Tangled Mind

I'd planned this. (I plan everything, so you can bet I'd worked on how to do this.) (Not, mind you, that I'd entirely decided just how much to tell her.) (And about whom.) [loc. 602]

I was an avid reader of Laurie R King's Mary Russell books (in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes marries a young woman of considerable talents) -- my enthusiasm waned around Pirate King, and though I've read and enjoyed several novels in the series since then, there are definitely others I've missed. No matter! This, the nineteenth novel in the series, more or less stands alone (though there are clear and rather intriguing references to earlier books) and I found it engaging and fun, though (again) Russell and Holmes are separated for a good part of the novel.

The year is 1926. Mary has just returned from a wedding in France (cue a lot of namedropping: Hemingway, 'Scotty' Fitzgerald, Picasso...) when she's visited by her long-lost Uncle Jake, who she hasn't seen since before her parents died. ( Read more... )

...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]

Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.

‘The ones who have hoards don’t need to work, but the ones who don’t, well …’
Hoards. Like piles of gold or money. Why do dragons need money? They don’t shop for groceries or pay bills. It hits me that, in all my years learning dragon tongues, I’ve never questioned how dragons fit into our human society. [p. 180]

London, 1923, where there's a Peace Agreement between the British government and the Dragon Queen; where some dragons fought in the Great War alongside humans, but others massacred the entire human population of Bulgaria; where Vivien Featherswallow, seventeen years old and the daughter of respectable Second Class parents, will stop at nothing to ensure that she can continue her studies in dragon linguistics, and prevent her little sister from ever being demoted to Third Class. ( Read more... )

Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like ... this road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so old. [p. 153]

Hy Brasil is a group of volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic: a former British colony, a former NATO base, a former pirate kingdom. It's hard to find due to magnetic and meteorological anomalies, and for centuries its actual position was a matter of debate.( Read more... )

I’m watching out for him, and no matter where he goes, I’ll be there to defend him. Even if it’s wrapped in layers upon layers of deception. Even if it can never last. [loc. 2515]

Ettian, as a child, survived the brutal invasion of his world (and the massacre of his family) by the Umber Empire. Seven years later, he's the star pilot at Rana's Military Academy -- until the day when his classmates attempt to assassinate Ettian's BFF, Gal, because Gal is ( Read more... )

"…being decent about…you know.” He gestured vaguely. Portnoy nodded, interpreting his hand wave as he meant it…being a queer, shacking up with a criminal, having poor judgment in my personal life generally. [loc. 1475]

Another novel set -- coincidentally -- in the early 1970s, mostly in rural England. Laurie Henshaw has been working on his uncle's farm since his teens. At thirty-two, he has a stroke, and is struggling to accept that some things are now impossible for him. Meanwhile, in the City, Phil McManus is on extended leave after his boyfriend set him up to take the fall for an insider trading deal. He retreats to a country cottage to wallow.( Read more... )

Demons were attracted to complexity and personhood. Laypeople assumed that this meant every magicians was on the brink of getting possessed all the tie, but really demons entering the mundane plane moved into complex and person-shaped spaces, like hermit crabs moving into shells. If you were unlucky enough to meet a magician with a demon looking out from behind their eyes, you could usually assume they'd invited it in. [loc. 225]

There are some books I read, and think about, and then review. There are others that I read, and think about, and then succumb to a reread before I review. The Incandescent is in the latter category, and I enjoyed it differently but just as much the second time through.

This is a dark academia novel, in the sense that it's set at a school for magic: but our protagonist is not a student, but Dr Walden (Saffy to her friends), 38 years old, Director of Magic at Chetwood School.( Read more... )

I find it harder and harder to put my finger on what exactly incenses me: whether it’s the knowledge that no matter how long I live in this place, some people will never believe I’m from here, or the fact that I am not and never will be from there. [loc. 236]

This caught my eye because I'm familiar with the big Canarian supermarket chain HiperDino -- who are, I'm sure, nothing like Supersaurio, the big Canarian supermarket chain for which Meryem, the narrator of Checking Out, works. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she's started as an intern: as the novel opens, she's working in Compliance and wondering if her boss Yolanda actually wants to send her home in tears three days a week. ( Read more... )

Mrs Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbours, joined in their complaints about the shortages and agreed that the war must soon be over... Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. [loc. 4269]

Another of MacIntyre's entertaining biographies of 20th century spies, this is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew and communist who spied for the Soviet Union before and during WW2, and was instrumental in the USSR's acquisition of 'the science of atomic weaponry'.( Read more... )