What did you just finish?
Rusty Puppy by Joe Lansdale. The twelfth book in the thriller/mystery/action series Hap & Leonard, this one picks up immediately where the previous one left off – which is good, since that previous one ended on a hell of a cliffhanger, with Hap seemingly in the middle of dying. Well, he's all better now and while I didn't particularly expect the series to kill off its narrator and co-protagonist, I really could have used some more resolution to that particular plot development.

Ah, well. I don't read these books for their subtle plotting, I read them because the banter between Hap and Leonard never fails to make me laugh. For example:
"You do look cool in that fedora.” [Hap said to Leonard]
“Like I value your opinion.”
“But you do.”
“Do not.”
“Do.”
“So you like it?” he said.
“Stylish, brother. You found something that works for you. I know how hard that must be for you.”
“You’re still searching, though,” Leonard said. “Your daughter doing okay?”
“Yep.”
“That’s working out?”
“Except she and Brett [Hap's girlfriend] have the colds from hell. I think it might be flu. Brett actually asked that I stay at the office tonight. They are seriously infectious. And I don’t want that shit they got.”
“But you don’t mind sharing their germs with me?”
“I don’t have a single symptom,” I said. “And I’m keeping it that way. I’m actually kind of enjoying being on my own at the office. Well, there’s Buffy [the dog]. It’s nice for a change of pace. Me and Buffy can play checkers until late at night. She hasn’t quite got chess down yet.”
“You can stay at my place, asshole.”
“I’m fine at the office. John and you might get back together, and I’d rather not hear you fucking behind the wall. I can’t enjoy that. I keep thinking something is in the wrong hole.”
“Long as I’ve known you, you are still bothered by it?”
“Not the gay, just the act. I don’t want to hear it going on.”
“That’s the same.”
“How do you feel about heterosexuality?”
“Nothing against it, but it makes me kind of go eeew.”
“Now you get it.”
“I’m going to tell Brett you referred to her equipment as a hole.”
“I was just speaking in a general way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Please don’t,” I said.
“I’ll consider on it,” he said.

In this book, they investigate the murder of Jamar, a young man supposedly beaten to death in a drug deal gone wrong, but whose mother swears that something more is going on. The plot expands to include a conspiracy of crooked cops, the sexual harassment of Jamar's sister, an illegal boxing ring, an abandoned sawmill, a bunch of incompetent hitmen, Leonard's new boyfriend, a sleazy lawyer, and a deliciously creepy explanation for the phrase 'rusty puppy'. There's a slender feel to all of it, like much of it is only there to provide a setup for the fanservice-y climax wherein Hap and Leonard are forced to publically fight each other to the death. But since I quite enjoy a bit of well-done fanservice, that's not really a criticism.

Speaking of, I also loved the new character of an eight-year-old girl who becomes involved in the mystery (warning for various language issues):
The little girl came over. “You think you’re bad, don’t you?” She said this to Leonard.
“Baby girl, I don’t think, I know I’m bad.”
“Them boys hold grudges,” she said.
“Do they now? Well, that’s going to worry me for days. Who the hell are you? ”
“Reba. I was named after a white lady that sings.”
“Yeah?” Leonard said.
“Mama liked that cracker shit. I don’t. I like me some real music. I mainly go by Little Woman.”
“You just made that up,” Leonard said.
“Startin’ now, then.”
“I like Reba,” Leonard said. “I mean the singer, if that’s who you’re talking about. You I don’t like at all, you little snot-nosed pile of rat shit.”
“Leonard,” I said. “Kid.”
“This ain’t no kid. That there is a fucking four-hundred-year-old midget vampire.”
“Fuck you,” Reba said.
“Fuck you too,” Leonard said.
“You ain’t black at all?”
“What the fuck color am I? This look like shoe polish to you?”
“Uncle Tom is your color.”
“Yeah, well, you want to stay in the goddamn projects and wear your own shower cap and house shoes and whine about the Man keeping you down, you go on and do it. Me, I spit in the Man’s fucking face, tell him it’s face wash, and he’s got to like it.”
“I hope you get et up by a tiger,” she said, walking away.
“Not likely,” Leonard said.
“Leonard, really? You’re going to pick a fight with a kid?”
“She started it. Ancient midget-ass motherfucking vampire.” He yelled out to her then. “I hope your fucking tricycle has a flat.”
She kept walking away, and without looking back, she stuck her hand up in a fist, extended her middle finger.

I suspect (and sincerely hope) that she will become a recurring character, which makes me very happy. Though really I want Leonard to adopt her so they become a mean angry kick-ass family of crime solvers.

It's not a deep book, but sometimes deep is not what I want. For funny, light-hearted entertainment, you could hardly do better.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid. A hard book to review, mainly because it doesn't really have a plot and barely has characters and it isn't even entirely clear as to which genre it belongs – memoir or novel – though the one thing it is closer to than anything else is poetry.

Let me demonstrate with the opening paragraph:
And that day, the sun was in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, and it shone in its usual way so harshly bright, making even the shadows pale, making even the shadows seek shelter; that day the sun was in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, but Mr. Potter did not note this, so accustomed was he to this, the sun in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky; if the sun had not been in its usual place, that would have made a great big change in Mr. Potter's day, it would have meant rain, however briefly such a thing, rain, might fall, but it would have changed Mr. Potter's day, so used was he to the sun in its usual place, way up above and in the middle of the sky. Mr. Potter breathed in his normal way, his heart was beating in its normal way, up and down underneath the covering of his black skin, up and down underneath his white knitted cotton vest next to his very black skin, up and down underneath his plainly woven white cotton shirt that was on top of the knitted cotton vest which lay next to his skin; so his heart breathed in its normal way. And he put on his trousers and in the pocket of his trousers he placed a white handkerchief; and all this was as normal as the way his heart beat; all this, his putting on his clothes in just that way, as normal as the way his heart beat, the heart beating normally and the clothes reassuring to Mr. Potter and to things beyond Mr. Potter, things that did not know they needed such reassurance.

The entire book goes on this way, full of repetitions and a focus on oddly specific little details while the larger picture is left vague, only gestured at rather than depicted. Certain phrases occur over and over again throughout the book until they take on the feeling of a chorus or chant: a line drawn through him; Mr. Potter was my father, my father's name was Mr. Potter; Mr. Potter was born in nineteen hundred and twenty-two and he died in nineteen hundred and ninety-two; Mr. Potter could not read and Mr. Potter could not write. The story, such as it is, is about Roderick Potter, a poor chauffeur on Antigua: his parents (his father who never acknowledged him and his mother who committed suicide when he was young), the man who owns the car Mr. Potter drives (from Lebanon, with his own tragic history of exile), one of his customers (Dr. Weizenger, about whose past we never learn more than that he is fleeing Prague in the 1940s, but really, what more is there to say than that? – to say someone is fleeing Prague in the 1940s is to say exactly what they're fleeing from), Mr. Potter's own many illegitimate children, one of whom grows up to be a writer and becomes the narrator of this book. More than a story, it's a lyrical observation of colonialism, racism, poverty, sexism and broken families, tragedies carried down the generations, all the general global and individual ills of every life, and the ability – or the lack of it – to recognize and articulate such problems. And, most of all, whose voice will be heard doing so.

I think I liked it, overall, though it's a weird book to grapple with. It's a very good example of a very particular thing, but if a 150 page prose poem about the narrator's unknown harsh-but-suffering father doesn't sound appealing, I don't think the actual experience of Mr. Potter will change your mind.


Mount TBR update: 14!

What are you currently reading?
Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant. A novel about the Borgias from my favorite melodramatic historical fiction author!

What did you just finish?
Color of Love by Anita Stansfield. A Victorian romance starring Amala, an Indian woman adopted by a white family and raised in England, and Henry, a white Englishman recently returned from India. I can't figure out how to talk about this book without spoilers, so if you really want to be surprised, skip the rest of the review. Otherwise I'm going to talk about everything right up until the very end.

Despite their instant attraction and obvious suitability for one another, Amala refuses to marry Henry because she's unwilling to deal with the difficulties of an interracial marriage in their stuffy country town. She vows instead to be a stylish independent single woman like her aunt the world traveler, and insists that Henry move on and forget their relationship. Which he does – by marrying her (white, adopted) sister. Amala is at first dismayed, but the years pass and she settles happily into traveling around Europe and doing good. And then her sister develops cancer and calls her home. The sister has one last wish before she dies: for Amala and Henry to promise that they'll marry one another. It turns out that despite their efforts to keep their former relationship a secret, the sister has known all along and doesn't hold it against them. She dies, and Amala and Henry go through a lengthy grieving period, their healing impeded by their resentment against the sister for forcing the promise out of them. They only are able to move out of the mourning period when they finally acknowledge how angry they are at her. Amala realizes that her exposure to the greater world, as well as the inclusion of more Indian people in her life (via the presence of Henry's servants), has changed her attitude toward interracial marriages and she's now willing to marry Henry. Henry, though, now has to get over the fact that Amala broke his heart years ago when they first courted. But, of course, he eventually comes to see that he's still in to her, and they marry and live happily ever after.

Whew.

I have such mixed feelings about this book! On the one hand, Stansfield does a better job of handling the racism of the period than I honestly expected. She's fantastic at depicting how Amala's isolation from any other people of color has had lasting, detrimental effects on her self-image, confidence, and personality, even when no one is actively being mean to her. Stansfield also is sensitive to how privilege has blinded Amala's white family and Henry, leaving them unaware of much of what she deals with and prone to making mistakes despite having the very best of intentions.

On the other hand, HENRY MARRIES AMALA'S SISTER WTF. And yet again Stansfield is so careful and gentle that it never comes off as the sister being fridged for the sake of advancing their relationship! In fact, the section of the sister's illness is probably longer and written with more detail than any other part of the book. There's even a gruesomely long death-scene, with last words and tears and medicine side-effects and doctor intervention and sleeplessness and a fucking death rattle for god's sake, that was almost certainly more realism than I have ever needed for a romance novel's angst. Not to mention the year of grief that comes afterward. I can't deny that this plot point was handled as well as possible, but I also can't get over the fact that this plot point exists in the first place.

Now, all of this attention to detail and thoughtfulness might lead you to assume that at least the craft of writing is well done – pretty sentences, gorgeous descriptions, and so. Sadly this is not the case. In fact Stansfield has an odd habit of skipping entirely over things that really need to be on the page; everyone knows 'show don't tell', but this is the worst case of it I've ever seen. For example, this is the first conversation Henry and Amala ever share, immediately after meeting one another:
She was glad when he began to talk about the things he’d loved about living in India, as opposed to asking her questions about her own memories. He also talked of the things he’d hated—most specifically the heat and the bugs. She enjoyed listening to every word that came out of his mouth, until the sense of how much time had passed shocked her to her feet.
No actual lines of dialogue from the conversation that will prove pivotal to drawing them together! We don't actually get to see these characters fall in love, how they talk to one another, what attracts them! This is basic Romance Novel 101, people: show how the love happens!

For another example:
Finally, Amala found the courage to break the wax seal and unfold the letter. She had to move closer to the light in order to more clearly see what was written. At a quick glance she was able to see that the letter began with My Dearest Amala, and that it ended some pages later with, All the love my heart possesses, Henry. The problem was that in between was such a beautifully detailed expression of his devotion that Amala kept having to dab at her eyes to keep her vision from blurring so that she could continue reading. When they had spoken in the garden, she had told him plainly and clearly where she had to stand on the matter of their attraction to one another, but she was now reading a genuine and sincere rebuttal to her every argument. It became evident through his words that he knew a great deal more about the issues of prejudice behind her motives than she’d given him credit for. He declared his firm belief that no matter what governments or society might try to dictate in this world, God surely saw all of His children equally, and that in God’s eyes, surely they could find a way to be right with this.
Amala was completely taken off guard by how much her resolve had melted by the time she finished reading the letter, and after she’d read it through a second time, she was filled with doubt and confusion over matters that had previously seemed completely clear.
One might assume that with such a plot-important and emotional letter, we'd get to read it ourselves, right? No. Those two phrases up there are literally all the reader gets to see of the letter. Similar problems happen throughout the book, though they're more common in the early pages.

I suppose with a novel that covers as many years and has as many plot twists as this one, it's got to be forgiven for skimming over some of the details. But then again, it's the details that I most wanted to read!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual – And the Modern World Began by Joan DeJean. The premise of this book is that during a single century (1670-1765) in France, many of the things we consider basic to life were invented or came into use: cotton clothing, clothing designs with the emphasis placed on comfort as opposed to imposing court dress, sofas, armchairs, bedrooms and bathrooms as separate rooms instead of one corner of a grand hall, flush toilets and running water, large paned windows to let in light, nightstands and writing desks, hardwood floors, and more. Part of this was a reaction to the grand magnificence of Versailles – after a day in a boned bodice that wouldn't let you sit down, surrounded by strict rules of etiquette, who wouldn't want to relax in cozy privacy? Another part was simply a consequence of the historic moment: increased trade with India, a newly rich merchant class eager to commission their own architect-designed houses, increased technology in various crafts, Enlightenment philosophers coming up with new ideas for improving "the art of living". It's a fascinating argument, to show how all these disparate things are linked, and DeJean makes her case very well, though I don't know enough about it to say if she missed anything obvious.

DeJean has a entertaining, breezy style that makes the book more fun to read than you might suspect. For example:
From the start (and the stories about [the Marquise de Pompadour] started right away), her biographers agreed that she set her cap for the king, having been encouraged to believe since childhood that she was somehow destined to become his mistress. (Her will contains a curious, and curiously touching, bequest of six hundred livres to "Madame Lebon for having foretold when she was nine years old that she would one day become the king's mistress").
Describing newly curved seating:
And for "those who write" and therefore "spend long periods" leaning forward, [Roubo, a furniture designer] shows how the seat's curves could be adapted to this particular distribution of body weight and thereby help writers "resist fatigue". (I only wish someone would think like this today.)
Describing an early toilet:
Since it was not hooked up to waste piping, it's hard to imagine how well it performed its function. (In the fixtures he created for Pompadour, Migeon did at least use a wood then new to France, mahogany, because of its odor-resistant properties.)

It's a surprisingly quick, easy read, with lots of illustrations and a really intriguing central premise. I recommend it if you have the least interest in the origins of mundane things.


The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch. YES I GOT TO READ THE NEW RIVERS OF LONDON NOVELLA EARLY! :D :D :D

In this fairly short and light story, ghosts are harassing morning commuters on the Tube, and Peter has been deputized to put a stop to it. Abigail is a major character, with Jaget and Toby playing important supporting roles along with Nightingale and Molly. Pretty much no one else appears, unfortunately, though that's what happens when you only have 144 pages to fill. I was so glad to see more of Abigail, who is totally my favorite part of this novella, and I love how her role is developing: her Latin (now better than Peter's), her odd relationship with foxes, her pseudo-job as the Folly's intern, and of course the question looming ever closer: how to (or if to) teach her magic. A subplot about a new river is adorable, and I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.

The writing is, as always, funny and clever and full of odd little facts about architecture and history, with a few moments of surprising emotion. I absolutely love the way the mystery developed – which is why I'm trying not to spoil it here – but my one complaint with the book is that I wish there'd been just a little bit more resolution at the end. I wanted that last thread tied up, even if it is probably more realistic to leave a few dangling.

And again: only 144 pages.

Overall it's a charming and memorable story, even if it doesn't advance the series's overall plot arc any. Highly recommended, though I'm sure all the Rivers of London fans plan to read it already. :D I'm not sure how well it would work as an introduction to the series – on the one hand, there is that fairly small cast, but on the other there's plenty of unexplained backstory and worldbuilding. It could go either way, I suppose. But if you're not familiar with Rivers of London, get on that!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Mount TBR update: With The Age of Comfort, 12!

What are you currently reading?
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I've read this before, though probably not in the last decade, which is why I wanted to reread it before the TV adaptation starts at the end of the month. (Although I don't have Starz, so I'll have to figure out some other way to watch it.) Also this is the "director's cut" ten-year-anniversary edition, slightly longer than the original. I'll be interested to see what's different, though honestly I'm not sure I remember it well enough to notice a new scene or two.

What did you just finish?
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz. I am a huge fan of Horwitz (who is primarily a journalist rather than a historian), so of course when I realized that he had a book criticizing the primacy of Plymouth Rock in the narrative of American origins I had to read it. I reliably go on rants about how the Pilgrims didn't earn their mythologized status of the "first" immigrants, and adding in a favorite author just sweetened the deal.

Horwitz starts the book by realizing that he knows very little about the history of European exploration in the New World pre-Plymouth Rock, and sets out to correct that lack with a mix of historical research and traveling around to visit modern people at once-important locations. It's a book that's really as much about how historical myths are created, sustained, and reacted to as it is about straight history, which gives it an interesting twist.

Horwitz starts out with the Viking exploration of Newfoundland, skips ahead to Columbus in the Caribbean, and then details the stories of various conquistadores: Cabeza de Vaca (abandoned in Florida, eventually walked all the way around the Gulf and south to Mexico City), Coronado (came north from Mexico, made it all the way to Kansas), Ponce de Leon (who was not searching for a Fountain of Youth!), de Soto (landed in Florida, rampaged all throughout the SouthEast). There's also chapters on the lost colony of Roanoke (not so lost), the founding of Jamestown with its famous inhabitants John Smith and Pocahontas, the French Huguenots in Florida who were shortly afterward attacked by the Spanish who subsequently founded St Augustine and, of course, the Pilgrims themselves.

Horwitz makes a great effort to speak to descendant communities or local historians where he can, but it's often difficult to include non-European perspectives due to the massive dislocation and cultural loss in Native American groups in the last few centuries. Still, the chapters on the Zuni (in New Mexico) and the Powhatan (in Virginia) were fascinating. My favorite part of the whole book may have been a hilarious section where Horwitz hangs around in the Dominican Republic, fighting against bureaucracy and disinterested locals in an attempt to get a glimpse at what are (supposedly) Christopher Columbus's bones.

Ultimately Horwitz concludes that it's not so surprising Americans have chosen the Pilgrims to focus on for our national origin myth – it's tidy, it's happy, it promotes the 'right' sort of values – and I wish he had been a little more critical of that. But overall it's a fun book, a great combination of interesting history and funny modern anecdotes.


The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – And Us by Richard O. Prum. A common problem for evolutionary theorists is explaining animal traits such as the peacock's tail: it's huge, extravagant, a target to predators, prone to getting caught in branches, and in plenty of other ways seems to be detrimental to the peacock's survival. So why did it evolve? The standard explanation is that it functions as a "costly signal" – that is, the bigger the tail, the more likely the peacock is to have good genes to survive such a handicap, and the more likely female peacocks are to choose it as a mate, since they want those good genes for their offspring.

Prum argues that this explanation doesn't work. He says instead that there's no need to bring natural selection into the picture at all. If a big tail seems "beautiful" to potential mates, that is enough for it to evolve: females will choose big-tailed males so that their sons will also have big-tails, who will then also be preferentially chosen by the next generation of females, and on and on it goes, tails forever getting bigger even if it's actually detrimental to the good of the overall species. Prum calls this "aesthetic selection" or "sexual selection" and argues that it's an important force in understanding evolution. It can function against natural selection, and recognizing the conflict between these two impulses is the only way to understand the diversity of modern biology. Prum is primarily a bird scientist, so the first half of the book consists of examples from his own research, from the amazing tails of Great Argus pheasant, to manakin courtship dances, to the elaborate and colorful structures built by bowerbirds. He even discusses the origin of feathers in dinosaurs, and what colors they might have been! In the final chapters, Prum speculates on how aesthetic selection might also have influenced human evolution regarding everything from our body shape to female orgasms to the existence of same-sex desires.

Overall it's an interesting and insightful argument, and Prum makes his case very well. The one thing I would critique is that I don't think he did a good job of proving that aesthetic preferences are themselves heritable, or how they would originally spread within a population. It's also a book that requires the reader to have a fairly well-informed background in evolutionary theory, which I'm not entirely sure matches the fact that it's being sold as popular science. But maybe I'm underestimating the average person's level of knowledge! At any rate, I'm glad I read it, even if it required more thought than I expected.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Mount TBR update: A Voyage Long and Strange takes me up to 10!

What are you currently reading?
Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours by Nog Arikha. Non-fiction books are hard to blurb, since they have all the information right there in the title.

What did you just finish?
Deeds of the Disturber by Elizabeth Peters. #5 of the Amelia Peabody books, a hilarious murder mystery series starring the stubborn, self-righteous, extremely late-Victorian British Egyptologist/amateur sleuth Amelia, her Byronic hero husband Emerson, and their annoyingly precocious son Ramses. This edition is the first to take place in London, and features the rumor of a mummy's curse in the British Museum, debauched aristocrats, a lady journalist, a lunatic disguised as an Ancient Egyptian priest, Emerson's ex-girlfriend, faked human sacrifices, people literally imprisoned in dungeons with the water levels rising rapidly, a cameo appearance by Dicken's Inspector Cuff, Ramses's scientific experiments in preventing corpses from rotting, and a visit by Amelia's niece and nephew, who turn out to be the only children worse than him. I'm generally not a fan of romance plots involving jealousy, but I have to say I loved how it developed between Amelia and Emerson, and I had to stop reading to cackle multiple times.

I felt like this book was a little scattered and not quite as well done as previous books in the series, but not so much as to make it skippable. I still had a very enjoyable time reading it, even if it was ultimately a bit forgettable. On the other hand, I did love the reporter, Miss Minton, and hope she shows up again in future books.


Mount TBR update: Up to 9 this week!

What are you currently reading?
A Lady's Code of Misconduct by Meredith Duran. A Victorian romance with marriage-of-convenience and amnesia that I am LOVING.

What did you just finish?
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. A biography focused on Cleopatra, but with plenty of detours into Roman history, Alexander the Great's afterlife, Hellenistic Egypt, King Herod of Judea, the library of Alexandria, and other such fascinating side-stories.

And it's kind of a good thing that the book is filled up with these other topics, because unfortunately there simply is not that much of a historical record about Cleopatra's life. To quote Schiff, "For a woman who was to be celebrated for her masterly manipulation of Rome, Cleopatra's story would be entrusted primarily to that city's historians; she effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room." Schiff struggles against this as much as she can, but inevitably there are many blank years which can only be filled with "presumably" and "she must have" and "other Egyptian rulers did". I hate to say it, because it's not Schiff's fault, but I finished the book feeling like I'd learned nothing new. Cleopatra remains a far more unknowable personality than Julius Caesar or Mark Antony or Octavius or any of the other familiar names from this period.

I mainly picked up this book because I loved, loved, loved Schiff's book on the Salem Witch trials, but alas, this one did not quite live up to my expectations. On the other hand, I did discover the Ptolemaic family tree, which makes the Habsburgs look reasonable. Goddamn, people. A family tree should branch!


Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. A novel set in the immigrant Sikh community of London. Nikki is a college dropout, primarily because she couldn't find a major she was passionate about, and is currently wasting her time by tending bar. She answers an ad looking for a creative writer teacher on impulse, figuring that hey, she's a reader! She could probably teach writing!

Instead she discovers that a) the class is supposed to be adult literacy, not memoir-writing, b) the students are primarily widows only semi-fluent in English who mostly just want to hang out and be entertained, and c) after accidentally discovering the existence of sexy romance novels, it turns out what the widows really want to do is tell erotic stories. Stories about themselves, stories about fantasies, fanfic about their favorite soap operas, fairy tales turned into sex epics, married couples, f/f couples, threesomes, kinky – all sorts of erotic stories. Nikki is at first mostly embarrassed to have a class full of people who look like her mom loudly debating the best vegetable to compare a penis to, but eventually comes around to seeing the stories as an important creative expression and her own role as teaching the women to stand up for themselves.

This part of the novel is all huge fun, if not particularly deep, and I had a great time reading it. Unfortunately there's a B-plot involving multiple murders, a vast cover-up conspiracy, a secret affair, disguised handwriting, and general melodrama. This part did not work so well for me. It just didn't seem to fit with the relatively small story of ten women rediscovering their passions – physical or not.

Ah, well. It wasn't enough to ruin the book for me, which remains a sweet, breezy read.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Mount TBR update: Cleopatra brings me up to 7. On the other hand, there was a church book sale in my neighborhood last weekend, and I bought 7 books. (But they were only $2!! Of course I had to!) So one might more accurately say I'm at 0.


What are you currently reading?
Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye. Jane Eyre retold with Jane as a serial killer!

What did you just finish?
The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island by Mac Griswold. A fascinating piece of microhistory focused on a single family farm in Eastern Long Island. The Sylvester Manor, as it's now called, was first settled by an English-Dutch family in 1652, and the current house dates to the 1730s. And yet was still being lived in as a normal family home! Griswold, the author, literally stumbled over the house while rowing around Long Island and made friends with the current owners, eventually even convincing them to allow multiple seasons of archaeological excavation in their front yard. The book is based on those excavations, as well as historical research, family legends, and Griswold's own speciality as a landscape historian (she was particularly interested in how the various trees and shrubs came to the plantation). Although there's three centuries of history to cover, the focus is very much on the first generation of the family, with everyone later than 1801 getting short shrift. Which was fine by me, since that's the period I was most interested in. Griswold makes a valiant effort to put the focus on the enslaved Africans and Native Americans of the plantation, but inevitably there's simply many more documents and details available about the white masters. I think she does a good job with what she has to work with, and does produce some fascinating finds, but it's just not much in comparison to the European history. As is, sadly, so often the case.

Sylvester Manor was a northern provisioning plantation, which means that it grew the food, bred the horses, and crafted the barrels necessary for the running of their partnered sugar plantation down on Barbados. The history of Northern slavery has been mostly forgotten (or erased, depending on your perspective), and this book does an excellent job of demonstrating how closely tied together North and South were economically, rather than the antagonist perspective you get from many simplistic histories of the Civil War.

A good book, though I'm still searching for my one ideal history of NYC slavery.

(For a comparison, if you want to read just one book about slavery in the NYC area, I'd highly recommend this one over last week's New York Burning.)


The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World by Abigail Tucker. Despite loving my two cats very much, and enjoying watching YouTube cat videos as much as any person on the internet, I am not actually one to read many books about cats. Everything from cozy cat mysteries to true-life inspirational cats turns me off. In fact, a cat on the cover is more likely to make me turn a book down than to pick it up. (I might make an exception for I Could Pee on This, and Other Poems by Cats.) And yet here I am, reading a book about cats!

The Lion in the Living Room is a pop-science book (very much in the style of Mary Roach or Sarah Vowell) about the history of cats. Her main topic is how they became domesticated – or if they even are domesticated – looking at the archaeology, biology, and history of humans' relationship with cats. She also covers topics from how good cats actually are at controlling rats and mice (spoiler: not very), Victorian cat shows, newly developed breeds, the impact of cats on the environment, the rise of the NTR (Neuter-Trap-Release) approach to controlling street cat populations, the history of the LolCat meme, toxoplasmosis (the parasite in cat's urine that might attract sufferers to cats), Egyptian religion, and interviews internet star Lil Bub. There's a ton of fun and fascinating facts sprinkled throughout the book. I particularly liked it for its straightforward scientific approach to cats, without much fluffiness, which unfortunately seems to be causing many negative reviews (I guess if being told that housecats are massively contributing to the extinction of birds and small mammals hurts your feelings, this may not be the book for you. Though I don't know how any reasonably well-informed adult doesn't already know that).

Highly recommended for a breezy look at the history and science of cats.


The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn. A novel I'd been stumbling across in different bookstores for the last several months, always being intrigued by the cover but never quite enough to buy it. And then I found it for $2 in a second-hand store and finally brought it home.

Well, I'm glad I only paid $2.

In 1999, Jacob Thacker is a doctor with the South Carolina Medical College, currently stuck on administrative duty as he recovers from a Xanax addiction. This past makes it easy for the Dean to blackmail him when a construction team uncovers dozens of human skeletons in the college's basement. Jacob is ordered to cover it up without the press finding out, even if that means reburying the bodies somewhere secret.

In alternating chapters the book jumps back to the 1850s and 60s to tell the story of Nemo Johnston, first enslaved and then free, who is also employed by the South Carolina Medical College. The school's very first Dean used Nemo as 'resurrectionist', a grave robber with the task of procuring dead bodies, mostly of other black men and women, for the school's students to practice on. Nemo is, of course, the source of the skeletons Jacob is being forced to deal with.

Jacob is kind of a terrible human being. He refers to his partner as a "woman in a man's world" because she's a lawyer; describes an ethnically Japanese coworker in this way: "Janice is as American as he is, but he can never help feeling that there is some reserve of samurai in her, some native allegiance passed down in the genes, that views him as the foreigner every time they meet"; and, when he first learns about the existence of Nemo, calls him "the poor, dumb bastard". It was around that last line when I decided that the author was deliberately writing Jacob as a dick, and perhaps that is the case since Jacob's entire plotline revolves around gaining enough courage and empathy to not accede to the cover-up. But since it takes being fired, blackballed, and rescued from his ensuing suicidal despair to consider that, hey, maybe the current African-American community has a right to their ancestors' remains!, I think the author drastically underestimated how incredibly horrible Jacob comes off as.

Even if that wasn't the case, Nemo's story is simply vastly more interesting than Jacob's. Unfortunately he gets much less page time and not really a plot arc so much as a series of random vignettes at different times of his life. At one point he gets elevated to the role of teacher – a black professor of a medical college! in the South! before the Civil War! – but how this came about or his feelings regarding it are never explained. And some of what little page time he gets is taken up by the story of white nurse Sara Thacker, who (spoiler, I suppose, but it's super obvious from page one) turns out to be Jacob's great-great-grandmother. I think Guinn was trying to do something about class or women's rights with this idea, but the plotline honestly is so thin that it feels like a last-minute addition which never got fleshed out enough to be worthwhile. At least Nemo doesn't turn out to be Jacob's great-great-grandfather, because I honestly spent at least fifty pages terrified that a tragic mulatto novel had somehow been published in 2014.

Overall: interesting premise, terrible execution.


Mount TBR update: 1 added this week (The Resurrectionist) bringing me up to 4! Oh, man, I am not making a dent in my massive mountain.

What are you currently reading?
The Last Woman Standing by Thelma Adams. A Netgalley novel about the wife of Wyatt Earp.

What did you just finish?
The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols by Genevieve von Petzinger. A non-fiction but breezily readable book about cave paintings. Many people are aware of the famous Ice Age paintings of animals – the horses and bison of Lascaux, the lions and bears at Chauvet – but less well-known are the abstract, geometric signs which pop up in this art just as often: dots, lines, X's, empty squares, etc. Mostly this is because the geometeric signs have been largely ignored by archaeologists themselves, who have a tradition of assuming that they're meaningless doodles, patches where the artists were testing their paints, or otherwise unimportant. Fortunately those assumptions are beginning to change.

von Petzinger is an archaeologist herself, one whose research has focused on documenting and analyzing the geometric signs, but this book is very much aimed at a non-specialist audience. She does a great job at providing the background to understand why this is such a fascinating topic (short version: it's the beginning of humans' making art, and may well be evidence of the oldest human language and capacity for symbolism as well). She is also great at mixing her theories with more tactile, personal experiences of crawling around in dark caves or visiting obscure museums, keeping the book from spending too much time in the realm of the abstract. She covers various theories for what the art might "mean" (were they painting animals they wanted to hunt? painting their religious experiences? representing a battle between maleness and femaleness?), and though von Petzinger makes her own personal favorite explanation clear, she keeps from ultimately declaring any single one to be THE answer. Which I appreciate. I've seen some reviewers annoyed that the signs remain mysterious, but honestly, any book claiming to definitively solve a centuries-old scientific mystery is probably a book you should be suspicious of.

Overall, a really great introduction to the topic, and one that I think could be interesting to a lot of people, especially if you like worldbuilding in fantasy or sci-fi. I always think that the Upper Paleolithic art is a great example of how utterly alien other humans can be while still being recognizable as ourselves, and it's endlessly fun to speculate on what they were like.


Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade by Joe Lansdale. Hap & Leonard is a mystery/thriller series that I discovered a year or two ago and have been slowly making my way through. The basic premise is that Hap is a liberal white straight ex-hippie, Leonard is a black gay conservative Vietnam vet, and together they fight crime! And also are best friends in rural East Texas, despite the problems that caused in the 60s and 70s and sometimes still today. Lansdale writes with an ironic, self-deprecating tone that makes the series appeal to me much more than a more straightforward 'tough guys beat up bad guys' take on the same idea would.

This book is collection of short stories, though Lansdale himself describes it as a "mosaic novel". In summary: Hap and Leonard spend a night driving around town, shooting the shit and doing nothing much in particular. As their conservation drifts along and they pass by places they used to know, memories spark off flashbacks which lead into short stories, mostly about Hap's childhood, his parents, and particularly his relationship to racism, but also covering the first time Hap and Leonard met and the first time they got into trouble together. (Two of the stories were published previously in another context, but they're integrated so well into the rest that I wouldn't have known if I hadn't already read them: "The Boy Who Became Invisible" and "Not Our Kind".) But despite mostly taking place in the past, I don't think this would make for a good introduction to the series; a lot of the power of the stories depends on already knowing these characters and having an emotional connection to them and their relationship. On the other hand, if you do know them, this is a wonderful expansion of their history.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Mount TBR update: No new additions this week! My yearly total is still at 2.

What are you currently reading?
The Enthusiast by Josh Fruhlinger. A comedy novel. I've been in desperate need of light, escapist reading material for the last week, and this is fulfilling that desire.

What did you just finish?
Bonecracker by Dick Francis. rachelmanija and egelantier have been urging me to read Dick Francis for literally years, but I have been foolish and never listened to their advice. Until now, though I can't claim to have suddenly increased in wisdom. Instead Bonecracker was the only book I had small enough to wedge into my vest pocket when I went to the Women's March Saturday – I couldn't face having no access to a book all day long, but also didn't want to carry a bag on such a long walk. And for such silly reasons I have finally discovered a great author.

In Bonecrack, Neil has taken over managing an elite stable of racehorses from his father, who was severely injured in a car accident and thus is temporarily out of commission. Not much time goes by before Neil is kidnapped by a Mafia-esque killer with an unusual demand: he wants his son to become Neil's head jockey and to be allowed to ride the horse everyone expects to win the Kentucky Derby. Since he doesn't have much choice about the matter, Neil agrees and thus Alessandro – touchy, spoiled, and only seventeen – shows up to brood in Neil's down-to-Earth English stables.

Neil, who is the epitome of calm, rational, and self-possessed, is determined to think of some way out of his predicament without asking anyone for help, but he slowly grows to like Alessandro, at least if the kid can get out from under the control of his father. Neil's own father is pretty much a dick (if not quite an insane megalomaniac), and the two sons have much in common. I really loved the slow growth of their friendship.

This is a thriller, though, so there is also plenty of exciting action, including a fantastic climax. I loved the many supporting characters and detailed world of the stables. I know pretty much zero about horses or racing them, but Francis's descriptions of their elegant appearances and the experience of riding them were lovely to read. A great book all around.


Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. Goddamn. How does one even begin to review this book?

Okay. Set in the 25th century, the world has become, in many ways, a utopia. War and murder have been all but erased. One way this has been accomplished is by removing religion entirely from public discourse – people can still believe whatever they want to believe, but all proselytizing is illegal, and even discussing theology in groups of three people or more is strictly controlled. Gender is considered an inappropriate topic to discuss in public; everyone is referred to as "they", and most clothing is gender-neutral. Nation-states have also disappeared, as a consequence of those flying cars sci-fi is always promising us:
Pundits may whine that Hives were birthed by technology rather than [a politician], an inevitable change ever since 2073 when [the first flying car] circled the globe in four-point-two hours, bringing the whole planet within comfortable commuting range and sounding the death knell of that old spider, the geographic nation. There is some truth to their claims, since it does not take a firebrand leader to make someone who lives in Maui, works in Myanmar, and lunches in Syracuse realize the absurdity of owing allegiance to the patch of dirt where babe first parted from placenta.

Instead people belong to one of seven "Hives", each of which has slightly different goals, politics, and lifestyle than the others. An individual chooses which one to belong to upon reaching adulthood. People also no longer live in nuclear families, but instead in a bash', a small group of adults who may be relatives, friends, spouses, or work colleagues, but all of whom have explicitly chosen to form an extended family, raising any children communally. Again, you choose this upon becoming an adult, with your options being continuing in the bash' of your parents, joining another established bash', or getting a group together to form an entirely new bash'. One of my favorite parts of this book is how plausible this all feels, the way it's easy to see how such a future might have evolved from our own modern day. But though this might be the future, history is important too: the 25th century turns out to obsessed with the Enlightenment, seeing it as the origin of their age. They continually reference Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, de Sade, and contemporaries, discussing them and their ideas so frequently that they're referred to with nicknames rather than formal titles. And then there's the tracker system, and the set-sets, and the Mars terraforming, and so many other details that I could go on and on and on about! I love Palmer's endless imagination.

All of this worldbuilding is fascinating and completely delightful, but there is also an actual plot. An important editorial is stolen from a newspaper office shortly before publication and left in the bash' that controls the computer system for those flying cars, planning the course routes to prevent crashes. Solving this bizarre crime – primarily why on earth anyone would bother committing it – forms the central mystery of the book. A second plot involves Bridger, a 13-year-old child with the unexplained ability to create miracles, bringing toys, drawings, and imaginary friends to life. Bridger and his talents are currently unknown to any world powers, and his guardians are determined to keep it that way, at least until Bridger is mature enough to make his own decisions.

Our main character and narrator is Mycroft Canner, a criminal who only escaped the death sentence (the exact details of what crime he committed aren't revealed until over halfway through the book, but trust me, it's worth the wait) by serving a life-long penance indentured to the public good, which means he spends his time picking up trash, clearing away flood debris, and being in curiously close contact with the heads of at least four Hives. Mycroft is fluent in many of the world's languages, and the constant switching between English, Spanish, Japanese, French, Latin, Greek, and probably at least one more that I've forgotten (distinguished in the text by subtle typographic marks) added to sense of the book's complexity and depth. Mycroft also uses gendered pronouns despite how archaic and intimate it sounds to his contemporaries, though it quickly becomes obvious that he's also not using them the way we would. A character becomes "he" or "she" not by their biology, but by their presentation, personality, job, or to parallel them with another character.

What I really want to talk about with this book isn't the plot, the characters, or the worldbuilding (even though those are all excellent), it's the philosophical questions it raises. Is this a utopia after all? Is clearing away gender and religion from the public sphere a good thing? If you can create a better world, what price would you be willing to pay to do so? When and how do the ends justify the means? None of these questions are answered in Too Like the Lightning (unsurprisingly, as it's the first of four books, and I can't wait for the next one to be out in March), but I adore all the discussion it's opened up.


Mount TBR update: both of these! So that brings me up to a grand total of... 2. Well, it's a start.

What are you currently reading?
The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols by Genevieve von Petzinger. I'm teaching a class (well, probably more accurate to say 'giving a lecture', but the group calls them classes, so whatevs) on cave paintings next week, and in putting together a list of 'further resources' for people, I came across this interesting new book. We'll have to see what I think about it!

What did you just finish?
Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide by Marzio Barbagli, translated (from Italian) by Lucinda Byatt. This is an academic investigation into suicide – not into why an individual might commit suicide (eg, depression, grief, incurable illness), but into the different ways cultures have interpreted and understood suicide, and how those contexts have resulted in different suicide rates between countries, genders, classes, races, and urban areas vs rural ones.

Barbagli's speciality is the history of Europe, in particular the cultural changes from Classic Rome through Medieval Christianity up to the modern day. About half of the book covers this topic, but he also ventures outside of his usual focus with chapters on sati in India (the tradition of a widow killing herself to follow her deceased husband), female suicide in historical China (sometimes also committed to follow a husband or fiance, but also done to get revenge on someone with power over her), and modern-day suicide bombers and suicides done as political protest. Although all of these topics were very interesting, the fact that Barbagli didn't have the same depth of knowledge about them as the first half of the book was unfortunately quite clear. In the sati chapter, in particular, it was inescapably obvious that he cited only European scholars, with no (or perhaps only one) Indian voices. And while an outsider perspective can sometimes be helpful, it should never be the only take on a cultural topic.

But despite those problems, the chapters on Europe were absolutely fascinating. Barbagli sets out to explain the rise in suicides that occurred in much of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, opposing Durkheim and other contemporary scholars who saw the origins in the Industrial Revolution and subsequent breakdown of the strong social ties of family and village. Instead he argues that the rise was a result of the breakdown of Medieval Christianity, which had seen suicide as the gravest sin (even worse than homicide or the murder of a young child!), into seeing it as resulting from a melancholic personality or as an understandable response to suffering, and then into the modern day's medical understanding of it (depression as a mental illness). Despite the depressing nature of the topic, I really can't think of a better word for these chapters than fascinating; just the way Barbagli lays out his evidence, the accumulation of little historical details and their step by step change through time, gives the book the compelling power of a thriller.

I wish all of it could have been as good as those opening chapters, but nonetheless the book's well worth reading for what it does accomplish.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

What are you currently reading?
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A fun sci-fi book I found through a recommendation.

I am desperately catching up on several weeks worth of LJ/DW, so if you've been getting lots of comments from me on old posts, that would be why. I am not yet all caught up, so expect more! Also, in case anyone is abandoning LJ in light of recent updates, I am on DW as "brigdh". Feel free to add me there if you prefer.

And now, a meme:
Let's start 2017 off in a positive way with a Pay It Forward meme. The first 6 people to comment (and more if I can manage it) will receive a surprise from me at some point in 2017 - anything from a book, a ticket, something home-grown or made, a postcard, absolutely any surprise! It will happen when the mood comes over me and I find something that I believe would suit you and make you happy.

If you can, post this in your own journal and pay it forward. Let's do more kind and loving things for each other in 2017, without any reason other than to make each other smile and show that we think of each other.

(Note that this will require you to give me an address. If you're uncomfortable with that, perhaps wait for another meme! :) If you're alright with that, I'll email or PM you after I've gotten 6 comments.)