skygiants

Over Memorial Day weekend genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

( this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )

I read K.J. Charles' Death in the Spires more or less in the course of a day, which happened to be the same day that I was reading comments on/responding to blotthis' post about aesthetic satisfaction in Genre: Mystery and Genre: Horror.

Death in the Spires is a really useful case study for genre: Mystery because Charles' usual Genre is Gay Romance. As this book was coming out she made a number of posts and announcements along the lines of: hello Readership, please be aware, this one's not Romance, it's Mystery, which does not mean there won't be romance in it, but please go into it with Mystery expectations rather than Romance expectations.

So already I was going into it expecting to pay attention to the rules of genre and how they worked or did not work in this book. And, having finished it feels really clear that the exact same fabric of characters and plot, tailored into a different shape, would form a standard Charles Romance, but because of the pattern being used the finished product is undeniably a Mystery, no question about it. And quite a fun one! I read it in a day!

The premise takes inspiration from Gaudy Night and The Secret History, among others: at the turn of the 20th century, a clique of golden youths forms at Oxford that's shattered by interpersonal romantic drama culminating in a mysterious murder; ten years later, having just received a particularly vicious poison-pen letter, one of the golden-youths-that-was decides it's finally time to figure out which one of his best-friends-that-was is a killer. The youths all seem likeable and the loss of the trust and friendship among them as important to the plot as the murder itself, which is one of the things that makes the book work, IMO.

Because of blot's post, I've been thinking a fair bit about what I want mystery-as-genre to do. P.D. James said very famously that the mystery novel is the restoration of order from disorder: a murder happens, but by the end we understand why and how, and something is done about it to bring justice. Or not done about it; occasionally the detective decides that the just response is to not do anything about it. I do like it when that happens, even if I disagree with the detective on what the just response is. I like it when justice is legitimately a problem, in mystery novels; I like it when the solution is not just the solution to a puzzle (though of course it is pleasant when a puzzle is good) but an attempt at answering the question of 'how do you repair the world, when something terrible has happened that broke it? Because every death is something that breaks it.' I say an attempt because of course this is not really a question that can be answered satisfactorily, but it is nonetheless important to keep trying. So, really, I suppose, I think a mystery novel has succeeded when it has, a little bit, failed: the puzzle is solvable, and solved, but the problem is unsolvable, and the tension between those two things is one of the things that most interests me in a mystery book.

'I want to be a little uncomfortable at the end because of how we as human beings have to keep trying to answer a question that has no good answer by answering questions that do have answers' is probably not a fair thing to ask of mystery novels, which are also, famously, comfort reading. Nonetheless it is what I think the great books in this genre achieve and I think I am right to ask it. I am not saying that Death in the Spires is a great book of the genre, but it is asking the kinds of questions that I want a mystery to ask, and it satisfied me in that, in a way that many modern mystery novels don't.

( a brief detour into spoiler territory )

The City in Glass is I think my favorite of Nghi Vo's full-length novels so far, for the reason that it seems to feel the least need to actually force itself to take the shape of a novel. The description calls it "a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story;" I don't quite think it's either of those things, though the first more than the second.

In the first chapter of The City in Glass, the seaside city of Azril, which the demon Vitrine loves, is destroyed, very thoroughly, by angels. Why? That's not what Vitrine cares to talk about or to remember. What she wants to remember is the city in its heyday, the place and the people, and that's what she spends the first half of the book doing: wandering through the ruins, accumulating bits and pieces of memory, grieving and gradually building a determination to see the city become itself again, somehow.

One of the angels is stuck there too, because she cursed him. She is not happy to see him and does not want him there. Though she is glad that this means that he's suffering horribly! Fringe benefit! Nonetheless. This of course is the dynamic that the description calls "an epic love story" which I think does not really accurately convey ... the vibe .......... the thing that is going on here certainly does contain elements of both 'enemies' and 'lovers' but is definitely messier than I think the standard image that this phrase conjures.

Anyway. In the second half of the book, people do come back to Azril, and it becomes a city again. Vitrine, frankly, has mixed feelings about this: no city can ever be the same city twice, and she's still yearning for Azril-as-it-was, which is neither possible to have nor reasonable to want. Nonetheless. The new city of Azril is shaped by both Vitrine and the angel, and reshapes them in turn, as they reshape each other, in various painful ways. And, in the end, Vitrine finds something to love forever!

Weird book. Vivid, evocative, odd. Not really shaped like a novel, and, I think, better for it. I read it in a single night, and had some feelings about the various shapes of its grief.

There is a subgenre that I wouldn't have thought to describe as a whole subgenre until I read Kerstin Hall's Asunder and immediately thought 'like Deeplight!' and also 'like those Max Gladstone books!' and also come to think of it 'like The Archive Undying' -- second-world fantasy set in a society that's been shaped around gods, and now those gods are [quite recently] dead or gone or murdered, and everyone is trying to reckon with the shape of the world that they left behind. I like this sort of subgenre quite a bit because it lends itself to interesting complexity; people can have all kinds of different messy feelings about the divine, and about their destruction, and about whatever new powers have come in to fill the void they left, and it's rarely as straightforward as 'it was better before' or 'it's better now.'

Asunder is kind of a weird book and it passes through a lot as it goes; I'm not sure it structurally holds together, and the ending feels in some sense incomplete, but it leaves its world messy in ways I really enjoyed. Our Heroine Karys' country used to be under the charge of a set of variously powerful, variously petty localized divinities, who created much of the important infrastructure, and who all died about twenty years ago, resulting in a major conquest. People Feel Various Ways About This. Now Karys has contracted herself to a different kind of powerful and terrible [divinity?/cosmic horror?] in exchange for the ability to talk to the dead, which serves as her main source of income. The job on which we meet her, however, is immediately in the process of going horribly wrong, as the shipwreck she was investigating turns out to have been caused by a weird monster that traps her in a cavern, where she finds a gravely injured survivor, a young diplomat from a foreign empire. Then in the process of trying to help him escape with her she accidentally traps this whole diplomat inside her subconscious, and the rest of the book is a long strange road trip for the purpose of Getting Him Out Of There, complicated by:

- the various debts of obligation and favor that Karys is obliged to incur to sneak through and past various borders
- the scholar who decides to come along for the ride because she thinks Karys is not only cute but also the most interesting potential research subject she's ever met
- the small unhappy town that Karys ran away from as a child, and her childhood friend/ex-girlfriend?? who has some kind of connection to Karys' childhood god/ex-god??
- Karys' powerful and terrible patron, who has informed her that she is destined to be summoned to him soon for a Great Honor, which does not seem like a good thing at all at all
- the fact that everyone keeps telling Karys and her new passenger Ferain that if they don't Fix This Immediately one of them is inevitably going to have to kill the other for survival, which does not help with building the trust and cooperation that they need to develop in order to keep escaping from
- the weird monsters that are still persistently trying to chase them down

And meanwhile we, the readers, are picking up slowly on all the complicated past between these countries and these gods as we pass through it, and also on what's going on with Karys herself. ( spoilers )

I did the little hundred movies and hundred books game that has been going around various social medias! I tried to make my lists with just the things I could think of not looking at any of my actual reading lists or bookshelves and as a result I am now sitting here thinking of all the things I love and/or have shaped me in some way that I didn't happen to think of while making the specific list and taking -5 HP each time. So it goes. I can't believe I forgot Between Silk and Cyanide. Anyway, if you're not bored with clicking little boxes yet, please do go forth and click mine and let me know how it went!

Let's start with the most fraught thing: Naomi Kanaki's Just Happy To Be Here is a book about a trans girl whose parents are on tenuous visas in a trans-unfriendly state, which came out in January 2024. That is simultaneously no time ago and a year ago and a hundred years ago, on the specific axes of criminalization and demonization of trans kids and immigrants in the US, and at various points in the book it feels like all of those things.

That said! This is not the plot of Just Happy To Be Here, although of course it runs through the whole background of the book and the choices that our heroine Tara is making, because how can it not. The plot of the book is that Tara wants to join the cool secret Classics society at her elite private girls' school, the Sybils, wherein two girls are chosen every year by making a great speech about their favorite Classical Woman and then they all get to hang out together in the Classical Woman clubhouse being weird and intense and and calling each other by their secret Classical Woman names and swearing oaths to each other to "never forget my cruelty, my courage, my ambition."

The cool secret society also comes with a cool secret huge scholarship, which is no longer secret because one of the extant Sybils (self-named Strife) decided to spill the beans and caused an enormous scandal ... so now everyone assumes that Tara is gunning for the scholarship, or to make a point about Joining While Trans, when in fact the real truth is that Tara loves Rhetoric and Speeches, and loves the idea of being a weird intense girl who LARPS as a Classical Woman, and also has a huge crush on Felicity aka Antigone, and was too distracted by all of this to pay attention to the scholarship situation at all. Although now that she is paying attention, the scholarship would change her life significantly for the better, also.

Naomi Kanakia is and has always been a profoundly honest writer; it's my favorite things about her books. Everyone in this book is coming from a real place and has a real perspective, and those all intersect with each other in ways that will, inevitably, cause tension. Nothing is simple, except sometimes some things can be simple: sometimes people just click. As soon as Tara starts spending time with Antigone and the other Sybils, they do click. While everyone around them gets progressively weirder about the idea of trans Indian girl Tara joining Classical Woman Club -- in all directions, including her aggressive supporters who refuse to listen to her about the way in which she wants to be supported -- Tara and the Sybils are falling in love with each other, and it's the emotional core of the book and it's lovely.

Over the past month or so genarti, shati and I have watched several Korean movies, of which I thought one was very good, one was very fun, and one was very chaotic ...

Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission is the one that I thought was the best of the three or at least most relevant to my personal interests; it's about the efforts of the Korean Language Society to secretly compile and publish a Korean-language dictionary during the Japanese occupation and is full of people being very passionate and heroic about etymology and phonetics and the representation of regional dialects. Wikipedia calls this a comedy-drama and we had a spirited debate at the end about the degree to which it was Comedy; it is a bit funny in that there is an Odd Couple (jovially illiterate scoundrel trips and falls into a job working for the dictionary, where he has an enemies-to-coworkers relationship with the noble but uptight dictionary team boss) but also this is a movie set during the Japanese occupation so you know that by the end someone and perhaps many people are going to die heroically and you are going to feel things about it.

I liked Mal-Mo-E very much and I also liked Phantom very much, which is also a Japanese occupation film but one that is both Higher Drama and Higher Nonsense. In this movie the Japanese army is trying to identify the leader of a revolutionary organization so they stage an elaborate psychodrama in which they trap five suspects in a luxury cliffside hotel and inform them all that they must figure out among themselves who the spy is. Things Escalate. Guns! Nuns! Determined middle-aged women spider-scaling the walls of a hotel over a sheer drop to the sea! Important to note that I had picked this one up because I heard there were backstory lesbians and a.) this is true b.) the lesbian energy of the film overall is absolutely off the charts.

Phantom is definitely all Drama and no Comedy; The Grand Heist by contrast is all Comedy and very little Drama except that people still occasionally do get tortured and murdered by the state. But otherwise! This was a wildly popular film in Korea and I have to wonder if our subtitles were just particularly bad because none of us for the life of us could track what was happening in the plot other than "ICE HEIST." And to be clear, 'ice heist! because it's the 18th century and ice is an incredibly valuable commodity!' is a fantastic premise. Why did the movie also include a trip to 18th-century Amsterdam by way of Egypt? couldn't tell you. Why were half the guys in the heist gang necessary to the heist? couldn't tell you. What did the two women see in their designated love interests? absolutely could not tell you. I did really enjoy the bickering children heist members although again I could not tell you why they were there.

After discovering that Frances Mary Hendry of my beloved Quest for a Maid wrote several other books that I had never heard of, I have finally managed to get my hands on Quest for a Kelpie, her very first novel, and enjoyed it enormously.

Like Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is a detailed, vivid portrait of the daily life of an adolescent girl doing her domestic tasks in a bourgeois household while living through Scottish historical turmoil, in which there are no good answers about who to support on a high level and all the normal people on the ground are just going through it as best they can.

Unlike Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is set during the Jacobite uprising, and I would eat my HAT if Hendry had not read Flight of the Heron, because in the first chapter our plucky heroine Jeannie Main rescues a [Romani] [this is not the word used but it's written in 1986. you know] girl from a false accusation and receives a prophecy from her mother of subsequently meeting five times! in life-endangering peril! I did wonder hopefully if we might go A Direction with this but it turns out the prophecy does not actually apply to the other teenager much at all, the Significant Fate is with her mother, and they do rescue each other from life-endangering peril various times and it's great but really not the same vibes at FotH. You know. Amuwau, I Received A Prophecy From A [Romani] Seer is also absolutely something that could go terribly wrong but aside from the Prophecy the book's attitude towards the whole family struck me as surprisingly grounded and matter-of-fact; it's another culture, one that has different norms and that sometimes comes into conflict with Jeannie's, but Jeannie is also much less weird about them than she is about, say, Catholics, Who Are Of The Devil (until she meets some and learns to think differently about that too.) Life is hard on all sides, and everyone in their own ways is just getting by.

'but what about Bonnie Prince Charlie?' you may ask, and also, 'what about the Kelpie?' Great questions!

To the first: the Jacobite Uprising is happening and we are very firmly focused on ordinary townspeople caught in the middle of it who mostly have no big opinions about the politics of it all and are just trying to Get Through These Bad Times, Preferably Without Any Family Members Dying. I love and support them for this. Jeannie occasionally has heroics and does impact the course of the war but the heroics are all things like bravely speaking up to say the right thing at the right time, or deciding whether to pass on an important piece of news that she's overheard, or going on a Totally Normal Walk To Sell Fish With Definitely Her Cousin Don't Worry About It. She's not picking up a sword. She is knitting every time she goes anywhere, because it's the eighteenth century and we all gotta be making textiles all the time if we're going to have enough for everyone to have clothes, and Frances Mary Hendry really wants to constantly immerse you in the details of daily life as a normal person and I love and support her for this also.

To the second: the prophecy about five significant meetings also tells her that she's going to ride a kelpie! So look forward to that!

It's definitely not quite as rich a book as Quest for a Maid -- you can tell that it's a first novel and she hasn't fully hit her stride yet -- but I had a great time with it and it in no way diminished my desire to seek out everything else Hendry wrote. It also has a fantastically irrelevant frame story in which Jeannie Main spends three pages at the front of the book explaining that she's writing this text about her heroic childhood adventures because she's annoyed about Regency culture and hates all her grandchildren. Perfect, no notes.

J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country is a short, lovely little book that I am finding/have found quite difficult to write about -- one of those books in which not very much happens except a person briefly living a life in a particular place at a particular time, and then leaving it again.

WWI veteran Tom Birkin arrives in a small English village, where his job is to restore a medieval mural, as part of the bequest left by an eccentric local notable: she's provided money to restore the mural, and money to locate the lost grave of one of her ancestors buried outside the churchyard, and so the local victor grimly arranges for this to happen despite his profound lack of enthusiasm for the inconvenience of it all.

On arrival Tom has little money and no connections, sleeping in the church belfry to save money. Over the course of his month in the country, he makes little of the former but much of the latter: with the fellow veteran who is working on the lost grave problem; with a local teenager who is fascinated by his work, and her friendly family; with the vicar's lonely wife; and with the medieval painter of the mural that he is uncovering. There's a lot of secondhand pleasure, for me, both in the specificities of Tom's voice and in the small, careful, detailed work that he's doing -- the day-to-day routine of the village, the particularities of the materials used to make the paint in the mural. It's a charming book, a bit wistful, often quite funny. It's a beautiful English summer. Tom is having a good time. Occasionally one can glimpse the world-devastating event that was WWI through the cracks in his narration. He daydreams about staying in the village, but he won't.