Tangled Mind

I know plenty of people like us—some born in the underworld, some who ended up there by exile or by choice—but it never gets old to meet another. Women with cocks, men with cunts, people who are both or neither, people who have chosen to change themselves with clothes and haircuts and new names, and those like me who use magic. [p. 80]

C Forestier has appeared in the previous two novels in the French Letters series (The Scandalous Letters of V and J and The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q) but only peripherally: he's a resident of the same boarding house as Victor and Julie(n), and his work as a police officer seems to involve him in some of the same occult mysteries as the protagonists of those earlier books. ( Read more... )

We are not, in fact, victims of a great pre-written fate. Time -- all of it, all of human history -- is a great big messy conflagration of connectivity, of people making choices and choosing outcomes and all of it just tangling together until what could be coalesces into what is -- but still, people choose. [loc. 4553]

Time travellers exist. Often (always?) there is something indefinite about their birth: Cal, our protagonist, was born, a medieval peasant, 'in a moment of temporal uncertainty', to a mother 'pregnant/not pregnant from an affair with a man who had/had not passed by'. 

Cal is indeterminate in other ways, too: ( Read more... )

Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you'll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you'll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.

The Old Drift tells the entwined, tangled stories of three generations of Zambians. It begins in 1902, with 'Percy M. Clark, a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all.' (When I first acquired this novel in Kindle form, I never got past that section.) The rest of the novel, though, focuses on more intriguing individuals, spanning the years from 1939 to 2023 -- which was, when this was published, The Future.

... what etiquette exists for an androgynous novelist paying a visit to the escaped convict she’s hosting at her lover’s request... [p. 205]

Second in the series that began with The Scandalous Letters of V and J (which I really should have reread before starting this): it's the story of Delphine, in love with scandalous androgynous novelist Camille Dupin ... and also with the father of her child, Ari, who vanished mysteriously before she could break the news of her pregnancy.( Read more... )

...while I’ve been in my own particular hell since Leo’s murder, you don’t seem to have lived the lives you longed for when we were young and full of promise. [loc. 1388]

Tyler Green has spent nearly 29 years in prison, found guilty of the murder of his friend Leo Bauer at a post-exam house party at university. He claims he is innocent, and asks a friend to organise a reunion of the guests at that house party. ( Read more... )

"...since you met him you keep getting attacked by demons.”
“Twice!” Sam said. “It’s happened twice.”
“It’s been two weeks!”
Harry was looking back and forth between them nervously. “Ellen, every relationship has trade-offs.”[p. 193]

Audiobook of a novel I enjoyed very much last winter (original review from January). Dionysus in Wisconsin is set in Madison in 1969, in a reality where magic works and ghosts walk.( Read more... )

...maybe finally he’d be a different person, someone he liked more than the person he was now. Someone who could let sweetness and softness happen to him without his throat closing up in fear and suspicion. Someone who could be loved. [p. 163]

Tam Brocken runs a tea shop in a village. He's lonely, if you discount -- as he does -- the more-or-less weekly occasions on which he has sex with Lord Lyford. He always leaves hastily, and it's just sex, so that's all right -- even if Lyford (who he's hated since childhood) keeps flirting with him. And then Tam and Lyford are assigned to run the matchmaking tent at the village festival. Together.

Every generation before had a semblance of chance, but we have the end of the world. This end of the world. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, and I wish we could think of a future without a thousand ways of how we must change to endure it.

Nhung, known as Noon, lives on a boat with her mother, making a living by selling the sometimes-mutated fish they catch. Hurricane Arlene took Noon's father and brother, and flooded Mercy, Louisiana: it also left behind a toxic bloom of weird red algae, and there have been sightings of strange sea creatures and reports of missing persons. ( Read more... )

Literacy is tyrannical, for it encourages us to undervalue our pasts –- the knowledge amassed by those countless ancestors of ours who could neither read nor write.

Subtitled 'Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World', Nunn's thesis is that preliterate societies encoded and passed down observations of natural disasters in folk tales.( Read more... )

Avelyn thought of saints in paintings again. There were often other paintings hidden underneath that final layer of colour. You could see them under the right kind of light, those deeper iterations where the saint was not smiling, or where instead of cotton, they wore armour. The more time he spent with Jericho, the more he saw flashes of armour. [loc. 4493]

Avelyn Brocken is a Jesuit priest, 'sent from the Vatican to investigate something that was either miraculous or requiring an exorcist'. He is the only person in the Vatican who speaks Hreod -- the language of Hreodwater, a remote and inaccessible place somewhere in East Anglia that does not appear on any maps, contains the most valuable salt mine in Europe, is a place of pilgrimage, and seems to have been the site of a miracle. ( Read more... )