June was a terrific month, I started at home in Montreal for Scintillation, then towards the end of the month flew to Sweden to take a boat to the Åland islands in Finland for Archipelacon 2, this year’s Eurocon. I saw lots of friends and was on a bunch of interesting panels, and it was just terrific. I read thirteen very assorted books, and they were mostly great too.
The Space Between Worlds — Micaiah Johnson (2020)
This is a very odd book. It’s SF set after an apocalypse and it’s about people who can travel to alternate universes, but only those where their alternate selves are dead. You know how some books are vast sweeps of epic and others are intricate miniatures painted with a tiny brush? This is the latter. It’s interested in only two towns (the rest of the post-apocalyptic future world essentially doesn’t exist) and in a very small number of people, though in multiple versions of all of them. It’s very, very good, at the scale it’s working on, but it’s an intimate scale that’s unusual for SF, and which sometimes runs into oddities with genre expectations. It’s slightly claustrophobic, but memorable and effective and very compellingly written. I won’t be reading the sequel, I’ve definitely had enough of this world and these people, but I will be looking out for what Johnson does next.
Olive in Italy — Moray Dalton (1909)
I’m familiar with Dalton as a writer of cosy mysteries, but this is a book about a girl without family going to Italy and, to my surprise, having a thoroughly bad time. This is free on Gutenberg but I can’t recommend it, it’s depressing and just not very interesting.
The Secret of Chimneys — Agatha Christie (1925)
Technically a re-read because I read all of these when I was a kid, but I didn’t remember it at all. A country house, love letters used for blackmail, any number of murdered bodies… it’s all nonsense of course, full of the ridiculous implausibility Christie does so well, and this early in her career she took it more seriously and doesn’t leave any dangling loose ends. Not a good book, but a fun read.
Ragged Maps — Ian R. MacLeod (2023)
Another stellar collection of short stories from Ian MacLeod, who is a terrific writer with the enviable ability to take an SF idea, work out the secondary and tertiary implications, and apply it to real characters living in the interesting world he’s come up with. I’d read some of these before but read them again with pleasure, and others were new to me and very good. MacLeod is one of our best writers, and we should pay attention to him.
Bath Tangle — Georgette Heyer (1925)
Re-read, bath book, and also a Bath book, so that amused me. This is a piece of froth, in which people move to Bath, take the waters, and get engaged to the wrong people. It all comes out in the end like a well-done sudoku. Not Heyer’s very best, but readable and fun, and the characters have very sympathetic problems.
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library — Michiko Aoyama (2021, English translation by Alison Watts published 2023)
A Japanese light novel which is technically genre, but only just. This is a short collection of charming stories about people who have problems that are solved by a (possibly) magical librarian giving them a book they didn’t know they wanted along with a felted creature that she’s made. This sounds more simplistic than it is—it’s actually a lovely window into another culture’s expectations about everyday life. The term “light novel” can be a bit vague, but the books are generally aimed at a younger audience, and many are originally published in frequently used kanji, and thus easier to read. I enjoyed this a lot and I think others might too.
Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age — Ann M. Blair (2010)
Before 1550, it was possible to read everything if you worked at it; after that, there was just too much, and people started to write books about what to read and making books of extracts and encyclopedias, and there was a lot of anxiety around all of this. Fascinating book about the different systems people tried in an attempt to keep track of all the knowledge. They invented things we still use like footnotes and tabs and indexes, and also weird things like patent cabinets in which you put extracts on different layers with mnemonics for finding them again. Nobody now would think they could know everything, though there was a time in the recent past when I thought we knew how to find everything. I hadn’t really thought there was ever a time when you could read all the books—and in fact you couldn’t, because they weren’t counting things in languages other than Latin; they were barely thinking about Arabic, never mind Chinese. Blair has a chapter on the world outside Europe that’s very interesting, but her focus here is Europe and the changing perspectives on what a person can know. Great book, readable and interesting and does not require any prior knowledge of anything.
The Husbands — Holly Gramazio (2024)
Re-read, book club, and we had a really great book club discussing it. I hadn’t meant to re-read it, as I’d read it fairly recently, but after opening it up to remind myself, I found I was halfway through it before I noticed. Extremely readable book about a woman who isn’t married in her original life but finds husbands she might have married in alternate worlds coming down out of her attic, and vanishing again to be replaced by another if she sends them back up. The book rings the changes on this theme extremely well, in a thoughtful and excellent way. It’s an interesting contrast to The Space Between Worlds because that too is about alternate worlds and just a few characters, but here we have a very wide cast of husbands, and the wider world isn’t affected at all.
The Humble Administrator’s Garden — Vikram Seth (1985)
An early book of poems by Seth, finally available as an ebook, and just as delightful and unexpected as all his poetry. Highly recommended if you enjoy poetry at all.
Harvard Classics Volume 33: Voyages and Travel — edited by Charles W. Eliot (1909)
I’ve been reading my way through the Harvard classics volume for a long time now, and this one is odd. It’s the part of Herodotus about Egypt, part of Tacitus’ Germania, and bits of voyages of Drake and Raleigh. All of it was enjoyable, none of it was a whole book, it did not feel connected in any rational way. I guess the theme was like the Le Guin story where aliens ask to be told about Earth and the ambassador just tells them about Venice—there is a whole planet, humans have been on it for a while, you can’t see all of it at once, but here are some angles.
Camp Concentration — Thomas M. Disch (1967)
Re-read, for book club. This is a grim book, and it didn’t feel any less grim on this re-read. The theme of increasing intelligence must have been in the air, as Flowers for Algernon came out the year before in novel form. Perhaps this was a response to the novella? A vain poet and conscientious objector in a future war finds himself part of an intelligence increasing experiment. Brilliantly written in full New Wave style, and not very long. None of the characters is sympathetic, and it has aged oddly, some of it feeling more relevant than when it was written, other parts being things nobody would write now. Read it, but brace yourself. Again, this led to a very good book club discussion.
Mrs Tim of the Regiment — D.E. Stevenson (1932)
I’d previously read the second book in this series. This is much less good. Hester is married to Tim, he’s in a regiment, she has to move around because of his job, they have two children, and servants, and have to move to Scotland… and then in the second half, Hester is staying with a friend in the Highlands and two men are in love with her and she doesn’t notice. The resolution—or what would be the resolution in the love story the book keeps threatening to turn into—is averted. Hester herself, whose diary the book purports to be, is a good point of view for understanding some things and not others, and the story is not without charm, but the whole book is unbalanced and doesn’t quite work. Stevenson has written much better.
Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 — Christopher Clark (2023)
This is a very long and detailed book about the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and why they both did and didn’t change the world. They didn’t become the revolution people expected, but they changed regimes in many places, and had long-lasting effects. This is a book full of details that also constantly pulls back to look at the big picture, with the effect of speedy communications meaning that, for instance, events in Paris affected those in Hungary and vice versa, even when the people weren’t in touch at all except by reading newspapers about what was going on. It’s a really fascinating time, and this is an excellent account and reflection.
thanks so much for this Jo – yet again you are my wonderful go-to guide – and in this case, Too Much to Know is a totally serendipitous choice – I was looking for a book just like this. Very many thanks! By the way, have you read any Karen Lord? I think you might like it – & I’d love to know what you think – it does odd things with narrative structure… best starting point maybe with The Best of All Possible Worlds…
I agree- Mrs. Tim of the Regiment is the least of the series. The other 3 are excellent. I’m using House on the Cliff as my bedtime audiobook.
I just reread Miss Clara, possibly my favorite of Noel Streatfeild’s adult novels.
I find the Mrs Tim books, which were based on D E Stevenson’s experiences as an officer’s wife, fascinating for the incidental details. For example, Hester’s husband gets a promotion which entitles him to a horse, so she has to find accommodation with a stable. Does the army pay for the feed? Provide a groom? Does he commute to work on the horse?
The first book reminded me of the Provincial Lady books- with spousal relationships that serm like they don’t like each other.
I admit I had thought most of Heyer’s Bath books were much later in her career. I certainly read Bath Tangle (I’ve read every Heyer novel except My Lord John and 1.5 of the very early and painfully dire contemporary romances) and I remember liking it but that’s all.
Camp Concentration is a great novel, I think. Or I thought that the last time I read it (turn of the millennium, maybe?) Possibly he was responding not to the novel version of Flowers for Algernon but the 1959 novelette?
Regarding Micaiah Johnson’s sequel: it has a salutary rage to it that distinguishes it from the first. But the world is much the same. I admit to a certain weakness for that sort of thing myself, but setting that aside, if one takes that as given I think the sequel is rewarding.
Does anyone know the title of the “Le Guin story where aliens ask to be told about Earth and the ambassador just tells them about Venice”?
Le Guins’ story is “The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb”. It’s in The Compass Rose.
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is actually not a light novel. Light novels generally have at least a few pages of illustrations and Aoyama makes use of less frequent kanji in her writing, which I’m guessing are more literary but I’m not an expert. I could easily see how the translation might have seemed as though the original was a simplistic book though. Translations from Japanese almost always read (to me) as if they’ve lost the original flavor of the writing.
I like being able to point to your columns when people wonder why anyone rereads books.
now I’m pushing The Husbnds even higher up the to-read pile.