The Books That….

Micro reviews from September:

The Book That Got Away:

Blood Over Bright Haven by M L Wang. This book has been on my TBR for a while, and I’ve actually had it in my hands twice. The first time, it was the self pub trade paperback and… the print was too tiny to suit me. The second time, I got my hands on the hardback from the publishers and… I just ran out of time to finish it before the library wanted it back. The third time may be the charm. I do like Sciona and Thomil (what I’ve seen of them so far), and of course, I appreciate the story of a woman struggling to make her mark in male-dominated academia.

The Book That I Loved:

The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison. So, yeah, this is the hold book that came in while I was supposed to be reading Blood Over Bright Haven, and well, I just adore this series so, Bright Haven got shunted aside. Addison is just such a meticulous writer and things always feel so… sensible. This is my kind of “cozy” fantasy, one wrapped around a series of murders, politics, and at the core, a weird sort of celebration about just being a good, upright person who tries their best. Loved it.

The Books That I Want to Add to My Shelves:

Charlotte Vassell’s Caius Beauchamp mysteries: The Other Half & The In Crowd. I am getting so picky! To be fair, I have been reading obsessively for several decades now. I am allowed to be picky. I am so out of shelf space that it is absurd; I have stopped buying books in general (so, you know, only a dozen or so a year). But I really love this series and want to be able to reread them on a whim.

The characters are appealing, but primarily it’s about Vassell’s narrative voice. She’s wry, often scathing, but just as likely to turn that judgment back in on itself. Her characters might look at some trendy café and be snobbish about it, then just as quickly acknowledge that yeah, their mum might love it, and they’ll take her for a treat. And the plots are solid! All around pleasures to read.

The Book That I Noped Out of.

All The White Spaces – Ally Wilkes

I DNF a lot of books and many times there’s nothing objectively wrong with them. Sometimes they’re just hitting me in the wrong mood. Sometimes they’re just too familiar (decades of reading!) Sometimes, I just don’t click with the author. Here, it was primarily that I had recently read Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, and while they are two separate books, they have enough in common that I just didn’t want to finish this one.

The Book(s) That I am Eagerly Anticipating:

Okay, so everyone knows I am a Martha Wells fan. Obviously, I am lined up and ready with cash in hand for Queen Demon! Witch King wasn’t my favorite book of hers, but I did find the world fascinating. I can’t wait to see how she expands on it.

Also of note, T. Kingfisher’s What Stalks the Deep. Another Sworn Soldier novella? Hell, yeah!

Micro-Review: We Live Here Now

This has been the year of horror reads for me. Mostly, it has been very rewarding.

I just finished We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough, picked up on a whim, and really found it very satisfying. It’s also proof of how important an author’s voice is to my reading enjoyment.

We Live Here Now involves a super familiar premise: a couple—married or otherwise—full of issues and secrets moves into a house that is less a “fresh start” and more a fresh new hell. I routinely have tossed books like this against the (metaphorical) wall. (I rarely throw books, especially if they’re on my kindle!) I saw War of the Roses at an impressionable age and what it impressed upon me is how much I disliked watching a couple tear each other apart. How little tolerance I have for truly mean-spirited people. It’s especially irritating to me in a modern setting where it becomes increasingly difficult (plausibility wise) to keep a couple together. In the age of “setting healthy boundaries”, it’s hard to imagine couples staying together when they have come to actively dislike each other.

So, I started this book expecting that I would DNF it. But! I loved it.

And that is all due to Pinborough’s voice. She glides through this story. Just when the characters do something appalling, she’s there to remind you, it’s not just them—it’s the house encouraging this behavior—and the characters spend as much time regretting their behavior as they do committing the acts. It makes it so easy to just keep moving through the story.

Minor spoilers follow:

It’s told in three POVs. Emily’s, Freddie’s, and weirdly enough, a crow. The crow’s POV was unusual, but not off-putting. Another major point in Pinborough’s favor, because I often dislike animal POVs.

It’s got all the usual spooky accoutrements you want in a haunted house story—creaking doors, scratching noises, ominous messages, a country vicar, a few eerie rumors, windows that open and close, a terrible stench, a room that feels dangerously unwelcoming. And honestly, the usual plus the couple plus her strong writing would be enough, but then she adds the twist (which I will not discuss other than to say I very much enjoyed this element) which changes the whole feel of the story. It’s not just a haunted house story. It’s something weirder and better and just sold me on the whole thing. It went from a novel I enjoyed to a novel I want to make sure other people read. 

I think though, if it hadn’t been Pinborough writing it, I might have DNFed before the twist, and I would have missed out.

It seems like every holiday gets pushed on us earlier and earlier and you know, in the case of Halloween, I’m not mad about it. Spooky Season used to be Oct 1, but now apparently it’s Sep 1 and hey, I’ve started it off well with We Live Here Now.

Playing with a new character

Have a snippet!

Mikas Rowe’s mother always said that his red hair would lead him astray, and until the day he left her house, she made him keep it shaved close to his scalp in hopes it would grow out dark. It never did.

Once Mikas went so far as to try transforming it as it grew—another thing she found troublesome in him; that skill for magic.

That was how he learned that casting a transformative spell on flesh and blood caused so much pain that the results could not be anticipated. The scarlet blossoms had faded first; but the thorny vines lingered for weeks, cat-scratching his face and ears and forcing him to wear spectacles at all times, lest he blind himself.

So no transformation spells cast on living things. Though, theoretically, transformation spells cast on other people—well, their pain wouldn’t distract your focus, would it?

Those were the types of thoughts his mother blamed on his red hair.

For most of his life, she persisted in thinking him on the ever-teetering cusp of villainy.

The Mezzotint

Took a break from reading horror to dip my toes into watching it. I am very bad at watching horror. I generally dislike gore and screaming people (though Abigail was a delight), so horror movies are generally a miss.

That said, I found that Britbox has a series of stories turned into mini-horror movies, one of which was MR James’ “The Mezzotint” which was always a fun read. I’m not sure when it was made (some time ago, I assume, but the story and setting make it vaguely timeless) but they did a really excellent job with it. Kept all the story and added a reason why this story mattered to the protagonist.

James’ scary stories are great, but they almost always seem to happen at a remove: some uncanny happening was told to a friend who then passed on the strange story to the narrator.

I enjoyed A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint very much but I am not sure James would have approved of the blatant ending, when the horror came home for the narrator. I’m also sure he would have disapproved of so many women in the story. But the show gave me pleasant chills before a late bedtime.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

My life by book numbers

It’s weird, but I tend to use my reading habits as a barometer of the state of me. Everything going great? I am reading no more than two books.

Stressed out of my gourd? Insomnia? I go through kindle unlimited books like potato chips–devouring entire series in a matter of days (Lots of time to read if you cut out sleep, I’m just saying.)

ADHD out of whack? Add another book to the pile. The breakfast book stays at the table. The lunch book stays on the e-reader. I add one book that was too tempting not to start, but then gets carted from room to room, temporarily lost over and over again.

No books? Send me to the doctor. Or more practically and a bit cheaper, send me to the bookstore. I’ll reset. It’ll be fine.

Writing up a storm and using my creative brain non-stop? I’ll be rereading all my favorite comfort reads. Ilona Andrews, Martha Wells, Agatha Christie. If I’m utterly wiped out? Dick Francis or Diana Wynne Jones.

If my life is chaos? Well, I can tell by so many obvious things, but the one that usually makes me sit up and say, okay, time to get things back under control is the number of books I am currently reading. I tend to read two books at a time. One is the breakfast table book; one is the lunchtime e-reader book.

Right now? I am reading a breakfast book (Cascade Failure, LM Sagas, very enjoyable); a lunchtime libby book (A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid; fraught but good); a dinnertime book (same table, different book, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Mark Lawrence–great characters so far); a bedtime book (How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler–more violent than I was expecting somehow); an ‘oops, I left the bedtime book in another room so I’d better start a different book rather than walk down the stairs‘ book–(if you have an entourage of pets, you know why – Cinderwich, Cherie Priest, enjoyable if spare); the ‘I keep waking up in the middle of the night and the kindle is in bed with me*’ book (Hell for Hire, Rachel Aaron, popcorn book!), or the ‘ugh, I woke up in the middle of the night and the kindle is out of battery so I will use my phone kindle app‘ book (An Inheritance of Ashes, Leah Bobet; good but fraught), plus the two books that I have (kind of) forgotten that I am reading (Hide, Tracy Clark and The Monstrous Misses Mai, Van Hoang).

This is TOO MANY BOOKS. Plus I have two more library books eyeing me distrustfully. They want my full attention and don’t they understand that I just want to pick them up and love their first chapters or two? (Ghost Station, SA Barnes and How to Solve Your Own Murder, Kristen Perrin)…. I fully expect to start them before the end of the day in the name of ‘trying to figure out which one I should read next..’.

Anyway, this means that my solution to a life in CHAOS weirdly starts with… finishing a book. Sure, I’ll get the bills paid at some point, the laundry done before Monday, the house cleaning caught up on, the dogs groomed, etc., but for sheer sense of accomplishment? Getting the currently reading books down to two is the goal.

It gets to the point where I find myself wishing that I had picked worse, less enjoyable books, because then I could just declare them DNF (which totally counts as finishing a book somehow).

It’s okay. That’s what weekends are for, right? To catch up on reading short stories!!! (I know, I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but I am so easily led into reading things and Alex Brown from Reactormag just listed their must read May stories)

That said, here are three book recommendations that I did finish this past week.

Alice Bell’s Grave Expectations. Fun, cozy sort of murder mystery with a ghost and an amateur detective whose life makes mine look neat, tidy, and organized. Claire and her ghostly best friend Sophie are hired to do a seance for an upper class family that is full of delightfully awful people. They uncover a past murder. Claire is kind of a disaster area as a person and I appreciate chaos in a protagonist. I really hope this is the start of a series. The characters are all engaging, and I’d like to hear more about them.

Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon. I picked this book up because well, kind of a long story. A few years ago, I was taking French and decided I would enjoy French lessons more if I could reward myself by reading in French and I found a novel that sounded really good and I thought this was the same author. It is not. I can’t recall the title (or apparently the author of the book I did want to read which is a pity because it still sounds intriguing in my memory) but this book sounded interesting in its own right.

If Grave Expectations is a cozy, Killing Me is a strange in-between step between a cozy and a genuine thriller. The tone is not always quite successful, and there are a few moments that misfired, but overall, I really enjoyed this. Even with chaos brain, I sat down and read this pretty much straight through. It’s about Amber (not her real name) young woman who is nearly killed by a serial killer, then rescued (accidentally) by a woman who is looking for a specific serial killer and is rather put out that she has stumbled on the wrong one. Since Amber has a past of her own to hide, she dodges the police and ends up in Vegas where she reunites with the hunter and a motley cast. The heroine is full of snark, which mostly works. It’s very readable.

The Brides of High Hill – Nghi Vo. I’ve read some of her other novellas in this series, but this is definitely one of my favorites. It’s a Bluebeard tale that gets upended in a sudden, yet delightfully vicious way. I loved it so much! Nghi Vo has become one of my favorite writers for interesting and beautifully written stories. I adored her clever take on The Great Gatsby: The Chosen and the Beautiful, and I also really loved Siren Queen.

*Yes, the kindle lives in the bed, why, where is it supposed to live? Somewhere out of reach?? Don’t be silly.

The week in summation

Ugh Bunnies! Why must you tempt my dog into murder most foul? EVERY FREAKING YEAR. I cannot seem to keep them from nesting in my yard. I have a terrier! Bad combo. Very bad.
Prom dress season is winding down at the day job. The glitter remains. So much glitter. Embedded in the carpet. On my clothes, in the treads of my shoes. I had to remove glitter from my eyeball on Wednesday. So much glitter. It’s following me home and moving in. It’s in my dryer filter. And when it’s not glitter, it’s sequins. The fun part is that at the end of the day, when the lights are low, you can let it all just sort of blur into a multi-colored disco ball. Also? Most prom dresses have pockets now!
Still listening to the Tortured Poets Department. Some great runs of songs in there. Plus a handful of skippable ones. 31 songs was TOO MUCH. But if the entire album consisted of nothing more than the run from “The Tortured Poets Department” to “So Long London” and the run from “Guilty as Sin” to “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart”, it would be amazing. The fact that there are other songs on top of that which I adore? It makes this extended album a winner for me. Another song that I really think is top notch: “How Did It End?”
Checked out too many books from the library and am desperately reading all my free hours. So far my favorites this month are Diavola by Jennifer Thorne (such a great narrative voice!) and What Stalks Among Us by Sarah Hollowell, which tells a time loopy YA horror-adjacent story set in a corn maze. Both are high recommends. I also read Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunting of Velkwood, which was not quite what I wanted, but was pretty good anyway. I still have 5 books to read in the next ten days: Projections by S. E Porter, Necrobane by Daniel M Ford, The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox, My Darling Girl by Jennifer McMahon, and The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence.
Writing is an issue. The irksome “chronic condition” is really screwing up my writing time. I can sit and type, or I can focus, but the back spasms, joint pain, etc. do not let me do both at the same time. I am trying to think of a workaround, and also being a little sad that apparently my day job does not require the same amount of intense concentration that writing does.
Trying to find good TV to watch. I am sampling Anthracite on netflix, as well as Bodkin. I want to watch Elspeth on paramount (I think), and of course, there’s New Who! But see #4. TOO MANY LIBRARY BOOKS. I have two due back in three days, and it’s going to be a race. I want to read both of them!

Murder Dog and her slightly more laid back buddy.

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to them, so much so that even death wouldn’t be a rest (Yes, I know the series resolved well. I just gave up for a long time around season 10.)

But I also love people struggling against forces that they don’t understand. I love people trying to survive long odds—not undamaged, but coming out alive. I love man vs. monsters. I also really love the style. A lot of horror writing is extremely visceral (no pun intended) and powerful. It’s a genre of senses. The creeping cold around your ankles, that scratching of claws against your window, the scent of something subtly wrong, and on and on and on. Love that. It’s probably the most sense-driven genre.

So this month I read:

What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher

In this novella, a soldier decides to take a sojourn at their cabin in the woods, mostly to facilitate their batman’s affair with a mycologist. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Easton arrives to find the caretaker dead and something lurking in the woods. I really adored What Moves the Dead, the first novella in this (hopefully long-running) Sworn Soldier series. I adored it, even though it used the Fall of the House of Usher as its springboard. I have contradictory opinions about books based on other fiction—suffice it to say that I approach all books of that ilk with suspicion.

What Feasts at Night was not quite as good as the first novella but was still an excellent read and a keeper. Kingfisher is really wonderful with setting and characterization. I always feel like I am immersed in her world, and I would love to hang out with her characters. I’m adding this series to my shelf with Sarah Monette’s Grave Key.

What Grows in the Dark – Jaq Evans

This is a tricky book. It has a heroine who is not particularly likeable, being repressed, and a con artist of sorts. She claims to be a psychic so that she and Ian, a college friend (who doesn’t really know her that well) can travel around making a little bit of money making youtube videos. She gets called back to her small town by her dead sister’s girlfriend who says something is taking other kids. The way it took her sister. Usually, I dislike characters who aren’t forthcoming with their friends and allow situations to go from bad to worse, but here, it works. This book never really gets terrifying, but it is definitely slow burn creepy.

A Cosmology of Monsters – Shaun Hamill

Strange, strange book. I loved it. It’s a literary sort of horror, about a family over decades, primarily the youngest son. And of course, it’s about the monsters that are haunting them. I really liked the monsters and their relationship to humans.

Where He Can’t Find You – Darcy Coates

A YA horror novel.

This one might be my favorite read of the month, not just of the horror books I read. I adored this book from page 1 to the end. It’s got a fairly standard premise: there’s a killer in a small town, and if you’re not careful, it’ll get you! But what really made this stand out is that everyone knows what’s up from page 1. The Stitcher is the town bogeyman; the teens think they know who he is, and the police agree, but! There’s no evidence. There’s none of that slow “we must convince people we’re right!” They start off believing two things at once: that the creepy man who smiles is the Stitcher, and that the Stitcher’s kills come on a crest of inexplicable events—technology failing, animals being born deformed, etc. I’m not a huge Darcy Coates fan; her books are hit or miss for me, but this one is a definite hit.

The Grip of It – Jac Jemc

This piece is as hard to follow in some ways as a fever dream, and that’s really what this book is like. Nightmarish. But you’re in it, and you’re accepting it, and then you wake up. The premise is a straight-forward as these stories go: a married couple with some problems buy a haunted house. Things get worse. This is definitely a book where the style is what sells it. If you want your hauntings wrapped up with a bow, though, this is not the book for you.

I also watched The Dead Boy Detectives, which I mostly liked.

All of these books were good reads.

Three Things and Another One

It’s cold and I’m rewriting a novel. I have no thoughts to spare. Arguably, at this point I have no thoughts at all.

That said, here is one thing in general that I have loved this last month–MYSTERY– and three things in particular.

Nina Simon’s Mother Daughter Murder Night. A fairly low stakes mystery–I wouldn’t really call it a cozy, though I have seen others do so–that shines because of the characterization. I loved that the mother and daughter have a fraught history between them, but that the author doesn’t take the easy route out and tar one of them as “villain” and the other as “wronged”. They’re both stubborn women who know how to fight, and the third member of the trio–the grand-daughter–is just like them both. One of the dangers with amateur sleuths is that often it feels too forced or contrived that they would be able to solve the case, especially when there are police involved. Here, the women are placed in good position to find out what they need to know to beat the police to the solution. The mystery holds up all the way through and was just a pleasure to read.

Death & Other Details on hulu. There was little to no chance that I wouldn’t watch this given the glut of advertising, Mandy Patinkin’s role, and my fondness for mystery. But I really loved the first three episodes: the writing is exactly to my taste, the clues are doled out well, the time jumps are interesting, and I feel like the mystery is going to play out properly–surprises, but surprises that we will have been set up for. That’s the big thing in mysteries, right? That we have faith in the writer. That they’re going to tell their story well, laying out the clues in the right way, and not randomly ambushing us with bullshit twists for the sake of twists. I am grateful to Knives Out and Rian Johnson for proving that mysteries can be well-plotted and profitable again (and probably to a lesser extent Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot outings, which were not faithful to Christie’s books but were still intriguing.). More mysteries please! With the classic form of the amateur detective–the well-respected private investigator. As a side note of no importance, I do love the name Imogene. I hope to see more from the writing crew of Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss.

In the same vein, I have just this moment started A Murder at the End of the World, and so far, it has the same quality as the above: writing that feels confident, an actor who is compelling, and an amateur sleuth I immediately want to root for. If it turns out to be bad, don’t tell me! I’ll just be disappointed.

A fourth thing, tangentially related: Mystery, yes; amateur sleuth, no. In this instance, The Puppet Show by MW Craven was a really interesting police procedural of the type I like: the protagonist is not without his (significant) flaws, but never to the point where you wonder, how on earth is he even capable of detecting? It is also, despite its very dark subject matter, not unrelentingly grim. I enjoyed it and because for once my library has let me down, bought the second book online.

Year End Book List

Well I was going to talk about the absolute best twelve books that I read this year, anticipating having to narrow it down as I do every year. Then I started looking through my list, and um, maybe the challenge will be finding twelve?

Jeez. I refuse to believe that there weren’t 12 perfect-blow-me-out-of-the-water books that I could have read this past year, so I will accept that I apparently read a lot of perfectly pleasant, perfectly average novels that aren’t really worth recommending.

So here is my amended end-of-year list numbering 9 extremely good books.

The book I expected to be a favorite read and was: Martha Wells’s System Collapse. New Murderbot! Though one of the things I loved most about this book was that it gave me an excuse to reread Network Effect which is still so far my favorite book in this series.

The amazing book I can’t believe I read this year because it seems like it was forever ago: Saint Death’s Daughter by CSE Cooney. This fantasy was exactly my cup of tea—wordy and weird and creative. I even have a note beside my documentation of it that this book suggests it’s going to be a great year for reading. Um. Sorry past me, you were wrong.

The new-to-me favorite author I discovered this year: Margaret Rogerson. Vespertine, Sorcery of Thorns, Mystery of Thorn Manor, and An Enchantment of Ravens. Vespertine is a fantasy novel about a would-be-nun who acquires a revenant, and ends up on the run, and also becoming a major figurehead in the war going on. It’s dark and delicious. Sorcery of Thorns is about a librarian who is learning to care for dangerous, living grimoires. After she is accused of freeing a dangerous grimoire that kills their leader, she is sent away. She distrusts sorcerers but gets involved with one, and together they figure out who is actually to blame for the grimoire’s release. The follow up, Mystery of Thorn Manor, was utterly unexpected and delightful, being a slice of domesticity between Elizabeth, the librarian, and Nathaniel, the sorcerer.

Favorite nonfiction read of the year goes to Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days, which despite a twee sort of title, was remarkably honest and interesting. A close runner up was the autobiographic memoir Starstuck by Sarafina El-Badry Nance about her struggles struggles to become an astrophysicist.

My favorite short story collection was No One Will Come Back for Us & Other Stories by Premee Mohamed. I really enjoy her writing. It’s often bleak, but it’s always very rooted in humanity—the good, the bad, the inevitable.

The book that surprised me with how much I loved it. Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You. I expected a fairly standard mystery novel where the intrepid heroine uncovers the truth about a past murder. I got something more meditative, more realistic, and very much a reflection of society.

My two favorite “so weird you have to read them” books are Edgar Cantero’s This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is about a noir-style PI who is two siblings in one. Over the top in style and in story. Great fun. We Ride Upon Sticks combines 1980’s girl’s field hockey and witchcraft, plus the unusual use of a narrator that is obviously one of the team, but never any particular one. It’s an interesting take on an omniscient narrator, and I loved it.

And here’s hoping for a better upcoming year where I will have to choose from a vast quantity of absolutely excellent books.

Three things

As a retail worker, I always brace myself for “Black Friday” week, but forget that the week immediately after is JUST AS BAD. (Let Bad = requiring complex, time-sensitive multi-tasking, coping with the first round of crazed customers, and coworkers who are just stressed out. All of this on a food hangover from the week before.)

So in lieu of a real post, have three things.

I have finally watched Vast of Night and found it excellent. I think the reviews which say the story isn’t anything wildly original, but the storytelling is exceptional have it right. Great characters; great dialogue; and although I am a plebeian when it comes to caring about film direction, even I can say oh, now that’s neat!
Got the Patreon up and running, even if I haven’t really started advertising it. That’s been eating my brain for a while. As a Gen-Xer, I want to know when did all these computer systems STOP HAVING INSTRUCTION MANUALS. I am very tired of just hurling myself at a system and hoping to learn it by pushing a lot of buttons and seeing what happens. Pushing mysterious buttons is not an ideal way to learn something, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Ugh, I feel old.
Started holiday baking with peppermint snowballs. Not a fan. The cookies are tasty, but they were so sticky as I rolled them in powdered sugar (twice!) that they are going on the list of “never again” cookies. I don’t like sticky fingers. I would rather go back to my old favorite of Marcel Desaulniers’ White Chocolate Peppermint cookies.