troisoiseaux

Re-read Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, and I have to confess, I found the first third of it kind of a slog— maybe I wasn't in the right mood, or maybe it's because I already knew the answer to the Question of Nona, but this time I had like 40% less patience for Nona as a character and kind of bounced off of the narrative tone. Once things got going, though, it was very good.

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Read The Scottish Boy by Alex de Campi; I guess my weirdly specific reading niche of 2022 is "historical fiction set in pre-1750s Britain" (5) with a particular focus on periods of war between England and Scotland (3) and, within that, circumstantial enemies-to-friends(-to-lovers) where at least one party is a prisoner of war (2, but weird it happened twice). In 1333, a young English knight is made an offer he can't refuse: keep an eye on an important Scottish prisoner, a teenage boy just a few years his junior, or lose his family's land. The resulting plot feels like The Flight of the Heron, The Song of Achilles, and the Queen's Thief series were stuck in a blender, which I mean in the best way possible.

My plan to re-read Harrow the Ninth and then Nona has turned into reading the series from the beginning. Who could have seen that one coming?

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Recently read

- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, for the fourth (!) time. It's hard to explain exactly why I love this book so much— it is, of course, at least in part because I am always a sucker for rivals being forced to work together, and I love Gideon and Harrow's whole relationship dynamic, 10/10, would go absolutely nuts over this book for that alone, but there's definitely something more. Something about it - the writing style? the sense of humor? the set-up and pay-off? - operates at the precise wavelength to appeal to me personally. ( massive self-own behind the cut )

- The Little Friend by Donna Tartt, which appears to be the less popular middle sibling of her more famous books - The Secret History and The Goldfinch - but honestly, I think this one is her best. In late 1970s (?) Mississippi, twelve-year-old Harriet sets out to solve the (alleged) murder of her older brother, who died in tragic and suspicious circumstances when she was a baby. I absolutely loved Harriet: she is a peak Weird Little Girl, and frequently, unintentionally awful, growing up in the emotional wreckage of the bomb her brother's death dropped on her family.

In some ways, I think The Little Friend fits into the middle circle of a Venn diagram of The Secret History (weird religious rituals, unsolved murders, a sense of timelessness but place-specificity) and The Goldfinch (childhood trauma, childhood friendships, crime)? It's intensely atmospheric, with (unlike Tartt's other novels) a kaleidoscopic sense of perspective. I liked the resulting view of cause and effect, and the fact that Harriet and Danny - a local meth dealer, who Harriet views as a suspect in her brother's death, although he was a child himself at the time - have such completely different understandings of the narrative that they're in.

Currently reading

- The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones, up to 6 a.m. Not every hour has a specific, documented tie to 9 Thermidor/July 27, 1794 - the 5 a.m. chapter, for example, discussed the Revolutionary government's market- and price-control policies, because that was generally when farmers would drive into Paris and people would start lining up to buy food - although it's impressive how much was documented.

- What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." If I had a nickel for every modern Gothic featuring creepy mushrooms that I've read— well, I'd still only have five cents, because I haven't actually read Mexican Gothic, but my point stands.

Finished A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a non-fiction book about murder in ancient Rome that I've been describing (only semi-facetiously) as "Horrible Histories for the discerning adult listener of true crime podcasts"— weird, fun stories about the Roman political elite stabbing and poisoning each other, interspersed with horrifying, depressing stories about the Roman political elite killing other, non-elite people in ways they didn't classify as "murder" largely because they didn't see them as people.

As I've commented elsewhere, I really liked how Southon unpacked her sources, the gist of which is that all Roman authors should be taken with at least some grains of salt (as osprey_archer said, Tacitus requires his own private salt mine) but their accounts, even if not true-true, still say a lot about what Romans thought and feared as a culture, which is valuable and interesting in itself.

Re-read Gideon the Ninth, which at— what, two months since I first read it?— is a new record, at least in recent years. (I've always been a big re-reader of books, but I don't think I've read a given book twice in one year since I started keeping track of everything I read in 2017.) Savored rather than devoured it, this time; I was a little more aware of its flaws, but these were vastly outweighed by the fun of catching all the foreshadowing I'd missed the first time, and also I just enjoy this book so much.

Read Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, an urban fantasy police procedural— a young constable discovers he can see ghosts and gets recruited by the Met's one-man bureau of magical crimes; his first case involves a series of supernatural murders and a turf war between rival gods of the Thames. The things I actively liked and actively disliked about it more or less balanced out, so ultimately my feelings are "neutral, but unlikely to read the rest of the series."

Read Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh; village drama turns deadly, as it was apparently wont to do in English villages of the 1930s. One wonders how anyone made it out alive. I enjoy Marsh's creative methods of murder— ( is it even a spoiler if it's just the 'how' dunnit, without the 'who'? )

Read There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, which was a mood and a half. A burnt-out young woman takes on a series of "easy" jobs - watching surveillance footage, writing copy for bus advertisements or trivia for the back of cracker packets, etc. - and finds herself unhappily over-invested in each one, usually on account of being drawn into some sort of drama/mystery that teeters on the edge of the surreal.

Read Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir— oddly enough, the second book about gay teen necromancers in a religious cult I've read in 2021! This has been on my radar for a while and I'm SO glad I finally got around to reading it, because it was really good. Like, "stay up to stupid o'clock on a school night to finish it" good. It plays with some tropes/concepts I love against a backdrop I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did.