Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Books I've finished in the last several weeks:

You're My Kind, by Claire Lydon is a lesbian romance that I may have gotten as a freebie via the BookBub email list. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist still misses the ex who walked out on her without a word several years ago, and also has trouble trusting anyone because if Justine could do that, so could anyone. The tone is sweet, but it felt like a little too many of the necessary conversations were not just offstage, but of the form "Maddie, Justine did X" and "Justine, Maddie says Y." Yes, the genre promises the reader a happy ending, but the author is expected to supply it, and this has a bit of the tone of "meanwhile, back at the ranch..."

No Love for the Wicked, by Jessica Cage, is a fantasy set mostly in a world where most people have magic. People are divided into Lights and Darks, which is somehow innate but also everyone is told which they are in high school. There's a romance plot, between two people who meet as adults, mixed in with the assignment to do a series of arbitrary-seeming things to save the world. The plot is driven partly by the protagonist/narrator's mother having carefully not told her the Very Important Prophecy about her. On the other hand, ( spoiler ) This was via a StoryBundle of fantasy books by BIPOC authors, and was clearly spell-checked rather than proofread, based on homonyms and missing words.

The White Mosque: a Memoir, by Sofia Samatar. Someone recmmended it, and I liked her novel A Stranger in Olondria, so I got this from the library.

The White Mosque is a linked collection of many short pieces about Samatar's family; Mennonite history; and her own life, built around a visit/pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of German Mennonite history. The "white mosque" of the title is a Mennonite church in Uzbekistan, built in the late 19th century. Samatar talks about having a Somali father and a white American mother, and looking for a place in a religion that still thinks of itself as ethnically (north) German, although most Mennonites today are people of color who live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

Samatar thinks and writes about memory, and about what missionary work does for, and to, the people doing it and those they're trying to convert. And numerous other topics, including the Aral Sea, a failed end-of-the-world prophecy that led some of those Mennonites to what is now Uzbekistan, and the history of photography and movie-making in Central Asia.

The book feels a bit like long strings of beads, making something but not a straightforward narrative. This shouldn't have surprised me; A Stranger in Olondria wasn't a linear narrative either. The acknowledgements describe the book as "creative nonfiction," saying some living people's names have been changed but the stories are as true as she can make them and the places are real.

I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy, is good but not pleasant reading. It's a memoir by a former child actor. There's a lot about her being a parentified child, including that she was expected to make her mother happy by, among other things, never having a different preference than her mother about anything, even favorite colors.

Current reading: The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, which feels relatively light so far. And I'm still (slowly) rereading Always Coming Home.

I'm going to try doing "reading Wednesday" posts again, without the "what I plan to read next" section, because I'm bad at predicting that.

Recent reading:

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecilia and The Mislaid Magician. These were rereads, mostly during nights when I was having trouble sleeping and wanted something light. Still fun. This is volumes 1 and 3 of a trilogy, because for some reason I don't own volume 2.

Merle A. Reinikka, A History of the Orchid. This is more a history of orchid collecting; I asked the library for it after seeing a mention somewhere, and don't remember the context. I stopped reading partway through, for several reasons, including that there isn't the right kind or level of detail for me; irritation at old-fashioned and even racist language; and the topic not being at the center of my interests. References to "Oriental" plants and using "Western Hemisphere" instead of "Americas" were distracting, but I could accept them in a book from 1970; the phrase that stopped me cold was a reference to European orchid-hunters running into "hostile savages." This on a page where the author also tells the reader how those hunters had destroyed areas of forest and completely eliminated the local populations of orchids; "savage" seems in this context to mean the locals, who weren't European or urbanized. I can't recommend this one even if you're looking for something on this subject.

James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside. This is a first-person memoir by a neurologist/researcher who discovered that his brain scan matched the patterns seen in criminal psychopaths, and started wondering what that meant and why he hadn't done such horrible things. I'd read a magazine-article version of this a couple of years ago. He talks some about gradually realizing/listening to friends and family who told him that no, he really wasn't "normal" in things like his risk tolerance and willingness to ignore possible harm to others.

The author hasn't (from what he writes here, at least) tried to kill or sabotage anyone. But he has left colleagues holding the bag at what were supposed to be joint conference presentations, because he was having fun hanging out at a bar. And he invited his brother to explore a cave with him, concealing the fact that it contained bats that carried a potentially lethal infection. (His brother was not pleased when he stumbled on that fact months later, needless to say.) One bit that fell under "what kind of person says that?" crossed with "ugh, Libertarians" [he identifies as one, and says it's one of the important things he and his wife have in common] was the author's assertion that he's not a monster, so he wouldn't watch a child starve to death in front of him—followed immediately by saying that he would happily eliminate all welfare payments even though he knows it means people would die, because that would be good for the species. So, not ethics but an odd combination of squeamishness with a surprising willingness to admit that he is in favor of people children starving to death.

Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library. I am working my way through the Miss Marple books (I think I read these in my teens, but that's long enough ago that I remember nothing at all about them). This novel is "what it says on the tin" in the sense that Christie says in the introduction that she wanted to write that already-cliched shape of story but only if she could break already-existing expectations for that shape of story. A dead body is found in the library of one of Miss Marple's acquaintances, and the book is about the police, with her assistance, figuring out who the dead woman was, why she was left there, and by whom. As seems to be the pattern here, people who hadn't already known Miss Marple assume she is a stereotypical harmless old lady; her crime-solving "secret," such as it is, is to listen for gossip and assume the worst of everybody.

Jim C. Hines, Codex Born. The continuing adventures of a young "libriomancer," someone whose magic consists of being able to pull things out of books and use them. "Things" can be weapons, healing spells, or almost anything small enough: one of the main characters is a dryad, born from an acorn someone pulled out of a bad fantasy novel. The main constraint is that the same book has to have been read by a lot of people; a magician can't materialize something just by describing it om paper. This is fast-paced and good, but it's definitely the middle book of a trilogy; start with Libriomancer.

Catherynne Valente, Smoky and the feast of Mabon. A sweet but rather earnest picture book about a girl getting lost in the woods and celebrating a pagan holiday; there's a smaller-print introduction that tells the adult reader more about Mabon. This is another book that I grabbed off our shelves because I wanted light reading; cattitude is a serious Valente fan, which I assume is why we have this, since neither of us is pagan nor do we have children of the age this is aimed at. conuly, you can add this to your list of picture books with protagonists of color, but note the explicit religious content.

Currently reading:

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. I'm about a third of the way through this one, and so far it's very good. More later, or go find any of the write-ups by people who have already finished it. (This won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel for 2014.)

Julie Smith, Death before Facebook. A mystery novel that I downloaded a while ago; my current kindle book. I'm not using the kindle much, for some reason; I wouldn't be surprised if I don't finish this until partway through my next flight to Boston.

I haven't done an actual "recent reading" post since summer, though I've been recording authors and titles as I went. So, here's a somewhat sketchy three-month book writeup, including books I realized I didn't need to finish.

( book discussion, cut for length: Abraham, Taylor, McHugh, Beagle, Petroski, Pratchett, Gentle, Thurber )