wandering_star's new old things in 2022, part 2

July reading started with

61. The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

Three women in their seventies, who have been friends for so long they can’t really remember what they like about each other, gather for a final time at the house of the fourth member of their friendship group, after her death. Wendy is a scatty academic with a very elderly dog who she brings along, to the disgust of Jude, a successful restauranteur. The third woman is the self-centered Adele, an actress who is remembered by her fans for one big role many years ago.

At the start of the book the three women are making their way to the house, each in their own style. Wendy’s ancient car breaks down and her incontinent dog wees on her lap. Adele’s girlfriend sees her off at the station with the ominous words that they’ll need to have a talk after the weekend. And Jude arrives in the sleek, expensive car that her long-term married lover has bought for her.

Wood is very good at writing the dynamics between the three women and their absent friend. In one telling example, even though Adele arrives last, they leave her the nicest bedroom because it’s inevitable it would end up being hers. And as the three of them unpack, divide up the house-clearing duties and catch up, the balance of emotions between them shifts.

It is a bit sad how little the three women like each other any more. At least, on a moment-to-moment basis - my favourite parts of the story were the ones where the women rally round their friends, such as when Adele bumps into her nemesis, the actress who is now getting all the parts for women of their age, and the young director she always works with - the other two women are magnificent in the way they subtly undermine the new arrivals and protect their friend from emotional harm. Or the way that the other two help Jude identify exactly why her brother and his wife are so annoying.

As well as friendship the other theme is about getting older. This read well to me but at the time I wondered how accurate this would be from a younger writer. To write this I looked up Wood and it turns out that she is in the second half of her sixties, so approaching the age of the women she writes about. My mum is also reading the book now and I will ask her what she thinks of the portrayal of age.

But Wendy felt Jude’s gaze coming backwards through her shoulder blades, through the base of her skull, as Wendy drew from the cooler bag the packets and jars she’d tossed into it from her own fridge. At home it had felt freeing and spontaneous, not planning what to take, but now she saw this was wrong. Under Jude’s cold scrutiny she saw how motley her collection was, how the very presence of her substandard groceries had somehow already marred the days ahead.

62. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

A super-fun read about a group of plucky scientists (and one science fiction nerd) assigned to guard a multiverse portal and prevent giant dragon-like creatures from breaking through into our world.

We were fine. It was fine. This felt … weird. “Of course it feels weird,” Niamh said to me the day after the explosion, after dinner, when I confessed my feelings about it to them. “Back home, a nuclear explosion is an existential threat. Here, it’s just Tuesday.” “It’s Monday,” Aparna said, from the couch, where she was reading a report on the day’s events.

63. Word by Word by Kory Stamper

An equally delightful read, this time a non-fiction book on lexicography written by one of the editors/compilers of the Merriam Webster dictionary. It's funny ("Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid"), and interesting about the nuts and bolts of what goes into creating a dictionary as well as the debates about, for example, correct language and whether the dictionary "ought" to include certain words, as well as the complexities and frustrations of the English language.

Gil’s “Quirky Little Grammar” provides a cheat sheet with quick paradigms to help clarify common uses. These paradigms are often dotted liberally with warnings about the many pitfalls awaiting lexicographers as they begin pulling this sticky mess of a language apart to peer at its entrails. Here is the paragraph on articles in the “Quirky Little Grammar”:
4.2 Article. There are three: the indefinite articles a and an and the definite article the. Not much room for confusion here, right? All three are also prepositions (six cents a mile; 35 miles an hour; $10 the bottle), and the is an adverb (the sooner the better). In more sophisticated grammars, articles are one kind of determiner.
The entirety of Gil’s grammar is like this: here is a part of speech, and here are all the ways that this particular part of speech will drive you crazy as you attempt to parse its uses.

64. Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer

This is going to be a loooong review because it is very hard to figure out how I feel about this book!

One of the things I really like about reading SF is the way that a good writer gives you a lot of clues about the world that they have created, and you have to gradually put the pieces together to flesh the world out. There is certainly a lot of that in this book, which imagines a world centuries into the future where the role of the nation-state has ended, and the world is instead divided into seven "Hives", each of which value different things. On passing your "adulthood proficiency", everyone can choose which Hive they want to associate with - or not to associate with one at all.

There are two main strands of narrative, at least to start with - the story of a young child, Bridger, who is able to bring inanimate things to life (miraculous even in this universe); and the mysterious theft of a document, stolen from the heart of one Hive and left in an important "bash" (chosen-family community) of another Hive - apparently with the purpose of creating disruption and disunity within the currently finely balanced world system.

I absolutely loved this book for about the first three quarters of it. Among other things, I really liked the conception of identity (everyone chooses, essentially, what and how many identity markers to wear), and the story was complicated enough to need concentration and to feel a sense of achievement and engagement as you unravelled it. There were a few things I didn't really understand - in particular the approach to gender, where the narrator keeps saying, dear reader I know we don’t gender people any more but I am going to gender this person and you will understand why later - but I was happy to roll with it and see what happened later. (It probably helped that I was listening to this on audiobook which meant that I could get through some of the bumpier bits).

Then about three-quarters of the way in there is a scene in a sort of pastiche eighteenth-century brothel which really kind of pulls the rug out from under the reader; and the story then takes a bit of a turn, introducing a lot more philosophy - I guess there was always philosophy embedded into the story but suddenly it was a lot more undigested, eg here’s a potted history of Diderot and why he was important. There is also a lot more sex, some of it kind of coercive. In fact there are a few instances, including earlier in the book, where the reader is introduced to something disturbing which later is explained as justifiable, which kind of makes me wonder what the writer’s intentions are - is she trying to get us to question our assumptions? But it also feels a bit like being pushed to accept things which are not acceptable. At this point I decided that I was not going to be recommending the book to other people.

The ending is also somewhat frustrating. Of the two storylines we started with, one of them is resolved with a last-minute info dump, the other with a jawdropping piece of information which you feel needs another whole book to examine the implications of. And some of the moral questions are also left unresolved.

So 18 hours of audiobook later you might think I would chalk that one up to experience and let it go. And yet.... I talked to a couple of people who had recommended the book to me and they agreed with a lot of my uncertainties and said that it would all pay off but only in the fourth and final book of the series. I was very much in two minds about whether I really wanted to commit that much more time to this, but have ended up buying the second in the series. We will see if I finish it! I will have to listen to it soon though or I will definitely forget too many details and not be able to pick it up again.

>4 wandering_star: I recognize myself in this review. I just can't face three more books of this. I also loved the beginning and got bogged down in the philosophy - it was there from the beginning, but was entertaining to start with.

>4 wandering_star:

Would you say there's some sort of commentary to the 18th century libertine philosophy, Enlightenment in general? It certainly sounds "inspired by..." It's one of my topics but I'm not familiar with the writer and four volumes is a lot.

>7 LolaWalser: Oh, 100% - Palmer's day job is associate professor of history at U of Chicago and she is very interested in how ideas/philosophy both evolve, and affect history. The influence of Voltaire on the development of the world of Too Like The Lightning is explicitly described.

Apparently one of the seeds of the book was reading Enlightenment science fiction and being struck by how different the questions it asked (eg the dualistic nature of the soul, the existence of Providence) are from the questions that modern sci-fi asks. She talks about it in this interview if you are interested to see more.

>8 wandering_star:

Thank you, that was amply answered (and what an interesting publication, don't recall seeing it before).

>2 wandering_star: I enjoy Scalzi's humor. I have one of his books upstairs that I haven't read yet. I should dig it out. Fun summer reading.

>3 wandering_star: Have you read Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen? It's by Mary Norris, a longtime proofreader for the New Yorker. It's fun.

>3 wandering_star: Well, that one's going on the wishlist, I think. It sounds right up my alley!

>10 labfs39: I haven’t, but it does look fun!

65. At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald

I would describe this as one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s lighter novels. The other two novels in this category that I have read, Human Voices and The Golden Child, are respectively based around the BBC and British Museum. The institution at the centre of At Freddie’s is a stage school, although in some ways it is Freddie herself that is the institution, running her school on little more than the strength of her connections to successful actors and producers and her ability to shamelessly milk those connections.

I think this also the novel of Fitzgerald’s that worked least well for me, maybe because the satires on large bureaucratic organisations have aged better? Or maybe it’s just because I don’t know the world of the theatre well enough - the introduction to this book is by Simon Callow, who loves it and for whom the jokes seem to resonate more. Fitzgerald herself had worked as a (non-theatre arts) teacher at the Italia Conti stage school, and the charm of the theatre is well portrayed in the book - the magic of how things can suddenly come together out of a motley mix of ingredients. In a way it is precisely the ridiculousness of Freddie herself and her threadbare, ramshackle school which make the success of the theatrical illusion all the more impressive.

Two hundred years earlier, when slops were emptied direct out of the plain flat-faced houses, the smell must have been if anything less strong than now when great gusts of vegetable odour from the market floated above the heavier diesel vapour and a hint of the cafe's drains. But Freddie thought poorly of fresh air. In particular she believed that the theatre should never be exposed to it, or taken outdoors, or brought to the people. The theatre was there for audiences to come to. At this very moment they were hurrying off from work, bolting their macaroni cheese (Freddie’s heart was always with the cheaper seats) and braving the struggle back into the city, to concentrate on what was said and done in a lighted frame, which, when it went dark, would make them cry to dream again. They were creators in their own right, each performance coming to life, if it ever did, between the actors and the audience, and after that lost for eternity. The extravagance of that loss was its charm.

There are a few other sublime moments like this which made the book worth reading for me. But it is probably best read by people who are already fans of Fitzgerald's work.

66. Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

A memoir by Polly Barton, a Japanese-to-English literary translator (her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job).

The "fifty sounds" of the title is a term used to refer to the Japanese syllabary. Barton gives it another meaning, as she structures the book around fifty Japanese onomatopoeic words (a type of word which is much more frequent in Japanese than in English, and which can refer to things like textures or feelings as well as sounds - such as "pika-pika" which means sparkling and is often used to describe newly cleaned surfaces). As Barton tells the story of how she came to Japan for the first time (as an assistant English teacher on the JET programme), made friends and developed relationships here, and struggled with the process of fitting in, each chapter also takes one of these onomatopoeic words to explain something about how she felt or recount a conversation she had.

Describing this it seems rather forced, but it didn’t feel that way to read - perhaps partly because I too have certain words which remind me of the scenario in which I first learnt them. I am at the moment living in Japan and trying to learn Japanese, but I think the appeal of this book goes much wider than that. Of course, it is partly about this specific language and the experience of learning it, but it is also about the whole process of establishing who you are - something which is perhaps harder when you are trying to live in another language and another culture. (Barton is a big fan of Wittgenstein’s views on how language forms meaning, quoting him to say that language “is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.”)

Barton is not someone who takes the easy answers and is very self-reflective, which also made this book stand out for me. It is not another book about a Westerner coming to Japan and rolling their eyes about how odd everything is - for Barton, the differences she experiences make her examine herself and what she thinks she knows - taking off the “English-language” glasses that she grew up looking at the world through.

I loved this book - definitely one of the highlight reads of my year so far.

>14 wandering_star: Very interesting. I've been picking up a little Korean and not surprisingly, it too has onomatopoeic words to describe things that don't have an equivalent in English. I think I would like this book, I just wish it were about Korean!

I forgot to add a quote from Fifty Sounds - here is one:

min-min: the sound of the air screaming, or being saturated in sound

With the humidity came the sounds. In the morning, as the sun blazed through my curtainless windows, the cicadas started up, thickening the air further. Min-min is how Japanese renders this cry, the “i” a high, bright sound, better approximated in English with “ee,” and this description has always seemed to me almost preternaturally evocative, probably because we don't have a word specifically for the cicada cry in English. In fact, I'd never spent time in a place inhabited by cicadas before, and I was astonished not only by their volume but also the omnipresence of their sound, which seemed more like a feat of some unknown technology than than anything nature could have achieved: maybe some construction tool I'd not encountered before, or a proliferation of futuristic sirens. Clamoring, textured, impossible to ignore, the cicadas were a constant reminder that I was in another country.

>15 labfs39: How interesting that Korean does this too! Chinese doesn’t as far as I know - all the ones I can think of are similar to in English ie they represent sounds.

67. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

Urban fantasy. We first meet Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle as a group of teenage friends, just as they are about to swear their oaths to become fully fledged witches. We then jump forward into the present day, in the aftermath of a terrible civil war started by witches and warlocks who wanted to use their powers to gain power over humans rather than protecting them. Bruised by the experience, Elle and Niamh have left formal witchcraft, while Leonie has set up her own intersectional coven. Helena is the only one still working as an official witch, and so she is the first to hear from the oracles that something terrible is coming - worse even than the recent war. And the harbinger of disaster is a young boy with powers which would be extraordinary in a female witch, and are unheard of in a warlock. The news freaks Helena out so much that she gets back in touch with the old gang - but when it turns out that Theo identifies as a girl, Helena's determination to uphold tradition blinds her to what might be the right thing to do.

For most of this book I really enjoyed it. It is a fun, gripping read with great characters. The jokes are not that funny (eg: Her Majesty’s Royal Coven = HMRC which is more usually the acronym for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) but fortunately there are not too many of them. I found the ending very disappointing though. In the last three chapters, Dawson wraps up the story of this book very abruptly, and then introduces two VERY BIG plot twists which are designed to set up the next book in the series. I would have preferred a bit more effort going into the ending of the narrative for this book!

If I had a shilling for every time I explained the nature of prophecy I’d be a very rich woman indeed. For us, even as witches, we read time in a straight line. Only Gaia sees it all upside-down and back-to-front. We tell stories and pass them down the line to the oracles before us and we receive the ones being passed down from tomorrow. But here’s the thing: we tell ’em slant. None of us can resist adding a little relish, a little spice. And you’ve got to bear in mind two things: who’s doing the telling, and who is the audience? They both matter very much. Both history and future are fictions. Only the present is real. Remember that.’

End of July reading. Seven books read, of which three were from the TBR - one bought in 2019 and the other two this year.

68. The Colony by Audrey Magee

I have recently reviewed several books by saying I loved them to start with then found things I did not like. This book is the opposite - I started out finding it a bit irritating and ended up with more respect for what the author was trying to do.

The setting is a remote Irish island, 1979. An English artist arrives for the summer - choosing to be rowed across the choppy sea even though bigger, faster boats are available - in search of landscapes which have not been painted to death, to make his fame and fortune. A few days later, a French academic arrives, for the final year of his study of the use of Gaelic on the island and the way that it is gradually eroding as the islanders have more to do with English-speaking mainlanders. The two men bicker with each other, each feeling they have a prior claim to the island, just as each one is hoping to boost their careers from what they get from being there. Neither of them look at the islanders as they really are - Lloyd is more interested in landscapes than people and when he does paint the islanders, he asks them to copy the poses of famous paintings rather than painting them as they are. Masson meanwhile is not willing to let the islanders make their own decisions to change towards using English.

The book is fairly obviously a satire/commentary on colonialism and those are the elements that I came to respect by the end of the book. There were various stylistic things I found irritating though - not things which were key to the book but which just stopped me from properly enjoying it. For example, neither of the visiting characters really make sense in the 1970s - they would be much more credible if the novel was set 40 or 50 years earlier. The 1979 setting enables the story to be interleaved with terrorist incidents happening in Northern Ireland, but I didn't think this was necessary - it's already clear that the story is around colonialism and the impact the two men have on the islanders. Secondly, the messages can be a bit unsubtle, with similar incidents or conversations happening several times. Finally, I know that all historical fiction is about modern issues, but there were some bits where these 1970s characters were uncannily prescient about the way 2020s people might see the world - one elderly island woman comments that people on the mainland acquire too many possessions because they are "hunting for affirmation".

That said, my favourite part of the writing were the bits which went inside the islanders' heads, so here is one of those.

She smiled and stroked the woollen knot, a thickening of the wool to keep James warm, as it warmed me, knitted by my mother, though not my grandmother who still calls this English knitting, the English scheme, their guilt for the famine, for the land theft. They take our land, she says, starve us and then to alleviate the poverty, to assuage their guilt, they set us up with knitting. Make jumpers this way and sell them, they said. Earn your living that way, they said. Earn your rent that way, they said, though we liked earning our living the other way, from the land that was our land, the sea that was our sea. But they told us to knit, so now we knit. Well, I’m not knitting, says Bean Uí Fhloinn.

Great review of The Colony, Margaret. I look forward to reading it in the next month or two.

>17 wandering_star: One of the words I hear the most is 반짝반짝 (banjjak-banjjak) for sparkly. 말랑말랑 (mallangmallang) is a soft and chewy food and 솔솔 (sol-sol) is a gentle breeze.

>20 wandering_star: you only gave it 2.5 stars?

>23 dianeham: Yes - as I hope came across in the review, I could see and respect what the writer was trying to do, but did not especially *enjoy* reading it, so that is what the star rating reflects - they always tend to be quite subjective.

>22 labfs39: I love these! You can really hear the texture in the sound.

This is an interesting interview with Barton, partly about Fifty Sounds and partly about the art of translation: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/12/01/precise-tactility-polly-barton-...

69. The Plotters by Un-su Kim

At the start of this book, our antihero Reseng is on a mountainside with a sniper rifle, peering through its sights at an old man, a retired general - his current target. Reseng is a contract killer - one of a whole community of contract killers working in South Korea - and the "plotters" of the title are the people who set up the hits, who take the money from the politicians or businesspeople who want a quick way to get rid of a rival or holder of embarrassing information, and who provide Reseng and his colleagues with the dossiers about their targets' habits and movements. Although Reseng has a good line of sight on the old man, for no particular reason he decides not to shoot him that night, which leads to an awkward situation a bit later on when the general, walking his dog on the mountainside, stumbles across Reseng and invites him home to get warm.

This book is packaged like a thriller but I think it is really a satire about South Korean politics and society, specifically the corruption and ruthless competition to succeed. I can see why the publishers have done this - a lot more people would buy the first kind of book than the second (I include myself in this) - but if you pick it up because of the cover quote about "Tarantino-like fight scenes", you are going to be disappointed. What you do get though is an engaging read which through its surreal perspective asks questions about what an ordinary person can do when they are stuck in a corrupt system (as Reseng muses, "plotters are just pawns like us ... There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter ... if you keep going all the way to the top? Nothing. Just an empty chair"). I enjoyed this book.

You might not think beer is a breakfast drink, but in fact it's perfect. If knocking back a can of beer after a hard day’s work makes you feel refreshed, rewarded, and relaxed, then a can of beer in the morning is about feeling melancholic, fuzzy-headed, improper, and refusing to act like a responsible adult just because the sun's come up. Reseng loved the feeling of irresponsibility that came with drinking beer for breakfast.

70. These Names Make Clues by ECR Lorac

Now this is a much more straightforward mystery - at least in the sense that it fits into a classic genre, that of the Golden Age murder mystery. A publisher hosts a party at which his guests - none of whom know each other - have to solve clues, including about the identity of the other guests. One guest is Chief Inspector Macdonald, which comes in handy when one of the other guests ends up dead.

If you like this genre of mysteries I highly, highly recommend this one. It is a very enjoyable read, with some great characters (including female characters - Lorac was a woman) and a satisfying ending - it gets extremely twisty in the middle but when Macdonald explains how he got on the trail of the killer I just wanted to slap myself on the head and say of course! - a perfectly simple and obvious anomaly, beautifully hidden in a cascade of strange occurrences.

71. Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain by Matthew Green

This book looks at eight British settlements which once flourished, and now no longer exist. They are distributed across the UK, from Orkney to the south coast, and in time from the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae to a Welsh town flooded in 1964 for a reservoir. Some of them I already knew about - I visited Wharram Percy on a holiday in Yorkshire, after my sister and I saw a sign to "Deserted Medieval village" and of course followed it - others were new to me, most amazingly Trellech, a medieval iron mining boom town which is now completely forgotten.

I think I would have found this book completely fascinating even if it had just told the story of these eight places. But in addition, Green uses the settlements as jumping-off points to range pretty widely, over topics both obvious (Wharram Percy leads to a discussion of the impact of the plague in Britain, although it turns out that it was not only the plague which wiped out the village) and less so (my favourite footnote reads "For this discussion of edibility I have drawn upon the ideas of Val Plumwood… {who} developed much of her philosophy of edibility after nearly being eaten by a crocodile").

In reading this book I learnt how medieval wine merchants got rid of bad wine (by persuading their customers to eat strongly flavoured food before they drank, or by soaking the container in good wine so that it had the right smell); that even in the mid-14th century London was seen as a den of "pretty boys, pickthanks, catamites, sodomites, lewd musical girls, druggists, lustful persons, fortune tellers, extortioners, nightly strollers and magicians" (and therefore deserved the plague); and all about the roots of the eighteenth-century fascination with ruins and with the idea of the untouched "noble savage", among many other things.

To top it off, Green writes vividly about both the history of the towns that he imagines, and what it is like to visit them today:

What is most striking, though, is how abruptly the town melts away after St Thomas’s Church. By the time you reach the site of Monday Market, you are in rugged fields. You can walk for twenty minutes, feeling like you’ve left Winchelsea far behind, until you find the ruins of its three hospitals, sorrowful stone shards upended in the grass, and all the way to the edge of the dyke, uneasy ruts and bumps where long-vanished houses, stone-vaulted cellars and St Giles’s Church once stood. These are Winchelsea’s ghost streets. The sight of the seven-hundred-year-old New Gate marooned at the southern end of the old town makes the soul quiver; there it stands forlorn, a stranded portal to a lost world.

72. Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

This was a book club pick, which I went along with a bit reluctantly as I don't tend to enjoy YA stuff - and as I read it I realised that it is not even YA really but probably suited for pre-teen readers. I did enjoy it but wondered what discussion we would be able to have - but as it turned out, the book can support a surprisingly rich discussion. The world-building was deceptively simple - this is a world full of amazing plants and animals, where a lot of technology is grown rather than made:

I sat on the floor facing the window with my flora computer in my lap. My father had given me the CPU seed when I was seven years old, and I had planted and taken care of it all by myself. It was my first responsibility. My flora computer had grown nicely because of my care. Its light green pod body was slightly yielding, and the large traceboard leaf fit on my lap like a part of my own body. The screen was large and oval, a shape that I had always found soothing. The computer would pull energy from my body heat, and I’d link a vine around my ear so that it could read my brain waves. It would grow in size and complexity, as I grew.

On first reading I had also thought the book was a bit "message-y" but as we discussed it I realised how many of the messages were subtly delivered. There is no "rescuing" - in fact, Zahrah's quest is held up by people who think they are trying to help her by protecting her.

I enjoyed this and would love it if Okorafor set some adult novels in this world.

>28 wandering_star: Fascinating review! I also loved the quote you added and think that this is definitely a book I would enjoy.

73. Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

A collection of short stories - more like episodes really - illustrating life inside the gulag, in Kolyma in the Russian Far East. Shalamov himself spent a total of around 17 years in camps in Kolyma, and some of the characters in the stories share details of their life stories with him - getting out of the gold mines by becoming a paramedic, or being freed from the camp but being unable to get the paperwork to travel off the island.

The horrors of camp life are told simply, in a style without exaggeration or emotion, which only highlights the extent to which humanity was stripped away from the prisoners through cold, hunger, exhaustion.

Very good but (in case it needs saying) very bleak reading.

We were all tired of barracks food. Each time they brought in the soup in large zinc tubs suspended on poles, it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick, we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. All human emotions — love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty — had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during their long fasts.

74. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

This is the sequel to Too Like The Lightning (>4 wandering_star:), the science fiction/philosophy epic which I partly loved and partly found deeply frustrating.

The reader of the audiobook is not the one who read the first one, and he is not as good as the first one either. In particular, he decided to do a different accent for each one of the cast of thousands, a decision I can only imagine he came to regret. This can be distracting (why does this character have an Irish accent?) and occasionally grating if he gives the character a lisp or a monotone.

Despite initial irritation though, I eventually settled into his reading, and I am glad that I persevered. This volume has less undigested philosophy than Too Like The Lightning, and a lot more story. An investigation into the mysterious theft at the start of Too Like The Lightning uncovers a great conspiracy at the very top of the world-governing Hive leaders, and this is revealed to the public at a time and in a way which plays into the hands of demagogues and those who want to shake up the idyllic society - whether because they think it has made life *too* comfortable, or because they think it hides deep downsides that people are not able to resist.

Still quite a lot of philosophy, particularly the utilitarian questions of whether the ends justify the means and what is hidden behind "the greatest good for the greatest number". But I started to wonder whether Palmer does not in fact want to pick a side within the arguments, but to highlight where they do and don’t work. This gave me a lot to think about in addition to enjoying the unrolling of the story.

I will continue with the series, but this book ended one major story arc, and so I don’t think I need to read Book 3 quite as soon as I did this one (I was worried that I would forget too much of Book 1 if I left it too long). I can also - and I can't quite believe I am saying this - imagine myself listening to the whole thing again, once I have that sense of the way the full story develops.

Perry rubbed his chin, in need of shaving. “I know that name.”
“Our late sensayer, Prime Minister,” Ockham prompted. “The one who realized what we were doing, and couldn’t handle it.”
“Ah, yes. Unfortunate. Then Revere was a hit?”
“Yes. Our second-most recent, before the Mertice O’Beirne hit to silence Sugiyama’s Seven-Ten list.”
The three Hive leaders’ faces—severe Andō, exhausted Perry, dazzling Ganymede—all took on that signature determined darkness of mourning someone whose death you chose, and would choose again.

75. Flush by Virginia Woolf

Picked up because I needed something light and short after my recent reading (and the next book I am going to review, which I was reading at the same time as Flush, is no picnic either).

Virginia Woolf is having great fun here I think in imagining herself into the mind of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, based on mentions of him in EBB's letters and diaries. Stream-of-canine-consciousness anybody?

For the first time the whole battery of a London street on a hot summer’s day assaulted his nostrils. He smelt the swooning smells that lie in the gutters; the bitter smells that corrode iron railings; the fuming, heady smells that rise from basements – smells more complex, corrupt, violently contrasted and compounded than any he had smelt in the fields near Reading; smells that lay far beyond the range of the human nose; so that while the chair went on, he stopped, amazed; defining, savouring, until a jerk at his collar dragged him on.

I am not a dog person but despite that this hit the spot.

>31 wandering_star: My bookmark got stuck in Kolyma Tales a few years ago. I was meaning to return to it and forgot. Thanks for the reminder.

>33 wandering_star: That sounds different!

>29 wandering_star: Glad to hear you and your book club had a good experience with Zahrah the Windseeker. I haven't read that one, but have read The book of Phoenix and Who fears death, both for an adult audience.

>32 wandering_star: I haven't made it through Seven Surrenders, though I have an ecopy, partly because the philosophy in Too like the lightning got me bogged down. Your experience gives me hope that I may read it someday. And yes, I'm sure it will be rewarding to reread it knowing the overall story arc.

76. Providence by Anita Brookner

London in the 1960s was not "swinging" for everyone. Kitty is a junior academic, working towards a more senior/secure role and hoping for some sign of commitment from her lover Maurice, the head of department. Her two closest friends are her neighbour Caroline, unhappily divorced, and her colleague Pauline who lives in the country with her elderly mother and large dog. These two women are cautionary tales for Kitty, at a time when it is not easy to find a role as a woman who does not want to depend on a man, but does not want to end up loveless either. Kitty is a talented teacher and an attractive woman, but will her "timid determination" enable her to get what she wants?

Well-written and observed (the descriptions of the academic politics are funny) but a bit bleak. Also I want to shoot whoever wrote the cover blurb, which is really patronising - talking about Kitty’s "cautious attempts to reel in her lover" and including a review quote "Moves to an unexpected and dramatic climax" (which I object to because (a) I predicted the ending, and (b) talk about damning with faint praise).

She could not even tell Maurice, for his world was all of a piece; success in all one did was assumed without affectation. Besides, in his world, everyone was active and united. His mother sometimes came to his lectures, and was in the habit of driving off by herself to stay with friends in Scotland or Italy. People with houses. It was a question of conditioning, thought Kitty Maule, as she hung up her skirt. I function well in one sphere only, but all the others must be thought through, every day.

77. When a Child is Born by Jodi Taylor and 79. The Fool who Thought Too Much by Ishmael Reed

Grouping these together as they are both "audible original" short stories - I think that means they have not been published anywhere but are available from audible.com as audiobooks.

When a Child is Born is a short story from the Chronicles of St Mary's world of time-travelling historians. I do enjoy these books but have found diminishing returns from them over time, as they do follow a similar format and contain similar jokes! So this short story was actually a great way to re-enter that world.

The Fool who Thought Too Much was narrated by a jester in a world which contains elements of the medieval and elements of the modern. Satirical, but its targets were a bit scattergun.

78. The Easy Life In Kamusari by Shion Miura

This was a free Kindle e-book giveaway at some point. It tells the story of a young man who has no idea what to do with his life and is packed off by his parents on a rural forestry training scheme. Initially he is a total fish out of water - frustrated by the slow pace of life in the village and completely unable to keep up with the hard work of maintaining the mountain forest. But gradually he gets used to the villagers - and they to him. I found this a really sweet and charming read, and loved the crazy village festival with which the story concludes. I have bought the second in the series.

I figure there are a couple of reasons why Kamusari villagers are so easygoing. One is that most of them are involved in forestry, where you have to think in cycles of a century; the other is that there’s no place to hang out at night, so when it gets dark everybody just hits the hay. “Running around won’t make the trees grow faster. Get plenty of rest, eat hearty, and tomorrow take what comes”: that seems to be the prevailing philosophy.

80. Augustown by Kei Miller

In Augustown back then, there were many kinds of stories: Bible stories and Anancy stories; book stories and susu stories; stories read by lamplight and stories told by moonlight. But always there was this divide between the stories that were written and stories that were spoken – stories that smelt of snow and faraway places, and stories that had the smell of their own breath.

This book focuses around two of these Augustown stories. The first, set in 1982, is about what happens when a young Rasta boy has his dreadlocks forcibly chopped off by one of his teachers. The other is about a real historical figure (although I did not realise this until the end of the book), the so-called Flying Preacher Alexander Bedward, a religious leader and forerunner of Marcus Garvey.

But, as the quote above suggests, there are many other stories - we hear the stories of almost every character who wanders into the narrative. I found the writing very poetic (in fact I realised after I finished the book that the author had also written a book of poems I really enjoyed, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion).

One of the themes of the book is about who gets to have their story told, and from what perspective. So I understood the aim of having a narrative that wove around and told everyone’s story. But I did end up finding the pace a bit frustrating.

That was my August reading. 13 books, of which one was a library book. 7 were bought this year and 3 in 2021. Of the other two, one is from 2013 and the other from my parents' bookshelves.

>38 wandering_star: I picked up The Easy Life in Kamusari as a free e-book on World Book Day, perhaps at the same time you did. I too found it sweet and charming. I didn't know anything about Japanese forestry culture and found the Shinto customs interesting. I definitely want to read something else by Miura, but haven't decided whether to get the second Kamusari book or The Great Passage.

81. Stone Mattress: nine tales by Margaret Atwood

As I was reading this collection of short stories, I recognised several of them - but it was only when I came to add the reading dates to LT that I discovered I actually read the whole book before, in 2015. I made a comment in my review then which is something I was also planning to say now, which was that as the first three stories were interlinked, I kept expecting the collection to loop back to these characters.

I even highlighted one of the same passages that I quoted in the previous review...

“You’ll need salt,” says Ewan, right in her ear. The first time he spoke to her it startled and even alarmed her – Ewan having been no longer in a tangibly living condition for at least four days – but now she’s more relaxed about him, unpredictable though he is. It’s wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can’t depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be one-sided: if she answers him, he doesn’t often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.

82. Spear by Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith is a great fan of Arthurian legend, but had never thought that she would like to write her own retelling - what could she add? But she accepted a commission to write an entry for a collection of queer Arthurian retellings, and once she found her character, Peretur, she started writing and could not keep the narrative to story length - and so we have this book.

I bought it partly because I have been waiting since 2017 for the sequel to Hild, Griffith's wonderful historical novel about Saint Hilda of Whitby, a pagan noblewoman who ended up as a powerful Abbess. I thought that reading this might be a suitable "snack" while I was waiting. I enjoyed it - and even better news is that there is finally a publication date for the sequel to Hild early next year - it will be called Menewood.

We first meet Peretur as a young woman, who has been brought up in secret by her mother, who sometimes calls her a gift, and sometimes calls her a sin. They have been in hiding since before Peretur was born. But Peretur is adventurous and gradually she goes further and further from home, becoming fascinated by the lives of the villages that she sees.

On one far roam she follows a twining wisp of blue-grey smoke south, down the valley where it begins to widen, and comes to a new steading, built by the ruin of one abandoned in the Long Ago to the wet and the cold. But the land now is drying and warming, and folk are creeping back: real people, not from stories. Hidden in a copse of hazel, she watches and listens as the folk move about the new-built roundhouse with the blue smoke seeping from the pointed roof. They speak a language like hers, but not quite: blunter and rough-hewn, blurred by time.

Eventually she learns more about her own origins and why her mother has been in hiding, and as a result sets out to try and join King Arthur’s court. Because Peretur is another name for Percival, and so will have an important role at the Round Table.

Griffith has drawn a lot from early Arthurian legend for the bones of the story - going back before the better-known romances to sixth-century Wales. It was interesting to read all about this in the afterword.

It ended rather abruptly but overall a fun read.

83. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

A very fun book about a talented scientist in 1960s America who is shut out from academic research because of patriarchy, and winds up as a TV chef.

During one of the advertising breaks he turned to the woman next to him. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he said politely, showing his credentials, “what is it that you like about the show?”
“Being taken seriously.”
“Not the recipes?”
She looked back incredulously. “Sometimes I think,” she said slowly, “that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon.”
The woman on the other side of him tapped his knee. “Prepare for a revolt.”

I also bought The Easy Life in Kamusari when it was free and I'd totally forgotten it was on my kindle. Thanks for the reminder and glad to see two of you enjoyed it!

>43 wandering_star: I have never heard of Nicola Griffith (I think!), but both Hild and Spear sound very good.

>46 MissBrangwen: I also am eagerly awaiting Menewood.

84. Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan

1949, Bombay. A senior British official, who had recently been on a secret mission to investigate atrocities committed during Partition, is found dead in his study during his New Year's Eve party. A young female detective - the first in India - is called in to lead the case. Not realising that she has been chosen because the powers that be expect her to fail, Persis Wadia brings all her deductive powers to bear.

I quite enjoyed the crime story element of this book, but found the narration a bit clunky - and I was rather sorry that Persis has to have a British sidekick - she would certainly have been able to hold the story on her own!

And it wasn't just Bombay, she thought. The city of dreams was a mirror for every corner of the new nation, every village, every town, every city. The struggle for freedom had left in its wake a desire to make something of this ancient-new nation of theirs. But for the three hundred million Indians who dwelt within the newly drawn borders, it was anyone's guess how they would achieve that reality. If Partition had shown them anything, it was that India was a nation as liable to war with itself as with a common enemy.

85. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (audiobook)

A story about two magicians who are bitter rivals and who go to greater and greater lengths to outdo each other. I was interested to read this because I enjoyed the film of the book, directed by Christopher Nolan.

The book uses a slightly odd structure, telling the two magicians' stories one after another, rather than interleaving them. This means that you eventually see the other side of the story, but so much later in the book that you can't remember exactly how the story was told first time around.

The film has a more balanced structure, drops the framing story, and changes one element of the story in a way which makes it much more effective. So I think, in this case, stick to the film...

86. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Like The Magician’s Assistant, which I read earlier this year, The Dutch House starts off seeming to be about one thing and then keeps unfolding, opening out new vistas as it goes and ending up as a book about something different.

At the core of the novel are two siblings, the narrator and his older sister Maeve. Their mother left when Danny was a young boy and Maeve essentially brought him up. The Dutch house of the title is the house they grow up in, an extravagantly beautiful property. Their stepmother is drawn to the house more than she is drawn to their father, and when she inherits it after his death, the loss of the house drives the decisions that Maeve and Danny make about their lives, or perhaps more accurately that Maeve makes about Danny's life. For decades after, when the siblings need to talk things through, they drive to the street in front of the house and sit talking in the car.

There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.

I think the house is a symbol of unexpected losses and unexpected gains, and the impact these have on the way you see yourself.

I also think Ann Patchett is becoming one of my favourite writers - although I did prefer The Magician’s Assistant to this, perhaps because the narrator of this book is less engaging.

Very late, those are my September reads - 6 books, one from the library, three others acquired this year and one each in 2021 and 2019.

>50 wandering_star: I keep waffling on whether to read The Dutch House, but your review makes me think I should.

>50 wandering_star: was the narrator Tom Hanks for The Dutch House? I thought he made the book better than it was, lol. I also read and really liked, The Magician’s Assistant this year. I also added Patchett to my favourite author list.

>53 raidergirl3: I meant the narrator of the book - I read it rather than listening to the audiobook. Now I am trying to imagine it in Tom Hanks' voice! I think he might have made Danny more charismatic than he came across on the page.

>52 labfs39: I would recommend it.

87. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

At the start of this novel, Maali Almeida has recently died. He discovers that each soul is given seven days (the "seven moons" of the title) before their memories are wiped clean and they move on to the next phase of reincarnation. Or at least, that is the official story, told to him by a bureaucrat in the overcrowded afterlife government office. But other souls seem to have been hanging around in the In Between for longer, and one of them urges Maali not to pass on - "They want you to forget. Because, when you forget, nothing changes. The world will not correct itself. Revenge is your right. Do not listen to Bad Samaritans. Demand your justice. The system failed you. Karma failed you. God failed you. On earth as it is up here."

Maali cannot remember who killed him - as a journalist photographer in the midst of Sri Lanka's bloody 1980s, a gay man, a gambler who owes money to some bad people - the list of people who might have done it is long. But he does know that he kept a collection of his most dangerous photos - the ones which proved political corruption or shocking human rights violations - and now that he is gone, maybe it is time for those photos to be seen.

So in his seven days, he must decide whether he wants to move on to the next world, remember how he died, and try and pass on messages to the living about his photos. He also encounters many, many other ghosts, killed by disease, accident, suicide bombers, soldiers, or just for having crossed someone too powerful.

There are creatures for you to fear in this and every other tale. The Charred yaka who spreads rumours and cancers, the Riri yaka that rips babies from wombs, the Mohini, the Devil Bird, the ten-headed Ravana, the Mahakali.
Then there is the drunk bus driver, the dengue mosquito, the maniac monk, the crazed soldier, the torturer in the mask, the Minister’s son. Men who are neither army nor police. Men who wear national dress to work.

This was not always an easy read, both because of the subject matter and because of the narration style, which reveals the story a little at a time in an exuberant outpouring of little mosaic pieces. But definitely worth reading.

>55 wandering_star: That sounds fascinating!

>55 wandering_star: Interesting. Onto the wishlist it goes.

>56 Dilara86:, >57 labfs39: Glad you like the sound of it!

88. Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

This novel takes the form of a group of notebooks, supposedly written by a young woman (who does not record her name), and sent to "GMB", the author, by the woman's cousin after her death. He sends them because GMB is writing a biography of an infamous psychiatrist, Collins Braithwaite, enfant terrible and icon of Swinging London's counter-culture; and the notebooks are the story of how the young woman investigated Braithwaite, believing that he is responsible for her sister's suicide.

Her sister had been a patient of Braithwaite's, and so the writer of the notebooks also becomes a patient, under a false name (Rebecca Smyth) so that she can understand what his methods are. She herself is quite a staid and conventional individual, and so she also creates a persona to go with the name - someone much bolder but also more troubled than herself.

I long ago resolved never to become a Modern Independent Woman. I do not myself understand this current mania for freedom. It seems to me that we would all be a good deal better off if we accepted our lot in life, rather than struggling to throw off some imagined shackles. I realise that not everyone is as fortunate as me, but this constant striving for things above one's station is no more than a recipe for discontent. I want nothing more than to look after my father and be able to treat myself now and then to a new coat or a pair of stockings. That is not to say that when I am out and about, I do not sometimes feel a stab of envy towards those to whom success comes easily, but we cannot all be tip-toppers. It is better all round to accept one's allotted portion in life. All the needlepoint and pianoforte in the world cannot alter the fact that, for most of us, quiet despair is the best we can hope for.

Maybe this passage is protesting too much? Because the young woman comes to like the persona of Rebecca Smyth more and more, even as she struggles against this. The notebooks end up with a narrator unreliable in two ways - lying to herself about the way she feels, but also too innocent to understand exactly what she is witnessing in Braithwaite's behaviour.

There was a lot of other clever stuff, bringing in real people from the 1960s and playing with the framing story; much of this either went over my head or I have forgotten it now, two months on from reading the book. But I definitely enjoyed the story of "Rebecca Smyth" and that was enough for me!

89. The Blackmailer by Isabel Colegate

A thin novella with a hugely complex view of human nature. On page one we meet a character called Baldwin Reeves - an up-and-coming lawyer who is clearly cynical, self-centred and out for everything he can get. We follow him to an encounter with a young widow, Judith Lane. Judith's late husband is well-known for his heroic behaviour as a prisoner-of-war in Korea; but Baldwin served with him, and knows the terrible truth - that in fact Anthony Lane not only got his men captured but behaved with extreme cowardice once they were in the hands of the enemy. Baldwin has plenty of proof - but a bit of money from Judith can make all the problems go away.

Once Judith gives him the money, you might expect Baldwin to feel triumphant - but in fact, somehow, his resentment of Anthony (rich, handsome, upper class and a national hero) transmutes into a desire for Judith to understand that he did what he did for good reasons, not just out of greed. And through this their relationship, and the balance of power between them, shifts in some quite surprising ways. Colegate does a great job of making implausible behaviour seem understandable, as well as hitting a tone which is much lighter than you might expect from the subject matter, but still manages a poignant denouement. The book reminded me a little of Penelope Fitzgerald in the way that you have to read a bit between the lines.

He would have been even more puzzled had he seen them at lunch, for Baldwin, who had now decided quite simply to get to know Judith better, in order both to explain to himself the attraction she had for him and to study and somehow deal with the challenge she represented, was finding his task difficult, and it was certainly not made easier by Judith, who was never, at the best of times, much of a breaker of silences.

>59 wandering_star: Interesting. Burnet did the same thing with His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae. I'll have to look for Case Study

>61 SassyLassy: Yes, I read His Bloody Project too. I liked this one better - I felt like it stood up on its own without the metafictional elements.

>59 wandering_star: Nice review of Case Study, Margaret. I'll read it early next year if I don't get to it this month.

Thanks, Darryl!

90. Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

Lucy Pym, author of a recent bestseller in popular psychology, gives a guest lecture at a physical training college for young women. The head of the college is a friend of hers, and so when the lecture goes down well, Lucy agrees to stay on for a few days. She is enjoying the company of the graduating class, and is a bit flattered by the way they look up to her.

Although this is a crime novel, the crime does not take place until well over half way through - it's much more of a psychological study - not just of the relationships between the girls, but also in how Miss Pym reacts on the two occasions where she finds evidence that someone has been doing something they should not...

She creamed her face and considered it, unadorned and greasy in the bright hard light, with unaccustomed tolerance. There was no doubt that being a little on the plump side kept the lines away; if you had to have a face like a scone it was at least comforting that it was a smooth scone. And, now she came to think of it, one was given the looks that were appropriate; if she had Garbo's nose she would have to dress up to it, and if she had Miss Lux's cheekbones she would have live up to them. Lucy had never been able to live up to anything. Not even The Book.

91. Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton

I picked this up as Halloween reading, but in fact almost all the stories are about human nature rather than the supernatural. They felt surprisingly modern to me - in many cases, early in the story I thought I could guess the twist, but what actually happened went beyond my expectations.

For example, one story focuses on a man who has exquisite taste in antiques, but very little money. When he unexpectedly comes into a large inheritance, you might guess that he buys everything he wants but this does not satisfy him - but I was surprised by what he did after that.

There is only one story which is definitely a ghost story (there is one which is ambiguous) and again, although I worked out some of the details early on, I found it very effective.

I think Wharton did write more ghost stories and I would like to track these down.

"Archie's got a delightful little mind," Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, "but it's just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes. Dredge's mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just how it would be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping retriever, a long way beyond Archie's objections, and with an answer to them in his mouth."

Those were my October reads - 5 books, of which two were library books, one bought this year, one in 2013, and one unknown! (I didn’t add it to LT when I acquired it).

>65 wandering_star: I don't usually seek out ghost stories and so would have passed on this title, despite liking Edith Wharton. Your review and the quote have made me change my mind. Must. Read. More. Wharton.

92. The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure by Katherine Rundell

A collection of essays about animals, full of wonderful facts. For example, while pregnant, and for two weeks after giving birth, a dolphin gives the same signature whistle over and over, and during those weeks, the other dolphins are quieter than usual so that the unborn calf can learn its mother's call.

To prepare for their migration flight, young swifts do exercises to strengthen their wings, like press-ups. Hares can get pregnant while already pregnant. Six rooks in France have been trained to pick up litter.

Rundell is particularly good at vivid comparisons. The Greenlandic shark has such as slow metabolism that "in order to survive, a two-hundred-kilogram shark would have to consume the calorific equivalent of one and a half chocolate digestives per day". An elephant's truck has 40,000 muscles (compared to a human body which has 650). The largest ever elephant was "the weight of a rubbish truck, carrying a vending machine and a grand piano". "The greater bulldog bat can scream at 140 decibels, equivalent to your standing a hundred feet from a jet engine amid a rock concert."

She can also write very beautifully - I couldn’t choose which of these passages was my favourite so am including both:

The swift is sky-suited like no other bird. Weighing less than a hen’s egg, with wings like a scythe and a tail like a fork, it eats and sleeps on the wing. They gather nesting material only from what’s in the air, which means that there have been accounts of still-flapping butterflies wedged in among the leaves and twigs. They mate in brief mid-sky collisions, the only birds to do so, and to wash they hunt down clouds and fly through gentle rain, slowly, wings outstretched.

and

The pangolin is known as a scaly anteater, because of its diet, and because it’s the only mammal entirely covered in scales, but the description does not acknowledge the fact that the scales are the same shade of grey-green as the sea in winter, and the face that of an unusually polite academic. The tongue of a pangolin is longer than its body, and it keeps it tidily furled in an interior pouch near its hip. The name comes from the Malay word penggulung, meaning ‘roller’; when threatened they curl into a near-impenetrable ball.

The overarching message from the essays is about the preciousness of the natural world, and its fragility in the face of human destructiveness. We all know about how pangolins are threatened - but Rundell also writes about the hedgehog, pointing out that in the 1950s they were as common in the UK as pigeons are now - "when my parents were young, hedgehogs were everywhere, a proliferation of commonplace spinose beauty."

The essays are short and I enjoyed dipping into the book. I think I would have liked it even more if I had not read another similar book of poetic essays about the wonders of nature about this time last year, Things That Are by Amy Leach, which I preferred slightly to this one.

>68 wandering_star:

It always amazes me that people go to such lengths to "create" beauty, wonder, poetry, when just looking at nature reveals them in incomparable profusion.

There's a nice NYRB collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories—I've been dipping in and out of it all year: Ghosts. I love an old-fashioned spooky tale, though I can't read too many in a row.

>68 wandering_star: That sounds like fun. I've loved cool true animal facts since I was a little kid.

>69 LolaWalser: I think the writer’s argument would be that there are so many amazing things in nature which people don’t know about, or (even worse) take for granted. Personally I do enjoy noticing and appreciating the craft of the writer, in fact it is definitely one of the things I look for in my reading - but I can see it is not for everyone.

>70 lisapeet: Ghosts is now on my Christmas wishlist - thank you!

93. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

A nested story taking place over a number of different timelines, linked together by one strange occurrence which seems to echo through time. In 1912, 2020, and 2203, people are quietly going about their lives when they experience something like an epileptic attack - a short blast of strange noises and sensations which comes out of nowhere. By 2401, time travel has been invented (and promptly made illegal outside of government facilities), and one person - Gaspery - is sent to investigate this glitch.

I really enjoyed reading this. One thing I particularly liked was that you got to see quite a lot of the people’s lives (and the times they lived in) up to the point when they experienced the glitch. I would have liked to know more about what happened to them afterwards, having started to get engaged in their stories. The ending was very neat, but slightly unsatisfying in retrospect - it tied all the loose ends up a bit too tidily.

I confess though that there may be have been some commonalities and links between the stories that I didn’t spot as I had to return it to the library mid-way through and then wait a few weeks for my hold to come back up, so there was a big gap in the middle!

Regardless, I thought this was an interesting read and will probably read St. John Mandel's next book. (I liked Station Eleven but didn’t love it as much as many readers did, so I had held off reading this one, but so many people on LT recommended it! I am glad I did.

There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.

94. Winter Work by Dan Fesperman

I really think Dan Fesperman should be better known - I have read several of his thrillers and they are all excellent. This one is set in Berlin in 1990 - the Wall is down and both Allied and Soviet agencies are scrambling to pick up as much intelligence as they can, taking advantage of the chaos.

In a lakeside village on the outskirts of Berlin, a former Stasi colonel Lothar Fischer is found dead, apparently having shot himself - but his friend and neighbour, Emil Grimm another former Stasi colonel, knows that it is not suicide. He keeps this to himself, however, and observes quietly as ex-Stasi security agents, and the East German police, struggle for jurisdiction over the case. Grimm and Fischer had been planning something - will Grimm be able to carry it through on his own? At the same time, a young CIA agent is suddenly tasked with handling the defection of a high-level East German, with information to share about the KGB. It is a promotion for her - but something is strange about the assignment, including the fact that she is being asked to handle it without backup.

A very enjoyable story (apparently based on true events), which makes the most of the fact that in that environment, no-one knew who their friends were, and old enemies could suddenly find themselves making common cause.

The visit to Markus Wolf’s dacha was also to blame. Meeting his old foe had made him realize that while East Germany was dead, the struggle wasn’t, not really, because in between their laughs and war stories both men had been probing for weaknesses, like old generals inspecting a battlefront.

And those are the three books I managed to finish in November! (things were crazy busy at work). All three from the library so no dent in Mt TBR this month.

And all three sound very interesting. I have not read any Fesperman. Perhaps I'll look for him after I finish Daniel Silva's Allon books.

I think I'm going to try Sea of Tranquility sometime next year. I couldn't get into Station Eleven, but I've heard good things from so many people about this one that I need to give it a go.

I really liked Sea of Tranquility—I thought she did a great job of balancing the time travel/world building with a genuinely humane story. And I have Winter Work in the virtual pile, so I'm looking forward to that.

>75 labfs39: And I have not heard of Daniel Silva - I will look him out.

>76 markon:, >77 lisapeet: I look forward to hearing what you think of them!

95. Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Japan by Keisuke Matsuoka

The original title of this book is "Sherlock Holmes and Itō Hirobumi" - Itō being the first Prime Minister of Japan, and one of the famous "Chōshū Five", the first group of Japanese to study in Europe.

In the book, Itō and Holmes first meet in London in 1863 (while Itō is studying there); and reunite when Mycroft packs Sherlock off to Japan to lie low after the Reichenbach Falls incident, because it’s the only place Sherlock can get to without going through territory controlled or allied with Britain, where he might be picked up to face trial for murder.

Holmes gets drawn into the solution of a real-life incident in which Tsesarevich Nicholas of Russia was almost assassinated during a visit to Japan - an incident much on Itō's mind as there was fear at the time that it would become the casus belli for a war in which Japan would have certainly been defeated.

An entertaining story set at an interesting time in international history.

Shevich furrowed his brow. “To avoid difficulties? What is really motivating you? You say advisor, but Sherlock Holmes is a detective by trade. There is but one matter on which he could be advising you. You have invited him here to train spies!”
Anger flashed in Kanevsky’s eyes. “You have struck a secret bargain with the British. Behind our backs!”

97. The Emissary by Yōko Tawada

Finally got round to reading this novella which was given to me earlier this year by Lilisin. It is set in a dystopian future Japan in which young people are ailing and weak, while the elderly remain hale and hearty well into their 120s. In a similar reversal, the countryside and peripheries are flourishing best, while the cities have emptied out.

It had been years since he had been to Shinjuku – what was it like now? Billboards, far too gaudy to be overlooking ruins; traffic lights changing regularly from red to green on streets without a single car; automatic doors opening and closing for non-existent employees, reacting, perhaps, to big branches on the trees that lined the streets, bending down in the win. In banquet halls, the smell of cigarettes smoked long ago froze in the silver silence; at table after table in the pubs on each floor of multitenant buildings customers called absence caroused, drinking and eating their fill for a flat fee; with no one to borrow money the interest demanded by loan sharks rusted in its track; without buyers, mounds of bargain underwear grew damp and fetid; mold formed on handbags displayed in show windows now flooded with rainwater, and rats took leisurely naps inside high-heeled shoes.

In response to the disaster, Japan has cut itself off from the outside world. Foreign concepts and connections are seen with suspicion, and even the katakana alphabet (which is used to transliterate non-Japanese words) has fallen out of use.

The central characters of the book are young Mumei and his great-grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about his family, feels guilty about what his generation did to bring disaster on the young, and misses the world which is no more.

This book is more about mood than plot, although at the end (literally the last 14 pages) a sudden major plot development happens - which is not particularly well connected with anything that went before, and opens up all sort of questions which are not answered. This meant that my main feeling on finishing reading was "huh?" - a pity, as I had enjoyed most of the book.

98. Dalziel and Pascoe Hunt the Christmas Killer & Other Stories by Reginald Hill

A collection of short crime stories, some featuring the detectives from the series Hill is known for (Dalziel & Pascoe), others standalone. Most fall into one of two categories - light-hearted "fun" ones (such as the closing story, "Where The Snow Lay Dinted", which features a hung-over Dalziel trying to track down whoever stole all the breakfast ingredients from his hotel), and twist-in-the-tale psychologically dark stories of the kind I associate with Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. All very enjoyable.

It wasn’t hard to open up one of Donna’s ‘lifesavers’ and substitute a powdered-down cortisone tablet.
When I say it wasn’t hard, I mean mentally as well as physically. I felt no qualms at all. My thinking was that if Donna kept herself on an even keel by accepting that other people were also entitled to opinions, hopes, fears, and a measure of independence, then she wouldn’t be in any danger. And even if she did resort to her capsules, well, there were at least a couple of dozen in her bottle, and she always kept it well topped up, so that meant she had a better than twenty to one chance of not selecting the ringer. And in any case, I couldn’t be absolutely sure that its effect would be fatal.
So easily do we distance ourselves from our morally suspect actions.

99. Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

The winner of this year's International Booker.

In the first three-quarters of this book, the following things happen: an elderly woman, depressed after the death of her husband, lies in bed and refuses to interact with her family. One day, they discover that she has left the house without them knowing; later, she falls and is taken to hospital. After this she moves into her daughter’s house, and spends time with a hijra, Rosie/Raza, who comes to the house in both female and male dress at different times. One day, Rosie disappears.

So how does that get to 600 pages? Well, there is quite a lot of family bickering; one of the themes of the book is about artificial categorisations and differences, and this is illustrated through the way the family reacts to things which go against expectations, such as the non-traditional behaviour of the daughter, or the mother’s decision to go to her daughter’s house rather than her eldest son’s, as would be "proper".

There is also a lot of allusive language and passages which feel like fables (such as the story of "Serious Son", who is unable to laugh, and a chapter which tells the story of a group of crows who live in the trees outside the daughter's house). One technique which is used quite often is that there is a chapter which is entirely told in allusion, and then in the following chapter it is the aftermath of an event which you can connect with the allusions which came before. For example:

A rock floats up like a sheet of paper. A droplet falls like a rock. A rock is only a rock as long as it’s a rock. Heavy solid unmoving unshaking. A breath rises and the rock trembles. Then it turns to paper and floats. The paper flaps and a story flies upon it, new and fresh.
The red glow of the sunset spreads over the frontier like words flowing from a pen.

I am sorry that this is such a grumpy review. I really liked the style at first, but after about 150 pages I started to run into the sand with it. And the style and themes are more important than the characterisation. Towards the end the elderly woman makes a playful speech about borders, which goes on for about six or seven pages. I appreciated how this worked as part of the book's overall message/theme about the ridiculousness of borders. But I couldn't imagine the woman in the story actually making such a speech.

I am now wondering whether the answer would be to read the book slowly, just to enjoy the wordplay and the way that the story is told. I think it might be a bit confusing if you did that? I certainly would not have been able to finish it if I wasn't on a week's beach holiday with very little to do.

This makes it seem like I hated the book. I didn’t! There were many things I appreciated about it. But those things would have had more impact if the book was, say, about half the length.

So now the story has come to dwell in Beti's house. Whoever comes here will be most pleasing to the pen. Bade's calls came, but not he himself. So why should the pen stray to Bade?
Because it's like this: it's an old custom when it comes to families that everyone comes to the eldest son. But not all divine the meaning of this. What it means is that whoever meets with Bade, wherever he may be, they are the one going to him.
...
And if you speak of those living with Bade, it would be something similar. Those living with Bade, wherever they may go, for however long they may leave, still live with Bade, and will surely return, once they’ve completed their leave of absence. Amma is living with him, no matter where she may be staying.

>71 wandering_star:

Oh, I like the writing, it's beautiful. I was thinking of less abstract arts and crafts -- the thingy stuff.

>81 wandering_star:

Hill was just such a good writer. And getting ever better as time went on; not something that happens often.

Both Japanese books sound interesting. Your thread is dangerous.

>78 wandering_star: As for Daniel Silva, I really disliked the first one in the series, The Kill Artist, but they have steadily improved. I like the ones that explore aspects of WWII. They are not at the level of The Good German, but they are my current escape reading.

>83 LolaWalser: Ah yes, that makes sense! And I agree about Reginald Hill. I like the way he could be quite playful in his writing - I have read the Austen-esque one (Pictures of Perfection) but not A Cure for All Diseases which I learn from Val McDermid's intro to this collection is a reworking of Sanditon, "but with corpses".

>84 labfs39: Sorry for the book bullets! I generally don’t finish a book I am not enjoying so maybe that’s why they skew so positive...

>73 wandering_star: Nice review. I've only read one book by Fesperman, and that a long time ago: The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, which I enjoyed a lot.

>80 wandering_star:

And that is exactly why I had no problem giving away that book (well that and because I already have another copy) because you enjoy the book and you work yourself up to getting some deep insight on some intrinsic part of Japanese society and then suddenly you get to that ending that comes out of nowhere and go huh?

Because of that book I certainly have not hurried to read another by the author.

>87 lilisin: Yes exactly! There seemed to be so much that you could read into the story and then it falls off a cliff...

I realised I missed a review:

96. The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

The Bass Rock is an island off the Scottish coast, near a town in which all the timelines of this story are set. The main stories are that of Viviane, who is coming up from London regularly to clear out her late grandmother’s house before it is sold, and Ruth, who lived in the same house after WWII with her husband and his sons from his first marriage. These are interleaved with events from the seventeenth century and earlier.

There are numerous echoes between Viviane and Ruth's stories, as well as folk-horror and gothic elements; but about half-way through the book it becomes clear that the thing which ties all the stories together is male violence, against women and against vulnerable men, and the way that the powerful will band together to cover this up.

Although there was a lot of violence against women in the first half of the book, it first became clear to me that this was a theme of the book in an angry outburst by Viviane's friend Maggie. At the time this felt a bit out-of-place to me, but later I understand what Wyld intended. The theme is quite heavily underlined, normally something I don’t like too much in my reading, but I think that one of the things the book wants to do is show how in different eras, different kinds of terrible behaviour can be seen as normal and natural, and that did make me think.

I also really enjoyed the writing.

'Darling, why haven't you packed any underwear?' It came out quite unexpectedly.
'What?' he asked still smiling, though she may have witnessed a flicker in his eye.
'I just wondered - you have a couple of shirts but no underwear - no spare trousers either, in fact.'
'I keep some at the office.'
Ruth continued smiling. 'Well, that's that mystery solved then.'
'Ha, yes - perhaps you really ought to see about this horse riding, rather than playing underwear detective.' But something had passed between them. If she could have slowed the moment down, she would have captured the look. His eyes, asking her to drop it, telling her not to notice. And her eyes telling him back, I cannot un-know this.
But the moment lasted only a grain of salt.

100. Space Invaders by Nona Fernández

Only 80 pages long, and largely made up of dream sequences, this book about Pinochet's Chile packs quite a punch. A group of friends, much older now, still sometimes dream about their high school years in the early 80s. The book is ostensibly about one of their classmates, Estrella, who was taken out of school suddenly one day - but it is also about their growing understanding, as teenagers, of the oppression and violence in the society they lived in. The use of dreams is a very effective way of blending their memories with the psychological impact of what they lived through, and how this still plays on the minds of their adult selves.

No one is exactly sure when it happened, but we all remember that coffins and funerals and wreaths were suddenly everywhere and there was no escaping them, because it had all become something like a bad dream. Maybe it had always been that way and we were only just realising it. Maybe Maldonado was right and we were too young. Maybe we were distracted by all that history homework, all those maths tests, all those enactments of battles against the Peruvians. Suddenly things sprang to life in a new way. The classroom opened out to the street, and, desperate and naive, we leaped onto the deck of the enemy ship in the first and final attempt doomed to failure.

>90 wandering_star: Space Invaders sounds like something I would enjoy. Onto the list it goes.

>89 wandering_star: Love the quote

Edited to fix touchstone

>89 wandering_star: That's an incredible quote - it says so much.

>89 wandering_star: I've read a couple of Wyld's earlier books—After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice and All the Birds, Singing—and liked them a lot. She's very good at combining sort of homely details with a sense of menace you can't pin down. I've got The Bass Rock on the virtual pile and am looking forward to it.

Just catching up here. You’ve read some wonderful books

Thanks all!

>93 lisapeet: I have heard of these books but for some reason had not been inclined to pick them up before; I read The Bass Rock by chance because it was on the swap shelf of the hotel that I was staying at. I will look out for them now.

This is a very good interview with Shehan Karunatilaka, the author of >55 wandering_star: - https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/interview-shehan-karunatilaka-booker-prize-....

101. Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

Seven letters. Old Mr Moon and young Dr Barnes, and Gervase Eden, surgeon, of Harley Street; Sister Marion Bates; Jane Woods and Esther Sanson and Frederica Linley, V.A.D.s. Higgins shuffled the envelopes together impatiently, and wrapped them round with a piece of grubby tape and thrust them into his pocket, plodding on, wheeling his bicycle up the hill. He could not know that, just a year later, one of the writers would die, self-confessed a murderer.

Essentially this was a kind of country house murder mystery, except that the country house in question has been repurposed as a military hospital during World War II. Locals mingle with those who have been called up to work at the hospital, who come from a range of backgrounds. When someone dies on the operating table, it seems at first like the sort of sad accident which can happen from time to time - but then fractures begin to appear within the small group of medical staff who were involved in the treatment. Pretty enjoyable.

>96 wandering_star:

The movie version from 1946, with Alastair Sim, is one of my faves. I actually had the first edition in my hands once but being spoiled (it's a mystery after all) I wasn't sure reading it would be worthwhile. The film is excellent, though.

102. A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

Shortly after they married, in the 1950s, Ralph and Anna Eldred spent some time in Southern Africa, where Ralph had taken on a role as a sort of volunteer social worker. He takes the job at least partly to get away from his oppressive parents, and wonders often whether he is actually achieving anything lasting.

In the 1980s, the Eldreds are living in Norfolk, and Ralph is working for the charitable trust set up by his grandfather. Their two eldest children are in the process of dropping out of university and mooching about in the family home, while Ralph’s sister Emma has recently been bereaved - although since the man who died was her lover and not her husband, there is not really a socially acceptable role for her to grieve.

For a long time I thought this was a book about the difficulty of knowing whether you are doing the right thing - a theme that always resonates with me. That is definitely part of it, but I think it is mainly about the way that secrets and hidden emotions play out, and can suddenly erupt after simmering under for a long time.

He applied stamps to his letters. Yawned. But, he told himself, don't despise these little things; they add up. A tiny series of actions, of small duties well performed, eventually does some good in the world.
That's the theory, anyway.

103. Madame Zero by Sarah Hall

The standout story in the collection for me was "Later, His Ghost", set in a world where normal life has been destroyed by a climate crisis - in this case, unending storms and gales.

This was his fifth house. The first – his mother’s, a white Thirties semi – had gone down as easily as straw, along with the rest of the row. The brick terraces had proved more durable, he’d lived in two, but they were high-ceilinged; once the big windows and roofs gave out they were easy for the wind to dismantle. Before the barn he’d been sharing with a man called Craig in a rank bunker near the market, a sort of utility storage. It was a horrible, rat-like existence – dark, desperate, scavenging. Craig was much older than him, but wasn’t clever or good at planning. Things had turned bad. He got out as soon as he could and wasn’t sorry. A lighthouse would have been best, round, aerodynamic, deep-sunk into rock, made to withstand batterings. But the coast was impossible – the surges were terrifying.

This story is available online here (as "Then Later, His Ghost) if you register (free) on the New Statesman website.

Other than that, there were a couple of stories which I quite liked, and several I didn't - there were a lot of stories which were short, unsettling events in an unsettling environment.

Incidentally there is no story called "Madame Zero", but I found this explanation in an interview with the author: "She was a case study – a woman with an identity disorder who believed she did not exist. She’s still discussed by psychologists and philosophers. But she’s also all of us on some level, perhaps, trying to figure out our identities, trying to reconcile human mutability and transience with definitions and existential meaning. As a title this really worked for me across all the stories."

A few last reviews to finish up for this year.

104. The Change by Kirsten Miller

Brendon parked along the curb in front of 256 Woodland. A line of rosebushes planted parallel to the street had grown to form an impenetrable bramble shot through with lovely red-stemmed sumac and glistening poison ivy leaves. Climbing vines scaled the house and hanging ferns of prehistoric proportions dripped over its roof, shielding the interior from view.
“How can it have gotten this bad so fast? The house looks like Grey Gardens, and it’s not even May.” He swiveled toward Celeste with a schadenfreude smirk. “This lady’s not going to come prancing out in a leotard with a scarf on her head, is she?”

Nessa has known since her adolescence that she, like many women in her family, has the power to hear the unquiet dead. But it is not until her daughters grow up and leave home that her life calms down enough for that power to come to the fore. Following the first voice that calls to her, she discovers the body of a young woman dumped in a thicket - and encounters two other ghosts whose remains are somewhere nearby. To discover - and avenge - what happened to them, she teams up with two other women: Jo, who in her late 40s developed incredible physical strength, especially when righteously angry - and Harriett, who may or may not have supernatural powers but certainly knows a lot about plants and their properties. The trio may be sneered at by some of the men of the town, but they are a formidable team.

As a woman in my late 40s myself, this was probably wish-fulfilment equivalent to men reading those books whose authors claim to have been in the SAS. I must say that I enjoyed it.

105. The Brain: the story of you by David Eagleman

A whistle-top tour of some of the latest neuroscience research. I am not sure who the imagined reader for this is - I feel like even if you are only moderately interested in neuroscience, or even if you listened to Radiolab when it used to be about science, you probably know most of the stuff in this book. In fact there were a few experiments in the book which are not only not new to me, but which I know have failed to be replicated.

In addition, the tone is a bit "gee whiz what a fascinating fact" - without much reflection on what this really means. One of the few new things which I learnt was that when your brain considers the trolley problem, the first question (which of two tracks to send the trolley down) is experienced in your brain as a maths problem whereas the second (do you push the person onto the tracks) also brings in your emotions into the decision-making. That is interesting as far as it goes, but for me should be the starting point of what it says about our brains, rather than the end. As for the assertion that addiction can’t be related to poverty/deprivation because rats can also get addicted.....!

Disappointing.

106. Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar

This comic imagines what would happen if the ship carrying the baby Superman had crashlanded in Soviet Ukraine rather than near Smallville, USA. The US bankrupts itself inventing super villains, while Superman's powers end up being co-opted by the state. Batman, though, also grew up in the USSR and his parents were killed in front of him not by street criminals, but by the security forces, so that is what he grows up to fight.

A fun read but I would have quite liked it to be pushed even further, a la Watchmen.

>97 LolaWalser: I did not see your message when you originally posted. The film sounds fun, and I have found that it is available on YouTube - thank you for the recommendation!

And finally...

107. Foreign Bodies, ed. Martin Edwards

A collection of crime stories not written in English (although several are set in the UK or US) from the late nineteenth century up to 1960. It starts with a bang, with Chekhov's "The Swedish Match", which manages to be both a perfectly structured detective story and a satire on detective stories, and which I really enjoyed. It turns out that Chekhov wrote several crime short stories!

As for the other stories in the collection, they range from short, macabre stories to the kind of story where the detective is told about a situation with many mysterious elements, and manages to deduce what actually happened. A stand-out one of the latter type is "A Cold Night's Clearing", a 1936 short story by Keikichi Osaka, in which on Christmas Eve, a crime scene is found with a large box of new toys, and the tracks of skis leading away from the house which appear to get lighter and then disappear in the middle of a field.

My favourite story overall was a 1933 Bengali story, "The Venom of the Tarantula" by Sharadindu Bandyopadyay, in which the mystery in question is how a housebound old man manages to get his hands on the drug that he is addicted to, even though he is constantly under the eyes of his family members.

And that's it! In December I read 13 books, 3 of which were borrowed. Of the others, 6 I acquired in 2022, 2 in 2021, and one each in 2016 and 2013.

This means that in 2022, of the 73 TBR books I read, around a third each (24) were acquired this year and last year. More heavily weighted to recent books than I had expected.

The rest of the tally is
2020 - 3
2019 - 4
2017 -1
2016 - 5
2015 - 1
2013 - 3
2009 - 2
2008 - 1
Pre-2005 - 1
Two others not logged

Where did reading take me in 2022

US, contemporary・UK, contemporary・UK, 1970s・all over the world, throughout human history・fairytale・US, 1990s and contemporary ・US, contemporary・UK, contemporary・UK, 1960s-now・UK, Victorian・Istanbul, C20th・US, mid-C20-now・Canada, contemporary・LA and Nevada, contemporary ・UK and former USSR (and ancient Rome), alternate contemporary・imaginary country, alternate late medieval・UK, early C20・Warsaw, contemporary and 1940s・n/a・fictitious Caribbean island, 1976・ LA, contemporary・Ireland, 1980s・US, 1930s・UK, C19・Pakistan, contemporary・Norway, contemporary・the Arctic, US and Japan, future・“the year 1927 in the city of New York”・UK, first half C20・UK, alternative 1970s (contemporary to the novel)・UK, 1910s・UK, 2010s・UK, contemporary・UK, 1950s・Indonesia, contemporary・Belfast, WWII・England, France, Spain, sea, Napoleonic Wars・Cairo, alternate 1920s・UK, 70s-80s and US, contemporary・future alternate nested universes ・UK and under the sea, contemporary・East Berlin, 1962・UK, 1980s・London, 1945・US, contemporary・Switzerland, France, 1970s・Sri Lanka, 1990s-2000s・Oxford and UK, C20・Cornwall, 1930s・Mexico City, 1989 and 2009・4x n/a・Texas, contemporary・Somerset, 14-17 Feb 1491・US and UK, 1960s and contemporary・UK, contemporary・Ukraine, 1980s and 90s・UK, contemporary・Australia, contemporary・alternate multiverse, contemporary・US, contemporary・various cities around the world, C25・London West End, 1960s・Japan and a little bit of the UK, contemporary・alternate UK, contemporary・remote Irish island, 1979・Korea, contemporary・London and Cotswolds, 1930s・various deserted settlements in the UK・fantasy country with African elements・Soviet gulag, C20・various cities around the world, C25・London and Italy, C19・UK, 1960s・UK, alternate contemporary and Palestine, 0 BC・rural Japan, contemporary・imaginary country, alternate late medieval・Jamaica, 1920s and 1980s・Canada, contemporary・Wales, C6・US, 1960s・Bombay, NYE 1949-1950・UK (and a bit of US), C19 and some contemporary・US, contemporary・Sri Lanka, 1989 and points before that・London, 1965・London, 1950s・UK, physical training college, 1940s・US and Europe, C19・n/a・Canada, 1912 & 1918, US (New York and Oklahoma City), 1990, 2008, 2195 & 2020, lunar colonies, 2172, 2203 & 2401・Berlin, 1990・Japan, 1891・Scotland, 1700s, post-WWII and contemporary・Japan, dystopian future・Yorkshire, contemporary・India, contemporary・Chile, contemporary and 1980s・UK, WWII・Southern Africa, 1950s and Norfolk, 1980s ・mixed, mainly UK contemporary・US, alternate contemporary・n/a・US and USSR, alternate 1950s-now・mixed (short stories, range of locations/times)・

And finally finally, my top reads of the year:

5*
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (memoir about the author's relationship with Japan and the Japanese language)
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (fiction, starts off like so many books about mid-century unappreciated older women, goes off in a very unexpected direction)
Unmarriagable by Soniah Kamal (South Asian retelling of Pride and Prejudice)
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley (modern retelling of Beowulf, with the monsters as homeless people and the mead hall an upmarket gated community)

4.5*
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández (novella about growing up during the Chilean dictatorship)
Winter Work by Dan Fesperman (spy thriller set just after the fall of the Berlin Wall)
The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett (fiction, about families, chosen and otherwise)

See you in 2023!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/347468

>100 wandering_star: As a woman in my late 40s myself, this was probably wish-fulfilment equivalent to men reading those books whose authors claim to have been in the SAS. I must say that I enjoyed it.

I know what you mean.

>102 wandering_star: Although not a comic superhero reader normally, that sounds fun.

Nice wrap-up to 2022!

>100 wandering_star: That was a fun review.

I'll be following you in the new year.