Books read, late April

[mrissa]

 

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

Comments

[sovay]

This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.

Fine, sold. What would you have titled it instead of Princess Puck?

[mrissa]

The Hidden Footpath probably, or Off the Beaten Path, or my agent and I would have figured out some variation on that and I would have gone back and tweaked the manuscript even just by a few words to make it work slightly better that way.

[sovay]

The Hidden Footpath probably, or Off the Beaten Path, or my agent and I would have figured out some variation on that and I would have gone back and tweaked the manuscript even just by a few words to make it work slightly better that way.

The Hidden Footpath is an appealing title.

[hawkwing_lb]

Frankopan is the worst at Central Asia on its own terms. I have a couple of good recs if you'd like to take the taste outof your mouth?

[mrissa]

Yes please!

[hawkwing_lb]

So S. Frederik Starr's Lost Enlightenment - here at Princeton University Press is great from an intellectual history point of view. I also like Christopher I. Beckwith and one of these years I will read his 1993 book about the rise of medieval Tibet (here), but Empires of the Silk Road is his most accessible one, you may have already read it.

[mrissa]

Thank you! I've read Beckwith on the Scythians, which was a wild trip.

[hawkwing_lb]

For sure. I was not convinced of all his arguments but he made them well.

[swan_tower]

Thank you! I was coming here to say I've had Frankopan's book on my list for quite some time because I want to know more about the Silk Road, but after this I'm thinking my time is better spent elsewhere . . .

[mrissa]

"Mama, tell my lil' sister, not to doooooo what IIIIIII have done...."

[hawkwing_lb]

I'd say so.

There's also Richard Foltz's Religions of the Silk Road, which makes for interesting reading.

[swan_tower]

Thanks! Mainly my interest is 1) this is a major thing I know relatively little about and 2) if Alyc and I ever write more in the setting of the Rook and Rose trilogy, the fact that Vraszan sits in the middle of a similar trade network is likely to be more than the background detail it is there, so I should know more about how that worked . . .

[mrissa]

I love doing this kind of worldbuilding, where you're not rubbing the serial numbers off a thing, you're patterning a completely different thing from the parts that actually worked. (See also: my MG fantasy that is set on a small peninsula off a gigantic land empire, with an island empire nearby. I could not do a good job of writing something that was thoroughly culturally Korean, but I could take lots of notes on their geopolitical situation over the centuries.)

[swan_tower]

Yes! Taking the basic concept and run with it in invented directions, rather than writing a direct expy of a particular place. Not that I haven't done the latter, too, but there's a ton of middle ground between that and "I'm just kinda making stuff up here."

You are probably the exact right audience for me to pitch Margaret Owens' Little Thieves trilogy as "what if fantasy, but make it Holy Roman Empire?"

[mrissa]

...why yes. Yes I am.

[swan_tower]

It's closer to the expy end, but it came to mind because Owens so very clearly comes across to me as an author who has actually read history and knows how it works, instead of just spitballing ideas based on fiction she's read that was itself based on other fiction.

[hawkwing_lb]

I really need to get a copy of those books and read them. Everyone who has read them seems to recommend them.

(...my brain's kinda broken for fiction right now, but maybe it will unbreak soon.)

Lost Enlightenment, though, I will rec as worth reading across many domains. Starr has enough of the languages to do really solid work. He's tracing the great intellectual flourishing in Arabic from the Arab conquests on, but many of those figures are from Central Asia, so he's tracing intellectual connections, influences, the creation of entire disciplines, and what sort of things were going on politically and culturally.

[swan_tower]

I find I go through cycles of fiction vs. nonfiction, yeah. It helps when I find a novel that clicks really well for me right from the start, reminding me that not every book has to be "given a chance" and then maybe it's okay-ish enough to finish; some of them just work, right away. Little Thieves was one of those for me.

But yeah, sometimes my brain just goes "no novels, not now." Then I just give it a break.

Lost Enlightenment looks really fantastic and is now on my list!

[hawkwing_lb]

Yeah, books that just work. Those are the business. (I just read Sally Smith's two Gabriel Ward mysteries and for a miracle they didn't feel like work.)

[sovay]

So S. Frederik Starr's Lost Enlightenment - here at Princeton University Press is great from an intellectual history point of view. I also like Christopher I. Beckwith and one of these years I will read his 1993 book about the rise of medieval Tibet (here), but Empires of the Silk Road is his most accessible one, you may have already read it.

Thirding the thanks for this recommendation as a person who does not want to Frankopan themselves.

[hawkwing_lb]

Always glad to be of use!

[mllesatine]

"They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him."

Ok so who gets the diamonds at the end?

[mrissa]

Neither of the above really....

[mllesatine]

I checked Wikipedia. :D I must have missed that this book is 150 years old so I expected a very different kind of story.

[larryhammer]

It's one of Trollope's books that actually has a plot, which means the swerve is ... neither!

[mllesatine]

The suspense was killing me so I checked Wikipedia. Ok, ok, ok, I see what kind of book this is. :D

[larryhammer]

Ah, Trollope as anthropology report. For a similar discombobulation*, Orley Farm works well, and is almost as good a story.

(* Why why why do I always think this is spelled disconbobulation? I know the rule that -n- before b/p > -m-, but my brain insists it doesn't apply here.)

[selki]

The Cassandra Khaw stories I've read have ranged from interesting to really good! Most with some body horror mixed in, and my tolerance for that varies. :-)

[mrissa]

Yes, Khaw is a writer whose work I really respect but will not often reach for, and that's the exact reason why.