was aiming at, but I don’t think Sarton is ever going to be one of the poets I really love. Well. They can’t all be.

Jo Walton, Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown. Rereads. This…is maybe not the most cheerful time to read an alternate history trilogy about the rise of fascism in midcentury Britain, but also cheerful is not the only thing we need, and the voice in these is so solid. Also though I spent an entire afternoon upset that [redacted] still dies in the last book on this reread.

Alison Weir, Queens of the Conquest: England’s Medieval Queens. Parts of this book drove me absolutely up a tree, parts were fine, and then we got to the last section, about the Empress Maud, and I was absolutely done with Weir, just plain done. Instead of taking into account the absolute hostility many chroniclers had to a woman exercising solo power ever, Weir speculates that maybe the Empress Maud sucked because of menopause. What. What. Stop that.

John Wiswell, Wearing the Lion. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend.

John Wiswell has a lot of thoughts about monsters, and a lot of thoughts about family. We’ve been treated to musings and permutations in various short stories and in his first book. Now with his sophomore effort, these themes come into play in a new playground: Greek myth.

Specifically, the Labors of Hercules.

Why does the most famous product of Zeus’s philandering bear a name that gives glory to his wife? What did Hera think of the whole situation–and what did Heracles? Is there anything to the labors other than roaring, stomping, and carnage? If you’ve ever read anything by John before, you’ll be unsurprised that finding a way forward through vengeance involves a lot more gentleness and humor than in the original. When the Lion of Nemea gets a name and personality, you know you’re in for some very different labors than ever before, and the sly commentary on both Greek myth and our current mores had me startling the people around me with my giggles. Wiswell’s Heracles is one of the most earnest heroes you’ll ever find–and his deeply felt sincerity has a piquant contrast in Hera’s vengeful rage. Highly recommended, John does not disappoint.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

First: arachnophobes should not read this novella. No, seriously. Do not. The cover is not an overdramatization of how arachnid-laden the book is, if anything the cover is an understatement. It is constant spiders up in here. Flee while you still can.

Okay, for those of you who did not run screaming from that: I am not the target audience for this book, I think. I’m not actually opposed to wall-to-wall spiders (seriously, literally), but this is the kind of sapphic monsterfucker book that I think would be intolerable if it was about straight people, and I don’t actually find it less intolerable this way. “Sure she literally eats people on a whim, but she has never felt truly seen and I truly see her” uh cool story pal but not actually a cooler story with “she” than it would be with “he.”

I know that there is a target audience for this book! That “she is a horrible giant spider lady who does horrible things in a vividly described setting, and then the sex” is something some people really, truly want. If that’s you, here it is, no shaming here, just: wow is that not for me, I will be somewhere else.

Mario Alejandro Ariza, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. Ariza has some weird ideas about what personal resilience might mean, but other than that this is a passionate and thoughtful book that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Clara Benson, The Body on Archangel Beach, A Case of Perplexity in Piccadilly, The Scandal at 23 Mount Street, and The Shadow at Greystone Chase. Kindle. Look, here’s how the last three weeks have gone: I show up at the hospital or the hospice, I read a mystery novel more or less straight through while waiting for Grandma or a member of the medical staff to need something, which they mostly did not. Some days I read two. These sure are mystery novels in the series they’re in, and I sure did read them. I hate the love interest in the Angela Marchmont series. HATE. So that made the back half of the series less fun for me. But basically? they still functioned as historical mysteries when I needed them to. Would I have read them eventually? Certainly. Would I have read all of them in a fortnight in other circumstances? I sure would not, and that will apply to some of the rest of this post as well.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 14-16. Kindle. The middle of a serial that is doing some fun school tropes on Mars. I’m not caught up yet, but I’m closer.

P.F. Chisholm, A Famine of Horses. Thank heavens this is the first one in its series and I like it, because the strategic mystery novel supplies have been pretty endangered here. This is an historical with Sir Robert Carey on the Scottish border during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. If that sounds like fun to you, it probably will be.

Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery, Elephants Can Remember, Murder in Mesopotamia, Ordeal By Innocence, Sleeping Murder, and The Hunter’s Lodge Case (Kindle last one only). These are as varied as hers generally are, from a nice enough puzzle story to a really loathsome book I recommend that you not read. (That one would be Ordeal By Innocence, which manages to be toxic about suicidality, adoption, incest, and probably a few more things I’ve forgotten in recoiling from its horrors.)

Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Kindle. The emphasis on the necessity of respect for solving social problems is an interesting thread through this book. As her selection of Ferguson as the titular example indicates, this book predates a lot of recent developments, and it’d be interesting to see what, if anything, she would say or analyze differently now.

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Three interesting women of different religions and nationalities, and an analysis of what their gender did to shape their lives in the same era but very different contexts. Interesting stuff.

Giorgio De Maria, Twenty Days of Turin. Dark Italian surrealism, I didn’t really resonate with it but am always glad stuff gets translated.

Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All There Is. This is kind of a weird book, because it’s very much a memoir of Gretel Ehrlich–not an autobiography, it doesn’t have the comprehensive structure of an autobiography–but there isn’t really a clear memoir throughline either. Home, maybe? I don’t know, if you’ve liked Ehrlich’s work before (I have), this is more of it, just don’t expect a cohesive work.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Heresy, A Play of Piety, A Play of Treachery, The Sempster’s Tale, The Simple Logic of It. Kindle. I feel like I could see the shapes of two different things she was setting up for herself and then didn’t have the chance to do, which is a shame. I also feel like she got to see how she really really liked doing political mysteries late in her career, which, more power to her.

Yoel Hoffman, ed., Japanese Death Poems: Written By Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. This had very strong “edited by a white guy when I was in grade school” vibes to its surrounding materials, which were copious, but the poems themselves were interesting.

Togzhan Kassenova, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. I particularly liked how this went into the nuts and bolts of activism and both national and international politics that went into this decision. Fascinating stuff. This is the book I bought myself for my grandpa’s birthday this year, and it was a great choice, he would have called me at least four times to read passages out.

Rose Macaulay, I Would Be Private. This is one of Macaulay’s lesser novels, a satire on shallow publicity. It’s about a family that unexpectedly has quintuplets and their attempts to flee the press. Some of it is very very funny. Some of it is attempting to be non-racist and not hitting the mark. Some of it is not attempting. I would not recommend this to anyone but completists and people studying media saturation/personal publicity, but I am one of the former, and I’m glad I’ve read it.

Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season. Discussed elsewhere.

Noel Streatfeild, Dancing Shoes. Reread. This is one of the lesser ones, I think–weirdly I also think it’s the first one I ever read. The thing that’s interesting about it to me now that I’ve read Streatfeild’s adult novels is that I think this is the children’s book where she attempts to acknowledge the kind of low-brow characters who show up fairly often in her adult work–Hilary is a good dancer but has no ambition in that direction, would much rather have fun in the chorus, will grow up to be a chorus girl and ideally find a nice man and raise babies. She does not gain depth over the course of the book because the plot is not about that, it’s about sisters accepting themselves and each other for who they are. Which I like a lot actually. “Everyone has to do the thing you value” is not okay. What I don’t really like is the ending–I feel like Rachel would be happier if she had some other talent and interest, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t except that this is what a happy ending looks like for a lot of Streatfeild’s children’s books.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of my complaints about noir written in this century is that some of the people who try it are trying for an aesthetic rather than depth. Onyebuchi has both here. There is the form of noir, which is easy enough, but also its deeply disaffected substance. The reality of French colonialism in West Africa has seriously informed this short fantastical novel–there is a richness to the details, even the ones that are not within our physical realm. It feels simultaneously extremely fresh and specifically creative–post-colonialist genre noir West African fantasy, not very common in publishing to date–and so well combined that it feels natural, almost inevitable. It’s a hard balance to pull off, and Onyebuchi does it beautifully here.

Boubacar has had a run of catastrophically bad luck, and his work as a private eye is not going well. Disappearing women (cut to bloody ribbons!) on his doorstep do not make him feel like his luck has turned. And his city–which is his all the way through, French occupiers’ and indigenous dugulen’s quarters both fitting and neither fitting him–is getting more full of gory mysteries by the day. It’s hard for Bouba to stay true to his inmost self when he’s not sure what that is–and maybe getting justice is more important anyway? but if he could see his way clear to both….

Clara Benson, The Trouble at Wakeley Court. Kindle. She really does better with straight-up mysteries, so the part of this that is spy story is…kind of purple, not better than it had to be. But the part that’s mystery is fine, and the story moves along and arc plots arc.

Sophie Burnham, Sargassa. Even saying what specific subgenre this Roman speculative fiction is would be a spoiler, but you can gradually learn where this new part of the Roman Empire is and why, and it acknowledges that not everybody loves an empire, go figure. I will probably read the next one, though I was hoping for a different subgenre.

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter. This was not even a very functional short story. It was an absolutely beautifully illustrated vignette with no momentum. I hate to be a crank here, but if this had not been written by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell who has not given the publishing industry loads of other things to sell, I’m not sure it would have sold at all, much less in an edition dedicated to itself.

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Spanish and Italian attitudes toward animal breeding and how they affected (and were affected by) attitudes about differences in humans, including both of what we would now call race and disability. Some of the worst applications of Plato’s Republic ever, with some terrible applications of Aristotle for a little treat. Gosh these people were confused by New World camelids.

Rosaleen Duffy, Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Securitization and militarization of conservation are unfortunately somewhat taken for granted in a lot of writing–of course if there’s bad outcome A, we must respond with militarization B, and so on. Duffy takes a moment to look at that and its drawbacks and alternatives.

Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. I like Eco, I like books on translation, this one is not long, there you are.

Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told: Poems. This is a great example of how poetry from a very different point of view than mine can still have spots of absolute resonance for me.

Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier. Gosh I liked this, what a nice book. It’s a gay Sleeping Beauty story about a Union soldier from the American Civil War waking to figure out his life with an earnest, sweet 1960s college student. Gray choosing to make this historical in both streams rather than waking into the present was a stroke of genius. I was a bit worried that some deeply unpleasant things would happen, so I will tell you: don’t worry, it is not that kind of book, it has people figuring out friendship and love, not people going to the hospital or jail because of the horrors of the time they’re living in. There is still plenty of tension about how they’ll do that.

Kerstin Hall, Asunder. An entirely cromulent fantasy novel in which the protagonists keep doing their best in hard (unplanned body-sharing!!!) circumstances and sometimes people are mad at each other for understandable reasons that still make their lives harder and do not make one of them the villain. How I feel about this will depend partly on whether she comes out with a sequel; any sequel at all would make the ending feel lesser to me. But we’ll see. People do like sequels (not even necessarily author people).

Ilkka Hanski, Messages from Islands: A Global Biodiversity Tour. Do you want to learn a lot about dung beetles? because this has a lot about dung beetles. Also several other island creatures, but: dung beetles, get your fresh hot dung beetles here.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Inheritance. This is my last favorite of Jaswal’s books. You can see that she’s not quite hit her stride yet, and there are lots of Issues she tries to handle in fairly small word count, with mixed success. I recommend everything else of hers I’ve read first, and only this if you’re a completist (as it turns out I am).

Rich Larson, Tomorrow Factory. Something for everyone in this collection, quite varied science fiction, all of it well done, probably not all of it to any one person’s tastes, but that’s the nature of variety of this type. One of the best collections of the last decade I think, in terms of sheer scope of science fiction from one person.

Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers. What it says on the tin. This is a book from 1892, a British woman going to Siberia to nurse lepers and talking about the voyage the whole time. This edition has not been edited and doesn’t really have commentary on it, so if you don’t want unfiltered late 19th century, this is not for you. If you want pre-contemporary travel in the north in several seasons, well, here we are.

Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter. How much can I be pushed to horror because of plants and fungus? The answer is that I read this straight through but could not be induced to love it, it’s definitely on the horror end of things in ways that don’t resonate with me, but it’s quite well done and very full of the non-animalia kingdoms.

Premee Mohamed, And What Can We Offer You Tonight. Dark and deathy and atmospheric and revolutionary and brief.

Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?. I think this is the most offensive book I’ve read in ages. It’s supposedly about a woman, a therapist, mourning the death of a friend she’s had for decades. Instead it’s about being secretly in love, and the resolution to losing someone you’ve been in love with for decades is oh yay falling in love again. And her colleagues, also therapists, are like, seeee, we THOUGHT you wouldn’t be so upset if you just lost a FRIEND. Friends are crucial, friends lift us up for our entire lives, friends are how we connect to the vast tapestry that is most of the human experience, what the actual hell, Anna Montague.

Roy Morris, Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. This was published shortly after the 2000 election, so there are bits of it that feel very certain about what parts of the present (recent past) are going to resonate with election fraud, and…welp. Huh. But anyway it’s an interesting book in which Morris is very clear that trying to identify with one side as heroic is…probably a really bad idea.

Jake M. Robinson, Treewilding: Our Past, Present, and Future Relationship With Forests. A Nice Book About Trees. Do you need one of those now? You might. I did.

Alanna Schubach, The Nobodies. This is a body swap story in which the people swapping bodies do not seem to gain much insight into each other’s (extremely ordinary) lives. Not so much Freaky Friday as Aggressively Mundane Friday Actually.

Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. My book club’s latest read, some really lovely pieces but mostly from the expected people. Makes for interesting discussion.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories. What a difference Lucifer makes. Stories of people who dislike each other making each other unhappy just aren’t the same without him.

Amy Wilson, A Girl Called Owl. This title is less spoilery than the UK one, although I really prefer unified titles. Owl finds out about her father and her own powers and deals very realistically with friend issues in this fantastical book.

P. G. Wodehouse, Mike. Kindle. I have said before that I hate when one book has two titles depending on what country you’re in, and I ran into one of those this fortnight with a Wodehouse novel I liked but did not want to reread just now (Jill the Reckless/The Little Warrior). Undeterred, I plunged into Mike, and felt utterly confident that it was not one I’d read before, because it was the cricketiest cricket school story you ever did see, in ways that were utterly unfamiliar. However, the second half of this book bears almost no relation to the first except that it’s (hypothetically) the same person in it, and the second half was published separately as Mike and Psmith. Ah well. The lot of a commercial author etc. I don’t know a darn thing about cricket and was still amused, that’s what.