Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

Read I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, which starts with a musician on a probably futile quest to reunite with his dead wife on a possibly supernatural archipelago in Lake Superior – it's not a retelling of Orpheus & Eurydice, but it's got the family nose, as it were; the blurb describes the main character, Rainy, as "an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator" – and then wanders off to become a different story entirely halfway through. I keep wanting to describe this as "gently dystopian," which is slightly misleading; the dystopian aspects of its near-future setting are certainly not gentle, but it's a world of communities doing their best to keep going post-collapse of society as we know it as much as it is one of indentured servitude and the powerful squashing the weak, on however petty a scale that power comes. Would pair well with Catherine Leroux's The Future, I think.

Read The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, which was a fascinating book in ways I don't want to spoil for anyone who hasn't read it: for the first half, the narrator is an amnesiac ghost trying to figure out who she is and why she's there by observing her (very screwed-up) family (based off DWJ's own, which is just... oof) and piecing together the clues; in the second half, it turns out that seven years have passed, the ghost is the now grown-up version of one of the four sisters she'd been haunting - although she still can't figure out which one - and just had a near-death experience that allowed her to go back in time seven years (as a "ghost") to try to undo the deal she'd made as a teenager with the ancient goddess who the sisters assumed they'd made up, but hadn't??

...I am explaining this badly, but this book is narratively doing really interesting things, and also feels like the opposite of Fire & Hemlock in a way I can't quite put my finger on...?

Comments

[ursula]

Time of the Ghost is really fascinating! I first found it in my twenties and that felt like the right age for it.

[troisoiseaux]

I didn't read any of DWJ's books until I was in college, and while there are some of them I've read and been like "I wish I'd encountered this when I was younger"— I agree, twenties is a good time to read this one.

[muccamukk]

Oh, Cheerfully Refuse sounds entirely like my thing. Thanks for the rec!

[troisoiseaux]

It's been on most of the "best books of 2024" articles I've encountered, and yeah, it sure is!

[skygiants]

I love Time of the Ghost, it is so, so weird and such an effectively creepy literalization of being haunted by yourself, and by your lack of knowledge and understanding of yourself.

[troisoiseaux]

Yes!!! I already want to re-read it at some point, because I feel like I'll get something completely different out of reading it while knowing how everything fits together.