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.

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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!

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!

top ten tuesday: ten books set outside the US.

This week's Top Ten Tuesday—hosted as always by The Broke and the Bookish—is about books set outside the United States. To be true to the prompt I've only listed things that are set in real countries in the real world, and I've left out books set in Britain (I read so much stuff set in Britain). I'm also trying to give a slight preference to Things I've Read Recently, Novels In Translation, Non-Western Countries (Yes I Hate That Term But What Can You Do), and Things You Probably Haven't Read. Also the list is more than half female, so!

One: Joann Sfar, The Rabbi's Cat, trans. Alexis Siegel & Anjali Singh. Algeria. This is a French graphic novel capturing one man's struggle to answer the age-old question, Is my talking cat Jewish? It’s set in the 1920s, primarily in Algiers though there are sections set in Paris. In the sequel, The Rabbi’s Cat 2, the Rabbi and his cat travel by land to Ethiopia. (They briefly meet Tin-Tin while they're passing through the Congo, and they don't think much of him. Get wrecked, Hergé.) A masterpiece of the form, and quite good fun to boot.

Two: The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yõko Ogawa, trans. Stephen Snyder. Japan. Very short indeed, and well-worth reading if you’re interested in issues of memory and/or people who feel too many things about math and/or Japanese baseball teams. It’s rather light, but I enjoyed it immensely—sort of gentle and domestic, a lovely study of cross-generational friendship.

Three: The Core of the Sun, Johanna Sinisalo, trans. Lola Rogers. Finland. Guys. If you have to read just one book off this list, you have to make it be this. Published in Finland in 2013, it only came out in Anglophone markets this year. It’s science fiction or (more precisely) a genre they’re calling the Finnish Weird, which seems to be analogous to what Anglophone SF writers call the New Weird. It’s set in Finland 2017, in a misogynistic dystopia that’s a bit like The Handmaid’s Tale if Maggie Atwood were weirder and smarter. (Is it misogynistic of me to put down Margaret Atwood with a diminutive of her name? I respect you, Ms. Atwood, except for The Penelopiad!) The protagonist, V, fairly leaps off the page; she’s a depressive synesthete with a scientific mind and a capsaicin addiction—not a word of exaggeration, there, and I sometimes (often) think that one of the major signifiers of feminist fiction ought to be us allowing ourselves to write unrepentantly strange women. I’m sick of everywomen; I want to see us—female writers—let our girls be weird. V is crazy and hungry and brilliant and scared and strange; she’s got enormous appetites and a mind like a scalpel, and I love her to death. This book is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Four: The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, Nancy Farmer. Zimbabwe. Looking through my list of books for this year, I thought about including Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, which is set in a future Mexico. I was on the point of adding it when I remembered this one, which I think is much better. It's an old favorite of mine, a delightful children's novel set in Zimbabwe in 2194.

Five: Feeling Sorry for Celia, Jaclyn Moriarty. Australia. Is it just me or is Australian YA weirdly reliable? And "reliable" really is the word: I wouldn't say it's all terrific, but I don't think I've ever read a really bad Australian YA novel. And this one is genuinely terrific, top-quality feel-good fun. The sequels, The Year of Secret Assignments, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, and The Ghosts of Ashbury High, only get better. (Although if you're an overachieving perfectionist with self-worth issues [hi] Bindy Mackenzie can seem decidedly less feel-good. I love it, but I have trouble re-reading it sometimes because there are lines that hit altogether too close to home.)

Six: How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Sarah Glidden. Israel. It's the only non-fiction on my list, Glidden's graphic memoir of her Birthright trip. Really interesting and like The Rabbi's Cat it should be fairly accessible to people who don't read many comics.

Seven: Calvin, Martine Leavitt. Canada. More YA; this one's a short novel about a schizophrenic teen obsessed with Bill Watterson. I stayed up way too late to find out how it ended, and it was entirely worth it.

Eight: The Melancholy of Mechagirl, Catherynne M. Valente. Japan. A collection of Valente's Japan-themed short stories and poetry, all SF and fantasy. Almost all of them are set in Japan—one or two are US set but only one or two. I liked some of them better than others, and certain pieces here are more than a little confusing, but I've always enjoyed Valente as a stylist and overall this book was a delight. One of these stories was also featured in an anthology called The Future Is Japanese from the same press—the anthology's had mixed reviews, but I'm probably going to pick it up from StoryBundle. Also: writing this I realize that The Future Is Japanese features quite a few non-Japanese authors, and I'd love to read some SF/F by actual Japanese people. Please advise—there are some Japanese authors in the bundle I linked, but I'd love to hear other recommendations!

Nine: Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder, trans. Paulette Moller. Norway. A novel about a fourteen-year-old girl taking a life-changing correspondence course about the history of philosophy. It’s a cross between a philosophy textbook, Alice in Wonderland, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s a bit of a doorstopper, so I don’t reread it often, but it’s a mind-bender and well-worth your time.

Ten: Boxers & Saints, Gene Luen Yang. China. A weird and excellent two-volume graphic novel about the Boxer Rebellion, by this year's LOC Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I've not read a single book by Yang that wasn't excellent—I've got a particular fondness for The Shadow Hero—but as far as I recall the others are all American-set.

Roundup.

a softer elsinore.

Music: The Rough Guide to English Folk.
Tea: Earl Grey, milk & honey. 
Word count: 7350 (!).

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A Softer World strips edited to be about Hamlet & co. These are in no particular order. As ever, click to enlarge. Previously.

(content warning: depression & suicidal imagery. It's Hamlet.)

924 // David Tennant as Hamlet.

560 // Ladi Emeruwa as Hamlet v. Tom Lawrence as Laertes.

778 // David Tennant as Hamlet.

527 // John Dougall as Claudius.

242 // Horatio & Hamlet (cannot find actors' names; information welcome).

476 // Maxine Peake as Hamlet.

27 // Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet & Nicholas Farrell as Horatio.

976 // Ladi Emeruwa as Hamlet.

1170 // David Tennant as Hamlet.

15 // Beruce Khan as Laertes & Jennifer Leong as Ophelia.

1024 // Ladi Emeruwa as Hamlet & John Dougall as Claudius.

1224 // Maxine Peake as Hamlet.

1106 // Maxine Peake as Hamlet.

763 // Maxine Peake as Hamlet.

writing update.

Music: Songs for As You Like It, the RSC & Laura Marling.

Tea (pictured): Hot Cinnamon Sunset, with milk and honey.

Word count: 3030.

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Recently I've been writing in the living room, at my father's desk, working on the theory that more work gets done when I'm not in the same room as my bed. And, glory be, I've been making real progress. No, I'm not going to talk (much) here about the project, not at this stage anyway. I'm of the mind that it's possible to jinx a story by writing about it instead of using your energy to just write it. But I will say that it's a short story, it's about Greek mythology, and it's coming along better than anything I've written in ages.

In lieu of prose to share, here's a few literary limericks.

(I know. I spoil you.)

There was a cartoonist called Ware
Who set to all houseguests a dare:
"When you've finished my Corrigan
You'll have the floor again!
Till then it is I who'll declare."

A fellow called Mr. McCloud
Said, "Please dispel this great crowd.
When they've all gone away
I'll draw comics all day,
But with them here I'm terribly cowed."

There once was a Dansker called Søren
Whose reflections were frightfully borin'.
Though I'm reading his work
I still think he's a jerk—
It's just that the rain outside's pourin'.

A lively young person of Porlock,
Suspected of being a warlock,
Replied, “Nonsense, sir!
Such allure I abjure;
I can’t even open this door lock.”

There was a stout carl, one Geoff,
Who wrote poetry up till his death.
But then in his bed
A thought came to his head
And he wrote a prose retraction wherein he sought the mercy of God and repudiated all his vain and worldly verses, repenting of his sinful writing and begging Mary and the saints for grace.

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Note 1: "Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw,^[6] describing the clean limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity". From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function." The Wikipedia page on limericks is a veritable garden of delights, though as far as I'm concerned the real point of limericks is showing off your rhyming chops. (And your rhythmic chops, to a lesser extent.)

Note 2: I am in fact exceedingly fond of Kierkegaard.

Note 3: Wendy Cope is the master of the limerick. Please enjoy also the OEDILF (Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form).

a softer tardis.

A word of explanation, though not of apology, for today's bit of folly. While it existed—it ended last year—A Softer World was the best comic on the web. It was a strange little poem-comic—always artistic, often funny, and sometimes deeply depressing. It consisted of photos, taken by Emily Horne, with text by Joey Comeau over them. Among fans of the comic, it's quite common to create remixes. Images from existing strips are removed and then replaced with images from (usually) a TV show to whose characters the text is applicable. I did some Doctor Who ones a while back, and I'm posting them today by way of fulfilling my promise to write here about Who. (I'm also drafting a post on robots and humanism, so. Watch this space!)

Click to embiggen. If you enjoy, do let me know; I have ideas for more.

621 // The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

568 // The Curse of Fenric

364 // the seventh Doctor

680 // The TV Movie

940 // The Night of the Doctor

635 // The Eleventh Hour

721 // The Beast Below

901 // Vincent and the Doctor

869 // the eleventh Doctor