Tangled Mind

2024/184: Antiemetic for Homesickness — Romalyn Ante

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 07:56:44 GMT

2024/184: Antiemetic for Homesickness — Romalyn Ante

and while your house grew with gifts -
a rooster crowing in a bayong,
a sack of corn, whiffs of ripe jackfruit,

     a patient woke
     and accused me of stealing
     her job;

[from 'The Shaman, the Servant: for my grandfather']

I first became aware of Ante's poetry via the Guardian's Poem of the Week column, and liked her interweaving of Filipino and British culture. Ante, who's from the Phillipines, has worked as an NHS nurse.( Read more... )

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2024/183: How the Light Gets In — Louise Penny

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 07:34:43 GMT

2024/183: How the Light Gets In — Louise Penny

"...He’s spending most of his time in some small village in the Townships, and when he’s not there he’s distracted by Beauvoir. It’s too late. He can’t stop it now. Besides, he doesn’t even know what’s happening.” [p. 190]

Culmination of the arc that began in Bury Your Dead, or perhaps earlier: perhaps all the way back to Still Life, the first of the Gamache novels. Luckily, it is not the last of the series: but I feel I can relax and take a breath now.

( Read more... )

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2024/182: The Balancing Stone — Victoria Goddard

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 08:56:28 GMT

2024/182: The Balancing Stone — Victoria Goddard

"I've heard that if you whisper a question into their ears, you'll be sure to find out the answer. Though it probably won't be an answer you want to hear."

"Is that what the stories say?"

"That's what all stories teach us. [p. 49]

A brief, calm and uplifting interlude on the edges of the Greenwing and Dart series. Hope Stornoway, who's in love with Jemis Greenwing's friend Hal (who happens to be the Duke of Fillering Pool) is staying in Ragnor Bella over the Winterturn festival. In order to claim her inheritance, she needs to discover her true name ...

Luckily Ragnor Bella's reputation for dullness is wholly undeserved, and when Hope goes for a walk she encounters interesting rocks, a two-tailed fox and a bookseller who offers oddly specific philosophical arguments in answer to Hope's dilemma. Short and sweet: I'm really looking forward to the next full-length novel in this series!

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2024/181: The Beautiful Mystery — Louise Penny

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 08:17:53 GMT

2024/181: The Beautiful Mystery — Louise Penny

I’ll find him eventually, you know. It’s what I do. But it’s a terrible, terrible process. You have no idea what’s about to be unleashed. And once it starts, it won’t stop until the murderer is found. [loc. 1604]

I stocked up on Louise Penny books when there was a deal on them a few months ago, and the days between Christmas and New Year seemed a good time to read a couple more. The Beautiful Mystery takes Gamache and Beauvoir away from Three Pines, to the isolated monastery of Saint Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, where a monk has been murdered. ( Read more... )

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2024/180: A Christmas Ghost Story — Kim Newman

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 08:00:32 GMT

2024/180: A Christmas Ghost Story — Kim Newman

‘When I was little, I wanted people to listen... Some did, but they were no help. I told a story. Not one I made up, though everyone said I did. I convinced myself I had made it up. A thing couldn’t have happened, so I decided it hadn’t. I tried to figure out how it got into my head, then gave up. I thought it was done with.' [loc. 790]

Seasonal novella: Angie and her teenage son Russell ('it's Rust, Mum') live in an isolated cottage. Angie is a best-selling author of self-published thrillers: Rust has a podcast about strange phenomena. They share a fascinating array of Christmas customs: Christmas cruels (like carols but nastier: 'Away in a Mangler', 'The Worst Noel'); putting down rotten biscuits for Santa's reindeer so he won't visit Angie's childhood frenemy; mince pies are too-much-mince pies...

( Read more... )

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2024/179: Long Live Evil — Sarah Rees Brennan

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 08:55:34 GMT

2024/179: Long Live Evil — Sarah Rees Brennan

“It’s hard for me to think of the characters around us as real people. Do you understand? Are you like me?”
[his] grey eyes went eagerly bright, silver as a magic blade. “I think so.”
Rae grasped his arm. “You walked into the book too?”
“Sorry...What book?” His face was blank as a page with no story on it yet.
Rae sagged. “Ah. You’re a sociopath. My bad.” [p. 170]

Rae and her younger sister Alice are massive fans of the 'Time of Iron' fantasy book series, described as 'grim and also dark. The series title might as well be Holy Shit, Basically Everybody Dies'. Rae, who's twenty, is dying of cancer: Alice sits and reads to her from the books, and Rae doesn't want to admit how much of the detail she's forgotten. Which becomes considerably more of a problem when( ... )

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2024/178: Zelensky: A Biography of Ukraine's War Leader — Stephen Derix

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:15:45 GMT

2024/178: Zelensky: A Biography of Ukraine's War Leader — Stephen Derix

While other Ukrainian stars played an express part in the protests, Zelensky remained non-partisan...‘I am keen to demonstrate, but my support is for the people, not for promises by the Government or the opposition.’ [loc. 726]

I suspect there are better biographies of Zelensky, but this fleshed out the 'comedian turned politician' story that's been doing the rounds since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.( Read more... )

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2024/177: The Book of Phoenix — Nnedi Okorafor

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:52:58 GMT

2024/177: The Book of Phoenix — Nnedi Okorafor

Each tower had … specializations. In Tower 7, it was advanced and aggressive genetic manipulation and cloning. In Tower 7, people and creatures were invented, altered, or both. Some were deformed, some were mentally ill, some were just plain dangerous, and none were flawless. Yes, some of us were dangerous. I was dangerous. [loc. 158]

After a lightning storm in the desert and a glimpse of a winged figure, an old man named Sunuteel explores a cave and discovers an ancient text. The ambience is Biblical, but the setting is centuries from now, and that text tells of genetic manipulation, science indistinguishable from magic, a winged man who cannot die and the eponymous Phoenix, who dies to rise again.

( Read more... )

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2024/176: Féonie and the Islander Regalia — Victoria Goddard

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:46:44 GMT

2024/176: Féonie and the Islander Regalia — Victoria Goddard

Féonie was from a very, very poor part of inland Mgunai. Her family had nothing: she was the only one who had ever been more than ten miles from home, bar two cousins who had gone to the city and never been heard from again. [10%]

Short story about Féonie, a minor character in The Hands of the Emperor and its sequel At the Feet of the Sun, and very much a major character in her own life.( Read more... )

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2024/175: Wrapped Up in You — Talia Hibbert

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 10:55:58 GMT

2024/175: Wrapped Up in You — Talia Hibbert

Will was an expert in the theory of wooing, having attended the premieres of many period dramas. [18%]

Soft and fluffy holiday romance novella. Will is a film star who's decided to stop being Captain X (aliens; spandex) and fly home to Britain to woo childhood friend and longtime secret crush Abbie, who's spending Christmas with her grandmother and a horde of felines in snowy Scotland.( Read more... )

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2024/174: The Winter Ghosts — Kate Mosse

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:18:11 GMT

2024/174: The Winter Ghosts — Kate Mosse

...it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not... [loc. 1833]

The bulk of this short novel is Freddie Watson's first-person account of an evening in the small village of Nulle, in south-west France: it's framed by events in 1933 (five years after that evening at the fête de Saint-Étienne), when Freddie is recounting his story to an antiquarian bookseller, explaining the provenance of a document written in medieval Occitan.

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2024/173: Deck the Halls in Secret Agents — Aster Glenn Gray

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:28:54 GMT

2024/173: Deck the Halls in Secret Agents — Aster Glenn Gray

Christmas crashed over George again like an ocean wave: the brass quartet, the bright swags of holly along the mantelpiece, the smell of wood smoke from the fireplace. Somewhere behind him, a glass broke, and people shrieked with laughter. [loc. 111]

M/M romantic novella. It's Christmas 1991, and American spy George Douglass is somewhere in the wilds of France, searching for an abandoned chateau whose attics supposedly harbour compromising letters which can be used against a Soviet general. ( Read more... )

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2024/172: The Book of Chameleons — Jose Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:59:25 GMT

2024/172: The Book of Chameleons — Jose Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn)

The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. [p. 122]

Félix Ventura, an albino, lives in a crumbling mansion in Luanda with his best friend, Eulálio, who happens to be a gecko.( Read more... )

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2024/171: The Truths We Hold — Kamala Harris

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 08:08:58 GMT

2024/171: The Truths We Hold — Kamala Harris

... something ugly and alarming was infecting the presidential election. The Republican primary was turning into a race to the bottom( Read more... )

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2024/170: Minor Detail — Adiana Sibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 07:29:13 GMT

2024/170: Minor Detail — Adiana Sibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

... there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. [loc. 748]

A short, powerful, harrowing novel, in two halves, that examines helplessness, brutality and occupation.( Read more... )

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2024/169: Hadriana in All My Dreams — René Depestre (translated by Kaiama L Glover)

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 08:38:06 GMT

2024/169: Hadriana in All My Dreams — René Depestre (translated by Kaiama L Glover)

One thing he said was very true: even in my coffin I was far closer to a carnival drum than to the tolling of church bells. [loc. 1580]

Set mostly in 1938, in the Haitian seaside town of Jacmel, this is the story of Hadriana Siloé, a white French girl who dies at the altar on her wedding day -- but has actually been zombified.( Read more... )

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2024/168: The Gathering Night — Margaret Elphinstone

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 08:03:16 GMT

2024/168: The Gathering Night — Margaret Elphinstone

If young men didn’t die there’d be too many... Young men must die, just as young Animals must die when we hunt them. If there weren’t so much death we’d all perish, and not be able to come back. I’d always known that young men must die. But not my son! [loc. 258]

Set in Mesolithic Scotland, around the time of the Storegga slide, this is the story of Nekané and her family, who are of the Auk People: her daughters Haizea and Alaia, Alaia's partner Amets, Nekané's dead son Bakar, and Kemen of the Lynx People who joins them after his home and clan are swept away by a monstrous wave.( Read more... )

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2024/167: Confounding Oaths — Alexis Hall

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:31:34 GMT

2024/167: Confounding Oaths — Alexis Hall

Gentlemen with fairer fortunes, fairer skin, and more interest in the fairer sex might have been able to get away with cocking a snook at a world that at once despised and admired them. [loc. 1387]

Standalone sequel to Mortal Follies, which I enjoyed very much: again, the narrator is Puck, unaccountably exiled from the court of Oberon and forced to live in modern London and pay rent. ( Read more... )

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2024/166: Madhouse at the End of the Earth - Julian Sancton

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:03:33 GMT

2024/166: Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night — Julian Sancton

In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes. And the best stories weren’t the ones in which everything went well. [loc. 2192]

An enimently readable account (I stayed up past midnight to finish it!) of a Belgian expedition towards Antarctica from 1897 to 1899. ( Read more... )

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2024/165: Rebel Blade — Davinia Evans

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:16:40 GMT

2024/165: Rebel Blade — Davinia Evans

In this city, money might be power, but true legitimacy comes from public spectacle.[loc. 2521]

Finale of the Burnished City trilogy, following Notorious Sorcerer and Shadow Baron. After the changes that swept through Bezim at the climax of Shadow Baron, Siyon Velo -- the Sorcerer, the Alchemist, the Power of the Mundane -- is lying low, blamed for the turmoil and upheaval ... and for the monsters converging on the City, drawn by the power he's unleashed. ( Read more... )

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2024/164: Orbital — Samantha Harvey

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 13:32:33 GMT

2024/164: Orbital — Samantha Harvey

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast. [loc. 1672]

A short, intense, literary novel set during 24 hours -- sixteen orbits -- on the International Space Station. From one angle, nothing happens: from another, everything happens. ( Read more... )

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2024/163: Ghost Bird — Lisa Fuller

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:28:12 GMT

2024/163: Ghost Bird — Lisa Fuller

“Remember, daughter, the world is a lot bigger than anyone knows. There are things that science may never explain. Maybe some things that shouldn’t be explained.”

Recommended by an Australian friend, whose review hooked my interest. It's unavailable as an ebook in the UK, so I went for the Audible version, splendidly read by Tuuli Narkle (who, like the protagonists and the author, is of First Nations descent). The one drawback of audio books is that I don't tag passages and make notes for reviews...

Laney and Stacey are twins, growing up with their mother -- their father's dead -- in a small town in Queensland. Stacey's a good girl, studying hard so she can leave behind their small town, with all its casual racism and long-standing feuds. Laney prefers to skive off school, hang out with her boyfriend Troy, and freewheel through life. But one night Stacey doesn't come home, and Laney's been dreaming of her twin being snatched by someone ... or something.

( Read more... )

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2024/162: Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:43:01 GMT

2024/162: Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[the dinner party guests] all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty. [p. 341]

The novel opens with Ifemelu getting her braids redone: she's going home to Nigeria after fifteen years in America, where she's gone from being broke and depressed to becoming a Fellow at Princeton. She's the author of a popular blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black' (excerpts from which are peppered through the novel) and a perceptive observer of racism and Black culture in America. But now she's going home, to a country where race isn't an issue.

( Read more... )

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2024/161: Ocean's Echo — Everina Maxwell

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 08:49:08 GMT

2024/161: Ocean's Echo — Everina Maxwell

Surit, not for the first time, felt a deep unease about the observational skills of his senior officers. A lit fuse didn’t stop being a lit fuse just because it had decided to burn politely. [loc. 1796]

Tennal has taken great pains to escape his aunt, a powerful legislator, and to escape the noise of other people's (and his own) surface thoughts: as a reader, his mind is 'a little too open to the universe'. He spends his time flitting from dive bar to socialite party, hiring his mind-reading skills to criminals and traitors -- until, calling his little sister to congratulate her on her forthcoming entry to legal academy, he accidentally re-enables the locator function on his wristband.( Read more... )

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2024/160: Winter's Orbit — Everina Maxwell

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 08:53:14 GMT

2024/160: Winter's Orbit — Everina Maxwell

“The palace revoked your clearance and you don’t even know why. On top of that, your partner dies—might have been killed—and Internal Security can’t even get themselves together long enough to give you the right data about it. And you can’t complain to your family because the palace says that you need clearance to do even that ..." [p. 143]

Prince Kiem, whose grandmother is the Emperor of the seven-planet Iskat Empire, is ordered by her to marry his dead cousin's partner, Count Jainan, who happens to be the diplomatic representative for the planet Thea. Kiem, who's something of a scandal magnet, didn't know his cousin Taam well, and he's never met the presumably-grieving Jainan. But, as the Emperor says, someone has to marry Jainan ( Read more... )

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