troisoiseaux

Listened to an audiobook of The Last Smile in Sunder City, written and read by Luke Arnold, better known for playing John Silver on Black Sails— which is 100% why I gave this book a shot and was, I will confess, pleasantly surprised to discover that it was actually... good? It's an urban fantasy detective novel set in a once-magical world whose source of magic has disappeared: still populated by elves, ogres, wizards, werewolves, vampires, etc., but now elves/vampires are no longer immortal, wizards can't do magic, werewolves are caught in half-transformation, and some forms of life died out entirely. The world-building was clever, the main character's tragic backstory unfolded in interesting ways, and overall, it ended up being a lot darker than I'd expected, but interestingly so.

I think this worked better for me as an audiobook than if I'd actually read-read it. It turns out that Luke Arnold is great at Doing Voices, and I particularly liked the use of different accents for different species— off the top of my head, American accents for non-magical humans (including first-person POV character Fetch Phillips, a hard-drinking private investigator with a broken heart and a guilty conscience), plummy English accents for wizards, Cockney(?) ogres, a cyclops bartender with a thick Scottish brogue, and a dragonborn/lizardfolk-type detective with a subtly hissing lisp.

Read Slow Horses by Mick Herron, in which an office of disgraced MI5 agents sentenced to desk jobs for various screw-ups finds itself at the center of a conspiracy with geopolitical implications— and at least one life more immediately at stake. Fast-paced and funny! My biggest takeaway is that Herron likes playing with audience expectations, and like, phrasing things to suggest he means one thing and then it turns out to mean something else; I thought this was done cleverly the first time - ( spoilers ) - but grew slightly wearing once he was pulling a bait-and-switch every other paragraph. (Insert that one Pacific Rim meme here.)

Finished Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal and just... WOW. Honestly, the wildly incompetent intelligence agency of John le Carré's The Looking Glass War makes a lot more sense now.

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I recently hit a bit of a book slump, so I ended up reading a couple of plays instead: Osamu Dazai's A New Hamlet (1941) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938). (Although, technically, I think A New Hamlet is a novel written in the form of a script...? But if it waddles and quacks, at what point is it no longer a duck?)

A New Hamlet was... interesting? It is, as the title suggests, an adaptation of Hamlet, although "remix" might be a more apt description. The first couple of scenes are more or less a direct "modern" translation of Hamlet's Act I, Scene 2 and 3— I pulled up the original online, for a line-by-line comparison— although, actually, it's twice translated: from its original Shakespearean English to mid-20th century Japanese, and then from Japanese to English circa the 2010s. (Owen Cooney's translation is an interesting blend of sounding natural as contemporary English, having a certain cadence(?) where it's more obvious that it was translated from a different language, and - mostly in Ophelia's case - intentionally anachronistic, even Shakespearean, phrasing.)

After that, ( the plot is different. )

Our Town is technically a re-read; I'd studied it in 9th grade English, but to be honest, it hadn't left a particularly strong impression on me at the time.* What made it interesting, this time, was that the edition I borrowed had a bunch of "bonus content" about the play's history, inspirations (surprisingly, classical Greek and Chinese theater?), and Wilder's writing process, including changes that were made between drafts— e.g., in an early draft, young George Gibbs had political ambitions, but this was cut for not being in line with Wilder's goal of "an allegorical representation of all life." There was also apparently some behind-the-scenes drama between Wilder and Our Town's original director, Jed Harris; a list of changes Wilder demanded to Harris' direction boiled down to "stop changing the lines" and "everyone's acting should be like 60% less weepily sentimental."

( Footnote )

Read The Future by Catherine Leroux, set in a dystopian future(?) Detroit with an alternate-history past – in this world, it's the francophone Canadian city of Fort Détroit – and also magic?? (It took me until almost the end of the book to pin down whether the magic was actually happening or more metaphorical magical realism, but I came down on the side of there being actual magic.) All of which is just the backdrop! Plot-wise, it's about a woman searching for her missing granddaughters after their mother/her daughter is murdered, which brings her into the orbit of two communities: a ramshackle society of lost children living in Fort Détroit's Parc Rouge, and a neighborhood bound by shared history and a shared garden. It's a kaleidoscopic story, with a wide-reaching narrative built from vignettes, each tightly focused on one or two individual characters; and it's a story that loops around on itself, revisiting the same scenes from different perspectives. My interest in this had originally been piqued by Leroux's alt-history Detroit, but I ended up really liking it for the ways it felt like a take on Peter Pan.

Read Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones, which was an ABSOLUTE DELIGHT, 10/10. If you've ever read Howl's Moving Castle and been like "I wish DWJ had written a prequel about how a Welsh grad student ends up as a wizard in another world," this is not exactly that book, but it satisfies the same itch: a stressed-out multiverse wizard in his mid-20s tries to keep a space empire from collapsing while also looking for a new multiverse wizard apprentice at a sci-fi/fantasy convention in England, and he is so annoyed about the bossy weird young woman who is obviously his best choice. I loved this!! It has so many great characters, and does fun things with blending magic and (1990s) technology, and made me nostalgic for a convention experience I've never actually had. It definitely felt written for a more mature audience than most of DWJ's books, both in a "jokes about erotic art and orgies" way and a "higher stakes, more serious consequences" way...? Very '90s in some ways that have not aged super well, but didn't rankle.

Read I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai: I had thought I knew what to expect from this novel, with its premise of "podcaster returns to teach at the New England boarding school where her classmate was murdered during their senior year," but it surprised me by being much more complicated and interesting than I'd expected. I liked the narrative devices it used— addressing the first-person narration to a "you" whose identity and role in the story becomes gradually clear; the running thread, in the background, of an ongoing #MeToo-era news story that is never identified specifically, or rather, is identified as all of the news stories— and I liked the overall plot, which was more of a "coming to terms with one's coming-of-age, decades later" story than a campus murder mystery. (Although the campus murder mystery is there, too.)

Read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which also was not what I expected, although in this case it's not my own snobbery to blame, but the fact that the friend who recommended this to me did not follow up her "it's great!" with, say, "but devastating!" and I was therefore completely blindsided by the third-act ( MAJOR SPOILER. ) It is a good book, though: both a compelling read and a well-constructed one.

Read The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff: "a young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful— until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands." Very fun read! It's a dark comedy that touches on serious themes— abusive relationships, sexual assault, sexism, caste and religious prejudice— but frequently made me laugh out loud.

Read The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean, a historical mystery/thriller set in the Scottish Highlands. A disillusioned veteran of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion turned curmudgeonly bookseller finds a murdered stranger inside his shop, with a white cockade tied to the knife that killed him, on the same day that his fugitive father— a veteran of '15 and '45, and a spy for King James— returns to Inverness, drawing him into a tangled web of old betrayals and new conspiracies.

Read The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America by John Wood Sweet, about the first publicized rape trial in American history, in New York City in 1793, when 17-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer pressed charges against the wealthy man who had sexually assaulted her. Three guesses for how this trial played out, and the first two don't count.

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Read To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey— I actually guessed the twist before opening the book, because I made a connection between the plot summary, having once read that ( SPOILER REDACTED ) comes up in one of Tey's novels, and also, well, the fact that it was recommended to me; I ended up reading the last chapter first to confirm my theory. This would have been a fun read even if I had taken a more orthodox approach— in some ways, it feels like a successful execution of what Sayers was aiming for in The Five Red Herrings, as a mystery set in a village overrun by eccentric artists and hinging, in part, on an object that isn't there— but I'm actually glad I read it fully spoiled, which is another data point for my musings on when I like being "in the know" vs. letting a mystery unfold as intended: ( ... )

Read The Looking Glass War by John le Carré, about a deeply incompetent intelligence agency— not the Circus, of le Carré's other novels (although it, and George Smiley, plays a role in this one) but the remains of a WWII-era military intelligence agency, the Department, long since stripped for its useable parts and desperate to keep up appearances— whose collective mid-life crisis has a body count when they recruit a long-retired operative for one last mission in East Germany.

Read The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell, the first book in a sprawling historical fiction series about a Saxon-born, Viking-raised warrior in 9th century Britain. I enjoyed reading this but don't feel particularly inclined to continue the series.

Read Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald— I've seen people on DW enthusing over this book for months, and it completely lived up to the hype, especially since I somehow managed to go in entirely unspoiled! My impression of the plot, going in, was "manic Brit and stoic American investigate supernatural phenomena," which I think both is and is not an accurate summary; the authors have described it as "a mystery, a sci-fi adventure, a spy thriller, a queer romance, a military horror story, and satire about the weaponisation of nostalgia in our present cultural moment" and, yep, it is all of those things.

Read A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon, which had kind of a weak start— the first third or so basically just recounted stories from Livy and Ovid in a "gossipy podcaster" voice— but I'm glad I didn't give up, because it was worth the read once it got to the stories of Roman women that we know about through, e.g., archeological sources rather than Roman historians, like Pompeiian businesswoman Julia Felix or the woman known as Turia whose life story was recorded on a now-fragmented gravestone, or even through their own writings, like the personal correspondence between two military wives in Roman Britain, Sulpicia Lepidina and Claudia Severa, found among the Vindolanda tablets, and the graffiti left by Hadrian's court poet Julia Balbilla on the Colossi of Memnon.

Read The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault, sequel to The King Must Die in her duology about the Greek hero Theseus. It's hard to say which I liked more— the highlights, for me, were the Cretan bull-leaping arc in the first book (e.g., the Theseus and the Minotaur retelling) and the Theseus-and-Hippolyta arc in this one. Despite the questionable beginning of Theseus immediately going THE GODS MADE US FOR EACH OTHER, I MUST HAVE HER and then dueling with Hippolyta for his life vs. her freedom, they actually have one of the most well-adjusted relationships I've encountered in a Renault novel! This book also included the Theseus-and-Phaedra-and-Hippolytus story, which was interesting to compare to Jennifer Saint's recent retelling; I imagine there is a way to interpret that particular myth that doesn't involve demonizing either Theseus or Phaedra, but neither Renault nor Saint seem to have found it. (Saint's take is that Theseus Is The Worst; Renault's is that Phaedra Is The Worst, in a way that, next to Hippolyta, smacks of the inverse of Not Like Other Girls, but admittedly Theseus doesn't come out of it looking great, either.)

Read The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan, book #4 of the Percy Jackson series— I'd picked it up because it was the one available on Libby, rather than for the Theseus-myth-adjacent title, but although it focuses on the Daedalus aspects of the myth, Theseus does have a brief, ghostly cameo. (Actually, this book is probably why I'd always assumed Theseus died young, and was surprised to find otherwise, in Renault's retelling: Riordan's ghostly Theseus is just a teenager.) Re-reading this for the first time since middle school, I was very amused to realize that Nico di Angelo was the original moody gay* (pre)teen** necromancer*** of my heart; I am apparently nothing if not consistent. I also got a laugh out of a joke about Blue Ribbon schools and standardized testing that I'm sure went over my head as a kid, when Percy and the gang encounter a sphynx that had updated her whole "answer a riddle to pass" deal to a 20-question pop quiz (via scantron, of course!)

* according to one of the later spin-off series, which I haven't read but was utterly delighted to hear about a few years back
** I think he's 11 or 12 in this book, although technically, he's been 11 since the 1940s
*** son of Hades

Read The Fraud by Zadie Smith, historical fiction based off of the life of 19th century English author William Harrison Ainsworth and the 1873-74 Tichborne claimant trials, but focused on figures at the corner of history's eye: Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, and one of the witnesses who identified the Claimant as the presumed-to-be-deceased Roger Tichborne, Andrew Bogle, who grew up enslaved in Jamaica. It's a curious, kaleidoscopic book, told in mostly one- or two-page-long vignettes, bouncing between Eliza's past (mostly 1840s, iirc) and present (1870s) until it veers sharply into Bogle's self-narrated life story, and then back again.

Read Sir Mordred and the Green Knight, a new short story by Phyllis Ann Karr; it is less a direct "what if Mordred, instead of Gawain, took up the Green Knight's challenge?" AU than I had expected from the title, and in fact centers mostly on an original character of Karr's— an idealistic young squire— who, according to the afterword, appears to be an Arthurian AU of a character from Karr's steampunk alt-history works (?) who is, in his home canon, a vampire (??). However, it does involve Mordred coping badly with finding out he's prophesied to kill Arthur, which appealed to my personal interests.