Books read, late October

[mrissa]

 

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Briskly written and cheerfully done, short chapters examining different aspects of the history of the notebook as an object (plus a little bit about objects we might consider predecessors). Kind of a romp honestly.

Clara Benson, A Case of Duplicity in Dorset and A Case of Suicide in St. James's. Kindle. The next two in this series, probably fine to start here if you want--1920s historical British setting, mildly feckless journalist hero. I am finding myself in the mood for mysteries lately--the endings are comfortingly settling when I'm nervous about issues national and personal.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School Chapters 10-13. Kindle. You can tell I was away from home, because I caught up on reading my serial! Boarding school hijinx on Mars, protagonist extremely disgruntled, don't start here.

Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen. Discussed elsewhere.

Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life. "Double life" has a preexisting colloquial meaning, and it's not at all what Carlisle is using it to mean in this title. And...it could. She could very easily have been talking about the pressures and tensions between being Author George Eliot with all of her art and the problems attendant thereto and being George Lewes's partner with all of those attendant problems. There's not a lot of that, though. I had a few quibbles with interpretations of the fiction, but mostly she means "double life" as "life with another person," and it doesn't go particularly deep on that front. Honestly I was a bit disappointed.

Agatha Christie, The Big Four and The Murder on the Links. Kindle. The very early 20th century had some very weird international conspiracy novels--of course there was Chesterton, and Rose Macaulay had one, and then there's The Big Four, which is...look, we're distant enough from it now that I have a hard time even seeing how they thought of it then, whether it was ridiculous along the lines of Goldfinger in the late '50s (book)/'60s (movie) or whether it was, oh yes, this is a popular entertainment but also this kind of flamboyant and yet super-secret international conspiracy, well, you never know. Anyway The Murder on the Links was a much more standard Christie mystery, same faults and virtues as she generally has.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring. There was a misprint in the jacket copy and thus the online bookstore copy about this book. It claimed to be about an English painter in 1913 Russia. In fact it was about an English printer, and his work as a printer is plot-relevant. I had been specifically looking for something about visual artists to read that day, so it took me half the book to realize and get recombobulated, that no, the protag was not going to suddenly start painting things or even thinking about painting them, that's not the book you're reading. Its sense of humor and mine weren't very congruent, I don't think.

Margaret Frazer, The Hunter's Tale (Kindle) and The Widow's Tale. Two more of the Sister Frevisse mysteries. I've gotten a little out of order because not all of them are available in ebook formats and of course ebook retailers have every reason not to advertise that if instead they can get you to buy the next one they do have available. Still, for this late in the series she's still gong strong.

Barbara Hambly, Saving Susy Sweetchild. And this one is only third in its mystery series, and it's got a Shirley Temple-like child star being kidnapped, in with all the other elements of this Golden Age Hollywood setting. It's fine? I keep reading them, I'll read the next one, I definitely wanted to read this one, but also I don't feel like this is one I'm going to point to if asked to explain what I particularly like about Barbara Hambly's mysteries.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Martian Contingency. Discussed elsewhere.

Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons. Reread. But this is the first reread since 1997, so a lot of the detail had not stuck with me. This is an historical novel, the first in a trilogy, and its focus is King John's daughter Joanna and her role in Wales as the wife of Llewelyn Fawr, with all the political complications attached. It's a huge brick of a book, but it moves along briskly, very readable throughout, will probably reread the rest of the series as well now that I'm at it.

Brenda Peynado, Time's Agent. Pocket universes whose timelines run at different rates, combined with environmentalism and corporate depradations. This was a fast read but a depressing one.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Pomeranz argues vigorously against all comers about when and how the economies of the two regions in the title diverged, and he's pretty persuasive about avoiding western exceptionalism and the sense of the inevitable that dogs some otherwise-fine historians. If you're not interested in imperial economies, this will not be the book for you. He manages to remember that Denmark exists, and the Germanies, and some other examples of Europe that writers of this genre of history often don't mean when they say Europe.

Carole Satyamurti, The Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling. This is a kind of a weird thing to label a retelling, because it is a very, very straight-up retelling, it is aiming to replicate in poetry what the original did in its own native poetic meters, and that...is mostly a translation? But Carole Satyamurti is using multiple translations to get there and is not working from the original, so it falls into this weird in-between category. In any case it was extremely readable and gripping, and I was struck by the places where it felt absolutely familiar to my own cultural epics and then also the places where it was different.

Sascha Stronach, The Sunforge. A sequel to The Dawnhounds, this is full of ecological disaster, weird biotech, and trans characters who are fiercely themselves. Couldn't put it down once I picked it up.

E.M. Tran, Daughters of the New Year. The story of three Vietnamese-American daughters and their immigrant mother, and then the generations proceeding back in time. The ending disappointed me--I know that not circling back to the present was a deliberate stylistic choice, but what it meant was that I felt like I had a piece of a novel rather than a whole one, that no one's story had a satisfying ending.

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm. Kindle. I don't recommend this one. On the one hand, it has a bit of casual Antisemitism and quite a lot of both casual and structural sexism. On the other hand, the ending is completely boring in its main thrust and leaves half the characters you've been extensively introduced to in the first half of the book hanging or just stops them abruptly. He did better, several times.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. A study of Indonesian rural mountain communities and their contacts with the outside world, hits the gaps between the outside world and these communities and the developments from that friction pretty hard, undermining the supposed universality of "globalization." The other thing I've read by her is mycological, and she was apparently James C. Scott's partner until his death.

Patricia C. Wrede, The Raven Ring. Kindle, reread. Another book it had been decades since I reread. This one is the kind of fantasy I read all the time in high school but not, y'know. What's the phrase. Staggeringly sexist. Right, that. It's a fun adventure fantasy whose general non-sexist approach has gotten to be far more normal than it was at the time.

Comments

[sovay]

If you're not interested in imperial economies, this will not be the book for you. He manages to remember that Denmark exists

Do people forget economically that Denmark exists?

(I mean, I assume from your phrasing that they do, but I am confused by it. Like what do they think was going on with Norway for three centuries?)

[mrissa]

I regret to inform you that many of them do not ask what was going on with Norway during any centuries.

[oursin]

I read several early Patricia Wentworths (in fact I think even the first Miss Silver deploys the trope) with Secret Conspiracies last year. This was actually For Research, but ended up at least partly for reasons to do with constraints of length not going into chapter I was writing - but I think there was still a point to be made about how the Nice Young Women being blackmailed (not so much them, as on account of relatives) by the Conspiracy didn't ever seem to be being pressured into seducing politicians or other persons of influence for info or setting them up for blackmail. Damned decent of the conspirators, what.

[mrissa]

I mean, one might be a vast international conspiracy to overthrow all of civilization as we know it, but one still has standards.

[skygiants]

I remember listening to The Big Four in the car on a roadtrip with my family and spending all book guessing which friendly character they met along their journey was going to turn out to have been the member of the Big Four who was the master of disguise. And then none of them were! What a waste!

[swan_tower]

How long is that Mahabharata translation/retelling? I kind of assume a priori that it's abridged, because they always are -- even the two-volume, something-like-eight-hundred-pages-per-volume prose version I have still has footnotes saying things like "here I skip over fifty pages of Yudishthira subduing the other kingdoms of Bharata" -- but there are varying degrees of abridgement. I see the book is 928 pages, but is that mostly the Mahabharata, or with a ton of side material?

[mrissa]

It's mostly Mahabharata. Which is still abridged, of course. But I felt that the side material was reasonably minimal and useful.

[swan_tower]

Good to know, thank you! I have added it to my wish list. I have three versions already, but none of them are in verse.

[larryhammer]

Sounds like that Mahabharata is what I'd call an adaptation, which exists uneasily next to both translation and retelling in many people's minds.

Agree about Orley Farm. I'm not even sure why I've kept my copy all these years. I mean, better than He Knew He Was Right is not that great a reason.