What I expected: a mystery about a man, Eric Sanderson, who lost his memory after his girlfriend Clio died. The first (and only) progress note I posted mused that the title was a play on words and said, more or less, “I bet Clio didn’t die accidentally.” At that point, I thought the big reveal would be that Eric had murdered Clio and then entered a fugue state because he couldn’t deal with his actions. Cue the psychiatrist calling the police and then the poignant arrest scene. Probably in the rain.
I’ve been reading too many genre mysteries, I guess. Because no sooner had I posted that speculation than this novel went waaaayyyyy off the beaten track.
So what did I get? Here’s me, reading:
Wait, what? Multiple species of “conceptual fish” including a mindshark? Manic pixie dream girl? Hidden passageways in a Waterstone’s? A functional ship created on an abandoned warehouse floor from reclaimed two by fours and other junk? A cat named Ian?
WTF is going on here?
All I am going to say is cast aside all expectations. You’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Three stars because I’m not a big fan of post-modern throw-weirdness-at-the-page-and-call-it-a-plot-point novels. This one isn’t as egregious as some. Plus Ian is cool. And I still think the title is a veiled reference to a Rorschach Test.
Part of the 12 in 2023 challenge to read 12 books selected by 12 friends. This January book was selected by Rod Lindsey.
According to my Goodreads shelf, I read 107 books in 2022. That’s a lot. Of those, two were re-reads and ten were “did not finish.” So a total of 95 new-to-me titles. Here are the standouts.
The first of the trilogy is The Library of the Unwritten. A soul sentenced to Hell is chosen to be the librarian for all the books that have not yet been written. This librarian is responsible for overseeing the plot lines and characters of these yet-to-be-written creations and making sure they don’t get corrupted or intertwined, or hell forbid, escape. Naturally, one Hero does indeed escape, and Claire the Librarian must retrieve him. Unfortunately, the Library and its company have caught the attention of a militant angel, who is convinced they are harboring The Devil’s Bible, a key to the struggle between Heaven and Hell.
I thoroughly enjoyed this first book — it’s fun and serious and grave and silly — and eagerly picked up the second (The Archive of the Forgotten) and third (The God of Lost Words) volumes of the trilogy from my library as soon as they were available. They were also just as enjoyable, and oh my god so well-written!
I have to tell you, I cried buckets at the end of the third book, partially because of the story itself, but mostly because somehow this book allowed me to tap into the grief I had withheld since my father passed away in September. I hadn’t cried for him at all because I was so busy taking care of my mom and seeing that all the loose ends of Daddy’s life were tied in neat bows. There’s so much that must be done in the aftermath of someone’s death, even when you know it’s coming. The God of Lost Words loosed that suppressed grief. And I love this series for helping me get there.
The first of the series is The Anatomist’s Wife. In Scotland, in 1830, Lady Kiera Darby, a young gentlewoman, is widowed. In the aftermath of Kiera’s husband’s death, it is discovered that she assisted her physician husband in making drawings of deceased men for the anatomy textbook he was writing. Society is scandalized and Kiera is therefore shunned for her unnatural behavior. She takes refuge at the country estate of her sister and brother-in-law, spending her days painting and walking and reading in solitude. Then a houseguest turns up dead, and Kiera’s brother-in-law asks if she can use her knowledge of anatomy to assist an inquiry agent, Sebastian Gage, the son of an English nobleman, with determining the cause of death.
This series has chosen a delicate path to follow. It is both a period police procedural/murder mystery, with the usual frequenting of low places with low people, and a post-Regency romance, with the requisite discussion of balls, gowns, and societal mores. Kiera and Gage are likeable, and mostly creatures of their times — by that I mean their views are more progressive than most upper-crust 1830s society members would be, but still retroactive enough that they don’t stand out as complete anachronisms. Some fluff, some dark moments, and overall an enjoyable read. I’ve read the first nine of the series. There are ten volumes total, so far, with the eleventh scheduled for publication in early 2023. I suspect Ms. Huber will ride this pony as far as it will take her. I imagine I’ll ride along.
I had a goal of reading one non-fiction book per month in 2022. I managed to read 8, not 12, but that’s an improvement over previous years. The one I enjoyed the most was The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair. Absolutely fascinating discussion of how humanity learned to create fabric from the most ancient of times to the immediate present. If you have the least bit of interest in textiles, either because you sew or knit or weave, or if you love clothes, or wonder how “women’s work” has affected mankind’s quality of life, this is the book for you. I borrowed it from the library, but I may buy a hard copy for my permanent collection.
And finally, Metropolis by B.A. Shapiro. Honestly, who would have thought a novel about a failing self-storage facility would be so entertaining? This is the third or fourth of Shapiro’s novels that I’ve read and they’ve all been quirky and unexpected and oh so very good. Highly recommended.
That’s all the highlights for this year. Sadly I didn’t write any actual book reviews on Goodreads for anything I read this year — except briefly for a couple of the DNFs because OMG they were fucking awful — but if you want to see the complete list, click this link.
In 2020 and 2021, I read a total of 216 books — 85 in 2020 and 131 in 2021. Of those, only 5 were shelved as “did not finish.” Yes, that’s a lot of books, more than I’ve read in any year since I started keeping track in 2003. We can blame/credit the pandemic for that. Funny how much reading one can get done when all of one’s other customary activities are abruptly curtailed. I have to confess the library’s e-book catalog has been a godsend the last couple of years.
Many, if not most, of those reads were forgettable, to be truthful, but I did run across some gems worthy of mention in a blog entry.
First up, I discovered Martha Wells and her remarkable Murderbot series. Oh my fucking God these are SO MUCH FUN!!!!!! Our nameless protagonist (who refers to themself as “Murderbot”) is a cybernetic security bot with a faulty governor — in other words, they are self-aware and self-governing. To stay under the radar and preserve their autonomy, they continue to act like all the other security bots, mostly, but they conduct a hilarious (and hilariously foul-mouthed) internal monologue about the stupidity of humans and other bots in all their interactions. So far there are six books in the series. The first one, pictured at left, is All Systems Red. I’ve read all six, and eagerly await the next installment.
Redshirts by John Scalzi filled in another humor slot on ye-olde-SF-bingo card. As you may expect, its jumping off point is the trope in ST:TOS that the red-shirted crew member on the away mission dies first, often horribly. In this instance, the crew members are aware of the trope and go to desperate lengths to avoid being assigned to an away team. Fun, funny, and filled with geeky inside jokes and “easter eggs.” Scalzi is quickly becoming one of my favorite SF authors.
The last one I want to highlight is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab. In exchange for immortality, a young woman gives up the possibility of being remembered by anyone. When she is in the presence of someone, they recognize her existence and interact accordingly, but forget her entirely within moments after losing sight of her. It’s made for some awkward morning-after conversations when her lover has completely forgotten the evening before. But throughout history, she has been the mysterious unknown muse of one artist after another, and that is sufficient. Then one day she runs across a young man who recalls a previous encounter. A sweet and heartbreaking story of love and loss and memory and art. I loved it.
I have yet to read a Tana French book that I didn’t love, or at least like very much. The Witch Elm is no exception.
Toby has led a charmed life: popular, handsome, athletic in school; hip job, beautiful girlfriend, nice flat as an adult. There have been no hiccups worth mentioning throughout his life. Toby never even thought of his life as “lucky” until, after an evening out with “the lads,” he walks into a burglary in progress in his flat. The burglars nearly beat him to death.
As Toby struggles to recover, he decides to stay with his uncle Hugo — recently diagnosed with brain cancer — to help care for Hugo and further his own healing process in the quiet of the family estate. His girlfriend Melissa accompanies him. They settle into an easy routine: Melissa commutes to her job in town, Toby helps Hugo with his genealogy research, the rest of the family — aunts, uncles, cousins, parents — congregate on Sundays for a congenial lunch that lasts most of the day. It’s all very homey and comfortable…and then the children discover a human skull in the bottom of the garden.
All congeniality and comfort disappears in the path of the police investigation. And Toby — whose memory is unreliable with gaping holes after his near-fatal beating — does not come over well in the eyes of the detectives on the case. Convinced he is their prime suspect, Toby decides to do a little investigating on his own.
The novel sets a meandering, leisurely pace: we are nearly a third of the way through the book before the body in the garden makes an appearance. This is perfectly in keeping with storytelling from Toby’s point of view: Toby is damaged and it takes him considerable time to process information. He often has to wander down several mental tracks to get to a particular conclusion. The languid pacing didn’t give me as much of an issue as it did some reviewers, although I will admit to the middle third of the novel being somewhat of a slog. Regardless, the slow build-up in tension and deliberate spacing of the reveals worked for me.
Only one piece of action didn’t ring true — can’t discuss because it’s a spoiler, but it takes place close to the end and sets up the final drama of the story. When I read it, I thought: “No way, I can’t see that person reacting in such a fashion.” But even with that quibble, I was satisfied by the ultimate resolution.
Nice job, Ms. French. Bring on the next novel, please.
I really enjoy Tana French’s Murder Squad series, and this installment is no exception.
Antoinette Conway and her partner Stephen Moran tackle their latest assignment, the murder of Aislinn Murray. It appears to be a slam-dunk the-boyfriend-did-it case, but the inconsistencies lurking around the edges keep hinting at another solution. Conway and Moran poke at the inconsistencies, start running into roadblocks, and begin to suspect corrupt cops and organized crime are somehow connected to the murder. Then the constant harrassment and pranks Conway suffers in the squad room lead her to believe her partner is sabotaging their case.
Antoinette Conway is a difficult character to like, and the whole Murder Squad comes off as an abusive dysfunctional unit. That makes this a rough read. But persevere. It’s worth it in the end.
Aaron Falk returns to Kierrawa, his small hometown in southern Australia, to attend the funeral of his erstwhile best friend Luke. Decades earlier, Luke was the only person who stood up for teenage Aaron when he was suspected of murder; the unending suspicion drove Aaron and his father out of town. Now Luke’s death drags Aaron back; and Luke’s parents guilt him into staying, reluctantly, to investigate what they say cannot have happened: that Luke killed his wife and daughter and then himself in despair over their financial circumstances. The relentless heat and the bone-dry countryside are as integral to this novel as the still-suspicious townfolk who resist Aaron’s probing into old and new wounds.
Nicely executed whodunnit. I’ll look for more in this series.
Six months after the death of their father, Flavia de Luce and her sisters, Daphne and Ophelia, are on a summer boating holiday with family retainer Dogger, in a desperate attempt to jolt themselves out of their gloom and come together as a family once again. As luck would have it, and as one has come to expect when 12-year-old Flavia is involved, a body turns up — in this particular instance, it’s snagged by Flavia herself as she trails her hand in the river while they are punting along.
The boating party pulls ashore and Dogger goes off to fetch the local constabulary. While Daffy and Feely stand watch on either side of the soggy corpse, a delighted Flavia begins her investigation. And thus we’re off on another romp through our intrepid sleuth’s thinking process as she sifts clues and calculates advantages and outcomes.
Lots of lovely secondary characters here: I was nearly as enamored with Hob, the undertaker’s son, as Flavia was. He seems to be cut from the same jib as our young heroine: determined, spunky, and with a little larceny in his soul.
Yes, with each book, Flavia becomes a little more devious, I think, in the sense that she recognizes there are certain things the adults mustn’t know or they won’t let her continue with her favorite hobby. She generally wracks herself with brief moments of guilt over these little deceptions, but the ends always seem to justify the means. She’s more than a little frightening, actually. But she’s also starting to grow up here: she’s seeing her sisters in a more forgiving light, which is a good thing since they’re orphaned and have only each other now (leaving aside Aunt Felicity, of course).
Oh, almost forgot. Of course Flavia solves the mystery. Because she wouldn’t be Flavia otherwise.
Truth: I forgot I had this book. I don’t remember when I picked it up, or where, but it was probably on a book exchange shelf at one of the local coffee shops. So when Netflix made a series out of it, the title languishing on the bookshelf upstairs caught my attention, prompting me to pick it up for a read-through before jumping into the TV show.
I won’t be jumping into the TV show.
Okay, it’s a good story, a well-written story, a cyberpunk take on an old-fashioned noir detective story: Takeshi Kovacs is an elite military operative, currently inhabiting the “sleeve” (read: body) of an incarcerated “Bay City” (read: San Francisco) police detective. Kovacs — well, his consciousness, at any rate — has been brought out of cold storage and sleeved into this detective at the request of an extremely wealthy individual who wants Kovacs to solve a murder: his own. See, the wealthy individual apparently shot himself in the head, and then was re-sleeved into one of his clones; once re-sleeved, he insisted his death had to be murder because he would never EVER have committed suicide, especially knowing that he had standing orders to be re-sleeved from his backup consciousness upon the demise of whatever current sleeve he was wearing.
Yes, there’s a lot of body-swapping going on here, and much discussion of the technology involved, which I found fascinating. It’s far-fetched, but it makes sense in the context of this world some 200 or 300 years in the future.
Anyhow, along the way to his discovery of the truth, Kovacs runs afoul of some very powerful and dangerous people. Much violence ensues. Much. Violence. And torture. Plus murder, rape, and other assorted mayhem. Thankfully, Richard Morgan leaves at some of the violence and mayhem to the reader’s imagination, but it’s graphic enough that I winced and grimaced and skimmed my way through those sections….thus bringing me to why I’ll skip the Netflix series. Because (according to friends who have watched it) the TV show took those scenes and made them graphic to the point of verging on torture porn. No thanks.
So if you’re sensitive to violence, rape, and torture, skip both the book and the series. If you can handle skimming certain passages of ultra-violence, read the book.
Flavia de Luce is as charming as ever in this short story.
Young Flavia is hired – hired! – by a student to solve the mystery of the death of a teacher, discovered in a bathtub by that same student, who had recently expressed a desire to see said teacher dead. In fear that he would be accused of murder, he reaches out to the resident underage sleuth in an effort to clear his name before adults and other responsible members of society learn of the recently departed. Flavia sets to her task with her usual gusto, intelligence, and forthrightness.
If you’ve never read any of Flavia’s adventures, this is a good stand-alone place to start. For those of us who’ve been with her since the beginning, it’s lagniappe, a little something extra to tide us over between novels.
Having been, um, invited to disenroll from the exclusive young ladies’ academy in Canada to which she had been sent, Flavia de Luce arrives home in England only to discover her father is gravely ill. Thwarted at every turn in her attempts to visit him in hospital, our intrepid young sleuth runs an errand for the Buckshaw household and, amazingly enough, stumbles over the body of yet another individual who appears to have met a suspicious end. Solving this mystery serves to occupy Flavia’s mind and time while she waits for her opportunity to see her father and reassure him and herself that all is well.
She solves the mystery, of course, but trouble still awaits.
As with all Flavia novels, we are treated to the delightful inner workings of the young lady’s precocious and highly intelligent mind, as well as her perambulations about the countryside on her faithful Gladys, and her frequent (and unaccompanied!) trips to London on the train. (Flavia has bottomless pocket money, it seems, or the family has a running account with the railway.) I suppose that’s my only quibble with this series — Flavia has a massive amount of unsupervised time for a girl of 12. But I also have to remember that this is set in the late 1940s/early 1950s (years actually not closely specified), and children were left to their own devices much more then than they are today. Still, quibble aside, another enjoyable installment in the series.
But Alan Bradley is on my naughty list for the last two pages.
Summer 2015: A persistent knock on the door and a ringing bell rouses 25-year-old Cassie Danvers from an alcohol-induced haze. Cassie, grieving a number of things — the end of her engagement, the demise of her photography career, and, most recently, the death of her beloved Grandmother June — stumbles to the dusty foyer and opens the door of the decaying family mansion to be greeted by handsome young Nick Emmons, who promptly informs her she is the sole heir and, allegedly, the granddaughter of Golden-Age Hollywood movie star Jack Montgomery, and would she mind giving a DNA sample to verify?
I’m a sucker for stories that take place in two separate time periods. I love seeing the connections, and how long-ago actions affect present-day circumstances. Add a dreaming house, visions of ghosts, back-stabbing intrigue, murder, and quiet heroism to the mix, and you’ve got a fabulous page-turner of a story that satisfies right up to the surprising conclusion.
Excellent story. This is Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s fourth novel. I’ll certainly be looking for the other three.
Avanta Knits 