May began in Chicago, then I took the train home to Montreal, where I have been ever since, pretty much reading my head off. I read twenty-nine books in May, which even for me is quite a lot. Some of them were disappointing, but in compensation, some of them were amazing, and even with a disappointing book, it can be interesting to think about why.
Wandering Through Life: A Memoir — Donna Leon (2023)
Not actually a memoir. A collection of very slight autobiographical pieces, some much more interesting than others, none of them feeling as if she’s actually sharing anything significant. It felt like someone telling much-told anecdotes, when you’d really like to get to a level of talking more intimately. I love her Brunetti novels, and I’d like to know more about the person who has thought so deeply about ethical questions and how to live, but sadly this wasn’t the way to do that. Memoir, like travel writing, needs intimacy and honesty, or at least the illusion of it, for it to work. This felt as if Leon wanted to keep the reader at a distance.
100 Poems That Matter — The American Academy of Poets (2022)
Interesting collection of mostly modern poetry with a wide range. Sadly, it didn’t expose me to any previously unknown exciting poets. Still, I always enjoy having some poetry in my day, and I enjoyed reading these.
Ulfhildr — Mary Thaler (2024)
New epic poem in proper Anglo-Saxon-style alliterative verse with caesuras, telling the story of a woman for a change. This was very well done, and reminded me a little of Nicola Griffith’s Hild. This is a genre in need of revival, because if you like alliterative verse epic there hasn’t been much new in recent centuries.
Someday the Rabbi Will Leave — Harry Kemelman (1985)
Another mystery solved by Rabbi Small, in his small-town community near Boston, and it’s interesting to see how much cosier and less noir these books have become as they’ve gone along. The politics in this one feel older than 1985. It was actually quite a good mystery, even though I guessed it from general genre-awareness and having read the previous books in the series, it felt like something that could happen.
The Black Flemings — Kathleen Thompson Norris (1926)
Ah, Norris, whose work I cannot predict, even in the slightest. This one is almost a gothic; there’s a girl, and a house, and heirs, and even a madwoman in the attic. However, because it’s Norris this is a gothic happening at a very specific moment after WWI and before the 1929 crash, and to a very specific American family. Not what I was expecting, but absolutely compelling. There are still multiple Norris works that aren’t either in the public domain or on my shelves, and I’ll read them eagerly when I find them.
Far Horizons — Robert Silverberg (ed.) (1999)
An anthology of stories written in pre-existing SF universes, and a very mixed bag. Ursula Le Guin’s “Old Music and the Slave Women” is an incredibly powerful addition to Four Ways to Forgiveness and there’s a terrific Kress story, and good things from Haldeman and others. But it has the fatal flaw that if you don’t like or haven’t read the series, then you’re not going to like the extra novella. Nothing is going to make me like McCaffrey’s Ship Who Sang books, and certainly not this. It’s also now twenty-five years old—probably why it was only $1.99—and so of course there’s nothing recent. It’s interesting to consider what Silverberg thought of as big, significant series at the turn of the century, and whether that judgement has held up.
Warped State — Jo Miles (2023)
I should have loved this book—it has aliens and space stations—but in fact I only mildly liked it. I’ve been trying to think what’s wrong with me and a whole bunch of recent SF that hasn’t quite worked for me, and I think there can be a mismatch between the world plot and the emotional plot, where the author (not just Miles, I’ve had this problem with Tesh and Chambers and O’Keefe too) is more interested in the resolution of the emotional plot than the resolution of what’s going on in the wider universe, whereas if I have invested in understanding a whole complex universe I want that world to be changed by the story, not just the characters.
It’s not just that I have different standards for other genres, it’s that it’s very hard to make the pacing of a romance plot work in science fiction—you can have a romance in the book, but making it work as genre romance (where the characters commit not by, but at, the end), is tough when you’re also trying to tie up a set of complex other things. SF has generally dealt with this by having romance very much as a secondary plot. Maybe people wanting to write this should look at how the pacing of romantic suspense works? Anyway, Warped State has worldbuilding that was interesting enough to get me engaged but exists more in service of setting up the emotional plot than is my preference. I’d like there to be a name for this subgenre so I stop banging my head against it. If you like all these other books that annoyed me, you will like this one too. It at least has a bit of family and actual work visible in the background.
The Plus One — Sophia Money-Coutts (2018)
Coutts manages to write humour arising out of situation rather than gags, and her characters are well developed. There’s some weird British class stuff in this book, and that makes me realise there was in her last book as well—you’d think we were a bit beyond heroes with titles and stately homes by 2018, but oh well. Excellent dialogue, great friend group, and all the worldbuilding is done for her, I already know what a gossip magazine is like and how texting works.
One Italian Summer — Catherine Mangan (2022)
Romance novel set in Italy. The deeply unbelievable thing here is not the romance but the idea that a person could, in 2022, make a website about an island in Italy and people would invest in that. Because it’s true that mostly Italian tourists go to Ischia and not many foreigners, but why would people go to the heroine’s website either? Ischia, it’s lovely, but she’d do better giving it ratings on Tripadvisor. Oh well, definitely not reading these for the realism. (Not that kind of realism anyway.) Ischia is well described and it’s clear that the author has been there and loves it and isn’t phoning it in. But I much preferred her book about the woman who opened a cafe.
The Home-Maker — Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1924)
Re-read, now available as an ebook, hurrah. This is a well-written, compelling story of the horrors of ordinary life in America in 1924. A man works for a department store, riddled with indigestion, and deeply miserable. His wife works her fingers to the bone for him and for her children, keeping the home perfect, and is also deeply miserable. The kids are in their different ways also miserable. Then (fairly near the beginning of the book) the husband falls off a roof when rescuing someone in a fire, and ends up paralysed. The mother goes out to work. She becomes happy and fulfilled. He becomes happy and fulfilled as a disabled home-maker. The kids also cheer up and start to enjoy life. He realises he loves the kids and also the work of helping them grow up. Then, the father, the mother, a friend of the family, and the doctor, all individually and separately realise that if the father recovers everything will be ruined, because it is impossible, in 1924, for a healthy man to be a househusband while his wife works; nobody will respect anyone. It has been a hundred years. We’ve come a long way on this one. Let’s not stop here.
A Wedding in Tuscany — Sandy Barker (2022)
Romance novel set in Italy. This is volume 5 of a series called “Holiday Romance.” I have not read the other four, which put me in the fun position of reading this book where there were four couples who had all met in vacation destinations, all meeting up for a wedding—and the big question, which remains unanswered until the very end, is where will the married couple live after the Italian destination wedding? Enjoyable tosh.
The Backwater Sermons — Jay Hulme (2021)
A book of poems by a man who converts to Christianity and is baptised into the Church of England during the Covid pandemic. There is one very, very good poem about having a banal conversation on Zoom with a friend while frantically thinking at them in italics Don’t die which does encapsulate an experience many of us had, certainly I did. Interesting book.
Shadow — K.J. Parker(2001)
Unlike most Parker novels, this one is actually fantasy, in the way of his short fiction, which was an unexpected treat, meaning there was some metaphysics. There was also the death and destruction I’ve come to expect, and the fantasy of logistics and compelling writing that I find so addictive. This is not his best work, but it came together very well, and I’ll certainly be reading the sequels.
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 — Robert Darnton (2023)
This is an absolutely brilliant book about the fifty years leading up to the French Revolution, looking at the pamphlets, broadsheets, letters, and police spy reports around various significant events, that cumulatively show how the Revolution became imaginable, and a step that could be taken. We so seldom get the point of view of ordinary people, but here we have police spies writing down what they’re saying in cafes, as well as reactions in diaries to pamphlet wars.
For example, when Louis XV had two sisters as mistresses that was seen as shocking, incestuous, and when he replaced them with a woman who was a commoner people saw that as a debasement of his majesty and wrote dirty songs attacking her, and when he replaced her with a woman who may have been a sex worker, people lost even more respect for his sanctity and wrote songs that weren’t about her but about him. It’s not that a king who had slept only with noble mistresses wouldn’t have had his head cut off—it was Louis XVI who had his head cut off, after all—it’s that the slow erosion of the ridiculous level of respect for the king was an ingredient in what made the Revolution possible. (It’s interesting to focus on this example because our own attention to celebrity romance is so different.) Darnton has a lot of examples, and a lot of evidence, from hot air balloons to the American Revolution, and the book is not only enlightening but consistently entertaining. It’s rare for me to find a book I think absolutely everyone would enjoy and gain by reading, but this is as close as I’ve ever come. Read it. Give it to people for their birthdays.
Wild Mountain Thyme — Rosamunde Pilcher (1978)
In 1978 Pilcher was fifty-four, and her attempt to write a romance with the mores of the Seventies doesn’t work as well as the books she wrote (before and after this) that are focused earlier in the century. This book is three things: a compelling portrait of a strange selfish playwright, a fascinating glimpse of a Scottish estate, and a weirdly perfunctory romance. There’s some wonderful description, and the selfish guy is very well done, especially from his own POV.
Autobiography — John Stuart Mill (1873)
What a weird person Mill was, and not really in the ways you’d expect from someone who was taught Greek at three. I was impressed how much he acknowledged the help of his wife and step-daughter, and generally fascinated by what an oddity he was. I wonder if there’s a modern biography of him? However, when I tried to read On Liberty I couldn’t keep awake. But despite him being the kind of person he is from the time he’s from, this has the intimacy I want out of a memoir, and even when he isn’t telling me something he’s not papering over it.
If on a winter’s night a traveler — Italo Calvino (1979)
What an audacious wonderful terrible book! Calvino truly was an amazing writer. This book essentially has four characters, they’re called you, he, Ludmilla, and Lotaria—because even when he’s being brilliant Calvino remains as sexist as ever. When I was young I used to believe that if I introduced myself to very sexist writers like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and said “Look, here I am, I am a human being like you, despite my anatomy!” they’d say “Ah, of course!” After many years of trying this and instead being welcomed to the category of “Women are delightful mysterious creatures, Jo is of course an exception in being just like a real person only with female anatomy,” I had to abandon this belief. I suspect were Calvino still alive I could perhaps get across the message “Women are people!” if I had it printed on a t-shirt that was tight across my chest. Gah.
Anyway, moving swiftly on, despite this, this book is incredible. You start to read a book by Italo Calvino with the title If on a winter’s night a traveler and then discover it has been misbound and you’ve actually read a different book, so you try to find that book, and you—the protagonist—are led on and on through book after book, title after title, adventure after adventure, beginning after beginning, country after country, until you suddenly come around a corner and end up at an end that made me laugh aloud with delight. It’s meta and clever—too clever for its own good—but also charming. It’s not half as cold as I was expecting. This is a very weird book, and I’m glad I finally read more than the first chapter.
The Switch — Beth O’Leary (2020)
Delightful novel in which a grandmother and granddaughter change places, the grandmother going to London and the granddaughter taking her place in a small Yorkshire village. I didn’t read this for ages because there’s a dead sister, always a hard topic for me, but it is dealt with well and sensitively, with people reacting to grief in different but realistic ways. This was a lot of fun, well written, excellent characters with the kind of age range you’d expect given the premise. Neither of the romances is a surprise, but they each happen because of the other family member.
The Tatami Time Machine Blues — Tomihiko Morimi (2023)
Sequel to Tatami Galaxy which I read a while ago, and set in the same student residence and with the same characters, but in an alternate world—there were four alternates in the first book, this is a fifth, there could be hundreds. But this isn’t another iteration of Galaxy; this is a completely different story with a time machine, the remote to an air conditioner, and all time and space at the mercy of a group of slacker students. Not as good as the original, but well worth reading.
At Mrs Lippincote’s — Elizabeth Taylor (1945)
Agonisingly well written but difficult to read novel of miserable people in WWII Britain, trying to be happy and with no idea of the torture they are inflicting on each other. The characters are great, the writing is great, and second-wave feminism can’t come soon enough to rescue these people.
Watch Your Back! — Donald Westlake (2005)
Re-read, bath book. Comic crime caper in which the criminals have to rescue the bar they’ve been meeting in since The Hot Rock (1970) and which has served as the background to all the books, and which the reader has come to care a lot about. This is a very interesting case of jeopardy—why do we care? There’s not much bad that you can really believe is going to happen to a group of con men in volume 13 of a series—you know they’ll have another narrow escape. Westlake has rung a lot of changes, so we can see them in different environments and so on, winning, losing, lots of things since they stole that one diamond half a dozen times in book one, but really What’s The Worst That Could Happen? is the best book in the series and there’s nowhere to go from there. So we read them to hang out with the characters—but no! The O.J. Bar and Grill is at risk, and convincingly at risk, and suddenly I really care.
Papal Bull — Margaret Meserve (2021)
Terrific book about the papal use of printing and propaganda in the late fifteenth century, from Rome (and its enemies, like Florence and Venice) before the Reformation. It’s all deeply political, and it’s such a fascinating angle on the Pazzi Conspiracy and the underside of the papacies of Sixtus and Innocent, and then some absolutely fascinating choices under Julius and Leo. Well written too. Highly recommended for staff of the papal election of 1492, but probably a little too specialist for a normal reader.
Royal Airs — Sharon Shinn (2013)
Volume 2 of the Elemental Blessings series. Read volume 1 first, though actually this is pretty standalone, so it probably wouldn’t matter all that much. I love this world, this was a really good story set in it, and it’s actually very unusual to have a series about technological change in a fantasy world. If you like Goblin Emperor you will like Shinn a lot—she’s an underrated writer, she’s really good and she’s written some really enjoyable and interesting books and nobody pays enough attention to her. I loved this one, it very much was not a repeat of the first one, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
As Long As You Love Me — Ann Aguirre (2014)
YA romance novel by Aguirre, no genre content in this one, but it’s good. Realistic, except that moving to Canada for either work or to join a partner who is working is actually much harder than this makes it seem. Excellent detail on fixing up a house, excellent friend group. Very grabby, the obstacles to romance are people needing to fix themselves before they can be good partners, which isn’t easy to do but Aguirre does it gracefully and effectively.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World — Irene Vallejo (2022)
Long popular history of books and reading, not just on papyrus and not just in the Ancient World—this isn’t one of those books like Salt that has a microhistorical focus, this is broad ranging and is really focused on literacy itself. Because Vallejo is Spanish, there’s a focus on Spain that’s much more interesting to me than the Anglophone world’s usual focus on itself, especially when she talks about the Roman writers who were from specific parts of Spain. I enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed this more if more of it had been new to me, which means it would be a terrific starter book for someone who wanted to know more about the subject.
The Faery Reel — Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling (ed.) (2004)
Nina Kiriki Hoffman on her own would have been worth the price of this volume, but there’s also Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag” and a number of other great stories, so even though some of them were doing that “Celtic folklore in the US” thing that I dislike, I skipped those, and on the whole this volume was better than I was expecting.
Any Old Diamonds — K.J. Charles (2019)
Gay romance, set in the Gay Nineties, with jewel thieves, betrayal, murder, family secrets, sex, and trains. Charles is very good, and the twist surprised me. Fun, but not as good as the Society of Gentleman books.
Hild — Nicola Griffith (2013)
Re-read. Reminded of it by Ulfhildr and knowing I had the sequel waiting, I plunged back into the damp green world of seventh-century Northumbria. I’d forgotten almost all the detail of the book in the ten years since I read it, and retained almost all the atmosphere. It’s a historical novel, not fantasy, which is an interesting choice as it would have been very easy for Griffith to cross that genre line here as she does in Spear. However, Hild’s prophecies come down to paying attention, which is in many ways more interesting, and more science fictional. There’s lots of detail of animals and birds and growing things, and lots of detail of making and shaping and fighting. I love the cultural detail, both the real and the invented—writing something like this is like using the warp of history with the weft of invention filling it in, and the weaving simile is no coincidence. We see a lot of cloth being made. The people are solid and real, all of them, and this is the story of a girl growing up and finding her place in a complex and moving world. Powerful, compelling, and very, very long—but I went straight on into Menewood when I came to the end, I didn’t even consider taking a break.
Various Works of Poetry — Hilaire Belloc
I could actually count this as a whole bunch of books, but let’s not. I read Belloc’s Sonnets and Verse (for grownups) and then several books of his very funny poetry for children. His natural gift is for scansion, and he has a delightfully acerbic sense of humour, though some of his funny poems are funnier than others. I had read them as a child, but only “Matilda” (who told such Dreadful Lies) since. What I was actually looking for was more things like the poem “Tarantella” (“Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?”) which I remembered last year in Spain. I didn’t find any, but I quite enjoyed what I did find. All of Belloc’s work is available as free ebooks on Project Gutenberg.
