Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Murder Crossed Her Mind, by Stephen Spotswood, is the fourth in his series Parker and Pentecost mysteries. The series is set mostly in New York City, shortly after World War II.

The books work well as mysteries. Also, part of what I like about them is that one of the two detectives is living with multiple sclerosis, at a point when her doctor can't give her much besides stretches and advice about when to rest, which she often ignores, because resting is boring even if you aren't racing against the clock to solve a mystery. Her assistant is bi, ran away from home/was kicked out when her parents found out, and spent a few years working for a circus before coming to New York. Her boss doesn't consider this a problem in itself, but sometimes reminds Parker to be careful, because being queer could get her into legal as well as social trouble.

I read The Wednesday Wars for book club, finished it about an hour and a half before the book club meeting, and decided that I liked it, but didn't think I had much to say about it, so I skipped the book club. The book is a historical novel about a seventh grader, Shakespeare, and his family, set in suburban Long Island in 1966-68. The narrator is mostly interested in school, his friends and immediate family, and baseball, but there's no way to ignore national and world events, even if his father didn't insist on listening to Walter Cronkite every night.

I am still partway through Darnton's The Revolutionary Temper, about Paris in the half century before the French Revolution. I do want to go back to it, but I needed to sync my kindle to put other books on it before going to Montreal.

Books finished last month:

Penric and the Bandit, by Lois McMaster Bujold: the latest Penric and Desdemona story, which I liked. The bandit is the main viewpoint character, and this book doesn't (imho) depend as much on familiarity with the series as some of the previous stories do.

Perfect Accord, by Celia Lake: another of her fantasy historical romances set in Albion. The non-romance part of the plot involves an illegal conspiracy, and it's not entirely clear who they're conspiring against, and some of the conspirators don't seem to know either. The heroine of this one and her gay male best friend agreed, at 13, to get married if they reach the age when their families are pressuring them to marry, and neither of them has found someone they prefer.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by Peter Beagle: novella about a dragon-hunter/exterminator, who would like to be almost anything else; a princess whose parents are hoping she will like one of the many princes who keep turning up; and the first prince she does like, who was wandering around as part of avoiding his parents plans for him. Good.

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow, a queer Jewish sf romance, set on a satellite of Pluto, with some references to Brooklyn. I think Ruthanna recommended this one.

I read both of those while visiting rysmiel, and didn't make any notes,

I haven't read a lot of books lately, and have both read short things online (blog posts and Discord conversations and news stories) and played little games online, like Quordle and Metazooa and Infinite Craft). I have been advised to step away from my computer screen at least an hour before bedtime, but on the days I do that, am as likely to pick up a puzzle book as to read either a hardcopy book or on my kindle. But I finished a book about books last night, so here's a Wednesday reading post. I liked both these books:

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer, is a novel that I think started as a series of related stories about Beck, a girl growing up on a "seastead," a group of artificial islands outside any government's borders. She lives with her father, who is powerful within the not-called-a-government structure of their seastead. Along with going to school, Beck earns some spending money by finding things for people, like brown shoelaces or a pair of size 9 black sandals: an unofficial barter system for things people brought with them from the mainland and discovered they could do without. The book is narrated by Beck, which I think works well for world-building, as she figures out more of what's going on under the surface. Starting with those small-scale errands, Beck gradually discovers more about the seastead, angering her father in the process: he is definitely the sort of Libertarian who might say "the government doesn't own the children, the parents own the children," and sees no need to explain the orders he's giving to his teenaged daughter.

I'm going to cheat here, and quote from Naomi's annual guide to "gifts for people you hate": The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading).

Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo, is broader than the subtitle implies. This is a history of books, and paper, and of reading and kibraries and bookstores, with some discussion of modern and contemporary librarians and censorship. It's also part memoir. The "ancient world" here is mostly Europe, the Middle East, and the parts of Asia that Alexander the Great conquered. One of the things Vallejo is interested in is how shared literature helped create and maintain a culture in Hellenistic times, and afterwards. Vallejo discusses the long hard work of keeping books alive when they had to be recopied every couple of hundred years, and the difficult decisions librarians faced, of which of their books were worth the time and effort for that sort of preservation. Vallejo also talks about the spread of literacy, and who was allowed or required to read: in ancient Rome, enslaved people were expected to read aloud to their owners, because the Romans believed that reading, unlike listening, put the reader under the author's control.

[My ebook of the Vallejo is badly overdue, and now that I've finished it I can sync my kindle and go on to something else.]

Happy Public Domain Day! This article focuses on what href="https://web.law.duke.edu">entered the public domain in the United States today, with a bit on specific elsewhere. The case of Peter Pan is weirder than I'd realized: the play has been performed since 1904, but the script wasn't published for copyright purposes until 1928. It's now public domain in most of the world, but in the UK the Great Ormond Street Hospital has the right to royalties on Peter Pan in perpetuity.

Thank you, havocthecat, for a reminder and useful discussion of the matter.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, by Richard Fortey. This is a book about “living fossils”—and the author critiques that framing in a couple of directions. What he wrote about here are some species that look very much like Paleozoic or earlier ancestors, or that seem to be more like early members of their clades than are other extant species, so the tinamou for birds. He offers coelacanths and wollemi pines as “living fossils” in the sense that the fossils of distant ancestors were described before the extant species.

Nation, by Terry Pratchett (reread, because I remembered a particular bit and that made me want to get the book out)

Tsalmoth, by Steven Brust. The most recent of the Jhereg books. I was less sympathetic with the jerk narrator/protagonist than in previous books. I also didn't find the bits where the narration skips things because either Sethra Lavode, being addressed, knows them, or because Vlad has had part of his memory of the events removed, to work well. Probably worth reading if you've been following the series, and a bad place to start.

The Duke Who Didn't, by Courtney Milan. Romance between two Britons of Chinese ancestry, set in a small town in 19th-century England. A little odd, and I had trouble getting into it, but I liked it.

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (finished rereading this, after (re)reading the first two-thirds on a previous visit to Montreal)

Trouble in Triplicate, by Nero Wolfe (reread, three novellas, I had a vague recollection of one and no memory of reading the other two)

This year, the Boston Public Library's adult summer reading challenge is in the form of a bingo card. The prize for completing a row, column, or diagonal is a BPL "summer reading" tote bag, plus entry in a drawing for a gift card. The tote bags are "while supplies last," but when I asked a couple of days ago, they told me they had them available at every library branch. The categories range from "debut author" and "essays or short stories" to "book with a red cover." Having completed a line, I took the bingo card with me when I returned a book this afternoon.

I did choose a couple of things to fill out the bingo squares, in between looking up author biographies (for "indigenous author," "debut author," and "LGBTQ+ author."The card also includes several entries like "read outdoors" and "learn something new."

The Stuff Between the Stars, written by Sandra Nickel and illustrated by Aimée Sicuro: a children's book about the astronomer Vera Rubin's life and discoveries, including her difficulties with sexist male astronomers. (for the "children's book" square)

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean: a book about the Los Angeles Public Library, anchored by a massive fire in the Central Library 1986, the rebuilding afterward, and someone who was accused of having set the fire. Orlean goes back to the founding of the library, and forward to the 2010s.

She also discusses fire investigations, and the odd assumptions about arson that were part of them for decades--in particular, the idea that if the investigators couldn't find an accidental cause for a given fire, that was sufficient to prove that it had been arson. Orlean has loved libraries since she was a small child, and she came to know Los Angeles after moving there for her husband's job. (I read this for the "a book about libraries" square.)

The Blue Hawk, by Peter Dickinson, for the Scintillation Discord book club. This is a children's (maybe middle grade or YA) fantasy novel, and yes there's an actual hawk, which doesn't die. I liked it, but am not sure what else to say about it.

Once upon a Marquess and After the Wedding, Regency romances by Courtney Milan. After the Wedding is sort of a sequel to Once upon a Marquess, but doesn't assume the reader already knows the characters. I didn't read them one right after the other; when I went to add After the Wedding to my booklog, I realized I hadn't recorded the first book.

Currently reading: Views of Nature, by Alexander von Humboldt (which will go in the "book in translation" bingo square).

Mostly a list, again:

Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki. This is excellent, and is both definitely science fiction and definitely fantasy, and much of it takes place at a video arcade donut shop.

Forged in Combat, by Celia Lake

Perchance, by yojfull on Archive of Our Own. Original work (meaning not fanfic), which I found because I liked the author's InCryptid/Saint of Steel crossover story.

Third Girl, by Agatha Christie. A Poirot novel, with (again) questions of who some of the characters really are, plus a very 1960s-square atttitude toward drug use and then-contemporary fashion and art.

A Frame for Murder, by Imogen Plimp. another random cozy mystery from BookBuB. The romance is, fortunately, only a minor part of this, and the plot kept moving. It was good enough to finish, but I'm not going to look for more of the series. The bits about food seem shoved in, somehow.

---

sabotabby asked what I thought about Everything for Everyone (from the previous book post). I had hoped to write something thoughtful, but instead, I'm copying this from my booklog file:

post-dystopian SF, about the battles and work to build a communist future on the ruins of, well, everything, with world-building, both in the science fiction criticism sense and literally people talking about (re)building the world, working to restore the biosphere, education, and so on.

This is set about 50 years into the future, with voices including old people who were born before and lived through and helped create the transition, and talking about what they did and the friends and family they lost, and others who remember the worst times but not the world before, the world that included universities and airline travel as well as the horrors of late stage capitalism.

Family as a verb, a choice, some of it by people who needed to do that to have any family at all, having lost parents, siblings, other kin to war and detention camps and hunger and disease. // Characters talking about the ongoing work to make a better world, and also about the trauma. The "oral history" quilt format includes the "interviewers" being told "ask about something else" when they touch on painful topics.

I wasn't feeling well for several days, and it was a kind of not-well that meant I was more comfortable in my recliner than in a desk or dining room chair, so I spent a lot of time reading. [No medical advice please: I'm feeling quite a bit better, and also have an appointment with my doctor on Thursday.]

Books I've finished since my last post:

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson: This is a mystery/science fiction novel, and the viewpoint character works as a translator for an extraterrestrial cultural attache in Manhattan. ( Read more... )

The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors have taken on a very large project, which they realize, having started with the question "what was the origin of inequality?" and then decided that it was the wrong question, in two or three different directions.

( Read more... )

Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie ( mild spoiler )

A Case of Murder in Mayfair, by Clara Benson, is a light (though neither funny nor "cozy") mystery set in 1920s London. It's part of a loose series, but I don't think it matters whether you read them in order. (So far, I've read volumes 1, 3, and 2, in that order.)

All that Remains, by Sue Black ( Read more... )

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: a weirdly multilayered fantasy story about fiction and fictional characters interacting with real people, and influencing them, often via weird doors into and out of the secondary world (?) of the Starless Sea. It's very good, and I was well into it before I noticed that the book is told in the historical present, with only a few "here is a story being told within the story" sections in past tense.

A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian: an f/f romance novella, set in the late 19th century. One woman is a "companion" to a rich woman who took her in after her brute of a father threw her out, and who is trying to figure out what she's doing and what her patron wants her to do. The other is the patron's maid, who has managed to move from small-scale crime to a legal job that pays better as well as being safer. "Together, they commit crimes."

Reading a discussion on a Discord server, I realize I don't really have a to-be-read pile anymore, only a couple of kinds of "the library will want this back soon" [hardcopy vs. kindle/ebook], and a vague tendency to see what I have on my kindle, which is equally likely to lead to rereading an old favorite, or starting something I downloaded a while ago, or something cattitude bought and shared. That's how I finally read Delany's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, which I started while sitting in the Mt. Auburn ER a few months ago.

There's a certain amount of out-of-sight, out-of-mind, here, which means that once cattitude finishes reading a book and shelves it, I'm not realizing "hey, we have $Book, I want to read it," even in the places where our book preferences overlap.

I should also remember that about half the books in our living room are things adrian_turtle owns and I haven't read, some of which are or might be interesting. In the last few years, I'd gotten used to thinking that I'd already read all the books on those shelves that I was interested in, so wasn't looking there if I wasn't in the mood for rereading.

[Right now, I am reading two library ebooks, one in Firefox on my desktop computer and one on the kindle, not counting the one I have on the kindle, set aside a couple of days ago, and may or may not pick up again before the library takes it back.]

I did a lot of reading while I was visiting rysmiel, and on the trips there and back (there's not much else to do while waiting at the airport).

( cut for length )

Currently reading (and enjoying):

A Half-built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys