Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This time the delay is because I spent most of Wednesday traveling.

Another brief post, because I read a lot while visiting adrian_turtle, and they were mostly her books so I can't check things.

Recently read:

At the Relton Arms, by Evelyn Sharp. Finished this on the flight to Boston. Despite some undercutting of romance cliches, overall was not impressed. For some reason I want to quote Lady Bracknell, though in this case the good do not all end happily, nor do the bad end unhappily.

Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2014 edition. What it says on the tin, a collection of short stories. Free download from the publisher's website, convenient as a kindle book for travel. I enjoyed most of these, and skipped a couple that didn't grab me quickly; one oddity is that the stories are arranged alphabetically by author name.

The sweetness at the bottom of the pie, by Alan Bradley. Adrian lent me this, after Mrissa recommended it somewhere. A murder mystery from the viewpoint of a ridiculously precocious 11-year-old girl, who is in love with chemistry and has no idea of why it might be a good idea to give information to the police rather than try to find the answers before them. I enjoyed it, but a person could easily find the narrator irritating and not amusing.


I am half-sick of shadows, by Alan Bradley. If you liked the first you will probably like this one. The title is from Tennyson, who I don't care for, but all the quotes after the epigraph are from Shakespeare, who I do. I wouldn't have read these two books so close together except that my shoulder was doing an odd thing that had me selecting books partly by size and shape, which reduced the number of choices.

At the Bertram Hotel, by Agatha Christie; another Miss Marple book, different enough from the two I read recently that I enjoyed the similar style and time spent with Jane Marple rather than finding the stories too much alike. (This one courtesy of the Arlington library.)

Nurk, by Ursula Vernon (ursulav), a short illustrated adventure book about a vole ("Nurk" is his nickname) who stumbles into an adventure after getting a letter intended for his famous grandmother. I kept reading funny bits aloud to Adrian (because I was laughing as I read, and she asked for the funny bits), leading her to say that she would probably reread it. This has a somewhat different tone than Digger, but I suspect will appeal to many of the same readers, though this is a book with illustrations and Digger is a graphic novel.

Perfect Gallows, by Peter Dickinson. I picked this up thinking it was a detective story; it's much more a character study than a mystery, though it starts with the discovery of a corpse and ends with an explanation of what happened. The viewpoint character is at least close to being a sociopath, whose self-justification is that his art as an actor is more important than human connections or feelings. There's also a fair amount about 1944 Britain and the effects of the war on the civilian population. There might be an interesting comparison with Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, but it would take someone with more/different critical skills than I have to do more than say "these have some things in common, and might be overlooked by people who don't usually read detective fiction."

I also read and enjoyed an unpublished novel that turned out to be the right length for a Boston-Seattle flight.

Currently reading:

The Just City, by Jo Walton

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.

In the midst of interesting discussions of genre, including but not limited to fantasy, on Making Light and on papersky's journal, I just sent a coworker email stating that if we're going to treat "Mythology" as a separate genre from "Folk Tales, Tall Tales, and Fables" in our "Index by Genre," we're going to have to address which side of the line a lot of stories fall on. We can't just pull out the Arachne story as Mythology and leave everything else alone.

It doesn't help, for these purposes, that every reading in these anthologies must be listed exactly once in the index by genre. I don't know whether it helps or hinders that, for these purposes, "poetry," "songs," and "plays" are all being treated as genres, so we don't have to address whether a given play is historical fact, historical fiction, contemporary fact [for a sixth-grade audience in 2006 or after, is Samantha Smith's letter to Andropov history?]/