O England( Read more... )
Hedge-bound as Larkin
Omnivorous as Shakespeare.
[from 'Outward from Hull']
In truth magic had always had a slightly un-English character, being unpredictable, heedless of tradition and profligate with its gifts to high and low. [p. 22]
I'd started this novel several times and hadn't engaged: it must have been a case of 'right book, wrong time' because when I settled down with it, I was delighted. Yes, the premise (Regency England, with magicians) is reminiscent of other works, most notably Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but the execution is very different. Cho's protagonists -- Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave who has become Sorcerer Royal, and Prunella Gentleman, a young woman whose English father and Indian mother are both dead, leaving her to assist at a school for 'gentlewitches' -- have to maintain good manners in the face of constant microaggressions.( Read more... )
I am only now ... beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care. [p. 148]
Lynesse Fourth Daughter, accompanied by her laconic companion Esha Free Mark, is on a quest: a demon is threatening the land, and she seeks the help of the fabled sorcerer, Nyrgoth Elder, who aided her family centuries ago against the evil Ulmoth. The sorcerer, when they find him in his forbidding tower, is seven feet tall, horned, and wears 'slate robes that glittered with golden sigils'.
Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps, is woken from his long, artificial sleep by the outpost's caretaker routines.( Read more... )
‘You’re a very disputatious woman,’ he said, as if that were a slur. [loc. 2189]
This is, chronologically, the first in the loose trilogy that continues with Crooked Heart and V for Victory, both of which I read in 2021 during pandemic lockdown. Old Baggage is at once more and less cheerful: it's set before WW2, and focusses on women's rights, especially the multiple campaigns for female enfranchisement.
The setting is Hampstead in 1928, and the protagonist is Mattie Simpkin, a single woman in her late fifties who is somewhat adrift, nostalgic for the glory days of the suffragettes. ( no spoilers )
"She time travels constantly. She does it because she can’t. Every so often, the insanity spills over into my life, and I find myself doing something I can’t be doing either.” [p. 121]
Freddy Duchamp is 14, Canadian, and lives with her little sister Mel ('treacherous genius') and her detested step-brother Roland ('shambling mess'). Their parents are ... extremely hands-off, and certainly don't notice or care when some peculiar people move into the house round the corner. ( no spoilers )
She would have liked to be a snowflake in the drifts that lined the road. An individual lost among many. She’d like to not be seen ever again in a whiteout of her own life. If she always felt cold, then she wouldn’t know when the sun wasn’t shining. [loc. 1267]
Lily Armitage is, despite her inclinations, spending Christmas at Endgame House, her late aunt's mansion in the snowbound Yorkshire Dales.( no spoilers )
'Each of you was born with memory of the same ancient event, and the abundance of later myths and legends that had developed from it...Lavondyss for you – for all of us – is what we are able to remember of ancient times ...’ [p. 398]
Having reread Mythago Wood, I found myself craving the Ice Age and the multiple circling-backs of Tallis' story in Lavondyss. ( Read more... )
She was not violent, perhaps because the old man himself could not think of a woman being violent. He imposed a structure on her, disarming her, leaving her quite helpless in the forest. [p. 57]
This is a novel I return to again and again, each time finding something new. This time around I found the toxic masculinity almost overpowering: but this is, after all, a novel about tensions between father and son and between brothers. It's not an accident that the only female characters are either dead (Stephen and Christian's mother) or mythic( Read more... )
We tend to think that people in the past judged everything from a practical perspective: were certain changes going to benefit the occurrence of wild game, or the growth of cereal crops? But in reality, they would also have had an emotional response to any changes that were happening around them. [loc. 638]
Fifteen 'scenes', beginning half a million years ago (Boxgrove, Happisburgh) and concluding with snapshots of life in Roman Britain: they're not so much scenes from prehistoric life -- though there's quite a bit of informed speculation -- as scenes from an archaeologist's life, rich with anecdote and simile.( Read more... )
Some winters are gradual. Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them. [loc. 1480]
Katherine May's book on surviving winters meteorological and spiritual feels especially apposite in this second winter of the pandemic.( Read more... )
I’m not interested in working for someone who thinks I should be able to achieve the impossible because it makes for a better story. [p. 148]
Irene and Kai are back in the London they've made their home -- the London where great detective Vale lives and works, and pursues a master criminal known as the Professor; the London where Lord Silver holds court; the London, and Europe, in which both Kai and Irene have become targets of assassins and kidnappers. ( Read more... )
‘The United Kingdom?’
‘Very strongly tied to Europe, which is why CENSOR has an English name and acronym. It did attempt to leave the European Union last year, but apparently that was prompted by demonic interference. A lot of politicians were subsequently tried for treason and beheaded at the Tower of London.’ [p. 149]
The latest in Cogman's 'Invisible Library' series, set in a multiverse where each world is somewhere on the axis between order (dragons) and chaos (Fae). I always forget how much I enjoy these, and I also forget who's who and what's what ...( Read more... )
The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know? [loc. 5324]
My 'dip-into' book for most of 2021: Kimmerer's essays and stories reward contemplation: I don't think I would have appreciated the book as much if I'd read it cover to cover without breaks.
( Read more... ) 
Blest London was quite a bit different because they’d never had the Great Fire. There were thatched cottages in Mayfair and the parks were all in strange places. [p. 312]
(Re)read immediately after Deep Secret: my memories, as usual with rereads lately, were extremely vague, but I'm not sure I noticed on first reading (nearly 20 years ago) how very different it is to Deep Secret.( Read more... )
...here you can turn five corners and still not make a square. [p. 117]
Reread for Lockdown Book Club. I first read this fairly soon after it came out, in 1997: I recall enjoying it a lot, but I hadn't felt the urge to reread, and had (as usual) forgotten a lot of the details of plot and character. I'd also let some period-typical attitudes (most blatantly the fat-shaming) and dated technology (faxes! backup discs!) wash over me. The past is a foreign country...
( Read more... )
"We don't know how many men -- er, or women -- are involved."
"They're men ... if even a single woman was involved, they wouldn't have decided that a man who'd been working there one day was a more likely source of information than a woman who'd been there for years." [loc. 4104]
A Marvellous Light is the first in the 'Last Binding' trilogy, set in an alternate Edwardian England. Civil servant Robin Blyth, recently become a baronet after the (unexplained) deaths of his socialite parents, finds himself appointed as Assistant in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs. His first morning in the job is an eye-opener, as he encounters not only a lady civil servant of Indian origin -- the marvellous Adelaide Morrissey -- but the prickly Edwin Courcey, his liaison to the Magical Assembly. ( Read more... )
“I suppose now you realize we are not like other people and this house is not like other houses." [loc. 2971]
The setting is Mexico in the 1950s, opening in Mexico City but focussed on an isolated mansion near a decaying mining town. ( Read more... )
...anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your mother. [loc. 2545]
Eighteen short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, all with some element of the fantastic, some quite slight, many foregrounding young black women, several featuring queer and poly relationships.( Read more... )
“I can’t find her in a lab,” I explain. “That’s not the way the Dark Pattern works. Sometimes you can see it. Other times you just have to be it.”
“The Dark Pattern? Do you even listen to yourself?” [loc. 3922]
Dr Theo Cray is on the trail of a serial killer who works in hospitals; he's also plagued by the fear that he's running out of time. He's certainly slipping up more than before, making mistakes because he's so convinced by his own theories.( Read more... )
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