Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Last week:

*Cattitude read Blue Moose, by Daniel Pinkwater, aloud to us, because it's one of his favorites and Adrian had never read it. I've reread the book several times, and was happy to hear it out loud.

*I read Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, by Oliver Darkshire. Decidedly weird, funny fantasy. A lot of the humor is in the footnotes, which seem to be at least a quarter of the text. Also, the title does in fact describe the book. Isabella lives in a poor, out-of-the-way village, whose wizard keeps the local goblin market in check, until one day he doesn't. The goblins sell one thing, unnaturally tempting and dangerous fruit.

*Did not finish: Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval. I don't remember where I saw this recommended, and just couldn't get into it.

Currently reading:

*Installment Immortality, by Seanan McGuire, the latest book in her InCryptid series. I started it late last night, and only read a few pages before turning the light out.

*Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis, nonfiction about trees and climate change. I picked this up at the libraru, as a "book with a green caover" for the summer reading challenge.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, by Richard Fortey. This is a book about “living fossils”—and the author critiques that framing in a couple of directions. What he wrote about here are some species that look very much like Paleozoic or earlier ancestors, or that seem to be more like early members of their clades than are other extant species, so the tinamou for birds. He offers coelacanths and wollemi pines as “living fossils” in the sense that the fossils of distant ancestors were described before the extant species.

Nation, by Terry Pratchett (reread, because I remembered a particular bit and that made me want to get the book out)

Tsalmoth, by Steven Brust. The most recent of the Jhereg books. I was less sympathetic with the jerk narrator/protagonist than in previous books. I also didn't find the bits where the narration skips things because either Sethra Lavode, being addressed, knows them, or because Vlad has had part of his memory of the events removed, to work well. Probably worth reading if you've been following the series, and a bad place to start.

The Duke Who Didn't, by Courtney Milan. Romance between two Britons of Chinese ancestry, set in a small town in 19th-century England. A little odd, and I had trouble getting into it, but I liked it.

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (finished rereading this, after (re)reading the first two-thirds on a previous visit to Montreal)

Trouble in Triplicate, by Nero Wolfe (reread, three novellas, I had a vague recollection of one and no memory of reading the other two)

Books finished relatively recently:

Tove Jansson: Fair Play and Finn Family Moomintroll. These two have little in common except that in each book, each chapter is a different episode, and that they're both about people who like each other. Jansson is best-known, at least outside Finland, for the Moomin series of children's books. I thought I'd read all of them when I asked the library for Finn Family Moomintroll, but there are things in there I think I'd remember if I'd read it before, including the Hobgoblin's Hat, and Too and Ticky showing up and becoming part of the household. Fair Play is an adult novel, or series of stories, about two women, an artist and a writer, who live separately but in the same building, and ongoing events in their relationship. (It's at least somewhat autobiographical, and was written long enough ago that it could be read as a platonic friendship, absent the known context, which includes that the "about the author" on all her books falselu said she lived alone, rather than mentioning her long-term partner.) I'd recommend both of these, if you're at all open to both mimetic fiction and playful fantasy about non-human characters.

Marjorie Allingham: Look to the Lady and Policemen at the Funeral. This is two-thirds of a kindle "box set" of Allingham's Albert Campion stories. Look to the Lady is plot-driven rather than character-driven; not so much that it feels as though the characters are moving around to fit the needs of the plot, as that they're somewhat flat. Policemen at the Funeral is weird, in ways that I think would be spoilers even to hint at, so have a cut: ( Read more... )

Alma Fritchley: Chicken Run. This was recommended by rachelmanija and is, as she said, a cozy lesbian mystery about a chicken farmer, set in England a couple of decades ago. It's at least as much about shifting relationships as about the mystery, and the pacing of the plot is weird in terms of that genre. I enjoyed this enough that I have a sequel waiting for me at the Somerville Library.

Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky. This one is weird, and I'm not sure I'd say I liked it. The first part of the book is emotionally difficult, parallel/intertwined stories of two children/teens who are being abused by their parents and school systems. There's witchcraft and science/technology, the latter with a sort of hacker ethos, and a character who I'm fairly sure is based on Elon Musk, with the riches and intelligence and egocentricity. It's hard to really like either group or their cavalier way with everyone else's future, even realizing that they're dealing with a series of escalating natural disasters.

Currently reading:

Nick Lane: Life Ascending: the ten great inventions of evolution. Bits I've enjoyed so far include the discussion of how the DNA-->amino acid coding isn't random, and the explanation of how the two photosystems that make up oxygenic photosynthesis work, and how such an odd-seeming thing could have evolved.

This time the delay is because I spent most of Wednesday traveling.

Another brief post, because I read a lot while visiting adrian_turtle, and they were mostly her books so I can't check things.

Recently read:

At the Relton Arms, by Evelyn Sharp. Finished this on the flight to Boston. Despite some undercutting of romance cliches, overall was not impressed. For some reason I want to quote Lady Bracknell, though in this case the good do not all end happily, nor do the bad end unhappily.

Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2014 edition. What it says on the tin, a collection of short stories. Free download from the publisher's website, convenient as a kindle book for travel. I enjoyed most of these, and skipped a couple that didn't grab me quickly; one oddity is that the stories are arranged alphabetically by author name.

The sweetness at the bottom of the pie, by Alan Bradley. Adrian lent me this, after Mrissa recommended it somewhere. A murder mystery from the viewpoint of a ridiculously precocious 11-year-old girl, who is in love with chemistry and has no idea of why it might be a good idea to give information to the police rather than try to find the answers before them. I enjoyed it, but a person could easily find the narrator irritating and not amusing.


I am half-sick of shadows, by Alan Bradley. If you liked the first you will probably like this one. The title is from Tennyson, who I don't care for, but all the quotes after the epigraph are from Shakespeare, who I do. I wouldn't have read these two books so close together except that my shoulder was doing an odd thing that had me selecting books partly by size and shape, which reduced the number of choices.

At the Bertram Hotel, by Agatha Christie; another Miss Marple book, different enough from the two I read recently that I enjoyed the similar style and time spent with Jane Marple rather than finding the stories too much alike. (This one courtesy of the Arlington library.)

Nurk, by Ursula Vernon (ursulav), a short illustrated adventure book about a vole ("Nurk" is his nickname) who stumbles into an adventure after getting a letter intended for his famous grandmother. I kept reading funny bits aloud to Adrian (because I was laughing as I read, and she asked for the funny bits), leading her to say that she would probably reread it. This has a somewhat different tone than Digger, but I suspect will appeal to many of the same readers, though this is a book with illustrations and Digger is a graphic novel.

Perfect Gallows, by Peter Dickinson. I picked this up thinking it was a detective story; it's much more a character study than a mystery, though it starts with the discovery of a corpse and ends with an explanation of what happened. The viewpoint character is at least close to being a sociopath, whose self-justification is that his art as an actor is more important than human connections or feelings. There's also a fair amount about 1944 Britain and the effects of the war on the civilian population. There might be an interesting comparison with Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, but it would take someone with more/different critical skills than I have to do more than say "these have some things in common, and might be overlooked by people who don't usually read detective fiction."

I also read and enjoyed an unpublished novel that turned out to be the right length for a Boston-Seattle flight.

Currently reading:

The Just City, by Jo Walton

I'm going to try doing "reading Wednesday" posts again, without the "what I plan to read next" section, because I'm bad at predicting that.

Recent reading:

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecilia and The Mislaid Magician. These were rereads, mostly during nights when I was having trouble sleeping and wanted something light. Still fun. This is volumes 1 and 3 of a trilogy, because for some reason I don't own volume 2.

Merle A. Reinikka, A History of the Orchid. This is more a history of orchid collecting; I asked the library for it after seeing a mention somewhere, and don't remember the context. I stopped reading partway through, for several reasons, including that there isn't the right kind or level of detail for me; irritation at old-fashioned and even racist language; and the topic not being at the center of my interests. References to "Oriental" plants and using "Western Hemisphere" instead of "Americas" were distracting, but I could accept them in a book from 1970; the phrase that stopped me cold was a reference to European orchid-hunters running into "hostile savages." This on a page where the author also tells the reader how those hunters had destroyed areas of forest and completely eliminated the local populations of orchids; "savage" seems in this context to mean the locals, who weren't European or urbanized. I can't recommend this one even if you're looking for something on this subject.

James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside. This is a first-person memoir by a neurologist/researcher who discovered that his brain scan matched the patterns seen in criminal psychopaths, and started wondering what that meant and why he hadn't done such horrible things. I'd read a magazine-article version of this a couple of years ago. He talks some about gradually realizing/listening to friends and family who told him that no, he really wasn't "normal" in things like his risk tolerance and willingness to ignore possible harm to others.

The author hasn't (from what he writes here, at least) tried to kill or sabotage anyone. But he has left colleagues holding the bag at what were supposed to be joint conference presentations, because he was having fun hanging out at a bar. And he invited his brother to explore a cave with him, concealing the fact that it contained bats that carried a potentially lethal infection. (His brother was not pleased when he stumbled on that fact months later, needless to say.) One bit that fell under "what kind of person says that?" crossed with "ugh, Libertarians" [he identifies as one, and says it's one of the important things he and his wife have in common] was the author's assertion that he's not a monster, so he wouldn't watch a child starve to death in front of him—followed immediately by saying that he would happily eliminate all welfare payments even though he knows it means people would die, because that would be good for the species. So, not ethics but an odd combination of squeamishness with a surprising willingness to admit that he is in favor of people children starving to death.

Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library. I am working my way through the Miss Marple books (I think I read these in my teens, but that's long enough ago that I remember nothing at all about them). This novel is "what it says on the tin" in the sense that Christie says in the introduction that she wanted to write that already-cliched shape of story but only if she could break already-existing expectations for that shape of story. A dead body is found in the library of one of Miss Marple's acquaintances, and the book is about the police, with her assistance, figuring out who the dead woman was, why she was left there, and by whom. As seems to be the pattern here, people who hadn't already known Miss Marple assume she is a stereotypical harmless old lady; her crime-solving "secret," such as it is, is to listen for gossip and assume the worst of everybody.

Jim C. Hines, Codex Born. The continuing adventures of a young "libriomancer," someone whose magic consists of being able to pull things out of books and use them. "Things" can be weapons, healing spells, or almost anything small enough: one of the main characters is a dryad, born from an acorn someone pulled out of a bad fantasy novel. The main constraint is that the same book has to have been read by a lot of people; a magician can't materialize something just by describing it om paper. This is fast-paced and good, but it's definitely the middle book of a trilogy; start with Libriomancer.

Catherynne Valente, Smoky and the feast of Mabon. A sweet but rather earnest picture book about a girl getting lost in the woods and celebrating a pagan holiday; there's a smaller-print introduction that tells the adult reader more about Mabon. This is another book that I grabbed off our shelves because I wanted light reading; cattitude is a serious Valente fan, which I assume is why we have this, since neither of us is pagan nor do we have children of the age this is aimed at. conuly, you can add this to your list of picture books with protagonists of color, but note the explicit religious content.

Currently reading:

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. I'm about a third of the way through this one, and so far it's very good. More later, or go find any of the write-ups by people who have already finished it. (This won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel for 2014.)

Julie Smith, Death before Facebook. A mystery novel that I downloaded a while ago; my current kindle book. I'm not using the kindle much, for some reason; I wouldn't be surprised if I don't finish this until partway through my next flight to Boston.

Books read, April and May, with varying amounts of comment:

April 2012 books:

The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, reread, still a lot of fun.

Birdie and the Ghosties by Jill Paton Walsh, a picture book someone recommended ages ago that the library finally sent me, a sweet riff on the idea of "second sight." (If you're the recommender, thank you.)

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip, reread. After finishing this, I decided to reread the other 2/3 of the trilogy, despite being more bothered than I remember by Raederle's father having made an arbitrary condition for her marriage when she was born (yes, the condition is a quest in the best fairy tale tradition, but I'm not sure that helps).

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod, reread, sort of an alternate history to The Cassini Division (or vice versa, since there is no privileged "real history" between them).

Alphabet of Thorns by Patricia McKillip. This is mostly the story of Nepenthe, an orphan raised in the royal library, which has a tradition of taking in and training foundlings. She is trying to decipher a mysterious manuscript, in an unknown alphabet, that may be connected to the school of magic down the road. Nepenthe has an odd disinclination to talk about the manuscript (and realizes it's odd), and is squeezing in the work around her assigned tasks. McKillip plays with alternating narratives, one set much earlier than the other, and gradually brings them together. The impressive battles and heroic deeds are all far enough in the past that nobody in the librarian's time is sure of what happened, or when, and most don't think it matters much. The ease with which the librarians decipher unknown scripts is completely implausible, of course (Linear A, anyone?), but there's enough other magic driving the plot that it seems silly to draw the line here. Recommended if you like non-quest fantasy.

The Questing Road by Lyn McConchie. I picked this one up at Chapters on the strength of remembering the author's name from long-ago fannish correspondence and looking at a random page. It's a fun, fairly lightweight quest fantasy, complete with unpredictable travel among parallel worlds, sapient nonhumans, someone seeking revenge by summoning demons, and some of the political/historical background on the events he wants revenge for.

Something the Cat Dragged In by Charlotte MacLeod, reread; deliberately light mystery fiction, part of MacLeod's series in which the detective is a professor of agriculture known for having bred a better rutabaga; the attempts at political dirty tricks that are part of the plot here manage to seem quaint and remarkably harmless, from the viewpoint of 2012, and not just because the tech is significantly different.

V is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton. This gets off to a slow start, and I spent a while being irritated at some of the characters' really cliched "I am jealous even though I don't actually care about my husband" drama, but eventually the threads came together. Grafton is dealing with the problems of making mystery novel plots work in the present by evading it: the continuity in these is moving slowly enough that this book is explicitly set in 1988, which means cell phones aren't an issue, record-keeping systems are somewhat different, and various people are casually getting away with impersonations that would be difficult if not impossible with contemporary security systems. I'd say this is probably worth reading if you've been following the continuity, but not otherwise, and there are no major changes in Kinsey's circumstances, so you could just skip from _U is for Undertow_ to the not-yet-published W book.

Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia McKillip, reread of the second volume of the Riddle Master trilogy; there are still people doing things that don't make a lot of sense, but it's more "these characters are very confused and groping for what to do" than "what in the world is her motivation?" Raederle has rather more agency than in the previous volume, some of it achieved by sheer stubbornness. Among other things, she notes that her father vowed not to give her in marriage to anyone who didn't fulfill this arbitrary condition, but that doesn't mean she has to get married at all, even though she loves the designated groom. These books definitely have more male than female characters, but they easily pass any version of the Bechdel test. (I am now partway through the third volume.)

Ventus by Karl Schroeder: an odd and ambitious book set in a world that was terraformed some centuries in the past, and in which things went badly wrong. We, and some of the characters, slowly learn what went wrong, and how things are now being run on Ventus, and why. There's urgency to the question, as a variety of AIs are maneuvering with each other for power, and debating the proper role, if any, of humans in the world. One of the main characters was, and may still be, an agent of a tyrannical machine intelligence/group mind from another world, and is suspected of trying to recreate it on Ventus. I read this in bits over several weeks, partly because I didn't always have the iPad handy, and partly because it hit just the wrong mood one evening, so I put it aside for a while, and when I picked it up couldn't remember why it had been problematic. (Which suggests that it is good enough to have that emotional impace, though of course part of that was my own state of mind.) Recommended.