Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I've mostly been rereading (and doing cryptic crosswords), but have read one new book recently, and enjoyed it a lot:

The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher: This is a fantasy about a Scandinavian girl who sets out to rescue the boy she considers her best friend, after he has been kidnapped by the Snow Queen.

Gerta knows that she's doing something risky, but tells her grandmother than she has to do it anyway; her grandmother accepts this and sends her off with a few useful things and a cryptic message. The first thing that happens is that Gerta spends several months in an odd sort of enchantment, in the cottage of a witch; after escaping that, she befriends the titular raven, who accompanies her on the rest of her journey.

I liked this, and not just because never mind the boy, the story turns into a growing friendship, and courtship, between Gerta and another girl, Jenna, something Gerta had literally never thought of as possible. The story also includes interesting magic of plants and dreams, and some very fine otters. Definitely recommended.

Rereading:

Half-off Ragnarok, by Seanan McGuire. Third in her InCryptid series, and either I wasn't in the right mood, I don't like the Alex-viewpoint stories as much as the Verity ones, or both.

The Comfortable Courtesan, by L.A. Hall (as "Clorinda Cathcart"): a long serialized novel, or series of novels (apparently about a million words), a Regency-era historical with quite a few LGBT and non-white characters, and polyamorous relationships (not called that, of course, just as the story predates the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual"). This was originally serialized on Dreamwidth (the_comfortable_courtesan), with reader comments as it went on; in rereading I found my own remark that it was pleasant, and unusual, to read a story that felt as though it/the author understood my life.

The Comfortable Courtesan, and some related stories about Clorinda and her circle, is available at https://www.clorinda.org/

I picked Mammoth up semi-randomly at the library a few days ago, because I've liked a lot of Varley's earlier work (not all, but a lot) and elephants are cool..

The premise of the book is that researchers (funded by a biotech billionaire who wants to be Bruce Wayne) are working on cloning a mammoth when they stumble on a time machine; they then find themselves with an actual live mammoth born 12,000 years ago.

It's a quick read. I decided partway through that it had too much circus and not enough time travel; some people might consider this a feature rather than a bug, but what I wanted wasn't more paradoxes and mathematical hand-waving, but more Pleistocene scenery and fauna.

( mild spoiler warning for a book I'm not impressed by )

It seems as though everyone I know who reads mysteries has been saying good things about Alexander McCall Smith's books about Precious Ramotswe, which start with The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency.

I picked up a copy the last time I was at the library. It's a pleasant read. I think I might like the protagonist: she looks at people and things, and thinks about them. I say "might" because she has some attitudes about things like respect for older people that might well rub me the wrong way, even though I'm older than she is (at the point of this first book, at least)—in my culture, an on-duty registered nurse wouldn't automatically defer to a stranger just because the stranger was 15 years older than the nurse. But she'd probably think I was far too hurried, and not want my company either.

That curiosity and noticing are her main qualifications as a detective. That, and wanting to be one; she periodically runs into a stranger who questions the idea that a woman can be a private detective, and her invariable response is to ask if they've heard of Agatha Christie.

The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency feels like a pleasant slice-of-life of contemporary Botswana (though for all I know Smith's Botswana has nothing in common with the actual place beyond name and location). We get a variety of stories about Ramotswe, her father, other bits of her past, and people she meets in the course of her work. What it doesn't feel like is a mystery novel: it's very episodic, and the main connections between the episodes are Ramotswe and a few of her neighbors, rather than a problem to be solved or a crime to be investigated (though one question from early in the book is resolved later).

I'm not sorry I read this, because it was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, but I'm glad I got it at the library, and probably won't read further in the series.