a Christmas reading list.

I'm glad Christmas lasts for eleven more days after the day itself, mostly because I'm never very excited about before the day. This is mostly because I'm a student. It's very difficult to be jolly when you've got three papers and a presentation and a test and all your exams to deal with. No one has ever been put into a festive mood by the theme of corpse mutilation in Herodotus, especially as the deadline draws in. At the beginning of December I've already begun to keep strange hours; when I write by hand I do it in a random combination of the Greek and Roman alphabets. Every day closer to Christmas is a day closer to having to prove I understand Foucault, and can read Latin, and besides that I have grading to finish. Karl Barth and Roland Barthes have both physically manifested in my apartment. If there's ever a time of year I'm in favor of quiet, preparation, and repentance—not to mention looking forward to the end of all things—it's the weeks leading up to finals. Even after finals I'll have to clean for break, and pack—

This year I channeled the stress into being "person who's extremely concerned about proper Advent observance," which is a very specific person to be. For a while I even held to the insufferable position that no carols but "Veni Veni Emmanuel" and "Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus" were appropriate until the 25th. It's all part of growing up and turning into your dad. You develop a taste for oatmeal and Peter Paul & Mary, you start voluntarily reading Tolstoy, and you become obsessed with the church calendar. Of course I always get much more relaxed about the whole thing once I get home and put on the Mediæval Bæbes, and especially once I get started on my Christmas reading, which (because it's mixed up with all the other reading I'm always doing) stretches through all the twelve days. I reread the same few things most years, and you can probably guess most of them if I tell you straightaway that Christmas always puts me in a medieval mood.

The Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Which Dad and I read aloud. In original text, not in translation. We read it because it's set at Christmas; it's the story of how the Green Knight came to Arthur's Christmas dinner to challenge one of the knights to a beheading contest. This is exactly what Arthurian legend is meant to be like. The magic is alien and whimsical, and Gawain is a pure and courageous hero overcome by nothing other than his own ruinous weakness, and nobody ever recognizes their own relatives or bothers to find out what anyone's name is. I always forget just how brilliant this poem is, and just how long and dull the descriptions of hunting and armor are, but mostly I forget how funny it is. Not just funny because of the different conventions, deliberately funny, clever. There's one stanza early on, the long one quoted at the beginning of this post, which is the first description of the Green Knight. The narrator explains that everyone is amazed to see him, and that he's very tall, and very hot, and then right at the end, almost in passing, we get the note that also he's all over green. It's brilliant comic timing, and I always cackle to come to it. The whole thing's like that, always turning in on itself, right till the end turns back on the beginning.

The Wakefield Master, The Second Shepherd's Play. The which is also anonymous medieval verse, and the which we also read aloud, but at least on the face of it it's infinitely less high-minded. It's about the shepherds who attend the Nativity, who here are ordinary English shepherds, moaning constantly about the weather and their wives. There's sheep-stealing, and jokes about cannibalism. There's tennis balls. It's slapstick. But it's not only wonderful because of the cannibalism and the tennis, it's wonderful because like a lot of medieval work it's really believes in the Incarnation. The angel bursts in right as the shepherds are debating what to do about Mak the sheep thief; Christ's born into this whole solid and ridiculous world. When it begins to be about Christ it starts being much more solemn, but it's not a cheap whiplash thing, and it's not sentimental. It's only the natural response when something happens that's quite different from anything else.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Exactly the same thing as the Shepherd's Play, the Christmas story made contemporary and immediate, but for the 1940s instead of the fifteenth-century. And not so funny. This is a long poem, and it's designed for reading aloud although we don't and never have. It's very dense and melancholy and high-church; I've always thought of it as a festive answer to Eliot's Four Quartets. It's also got two long prose sections, which are my favorite bits: "The Meditation of Simeon" and Herod's complaint in "The Massacre of the Innocents." Herod's speech really is a complaint, a sort of sustained whinge against the absurdity of the whole situation: "O dear, why couldn't the wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can't people be sensible? I don't want to be horrid. Why can't they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd?" Auden's theme is that absurdity of Incarnation, the hard fact that even now "Nothing can save us that is possible." Really the only thing I don't like about For the Time Being is that I can't read it if I'm planning on doing any of my own writing anytime soon. Auden (in this mode, at least) does so exactly the writing I want to do, and does it so well, that he makes me feel almost unbearably small.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Well, look, mainly this one's harrowing, but it's set at Christmas, and it's a comfortable read if only because Willis writes prose that you can just melt into. She's not just compulsively readable, she's compulsively rereadable, which is rarer. This one's science fiction, about Oxford historian-in-training Kivrin Engle, being sent from 2164 to 1348, the plague year. At Christmas! And Christmas isn't just window-dressing, the whole book is concerned with issues of theology and Incarnation. A lot of that happens in Kivrin's relationship with her advisor, Dunworthy. Kivrin isn't straightforwardly a Christ figure, but the theme of sending a loved child to go and be helpless in a place of great danger has some unavoidable theological overtones. Especially at this time of year. But it's not just that, it's that Willis is very good on Christmas generally. There's some real gems in her Christmas collection Miracle, although that one's missing my favorite, her first-contact novella "All Seated on the Ground." But none of those talk about the Slaughter of the Innocents nearly as much as Doomsday Book does, and it is to their detriment.

In that same science-fictional vein I've often read Terry Pratchett's Hogfather at Christmas—the tl;dr is that it's a fantasy novel about Death taking over Santa Claus's job—but this year I didn't think of it in time to get a library copy out, and it's just as well. It's an excellent book, but I've found that this year, part and parcel with becoming Insufferable About Advent, I've had little to no interest in secularized approaches to Christmas. (Outside, that is, of watching the Doctor Who Christmas special and complaining about the dreadful theology of the Doctor Who Christmas special. We get it, you think the Doctor's Jesus. He's still really not.) Hogfather's got a lot to say about the (UK) cultural trappings of Christmas, mall Santas and the Little Match Girl, and a lot to say about storytelling and the imagination, but a book so indifferent to the religious festival doesn't have much to say to me.

Speaking of Doctor Who, the book I feel more inclined to turn to is the Doctor Who novel Timewyrm Revelation, by Paul Cornell. I'm not proud of my bizarre Doctor Who novel habit, but this really is a better book than anything with the word "Timewyrm" in the title has any right to be. It's set at Christmas, mostly in a church, and only a bit on the moon, and a lot in the Seventh Doctor's head. Of course you oughtn't to read it if you are the sort of well-adjusted person whose interest is not immediately pricked by the phrase "journey into the mind of the Seventh Doctor." You'd be better off reading Cornell's Christmassy Lost Child of Lychford (the sequel to his Witches of Lychford, but they're both so short there's nothing to stop you reading them both), or his short story "The Ghosts of Christmas." For myself I'm also thinking of rereading Dorothy Sayers' play cycle The Man Born to Be King. Which is suitable for Christmas in the same way Handel's Messiah is—i.e. it's not, it's for Easter—but I read it for the first time at Christmas, and the Epiphany play is marvelous and, anyway, it's not as though you can have Christmas without Easter. Or would wish to. Merry Christmas.

brief bookblog & linkblog.

Over the last couple of years I've gone through several very frustrating times—which I like to attribute to schoolwork but which actually have much more to do with ill health—during which I've been more or less unable to read prose at length. I can always read short fiction and listen to audiobooks, and I can generally cope by playing text-adventure games, inasmuch as that counts as reading (watch this space for the long-delayed posts on 80 Days and Open Sorcery), but the inability to sit down with a novel is a painful thing. I seem to be finally coming out of one of those periods now, having this past week finished in the space of two days two awesome new books.

One of them was My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, which just came out this February. It's a big, weird comic about growing up in Chicago in the late sixties, presented as the spiral-bound notebook/sketchbook/diary of narrator Karen Reyes. Karen wants to be a monster and draws herself as a wolfgirl; I loved the ins and outs of that obsession, and the horror comic covers that signaled the chapter breaks. I loved even more the scenes set in the Art Institute, especially the sequence when Karen's older brother Diego is teaching her how to look. Like a lot of the books I like best, it makes me want to write academic analysis; unfortunately the second volume is yet to be released, and until then there's a lot left unresolved.

The other book isn't only new, it's not even out yet: it comes out this coming week. A few weeks back I won an ARC of Weave a Circle Round, by debut author Kari Maaren, from a Tor.com giveaway, and this weekend I finally managed to read it. It's very, very good. It isn't from Tor's YA line, but it's about teenagers, and (partly because the protagonist, Freddy Duchamp, is only fourteen) it reads less like an adult novel or modern YA than like really good children's fiction. Early reviews have been comparing it to Diana Wynne Jones, which is more or less right (the way Maaren plays with memory reminded me a lot of Fire and Hemlock in particular). It's fun and absorbing, all about stories and time travel and growing up. The thing it's most like is Pamela Dean's novel Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. That's a frustrating comparison to have to make, because almost nobody's read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, but I can't think of a better pairing. They're both YA-ish fantasy about time travel and strange neighbors and difficult siblings; they're both deeply interested in poetry and folklore, and they both pay a close and careful attention to the mundane worlds of the characters. I think of JGR as a darker and more frightening book, and the central thematic concerns are different, but even so I want to read them side-by-side. I'm glad people are still writing books like this.

At the moment I'm reading A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar, a gorgeous and worldbuilding-dense fantasy novel that reminds me of what I love about Calvino, and I'm also reading Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys. Winter Tide is one of those revisionist takes on Lovecraft that we get so many of now, and although Lovecraft-qua-Lovecraft isn't all that interesting to me it's a genre I tend to enjoy. This one is a continuation of the short story "A Litany of Earth," which I've loved for years, and I think anybody who likes that story will like the novel too. I'd also point the curious to this interview with Emrys, from the podcast Cooking the Books, which interviews sf/f authors about food. The page at the link includes a recipe for honeyed saltcakes, which the characters in Winter Tide eat. I mention it here so as to note that I've already made the recipe twice. They're very good crumbled into oatmeal.

A handful of other links. I hardly ever play games that aren't text-adventures, but after reading this review I immediately bought and played Yorkshire Gubbins, a really good game that I'll probably write about eventually. This video is unaccountably hysterical to me. This article on sandwiches is unaccountably fascinating. This profile of a Japanese roboticist is accountably fascinating, as is a charming short story in Uncanny about a robot writing fanfiction. I'm sure everyone's already read about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, but I haven't stopped being excited about it. And this is a very good essay about one of my favorite comics, which I link as much for my benefit (so I don't lose the link) as for yours.

book review: john green, turtles all the way down.

[content note: incoherence, mental illness, minimal spoilers, bad Star Wars shipping opinions]

Not to be all, like, "having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card," about it all, but it does definitely pay to get your hold requests in early, because I've already read John Green's new book, and it's only been out for about five minutes, and I didn't pay a penny for it.

It's his best book to date. It's got a lot of Star Wars in it.

You know how sometimes you can watch something turn into a period piece? I went to see the movie of The Fault in Our Stars back when it was in theatres, and I remember thinking, this is the most 2014 movie ever; this movie will be dated in five minutes. This movie was dated yesterday. It isn't/wasn't a criticism, just a description. Green's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, feels always-already dated in a really similar way, even though I can't put my finger on exactly why. It's not the most 2017 book ever, because it's set in the United States and nobody talks about politics, but it is very 2017. I mean, I say "nobody talks about politics," but it is a book entirely about existential dread, so what do I know. The best friend character, Daisy, writes Rey/Chewbacca fanfiction, which is a very up-to-the-minute sentence. I have consulted a friend who is in Star Wars fandom and she says this isn't a ship people ship, ever, at all, and I think it's quite canny of Green to choose a pairing that won't get him implicated in fandom shipping drama.

I think what I'm trying to react to with all this is that all of his books are of their moments, in a way that's sort of expected of contemporary YA, but this is his first book since 2012, and so the effect is that his novel-world has skipped ahead nearly six years without missing a beat. It's disorienting, especially since in the interim I mostly stopped keeping up with what he was doing. The last time he published a book, the characters in it were older than I was, and now the protagonists of the new book look like kids to me. I don't really read YA anymore. What's big in YA these days? The Raven Cycle was big. Maggie Stiefvater's sentences aren't as pretty as she thinks they are, but talking trees are cool.

I'm also reacting to the fact that none of his earlier books had characters interacting with real popcultural objects quite like this. In The Fault in Our Stars they mostly interacted with fictional cultural objects, and in Looking for Alaska their cultural engagement was mostly with, I don't know, García Márquez. Millay. In Paper Towns everybody talked a whole lot about Walt Whitman. I don't remember about An Abundance of Katherines, because it's not a very memorable book. All I mean to say is that a lengthy argument about the personhood of Chewbacca sounds like a John Green thing to have, but not necessarily a John Green thing to write. It's a thematically resonant argument, though, because what this book is mostly about is what makes a person a person.

So the protagonist, Aza Holmes, has OCD, and a lot of her intrusive thoughts revolve around anxieties about her personhood—she's obsessed with her gut biome, the idea that there's more bacteria in her than there is her in her; she worries about her meds because she hates the idea of having to take a pill to change herself to become herself; she thinks of herself occasionally as possessed and occasionally as a fictional character, which is much less meta than it sounds. And then there's the damage that any mental illness can do to a person's sense of self. Most of us these days tend to think of our thoughtlife as the locus of our identity, but if your thoughts are awful and uncontrollable and other, what do to the youness of you? Is there a self that's more fundamental than what happens in your brain? If you believe in the soul, like I do, you think there is—but not everyone does, and even if you do believe in the soul, what does a soul look like? How do you find it? (It does occur to me that if my friends had that conversation about whether Chewbacca counts as a person it would immediately turn into a conversation about whether Chewbacca has a soul, whether Christ died for Wookiees, and whether the Wookiees are even fallen beings, or are they like the hrossa. Nobody in this book mentions the hrossa, which is normal, but nobody really mentions the soul either, which is interesting.)

The central plot is a semi-detective story, about attempting to find information about a missing billionaire, but that's not where the real interest of the book lies. I don't want to make it seem that the central plot is unimportant, and I don't want to make it seem as though I didn't like it, but if you were to ask me what this book is about I would think of OCD first and billionaires second. It's a book about being a teenager living with a chronic mental illness. Green is really good at describing intrusive thoughts; the scenes where Aza gets caught up in her spirals are incredibly intense and affecting, and while Green is still not an amazing prose stylist there's a few lines from those passages that have stuck with me. What I like about this book, right, is that it's a book about OCD without being a Book About OCD in the sense of being didactic or issue-driven. I like that she's already medicated and in therapy when the book begins, so it's not one of those stories about a character discovering that she's mentally ill but instead a story about a character learning more about what her mental illness means in her life. It's an upsetting book—there's some places near the end where I almost cried—but not bleak or manipulative. It's positively optimistic.

My biggest objection to this book also has to do with Star Wars. I am very consistent. The problem is: everybody in this book has a hobby that carries them throughout the story. Daisy has the Rey/Chewbacca thing, their male best friend/Daisy's love interest is an artist, and Aza's love interest stargazes and writes poetry. It's jarring that Aza has no interests of this kind of her own, and that I still have no idea what she would be doing left to herself. Does she read? Does she watch TV? We really don't know. Possibly it's meant to reflect the fact that her mental illness has taken over her life to the extent that she has little time, energy, or focus to spend on anything else—which makes perfect sense as far as it goes, but which also makes it even stranger that nobody comments on the disparity. If it's a choice on Green's part, it's a choice that for all the world looks like an error. It also makes some conversations late in the book ring a little false. Daisy accuses Aza of focusing on her own problems to the exclusion of listening to what other people want to talk about, but because essentially all their conversations that haven't been about the detective plot have been about Daisy's interests, the idea that their conversations always focus on Aza... is really not borne out by the evidence. They talk about Star Wars a lot, and it's a subject on which Aza seems to move between disinterest and active distaste. (And it's actively bizarre to me that the narrative treats Aza's failure to read Daisy's fanfiction as a genuine failure to be a good friend.)

That complaint being laid out—and it is a major complaint: much of the book rests on that relationship—there's still a lot to like here, and I do still think it's Green's best work. It's a John Green book, so it's a very quick read and and there's some credibly bad teenage poetry and James Joyce is brought up more often than strictly necessary. If you're into YA, or you liked his previous novels, I recommend it. I'm glad he's publishing again. Green, not Joyce. Joyce is dead.

january bookblogging.

1 & 2. Gerald Morris, The Squire's Quest & The Legend of the King. These are MG/YA, from a Gawain-focused Arthuriana series I used to be a fan of when I was younger. These two, which I never got around to (well—I might have read The Squire's Quest; I didn't remember most of it, but there was a gag about the filioque that I thought I recognized) cover the end of the story. The tonal shift from what had been a fairly lighthearted series is a bit awkward in places, but ultimately very well-handled. I especially loved the very end of The Legend of the King.

3. Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Note from log: "I repudiate it." A strange little book, twee and authoritarian and fundamentally deeply materialistic. Even her sensible tips are delivered in an absolutist tone that makes them hilarious. As everyone says, she's especially bad on the subject of books—the right time to read a book, see, is when you first encounter it, so any book you own that you've not read yet can be got rid of straightaway. She also doesn't believe in re-reading, though she does believe in feeling sorry for your socks.

4–10. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. Re-reads, obviously. At this point I'm not reading for plot even a little bit, but just to discover all the delightful little details I've forgotten over time. Can you believe that I didn't remember Bism? or Reepicheep losing at chess because he makes all his pieces do the stupid self-sacrificing things he would do in a real battle? et cetera, et cetera. As usual, Dawn Treader is my favorite, Silver Chair is the most effective/successful as a novel, and The Horse and His Boy is much easier to love than to like.

11. David Lodge, Changing Places. I have a documented weakness for campus novels; this one is very funny, very self-aware, and very good.

12. The Lais of Marie de France. This was for a medieval lit class; I am pleased to report that it's really wonderful, and totally mental in that way all the best medieval stuff is. One of them is about a werewolf!

13. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing. This was for my Literature of the Digital Age class. Goldsmith is a poet who thinks, among other things, that we have so much text now that what we really ought to do now is focus not on rearranging and recontextualizing what we've already got—"context is the new content." Most of my classmates had mixed-to-negative feelings about all this; my final feeling, as expressed to a friend of mine in the class, is that I kind of want to beat Goldsmith up in a parking lot, but just the once, and after that I'll be more or less okay with him. I don't want to pass judgment now beyond the thing about beating him up, but he's always interesting and there's a lot here worth talking about.

14. Lev Grossman, The Magicians. What if Harry Potter, but anhedonic, and also consuming heroic quantities of alcohol? It's all a bit Donna-Tartt-does-J.-K.-Rowling, and while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else it worked for me on that score. I really like campus novels. Unfortunately the protagonist is intensely boring (some of the supporting characters are quite good, and I'm powerless to understand why they spend any time with him) and once everyone graduates, which happens a little more than halfway through, things get a lot less interesting. It turns from My Harry Potter Fanfiction, By Me, Lev to My Narnia Fanfiction, By Me, Lev—and Lev Grossman is not great at writing Narnia fanfiction. (There exists a version of this review that consists solely of the sentence "I could write better Narnia fanfiction than that," and in a lot of ways that kind of sums it up.)

15. Emma Donoghue, The Wonder. You know when you've read too many books by men, or one book that's extremely By A Man, and then you open a book by a woman and it's like you can breathe properly again? Coming straight off the back of The Magicians I was pre-disposed to like anything that didn't keep describing its female characters' breasts at me. I was also positively inclined because I'd read Donoghue's last-but-one book before this, Room, a novel about a kidnapping narrated by the victim's five-year-old son. It was very well-regarded, deservedly so; this one's been less talked about, but for my money it's better. I knew straightaway that it wouldn't be as praised generally—it's a historical novel, and it's very unusual. The protagonists here are Anna, an eleven-year-old Irish girl who's inexplicably stopped eating, and Lib, a Nightingale-trained English nurse who has been hired to watch Anna and get to the bottom of what's happening. Donoghue is one of the best in the game at writing child characters, and as such she manages to make Anna both believable and lovable and her story intensely gripping. This book is hard to recommend, because it's very upsetting in ways that are hard to warn for without spoiling the plot, but I loved it.

16. Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. A gorgeous, timely little book about Japanese picture brides. It's written all in the second-person plural—I don't believe I've read anything else that uses that technique, but here it's surprisingly immersive and affecting.

2016 reading summary.

I don't know exactly how many books I read in 2016. It was at least 183, which is much less impressive when you take into account how many comics I read. But those records end in, at the latest, very early December. For some reason, I've been having a bad couple of mental health months. Upshot is that I've been not only struggling to read books but also forgetting to write them down. In the end I still managed to read quite a bit, but by the time I got back onto my horse I had entered a shame cycle whereby I couldn't write books down because I couldn't bear to look at the list. I reread The Phantom Tollbooth in the weeks after the election, because a quest for Rhyme and Reason sounded about right just then, and I did a lot of Edward Gorey comfort reading. I propose below to list a some things I've managed to get through lately, and then note my favorites from the year as a whole.

What I have finished lately has been short. I read Laurie Penny's Everything Belongs to the Future, which was as intelligent and absorbing as I've been led to believe, and also Paul Cornell's Witches of Lychford which was very good in what felt like a very Paul Cornell sort of way. (Are you into Anglicanism but also kind of into paganism? Yeah. And this one starred a female vicar, which is a good bit of the way to my heart.) I read David Davalos' play Wittenberg—a story about Hamlet and his professors Faustus and Luther, because of course it is—because I was worried it was too similar to something I've been making a tentative start on writing. It isn't, and it was quite good fun.

I did my traditional seasonal reads: From Hell (Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell) for Thanksgiving, Hogfather (Terry Pratchett) for Advent, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Christmas. That last I read out loud with my father, who is kind about my pronunciation and very patient when I collapse giggling about how much I love the Pearl Poet. We also organized a small reader's theatre of The Second Shepherd's Play, and I decided that I wanted to be the Wakefield Master when I grow up. Besides that there's the venerable tradition whereby straight after Christmas I steal and read a book I gave as a gift to one of my family: this year it was Dad's gift, Robert Farrar Capon's posthumous More Theology & Less Heavy Cream. Very light indeed, a collection of humorous columns for the late lamented Wittenburg [sic] Door.

Those are all worth noting because I liked them—one that's worth nothing for the opposite reason, though it saddens me to dwell on't, was Connie Willis' new book Crosstalk. Here's what I wrote about it in my journal at the time: "a cross b/t Bellwether & Lincoln's Dreams & so disappointing it soured me retrospectively on both. The thing about the Irish is stupid, Twitter does not work that way, & CB makes very little sense as a character. 'I assure you that parts of it are excellent'—but even the good bits made me feel that I was reading a draft of a much better book, one that would be half as long." Naturally this was all rather crushing. So, counterpoint: December's standout! It was a sci-fi novel which I can't talk about—or anyway I don't know how much I'm allowed to say so I'm keeping mum. This is because it isn't published yet, and I was a test reader on it. It is very, very good and I'm excited for when it comes out and I can review it properly here.

So: Favorite reads for the year as a whole. I make a habit of marking my favorites with asterisks, so this is easier than it might otherwise be. Here are some of my favorites, excluding re-reads, and including nothing that I didn't mark as a favorite at the time: 

Nox, Anne Carson — for school; my term paper on it ruled.
The Core of the Sun, Johanna Sinisalo
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne Valente
Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner
A Humument: A treated Victorian novel, Tom Phillips — for school, the same seminar that read Nox. It was a course about texts that interrogate the technologies that produce them, and it changed my thinking about books and reading in a really major way.
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, Steven Brust
Digger, Ursula Vernon
Liar, Justine Larbalestier — I'm not sure on this one of how good it was versus how well it pushed my own personal buttons. But it pushed those buttons very effectively.
Hitchers, Will McIntosh
The Rabbi's Cat 1 & 2, Joann Sfar
Games Wizards Play, Diane Duane — similar caveats as for Liar. This is a book aimed at my thirteen-year-old self with a ludicrous degree of precision, and I loved it largely on her behalf.
Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer
Antigonick, Anne Carson & Bianca Stone
Speak, Louisa Hall
The Parliament of Fowls, Geoffrey Chaucer (& the Tales)
Brendan, Frederick Buechner (& others of his)
Still, Lauren F. Winner
Glittering Images, Susan Howatch — and some but not all of the ensuing series, which I devoured at lightning speed this summer. Ultimately my favorite was probably Mystical Paths, the second-to-last.
As You Like It, William Shakespeare
The Fate of Mice, Susan Palwick (and Shelter and The Necessary Beggar: Susan Palwick was my real discovery of the year)
Necessity, Jo Walton
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The Paper Menagerie & Other Stories, Ken Liu
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey
The Secret History, Donna Tartt — did I tell you I'm a Classics major now? and yet still not a murderer.
Joe Gould's Teeth, Jill Lepore
Telling Tales, Patience Agbabi
Owl in Love, Patrice Kindl
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer

I've not done statistics on the whole list, because of the record-keeping errors noted earlier, but I'll say that this sample is mostly science-fiction and fantasy, almost all by women, and fewer comics than I might have expected. (Although this really is the year I got heavily into Saga and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.) If I had to choose a favorite from all of these it'd be—difficult, since I love all these for very different reasons, but probably Antigonick. It's breathtaking.

I'd meant to include here my reading resolutions, but this post has gone a bit long—expect them here within the week, and then a return to regular monthly bookblogs. And, while I didn't want to go into too much detail about all of the books I listed here, in the comments I'm willing to talk about any and all of them with possibly excessive enthusiasm.

the uncanny valley.

explained for English majors, by an English major.

Right, you know when you're in a used-book store, one of those wonderful tiny ones where the books are organized by subject matter and nothing else, and the shelves are improbably high and if you tried to take a book down off the top shelf everything would fall down and kill you, probably? And there's a cat, because of course there's a cat, and it's absurdly satisfied with itself? Which it deserves to be, if you lived here you'd be satisfied with yourself too. You wouldn't mind trading lives with that cat for a week or so.

You circle the store in no great hurry. You poke through the section labeled Esoterica, hoping to find some Charles Fort (you've been re-reading From Hell lately) but all you can find are dusty paperbacks about astrology and candle magick and that sort of thing. You almost buy a translation of The Golden Ass, but you're trying lately not to buy books that you can trivially find from the library, so you leave it, even though it's by a translator you admire a great deal. In general living so near a public library rather punctures your enthusiasm for book-buying; what you really covet is that lovely bust of Hippocrates, which isn't for sale. Textbooks you still buy, though, so you dutifully (futilely) examine all the New Testament commentaries in hopes of finding the ones you've been assigned for Advanced Koinē next semester.

You also seriously consider a novel by A.S. Byatt, but your mother loves Byatt and so you reckon she probably owns a copy—you can borrow it over Christmas break. If she doesn't have it you can just re-read Possession; it's been over a year. In Drama you accidentally pick up some anti-Stratfordian literature, and because you're absurdly overdramatic you make an audible noise of disgust when you realize what it is you're holding. This is by far your favorite bit of the store, in the absence of any discernible sci-fi shelves, and in between looking at nice editions of your favorite Shakespeare plays you reiterate to yourself your long-standing intention to finally read The Revenger's Tragedy. 

Another thing that catches your eye over here is a little hardback of the first quarto of Hamlet, the bad quarto of 1603. You take it down and open it at random, and the first line your gaze falls on is Corambis (the bad quarto's equivalent of Polonius) saying "He hath, my lord, won from me a forced grant." The Folio line, you know very well, is "He hath, my lord, won from me my slow leave." It's almost exactly the same thing—scans the same, means the same. But this version is completely nails-on-chalkboard wrong to you, so wrong that you can't even judge on its own merits how good a line it is. It's the wrong line, end of, and it feels even more wrong because it's so close to the line you already know. You've always thought of Shakespeare as a binary state, whereby any given text is either Shakespeare or not-Shakespeare, but this is almost Shakespeare, and it makes you physically uncomfortable.

And, yeah, the uncanny valley is that feeling but with robots.

you thought I was joking about the cat, didn't you?

a series of promises in the event that I am magically transported to London 1601.

This exists in lieu of an actual review of Saving Hamlet, a new YA novel in which the protagonist is magically transported to London 1601. It's essentially a much less good version of Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, which is one of my favorite children's novels of all time. It was fun even so, but I had mixed feelings about it, largely because the central time traveler is so unrealistically incompetent that I was cringing throughout. This is a recurrent problem with time travel narratives; one of the few things I wholeheartedly admire about myself is that I know I would do a very good job of time traveling. Most of the below are not based on specific things the protagonist of Saving Hamlet does, but some of them would be good advice for her nevertheless.

See also this and this.

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I will cheerfully eat and/or drink absolutely anything that anyone offers me. I will drink ale like it's water. I will not drink water, unless I am able to discreetly boil it.

I will not go around boiling water: that would attract attention.

If anyone suggests that I join them to go watch the bear-baiting, I will respond with enthusiasm and a blithe unconcern for the humane treatment of animals. This is a normal thing, I will say, and I am delighted to join you in this, a normal event which we will both without reservation enjoy.

I will be very grateful that my sense of smell is naturally quite weak, but to be completely safe I will not comment at all, even once, on the smell of anything. All smells I am smelling are normal smells, and I, a normal inhabitant of 1601, am completely okay with them. (The exception will be if I smell smoke—buildings of this period are extremely flammable, as am I, and I'm taking no risks.)

I will be very grateful that I'm not squeamish about blood.

I will express surprise at nothing; I will put forward no opinions.

I will do all in my power to ensure that no one notices me.

I will conjugate all verbs correctly. If I am unsure of how to conjugate a verb, I will not use it. There is always a workaround.

I will be aware of my use of pronouns. "You" is for strangers, social superiors, and groups of two or more. "Thou" is for friends, social inferiors, and supernatural beings. "Ye" is a plural form of "thou." I will not confuse these, but if I do I will err on the side of "you."

Despite my commitment to accurate EModE, I will not say "forsooth"; it will make me sound ridiculous. I might say "i'faith," but only if I hear other people doing it first.

Under no circumstances will I call anyone "nuncle."

I will not try to do the accent, because I have my pride. I will take as many notes as possible on the accent, though I will not let anyone notice me doing so; upon returning to my own time, I will anonymously mail these notes to Ben Crystal.

I will not attempt to invent feminism.

I will not attempt to invent vaccines.

I will not attempt to invent the germ theory of disease.

I will accept, generally, that I understand nothing about modern medicine, and that anything I say or do will help absolutely no one and might make people think I'm a witch.

That said, if I can actually do something to save somebody's life, I will.

I will express no doubts regarding the efficacy of bloodletting; in general, I will enthusiastically align myself with humor theory. Bile, man, am I right? (It will help that I already low-level believe in humor theory. Do I know it's been discredited? Yes. Do I avoid eating mustard when I'm in a bad mood? Religiously.)

I will figure out exactly what the deal was with Will Kempe and the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Any breakup that ends in one of the parties Morris dancing to Norwich must be a really good story.

I will remember that Shakespeare has not yet written Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, Pericles, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Tempest, or Two Noble Kinsmen. I will make no reference to any of these plays. I will be wary of mentioning Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet, all of which date to 1601 +/- a couple years. I will under no circumstances reference any of his sonnets at all; none of them have yet been published.

Anything by Kit Marlowe is fair game, though; he's already dead.

When I attempt to place evidence of myself in the historical record, I will do so subtly and with as little true anachronism as possible.

I will be extremely polite to Richard Burbage.

If I meet Edward de Vere, I will punch him in the face, and I will refuse to explain why. I may or may not seek him out for this express purpose.

october bookblogging.

Susan Howatch, The Wonder Worker. Astute readers may remember that over the summer I read the Starbridge series, a collection of novels focusing on the Church of England from the thirties to the sixties. Later on, Howatch wrote three more in the series, featuring a different setting but lots of the same characters. These are the St. Benet's Trilogy, about a London-based ministry of healing. The thing I love about Howatch is her characters. They all feel so real, and coming back to her world after a few months away was like paying a call on old friends. Unlike the Starbridge books, this book has a different narrator for each part: Alice Fletcher, Lewis Hall, Rosalind Darrow, and Nicholas Darrow. The changing perspectives worked very well to build a full picture of events. I was able to see—for example—from Lewis' perspective that Rosalind was utterly ghastly and all wrong for Nicholas, and then I was able to see from Rosalind's perspective how agonizing it must be to be Nick's wife, and how having Lewis around wasn't helping even a little. Nuance! None of these people are terrible, although they can be terrible to one another. They all need lots of help. And divine grace.

Alejandro Zambra, Multiple Choice. Experimental Chilean novel (short stories? poetry? game?) written in the form of a multiple-choice test. It took me a while to get into the spirit of things, but it got better as it went and ultimately I think it's a successful project.

Ryan North & Erica Henderson, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now. And just like that there's three whole ongoing comics series I care about. (Saga and Ms. Marvel, obviously.) Doreen Green is a sophomore computer-science major with all the powers of squirrel! She fights crime! Where was this comic book when I was twelve! It's a warm-hearted all-ages comic, it's really funny, and Henderson's art is delightful.

David Prudhomme, Cruising Through the Louvre. Immersive and magical. A man wanders around the Louvre, feeling as though he's in an enormous comic book. Minimal dialogue and narration, lots of wonderful sketches of museum patrons. My favorite bits are the parallels between the patrons and the art, especially on the Raft of the Medusa page. Looking at people looking at art is one of my favorite parts of the museum experience, and Prudhomme captures that so beautifully.

Howatch, The High Flyer. I don't know what it is with Susan Howatch. Her early books were so subtle and psychologically nuanced. This book is not really either of those things. (Well, maybe the second. Definitely not the first.) Carter Graham is a high-powered City lawyer; her husband Kim has, depending on how you count, no fewer than three dark secrets. One of them involves Nazis; one of them involves gnosticism. The number and general over-the-topness of Kim's revelations rapidly leads to diminishing returns, such that the entire plotline becomes less shocking than funny. There's a lot to like here—Carter herself is well-drawn, and the St. Benet's crew are as lovely as ever—but overall it's a weak entry in the series.

Howatch, The Heartbreaker. A step up from The High Flyer, though still not up to her earlier standard. I think my major issue with these three is that they focus almost entirely on the laity, which means they lack all the church politics from the earlier volumes. It turns out I really was largely in it for the clerical infighting and archidiaconal scorn.

ed. Jack Lindsay, Loving Mad Tom. A collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bedlamite songs. Folklore nerds, for the use of. (No, you regularly Google MA programs in folkloristics.) This was published in the twenties and reprinted in the seventies and is now out of print, and all I can say is thank God for college library privileges—it looks as though my other option would have been to buy it for $223 from Amazon. Which, like, if that sounds like a good deal to you then by all means go for it, though I'm not sure how wholeheartedly I can recommend that. In terms of the texts themselves it's an invaluable resource, but I wish the notes were less cumbersome to navigate. It's a good and important volume but not as user-friendly as it could be. (Also, shout-out to the foreword, by Robert Graves, which contains the following line on "Tom o' Bedlam": "All that need by said is that the author was someone pretty good." Same, bro.)

North & Henderson, Squirrel Power & Squirrel, You Know It's True. See above.

Pat Barker, Regeneration. A historical novel about Siegfried Sassoon's time in psychiatric care. I was going to say "long on incident, short on plot," but in fact it's short on both those things. It's a beautiful novel and I admire it, but the fact is that nothing happens and I had trouble telling the characters apart.

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning. A new sci-fi novel that's going to get nominated for all this year's awards, and if there's any justice in the world it's going to win the Tiptree. (Seriously, it'll upend your perceptions of gender if you give it half a chance.) It's a bit, a little bit, like if Susanna Clarke wrote sci-fi instead of fantasy, complete with the shock of wait, what, this is her first novel, WHAT. Like JS&MN, this is one of those books that takes a while to ease into because all the while it's teaching you how to read it. It's set in the twenty-fifth century but written in an eighteenth-century style. The world is intricate and multifaceted, and it gets into your head. The thing people will want to do with this book is argue about whether it's utopian or dystopian, and the argument will be as boring and wrongheaded as it always is. The world is a bit good and a bit bad, which is why it's convincing. I wouldn't want to live in Palmer's world, but I want some of the things that it has and I can see why other people would want to live there. It's also theological sci-fi, though the theology is very strange and I won't be able to comment on it properly until I've read the rest of the series.

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This is such a weird play. It's got that sort of Grimm Brothers atmosphere of casual slapstick surrealism—which makes sense, of course, as the plot comes out of German folklore. "Let's be invisible and steal the Pope's dinner and then punch him!" and "that magician just ate a whole cartload of hay for literally no reason?" and "oh, I tried to wake this guy up and now his entire leg came off in my hand, this is fine," that sort of thing. Besides all that, Faustus' idea of earthly delights appears to be a) pranks b) arguing (he argues about existence of hell with a demon he just summoned out of hell; Faustus is too dumb to live—same with all that "think'st thou then that Faustus must be damned?" malarkey: you just now signed your soul over to Lucifer, my dude! Do you, like, not know what words mean, is that the problem?) and c) kissing Helen of Troy that one time. (He's always promising to make human sacrifices, which would be interestingly perverse and make a change from all the astronomy, but he never really seems to get around to it.) He does get a chariot drawn by dragons, but the dragons are offstage, probably on grounds of "Kit, we showed your draft to the props master and he started crying?" Mistake me not: this play is incredible. There are parts of it I would give a year of my life to have written, and I want to have sex with Kit Marlowe's brain. But, yeah, it's also kind of ridiculous. Feelings! They're complicated!

Dorothy Sayers, The Devil to Pay. Another play of the Faust legend, and it was not well served by being paired so directly with Marlowe. I grant that saying "Dorothy Sayers was not as good as Marlowe" does rather amount to praising her with faint damns. There's some really wonderful moments here—Faustus' soul being so degraded that even Mephistopheles isn't interested in it anymore is a neat touch, and I love the handling of Azrael—but on the whole this is very thin. I think that skill at writing everyday people, which served her so well in her life of Christ plays, is her undoing here; she tries to make Faustus believable and ends by making him ordinary. Ordinariness is of course the last thing I want from the Faustus myth, and the effect shows in the fact that though this play is occasionally clever, it is never terrifying. There are also rather too many things that go underexplained, and the gender roles are not at all what I'd expect from Sayers.

september bookblogging.

[disclaimer: I wrote most of this instead of reading Wallace Stevens in preparation for my English midterm. If it's only half as disjointed as "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" it... should still be pretty incomprehensible, actually.]

I'd assumed that being at school would bring my book count significantly down, but the damage isn't as bad as I'd feared; I managed ten this month besides school books, and two of them were really quite long.

Jill Lepore, Joe Gould's Teeth. This book is so good; I think it's the only biography I've ever read that's gripped me like a novel. Joe Gould was for a while very famous, mostly because he had famous friends—he got check-ups from William Carlos Williams! Alice Neel painted him! he was friends with Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings! (Gould and Pound bonded over how much they both hated Jewish people, this is literally a true fact, I hate Ezra Pound with the fire of a thousand suns.) Nowadays almost no one has heard of him, which is a shame. He got into Harvard as a legacy student, dropped out of Harvard, worked briefly for a eugenicist organization, was often homeless and at least once institutionalized, and he also invented oral history. Lepore's book is about all this, and it's also about Augusta Savage, a black sculptor Joe Gould harassed for years. Sad, weird, highly recommended.

Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales. A contemporary verse retelling of the Canterbury Tales. I mentioned this on the blog back when I first found out about it, and almost as soon as I moved back to Wheaton I ordered an ILL of it. It's just as good as I was hoping it might be. Clever, funny, experimental, true to the source material, and she made the Miller's Tale even more bawdy. (I know! I was astonished too!) There's no real dead wood here, even the Tale of Melibee is surprising, but my very favorites were "Joined-Up Writing" (a sonnet cycle based on the Man of Law's Tale) and "The Contract" (the Second Nun's Tale, as narrated by one of the assassins who killed Cecilia).

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. A re-read. This is a college novel about fairies. It was one of my favorite books in high school, and one of the few books I brought with me to university, but I was nervous about reading it again as an actual college student myself. I finally reread it on Labor Day, when I was recovering from a ghastly cold and needed to read something engaging but not actually taxing. To my delight, it held up and had even improved. Several of the characters are classics majors (in that sense it's really sort of a lighter-and-softer counterpart to The Secret History) and those parts were even better now that I student ancient Greek myself. I love this book.

Susan Palwick, Shelter. Why does no one ever talk about Susan Palwick? How does Susan Palwick not have a Hugo? This is near-future science fiction about AI and parenthood and mental illness. It's not one of those one-big-change books, it's subtle and complex and there's a lot going on in it. Palwick gets a lot of things right that writers, and sci-fi writers in particular, usually get wrong—she writes wonderfully about religion for one thing, and for another she can write believable children. Nick isn't a normal child, or a healthy one, but he's as desperately real as the adult characters are. Absorbing, stunning, you need to read it now.

Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. A feminist memoir. It's good, funny and angry and well-written, but I'm not sure it's quite as good as it's been made out to be. This may be partly because I'd already heard some of the best bits on a recent episode of This American Life. Caitlin Moran on the back cover is particularly egregious in saying that it's "literally the new Bible." Right. And Jessica Valenti's memoir is literally the Bhagavad Gita, and Bad Feminist is literally the Enuma Elish, and words literally mean nothing. Come on, Caitlin.

Lucy Knisley, Something New. Another memoir, this one a comic about Knisley's wedding. Fun, but slight and overlong. I might write something longer about it; watch this space.

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things. Peter Leigh is a priest (n.b. the book does not use the word priest and I think that might be significant), Anglican-not-otherwise-specified, who gets sent to a recently-colonized planet to act as a missionary to the native population. This was a disappointment. It's a long book, and a lot of it is spent inside Peter's head, or in his emails home to his wife, and that's a problem given that Peter is neither likable nor interesting; at the end of the book I felt I didn't know much about him and didn't care to know more. (Note: based on plot developments, this is possibly something Faber's doing intentionally. It didn't work for me.) Theological science fiction is my entire jam, and I'll read as many examples as the industry produces, but this book is not great. The theology's nothing to write home about either, and much of the writing about Peter's faith felt fairly shallow to me. Just read The Sparrow instead.

Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue. A classic of feminist sci-fi. How much you enjoy this book will depend on your tolerance for second-wavers and the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I can cope with both of those things in a controlled environment, so I thought it was pretty awesome. A lot of the thought here falls apart fairly quickly if you start picking at it even a little bit (a text message I sent to my mother halfway through: "I reject the essentialist notion of a single 'female experience' in any kind of universalized sense"), but if you're into this sort of thing it's worth your time. I like it better than The Handmaid's Tale, to which it is usually compared, because Elgin writes female friendship better and is less afraid of science fiction cooties.

Susan Palwick, The Necessary Beggar. Absolutely wonderful. When Darroti kills a woman, he and his family are exiled to another dimension. They come through in a refugee camp in Nevada, where they start a long slow process of learning to live in another world. This book is about home and family and grief, and it's both sad and hopeful. Palwick does a gorgeous job of building her fantasy world, and of writing the culture shock that comes with the move to ours. (Content warning for suicide.)

Patrice Kindl, Owl in Love. This won the Mythopoeic Award for Children's Lit in 1995, and it unquestionably deserved it; this is what YA was made to do, and I've never read anything like it. Owl is a fourteen-year-old in love with her science teacher, and being a were-owl doesn't help. The first-person narration is both completely realistic and utterly alien: Owl is cold, uncertain, overconfident, passionate, awkward, brilliant, and totally sui generis.

Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year. This was for my Intro to Anthropology class. An anthropology professor in her fifties enrolls in her university as a freshman so she can understand the undergraduate experience, comes away with astonishing insights like "sometimes students don't do all their assigned reading." I too was stunned!

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So that's eleven in total, ten of them by women. Four nonfiction, one comic, one book of poetry. All of them were library books except for Tam Lin and My Freshman Year, which I own. (Well, Freshman is a rental.) My favorite was either Owl in Love or one of the Palwick books, and I'll definitely be seeking out more by both Palwick and Kindl. I'll see you next month with another haul!

august bookblogging.

Being back in Wheaton, I have access to a public library again (not to mention the college library), so my pool of available books has grown dramatically. Being back in Wheaton, I'm in class again, so my available reading time has shrunk dramatically. A man's reach must exceed her grasp, as the poet saith, or what's a heaven for?

Naomi Novik, Uprooted. This year's Nebula winner, a fantasy novel set in pseudo-medieval pseudo-Poland. The magic descriptions are the best part and I wanted more of them. Specifically I wanted more of the magic lessons. My problem with this book mostly boils down to a mismatch of expectations: I read it thinking it would be a quiet novel with romance and a heroine learning how to do magic (I'd heard it compared to Howl's Moving Castle, so you can't really blame me), and at the beginning that's what it looks like. I enjoyed those first parts immensely, mostly because I'm a massive sucker for a Beauty and the Beast motif. But then the high-stakes plot showed up, the court scenes and politics bogged me down a great deal, and the romance turned out to be underwritten. The ending's wonderful though, and overall I'm glad I read it. Novik's as competent as ever, and if you like this sort of thing it's just the sort of thing you'd like; it just wasn't as much my type of thing as I thought it might be.

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves. They're Wodehouse. What else do you want to know? If you've read any Wodehouse you know exactly what he's like, and if you haven't why are you wasting your time on this blog?

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion. What an aggressively peculiar play.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History. In summary: Never study Classics. Never do that. This is a book about a lot of pretentious Classics students at an elite Vermont liberal arts school who get together and murder one of their classmates. There is not a single spoiler in that sentence. You know from the beginning that they've murdered their classmate: when, why, and how they did so are gradually revealed. It's a beautifully written book. Tartt's characters and settings are well-drawn, and the story is incredibly gripping despite the fact that all those well-drawn characters are straight-up terrible people. It is also, in places, very funny. One of the best books I've read in absolute yonks, and despite its length a quick read. I love college novels and this is a good one. (I'm pretty sure it's also the book that Chip Kidd's novel The Cheese Monkeys was trying to be. Don't read that. Read this. Chip Kidd can do a decent atmosphere, but he can't do plot.)

Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison. This is not the first Lord Peter novel (that's Whose Body?), but it is the first to feature his eventual wife Harriet Vane; like many people I only read Poison because I first read and loved the later book Gaudy Night, which stars Harriet. I don’t like mysteries much as a genre; I can never keep suspects straight in my head, and I found a lot of the business about the will a bit tedious, but surprisingly the story picked up when the narrative shifted over to Miss Climpson. She’s a great character, and the séance scenes are delightful. Also—possibly because I don’t read mysteries—the solution took me completely by surprise and struck me as very clever indeed. The emotional plot is a little thinner here than we would get later on, and Harriet and Peter will both mature a great deal before this is all over, but even here I love them.

Curtis Sittenfield, Eligible. Why did I read this? I don't know, I didn't know while I was reading it why I was reading it. It is not a good book. It's a modernized Pride and Prejudiced, and it's competently written, if a little overwritten, but it's just not that good. I dislike Sittenfield's take on Mrs. Bennet, and Jane and Bingley are both fairly underwritten. There were some clever bits, but as usual: if you want to read Jane Austen fanfiction, do it on the internet. It's actually a lot better there.

Adam Rex, The True Meaning of Smekday. A re-read. This is a comic novel for kids about the alien invasion of the United States, and it's an old favorite of mine. The friendship that develops between Tip and J.Lo is one of my favorite friendships in all of children's literature.

Rumer Godden, The Peacock Spring. This was a recommendation from my mother—one of her old favorites. It's a quiet and sad story about an English girl, the daughter of a diplomat, who moves to India and falls in love with her father's gardener. Everything goes wrong, as things are wont to do. This is a beautiful book, written in a strange and evocative style, full of long and elliptical sentences. It's also smart. It would be so easy for a book with a plotline like this to come across as a condemnation of interracial relationships, but—largely because of Godden's deft and realistic character work—it's painfully obvious that the failings of Ravi's and Una's relationship aren't because he's Indian and she's English but because she's immature and he's awful. It's a relationship between two real and particular individuals, both of whom ring true to me. I'm hoping soon to read Godden's book In This House of Brede, which is about a convent.

Annie Dillard, Mornings Like This. A lovely little collection of found poetry. The pieces are rather hit-or-miss, but the hits hit hard. Curiously the technique works best in her imperative pieces, the ones where the text is drawn from how-to manuals; I haven't quite figured out yet why that should be. It's a good collection, and it gave me some excellent ideas for my own poetry.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. This was a re-read. Dean is one of my favorite authors; I re-read her novels regularly and always seem to pick up something new in them. I think the best place to start with this one is that it's a feminist novel, not in the sense that it’s about cool and interesting women and girls (although it is) but in the most literal sense of being a work about feminism, and femininity, and what it is to be just-barely a teenage girl. It's also an adaptation of a traditional ballad, "Riddles Wisely Expounded." Dean has the advantage here that most readers nowadays, if they are familiar with the ballad at all, are only familiar with the modern rationalized version. She follows the oldest and weirdest branches of the tradition, and although I knew both versions of the story the darkness of this telling astonished me the first time round. It does have one of my favorite hopeful-but-not-altogether-happy endings of all time. The young characters read older, which is a perennial problem with Dean's writing, but I love them too; it's one of those books you re-read just so you can hang out with the people in it. Dean's dense and allusive prose is as intoxicating as ever.

who even knows, probably Tara Gillesbie, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. No, I'm not explaining who Tara Gillesbie is. If you didn't already get that joke you don't want to know, and also you're not even a little bit cool enough to be reading this blog. So, this play. I mean—it's not good, to start with. I suppose you might call it a curate's egg, but you'd be best off just calling it fanfiction. I'm not sorry I read it, largely because there are some bits that are genuinely good or at least rather sweet (Draco gets a redemption arc! Ron and Hermione are in love in every universe!) and there are some spectacularly goofy bits that I enjoy knowing about ("dog diggity, Cedric Diggory, you are a doggy dynamo"). I recommend it, even!—if you can keep you expectations low. It tries to do too much, and it's sloppily plotted. I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't help being a little sorry that it exists. Feelings are complicated!

Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak. I know, I know, the rest of you all read this in middle school. I meant to, but then I didn't. So I read it now, and it's much better than I was expecting it to be. It is of course the archetypal YA "problem novel," a genre distinction I've always hated. It's about a girl starting high school who was raped at a party during the summer. It's about trauma and depression, and it's also in large measure about recovery and growth. You can see Melinda come to life. It's also funny and well-observed, and Melinda comes across as a real fourteen-year-old. It's well worth your time, and it made me cry.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark. The sequel to his wonderful Wishful Thinking. These are his theological ABCs, whimsical and insightful and heartening.

Buechner, Peculiar Treasures. And the third in the trilogy; this one is on Biblical characters, from Aaron to Zaccheus. I think it's the best of the three. My favorite entries included Aaron (Buechner's take on the golden calf: "a God in the hand is worth two in the bush"), Onesimus, and Paul, but it's a wonderful book all through. If I have one objection it's the way he writes about Bathsheba, generally blaming her for the whole debacle in ways that bother me. He's only averagely terrible at writing Bathsheba, I've definitely seen worse, but "average" is jarring when I've come to expect him to be so far above average.

Tommi Musturi, The Book of Hope. A Finnish comic book. The illustrations are beautiful, occasionally—as in some of the nature scenes—breathtakingly so. I don't know who decided that graphic-novels-as-art had to mean graphic-novels-as-incomprehensible, but I suppose we just have to make the best of it. This one's not bad. It's a bit like Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth if that book were less of an interminable slog and had brighter colors in it. The art style is similar as well, in fact—someday I really will write that paper on la ligne claire in non-Francophone comics. (I will not do this.) (I might.)

Anderson, Wintergirls. This one's about a girl with anorexia whose (also anorexic) best friend has just died. Like Speak, it avoids being a by-the-numbers issue-book by virtue of its sharp characterizations. It's a lot more painful than Speak though, and a lot less funny. It's got mythic undertones, and depending on how you read one plot element it may or may not actually be a fantasy novel. Though I'm usually all "YES EVERYTHING IS FANTASY" all the time (The Secret History is a fantasy) I'm not quite sure in this case what I want to believe. It's a very liminal book. Not as good as Speak I don't think, but a good book all the same.

&

That's seventeen books, almost all fiction and just over half of them by women, out of a hundred and fifty two books from the whole year. Currently besides several books for various classes I'm reading Jill Lepore's absolutely magical book Joe Gould's Teeth. I'll tell you about it this time next month!

lewis & potter.

I have, in preparation for a project, been leafing through Lewis' collected letters—one can hardly do anything but leaf, as except for the slim and delightful Letters to Children they're all rather intimidatingly doorstoppery. Excepted also is the volume that Warren Lewis edited, which takes the eminently sane path of collecting only the interesting bits of letters, and interspersing them with interesting bits out of Jack's diaries. Dare I say that Warren was in some ways a better editor of his brother's work than Hooper was? I do dare, because it's true. He didn't annotate but I don't hold this against him as it saved him from Hooper's deadly sin of overannotation.

The extent of the Lewis correspondence is vast, especially when you consider how very little pleasure it gave him. (A note to Dorothy Sayers: "Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters. One's real friends are precisely the people one never gets time to write to.") Despite that—and may we give thanks for his sake that he was spared the indignities of email, which would have enabled even more total strangers to make unreasonable demands on his time—he wrote terrific letters. Did you know he had a long correspondence with a nun and used to sign himself Brother Ass? And here's the reason for this post, a particular gem I encountered in volume II (1931—1949). He's discussing Beatrix Potter in a letter to one Delmar Banner:

It was the Professor of Anglo-Saxon [i.e. Tolkien] who first pointed out to me that her art of putting about ten words on one page so as to have a perfect rhythm and to answer just the questions a child would ask, is almost as severe as that of lyric poetry. She has a secure place among the masters of English prose. He and I have often played with the idea of a pilgrimage to see her, and pictured what fun it would be to shoulder aside the mobs of people who want to show you all the Wordsworth places with the brief rejoinder "We are looking for Miss Potter."

Which is delightful. I'd known that Lewis loved Potter's work, especially Squirrel Nutkin—in some ways his totally unpretentious love of children's literature was one of his more appealing qualities; see also the bit in The Problem of Pain where he's talking about numinous awe and his first example is out of The Wind in the Willows—but I hadn't realized that he saw her as a serious artist to this extent, still less that Tolkien loved her too and the two of them were a sort of fan-club. This sort of thing is why even when Lewis says something infuriating (as he so often does!) I can never get properly mad at him; I criticize him of course, but emotionally I can only sigh and say "sit down, Jack," as though he were a troublesome uncle or a much-beloved family friend. I've known him too long: I know too many endearing little facts about him, and I'm too well-acquainted with his fundamental intellectual humility.

So what I want to know is chiefly
1: Did they ever meet, and
2: Do we know if she knew his work?

Question 1 is a great deal easier to answer than 2, at any rate with the materials I have on hand. The Banner letter reads as though they hadn't met (you don't go on a pilgrimage to see someone you're already acquainted with, do you?), and it's dated November 1942; Potter died just over a year later, in December 1943, and it's not inconceivable that the two could have met at some time in that window. This letter is the last reference to her in the volume, though, and glancing at several biographies I don't see any references to her apart from the fact that he enjoyed her work. So there's no correspondence, and if there was a meeting the Lewis biographers either don't know about it or haven't thought it worth mentioning. I can't approach the question from the other end because I haven't any works on Potter. (There's no reference in the Tolkien biography either.)

But there's one last means of finding out. The context of the original letter I cite is that Banner had asked him to visit, and Lewis said that he couldn't but would love to, especially if there was any chance of managing to visit Potter—who lived near him in the Lake Country. And then early in 1944 there's another letter to Banner wherein he writes "Less chance now than ever of my getting to your much desired valleys. My domestic difficulties grow worse daily and half my correspondence consists of refusing engagements which I should both like to, and ought to, accept." So by 1944 the desired visit to the Lake Country had not materialized. If it had, even or especially in the form of a "pilgrimage," it seems to me he would have mentioned it here, and so I'm almost certain that no meeting ever took place. It's not the answer I wanted, but the satisfaction of using research to answer a trivial but interesting question is so great that I don't mind in the slightest.

As always, if anyone has any contradictory knowledge—or any data on whether Potter ever read Lewis—please write in. Please join me also in the mental image of C.S. Lewis and Beatrix Potter as a superhero team-up and/or a crime solving duo. She's a genre-defining children's author, he's also a genre-defining children's author, she's a Lake Country sheep farmer, he's an Oxford don, they fight crime. Yes? Yes.

Nothing more on the Lewis project for now, though a proof of concept may show up here at some point in the nearish future. And I've got several other posts in the pipeline, but as I'm flying to the States tomorrow and will be moving back in to the dorms I expect I'll be fairly scatterbrained for a good while yet. Which is the other reason I've been reading Lewis of course; the combination of straightfowardness and familiarity is very soothing indeed.

july bookblog.

PART ONE: BOOKS FINISHED.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Discussed here. 

Jo Walton, Necessity. Discussed here.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven. A gorgeous and immaculately plotted novel, set before, during, and (mostly) after a civilization-ending flu epidemic. It's about healing, the connections between people, and the necessity of art. For all that it's an apocalypse story it never feels bleak—it's gentler, more melancholy than despairing. It's a very hopeful book.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. I am ultimately going to write a proper blog post about this. You can't expect me to sum this up in a single paragraph. However, my Chaucer blogging up to this point can be found here and here and here and here. There is more to come.

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. I've been meaning to read this essentially since it came out, since all the reviews were so good and it's got such attractive cover art, and I finally gave in and bought it when Amazon was offering it for 1.99 a few weeks back. It's a mix of fantasy and science fiction, and it's so good. This is a best-of rather than a themed collection, but Liu has some definite preoccupations—parent-child relationships, intergenerational friendships, storytelling as an act of love and heroism. It's an intensely life-affirming collection, and the prose is delicious. Some favorites: "State Change" is delightfully clever, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" reads like neo-Calvino and I'd adore to write a paper on it, and "An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition" made me cry. Other great ones are "The Regular," "Mono No Aware," and "All the Flavors"—but really truly there aren't any duds here.

Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess. It's no Parliament of Fowls.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm. A re-read. This is from the same sequence as The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Year of the Griffin. I read the other two first, and they're more to my tastes—Tough Guide is funnier, and Griffin is an academic fantasy, which has always been one of my favorite subgenres—so Derkholm came as a disappointment and I've never rated it very highly. Re-reading it after several years I was much more impressed. It's still not one of my very favorite books of hers—how could it be when there's Witch Week and Fire and Hemlock and Howl's Moving Castle?—but it's very good indeed.

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels. What a good book. I know, I'm late to the party—but what a good book. It's a retelling of the Grimms' fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red," which was always one of my favorites. It's oddly structured and sometimes a bit confusing, but it's good for all that and I'd recommend it if you liked Kristen Cashore's Bitterblue; this is another woman-centered YA fantasy novel about trauma. (I know, I know, I really need to read Deerskin soon.) (Content warning for rape.)

Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. I read Real Sex less because I was interested in it and more from a desire to finish all of Winner’s oeuvre; I'd already read all her others (well, except her dissertation). This one is worth reading, but it’s definitely an early work and I think her weakest book. (Rough ranking: Still, Wearing God, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex.) I think you can also fairly criticize her for offering so much marriage advice in a book largely written before her marriage.

Rob Bell, How To Be Here. I was feeling insecure about how few books I've been finishing lately compared to how many I've been starting, so I went back and finished this one—I read most of it back when it came out. In many ways it's fairly standard Rob Bell; I don't think there's that much here that I haven't heard him say elsewhere. That doesn't mean it's not good, though. I'm a Rob Bell fan and I like some of the points he makes here, especially about the Sabbath. I have misgivings about his framing of that particular issue, but those misgivings are to be saved for the long essay about Sabbath-keeping. Which will happen! Eventually! Sometime before the last Lammas.

Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park. I was underwhelmed with both Fangirl and Carry On (throughout Carry On I couldn't shake the feeling that nobody needs to read knock-off Harry Potter fanfiction from St. Martin's Press when there's a superabundance of the real thing on the internet), but I'd heard such good things about Eleanor & Park that I decided to give it a try. Apparently third time's the charm. I don't read very many straightforward romances, but this one was a delight, very sweet and believable. What no one had told me is that the characters read Watchmen. I swear, the whole world is conspiring to make me feel guilty for not having read Watchmen yet. It's really dated now probably! I howl to the whistling winter winds. I don't even like superheroes except for Ms. Marvel! Anyway I already read From Hell, isn't that enough for you? And the whistling winter winds reply, It won a Hugo award before the comics category was even introduced and anyway you love From Hell, you thought it was a masterwork, that should just make you more excited about reading Watchmen. The winter winds may not be as unkind as man's ingratitude, but they're still plenty unkind.

Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. This is a children's classic that I somehow managed to miss reading. It's delightful, all plucky orphans and evil head teachers and secret passageways. It's been a while since I read a proper children's book, and it made me realize that my reading diet these days doesn't have nearly enough plucky orphans in it. I would have loved this if I'd read it in elementary school, and as it was I liked it a lot. The edition I read had a gorgeous Gorey cover, too, which put me in just the right mood.

Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples, Saga: Volume Six. I mean, it's Saga. It's one of like two/three current comics that I keep up with, and if you want a fast-paced space opera comic about family, it continues to be the go-to. Volume six is the most recent trade paperback, and if I have a complaint about it it's that it's been several months since I read volume five and I had a bit of trouble getting back up to speed and remembering where we left off. I'm sort of looking forward to when this series is all over and collected and I can marathon it, like my periodic Sandman marathons. Even at this stage it's a blast though, and there's not a single plotline or character that doesn't interest me.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Lovely and meditative, half memoir and half natural history. While Bailey was bedbound with a mysterious virus, a friend brought her a potted violet with a woodland snail in the pot. This book is about her illness and her time spent watching the snail, one might almost be moved to say becoming friends with it, and it's just really really wonderful.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze. The review I read of this said that it was YA, but it isn’t at all—it’s a children’s book, and it’s a very good one. The obvious thing to do is compare it to Octavia Butler's Kindred, but I’m not sure that the comparison is either accurate or useful, though this is a time travel novel about slavery. If you've only got world enough and time for one time travel novel about slavery, it probably ought to be the Butler, but that's not to say that Sherman's book isn't worth reading. It stars thirteen-year-old Sophie, a white girl from Louisiana in the early 1960s. She makes a badly-thought out wish and is sent back in time to the eve of the Civil War, where her ancestors take her for a light-skinned slave. Sophie begins by doing what's expected of her to avoid detection, but by the time she's returned to her proper time her memories have changed so that she really does believe she is who everyone says she is. It's a very short novel, and a genuinely moving one.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. It reads like C.S. Lewis stylistically and in that I recognize his ways of thinking, and not at all like Lewis in that nothing else of his is so... personal, I suppose, not even Surprised by Joy. It's more or less exactly the book you'd expect him to write, which is not even a little bit a critique.

PART TWO: THE STATS.

Sixteen books by eleven women and six men. (Which comes to seventeen because I'm counting Fiona Staples, the illustrator of Saga, as an author.) One comic, four books of nonfiction, two MG, three YA, two Chaucer, the rest adult sci-fi/fantasy. Ten that I and family own, the rest from various libraries. Seven paper, eight digital.

PART THREE: EVERYTHING ELSE.

I'm not doing a complete list this month of what I started and abandoned, because it's depressing. I tried and failed to read The Man in the High Castle, and I made it a few chapters into Life After Life before I got bored of it. I read most of The Odyssey, and I'm planning to finish it in the next few days. I've also been re-reading Frog & Toad books, which has been more or less where my mind is lately, and I'm working on Troilus and Criseyde. The last thing I started before the end of the month was Naomi Novik's Uprooted.

As of the end of July 2016, I've read 135 books since January. I'll see you next month with another pile!

thoughts on susanna clarke.

Source.

It's so difficult to tell, sometimes, if one is being spurred to excellence or simply called to break one's staff and drown one's notebooks. It is especially difficult when one is as envious a soul as I—envy's always been my besetting sin, and it's all too easy to imagine myself in Dante's Purgatory with my eyes sewn shut. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was Susanna Clarke's first novel. Her first—even Will Shakespeare wrote a few crap plays before he managed to turn out Hamlet and Macbeth! (Have you read The Comedy of Errors? There's a reason nobody performs it.) Even Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess! (It's not terrible, but... I mean, it's no Parliament of Fowls.) Of course Jonathan Strange took Clarke ten years, and she was in her thirties when she began it, and I am only scarcely nineteen. This is less comfort than you might imagine; I'm as susceptible as anybody to our culture's fetish for precocity.

(Has anybody asked Clarke about her trunk novels, I wonder? I hope she has trunk novels.)

I first read Jonathan Strange when I was about thirteen or fourteen. Too young, I think now, to really appreciate it, although I loved it with a ferocity and spent my NaNoWriMo that year trying without success to imitate it. The years wiped quite a bit of it from my mind, though, leaving only a few details and an overall impression of transformative brilliance. What Jo Walton wrote about it when she first read it was "It's as if we've all been building sandcastles in the shadow of a cliff and suddenly Clarke has raised a great castle out of the sea with a strange light shining through the foam-water windows." It's just like that, which might explain some of the despair it's engendered in me. Someone else's sandcastle may be great, but it's great in a way you can imitate. When somebody makes herself a castle out of the sea, all you can do is stare.

I reread the novel recently because my mother and I finally got round to watching the recent miniseries. Which is beautiful, ably adapted by Peter Harness. (I don't normally notice the names of TV writers, but Harness has done some fabulous writing for Doctor Who these past years, and so I've kept an eye out for him.) Some of the emphases are rather shifted, the story is of course compressed, and I disapprove strongly of the resulting marginalization of Stephen Black who has a great deal more interiority in the book. I'm not entirely certain about the treatment of the gentleman with the thistledown hair either. He was gorgeously unseelie, but I wonder if he didn't lose some of his charm in translation; there's very little here of the character that Arabella sees in the book as a friendly if bonkers acquaintance of the Poles'. On the whole though it captured the feel of the novel better than we had any right to expect, and it's an absolute crime that it's not up for anything in this year's Hugos. Obligatory Hugo head-shaking goes here.

It's tempting to say that everyone who'd like Jonathan Strange has already read it by this point—it's more than ten years old, it won the Hugo and the Mythopoeic and the WFA, and the Locus for best debut, and it was longlisted for the Booker of all things—but that's absurd of course. There are new readers all the time. So: it's a good book, and it's well worth reading even if you've already seen the miniseries, because quite aside from adaptive changes Clarke's prose is a pleasure all its own. I keep thinking that I should share an excerpt to make my point, but it seems that every time I open the book I hit on something that wows me with its elegance or its limpidness or even just its humor.

There's Paris Ormskirk's spell against madness, which Strange uses on George III with mixed success. (And all my love by the way for her utterly sympathetic portrayal of his illness—because besides everything else this is a book about the nature of madness.)

Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there.

Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver's lies.

Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes.

Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver's bidding.

Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there. 

Memorandum. The color red may be found beneficial. 

Which is perfect all the way down to that casually academic memorandum. It's the sort of thing that feels traditional even though it isn't, making it clear that Clarke's spent a lot of time studying Anon's work. Who was it said Anon is the greatest writer who ever lived?

Or there's this long, elegant paragraph describing Norrell's Yorkshire life.

Consider, if you will, a man who sits in his library day after day; a small man of no particular personal attractions. His book is on the table before him. A fresh supply of pens, a knife to cut new nibs, ink, paper, notebooks—all is conveniently to hand. There is always a fire in the room—he cannot do without a fire, he feels the cold. The room changes with the season: he does not. Three tall windows open on a view of English countryside which is tranquil in spring, cheerful in summer, melancholy in autumn and gloomy in winter—just as English landscape should be. But the changing seasons excite no interest in him—he scarcely raises his eyes from the pages of his book. He takes his excercise as all gentlemen do; in dry weather his long walk crosses the park and skirts a little wood; in wet weather there is his short walk in the shrubbery. But he knows very little of shrubbery or park or wood. There is a book waiting for him upon the library table; his eyes fancy they still follow its lines of type, his head still runs upon its argument, his fingers itch to take it up again. He meets his neighbors twice or thrice a quarter—for this is England, where a man's neighbours will never suffer him to live entirely bereft of society, let him be as dry and sour-faced as he may. They pay him visits, leave their cards with his servants, invite him to dine or to dance at assembly-balls. Their intentions are largely charitable—they have a notion that it is bad for a man to be always alone—but they also have some curiosity to discover whether he has changed at all since they last saw him. He has not. He has nothing to say to them and is considered the dullest man in Yorkshire.

Or there's this cutting description of the difference between a butler and a lady, a passage which gets right to the heart of a lot of the novel's concerns.

Curiously, no one noticed that the strange malady that afflicted her ladyship was to a precision the same as that which afflicted Stephen Black. He too complained of feeling tired and cold, and on the rare occasions that either of them said any thing, they both spoke in a low, exhausted manner.

But perhaps it was not so curious. The different styles of life of a lady and a butler tend to obscure any similarities in their situations. A butler has his work and must do it. Unlike Lady Pole, Stephen was not suffered to sit idly by the window, hour after hour, without speaking. Symptoms that were raised to the dignity of an illness in Lady Pole were dismissed as mere low spirits in Stephen.

And then she goes on to Lord Pole's depressive cook welcoming Stephen as "a newcomer to the freemasonry of melancholy," a turn of phrase that made me laugh aloud. This book pretends to be about the Romantic rivalry of two upper-class white men, but in fact much of what's most interesting here is the margins of that story, in many cases the victims of that story, and Clarke knows it. Characters like Childermass and Vinculus, and Stephen Black and Lady Pole and Arabella, are interesting to the reader because Clarke is interested in them.

The accomplishments of the book are perhaps too many to enumerate here. Clarke can do both humor and horror. She can do omniscient point of view the way hardly anybody in fantasy does these days. The novel has just the sort of ending I like best, ending on a moment of ambiguous hope. And, as regards specifically genre-related skills, her most important is that she's mastered the skill of putting in enough magic that the book feels magical, but not so much that the magic ever feels cheap. Wonder pervades everything, but we're still awestruck when Norrell or Strange (usually Strange, let's be honest) pulls off something really audacious.

I think it's down to worldbuilding. The word conjures visions of maps and vowel charts, but that's not the sort of thing I mean here. What I have in mind is more the organically immersive quality of Clarke's writing. It's the creation of not a map but a mindset. She's been noted for her tendency towards footnotes—at least once she sticks an entire short story in one of them. Sometimes the footnotes are citations, giving the impression of Clarke as a magical historian supporting her argument with a quote from a letter, a reference from John Segundus' biography of Strange. Other times they have nothing to do with the main plot; Ann Leckie discusses an early example here. "A digression on a digression," she calls it. "Decoration. Filigree. But there’s more than one kind of efficiency, isn’t there." I know Leckie means to be complimentary, and in fact the piece is a lovely tribute to Clarke, but I wonder if the words "decoration" and "digression" don't mislead slightly. Clarke's great accomplishment is that her "digressions" feel utterly of-a-piece with her narrative; her world feels less built than grown. It's all twined together, and it's this generosity of detail that makes one say—oh, of course it all happened, just like that! The same generosity of detail makes one feel that there must be just as much more she isn't telling us.

Tolkien, God rest his grumpy soul, had no time for the term "willing suspension of disbelief": "what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He [sic] makes a secondary world which your mind can enter. [...] The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed." (It's in "On Fairy-Stories," one of my favorite essays of all time.) Jonathan Strange never has this kind of failure. Its world is one that you can live in.

And so here's the part where we bring up Victor Hugo. He gets a lot of stick from today's readers for what one might politely term his interest in everything, his long passages going into loving detail about sewers and soldiers and slang. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a much more tightly focused novel than Les Misérables, of course, and it's quite a bit shorter. Obligatory joke about Napoleon goes here. But as far as I'm concerned that's one of the strengths of Hugo as a writer: he cares about everything. That's because, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to point this out, the hero of Les Misérables is not Valjean, or Javert, or Enjolras, or even poor silly Marius. It's not Fantine or Monseigneur Bienvenue. Hugo's hero is a heroine: she is Patria: Motherland: France. Citizen, my mother is the Republic! And in the shape of his great novel-epic Hugo wants to roll all her strength and all her sweetness up into one ball. It's a love letter to France, at that instant in her history.

Clarke's interest is similarly encompassing, and while Hugo had the advantage of living in the world he wished to capture, she manages to do it with a world that has never existed. That's what I mean by worldbuilding, this seamless capture of an entire country at a particular moment in history. Except, again, it's a moment that never happened in a country—magical England—that doesn't really exist.

It's a neat trick if you can do it. I'd like to learn how.