dickens

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 23-24. Kindle. Catching up on the latest installment, the rage is back, don't start here, obviously.

P.F. Chisholm, A Chorus of Innocents. Back to the Scottish borderlands, and I am relieved--the books in this series that were in the London area were fine, but they lacked a lot of my favorite elements of the series. Which have come roaring back here, with more ahead promised. Hurrah. But yeah, don't start here, this one expects you to know who's who and what's what.

Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table, Crooked House, Death in the Clouds, Murder on the Orient Express, Taken at the Flood, and The Body in the Library. It's not that these are indistinguishable from each other--there's a reason Crooked House and Murder on the Orient Express were on the author's favorites list. I'm skipping the ones that are appalling on page one, I'm being appalled by the ones that are appalling on the last page only (seriously, Agatha, you can get through a whole book and then--!!!). But for the most part I'm just reading them as a continuum. They deliver what it says on the tin. I did this with Georgette Heyer when Grandpa died, and now with Grandma gone it's apparently Agatha Christie. Nor am I done yet.

David C. Douglas, The Norman Fate, 1100-1154. Counterbalancing the urge for reliable mystery, I have had very little urge to read nonfiction lately. This also happened when Grandpa died, it went away, it'll go away this time, it's fine. This was one of the few pieces of nonfiction this fortnight, and I was disappointed in it, because it wanted to talk about the Norman spheres of influence in this era but not what the Normans brought to those areas culturally, what was concretely different because a particular region or island was ruled by a Norman ruler instead of someone else. Ah well.

Dan Egan, The Devil's Element: Phosphorous and a World Out of Balance. Egan's previous book about the Great Lakes was on my list to give several people a few years back, and he's quite good about phosphorous and its social and ecological implications as well. Hurrah.

Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie's. About the vaguely squalid adults involved with running a theater school for children. If you feel like you're still a little starry-eyed about child actors from reading Noel Streatfeild's children's books and you would prefer not to be, well, here you are.

Amity Gaige, Heartwood. If there's a third mainstream thriller that has a cover and title to make it look like a fantasy novel, this can be a genre with that and Liz Moore's God of the Woods. In any case I liked it for what it is rather than resenting it for what the cover made it look like. This is a book about a woman lost hiking the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail, and about the people searching for her, and about mothers and daughters, and a number of other things. It's quite well done, but my absolute favorite character is Santo, everyone else can sort of make there be enough book to be a book but Santo was my reason for wanting to go on with it.

John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. This is basically a TED Talk about why you should keep caring about tuberculosis and how it affects real, vivid people. There's historical background, sure, but it is very much a call to arms--or, as Grace Petrie puts it, not a call to arms but a call to helping hands. It's short and, for its subject matter, quite light.

Elly Griffiths, Now You See Them and The Midnight Hour. Two more in the mid-century British murder mystery setting with the characters who were stage magicians and dirty tricks people in the Second World War. One of the things I'm noticing about mystery series is that the ones that are attempting to be contemporary seem to have to scramble to stay put in time, but the ones that are consciously historical are extremely likely to skip blithely forward through time, changing their characters' personal as well as social circumstances. I think that's great, I love it. But I see how it's easier when you have control over the thing.

Christina Lynch, Pony Confidential. This is a murder mystery with two main POVs, one of which is a vindictive pony. Team Vindictive Pony all the way. The ending made me roll my eyes a little, but honestly, once you've signed on for an entire book of vindictive pony, sure, yes, do the thing. I had a lot of fun with this.

Rose Macaulay, The Shadow Flies. A novel about early 17th century English poets and their turbulent world. Its ending was not cozier or more comfortable than any of Macaulay's other stuff. Gosh I love her.

Colleen McCullough, The Ladies of Missalonghi. As though someone wanted to write The Blue Castle set in Australia, with some historical distance from the period they were writing about. And with the triumphant ending shared out more generally, and...honestly with a better mom, which was a surprise. I still think The Blue Castle is on the whole a better book, but this is worth having too if you like that sort of thing.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems. I have loved her since I was four, and somehow I have not ever read the Collected? Inconceivable. It was time. There were some wonderful things I'd never read before and some wonderful things I've had memorized for decades. There were also...let's say that long public occasion poems were not her forte. But I'm still glad I read the whole thing.

Naomi Mitchison, Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction. This is a lesser Mitchison collection. It was put together as an introductory sampler of her work for teaching, rather than because she really loved these short stories and thought they formed something wonderful as a whole, and you can tell--there's a sense of outtakes from her more famous novel work. Did I still generally enjoy reading it, sure, but it's not going to become a go-to Mitchison rec.

Sebastian Purcell, Discourse of the Elders: The Aztec Huehuetlatolli, a First English Translation. This is a translation of Aztec philosophy recorded by a Spanish monk very early in the Conquest. The discourse in the title is very literal: this is discussion of various philosophical questions about life, in a framework that is very much not the Western one. Very cool thing to have and read and think about.

Emily Yu-Xuan Qin, Aunt Tigress. Extremely syncretic Chinese-Canadian fantasy, and prairie Canadian specifically. Love to see a completely different frame on some elements of story I've enjoyed before. Will definitely be adding this to several gift lists.

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia Parts I-III (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage). A trilogy of plays about Russian utopianism in the mid-19th century, featuring Bakunin, Marx, Turgenev, all sorts of familiar names. This sequence is not my favorite of Stoppard's historical plays, but it still has some classic Stoppard moments.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith. The third in its series, and by far the most conventional: this is a political fantasy of a type that I like very much but have also read before. As compared to the previous book in the series, which was not quite like anything else. Ah well, still very readable, not sorry to have gone on with the series.