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 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 )

A year or two ago I stumbled over a copy of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States in a used bookstore and brought it home with me with intent to read at some future time. Last month I ended up having to sit still in our living room out of reach of my phone/current book/etc for cat-related reasons and so pulled the nearest thing off the nearest shelf: the time had apparently come.

And what a weird time it was, is, to be reading this book. The book was published in 2004, the essays commissioned for the project. The essays themselves vary from interesting to funny to overwrought to banal to offensive -- and one can't really be offended even so; it is, of course, always fascinating to see oneself as others see one -- but all of them were written in the early 2000s, in the immediate years following 9/11, and so there is a kind of thread of envy and pity and a little fear running as an undercurrent throughout the whole book: you Americans, you stupid Americans, you thought you were exempt from terrible things happening to you, and what are you going to do now you've realized that they can?

I've seen a lot of people saying August Clarke's Metal From Heaven is very good. Which it is! But somehow none of these recommendations managed to convey to me what the book was actually about, so up until about a week ago when genarti stole it out of my library pile before me I was somehow under the impression that it was a sort of surrealist space opera? Which it is emphatically not. It is not even science fiction.

Metal From Heaven is a fantasy novel, and fantasy in several ways: one, in that it takes place in a world that is not ours, which is right in the middle of a fantastical industrial revolution; and two, in that ninety-five percent of the characters, no matter where and in what situation they are encountered, turn out to be devastatingly hot lesbians. This is an incredibly, joyfully self-indulgent book. I'm not saying this as a complaint but a compliment. The rich worldbuilding and revolutionary politics and bloody background and constant high-key lesbian sexual tension are all wrapped up self-indulgently and inextricably together, and once you are in it you are in it.

The book begins with a massacre: workers in the ichorite factories are striking on behalf of their children, who are increasingly born with a mysterious sickness and sensitivity to the mysterious substance that is ichorite. Marney Honeycutt, our heroine, is one of these children, and the only person to survive the protest when the industrialist who runs the factories decides to silence it.

Marney, fleeing the city, falls in with a group of highwaywomen who turn out to belong to a collective of Hereafterists -- essentially, revolutionary socialists who've made a religion out of it -- who have murdered the baron of a remote area and have created a temporary socialist utopia by diligently maintaining the pretense that he's still alive but Very Eccentric. Life in the socialist utopia is joyous and beautiful and full of hot lesbians -- there are many people in the community who are not hot lesbians but Marney broadly speaking pays little attention to them -- but also dangerous; Marney and her hot lesbian friends and mentors all contribute to the general wealth of the collective via train robberies and general banditry, which is frequently fun but also frequently fatal. Moreover, everybody knows that at some point, questions will start being asked about the baron (dead) and his daughter and heir (also dead).

However, they have a plan! One of Marney's friends is being trained up as a fake heir. Marney also has a plan! When the fake heir is ready to be launched into society, Marney will go as her valet, and take her opportunity to revenge-murder the increasingly powerful ichorite industrialist, with the hopeful fringe benefit of destabilizing the establishment enough to give the Hereafterists a chance at establishing the utopia of the future. Things do not all entirely go to plan, but the end result is that the baron's heir gets politely invited to join the competition for the hand of the ichorite industrialist's daughter, and Marney and some co-conspirators end up at a house party populated entirely by another set of hot but more evil lesbians. (Despite the number of hot lesbians, this is not a world that one would call queernorm; most of the cultures in the book, of which there are many, have fairly conventional attitudes towards sexuality -- but it is a world where norms are in the process of evolving along with industrialization and also where a very wealthy man's daughter can utilize a legal loophole for gay marriage if she wants to throw a courtship competition for every aristocratic lesbian she knows.)

Challenges abound, including the fact that the whole house is full of ichorite, which Marney has a particular power over but which also makes her ill and gives her seizures! and that Marney and one of these hot aristocratic lesbians had a swordfight during a piracy situation just a few weeks before all of this went down! and that Marney herself is not a particularly good liar, and is also covered all over with tattoos that scream "I'm a socialist bandit!" and that the whole continent is a powder keg on the verge of devastating war, and the sizzling political and personal tensions between these hot lesbians could well kick it all off!

Clarke's world is dense and complex, and the book does a far better job than most sff at evoking real-world messiness and avoiding simplified generalizations: culture, religion, politics, class, and sexuality are all their own separate axes and all the characters fall in different places along all of them, not always in the ways one would expect (aside of course from all being hot lesbians.) It's also just beautiful, and beautifully described. One of my favorite small details is that early on we are introduced to a fruit called azurine, a clear statement if you're looking that this world isn't ours: no fruit that we have is pure blue. Occasionally characters will turn to Marney and spend two pages explaining their political or economic philosophy, which in another book I would find annoying but in this one really does just feel like part and parcel of the intense, chaotic, furious fever dream that is Marney's whole life, and the book.

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.

I really enjoyed the transmigration cnovel this is ridiculous -- extremely funny starting premise that gradually gets more serious and more interested into digging Thematically into The Problem of Transmigration.

The story kicks off, of course, with our genre-savvy, pragmatic office-worker transmigrating into the mediocre book she was reading on the subway. The book is, itself, a transmigration novel in which a plucky modern heroine transmigrates into the villainess of a court drama, defeats the original heroine, wins the love of the heroic prince, helps him overthrow the evil tyrant emperor, etc.

Now our heroine has transmigrated back into the original heroine of the book-within-the-novel, who is, of course, the villainess of the transmigration novel. She promptly gets summoned to spend an evening with the evil tyrant emperor, notices that he's acting weird, and immediately susses him out as another transmigrator who readily confesses that he's a modern CEO who transmigrated after starting to read the same mediocre transmigration novel that she did. Knowing that they're both doomed by the narrative, they immediately start scheming: can they recruit the transmigrator heroine of the transmigration novel to their team, or is she just a bit too fictional to deviate from the plot? Is it possible that the heroic prince who's destined to overthrow and murder the evil tyrant emperor is also a transmigrator -- and if so, is he on their level, or is he even one more meta level up from them, and are they just characters in his bad transmigration novel? If they get really lucky, instead of competing to the death in palace drama they can all hang out and play cards and eat hotpot? And if not, can they both possibly keep a straight face when the fictional transmigrator heroine whips out her oh-I-just-invented-this-instrument-called-a-guitar and plays her oh-I-just-composed-this-little-Bach-cantata at the big festival?

So far, so good; the office worker is Not Particularly Enjoying being in historical court drama land but it would be so much worse without a normal pal to hang out with in the evenings and trade jokes about how absurd this all is and occasionally do some moderate normal person flirting. However! There is something weird about her new bud! He's definitely from the future, but he does not really give off CEO energy, and something about his backstory does not add up ...

( spoilers! )

Obviously I am an easy sell on layered meta jokes and identity confusion, I enjoyed the romance, and I thought the plot's gradual shift from shenanigans to serious stakes and tension was well paced and satisfying. But mostly I am just genuinely a big fan of our incredibly pragmatic normal person office worker -- compared to the female protagonists she read about, her romantic inclinations were only a third as strong, and her courage was only a twentieth -- and I was rooting all the way through for her to get to clock out, go home, and have some modern hot pot.

It took me a while to get around to reading Shubeik Lubeik because it is too large and beautiful to carry around easily and so I needed a timespan to read it when I was not going to be leaving the house much ... absolutely worth it though. What a book!!

Shubeik Lubeik is an Egyptian graphic novel in three sections; I liked the first two sections and absolutely loved the third, which functions both as a beautiful study in love and faith and friendship and as a perfect little piece of Twilight Zone-esque fuckery. Set in an alternate version of modern Egypt in which bottled magic exist and can transform a life for better or worse, the story centers on an elderly street-kiosk owner who has inherited three genuine first-class wishes. Unfortunately, as a devout Muslim, it's haram for him to use the wishes himself, and with the government starting to crack down on the sale and use of wishes he is becoming increasingly desperate to offload them. At a really nice discount! Which you wouldn't think would be difficult! But most people don't expect to find genuine first-class wishes at a street kiosk, so for years these wishes have just been sitting there in the back of the shop stressing poor Shokry out.

But eventually, of course, he does find some takers: Aziza, a grieving widow who almost immediately runs afoul of the bureaucratic regulations on wish use, and Nour, a university student from a privileged family, who is hoping the right wish might be the key to fixing their increasingly dire clinical depression. Each of these first two books functions simultaneously as a portrait of the particular wisher and their particular problems, and as a new set of lenses on the ways that magical wishes fit into this world that's almost exactly like our own, with all its accompanying injustices.

I like Aziza and Nour's stories very much, but the third section, which focuses on Shokry himself and his family and his friendships, is IMO a straight up masterwork. I will not spoil it; I will instead leave you with a reaction image of Shokry when he finally hits the twist:




Me too, Shokry. TBH. Anyway, strong recommend.

A few months ago, I read Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword. Well! I said. That was a fascinating experience! I don't think I'm going to continue it! But it sure was fascinating!

However, then osprey_archer came along with a devil's bargain, and so, here we are, back again, with Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions.

Returning readers may recall that in book one, Peasprout Chen attended ICE SKATING MARTIAL ARTS SCHOOL in FANTASY TAIWAN with her BABY BROTHER, a PAIR OF HOT MYSTERIOUS TWINS, and A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO HATED HER. In book two, all these people are still at martial arts school, but we have added a New Girl into the mix: Yinmei, the GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER of the DOWAGER EMPRESS of FANTASY CHINA.

Yinmei has a voice as sweet and bright as a brook! She has a face like a mirror burning with light! She keeps giving Peasprout one-sided smiles and telling her things like 'you are the lock and I am the key!' Peasprout obviously takes all of this as a sign that Yinmei is interested in stealing the heart of the Hot Mysterious Boy Twin.

Yinmei also can't take more than five steps in one day or her heart will explode, because of a punitive dose of magical puberty blockers. This apparently was NOT just a throwaway line in the last book. Cricket might also be dying from magical puberty blocker side effects; unclear.

Anyway! ICE SKATING MARTIAL ARTS SCHOOL is being MENACED by FAKE CHINA, so the entire curriculum has become All Child Soldier Training All The Time and instead of last year's elaborate solo challenges everyone has to form up into BATTLEBANDS and compete in BIG BAND BATTLES. Fake China has also announced that they will STOP menacing Ice Skating Martial Arts School if Ice Skating Martial Arts School RELINQUISHES PEASPROUT CHEN, but Peasprout has bargained herself ongoing sanctuary if her battleband comes in first in EVERY big band battle competition. Peasprout's battleband, of course, includes her BABY BROTHER, the HOT MYSTERIOUS TWINS, and, intermittently, Yinmei -- intermittently because Peasprout changes her mind about once a chapter about whether Yinmei is a VALUABLE AND VALIANT ALLY or a SINISTER SPY.

[Other battlebands include the Battle-Kite Sparkle-Pilots, who all bleach their bangs and look like kpop idols; Radiant Thousand-Story Very Tall Goddess, who climb into a sort of giant mecha pyramid of ice skating martial artists; and the Pink Army, who cut their hair into bowlcuts and declare themselves an arm of the police in a bewildering plot beat that turns out to be completely irrelevant. I was charmed by Radiant Thousand-Story Very Tall Goddess though.]

So all that is one big problem. Another problem is the school is apparently being menaced by water dragons and any students who accidentally see them will immediately be turned into pillars of salt.

( The rest is spoilers ) Many questions with Peasprout Chen, but I'll say this for these books: as much as they make my eyebrows leap up into my hairline, they are NEVER boring.