October was a really excellent month. I was in Florence writing the whole time except for two weekends in Bologna—one for a tortellini festival and one to see a rock opera of Henry VI in Italian, both really fun. On the 31st I left for Chicago, where I am now. I wrote around half a novel, and I saw lots of beautiful art and architecture, and Ada (Palmer) was there, and friends visited, and we ate great food, and I read just six books. But actually this is the kind of month I want in my life. Some of the books were wonderful, but oddly everything I finished this month was fiction. I am in the middle of a lot of long nonfiction right now, which I’ll no doubt tell you about in due course.
The Husbands — Holly Gramazio (2024) This is amazing. Lauren is an ordinary British single woman who comes home one day to find a husband coming down from the attic. For him, and in the photos and texts she finds on her phone, they’ve been married for some time, but to her he’s a total stranger. And when he goes back to the attic, a different totally strange husband comes out. She has to figure out what’s going on, and the ways her life is the same and different. This book is most like Ken Grimwood’s Replay or Groundhog Day but it’s not replays—time advances, it’s just the past leading to this point that has changed. And as long as she can get a husband to go back up to the attic, a new one will come down, and she’s switched timelines again.
This is a wacky premise but it’s well thought through and well examined in a genre-savvy way. It’s very interesting thinking about where this fits in genre—because it’s a small-scale change, just her life, there’s no politics or world-scale changes, and the resolution, when we get it, is an emotional resolution of one woman’s life. But it’s written by someone familiar with how SF works, and it’s not only well written (compellingly written), it isn’t shallow; it thinks through consequences and second and third order consequences, it plays the “what if” game like a science fiction novel. I loved it, and I recommend it to everyone, because I really want to talk to other people who have read it. Also, it’s delightful and funny and clever. But I’ll be thinking about this and maybe re-reading it when next year’s award nomination season comes around, because it’s really, really good.
At Bertram’s Hotel — Agatha Christie (1965) Technically a re-read, but I hadn’t read it for at least fifty years. This is absolutely Christie at her best. There’s a hotel where everything is “like it used to be,” and you can even get crumpets and seed cake… but of course there’s something sinister under the comfort. It’s about nostalgia, and it isn’t in favour, while also itself handing out lashings of nostalgia—now double-edged, as 1965 is itself a long time ago. The “golden age” of detective fiction was the Twenties and Thirties, but Christie lived until 1976 and kept on writing. The world of country-house weekends and a little gentle murder was changing, and here she’s consciously reflecting on that. You can wallow in the nostalgia, and you’ll get to feel uncomfortable for doing so. Thoroughly enjoyable reading experience.
Again, Dangerous Visions — Harlan Ellison (1972) Re-read. It’s not that I’d exactly forgotten what an annoying, bombastic, self-important, irritating person Ellison was, but I kind of had, and reading the introduction and the intros to the stories here brought it all back. Dangerous Visions was a significant anthology, and I loved it. This later volume is much less impressive, even if I discount all the Ellison self-promotional nonsense. It has some top-notch work by Le Guin, Wilhelm, and others, but also a lot of quite lacklustre forgettable work. I remembered it as being not as good, but… well, sometimes the suck fairy works overtime.
The Wake-Up Call — Beth O’Leary (2023) Romance novel about two people who work in a hotel and have crossed wires about their feelings for each other. The problem with this book, which is otherwise really good, is that it all revolves around a Big Misunderstanding—meaning that if the characters actually talked about a thing, the thing keeping them apart would be instantly resolved, so they have to not talk about it, and that’s annoying. The No-Show, The Switch and The Flatshare are all much better than this. This one has its moments, and it’s funny, and there are a lot of excellent minor characters, but it all rocks on that one misunderstanding (which it’s apparent very early on is a misunderstanding). Good characters. Good setting. But don’t lead with “why did X do Y?” and then have it turn out that they never did X in the first place. Misdelivered letters were a bad device when Thomas Hardy did it, and they’re not any better now.
The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume 2: Oakland Dragon Blues — Peter S. Beagle (2023) Beagle is a terrific short story writer, and there are some really powerful things here, and some really charming things. I’d put him with Theodora Goss and Kelly Link as people who are doing really great work in fantasy at short length. People think of fantasy as needing long novels, but as Beagle shows here, it can really work in short stories and novelettes. He’s famous for The Last Unicorn but there are two other terrific unicorn stories here, along with some wonderful dragons. He makes it seem so easy. My favourite story here concerns a family of migrating centaurs and the very real way some boys in Brooklyn find to help them.
The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul — Victoria Goddard (2022) Goddard’s books are linked and connected in ways that resemble macramé. This one is a direct sequel to The Return of Fitzroy Angursell and takes place at the same time as some of At the Feet of the Sun and features characters from lots of other books, but it doesn’t really matter. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I’ve enjoyed most of her books because I went into it not liking Pali from when she shows up in The Hands of the Emperor and was mean, and then I got to have that from her POV here and she was still mean. A lot of this book was spiky people being spiky, and that just made it less fun. I also think you probably do need to have read some other Goddard to appreciate this—unlike Derring-Do for Beginners—and possibly some more than I have, in fact, read. So don’t start here.
