Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Michaels' Someone in the House is probably the first book I’ve read with such a beguiling mix of cozy creepiness. What’s particularly impressive is that the coziness is not a mere veneer covering the true creepiness: the coziness and creepiness are both real, and intermingled, so it’s hard to tell when one begins and the other hands. The bad guy, such as it is, turns out to be a benevolent genius loci who just wants all the people in its house to be happy, so happy that they continue living there forever and ever and take care of it.

This benevolence seems creepier the longer you think about it, which is why Anne flees the house at the end of the book, even though it means leaving Kevin, her colleague with whom she is pretty certain she’s fallen in love. But how can you be sure when you’re living in a magical house that has a vested interest in ensuring the continuation of the family line?

I intended to pick up Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses again (it got superseded earlier by Summer Reading), but then my ebook hold on P.S. I Still Love You came in and I figured I should prioritize that, as there are forty people on hold for it… And then I ended up blazing through it in two days, because all of a sudden I got really invested. Possibly it helped that I could no longer compare the book directly to the movie? Anyway, I ended up writing so much about P. S. I Still Love You that it's getting an entry of its own.

I also finished Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, which didn’t blow me away, but there are only two books in the series so far so I’m going to read the second anyway just in case. After all, look what happened with Lara Jean! I got real invested on the second book for that one!

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been reading Alexandra Kropotkin’s The Best of Russian Cooking (originally published in 1947 as How to Cook and Eat in Russian, which may have been part of a series of cookbooks? There was a contemporary cookbook called How to Cook and Eat in Chinese), which is fascinating not so much for its comments about Russian cuisine (although those are interesting and informative) but because Alexandra Kropotkin clearly had a fascinating life.

I really wish that she had set aside the cookbook format and simply invented the food memoir. I want to hear more about the time that Clark Gable tried to teach her how to make pancakes! Not to mention the occasion of George Bernard Shaw’s complaint that “You Russians appear to live on cucumbers. What I can’t understand is how you seem to keep on loving them devotedly no matter how many you eat.”

(Kropotkin’s answer, which I feel on a spiritual level: cucumbers “grow without any laborious cultivating, which endears them to every Russian heart because Russians are passionately prejudiced in favor of any edible plant that doesn’t make them work to grow it.” Aren't we all!)

What I Plan to Read Next

More Barbara Michaels, I think. (I also intend to check out her mystery series under the pen name Elizabeth Peters, but after I’ve finished the second Auntie Poldi book. One can have too many mysteries going at one time.)

Comments

[kore]

The series seems to have been Hippocrene International Cookbook Classics -- there's The Art of Syrian Cookery, All Along the Danube, The Art of Israeli Cooking, and so on....the cookbooks seem to have been redone, tho.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrene_Books

https://web.archive.org/web/20070502125913/https://www.hippocrenebooks.com/about.aspx

[osprey_archer]

That's the series that it was reprinted in - I was wondering if there was a series back in the 40s/50s when the book was first published. (And then reprinted again in the 60s! and then reprinted by Hippocrene years later! This book has been around.)

[kore]

Oh, I see. I don't think so. How to Cook and Eat in Russian was published in 1947 by Putnam's Sons, and How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was published in 1945 by John Day. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43498205?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

[osprey_archer]

Maybe it was just a popular cookbook naming choice, then. Thanks for looking it up!

[skygiants]

It's SO GOOD. "Who WAS Kevin having invisible sex with? ... just the house! just the house, is all! It's fine!"

My favorite part is when they call in the priest to consult on Kevin's invisible sex issue and he has no idea either.

[osprey_archer]

"The house just loves us all so much it never wants us to leave! Everything's good here! No worries!"

I am a little puzzled as to why Anne's male chauvinist boyfriend even exists, but I guess maybe Michaels needed a reason for Anne not to be sleeping with Kevin at the beginning?

[anelith]

It's been years since I read those Barbara Michaels ghost story books, but I remember that cozy feeling really well. They made me fantasize about getting my own haunted cottage, of course one with a nice un-creepy ghost.

[osprey_archer]

A slightly less benevolent ghost, perhaps! One that's not quite so invested in making you want to stay forever and ever.

[ladyherenya]

I was wondering if you were still reading The Shadowy Horses . But prioritising library holds is the way to go, especially when queues can be ridiculously long. There's a post going around Tumblr telling people they should just use the library rather than Audible, but I suspect that if you're already used to getting audiobooks whenever you want, then that could be hard to give up.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I was all set to get going with The Shadowy Horses again but then P.S. I Still Love You came in and I just couldn't justify keeping forty people waiting. But now I'm back in the saddle!

[sienamystic]

The Shadowy Horses is good, I enjoyed it a lot. And I remember being really spooked out by the Barbara Michaels stories that were more in the horror line because they were so effective and I don't read a lot of spooky stuff so I was an easy target! Some of her books are also Mary Stewart-esque romantic thrillers and some of them are quite fun. For whatever reason, I enjoy her Elizabeth Peters books when I read them but I don't go back to them much at all.

[osprey_archer]

I rarely reread a mystery novel, so it's not surprising to hear that about the Elizabeth Peters books. I'm not sure why; a good mystery novel can have just as good character work as any other kind of book, after all. Maybe it's because it's harder to dip in and out of a mystery at random while rereading.

[sienamystic]

I have a bunch of mysteries I'll reread, but it's those that do more character work since I'm not as invested in the whodunnit as in how the characters react to the situation. Weirdly the only Amelia Peabody Elizabeth Peters book I keep around is the very first one. They're an example of good storytelling and characters but somehow I read them, put them down, and forget all about them.

They'd be such a good tv show, really. Something along the lines of the Miss Fisher show.

[sienamystic]

I'm reading a sample of the Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions since you mentioned it and I'd never heard of it before, and enjoying it so far. Maybe I should grab it at the library rather than spend on it, though, if it was good but not really good.

[osprey_archer]

I'm generally a big proponent of borrowing books from the library rather than buying them outright. If you really love something you can always buy it later, you know?

[sienamystic]

For a while I was really click-happy to buy Kindle books but recently I pulled myself up, unearthed my library card, and started to use it. (Like...I found it last week.) Silly how you fall out of habits and into other ones. I'm lucky enough to have really good local libraries.