Books read, early February

[mrissa]

 

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Ride a Rising Storm. I'm usually a second book person, but this one took a minute to win me over. I think the bar was set so high by the first one that when the second one felt like "more of the same," I was disappointed. It is, however, going somewhere, and it finished up with a bang, and I am very excited for the third one. (But where it finished with a bang was more like a starting pistol. Do not expect closure here. This is very much a middle book.)

Lila Caimari, Cities and News. Kindle. A study of how newspapers evolved and influenced the culture in late 19th century South American cities, which was off the beaten Anglophone path and rather interesting, especially because the way that snowy places were exoticized pretty much exactly paralleled how these cities were exoticized in snowy places.

Colin Cotterill, Curse of the Pogo Stick, The Merry Misogynist, and Love Songs from a Shallow Grave. Rereads. And this, unfortunately, is where the series ends for me. I enjoyed Pogo Stick, and then the other two had mystery plots that were "serial killer because tormented intersex person" (REALLY STOP IT, these books came out in the 21st century, NOT OKAY) and "bitches be crazy, yo" (WELP). The mystery plots are not nearly as central to these mysteries as one might expect of, well, mysteries, but on the other hand they are integral to the book and not ignorable and I am done. When I read this series previously I endured these two in hopes that it would get better again, and now I know it doesn't. Well. Five books I like is more than most people manage.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Field Guide to the End of the World. I still resonate less with prose poems than with other formats of poem, and this had several, but it was otherwise...unfortunately apropos, a worthy companion in our own ongoing ends of worlds.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa's Memoirs. Kindle, reread. Charming and quirky as always, with some hilarious moments about memoir that went over my head when I was small.

Laurie Marks, Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic. Rereads. I still really enjoy this series, but on the reread it was quite clear to me that water is very, very much the weakest element here, no contest. The water witches are not really portrayed as people, nobody with water affinity gets to be a character, they're very much the "oh yeah I guess we have more than three elements" element in this series. Water is the element I connect with the most strongly. I still like this series, I still think it's doing really good things with peace being an active rather than passive state and one that has to be made by imperfect humans--more unusual things than they should be. As with the Cotterill books above, the fact that it was a reread meant that I couldn't keep saying to myself, "Maybe there'll be more on this later," because there won't, the series is complete. But in contrast to the Cotterill it was complete in a way I still find satisfying.

Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing. This is a family history novel with strong--in fact integral--fantastical elements, but only the realistic plot resolution is satisfying, not the fantasy plot at all. The fantasy elements are required for the plot to happen as portrayed, there's no chance they're only metaphors, but they only work as metaphors. Ah well. If you're up for a Chinese family history novel that goes into detail of the horrors of both the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, this one has really good sentences and paragraphs. But go in braced.

Comments

[sovay]

and then the other two had mystery plots that were "serial killer because tormented intersex person" (REALLY STOP IT, these books came out in the 21st century, NOT OKAY) and "bitches be crazy, yo" (WELP).

That is deeply disappointing from anything that begins with the irreproachable title Curse of the Pogo Stick.

[mrissa]

Yes. That one is still in the good lot. But still. BUT STILL.

[sovay]

Yes. That one is still in the good lot. But still. BUT STILL.

At least I am unlikely to forget the title after which I have to tap out.

(There's one Campion where the unreconstructed racism eats the denouement and it took me two full re-reads of the series to pin it down because it has such a generic title. [It's Police at the Funeral (1931), which is a pain because it introduces a character who recurs twice in later novels as Allingham's real-time people have a habit of doing, but I still don't ever need to put it back in my head. The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) has fire-the-book-across-the-room levels of sexism in its B-plot which are utterly absent from the A-plot, so that one I am willing to re-read if I remember to flick through the relevant pages without acknowledging their existence. Also she dumped a ton of her personal life into that one and while I am not sure it was good for the novel, I can at least understand how the emotional circumstances produced the narrative WTF.])

[athenais]

I reread two of the Moomin books every year: Farlig Midsommar in June and Sent i November in, well. I am overdue for a reread of the others.

[mrissa]

Yeah, I think "oh THIS one, YUCK" is one of the reactions I most want my book notes for. Sometimes I didn't see or was still processing the yuck at the time, but when I actually do have it, I can write it down as a warning to my future self.

[wychwood]

I really love the Logic books for the amount of thinking they're doing about building community and establishing peace between genuinely opposed factions, across painful history. There's just not enough of that in fiction! I should re-read.

[selki]

Yeah, *The Fashion in Shrouds* makes me want to shove Campion, so nasty to his sister, so sure of his own superiority. How do I keep loving a sibling who's so dismissive of me as a human being, I ask not entirely disinterestedly. Campion loves his sister in his own way, as all my siblings love me, even the MAGA one. Margery Allingham wrestles a little with Campion's personality defects in some of his later books, but doesn't really come to grips with it in a satisfying enough way, to me.