osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Dorothy Gilman's The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, which wrapped up a little abruptly - I suspect Gilman ran up against the limits of her word count and thought, “Well, gotta put a bow on this one” - but an outing with Mrs. Pollifax is always a pleasure even if it ends sooner than you expect.

I also zoomed through Barbara Hambly’s Cold Bayou, which is a particularly strong Benjamin January book even though tragically Rose and Hannibal exit stage right about a third of the way through and only show up again at the denouement. However, this does free up space to focus on January’s other family: his mother, his sister Dominique and her protector Henri Viellard, and Henri’s wife Chloe, without whom it’s pretty clear the entire extended Viellard clan would collapse because between the lot of them, they don’t have the common sense that God gave a cat.

We get to witness this fact for ourselves, because the premise of the book draws together a large proportion of the extended Viellard clan and their connections - both the white side of the family and the “shady” side, the planter’s placees (mixed-race mistresses) and their children - to celebrate, or rather wrathfully witness, the union of septuagenarian Uncle Veryl with his blushing bride Ellie Trask, an Irish tavern girl.

All of this gives Hambly ample opportunity to unravel the way that societal power dynamics can warp and poison family relationships, which is something that she’s particularly good at. There’s a particularly fiendish surprise in this book, which is worth it for its sheer revealing shock factor even though it’s the reason that Rose and Hannibal head for New Orleans so early on.

What I’m Reading Now

Years ago I enjoyed Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, so I couldn’t resist her latest book, Not If I Save You First. Maddie, the daughter of a senior Secret Service agent, is best friends with Logan, the president’s son… until Maddie’s father is injured thwarting a kidnapping attempt on the first lady and afterward moves himself and his daughter to the Alaskan wilderness. Maddie wrote to Logan every week, and Logan never sent a single letter.

Maddie is filled with rage about Logan’s total failure as a correspondent, and honestly this is the kind of grudge that I can get behind. However, she’s had to put it aside for now because Logan has just been kidnapped by a Russian,

I’ve also started E. M. Delafield’s Gay Life (in the old sense of swanky or hifalutin) which so far is introducing us to the inhabitants of a hotel on the coast in the south of France. Are there going to be several ill-advised illicit affairs that somehow all manage to work out happily in the end? Almost certainly.

And I’m taking another crack at Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: a chapter a day each day at work. Why do I find it so hard to pay attention to this book? I’ll be reading along about water bugs and suddenly my brain skates off the book and I’m staring into space thinking about nothing.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies waiting for me.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Barbara Hambly’s latest Benjamin January mystery, Drinking Gourd, which gave me nightmares and also the vague guilty sense that I’ve somewhere lost the thread. The series has gathered up so many secondary characters that I can no longer keep track of them all: I’m fairly sure, for instance, that I ought to remember Jubal Cain, but I had forgotten him completely. As well as Levi Christmas. I think an entire book revolved around Levi Christmas, and I don’t remember him for beans.

I actually have this problem with a lot of mystery novels - I often don’t remember whodunnit or how they done it or any of that - but in most mystery series, this doesn’t matter, because things more or less reset with every book. (I mean, the status quo does change in the Charles Lenox mysteries, but verrrrrry slowly.) In Benjamin January, the status quo changes practically every book, which was fine when I was reading the whole series all in a row but is clearly going to be a problem now.

I also read Rachel Field’s Calico Bush, which is a historical fiction novel about the early pioneers in Maine. It has lots of nice landscape description and some fun details about things like dyeing cloth (and some unfortunate stereotypes about American Indians; it was published in 1931), but the characters never really popped for me.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, “traditional” in this case meaning “hunter/gatherers,” agriculture being a new-fangled invention that has occupied a few paltry thousand years of human existence.

There is obviously a lot of food for thought in this book. The thing that struck me the most is Diamond’s comment that the current Western custom of having small children sleep in rooms alone is basically unique in human history, and would strike lots of hunter-gatherers as child abuse - I think just because this is such a basic fact in American culture that it never would have occurred to me to think of it that way; it’s not good or bad but just how things are done.

It was something of an “ah-ha!” moment for me, because I think it’s easy to look at the past and say, “How could these people not see that X thing is terrible and wrong?” - but of course seeing it as wrong would require seeing it in the first place, and if something is just the way a thing is done and has always been done (this is not actually the way things have “always” been done in the West, but it’s been the fashion among middle class people for ~150 years which in terms of human memory is always), then most people don’t see it at all. It’s not a custom that could be changed; it’s just there, like the air we breathe.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m on a bit of a Ngaio Marsh kick now, so probably another one of those. Maybe Killer Dolphin? Even though there are apparently no actual murderous dolphins in the book, which I think we can all agree is a misfortune.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I've Just Finished Reading

Lots of things! I have two weeks worth of things to report on, after all.

I finally read Lia Silver's Prisoner, which I have foolishly, foolishly left sitting on my Kindle for *mumblecough* a while - although possibly this was not so foolish, as it means that I won't have to wait quite as long before the sequel comes out?

ANYWAY. DJ's a werewolf marine, Echo's a super-secret badass assassin with an angsty past who valiantly struggles against her feelings - all her feelings, not just her feelings for DJ, although those too. They meet after DJ ges kidnapped by a secret evil government organization with shadowy but clearly assassinate-y aims. Obviously they fall in love.

Echo's angsty past! )

Also the evil government organization has created an unruly pack of creepily codependent miserable werewolves, I am so there for that.

I finally got the third of Sam Eastland's Inspector Pekkala mysteries set in Stalinist Russia, The Red Moth. Now that his premise is no longer new and exciting, the thinness of his characterization is beginning to gnaw on me.

Also Barbara Hambly's Crimson Angel, the latest Benjamin January book, and probably the most OT3 of the books so far. Rose has to pretend to be Hannibal's concubine for Reasons! They are forced to sleep together in an extremely narrow ship's berth - like, just sleeping, obviously - and Ben notes that it totally doesn't bother him at all because he trusts them both so much.

And then Rose gets kidnapped and both Ben and Hannibal (who are separated) chase her at top speed across the ocean to Haiti, even though Haiti is pretty much a death trap (especially for Hannibal, who is white, but really for everyone)! And when he arrives Ben is tormented, tormented by the fact that he will have to choose whether to search for Rose or Hannibal first. He chooses Rose, but because he has at least a vague idea where she might be, not because he feels good about abandoning Hannibal to his fate.

I also read Isabelle Holland's Trelawny, which is a trip. In fact it's such a trip that my discussion of it bloated out to five hundred words because there is just so much WTFery to discuss, so I'm going to post that separately after Christmas.

What I'm Reading Now

Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which is about, well, what it says on the tin. People betraying the hell out of each other for ideological reasons is kind of my jam.

What I Plan to Read Next

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, which I did not love as much as I hoped to. I usually love the sort of slice-of-life thing it has going - particularly if it’s slice-of-life about a way of life that is quite different from mine, which living on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland certainly is - so I’m not sure what didn’t click for me.

And...that’s it, really. I haven’t been getting much reading done; I feel that I haven’t been getting much of anything done, but I know that’s not true. I sent out a query letter yesterday, dammit! That is a thing.

What I’m Reading Now

Barbara Hambly’s Good Man Friday, which is the last of the Benjamin January series (for now; there’s another coming out later this year). I’ve really enjoyed this series, and very much recommend it if anyone is looking for a historical mystery series to try.

Also Jodi Lynn Anderson’s Peaches, which is not particularly grabbing me. It’s probably technically better written than The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (which I reread a few years ago, and my goodness, it’s a bit clunky), but it lacks the same sweeping forward force of story. The three different narrators just don’t sound different enough, somehow, even though they’re all quite different people in theory.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m not sure. I’m waiting for Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain to come in at the library, but whoever has it is taking their sweet time.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Hambly’s Days of the Dead. Benjamin January goes to Mexico! Now that he and Rose are totally rich, I hope and expect that there will be lots more exciting traveling. MAYBE HE WILL EVEN GO TO PARIS AGAIN. Well, maybe not Paris. BUT OTHER EXCITING PLACES.

I still am not super impressed by the mystery aspect of these books - I keep reading because I like everything else so much. I’ve been trying to think if there would be another way to organize the series, something besides mysteries, but nothing is coming to me. It would probably get dull just having January wander around New Orleans (and sundry other locations) being all “Let’s explore some more of my tragically terrible yet strangely fascinating society!”

What I’m Reading Now

The Ten Thousand Dollar Tan Line, the first of Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars novels, which pick up where the movie left off. My feeling about this book so far is “Can’t I please stay up all night reading this? Please please PLEASE, who cares that I have work at seven a.m. tomorrow!”

My superego cares, that’s who. But putting the book down was a hard-fought battle. The Veronica voice is perfect, as one would expect in a novel written by the showrunner, and I am filled with a burning desire to know the outcome of the mystery, too.

I’ve also been working my way through Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which is good but not as excellent as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (However, it should be noted that I am generally much fonder of novels than of short stories, which probably colors my views on this matter.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Rider on a White Horse.

Also probably John Steinbeck's The Pearl, assuming the library has it in. Also assuming that it isn't read by the same irritating person who read Steinbeck's The Red Pony, which I probably wouldn't have liked in any case (so many dead ponies!), but the obnoxious slightly nasal voice didn't help.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

More Benjamin January mysteries. I’m not sure why I find these books so enthralling, because as mysteries go I don’t think they’re very well constructed: I have trouble keeping track of who all the suspects are, let alone their supposed motives. But I really enjoy the denseness of Hambly’s 1830s New Orleans setting - it’s not just that the physical descriptions and social intricacies are vividly described, although they are, but that over the course of the books she’s really succeeded in building the closed, somewhat claustrophobic world of the New Orleans demimonde and the little clique of upper-class French Creole planters who support them.

The one world-building flaw, IMO, is that January is, supposedly, chronically short on money - except he always has all the money he needs for his investigations, even though it's not like he's being reimbursed or sometimes even paid. This is probably a good decision from a plotting perspective (who wants to read about the long pauses in an investigation as the poverty-stricken detective tries to drum up enough cash to continue?), but it reminds me that there's a reason (aside from sheer class bias) that amateur detectives are generally affluent. Who else has the time or the money?

I was thinking about this because I also just read Suzanne Supplee's Somebody Everybody Listens To, about small-town high school graduate Retta Lee Jones, who goes to Nashville to make it big in country music, and she really does have money problems - to the extent that she ends up sleeping in her car for a few weeks.

I rarely feel that a book ought to be longer than it is, but I really did feel that this book wanted to be about twice as long as it is, or possibly the first in the series. It cuts off just when Retta sets up a meeting that might be her big break, and while I can see why Supplee made that decision - it gives the book a happy ending without catapulting Retta to superstardom with perhaps unrealistic speed - well, I wanted to follow Retta's career a bit longer. I wanted to get to know Retta's friend Brenda better, and learn if Brenda decides to try to medical school; and to see if Retta ends up rooming with her new buddy Em, and how that works out...

In short I wanted more of everything. Sadly there isn't a sequel, but I'll probably read Supplee's other book, Artichoke Heart.

I've also finished Gloria Whelan's Listening for Lions, which I picked up on a whim and quite enjoyed. Young Rachel Sheridan grew up on her parents' mission hospital in Africa. But when her parents die of the Spanish influenza, Rachel's grasping neighbors bully her into impersonating their daughter - also dead of influenza - on a trip to England, to convince an elderly relative to write them back into the will...

The plot summary makes it sound like a rather different book than it is. The impersonation only takes up the middle third of the book or so. The first third is a description of Rachel's life in Africa, and the final third about Rachel becoming a doctor so she can return to Africa and reopen the hospital. The setting description in both Africa and England are wonderful: lots of loving descriptions of nature and animals and especially birds.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just started Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body?. Not far enough in to have any sort of opinion about it yet, but yay, at last I'm reading Sayers!

What I Plan to Read Next

Arika Oakrent's In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Doesn't that sound delightful and fascinating? I hope it lives up to its subtitle.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which I’ve been meaning to read since...fourth grade or so. I probably would have read the hell out of it if I read it back then, but it seems rather thin now.

Also Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs, which I adored. Anna is one of those heroines who conquers the world and everyone's hearts through the sheer magnitude of her vivacious zest for life and kindness (think Anne of Green Gables, or Sara Crew from A Little Princess, or Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket), and it's always fun to read about someone who is just having such a great time being alive.

I also thought Ibbotson did a lovely job with Anna's dialogue: the rhythm of the dialogue makes it clear that Anna, though fluent, is not a native English speaker (she was a Russian countess before the revolution), without the awkward expedients of tossing in random non-English words or trying to write her dialogue phonetically.

What I’m Reading Now

Barbara Hambly's Sold Down the River, in which Benjamin January agrees to pose as a slave in order to investigate a murder. I have spent the first few chapters sending loud waves of "DON'T DO IT" at the book, because this can only end in tears/floggings/actually being sold down the river and disappearing into the gaping maw of the slave economy. But as so often happens none of the characters are listening to my prognostications.

I also was listening to Anna and the French Kiss, but the second disc wouldn't play correctly and I'm not sure I care enough to seek out another way to read it. I suspect that the heroine's sort-of boyfriend Toph and her BFF Bridget are going to end up together, what with the heroine being across an ocean in Paris (and thus clearing the way for the heroine to be with St. Clare without having to shoulder the guilt of breaking up with Toph). I feel no enthusiasm for this possible future plot.

What I Plan to Read Next

I actually have no plan. I'm waiting for a bunch of books that I have on hold at the library - Longbourn, The Goblin Emperor - so I'll just have to see which one shows up first.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Hambly’s Fever Season, the second of the Benjamin January books.

What I’m Reading Now

Lots of things! Notably Pamela Dean’s Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which I’m loving so far. I like Gentian and her passion for astronomy; I like her group of friends, who are all good at different things but support each other in their goals and push each other to be better. They are possibly the first group in the history of fiction to have even a passing resemblance to my high school friends.

One of the things Dean is really good at, I think, is showing all the permutations of friendship. The friends you madly adore, the friends you adore but find exasperating, the friends you would never have sought out on your own but have grown to love as a part of the friend group, and the people in the friend group that you tolerate because everyone else seems to like them.

So far my feeling is that Dominic is super creepy. Also possibly an automaton. I know Dean likes quotes, but so far Dominic talks in nothing but quotes. It’s like he inputs the things other people say, processes the key words through a database of literary quotations, and spits out a couple lines of poetry that are vaguely related.

I’m also reading Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Cracks in the Kingdom, which I feel dubious about at present. However, I felt dubious about the first hundred pages or so of A Corner of White, too, so hopefully The Cracks in the Kingdom will pull together in the end in the same manner.

I’m nearly done with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. I have the strong impression that Sewell read Uncle Tom’s Cabin fifteen times, then said, “I want to write something like this, BUT FOR HORSES.” They have the compulsively readable quality, despite being about as subtle as jackhammers. Sewell hasn’t managed to make me cry yet, but perhaps she’s saving the tear-wringing scenes at the knacker’s for the end of the book.

And finally Frances M. Wood’s When Molly Was a Harvey Girl. I will forever grieve the fact that Wood’s writing career never really took off, because When Molly Was a Harvey Girl shows that Becoming Rosemary was not a fluke. I like Wood’s heroines, in all their stubborn and occasionally bratty glory; I like their older sisters, with their various but always vibrant personalities; and I like Wood’s light hand with historical fiction.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor. Also, Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs has finally (finally!) come in at the library, so at last I’ll get to read it.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally finished Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. I liked it, but it’s a bit uneven: it has two stories and they sort of work against each other. There’s the story of Tara’s coming of age and her relationship with her sister Lucy (and Lucy’s relationship with her husband and her best friend), which is very well done, and then there’s the story of Tara’s rise to pop stardom, which seems a bit tacked on.

It seems like Rice is reluctant to let Tara’s growing fame change her relationships in any fundamental way. Tara comments repeatedly that her stardom will change her whole life, but it really never does, and therefore it never really feels real.

But I did enjoy the coming-of-age story a lot.

Also Sarah Addison Allen’s Lost Lake, which is my favorite book of hers since The Sugar Queen. It feels less self-consciously, quirkily southern than some of her intervening books, while retaining the strong sense of place that I really enjoy in her work. By the end of the book I wanted to visit Lost Lake and stay in one of the cabins.

And G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. This book’s subtitle is A Nightmare, and it makes sense: there is something odd and dreamlike about it, which made it interesting but insubstantial. I had a similar reaction to his collection of essays Tremendous Trifles: he seems addicted to contradictions, whether or not they actually have a deeper meaning or even actually exist.

Emma is a big fan of Chesterton. Maybe you have to be Catholic to really appreciate him.

What I’m Reading Now

Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color. I am a bit in the soup about who all the characters are, but I’ve got the main ones straight and I’m having a good time reading it.

Also Brideshead Revisited, which is very well written and well-observed and extremely English. I’m enjoying all those parts. I don’t think I’m supposed to find Sebastian’s self-pitying decline into alcoholism quite as annoying as I do.

What I Plan to Read Next

Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Cracks in the Kingdom. Yes! It has arrived! I am trying not to get too excited about it, because it’s easier to enjoy things if you don’t pile too much anticipation on them.

Profile

osprey_archer: (Default)
osprey_archer

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1 234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 3rd, 2025 01:28 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios