Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Liz

If there is a truism about our world as it exists now, it could be that teenagers will be assholes to each other and everyone around them. Not even necessarily on purpose (although sometimes quite intentionally), they tend to be feeling everything and not yet have the skills to deal with emotions and people, or know how to get into or out of situations that spark those intense emotions without being cruel.

Moreno-Garcia knows this, and her teenage characters are frustrating and engaging both, and the adult versions of the same people still recognizable, and in at least one case, still lashing out to stay away from emotions. Of course, since that character is coming home in 2009 to attend the funeral of her dead father and clear out his apartment, emotions are everywhere.

Parts of this book remind me of Y Tu Mama Tambien, a movie by Alfonso Cuaron that I'm very fond of, in that both centre around teenagers who have no idea how to really broach the silence and admit that they want, that they desire, that they, even more scarily, have feelings for each other. In a weird way, bodies are easier than the vulnerability of emotions.

In 1998, three teenagers who feel like outcasts are friends. Meche (short for Mercedes), obsessed with music and better at science than humanities; Sebastian, poor, loving literature; Daniela, still slightly childish, prone to frilly things, but kind. Meche and Sebastian are really the main characters here, although Daniela is the malleable glue that holds two strong personalities together.

As they negotiate the treacherous terrain of high school, and the fact that there are unacknowledged or partially acknowledged depths of feeling between them, Meche discovers that she can do magic, with the right record, the right song. She pulls Sebastian and Daniela into this with her, even as her parents marriage is dissolving.  It's a heady idea, that you can change the world as a teenager, make it more right, more what it should be than it is.

Of course, since Meche isn't a particularly nice teenager, that soon spills over into revenge. At first, passed off as righteous anger, but then the power of being able to hurt people moves into retribution for smaller and smaller things, and her friends pull away.

All this is interspersed with Meche excavating her father's apartment and enduring the days of his novena. Daniela and Sebastian come back into her life, even though she screams at them to come out. They were with the emotions she buried, those she has kept at bay as she fled Mexico to work in Norway. Of course they bubble up.

All the feelings of high school, of wanting and not having words, of being afraid of wanting, of hurting and wanting to hurt - this book evokes all those feelings that remain complicated into our adult lives. Meche may have learned particularly little in the intervening years, but she's a prickly, slightly obnoxious host into this world where magic has a cost and friendships are broken.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amy.

For some reason, this is the second book in this series of reviews by Umberto Eco - apparently my friends are collectively convinced I need to read more of his books. I can't disagree - I've quite enjoyed all of his books that I've read. What's more, I found this one really funny. I mean, it wasn't a barrel-of-laughs-a-minute, but there were frequently bits that made me laugh out loud. Often enough that this will stick in my head as a very funny book.

Which is weird, because I'm not sure it would hit most people that way. It's fairly dense prose, and I think you have to know a certain amount of what he's writing about to get the parts that are amusing. Or maybe they would be funny to everyone, I might be underestimating people. I don't think I am, though.

What I kept telling people about this book when I was midway through it is that it reads like it's one of two possible results of having read a bunch of those Templar/Rosicrucian/Blood of Christ conspiracy theory books (like Holy Blood, Holy Grail) that were all the rage. One way to go would be completely unironically, a la Da Vinci Code, a treasure hunt with a material ending. The second way, the way of Umberto Eco here, would be with an extremely liberal dollop of irony, humour, and literary analysis.

In Foucault's Pendulum, the main character and his two friends work for a dodgy publishing house - one side self-publishes authors and pockets most of the money, the other puts out a few genuine publications, and is moving into the realm of the occult. The main character (whose name I don't remember!) did a very sober, scholarly thesis on The Templars, so as the book begins, he is called into his friend Belbo's office to go over a manuscript someone has submitted to the self-publisher.

It's a mishmash of conspiracy theories, all held together by duct tape and string. This leads to some delightful talk about truth and belief, and how people sometimes convince themselves that "able to be conceived of" is the same as "true."  If they can think of something that might have happened, that assumes the same force as it having happened.

Eventually, the main character and his two friends start to come up with their own Templar conspiracy theory in jest, bringing together disparate bits and pulling them together into something that sounds coherent but is really a big mess. And it was mostly through these sections that I kept finding funny bits - logical leaps that are breathtaking, stated plainly, and then people taking them as givens. Or the fake plan, the creators mimicking that, but almost falling into the fallacy as well.

It's a tour of all the weirdness in historical conspiracy theory, blown up to extreme proportions. I'd tried to read it years ago, but I was certainly much more ready to actually plow through it this time. And I'd read the last few pages before embarking, so I knew the ending, and that certainly helped, giving everything that happened a slightly different feel.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Eva

While I was reading this book, I was swept along, absolutely enchanted. I wasn't sure where it was going, and it was entirely unlike anything I'd read before, and I was loving it. Now I'm done, and I'm perhaps a little perplexed about where we ended up, or what it all meant, but the journey was so enjoyable I would have a hard time regretting the ride. And perhaps the feeling like the meaning is a wisp of fog just out of reach fits very well with the book as a whole.

In the way that life has of handing you little synchronicities, I have just started working on learning a new Tarot deck, one that came my way when a coworker said that she'd had it for a while and would never use it, would I like it? I gave it a good home, and am now finally settling down to familiarize myself, in a long process that will take me months to a year before I feel anywhere near comfortable enough with it to read for others using that deck. The synchronicity comes in because it's the Arthurian Tarot, so I was reading The Buried Giant while learning that the Knight of Pentacles in this deck is Sir Bors, and the Emperor is, predictably, Arthur. Or last night, when the card that came out of the deck for me to think about was Stone Five, a card of a standing stone in a barren field during a blizzard, with no shelter and nowhere to hide from the elements that batter it.

What I'm getting at, in addition to my excitement at embarking on learning a new Tarot deck, is Arthuriana, and trying to interact with it in a way that is open to interpretation and movement of meaning, which I feel this process has in common with Ishiguro's work. The Buried Giant is set in post-Arthur Britain, with Briton and Saxons settlements side by side, and a mist over the land that shrouds memories and dulls disagreements, paralyzing and soothing at the same time.

This is the story of an old Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, who are unhappy in the community in which they live, cold and no longer allowed to have candles in their small dwelling. They resolve to walk to their son's village, which is, they're sure, not that far away. Most of their past has faded in the mist that surrounds the land, but nevertheless, they set out.

On the way, they  meet a Saxon warrior, a boy who his village believed to have been bitten by an ogre, a monastery with some very odd practices, and, oh yes, Sir Gawain. The warrior is there to kill the dragon whose breath covers the land and causes the amnesia, but Gawain claims that quest as his own.

In between moments of forgetfulness, vague hints of the shared past of Axl and Beatrice emerge, worries that they would not be as dear to each other with full memories as without, and this is a microcosm of the larger theme of the impact of forgetfulness on the world. Would it solve divisions of tribe and history? Would it take away more than it gives? Would people still be whole people without substantial parts of their memories?

What we see may not be warfare, but it's far from free from petty suspicion and even mob justice. The boy bitten by the ogre is almost killed by villagers who suspect that he may turn into an ogre himself. They are suspicious of strangers, but know not why.

What could be bad enough to want a cloud of forgetfulness to settle over the land? Ishiguro carefully does not say, but knowledge of the Arthur myth and several hints in the book lead in a certain direction. Look for the worst thing King Arthur is ever reputed to have done, and you have a place to start.

The question I'm left with is...is there more? I liked this book a whole lot, and yet I wonder if I missed something. Were Axl and Beatrice supposed to be larger figures from the Arthurian myth than is completely obvious? There's a reference to adultery, which leads me down one path, and a bit at the end about recognizing the boatman who is going to ferry them across the water to and island. I just don't feel like I know, and I'm not sure if I should know.

But I'm okay if I don't. This is strangely about memory collective and personal, about old age and love, about life coming to a close and what comes after, all in elegant prose that was delightful to drift through.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Lisa

I was reading this book in the kind of circumstances that, perhaps, did a disservice to the book itself. I was distracted and upset, and read in short bursts. I wish I'd had the time and the opportunity to sit down and let long sections of A God in Ruins seep through me. As it was, I did really enjoy it, but I also felt like I might have loved it had the circumstances been a bit different. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm looking forward to rereading it, and the first time was enough to definitely warrant a second read.

The second thing that comes to mind is to contrast this book to the ones we've been reading the last few months in my science fiction and fantasy bookclub, all of which have centered around books written by people with direct experience of war. It's been interesting to think about similarities and differences between these authors, and differences that exist between them and authors who write about war but haven't experienced it.

It's funny, though, because Kate Atkinson's book doesn't feel as far afield as do some of the other books we could think of that valorized war and gave a feeling of purpose or story to battle. Through the sections of the book where Teddy is flying his fighting missions in the air to Germany, whether he lives or dies seems very arbitrary. He is lucky, but little else.

So, what's the book about? I'm thinking about how much to say, because this is a book where the discovery is part of the journey. It's the story of Teddy's life, is a safe way to start. Both his life during the war, and his life after, when he settles down, marries, and eventually has a grown-up daughter who is remarkably selfish, and two grandchildren who love him. As we dance back and forth in time, we get to see why some of those things occur, but I have to say that even when we find out the root of Viola's issue with her father, she is still a character that I just want to throttle a good portion of the time. Although I think maybe that's the point.

It's a life lived quietly, after the war, with huge domestic disruptions, but largely unaffected by interactions with the politics of the greater world. There are ways in which it reminded me of Jo Walton's My Real Children, and I hope I'm not giving too much away by making that comparison. The characters all felt so real, even when they were (or particularly when they were) ones I wanted to strangle.

At the end of his life, is Teddy the god in ruins? You'll have to read and see, but the title itself led me down many paths while I was reading, comparing it to this idea and the other, but I really don't want to say much more. This book is much less overtly the sort of something else that the companion novel, Life After Life, was. And yet it's there, and when it became apparent I was moved, but not as moved as I was by the relationships Teddy had with others in his life.

I do want to go back to the book when I'm bringing a better me to the experience. Some day.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Kelsey

I saw the movie first, and I'm not entirely sure that that wasn't a mistake. You know when books get made into movies that they're going to be, in some fundamental way, different from the words on the page. Not necessarily in a bad way, but there are things that are easier to capture in words than in movies, And in the same way, you can do different things with visuals than you can with words. But, on a fundamental level, movies often aren't as deep because it's hard to get the complexity of inner thoughts and feelings in their entirety up on the screen.

I have seen adaptations I loved, and adaptations I hated, but there is no case of which I can think where what was on the screen was exactly what was in the book, no more, no less.

Until now. Because what is in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret is almost precisely what we see on screen in Scorsese's movie. There is really nothing in the book that is not in the screen, and in the movie version, Scorsese adds some depth to the background and surroundings that the book lacks. In short, the movie feels richer than the book, and that is so extraordinarily rare.

It isn't that this is a bad book, it's just that there isn't really a lot to it. It's over 500 pages long, so I picked it up around the same time I started The Brothers Karamazov, and expected each to take me quite a while. Then I actually started to read, and found myself buzzing through 200 pages in about 20 minutes. I mean, yes, I read quickly, but what that really means is that only about, say 40 pages of those 200 were text. And even the pages with text often didn't have very much.

The pictures are pretty, but they aren't the type to hold my attention individually for long periods of time. They are like nothing so much as more detailed storyboards for the movies the book loves, and/or preparation for the eventual making of this book into a movie.

It's the story of Hugo, the mechanical man he tries to repair, a girl who snoops around his life, and one of the pioneers of what could be done on film, but who has been largely forgotten. Or, at least, he thinks so. Hugo is an orphan and deserted by his uncle, sneaks around the train station repairing the clocks that his uncle is employed to maintain.

He is also repairing a mechanical man that is one of his last mementos of his father, and I could go on, but I'd just be putting more details on what I've already written, and there really isn't much more to this book than that.

It made a lovely movie, and as a book it is inoffensive, and had I read it first, I might have enjoyed it more. But reading it second, I was hoping for a more filled-out story, the parts that didn't make it to the screen in the interests of time, but that is really not what I found. I found the movie redux, or the movie before the movie, and in a book about the magic of the movies, it's not that that's not an accomplishment. It just doesn't take advantage at any of the things that make a book a different medium.

Baudolino by Umberto Eco

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Ben

In that curiously relaxing time between Christmas and New Year's, when there's not much to do except sit around and read (if you're lucky enough to work somewhere that shuts down between the two), I picked up Baudolino. It was one of the pile of books I plowed my way through while visiting my in-laws. I hadn't had that much concentrated reading time in quite a while. Gosh, it was nice!

Baudolino, in particular, was a very enjoyable way to spend my reading time. It frequently made me grin with the medieval excesses of Baudolino and his compatriots. I described it to my mother-in-law as a romp, but while it is certainly that, it is also an intelligent and incisive look at legends and myths, stories that justify power and how they can be manipulated, and how even those who are creating the stories can come to believe in them.

And, of course, we get the preparation for and an expedition to the Kingdom of Prester John, a fine and fascinating medieval legend. Having visited already (in a fictional way) through Catherynne Valente's Habitation of the Blessed, it was extremely enjoyable to see another author's take on the same elements, the same fantastical creatures.

There's one section I loved a lot, where on the outskirts of Prester John's kingdom, surrounded by fabulous creatures, where Baudolino tries to tell the son of Prester John about the quite usual animals that exist in the world as Baudolino knows it, and from the words alone, no pictures, one can see how they might be confabulated to be just as fantastic as the blemmyae or satyrs or any of the other creatures we dismiss as the medieval imagination not knowing the difference between fiction and fact.

It is also the story of Baudolino's surrogate father, Frederick Barbarossa, and the struggles between Frederick and the Catholic Church, the other European leaders, and the smaller villages that still might be rebellious, for all that they're populated by ordinary people. In the midst of a few anti-popes, Frederick looks for divine proof that he should have supremacy over the church, and from this Baudolino creates reality by creating fiction, both in how he helps Frederick solve the siege of a city and in giving metaphorical support for his kingship from Prester John.

Baudolino gathers around him a group of friends, notable in its diversity - Eco has less trouble with the idea that there was diversity in the medieval world than many a fantasy author, possibly because he knows a bit more about it.  Many are in love with the idea of Prester John and help Baudolino craft a letter from Prester John to Frederick, even as they come to believe in what they're writing must be true because they want so badly for it to be true.

Introduce the Holy Grail in there, and it gets even more complicated and delightful. As a trip through medieval thought, legend, science, and politics, Baudolino is rich, and on the level of pure story, it's so much fun. I am sometimes intimidated by the idea of Umberto Eco, but not so much by his actual books.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Matt

Imagine magic as being something very much like the law - if you make a good enough argument and have the documents on your side, you can change the world. That's part of the premise of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. When a god is killed in one of the last places to even have a god, lawyer-magicians on two sides show up to fight it out over how exactly he'll be resurrected, according to which contracts, and depending on what liability can be proved.

This sounds like something that, in the wrong hands, could be very dull, but it is not. Gladstone has created something here that is most similar to Earthbound urban fantasy, but set it in an entirely other world, one where humans figured out how to harness the beliefs that gave gods their powers, and bound it into contracts and power. This caused a war with the gods, in which most of the gods died at the hands of the upstart humans. 

One city's god had no part in the war, although his lover joined and died. Just as the dust is settling, many years later, Kos the Everburning turns up dead. An associate from a magical necromantic firm takes on a new apprentice, Tara, who had been a student at the school for magic, but was tossed out (literally, given that the school floated above the clouds and she was unceremoniously dropped over the side.) 

The counsel for the opposing side was the professor who dropped her over the side of the school to, presumably, her death, so she's got some scores to settle. But mostly, she needs to prove herself. Tara is an interesting main character - she's so invested in learning a kind of magic that will eventually strip the meat from her bones that she is willing to forsake family, connection, and almost anything to get back into that world.

Driven as she is, though, she's still sympathetic, human enough to be horrified at what one of her professors had "accomplished" to try to take him down. She's clever, and in way over her head, but knows enough to enlist the chainsmoking monk who was present when his god failed to show up, the monk's childhood friend, now an agent of Justice and also a vampire bite junkie, and a vampire pirate captain. 

This book was a great deal of fun, while also having some things to say about power, about religious presence, and the effect of the void on those who once had it filled and are now looking to reclaim what made them feel whole.

Add in to that some ravenous shadows, another murder, a gargoyle who has his face stolen from him, along with his will, and some pleasing twists and turns that you'd expect from a book that, after all, hinges on something like a court case. There's plenty of action as well, particularly when the gargoyles are involved.

The concept of Justice as it is expressed in this book was particularly intriguing - after Kos' lover was killed in the war, she was resurrected, but only partially - everything that made her a goddess, a personality, or capable of bestowing grace on her followers, was stripped away, and she was turned into a force that is only concerned with tracking down malefactors as designated by the contract that brought her back. When the officers are in the grip of Justice, they lose all sense of self and get a touch of wholeness, but always without the core of connection that would make it something warm. This is what leads the officer we meet to seek out the addictive pleasures of having her blood sucked by vampires, because otherwise, she is always empty when she isn't on the job. 

I don't know if this one is for everyone, but this was definitely a fantasy book meant for me. I'll be looking for the others in the series. 

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

 

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Rob

I finished this book and I think I enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but it was an interesting read. Still, something felt missing, and I have orbited around this review for several days, unsure of what I wanted to say or how. Then, unfortunately for Jonathan Lethem, I started reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and with one sentence, she sort of demolished this whole genre. This isn't to say that I suddenly didn't enjoy the book, but the distance I was feeling from it crystallized.

This is what she wrote, talking about how the main character's boyfriend was trying to "improve" her taste in reading, recommending:

"novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness."

Ouch. Because in a lot of ways, that does describe this book very well. I think my other problem is a quirk of what order I have read books in. There were a lot of times where this felt like an odd conflation of two Michael Chabon books - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which I loved) and Mysteries of Pittsburgh (which was okay.) Combine the comics and slight magical realism of superpowers, with a tale of growing up, and exploring sexuality. Lethem's book is certainly more about race, but there were still similarities.

I'm talking around it though, about books that seem similar or relevant to this book. Let's focus back in on what Fortress of Solitude is. It's the story of a young white man growing up in Brooklyn, the only white kid for blocks and blocks. It's how he negotiates that identity, the way it isolates him, and it's about his best friend Mingus, the son of a soul singer, and the ways in which they orbit around each other.

Oh, and there's a ring that grants the power of flight.

So part of it, particularly when we get to Mingus, is a very subtle look at who's the hero and who's the sidekick, and what heroism means in a real world, and how complicated and sticky low-level superpowers can be when they lead to vigilante justice. It's also about friendship and distance, the barriers society builds and those we build ourselves.

Only about half the book takes place in their youth - much of the rest covers Dylan when he goes away to college, and later, as a music writer. It's about his relationship to blackness, which he can never quite reconcile. It's also about his relationship to absence, with his mother having run when he was small, his father isolated in a studio creating an unending animation, Mingus only appearing some of the time Dylan wants him, and Dylan wanting to disappear or at least to blend in.

I don't know what I want to say about the core of the book being about how hard it is to be the one white kid in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. I really don't. It bothered me, but I do not have my thoughts in order enough, beyond a tired "well, of course it's the white guy's book about race that gets published." Lethem has every right to write this story, but there's definitely an inequality of access to the publishing world.

I really wish this review were neater and better organized. Sometimes I come to reviews and they just flow. This one feels jerky and disconnected. But honestly, I think that's how I feel. I liked this book. But I was also made uneasy by it.

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by LibraryHungry

I am not easily squicked. It comes from growing up with an emergency room nurse as a mother, and therefore having a different line than most people between "normal dinner table conversation" and "why the fuck would you say that while I'm eating?" There aren't many books that push those buttons for me, largely because I am not a visual thinker, and so descriptions of what gross things look like I can shrug off. (It's a bit different if we add in sound or smell.)

I bring this up because I was about two-thirds through this book before I started to tell my husband "you know what? This is really gross." Not too gross, because most of it was visual in nature, but definitely approaching the limits of what I can read while I'm eating.  (Stiff was probably the only book that was too much to read while I ate. I read while I eat a lot, so this is an important consideration.)

However, despite the grossness of the threats in this book, it's mostly quite rollicking fun. We have here a British secret service made up of people with supernatural powers (including a vampire). In fact, the British government has long more or less conscripted everyone with strange powers and pressed them into some kind of service within the Checquy.

Myfanwy Thomas (who, to my perpetual discombobulation, pronounces it "Miff-un-ee" like it rhymes with Tiffany) is one of the eight people who run the Checquy, as a Rook, which means that she's essentially one of two running all internal matters. As the book starts, she has no idea who she is, but whoever she was before whatever happened happened at least knew that this utter loss of identity was coming, and has tried to leave her enough notes to keep her alive and maybe figure out who wanted her mind erased.

It's a spy novel, essentially, with lots of crazy powers running around (Myfanwy can control other people's bodies, although her former self had a serious mental block about doing so, something that does not carry over to the new Myfanwy.)

We get a lot of history of how the Checquy came into place, and a slow burn through what the conspiracy is and what the former Myfanwy had discovered before her identity went poof. There are also strange houses with chanting and purple light from which no one comes back, a dragon hatching, and the threat of the Belgians. Well, the Grafters, who are Belgian fleshmancers. Or flesh scientists? Whichever, they can do some truly creepy shit with the body, and have been enemies of the Checquy for centuries, at least until they were destroyed in a battle a couple of hundreds years ago.

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that the next part of that sentence is "Or were they?"

It will also likely not be surprising that the threats are both from without and within. 

My only real problem (and it's a small one) is that we get all these documents from the former Myfanwy to the present Myfanwy, and somehow it takes her weeks to actually sit down and read them all. If it were me, I'd be reading while I ate. I'd be reading in the car while being driven to work. I'd be reading on the fucking toilet - if all you have between your new self and possible death or more brain death, the reading of this stuff would not done when I got around to it.

Other than that, this is a fun spy story with superpowers, shading slightly on the gross side, but not terribly so. I would certainly be interested to hear what happens next, and I'm told the next book will be forthcoming soon.

Book Notes: While I was writing this review, there was a lively discussion on my facebook about other books with issues of identity and the complexities thereof. Here are some other books that people contributed as suggestions:

Unpossible by Daryl Gregory (the first story, I think)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Isniguro
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
books by Virginia Woolf or Philip K. Dick
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Melissa

This is a story about how I eventually came to mostly like this book.

This book and I got off to a rocky start. The letter that opens up the novel just felt so completely wrong, like exactly what someone in the 21st century thinks someone in the 19th century would write. It's so over the top and melodramatic and mea culpa about things that the book will then explain to us very reasonably...I was put off.

Then there was the cover. Look at it. Do we see anything weird about the word 'heretic?" Like, for instance, the inexplicable capitalization of the first three letters? This then meant that every time I thought of the book, it rang in my head as the HER-etic's daughter, weird stress and all, and oh, for goodness sake. It's not anywhere in the book itself, including the title page, but it's SUCH a wrong-headed choice for the cover. As if to suggest that this time, only this time, the heretic is a woman. Except, you know, they often were. 

Next thing wrong with the title is that it's wrong. Sarah's mother isn't a heretic. She's accused of being a witch. These are very different things. The word "heretic" actually means something, and when the book itself explains heretics in the context of their world as Quakers, I kept expecting the mother to be revealed as a secret Quaker. She is not. She is not a heretic. She is accused of being a witch. Do we see how those two things are different? Precision, people. Some words actually have specific meanings.

These are really fairly minor things, but they made me grumpy every time I picked up the book and looked at the cover.

So, this book had an uphill battle when it came to winning me over. So take that for what it's worth when it settles in to be really not a bad look at suspicion and paranoia in a small town near Salem, touched by the witch hysteria in the same way. Kent does a good job of showing how anything could be used as evidence, and how small grudges and small lies could be suddenly blown into huge consequences. 

Sarah, the main character, is a young girl when her mother comes under suspicion, fostered by resentment that her grandmother left property to her instead of other family members. Like her mother, Sarah has a temper, and neither are popular where they move, particularly when they bring smallpox in their wake.

In the end, I enjoyed this book, although I'd never say it reached the level where I'd be running out and telling people to read it. One of the most interesting possibilities was skipped over - stories have been written of the witch trials before, of course. But they all end with someone being hanged, or the fever subsiding and people being released. I'd be interested to see someone write about the third act - what happens after.

When you know your neighbours could turn on you. When your neighbours know they did things unspeakable. How do you live? What do you do? Does it ever go away? Does it fester? While The HERetic's Daughter did the paranoia well, it feels like paths that have been tread before. They're tread well here, but nothing feels particularly new.

In other words, if this is something you like to read about, it's a good entry into that niche. It's just not revolutionary.

Wise Children by Angela Carter

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by my Sarah!

I trust my sister's choice in books, but I was a little startled when I picked up this book that it was about the theatre. I don't know why that should startle me, except that I scarred her once by exposing her to a bunch of actors, and she's seemed a little leery since. At the remove of fiction, though, this was apparently right up her alley, and I'm pleased to say that it was exactly to my taste as well.

I knew almost nothing about Angela Carter before I picked it up, butw as delighted to find her writing something so thoroughly Shakespearean/theatrical. It's about a pair of twins who made it "big" in English music hall theatre, but have connections to the legitimate theatre because they are the illegitimate children of the leading male Shakespearean actor of his generation.

Oh god, there are so many twins! Not only that, twins whose parentage is frequently in question. Carter is playing a great deal with legitimacy and illegitimacy here, both in the legal sense around birth, but also to do with the "legitimate" and "illegitimate" theatre - the grungy spotlights that are a far cry from those who set themselves up as the bearers of culture.

Except that this book subtly makes the point that from the point of view of "normal" society, there's less difference between the music halls and the august stages than you might think. An air of raffishness persists, and as far as love lives go, both groups are less bound by conventional morality. And it's all thoroughly enjoyable.

The main characters are octogenarian twins, invited to their father's 100th birthday party, even though he's never acknowledged them as his children. From their time on the music hall stages, they're fascinating older women - the story is told by Dora, of herself and her sister Nora.

Their father, of course, is a twin as well, and has fathered two other sets of twins (or has he? There's lots of questionable parentage in this one. As well as ungrateful children, ousting of parents from their homes, drownings of grief-crazed young women, mixed identities galore, falling in love with asses, and many other Shakespearean nods.)

The writing is what really makes this shine - Angela Carter can certainly turn a phrase, and the characters and world jump vividly to life under her pen. In sixty years of people falling in love, cheating, remarrying, betraying, disliking, liking, the myriad characters were always memorably distinct and entertaining.

Since this book is a comedy, at the end, all is restored. (Comedy not in the sense of being funny, although it is, but in the sense of Northrop Frye's elucidation of Shakespearean genre. ) I'm very happy Sarah recommended this book to me, and would happily recommend it to any other lovers of the theatre, or simply good prose and Shakespearean hijinks.

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Bev.

This book took a long time to get going. And it was not a quick read by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it was taking long enough that I had to adjust how much I was trying to read in a day, so I didn't keep getting frustrated by never getting near my goal. Despite that, I kept reading, and it was never that I wasn't enjoying it. Just that it was slow, and incredibly looping, moving around and around the crux of the novel without ever quite getting close to it until the end.

Having read the whole thing, I appreciate that as a technique. It makes perfect sense for this particular story, to get the whole thing from so many different angles before we actually find out what happened. However, as I was reading, there were definite moments of just wanting Scott to get on with it.

This is definitely a book for the patient. If you are, there are rewards, it will just take a while to get there.

This is, as the book tells us, the story of a rape. But more specifically, it's about the fault lines that that rape exposes in British and Indian culture in India just before Independence and Partition. The rape itself is omnipresent in the book, without ever being luridly dwelled upon. Instead, it's people's reactions that come to the fore, the assumptions about the white woman who had been attacked, assumptions about her attackers, reactions from Indians and British alike, particularly as the case starts to not go in the way that the British will expect.

The story is about Daphne Manners, a young British orphan come to India to live with her aunts (one biological, one affectionate), and Hari Kumar, an Indian orphan brought up in Britain who is now discovering what the colour of his skin does to his Britishness. Daphne is raped. Many assume Hari was one of the perpetrators. Daphne refuses to testify as to the identity of any of them, and we do not know why until near the very end of the book, although there are certainly suppositions.

It's a complex book, and certainly not only from the colonial point of view. Scott does a really excellent job of layering viewpoints, British and Indian alike, and embodying each of them as a person expressing their true and clear vision of how the world actually is, and then undercutting that with someone else's remembrances of those days shortly thereafter.

I was incredibly intrigued by trying to figure out who the narrator is, but if it was ever revealed, I didn't catch it. It's someone trying to reconstruct the story, long after it happened, going to colonial officials, Indian newspaper editors, family members of both young people. The book is heartbreaking in showing how even those who want to look past the colour barrier in India find it unofficially as well as officially enforced. (Neither is the book simplistic in looking at that - the section of Daphne reflected on Hari and both what she thought his Indianness meant to her at the time, and what she later realized about her implicit assumptions about him and herself is quietly difficult.)

This is not an easy book, and it's particularly not a quick-moving book. But I enjoyed the multiple viewpoints and the refusal to find simple answers.

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Chris.

It has driven the recommender a little crazy, I think, that it has taken me so long to get to this one. It's just a picture book! I could read it in about 10 minutes! He's not wrong, but I'm stubborn. I waited until it came up on my list, and then I read it. Which is now. Over a year after he recommended it.

Of course, this all leads to the question, how do you review a picture book? They're short, they're mostly pictures, and I'm pretty much the opposite of a visual thinker. (Doesn't mean I can't see the pictures when I'm reading, but it does mean I'm unlikely to retain more than a very fuzzy memory.) (Seriously, I've filled out questionnaires for the aphantasia study going on right now, and everything.)

Of course, even without remembering exactly what the pictures looked like, I have a sense of Dr. Seuss and how he draws in general. I mean, just look at that little guy up there! It's all shaggy and fuzzy and pretty damn adorable, and probably bends in interesting ways. Wow, do I not have a lot more to say, except that how can you not love Dr. Seuss illustrations.

This is not one of his books that formed a big part of my childhood, although I do remember reading it before, probably past childhood. It is, of course, the most overtly environmental of Dr. Seuss' books, with the ongoing rapaciousness of capitalism making goods no one wants moving into an area, stripping it of everything, displacing the animals, and cutting down all the trees, and then moving on, leaving it barren and sterile.

It's not a subtle message, although it is probably a necessary one. Let's bootleg a little anti-uncontrolled capitalism into every child's life, shall we? (I'm serious. We should.) It's accessible, and I'm pretty sure kids reading this book would be outraged at that damned Onceler.

The biggest thing, though, is the ending, which is catchy and memorable, and would be great if it stuck in everyone's mind. I've seen it since, just as a quote. It's the part that goes:

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, 
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Bringing it back to the reader, even as a child, that this is something preventable, and encouraging them to see themselves as part of the solution as well. It's a good message.  So yeah, I like this picture book. If I had kids, I'd get it for them. (Of course, were I a parent, I'd eventually probably get very boring and talk about how that individual action has to be gathered into collective and governmental action, and my kids would probably start rolling their eyes pretty damn hard.)

I'm very glad I never saw the movie that was made of this. I don't really intend to ever see it.

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amie.

After I was lamenting, a month or so into reading this book, how long it was taking me to read it, Amie, who had recommended it to me in the first place, replied saying she hadn't managed to finish it. This made me cock an eyebrow. On the other hand, I am a damnably stubborn woman, and books that are difficult to read but not actively unpleasant stimulate my competitive impulses.

So I changed how I was reading it. Instead of trying to read it in 100-page chunks, as soon as I got up in the morning, while the oatmeal was simmering and the water for coffee and tea was boiling, I'd try to read two chapters. And that's it. That's all I would read in a day. So it took me months, wore out the entire number of renewals I had on the book at the library, and still got taken back a day late, but I finished!

I feel like I've conquered something.

So, on the other end of this bizarre meditation on trying to structure space and time in systematized manners, without regard for natural landscape or desire, what do I think? I think I'm still puzzled. It's hard to call this book enjoyable, exactly, but I don't resent having read it. (I do, however, feel an immense amount of freedom, like I've put down a heavy pack, that I don't have to start the day trying to read another 20 pages.)

There is so much strangeness in this book, and so much language that is obfuscatory and meta, that I frequently felt entirely lost, and that's not particularly usual for me.

On this other hand, this book has invisible mechanical ducks in love with French chefs, werebeavers, a descent into the Hollow Earth, Chinese Feng Shui experts fallen in with debauched Jesuits straight from an anti-Catholicism novel, and a whole host of other oddities. Every time one of these sections came up, with their exceedingly strange and yet somehow appropriate stories, I was enthralled.

I think the problem is maybe the stuff in between. Problem is perhaps too strong a word, but between these incidents of oddness, we get Mason & Dixon, travelling, surveying, astronomizing, quarrelling, and drinking. They maybe have feelings for each other, but it's buried under prose so deep it's hard to breathe in.

There are also layers of meta that I'm sure I'm just not getting. There's an incident at the start of the book including a sailor named Patrick O'Brien, who knows everything about boats, that felt like it was clearly a reference to the author of the same name, which warned me to be on the lookout for similarly meta references, but if there were any, they went right over my head.

It's the kind of book I'd like to come back to in, oh, say 10 years, and see what it says to me now. There's an underlying theme about how we divide, catalogue, and structure reality that I'm still grappling with. I'll let it sit for a while, and see where it goes. Also, other people should read this now, so I can discuss it with them.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Bill.

*Spoilers Below*

So yes, the book my husband recommended got to jump to the top of my recommendations list. To be fair, that's not just nepotism. He did employ the short-cut I allude to in the introductory paragraph, about shoving a book into my hands getting it onto my upcoming reads list immediately, instead of it languishing for quite a while. It's how I read all the Vorkosigan books I read last year. And how Lev Grossman's The Magicians managed to get read so quickly.

In this case, we have actually owned the book for years, and when my husband recommended I read it, I kept telling him it would go on the list, but at the bottom. That's when he pointed out we had a physical copy on hand, and to stop being stubborn. (He says that last bit a lot.) As he was right, that this is exactly the sort of thing I make an exception for, I settled down to read Dracula.

Side Note: In certain pictures, Bram Stoker resembles my husband to an almost scary degree.

We all know the story of Dracula, at least the bare edges of it. Evil bloodsucking fiend from Transylvania preys on, well, mostly on young women, turning some of them into vampires like himself. Soulless, they continue the chain.

Fair enough. What I was struck by was two-fold. One was how many bits of vampire "lore" come directly from Stoker. And the flip side of that, how many bits didn't. Garlic, stake through the heart, cutting off the head, disappearing into dust, that's all there in the vampire stuff I know the best, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Otherwise, I'm not much of a horror gal.)

But planting wild roses on the grave to keep the vampire in there? That one has kind of fallen by the wayside. Not being able to cross moving water under their own power? (Well, I knew about that one from the Cold City game I played in.) And I was a little fuzzy on the daylight stuff. We see Dracula in daylight, but the deal seems to be that he can't change shape then. There may have been more to it, but quite frankly, I must have zoned out on the fine details.

I just find it interesting what has survived into our modern incarnations of slayers and vampire hunters and what has not.

The other part is the reason my husband was so intent on getting me to read this. Dracula is renowned as a gothic. My husband was more struck by how modern the book was, and wanted to talk about that with me. So now I've read it, and I have to say he's right. There are the superficial trappings of the gothic - the castles, the spookiness, the women wasting away to shadows. But there are also train schedules (a lot of train schedules, actually), the fine details of guns, and the nitty gritty of a chase of Dracula across Europe that focuses not on the supernatural but the mundane.

It works really well. The foreword likens it to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and I can see that influence here through the shifting narrators, recorded from letters, diaries, dictation, presented as a mass of notes by different people creating a story. What this does, and does well, is to ground this story in something like the real world. Dracula, oddly, is far more scary if the reason you can't get to him to kill him is because the train isn't running. The obstacles are far more everyday than they are mystical, but then the heroes still have the mystical to contend with.

This is the supernatural in full contact with the contemporary, and it was not what I was expecting, but it was enjoyable. And truly, I ended up mostly enjoying the female characters as well. It's hard to know if you're getting into something interesting or something that will be irritating. But while there's a lot here about saving women from Dracula's dread clutches, Mina, at least, is interesting enough that it doesn't grate. 

If Lucy wastes away to a shadow, Mina is fully on top of the train schedules. She's more organized, more determined, and at the end, they give her a gun like everyone else. (No, she doesn't get to use it, but I appreciate the gesture.)

Of course, I keep flashing back to Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and Mina's line that goes something like "not quite the two discreet markings of legend, are they?" about her mangled neck. Having that Mina in my head probably influenced this one.

But here's the part I really did like, something I haven't seen in other vampire stories, a way of raising tensions that I think really works. It's a bit spoilery, so you can stop reading here if you like.

In this one, Mina has been attacked by Dracula enough that she will turn into a vampire when she dies. But she doesn't die. So it's not the tension of waiting three days for her arise, or whatever, it's about her knowing that if at any point from now until old age she does die, before Dracula is vanquished, then she'll turn into a vampire. It makes death, which may not be imminent, far more terrifying, having full knowledge of what will happen to you when it happens.

Why hasn't anyone used this? It strikes me as a great source of dramatic tension!

At any rate, I enjoyed Dracula quite a lot, and agree with Bill that it seems to be setting out to put a distinctly modern twist on a gothic setting. I like what that did, and now I'd like someone to exploit the fine dramatic tension that Mina undergoes.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Téa.

I had read The Great Gatsby before, but it was long before I started writing reviews. In fact, the first time I ever read it was for my grade 10 English class. I can't say I remembered much about it, but that's true for a lot of books I read in high school English, with a few notable exceptions.  I read it again a couple of years ago, and here I am now, ready to try to review a classic. It's a little daunting.

This was also the first book I read on our iPad, because I couldn't find my paper copy of it when I went looking, and it was free. As far as I could tell, it was the full text. It's not the first thing I've read on a reader, it just meant I had to wrest the iPad out of my husband's hands every time I wanted to sit down with it.

And now I've put the review off long enough. So, what did I think of The Great Gatsby? It's a great book, obviously. The writing is beautiful and poignant. The characters are, by far and large, irritating rich people, and their follies are worked out through pain for other people.

I'm sure you all know the story. Nick, the narrator, moves in next door to Party Central, Jay Gatsby's house, a man with all the wealth in the world and a million stories about how he got it. His raucous parties mean little to Gatsby himself, though. He's only concerned about attracting the attention of Daisy, who lives across a narrow strip of water, his sweetheart before he went off to war.

Daisy is married to a rich asshole, Tom, who in the tradition of rich assholes everywhere, thinks that he has little power, and is worried about all those uppity non-white people getting a piece of his pie. There was a lot about this book that made me sigh and think how little has changed. The dude with all the physical power, all the money, all the ability to cheat on his wife and beat his mistress and do whatever he wants, he thinks he's powerless. He thinks those damned poor people and those damned immigrants are out to rob him of his rightful...well, whatever his "rightful" is is never defined. But it feels threatened, dammit! And that justifies...well, whatever he wants!

People keep saying that income inequality is approaching or has surpassed the era in which Fitzgerald was writing, and this isn't the main point of his book, but it's a little eerie to see the same kind of denial of privilege coming out of the mouth of the character with the most power.

I know very little about formal criticism of this book, but you hear about it as a critique of the Jazz Age, but what I was struck with this time was how virtually every character we know is actually from the Midwest, transplanted to the outskirts of New York City. Do we see native New Yorkers? Maybe Tom's mistress' sister, and a few people at that party, but they don't make much of an impression.

It's hard to come up with a coherent review of The Great Gatsby. I'm sure a million have been written. But every time I read it, I come up with something different to think about. That right there is the mark of a classic.

Also read as part of the BBC Big Read

Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. So for a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

When I started reading this, my first reaction was that this seemed to be a more literate Da Vinci Code. In a historical setting rather than the present, and with da Vinci as an actual character rather than the architect of the puzzle. Still, people being killed in a theatrical manner and left in patterns for the pursuers to solve? It does sound a bit familiar, does it not?

Luckily, it is more literate and somewhat deeper, overcoming most of my early worries. I can't say that this is one I'm running out to recommend to people, but I am glad someone recommended it to me. I doubt I would have run across it otherwise, and it was an interesting read.

Ennis has obviously done a lot of thinking about the Borgias. I mean, a lot. Also about modern theories of sociopaths, and not a little about serial killers. All of these get pulled together to create the setting of Malice of Fortune, where Damiata, a courtesan who was a lover of the elder Borgia's younger son, and mother of his son, is sent to find out who killed her former lover. Otherwise, she herself will be presumed guilty. Her son is held hostage to enforce compliance.

This book presumes all the most lurid stories about the Borgias barely do them justice. I know nothing of the scholarly debate on the issue, as this is definitely not my period or continent of specialty. I do think there's a debate, though, on how many of those stories are true, and how many are gossip and invention designed to discredit them. But for the purposes of this book, every orgy, every murder, every blasphemy that can be committed in the Vatican probably is.

The first third of the book is told through letters from Damiata to her son. The rest comes from the man she meets while searching for the truth. You may have heard of him. No, not da Vinci. Well, also him. But mostly Machiavelli. I am puzzling over what this change in narrators adds. It adds something to the comfort of Machiavelli and the reader, I guess, knowing Damiata's true feelings and motivations. It makes her a more understandable character. However, the book might have been more tense by making her a bit more opaque. Be that as it may.

While searching, Damiata and Machiavelli keep coming across bits of women, scattered in patterns that make particular sense to da Vinci. I am not the fondest of serial killer books, so I will pass over this lightly. It wasn't done with extreme detail, but still, more dismembered women? Not my favourite topic.

Remember how, last week, I was saying there was a post about colonialism and contact and science fiction percolating but not quite ready to come out? There's another one here, about using courtesans and well-off prostitutes as main female characters in historical fiction/fantasy. Similarly, that idea is composting. At some point (as in, after I get this last chapter of my dissertation finished), I will hopefully have some time to sit down and think about them and write down my ideas.

Malice of Fortune is pretty good, despite my serial killer reservations. I couldn't speak to the history, but the story moves along, and the denouement is satisfying. Thanks, Cinz, for recommending this one!

Sabriel by Garth Nix

As you may imagine, people recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. So for a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. I decided I needed to be a little more flexible. So I started a new list from which to pick of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This is a very solid young adult fantasy. It's got some aspects that are unlike anything I've seen, and others that are more familiar, but well done. The characters are interesting, and the evolving relationships, thankfully, more subtle than a lot of more recent books. And a focus on necromancy for a book meant for teenagers? Interesting....

For the magic in this book revolves around the dead. There seem to be other sorts of magic, but they are background, and this is foreground. The fantasy world exists right beside our own, separated by a wall that reminds me of nothing so much as Hadrian's wall. In our time period, it seems to be about the 1950s. Across the wall, time does not run at the same pace, and the phases of the moon are different. The powers that be seem to know about the magical kingdom on t'other side of the wall, and man it accordingly, with soldiers. Some who have been trained in Charter Magic, the magic of the kingdom.

I'm a little fuzzy on the Charters, still. They are filled out somewhat through the book, but not entirely explained. It's not the type of lack of explanation that drives me batty, though. I get the feeling it's coming. I can wait.

But I was talking about the dead, wasn't I? Right, necromancy! For the land behind the wall, more and more dead stalk the land, occupying the bodies of the living. And there seems to be an evil force behind them. Into this comes our young adult protagonist, refreshingly, a female character. The most refreshing thing is that swooning or falling desperately in love is not her main consideration. (Okay, yes, maybe she does fall in love, but it happens slowly.)

Sabriel (My husband was convinced this was a book about angels, given the way the name is constructed. It's not.) is brought up on our side of the wall, at a girl's school nearby, where she is taught magic as well as more practical things. Near her 18th birthday, she is sent a message that her father is missing, and knows she must cross the wall to look for him. Once there, and the going is rough, she discovers that not only was he her father, and a strange sort of necromancer, but that he had an official title, which has now passed to her. This is Abhorsen, and it means the one necromancer who holds the duty of banishing the dead instead of raising them.

Now Sabriel must embark on a journey to find her father's fallen body, and figure out what being the Abhorsen means. She brings a spirit masquerading as a cat with her, named Mogget, and frees a man frozen in time and place, who calls himself Touchstone, and belongs to a much earlier age.

The middle part of the book felt a bit meandering, but I think it was to teach this new world to both Sabriel and the reader. The pace of the reveals is good, but the journey could be a bit more tightly plotted. But as the danger grows, so does the urgency.

The magic is particularly dark in this book, and that's a nice change. There is the suggestion of nicer magic about, but it is certainly not the focus. It's dangerous, it's chancy, and it involves death. For all that, the book is not too intense for young adult readers, and i would recommend it. It didn't enchant me, but it was very enjoyable.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

As you may imagine, people recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. So for a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. I decided I needed to be a little more flexible on that one. So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Steph.

This is the second Ken Follett book I've read, and it thankfully avoids the major flaw of The Pillars of the Earth, the one that irritated me so consistently. There is no absolutely cartoonishly evil villain who adds nothing to the story except by being a horrible person and wanting to rape everyone.

I have little patience for such characters. Once you've established that they're horrible, where do you go? There can be no development, no changes, no different menace. And when your menace is all about rape? That's not that fun for the better part of a thousand pages.

This is a major step forward. There is no such thin master villain here. There are some other issues with the book, but none of that magnitude, and so I enjoyed it quite a lot more. It's an easy read, for one, for all that it is also the better part of a thousand pages.

It is the story of the Great War, told through a Russian family, a German family, an English family, and an American family. Well, family is a bit of a misnomer. This is the story of four or five young men, and makes occasional references to their parents, their sweethearts, their children. The English setting gets two more complete female characters, and the Russian and American settings about half of one each. (They're not in the book much.) So although this promises to be a family saga over multiple books, for this one at least, it is mostly focused on the young male experience, although there is quite a bit about female suffrage in England.

The story covers the lead-up to the war, the war itself, and the immediate aftermath. It's fairly interesting, and there were times when it seemed like Follett had done his research well. But then we came to the part I actually do know inside out and backwards (military history is not that topic), and he got it wrong, and so now I'm not sure.

It's a minor point, but it's mine, so:  in Toronto in 1920, there is no way in hell you could go around perfectly legally buying liquor. The Ontario Temperance Act was in force from 1916 to 1927, and buying alcohol was just as illegal here as 18th Amendment made it in the states.

Yes, I know there was massive smuggling of liquor over the border. This was due to the division of powers in Canada. Prohibiting the sale of alcohol was a provincial matter. Prohibiting the manufacture of alcohol was in federal jurisdiction, and except for a very brief period near the end of the war, the federal government declined to do so. So, we have the strange situation where it was perfectly legal to manufacture alcoholic beverages in Canada, but it was absolutely illegal to sell them. Hence why there was a supply to be sold illicitly in Canada and smuggled over the border.

The point is, walking around Toronto and going into a liquor store (post-prohibition invention, by the way) and buying cases of whiskey perfectly legally and openly? In 1920? Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope.

Pedantic research nitpicking over. For the areas I don't know that well, nothing jumped out at me as glaringly wrong. But when we got to the stuff I do know, problems. On the other hand, this was recommended to me by a First World War historian, so maybe his military research is better than his prohibition research.

But here's my main issue with the book. As I said, it's very readable, it's fairly interesting, but if one of the representative young men was shown to have caused a major turning point in their country's history once more, I was going to throw something. Forrest Gump works by having him present at turning points, and even that doesn't work that well. This one has the young men actually being the power behind the scenes, present at and causing major events. It strains credulity, to say the least.

Let's take the Russian main character, for instance. His father is hung by Russian nobles for poaching. He is with his mother at the gates of the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday. His mother is killed. He is in the first Russian military unit to see service in the Great War. He is the first soldier to lead a revolt in the Russian revolution. He dictates the first pronouncement of the new government. He meets Lenin at the station when he re-enters Russia. He warns Lenin to get out of town when things become difficult. He's the one who brings Lenin back to the Parliament to cement the Bolshevik victory.

Really? I mean, really? It's kind of okay to want all those things in there. It's even okay to want your own characters somehow involved. But for one individual character, utterly unnoticed by history, apparently to be instrumental in so many things? It isn't poignant, it's just irritating. Similar massive improbabilities cluster around each of the other nationally representative young men. At times, I wanted to investigate this supernatural phenomenon.

It's far too much. The stories themselves are interesting, but shoehorning your five young men into EVERY. SINGLE. EVENT. of the First World War is not only massively unlikely, it's ludicrous.

If you can overlook that, then this is a fun read. I mostly enjoyed it, although it got to the eyerolling stage pretty quickly every time a historical issue came up and somehow one of our five young men was right in the middle of it. Again.