Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Recent reading:

Aftermarket Afterlife, by Seanan McGuire: the most recent Incryptid book. Contains significant spoilers for events earlier in the series, including but not limited to the immediately-previous Spelunking through Bedlam

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels, by India Holton, a light, odd fantasy romance novel set in an alternate England during Queen Victoria's reign

Letters to Half-Moon Street, by Sarah Wallace, M/M romance set in an alternate past, where same-sex relationships are accepted as a matter of course, but one of the main characters' family is pushing him to get married, offering to send him a list of suitable women, or one of suitable men.

The Sybil in Her Grave, by Sarah Caudwell, another read-aloud. This one turned unexpectedly dark near the end, after several plausible murder suspects were ruled out. Cattitude kept asserting, as the story went along, that "Rodrigo is innocent." [Rodrigo is a vulture, and did not in fact kill anyone.]

Lyorn, by Steven Brust, the most recent Vlad Taltos (Jhereg) book. This one contains spoilers for many of the previous volumes. Much of the book takes place in a theater, and the text is full of lyrics filking songs from musicals. I did find myself thinking "Mike [Ford] did it better" (in How Much for Just the Planet?); the similarity may be part of why Brust dedicated this book to him.

I would recommend all of these except "The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels," with the notes about

Currently reading: Well, I've been partway through _The Rediscovery of America_ for weeks, and keep not picking it up again.

I finished Murder under Her Skin,, by Stephen Spotswood, last night.
It's a good mystery novel, meaning in this case that I liked it and that the solution to the mystery didn't depend on obvious contrivance or characters doing something implausible for no good reason.

This is a sequel to Fortune Favors the Dead, and feels like the beginning of a series. I'll be happy to read more about about Will Parker and Lilian Pentecost, the detectives. The story is set at a traveling circus, currently set up in a small town Virginia; the locals are a bit suspicious of the circus folk, and at least as suspicious of the private detectives from New York City.

The books are set right after World War II, and part of why I like these is that Parker is a not-very-closeted bisexual woman, and her boss, Ms. Pentecost, has MS, and it's depicted realistically. No inspiration porn, certainly no miracle cures -- just getting by from week to week with a cane, and trying not to overexert herself.

I recently read Laurie R. King's Justice Hall, a murder mystery set partly in a home that is not only an English country house, but a duke's, which is full of people playing with identities, and a duke who doesn't want the job because he wants to go back to Palestine. It's set in 1923, and very definitely in the shadow of the First World War--though if Britain has such a thing as a soul, major wars and their aftermaths would be part of that. (This is a Sherlock Holmes AU, but Holmes being fictional, that doesn't make it alternate history in any other sense.)

Recommended, though not as cozy as you might expect from a mystery set in an English country home: if you know Dorothy Sayers, think The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club more than Clouds of Witness/em>.

(I wrote the first paragraph of this as a comment to a post of oursin's.)

I've been slowly reading Alastair Reynolds's Blue Remembered Earth on my kindle for the last couple of months, and finished it this afternoon. I liked it, including the world-building (both in the usual stfnal sense, and some of the literal bits of how the people in that future build their world, on the Moon and Mars and the United Aquatic Nations). Also, it has elephants, of various sorts, and they are definitely plot-relevant. rysmiel said that they found it slow; it might be, a bit, but I think my slow pace has more to do with me than with the book. (I'm still having trouble getting settled in to read books when I'm at home, for some reason; I'm reading lots, more than 90% of it on screens, but that 90% is overwhelmingly nonfiction—news and blog posts and email and Atlas Obscura... On paper, it's mostly the less technical parts of Science magazine, as bathroom reading.)

I got Blue Remembered Earth as an ebook from the library, and it is badly overdue. Having finished it, I can sync my kindle and let it vanish in a puff of logic. I have the sequel listed as "for later" with the library (SPL, I think, or maybe KCLS) but am going to wait to borrow it, having another library ebook waiting to be downloaded to my kindle, plus various things I got for a dollar or two each.

I grabbed The Nature of New York, An Environmental History of the Empire State, by David Stradling pretty randomly from the "new arrivals" shelf at the library. This isn't natural history, it's a description and discussion of how humans have affected the environment of New York, and vice versa. The author notes that state borders are somewhat arbitrary, especially for a discussion of environment, but that in addition to New York being a somewhat manageable topic for discussion, the borders themselves made a difference, especially starting in the late 19th century: while early white settlers in New York cut trees to make farmland or for lumber in much the same way as settlers elsewhere in the region, reforestation was driven significantly by government policy. The most important canal-building, which made a large difference to the environment and how people interacted with it, was sponsored by the state government. Early conservation legislation was also at the state level, notably under both governors Roosevelt (both took some of those policies to the national level as president).

Another theme of the book is identification with place. That was driven partly by people thinking of themselves as New Yorkers, rather than (or in addition to) as Americans, or as residents of Brooklyn or Albany or Buffalo. Stradling connects this to Hudson River School art, which romanticized American and especially New York landscapes. A lot of this book focuses on the Hudson Valley, both for the obvious bits such as its importance for transport, and as a way to discuss the creation and maintenance of farmland and sources of timber. Early conservation efforts were significantly about saving the appearance of the land: not just the value of wilderness, but of specific scenic areas. Places like Storm King mountain were close enough to New York City to attract the attention and interest of people with the money and influence to push for their preservation.

This is 400 years in one book; if you know about a particular topic, the discussion may feel shallow. But there are already entire books on the Hudson River School, Robert Moses, and Love Canal, and the best place to start with Jane Jacobs is her own writing. Love Canal is traced here from a failed canal-building project, one of many such, through the casual use of abandoned canals as chemical dumps, to the equally casual practice of building on poisoned land, and the wastes seeping out, through citizen activism, to the EPA's Superfund. By the time Stradling had covered that and Brownsville and the epidemic of insurance-driven arson by landlords in the Bronx, I was surprised not to find anything on the failed Shoreham nuclear project, and its effects on Long Island politics.

Conversely, I hadn't known that agriculture in and near New York City that thrived when agriculture further upstate didn't, specifically because of the amount of stuff that needed to be transported within the city, and hence the amount of horse manure available to local farmers as fertilizer. The general overview of city history (I suspect any city) is of agriculture moving further away as cities develop. The occasional book or article mentions horse droppings as a pollutant on city streets, often in terms of "see, the automobile wasn't all bad." But Stradling argues that city farmers didn't just have easy access to markets for their fresh produce, they had the advantage of not having to let their land lie fallow or rotate their crops, an advantage over farmers elsewhere in the state.

Stradling only touches on pre-European habitation here: he's working mostly from written records, when he isn't discussing the visible topography and most recent geology. This choice may also be affected by the common assumption that the earlier human inhabitants of the Americas didn't change the environment much. I don't know how true it is for New York; we're starting to find evidence that it's not at all true in the Amazon basin. That's aside from the point that if the first human settlers wiped out the mastodon, horse, giant ground sloth, and several other species, that will have affected the environment in important ways.

I just finished Jo Walton's Among Others, which means I can now go read my friends' posts about it. It's very good, at least if you're our sort of person, the sort whose mind is furnished partly by what we've read. I think it would work even for someone who hasn't read large amounts of the fiction that Mor refers to in the book, though the familiarity helps. Mor reads mostly sf, and some fantasy and historical fiction, and some poetry: I liked the bit where she got back at a teacher by doing her Latin translation in the style of T.S. Eliot, and the teacher couldn't say anything because it was also an accurate translation.

There are books, and fairies, and deniable magic—not splashy, and not following neat rules or spells that a person can read and memorize. The book is also about family, and feeling alone, and finding people that you can really talk to and connect with.

Read this. Yes, Jo is a friend of mine, and I generally like her writing, but I think I'd be recommending this book even if I'd never met her. Knowing her and knowing that parts of this are autobiographical, I was noticing similarities and differences between Among Others and things she's said about her life, but that's not why I liked it.

Travel in the Ancient World, by Lionel Casson, is just what it says: an overview of medium- to long-distance travel in the ancient world, meaning mostly the area relatively near the Mediterranean, from pre-history through about the sixth century CE. cattitude picked this one up on a whim, and we've both found it delightful.

Casson says he wrote this because there was nothing else that even tried to cover the whole topic; the work that came closest was decades old (meaning that a fair amount of recent archeological evidence hadn't been used), more limited, and in German. What he covers includes, obviously, how people got where they were going—road-building and maintenance; carts, riding animals and beasts of burden, litters, and simple walking; ships, life on shipboard, and common routes by sea—but there's a lot more here than that. We learned about the varying arrangements for finding a place to stay in the destination city, including generations-long arrangements like "your family can stay with ours, and vice versa" and "we'll give a room to anyone from this town who comes to our city," as well as sleeping in temple porches and the eventual development of inns.

A thorough discussion of travel includes a discussion of what people did at the destination, which overlaps with the questions of why they were going. It turns out that, for the most part, ancient Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Indians, and so on traveled for the same reasons people do today, including business (loosely divisible into trade and government business); tourism in various forms; and religious pilgrimages. The tourist visit to see ancient Egyptian monuments is itself ancient: 35 centuries ago, Egyptian guides were showing foreigners the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, which were already ancient at the time.

A chunk of what I expect to remember is the incidentals: that the Appian Way is named for the Roman official who ordered it built; that the first known archeological museum was opened by Nebuchadnezzar II; that Monty Python didn't invent the community of hundreds of hermits in the desert; that there are Egyptian monuments where having one's name carved on the wall, graffiti-style, appears to have been a privilege reserved to high officials and their families; that the ancient Greeks invented not only theatre, but the touring company.

[The edition we have is from 1994, but appears to be basically a reprint of the 1974 original: Johns Hopkins University Press, 0-8018-4808-3.]

This isn't a book review, because I haven't finished the book. (And I am therefore disallowing comments to protect myself from spoilers.)

cattitude has been reading me T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, at a chapter or part-chapter at a time, before bed. We're having a fine old time.

There is in fact a plot, and characters. I particularly like Merlin, Wart, Archimedes, and the Questing Beast, and have been getting fonder of Sir Ector as the story proceeds. On the other hand, I keep interrupting the story to make rude remarks about some of the characters, notably King Pelenor. The entire thing is a festival of anachronism: it's got Uther Pendragon and Robin Hood, and has no definable tech level, and everyone in it talks like late Victorian or Edwardian English people, down to complaining about the Bolshevists. Quite funny.

I may attempt an actual review when we get to the end; this is mostly a placeholder because I haven't been talking about books much of late: I switch between focusing on Tiptree reading, which I discuss on the appropriate mailing list, and taking breaks therefrom with T. H. White or Ian Macdonald or rereading Amanda Cross.