Rasdhar continues to be a reader of this world (III)

New thread, new comic, again by the wonderful Tom Gauld. This is my thread for the 3rd quarter of the year. Happy reading!

Thread for the 1st quarter: https://www.librarything.com/topic/357082
Thread for the 2nd quarter: https://www.librarything.com/topic/359708

Currently reading:



Judith Flanders - Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain (Pan Macmillan, 2024)
Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe (Riverhead, 2024)
Andrei Kurkov - The Silver Bone (Harper Via, 2024)

Books in Quarter 1

January:
1. Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of the Owl
2. Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground Review here .
3. Magdalena Zyzak - The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel Review here.
4. R. F. Kuang - Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Review here.
5. Christopher Moore - Noir and Razzmatazz Review here.
6. Emily Henry - Beach Read
7. Sebastian Sim - Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao! Review here.
8. Richard Osman - The Bullet that Missed Review here.
9. Kate Collins - A Good House for Children Review here.
10. Ronojoy Sen - House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy (reviewed on the book page).
11. Paul D. Halliday - Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire
12. Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die Review here.
12. Eileen Chang - The Rouge of the North Review here.

February:

13. VV Ganeshananthan - Brotherless Night Review here
14. Black Coffee in a Coconut Shell (edited by Perumal Murugan) Review here
15. Chen Zijin - Bad Kids Review here
16. Anthony Berkeley - The Wintringham Mystery Review here
17. Cristina Campo - The Unforgivable, and other Writings Review here
18. Maryla Szymiczkowa - Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing Review here
19. The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries (edited by Michael Sims) Review here
20. Supriya Gandhi- The Emperor Who Never Was Review here
21. José Maria de Eça de Queirós - The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers Review here
22. Isaac Asimov - Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection Review here
23. The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 - by various poets Review here
24. Tiitu Takalo - Me, Mikko and Anikki (Minä, Mikko ja Annikki) Review here

March

25. W. H. Auden - A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (Faber and Faber, 1971) - reviewed here
26. Alex Michaelides - The Fury reviewed here
27 and 28. Keigo Higashino - Malice and Newcomer reviewed here
29. Sebastian Sim - The Riot Act reviewed here
30. Robert Thorogood - The Marlow Murder Club here
31. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Velvet Was the Night reviewed reviewed here
32. Iris Yamashita - City under one Roof reviewed here
33. Elisa Shua Dusapin - Vladivostok Circus reviewed here
34. Yulia Yakovleva - Death of the Red Rider reviewed here
35. Laura Lippman - Sunburn

Books in Quarter 2

April:
36. Emily Henry - Book Lovers (Berkley, 2022) reviewed here
37. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya - The New Adventures of Helen (Deep Vellum, 2022) translated from the Russian by Jane Bugaeva reviewed here
38. Tana French - The Hunter (Viking 2024) reviewed here
39. Karrie Fransman - The House that Groaned (Square Peg 2014) reviewed here
40. Terry Pratchett - Making Money (Doubleday 2007) reviewed here
41. Marina Tsvetaeva - Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 (Yale University Press, 2002), translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell reviewed here
42. Mary Roberts Rineheart - Miss Pinkerton (American Mystery Classics, 2019) reviewed here
43. Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express (narrated by Dan Stevens)
44. Balli Kaur Jaswal - Inheritance (Sleepers Publishing, 2013) reviewed here
45. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (Orbit 2013) reviewed here
46. Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Ecco Books, 2024, translated by Polly Barton) reviewed here
47. Graeme Macrae Burnet - Case Study (Saraband 2022) here
48. Percival Everett - The Trees (Graywolf Press, 2021) reviewed here
49. Hilary Mantel - Mantel Pieces (London Review of Books/Fourth Estate, 2020) reviewed here
50. Susan Casey - The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Vintage, 2024) reviewed here
51. Kalpana Mohan - An English made in India

MAY
52. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (John Murray 2019) reviewed here
53. A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh (1934)reviewed here
54. Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe (Epigram Books, 2013)reviewed here
55. Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See - Bianca Bosker (Viking 2024)reviewed here
56. Jeremy Tiang - State of Emergency (Epigram Books, 2017) reviewed here
57. Joanne Harris - Broken Light reviewed here
58. Ambedkar in London (Hurst and Co, 2022) edited by William Gould, Christophe Jaffrelot, and Santosh Dassreviewed here
59. Elena Ferrante - Frantumaglia reviewed here
60. Magda Szabo - The Door reviewed here
61. John Scalzi - The Kaiju Preservation Society reviewed here
62. Shubhangi Swarup - Latitudes of Longing reviewed here

JUNE
63. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate (Del Rey 2023) reviewed here
64. Ana María Matute - The Island (Penguin Classics, 2020, translated from the Spanish by Laura Lonsdale)reviewed here
65. Sharlene Teo - Ponti (Picador, 2018) reviewed here
66. Martha Wells - All Systems Red (2017) reviewed here
67. Donatella di Pietrantonio - A Girl Returned (Europa Editions 2019, translated by Ann Goldstein) reviewed here
68. Mari Ahokoivu - Oksi (Levine Querido, 2021, translated from the Finnish by Silja-Maaria Aronpuro) reviewed here
69. Reine Arcache Melvin - The Betrayed (Europa Editions, 2018) reviewed here
70. John Banville - Snow reviewed here
71. Doreen Cunningham - Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir (Scribner 2022) reviewed here
72. Fabulous Machinery for the Curious: The Garden of Urdu Classical Literature - edited by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (World Literature in Translation) reviewed here

Books in Quarter 3:

JULY
73. Magdalena Zyzak - The Lady Waiting (Riverhead, 2024) reviewed here
74. Lucy Foley - The Hunting Party (Harper Collins, 2019) reviewed here
75. Lucy Foley - The Midnight Feast (William Morrow, 2024) reviewed here
76. Judith Flanders - Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain (Pan Macmillan, 2024) reviewed here
77. Lee Geum-yi - Can't I Go Instead? (translated from the Korean by An Seonjae, Tor Publishing Group, 2023) reviewed here
78. Danielle Arceneaux - Glory Be (Pegasus 2023) reviewed here
79. Elizabeth Macneal - The Burial Plot (Picador 2024) reviewed here
80. Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe (Riverhead, 2024) reviewed here
81. Shari Lapena - Everyone Here is Lying (Books on Tape, narrated by January LaVoy, 2023)
82. Andrey Kurkov - The Silver Bone (Harper Via, 2024, translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk) reviewed here
83. Peter Swanson - A Talent for Murder (Harper Collins, 2024. Audiobook, narrated by several people). reviewed here
84. Sarah Perry - The Essex Serpent (Serpent's Tail, 2016) reviewed here

AUGUST
85. Zhang Yue Ran - Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions, 2022) reviewed here
86. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Steph Cha and Lisa Unger (Mariner Books, 2023) reviewed here
87. Amélie Nothomb - First Blood (translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Editions, 2021, 2023) reviewed here
88. Anjum Hasan - A Day in the Life (Penguin 2018) reviewed here
89. Francesca Manfredi - The Empire of Dirt (translated from the Italian by Ekin Oklap, Norton, 2022) reviewed here
90. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Untamed Shore reviewed here
91. The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1942, re-released by American Mystery Classics in 1998) reviewed here

SEPTEMBER
92. Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (Hachette, 2019) reviewed here
93. Riku Onda - The Aosawa Murders (translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts, Bitter Lemon Press 2020) reviewed here
94. Tara Isabella Burton - Here in Avalon (Simon and Schuster 2024) reviewed here
95. Bae Suah - A Greater Music (Open Letter 2016, translated from the Korean by Deborah K. Smith)
96. The Best American Mystery Stories 2020, edited by C.J. Box (Mariner Books, 2020) reviewed here
97. Kotaro Isaka - The Mantis (Harvill Secker 2023, translated from the Japanese by Sam Malissa) reviewed here

Books in Quarter 4

OCTOBER
98. Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation (Riverhead 2024) reviewed here
99. Anne Michaels - Held (Bloomsbury, 2023) reviewed here

JULY

This is what I have coming up on my reading list (a text list is below):



Sarah Perry - The Essex Serpent
Andrey Kurkov - The Silver Bone
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Untamed Shore
Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe
Jo Walton - Tooth and Claw
Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics
Ovidia Yu - The Mouse Marathon
Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: Life, Death, and the Illusion of Control
The O'Henry Prize Stories 2019 - edited by Laura Furman
Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made
Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors
Anil Pratinav - Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77
Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai - Dust Child
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

73. Magdalena Zyzak - The Lady Waiting (Riverhead 2024)



Earlier this year, I read The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel, a charming, vulgar picaresque fable by Magdalena Zyzak, a Polish filmmaker. It was her debut novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed the wry, dark humour. I was looking forward to her sophomore book, The Lady Waiting, but it doesn't live up to the high standard set by its predecessor. It is a novel about relationships, exploitation, and art theft, and I can see that she's trying for a sort of arch, bleak humour, but doesn't quite succeed. The tone is far too sordid for that, and the end grinds against the rest of the novel like a bone out of joint.

The Lady Waiting is the title of a missing Vermeer, allegedly stolen from a museum, and now making its way around private hands. A substantial reward has been offered for its return. This sets up the premise for our characters. Wioletta, a 21 year old Polish woman, wins the green card lottery but is struggling to thrive in the U.S., her poor English and different upbringing it near impossible to get a job. At an interview, early in the novel, she's asked about her worst qualities, and says she's "manipulating" - the interviewer corrects her, telling her it should be "manipulative"* but does not offer her the job. The interviewer kindly tells her, "We don't admit to such things so much here....that's not really a weakness. As long as you don't talk about it." This is broadly the theme of the novel that follows. Wioletta happens to give a lift to a woman along the highway: flightly, beautiful, capricious Roberta "Bobby" Sleeper, who invites Wioletta to be her assistant/dogsbody. Wioletta rebrands herself as 'Viva', takes on the job, covets her boss' beautiful belongings and his husband, and gets inveigled into a plot to redeem the stolen Vermeer for a small cut of the profits. At some level, she recognises she's being manipulated by Bobby, for whom she becomes "her help, her thief, her lover, her lover's lover." There's a cast of strange hangers-on, including Bobby's various ex-husbands, the wild and angry Polish boy, the smooth and dangerous Russian FSB agent. Yet, Wioletta/Viva was being truthful to that initial interviewer and as you go along, it's not quite clear who is manipulating whom.

While the book itself is fast-paced and moves along rapidly, spanning LA, Italy, Poland, and so on, it's difficult to see this as anything but an inferior take on The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Many of the themes are similar, but Highsmith's execution is subtle, sharp, menacing, while Zyzak leans into lewd, glib, and arch. I prefer the former.

*Edited to correct a typo

>5 rv1988: I quite liked Dust Child, almost as much as The Mountains Sing. Have you read TMS? I'll look forward to your impressions.

As English is actually the third language I learned, I am now questioning whether the title of this thread is correct. "Continues to be"?

>8 rv1988: "Continues to be" is proper and correct English.

>8 rv1988: >9 KeithChaffee: FWIW French words in English is one of my pet peeves (if you want to use French words, speak French! ;) so I preferred your former title. ;)

In class we would not be taught most of the French-origin words (for instance we learned "begin" but not "commence") so I felt cheated when I discovered so many of them were in use: why did we have to learn new words when many of the ones we already knew worked perfectly fine?

>10 chlorine: The reason you need to learn old-English derived words as well as French ones is that often there is a subtle difference in meaning. Commence is more formal than begin or start. There is also a difference in pronunciation of what you call French words when used in English. English-French words, like French-French words are both come from Latin. So we’ll get similar words in French, English, Italian and Latin.

After the Norman invasion, French continued to be used by the conquering/upper classes. So the word pig was used for the animal because the farmers used the English word. Whereas the upper class English ate pork from the French porc. Similarly with cow and beef (boeuf). And sometimes it’s just that over time the Latin words have taken on different pronunciations over time.

What you are calling “French words” in English are French derived. English-speakers don’t think they are using a French word when they say “commence”. If fact, they do not pronounce “commence” the way the French do.

Sometimes words are used where there is no equivalent in the native language. Such as “je ne sais quoi” and weekend.

>8 rv1988: Either still or continues is correct in the context of your topic titles.

“Still” means being constant, not moving or staying in place (physically or in the point of a topic)

“Continue” means to carry on, moving forward or not stopping.

“The some people were still because they were too shocked at the explosion. Others continued to run in every direction.”.

— edited to fix typos

>11 kjuliff: Ha! I was in a French immersion program in school and I didn't even know that the French just called it "le weekend," as I went around calling it "le fin de semaine." Likewise, "le chewing gum" vs. "le gomme a mâcher."

>11 kjuliff: I wasn't entirely serious in my comment about French words. :) You're right that they're French derived.

Thanks all for the comments. I don't entirely trust my 'ear' on the subject of English grammar!

74. and 75. Lucy Foley - The Hunting Party (Harper Collins 2019) and The Midnight Feast (William Morrow, 2024)



I don't think I've read any of Lucy Foley's books before, but she was recommended to me by a member of the (now defunct) mystery novel book club that I was a part of, so I decided to give her a try. I listened to two of her books on my walks home over the last few weeks. They tend to share common themes: rich entitled people committing crimes and getting away with them with poorer exploited friends nursing grudges and taking long delayed revenge years later. Both the The Hunting Party and The Midnight Feast follow this outline. She does tend to write books with multiple points of view, and changing timelines, flipping back and forth between the past and present. Characters will change names over time as well. All of this, plus the plot, should theoretically make this a good mystery, but it isn't handled well at all. As a result, the actual mystery is so clearly telegraphed that it really is not a surprise; there's no twist. The books in themselves pretty forgettable. They worked well for my commute, because I didn't have to give them my full attention.

>7 labfs39: I haven't read anything by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai before. I'll look up The Mountains Sing, thank you!

76. Judith Flanders - Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain (Pan Macmillan, 2024)



I actually began reading this last month, but have slowly worked my way to the end this week, after seeing this review in the Times Literary Supplement. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/modern-history/rites-of-passage-judith-flander...

It's a fabulous book, rich with detail about mourning customs, practices, and beliefs, and ranges over primary sources, literature and poetry, biographical details of the famous and the poor. Although the research is clearly rigorous, she has a great narrative style, which keeps it eminently readable. The book is organised into chapters that trace death from the first signs (the nursing of the ill) to the final (Victorian beliefs about the afterlife and mourning). In between, are chapters on funeral practices (in which you learn that placing cut flowers on graves is actually a comparatively new practice), on mourning clothes (I learned a lot about how to look after black crepe, the mourning material of choice), on the use of churchyards as spaces for mourning (and play, and gardens), and the gradual transformation of funerals in public and private from religious rites to commercialized practices. Despite the grim subject matter, there is a great deal of tenderness for the unloved and disrespected (as demonstrated by her careful attention to paupers' funerals, as well as the disparity in how suicides by the poor were criminalized and treated as blasphemous, as opposed to the rich, whose suicides were romanticised and forgiven). Unexpectedly, there's also humour: Flanders notes that the social practice of funeral customs had become so widely commercialized and complex that even Victorian cartoonists mocked them (she included pictures of said cartoons). She doesn't waste a lot of time on the more well-documented Victorian matters in this regard; for example, her discussion on grave-robbing for supplies to surgeons is limited, and focuses mostly on the question of *the ethics of allowing surgeons to utilise the bodies of the poor for dissection, against the religious norms and scruples that prevented them from doing so to the rich.

There are so many small and minute details that I found fascinating. Flanders notes, for instance, that early records of deaths were maintained chiefly by women known as ‘searchers,’ who rarely received acknowledgment or credit for the vital data that they collected (chapter 4, ‘Before the Funeral’). Her investigation of Victorian literature also shows the differing attitudes to women remarrying, versus men, and the harsh criticism women received for the way they mourned (she has a great bit from Anthony Trollope, who criticises a woman for mourning too much, yet not enough; for wearing too much black but not appropriately black clothing; for not crying enough except when she cries too much; for being too poor when she married her late husband but for being too rich when he dies). I think the great value of this book is not only the careful and thorough research (and the fact that most of it was achieved during Covid lockdowns!) but also the careful and thoughtful scrutiny she keeps on the class and gender aspects that we, as lay readers, might not know of, or appreciate.

*(edited because I left a sentence incomplete)

>18 rv1988: Sounds very interesting!

ETA: just saw she also wrote The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime.

>18 rv1988: That sounds interesting. Not a book I would pick up on my own, but your review may persuade me.

>16 rv1988: I just finished a terrible legal thriller for my mystery book club and I wonder if it might have gone down easier if I'd listened to it with half and ear while doing other things. Something to keep in mind for next time (I like the people in that book club enormously, but the tendency to want to read from a variety of sub-genres does not always serve us well.)

>19 FlorenceArt: Indeed! The Invention of Murder is on my TBR. I'm quite looking forward to it.

>20 labfs39: It was a bit of a random read for me too, but I ended up liking it.

>21 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, which legal thriller? My mystery book club has sadly died out. I think people have just been busy with life. I'm the only one of my friends who isn't a parent, and so I quite understand!

>22 rv1988: It's called The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark. I am hoping that I will be able to be diplomatic about what I think about it if it turns out that the person who suggested it is a fan of the author (it will change how I think about them, if that is the case.)

>23 RidgewayGirl: Thank you! The NYT called the author "the thinking man's John Grisham" - but it's not the first them they've been wrong.

77. Lee Geum-yi - Can't I Go Instead? (translated from the Korean by An Seonjae, Tor Publishing Group, 2023)



I had this on my list of interesting translations from 2023; the original was published in Korean in 2016.

The subject matter of this book is complex and powerful (the war between Korea and Japan, World War II, Korean independence, the abuse of Korean 'comfort' women by the Japanese army). The story revolves around two women: the daughter of a wealthy Korean nobleman who collaborates with the Japanese when they occupy his country, and the young woman he purchases and enslaves, to be his daughter's companion. It is a little bizarre, and very disconcerting, to have these difficult and distressing themes narrated in the tone and style of a disengaged teenager. I can't tell if it is the way it was translated, or if that's the fault of the original text, but the writing on these subjects was not well done, and seemed almost glib and facile. Additionally, there are so many grammatical and syntactical errors in the English translation, which ought to have been addressed by the publishers. It is particularly unfortunate when you think of the many excellent examples of literature that already exist on similar themes, which demonstrate how skillfully and sensitively they *could* have been handled (e.g. Pachinko). All in all, would not recommend.

>25 rv1988: Have you read the graphic work Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim? It's the best book I've read on comfort women. Which books would would you recommend on the occupation of Korea and the accompanying issues? I've read Pachinko and watched the tv series, at least the episodes that have been released so far. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the tv adaptation was.

>26 labfs39: I have! Grass is the other book I was thinking of.

>27 rv1988: I also another graphic work by Gendry-Kim called The Waiting, about people waiting for their number to be drawn for a reunification visit with their family in North Korea. I didn't think it was quite as good, but it was still worth a read.

>24 rv1988: LOL, no. John Grisham is a far better writer. The worldview was so simplistic and fundamentally callous. I am very curious about our book club meeting on Thursday.

>28 labfs39: Oh, this sounds interesting. Thank you for the recommendation. I've added it to my list.

>29 RidgewayGirl: I hope the discussion is entertaining! My dormant mystery group decided to restart, the book we've chosen is also something I am slightly hate-reading, so I think we're in the same boat.

78. Danielle Arceneaux - Glory Be (Pegasus 2023)



I was in the mood for something light and easy and this did the trick. A short little murder mystery, featuring Glory Broussard, a devout, church-going Black lady, with an absent husband, a successful daughter in New York, and a lot of time on her hands. She manages a small gambling business from a coffee shop table, nurses a grudge against her sister, and in this novel, investigates the murder of her best friend, a nun. Although the death was ruled a suicide, Glory is convinced there's something else going, and pokes into local politics in Lafayette, Louisiana, until she can figure it out. The writing is not great, but the story is well-developed, the characters memorable, and it is pleasant enough. As this is a debut novel, I'm looking forward to more.

The shortlist for the Singapore Literature Prize was announced, in Tamil, Chinese, Malay and English. As English is the only one of these languages I can read (I can speak a little Tamil, but I can't read it at all), here are the shortlisted books. I'm going to try and read as many as I can!

https://www.bookcouncil.sg/slp-2024

Fiction:

Myle Yan Tay - Catskull
Suchene Christine Lim - Dearest Intimate
Prasanthi Ram - Nine Yard Sarees (I don't have the book but I do have a nine yard saree)
Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation (I have a copy of this one)
Nisha Mehraj - We Do Not Make Love Here

Nonfiction:
Peter Ellinger - Down Memory Lane: Peter Ellinger's Memoirs
Shubhigi Rao - Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book
Jee Leong Koh - Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America
Chan Lee Shan - Searching for Lee Wen
Dana Lam - The Art of Being a Grandmother: An Incomplete Diary of Becoming

Translated:
Acharya Chatursen - Bride of the City (translated from the Hindi by Pratibha Vinod Kumar and A.K.Kulshreshth)
Zhang Yueran - Cocoon (translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang)
Shuang Xuetao - Rouge Street: Three Novellas (translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang)
Liang Wern Fook - The Joy of a Left Hand (translated from the Chinese by Christina Ng)

>32 rv1988: That's a great list (I only looked at the fiction). I enjoyed Rouge Street when I read it and I've added Cocoon and The Great Reclamation to my wishlist. As usual, several of the books are not (yet) available in the US.

>32 rv1988: Interesting that two of the four translations are by Jeremy Tiang.

>33 RidgewayGirl: I'm looking forward to The Great Reclamation too.
>34 labfs39: Yes, I've read one of his books but I didn't know he translated as well.

79. Elizabeth Macneal - The Burial Plot (Picador 2024)



Another 'walking' read. The Burial Plot is set in London, 1839. Bonnie runs away from home to avoid being forced to wed the vicar; although he paid for her to be educated, she wants to choose her own life and own fate. She meets Crawford, a manipulative, cruel, but charismatic con man who romances and rejects Bonnie with equal measure. With Crawford's friend Rex, they run cons, until one day, Bonnie kills a man in self-defence. To keep her out of London and away from suspicion, Crawford fakes her a recommendation letter, and gets her a place as a lady's maid in Endellion House, a massive, crumbling neo-Victorian mansion. Endellion is owned by Mr Moncrieff, an eccentric architect and widower who sits in office, obsessively drawing up designs for a mausoleum for his dead wife. Bonnie works for his daughter Cissie, a strange, quiet teenager who writes love-letters to herself from a mysterious lord, when she's not reading romance novels. At first, things are going well - Bonnie settles in, the Moncrieffs treat her well, and the work suits her. She suggests that Mr Moncrieff convert part of his lands into a cemetery, and to her surprise, he actually takes her suggestion seriously, and credits her for it. She has the run of the gardens, and loves plants, and seeing this, Mr Moncrieff lets her help design the proposed cemetery gardens. Even though there are rumours swirling around the village about how Mrs Moncrieff died, Bonnie finds a home in Endellion. But then Crawford shows up, full of plans to con the Moncrieffs out of the house, pretending to be Bonnie's brother while sneaking into her room at night. Bonnie is drawn into his plans again, and this time, no one might survive them.

. I will say the plot is nothing special, and should also warn that there's a lot of violence, and sexual violence, including mentions of such violence against a child (which I fast-forwarded through, to be honest). Still, this was a very well-written novel, and I enjoyed listening to it, with the story gripping enough to keep me going and even speed up my pace a bit during the tenser moments. It was especially interesting because I just read Judith Flanders - Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain and a lot of the discussion around the funeral rites, the graveyard design, and mourning made more sense. It's a well-researched, tightly written story, and I do plan on reading more by the author.

80. Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe (Riverhead, 2024)



I really struggled with this one - partly, because I think I was not in the right frame of mind for it, and partly because the style is almost deliberately inaccessible. Sentences run into each other, the dialogues are deeply stylized and layered, and nothing is quite what it seems, with metaphor piled on metaphor and misdirection rife. Oyeyemi has lived in Prague for several years now, and this seems to be her tribute to the city: a novel that envisions it as a living, wilful, conniving creature. Parasol Against the Axe has a plot of sorts but it doesn't matter: the book is not about the plot, or the characters, but about Prague.

In Parasol Against The Axe, Hero Tojosoa goes to Prague for the wedding of her friend Sofie, and brings along a book that her son gifted her, titled Paradoxical Undressing , written allegedly by a Sydney bartender named Merlin Mwenda. While the preparations for the wedding seems to be going well, someone spots Dorothea Gilmartin, a former friend of Sofie and Hero's, with whom they had a falling out. Oyeyemi tells us, "...Now, if Hero Tojosoa was an axe, then Dorothea Gilmartin was a parasol. Really both were both, of course, but you try telling them that." Oyeyemi does not elaborate further. We know that Hero is a journalist of sorts, and Dorothea, an heiress who performs mysterious unspecified tasks for clients. We learn also, that Dorothea is looking for Hero, as much as Hero is dodging her. In chapters alternating between their cat and mouse chase over Prague (worst bachelorette ever, by the way), each of them is reading their own copy of Paradoxical Undressing . The excerpts from this book within the book show us that Paradoxical Undressing changes not only depending on who is reading it, but each time someone reads it. Intervening in their lives, and the narrative, is Prague itself, appearing through various figures: a hair dresser, a woman dressed as a mole, and so on.

This book is confounding, with each layer of sense undone promptly in the next sentence. Dorothea Gilmartin is not even a real name: it's Hero's nom de plume, that not-Dorothea adopted after reading a book that Hero wrote. When asked what she thought about the book, not-Dorothea says, "Think? I couldn't. It walked all over me and wiped its feet on my hair." Parasol Against the Axe was ruder than that.

(edited for grammar)

>37 rv1988: Sounds weirdly intriguing!

>38 FlorenceArt: I agree, Florence. >37 rv1988: You many not have liked it, Rasdhar, but you write a fascinating review.

>38 FlorenceArt: >39 labfs39: To be honest, I'm not sure what I feel about it. I think I liked it, but also I found it challenging.

>37 rv1988: I've read two books by Oyeyemi, Peaces and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and I liked her short stories, but found the novel inscrutable. It felt like things were happening so randomly that I had no way to grasp any of it.

>41 RidgewayGirl: I read and liked her book, Mr Fox, which is more accessible, I feel. Everything she wrote after that has been progressively more obscure and difficult to read. I think she's writing for a small pool of MFA candidates, and I'm not in that pool.

81. Shari Lapena - Everyone Here is Lying (Books on Tape, narrated by January LaVoy, 2023)

I've been on my feet for the last couple of days and ended up listening to a lot of books, including this one. I picked light thrillers on purpose, because they provide just the right amount of mindless content that doesn't require me to fully engage but still have the surface level distraction to get through menial work. This is not a good novel, but it didn't have to be for me, and that's fine. I'm just not sure why it received such glowing reviews across the board last year, given how mediocre it was.

82. Andrey Kurkov - The Silver Bone (Harper Via, 2024, translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk)



In Kyiv, 1919, Samson Kolechko is walking home with his father, when Cossacks attack. His father is dead, and Samson's ear is severed. With no other family, and many factions fighting for control of Ukraine, Samson has no option but to find a way to support himself. He writes out a statement for the police, and noting the clarity of his writing and thoughts, they hire him. With only a marksmanship course under his belt, he proceeds to investigate crime, even as rebellions, violence, and war continue to unfold around him. As he works, he finds that he has an unusual ability: his severed ear, which he stored in a candy tin, neither decays nor disconnects from him - instead, he can hear whatever is being said in its vicinity.

This book is not precisely a mystery novel, in that it isn't deeply plotted, or contains an unexpected twist. Instead, it just unfolds atmospherically, containing hundreds of tiny, little details that give you an uncomfortable look into what it is like to live with occupation, conflict, and war. Samson's investigation occurs even as the electricity runs out, for lack of fuel or workers, with scarce food and no salt, with lice and rats infesting the living environment. There's a sense of unreality to it: on one day, a fellow policeman is killed while quelling a rebellion, on the next day, he sits and records statements about a theft of bread from a bakery.

I did enjoy it, but I don't think it was Booker material. The Booker reading guide is very useful, though, with lots of information from the author, translators, and so on. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-the-silver...

>44 rv1988: Thanks for this review and for alerting me to the Booker reading guides. I was not aware of them. I read the one for This Other Eden and wish I had read it before our book club discussion of the book.

>43 rv1988: Light thrillers are what works for me on audio, too. Anything more substantial and I feel like I'm shortchanging the book as I'm a better reader with my eyes than my ears. I've also started listening to short stories which also seem to work for me.

>45 labfs39: Aren't they great? I should use them more.

>46 RidgewayGirl: I think you've mentioned short stories in this context before: I will try that next, as all the thrillers I've read recently have been disappointing.

83. Peter Swanson - A Talent for Murder (Harper Collins, 2024. Audiobook, narrated by several people).



This was terrible. Swanson has an ongoing series about a woman named Lily Kintner, who is some variety of -path (psycho, socio, osteo, I'm not sure). This is the third book in the series. We already know from books 1 and 2 that she's killed several people and gotten away with it and is currently unemployed and living at home with her divorced, yet unhappily co-habiting parents, while conducting a handwritten letter-based flirtation with the cop who once investigated her. In this novel, Lily is contacted by a old college friend, Martha. Martha has noticed an odd pattern of deaths that occurred in the cities where her husband, a travelling salesman, has been, of late. She contacts Lily because in grad school, Martha was in a relationship with a terrifying man who hurt her, and Lily helped her end it. So Martha and Lily decided to investigate and see if Martha's right, and whether she should in fact go to the police about her husband. The initial premise is stupid enough, but then the plot gets progressively stupider and more unbelievable, and not in a fun way. Why do I keep reading these books? Masochism, probably.

84. Sarah Perry - The Essex Serpent (Serpent's Tail, 2016)



This was such an excellent read. I feel relieved and glad that after all these terrible thrillers, I finally had the chance to really enjoy some excellent prose. Perry has such a beautiful turn of phrase, and such a remarkable, elegant ability to characterise people. You can know all of them in just a few sentences.

The Essex Serpent is set during the course of one year in the 1890s, in England. At New Years, Cora Seaborne's unpleasant, abusive husband dies. Relieved and grateful, she relocates from London to Essex with her companion, Martha, a staunch socialist, and her son Francis. Although it isn't explicitly stated, Francis is on the spectrum. Cora herself, fascinated by the natural world, collects fossils and reads politics; she wears men's boots and walks among the woods and does not conduct herself like a Victorian widow. In Essex, she is introduced to the local reverend, William Ransome: theirs is an immediate meeting of minds, but also, an impossible one. William is married to his beloved, beautiful Stella, whom he adores, and Cora has eschewn every last trace of her womanhood, largely because of her awful marriage. In Essex, they are both caught up with local legends of a massive serpent that is said to be lurking the waters around. This is at a time when paleontology, natural sciences, and so on are in fashion, and Cora wonders if a recent earthquake in the region has not revealed some prehistoric relic. At the other end, William tries to keep his congregation in check, as they increasingly see in the serpent the signs of evil and death: every last misfortune, from curdled milk to missing animals, is blamed on the Essex serpent. By the end of the year all secrets are revealed, and each character, from Cora and William, to the most minute figure to appear on the pages (a local begger, the fisherman's daughter, the fisherman himself, who has lost his boat, the surgeon and his friend, the patient that Martha befriends) have each renegotiated, with themselves, the conditions under which they can live, and chosen their own path, or come to terms with the paths available to them.

This novel is so rich in detail and texture. There are dozens of ideas, concepts, themes, and characters, but it feels dense and diverse and not crowded, as it might have done in the hands of a less skilful writer. It isn't just about the evolution of science, or how Darwin's work transformed Victorian faith, or about the development of surgical techniques, or the changes in laws for the housing of the poor and indigent, but about all of these things, and then also, about love, romance, friendship, adoration. I loved, more than anything, how she could tell you all about each character so deftly, in spare, but vivid prose. Cora's friend and admirer, Luke Garrett is "thirty-two: a surgeon with a hungry disobedient mind," the Reverend William's faith is "felt deeply, and above all, out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral and the oaks its transept pillars," Maureen Fry, a nurse who longed to be a surgeon but could not, as as a woman, wields "an implacable serenity...as a weapon against the arrogance of men...". You can see right to their core from her sparse description, but when it comes to the world that Cora and William see, one through the sharp eyes of scientific rigour, the other through the ardour of fate, her language turns lush and descriptive. If she wrote about a trip to the grocery store, I'd probably be fascinated.

I think this nice review in the Guardian does a far better job than I could, so I am linking it below, but how nice it was to have writing that I could truly savour, and not get through to find out what happened at the end.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/16/the-essex-serpent-sarah-perry-revi...

>49 rv1988: Your review makes me think this is a book I must seek out. Different from my usual fare, but I love well-written characters.

>48 rv1988: I'm sorry you read that terrible book, but I was very entertained by your review.

>49 rv1988: I really love this book.

>49 rv1988: Thank you for your review. I wishlisted this.

AUGUST

It's a busy month with the semester starting, so I'll update this later! Just placeholding it for now.

Currently reading (carry-overs from last month):
The O'Henry Prize Stories 2019 - edited by Laura Furman
Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics

Upcoming:
I know I won't get around to all of these, but here's what is on the bedside table in a tottering mountain:
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Untamed Shore
Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: Life, Death, and the Illusion of Control
Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made
Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors
Anil Pratinav - Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77
Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai - Dust Child
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job
Nadine Akkerman - Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Alvaro Enrigue - You Dreamed of Empires
Su Pae - A Greater Music
Mary Roberts Rhinehart - The Haunted Lady
Francesca Manfredi - The Empire of Dirt

I had picked up two books in July that I've decided not to take up, for now - perhaps later: Jo Walton - Tooth and Claw and Ovidia Yu - The Mouse Marathon

I hope you have a great start to the semester!

>54 labfs39: Thank you!

I forgot: here's this month's book cartoon, courtesy the great Tom Gauld.

And with reference to my >37 rv1988: earlier comments of Helen Oyeyemi's Parasol Against the Axe, here's a better review than I could write. I don't agree with all of it (she likes Oyeyemi far more than I do, and won't concede the pretentiousness) but she does catch what is interesting and confounding about her writing:

In Parasol Against the Axe, books desire readers and cities desire visitors and residents—a reversal of the anthropocentric way we’re used to thinking about these interactions. It is these reversals that Oyeyemi ultimately seems interested in narrating: What might it look like if books and cities really could speak for themselves, aside from their authors or various kinds of human ambassadors? Or if, instead of a reader’s impression of a book, we were somehow party to the book’s impression of its readers? Likewise, imagine that instead of a travelogue, we could get a sense of the city’s own judgmental log of the travelers who pass through it. While some of Oyeyemi’s earlier books disassembled and reconstructed familiar fairy tales—Mr. Fox took on “Bluebeard,” Boy Snow Bird looked at “Snow White,” and Gingerbread toyed with “Hansel and Gretel”—Parasol Against the Axe is more interested in interrogating the fairy-tale logic we take for granted in real life. Here, the magical belief under examination is the idea that anyone can ever really know a city or a text comprehensively. The “Prague book” is like Prague itself: It has other ideas about what it is that transcend any one reader’s or visitor’s conception. Books and cities, Oyeyemi argues, have lives of their own.

Sarah Chihaya, The Ghosts of Prague: Helen Oyeyemi and the borderlands of realism (The Nation)
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/helen-oyeyemi-parasol-against-axe/

I gave up on Nisha Mehraj's We Do Not Make Love Here after 30 pages in. I don't usually drop a book once I've started it, but this was really insufferable. The writing was incredibly sophomoric. I cannot understand how it made the shortlist for the Singapore Literature Prize this year.

>56 rv1988: This is too on the nose!

Parasol Against the Axe is intriguing. Even though your review is rather lukewarm, it made me want to pick it up :-D

>53 rv1988: Looking forward to your reviews for all the upcoming titles, but especially Anil Pratinav - Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 so I know whether it is worth getting or not...
I loved A Greater Music, BTW :-)

>53 rv1988: The Anil Pratinav book has been slow going - I'll definitely post once I'm done!

85. Cocoon by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions, 2022)



Cocoon was first published in 2016 in Chinese, and sold over 120,000 copies: a massive success. Jeremy Tiang’s English translation was published by World Editions in 2022. I picked it up because the English translation was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024 (Tiang is Singaporean) and I'm working my way through the list. Zhang had already made a name for herself with two prior books, but this is the one that established her reputation as a writer.

Zhang is part of a literary generation that grappled with the impact of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in their writing, or as it is called, ‘scar literature’. In Cocoon, this is through the lens of people born in the 1980s, looking back at their parents and grandparents who lived through the events of that time. The two protagonists, Jiaqi and Gong, were childhood friends over one year spent in Jinan, before Jiaqi moved away. They had a falling out at the time, but as adults in their 30s, unemployed and purposelessly drifting, they meet again. In chapters alternating their points of view, they slowly narrate to each other the secrets that they uncovered over the decades in between.

Jiaqi and Gong’s grandfathers used to work in the same hospital during the cultural revolution: one, a surgeon and the other, an administrator. Both were involved in some kind of incident at the ‘Dead Man’s Tower’ – a local dumping ground for corpses, resulting in Gong’s grandfather entering a coma from which he never recovered. Their parents’ generation, living with the memory of what their parents went through, failed Jiaqi and Gong. Both had fathers who abandoned them, mothers who were disinterested, disaffected relatives who raised them. Jiaqi as an adult is obsessed with tracking down every one her father knew, in a bid to understand why he left them. Her boyfriend leaves her over this, telling her, “You feed on that generation's scars. Like a vulture.” Gong is equally obsessed with uncovering who it was that put his grandfather in a coma. As they go along, they unpick longstanding grievances and pain: Jiaqi finds a rival who wrote an anonymous letter that cost her father his nascent literary career; Gong finds out his grandfather’s assailant is somewhat closer to home that he suspected.

Cocoon is intimately told, making the great political significance of these years very personal. Yueran Zhang captures the deep trauma that individuals experienced, told over three generations, and how it was passed down through families. It’s filled with global literary references that I caught – and probably many that I didn’t, because I’m not familiar with Chinese literature. Tiang’s translation is well done, reading naturally and easily. Recommended.

Sidenote: scar literature recently came up in another discussion here, a little coincidence.

(Edited to add the book cover)

86. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Steph Cha and Lisa Unger (Mariner Books, 2023)



I took up RidgewayGirl’s suggestion to try to short stories on audio, when I walk home from work in the evenings (I usually listen to suspense novels, which don't require a deep level of attention). While I didn’t love this collection, I did like the format of the short story for my walking, so thank you! I will try some more stories after this one.

This was a very uneven collection of mystery and suspense stories from U.S. writers in 2023. I’m not quite sure I understood the editorial intent behind this selection since the quality varied so widely. I’ve seen previous editions which were very impressive; this time, only one story in the collection really left an impression on me. That was ‘New York Blues Redux’ by William Boyle, which has also been anthologized in a collection dedicated to Cornell Woolrich (the author of ‘Rear Window’). It balances violent crime and a bleak, dark humour, telling the events of one evening at a dive bar habituated by a group of female alcoholics.

Also notable was Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s "The Land of Milk and Honey,” about six women (a wife, a sister, daughters) who live in a house, trapped under the thumb of a cruel, domineering patriarch, until his nephew arrives to come help in the family business. It has her usual style of Gothic horror blended with suspense, which was very good. I also quite liked ‘The Invitation’ by Martha Randall, which is about a young woman who is deciding between two opportunities: either intern at the Boston Globe, or go a full-expenses paid month long vacation in Barcelona, with a ex-boyfriend who is generous with money but has an unbearable personality. The story narrates what happens in both circumstances, as if either were the one she had chosen, going back and forth. It is well done.

On the other hand, Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘33 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister,’ was actually terrible. By far the longest story in the book, made worse by a narrator who sounded oddly like they were gurgling each sentence, it is a somewhat unconvincing story about two sisters, narrated in an uninteresting way. Several of the stories were just pedestrian suspense with gratuitous violence (Traai Walker’s ‘Flight,’ Anthony Neil Smith’s ‘The Ticks Will Eat You Whole,’ and James A Hearn’s ‘Home is the Hunter’).

Several others are interesting as stories, but are neither mystery, nor suspense, so I wonder why they were included at all. S. A. Cosby’s "The Mayor of Dukes City" is about a former MMA fighter turned bar bouncer who is obsessed with who killed his ex-girlfriend, who was murdered one evening at the bar where he now works. Walter Mosley’s ‘No Exit,’ while beautifully and powerfully written, is just an unrelieved account of the misery that young Black men endure in the American prison system. It was quite difficult to get through, to be honest, and I’m glad I read it, but I don’t quite understand what it’s doing in this collection specifically.

Apparently the print edition included a list of stories that they thought were notable but did not include. It might be interesting to go through those and see if there were any more worth reading than the others.

(Edited to add the book count number)

>61 rv1988: Adding this to my list of Chinese books I want to get to. I'm currently reading Ai Weiwei's memoir, not sure if it is scar literature since it was written much later, and as I understand it most scar literature was written in the 70s. It also covers a much longer timeframe than the Cultural Revolution, although that is the defining event. In any case, I continue to work my way through my list which keeps getting longer with books like Cocoon.

>63 labfs39: I just saw your very thoughtful review of Ai Weiwei's memoir. Cocoon is more about the effects of the Cultural Revolution than the Revolution itself; I listened to an interview with the translator, and he locates it in scar literature, even though most, as you said, was written in the 70s.

87. Amélie Nothomb - First Blood (translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Editions, 2021, 2023)



Amelie Nothomb, properly the Baroness Fabienne Claire Nothomb, is a Belgian writer, writing primarily in French. She comes from a very well-connected political family: her great-grandfather was a famous Belgian politician, her grand-uncle was one of Belgium's foreign ministers, and her father, Patrick Nothomb, was a diplomat. She's previously written about her family history in other books, but First Blood, a novella, is a fictionalized version of her father's life, and specifically one incident. In 1964, rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo took prisoner all Belgians and Americans in Stanleyville, and detained them in a hotel. After failed attempts to negotiate a release, a force of Belgian and US paratroopers carried out an operation, rescuing the hostages, saving most, although several lives were lost. Patrick Nothomb was the Belgian diplomat to Congo at the time, and First Blood is a fictionalized account of this incident and the life leading up to it.

Nothomb herself is a bit of an odd bird: she falsely claims to have been born in Japan, although records clearly show she wasn't, and instead, spent part of her childhood there. Her books do very well, but I found some aspects of this one a bit odd. It is a very personal account, certainly, but one that does adopt a certain specific worldview: the civilised European beset by the savage African. Consequently, the novella touches not upon the previous Belgian colonization of Congo, which was was one of the most brutal incidents in imperialism. I am forever haunted by the photograph of a man staring at the severed limbs of his five year old daughter, a punishment carried out by Belgian overseers when he failed to meet his daily quota of rubber. The rebel leaders ask Patrick Nothomb what he thought of Lumumba; Nothomb never thinks to ask any Congolese what they thought of Leopold. I don't mean to suggest in any way that the capturing and detention of the hostages was in any way justified, but only that it is part of a much bigger story and simple black and white accounts (literally) ignore that. I am reminded once again of Partha Chatterjee's excellent book, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, which dealt with the famous incident of the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' and examined the ways in empire and colonialism are justified in public imagination.

First Blood, this aside, contains a dry, witty account of Patrick Nothomb's youth, his time spent between one set of grandparents (very wealthy) and the other (very poor), his distant mother, dead father, how the sight of any blood caused him to faint, and his noble family's deep objections to his marriage to a less well-born woman. The incident in Congo brackets the book - beginning and ending with it. The book is certainly well-written, and won the Renaudot Prize in 2021, the 2022 Strega Prize and so on.

(edited to fix image)

88. Anjum Hasan - A Day in the Life (Penguin 2018)



I read Anjum Hasan's collection of short stories, Difficult Pleasures, some years ago and really enjoyed it, but never kept up with her work. I noticed this subsequent collection of stories in the library, published in 2018 and promptly grabbed it. It is much like her first collection: strong in parts, weak in others, but overall a good read.

Hasan is an Indian writer, and this collection of stories revolves primarily around lives in the city of Bangalore (now known as Bengaluru). I have fond memories of the city, having lived there for several years, and a lot of the things she wrote were no doubt tinted my nostalgia for its beautiful, tree-lined roads, the constantly pleasant weather, the great food and the good company I enjoyed. There are stories set elsewhere as well, and credit must belong to her skill as a writer too, because she constructs, from a few short moments, entire narratives that humanize all her characters in their loneliness, oddness, and relationships. Among all this is an awareness of the deep class and religious divides in India; not hammered home in too obvious a fashion, but omnipresent. There's also a wry humour. All in all, a very skilled collection of stories. If there is a big failing in the book, it is her tendency to collapse in triteness and tropes, especially when she grapples with these bigger themes. She's at her best when dealing with the lives of people, because it lets her observant, witty eye tell you in detail what you might have missed.

In 'The Legend of Lutfan Mian,' Hasan tells us a historical story: Lutfan Mian, to be married, walks from his little town to the city of Benares with his friend, the wrestler Gopal Singh. It is 1872, British colonial rule is expanding to the mofussil (the rural parts of India) and Gopal Singh, whose day job is to run from city to city with urgent messages, is worrying about losing his job to a rumoured telegraph system. They walk across towns and villages to the city, where Gopal participants in a wrestling match, and Lutfan Mian attempts to buy his fiance a new sari, with the small, meagre amount of money he has saved. It's a beautifully told, funny, and tender story, made all the more touching by the easy, matter of fact friendship between a Hindu and Muslim - now increasingly uncommon in modern India. It is also very unlike any of the stories in the book, which should not take away from how well-told it is. In 'The Stranger' as well, distant communal strife colours the present: a Koran is burnt, a protest march is conducted, but for the day to day lives of the people in a small town in South India, all this is "just political": instead they are preoccupied with their own daily lives and challenges - the retired corporate drone, living simply in two rooms but desperately seeking connection, the old soldier, spending all his days trying to get authorities to grant him the funds to buy one pair of glasses, the gossipy landlord, the aristocratic cook, all go on. While well-told again, the ending is cliched, and you enjoy the story despite that and not because of it. Similarly, the weakest in the collection is 'Sisters' about a wealthy woman, wracked by ill health and depression, who is rescued in a sense by her no-nonsense maid, who seems to be the only person who gives her support (in exchange for very little money). It's a hackneyed story about middle class privilege that goes nowhere, asks no questions and provides no answers, culminating in an excruciating scene of deluded self-interest.

Hasan is at her best when she provides small, tender accounts of little lives lived normally. In 'Bird Love,' a young couple in an arranged marriage slowly develop intimacy and affection, built largely on their tiny balcony where she grows plants and he watches birds, and they drink coffee. In 'I Am Very Angry' an old retired man mourns his late wife, missses his son who lives abroad, and is filled with fury, and then pity, for the new family next door, whose constant fighting he can hear through the walls. In 'Nur' we follow the protagonist over one whole day, as she dodges her duties as a domestic maid to trace her feckless husband, who has gone missing. These are stories that you could hear every day about any Indian, but carefully drawn to humanise each person inside them.

All in all, I would say three stars: an imperfect collection but worth reading.

(edited again to fix image: I'm so bad at this formatting!)

>64 rv1988: Have you read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows? Only in a few chapters is the Cultural Revolution front and center. The rest of the book is about Ai's journey as an artist and activist, which was heavily influenced by his childhood experiences. So in a sense, I thought it was all about how the CR impacted him and his generation, and less about the CR itself. So sort of scar literature?

>61 rv1988: My copy of this book was delivered a few days ago. I'm excited about it.

>62 rv1988: I'm glad you like the format, even if the first collection wasn't great.

>67 labfs39: I haven't read it! I'm hoping to, even as the expanding pile of to-be-read books threatens to collapse on my head.

>68 RidgewayGirl: I'm looking forward to your thoughts!

NIF’s 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize for nonfiction announced their longlist recently. This is a nonfiction prize focused on India. Several of these books are already on my list (marked with a star), many of the others looked interesting to me. I'm putting it here for convenience.

NIF’s 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize for nonfiction

- ★ Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India, Aditya Balasubramanian, Princeton University Press
- ★ From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada, Sudha Bharadwaj, Juggernaut
- Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century, Joya Chatterji, Penguin India
- How Prime Ministers Decide, Neerja Chowdhury, Aleph Book Company
- ★ A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, Ashok Gopal, Navayana
- Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras, Radhika Iyengar, Harper Collins India
- ★ No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities 1800-1975, Michael O’Sullivan, Harvard University Press
- H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Kunal Purohit, HarperCollins
- Swadeshi Steam: VO Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle Against the British Maritime Empire, AR Venkatachalapathy, Penguin India
- Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir, Chitralekha Zutshi, Harper Collins India

>70 rv1988: What is the main Indian fiction prize?

>70 rv1988: Thank you for putting this prize on my radar: there are some very interesting titles there :-)

>71 kjuliff: I don't know if there is any 'main' Indian fiction prize. The Indian Govt's academy of arts and letters (Sahitya Akademi) awards prizes for fiction and translation in multiple Indian languages annually. A newspaper, The Hindu, also has an annual prize for fiction, as does a bookstore chain, Crossword. There are two more corporate sponsored prizes that are pretty well-known: the DSC Prize for South Asian literature, and the Tata Literature Live Prize.

>72 Dilara86: You're welcome! I agree, it's a good list this year.

>73 rv1988: Thanks. I have never see these listed anywhere. The Australian Miles Franklin Award occasionally gets a mention in lists of literary prizes but I haven’t ever come across references to Indian ones.

89. Francesca Manfredi - The Empire of Dirt (translated from the Italian by Ekin Oklap, Norton, 2022)



In an old stone house in rural Italy, three women live, besieged by its crumbling walls, decaying pipes, and internal despair. Valentina, the youngest, is twelve, and has just had her first period. Terrified and confused, she has convinced herself she is responsible for plagues befalling their residence. Her mother, whose choices were constrained by a teenage pregnancy, is navigating the departure of Valentina's father, and her growing attraction to a new person. Valentina's grandmother, a devout, strong personality, slowly dying of an illness, believes the house to be cursed. One season, they are surrounded by frogs that cover every pathway and garden. Another week sees the house covered in locusts; then all the food rots, and maggots come crawling out of the walls. Locals believe the house to be haunted, or cursed, and its inhabitants to be witches. Valentina, meanwhile, is fighting with her best friend over a boy; even among a plague, life goes on, and as it does, the secrets that all three women hold are slowly uncovered.

This is an odd little novel. Some of the descriptions are very grotesque, and I had trouble getting through them (animal deaths, for those who are concerned). It's all a bit vague, and I was slightly amused to see that the title is from a song that really captures the theme of unfledged angst ('Hurt' by the Nine Inch Nails). It's a short enough read, beautifully written, but the book does not hold well together, and you're left with a feeling of "And, so?" at the end.

90. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Untamed Shore



"She'd always been so afraid that the land would eat her, but it was obvious now that the answer was you had to eat it. You have to be the carnivore, the devourer, the one who bites first. A shark, enormous, majestic, unstoppable, rows and rows of teeth."

A fun, pulpy noir. I really enjoy Moreno-Garcia's writing: this is, I think, the third book by her that I've read this year. In a small fishing village in Baja, Mexico, a young girl named Viridiana works as an occasional translator. Educated far beyond the rest of her friends by her father, also a translator, she reads voraciously. One summer, she's hired by visiting tourists. Ambrose, a wealthy, older man has pretensions at writing a novel, and Viridiana lives in his home, taking notes on his book whenever inspiration strikes him, night or day. Also there are Daisy, Ambrose's much younger wife, and Gregory, Daisy's good-for-nothing, but very handsome, brother. In the hot, desert climate, surrounded by the rotting corpses of sharks, Viridiana soon learns that Ambrose, Gregory, and Daisy aren't quite what they seem. It's only when circumstances spiral into violence that she has to ask herself, will she rise up? Or will she remain, like her mother, trapped in this small village forever? Moreno-Garcia knows how to write a good noir novel. This was very entertaining.

>76 rv1988: This looks interesting. I’ve borrowed a copy. BTW I’m intrigued by your recent reading choices Rasdhar.

>76 rv1988: Intriguing! I'm not a fan of thrillers or noir, but I could make an exception for this I think.

>77 kjuliff: >78 FlorenceArt: it does get pretty violent to the end, let me know if you want any content warnings.

Hi Rasdhar! I thought I had written a post complimenting you on your excellent reviews a couple of weeks ago but I don't see it here. I particularly enjoyed your reviews of The Essex Serpent, which I'll have to make room for sometime this year; First Blood, as I've read several of Amèlie Nothomb's books, some of which I've liked and others left me cold; and Untamed Shore, as I want to get to Mexican Gothic in the near future.

>80 kidzdoc: Thanks for stopping by! I'm looking forward to your thoughts on those books, as and when you read them.

91. The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1942, re-released by American Mystery Classics in 1998)



Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton (reviewed here), which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ‘Miss Pinkerton’ for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say "on the whole" because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she’s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn’t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening.

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There’s Marian, Eliza’s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There’s Frank, Marian’s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There’s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza’s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza’s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there’s the doctor too. And then there’s Eliza’s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her – and how?

The mystery is of the “had I but known” variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It’s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. “Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!” he tells her. “Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I’m afraid to take you and I can’t leave you alone.” The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it.

>65 rv1988: I put it to my library list. Nice review.

>83 Ameise1: Thanks!

SEPTEMBER

August was a slow month: with universities reopening, it was too busy for me to actually get as much reading done as I would have liked. I have these post-summer reading blues every year! This month's comic is by Amy Kurzweil, an artist who regularly contributes to the New Yorker.



I have a long list of carry-overs from the last two months, which I'm chipping away at, mostly unsuccessfully, because I keep getting distracted by new books! more books! even more books! Here's what I'm looking at, up next.

Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: Life, Death, and the Illusion of Control
Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made
Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors
Anil Pratinav - Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77
Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai - Dust Child
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job
Nadine Akkerman - Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Alvaro Enrigue - You Dreamed of Empires
Su Pae - A Greater Music

92. Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (Hachette, 2019)



I am usually pretty good at keeping track of where I source a book recommendation, or why I choose a particular book for my reading list. This time, I am confounded by myself - I don't know how or why this ended up on the list, but here it is, and it is a short little book, so I read it despite having misgivings almost as soon as I started. I've previously read Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed, which is a very powerful account of poverty in the USA (the Indian equivalent to me is A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi by Aman Sethi, which is also excellent). This book, though, is about the healthcare industry, medical care, and wellness, chiefly in an American context.

I should clarify that I personally, staunchly stand by scientific research in this regard, and am dismayed by the rise of anti-vaccination movements, and the general distrust of medicine during Covid. Having said that, I do understand that the way healthcare is structured in the US, and more globally, the history of discrimination on gender, race, and sexuality in health care, do provide grounds for doubting the industry as a whole. There's a tension between these two concepts in Ehrenreich's book that she can't quite resolve, so she goes back and forth between "the insurance companies are making you take medicines you don't need" to "stop believing junk you read on the internet". I believe the goal was to establish nuance, but her style is very anecdotal, and so easy to be skeptical about in itself. Even when she's debunking points, her tendency to draw conclusions based on singular examples that range from op-eds to twitter posts is very disconcerting. I'm not saying all writing should be data-driven, but surely claims about scientific research should be somewhat better sourced.

On the plus side, there's a lot of interesting fact and detail in the book that I wanted to follow up on. In particular, she discussed the work of Robert Trivers, a scientist, member of the Black Panther Party (they later ex-communicated him), and one of the first to identify the genetic stakes in parenthood. She referenced his book, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, which I immediately wanted to read.

The book in general is quite glum. Her theme seems to be largely, 'death is inevitable, why even bother'. Consider this excerpt: "So much then, for the hours - and years - you may have devoted to fitness. The muscles that have been so carefully sculpted and tone stiffen when calcium from the dead body leaks into them, causing rigor mortis, and loosening only when decomposition sets in. The organs we nurtured with superfoods and supplements abandon their appointed functions.....Everything devolves into a stinking pool, or what may sound even worse, a morsel in a rat's digestive system." She wrote this book at 76, after surviving cancer, and deciding for herself that she was done with scans and checks and probes. I understand that she was tired. But this isn't a model for everyone, especially the young. While we are all going to die, we do have to live until death. The inevitability of death is no reason at all to give up on living, or living well. In an NYT review, Parul Sehgal wrote, "It’s reasonable, even honorable to so coolly make peace with the inevitable. But I confess wanting a bit more raging against the dying of the light." I agree!

>86 rv1988: Fantastic review of a book I will now happily avoid reading.

Those are a lot of great reviews, Rasdhar. I deleted The Empire of Dirt immediately on reading your review—just an e-galley, so nothing lost, and I appreciate your doing the distasteful reading. I have the Ehrenreich, and kind of knew her basic premise... not sure if I have the fortitude to dive into it anytime soon, but I'm glad you could clarify it.

93. Riku Onda - The Aosawa Murders (translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts, Bitter Lemon Press 2020)



Japanese honkaku (tr: orthodox) mysteries are structured around rules of deductive reasoning. Through the strategic disclosures of clues, the author leads a careful and attentive reader to the book’s conclusion, sometimes around a twist as well. Honkaku novels emerged in the 1920s, in direct response to the western ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). Pushkin Vertigo has been translating these to English of late, and last year I read several of them. This book, The Aosawa Murders, by Riku Onda, is part of a newer generation of shin honkaku novels, which advocate a return to this classical style of mystery novels, with ‘fair play to the reader’ as a guiding principle.

(More about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/27/honkaku-a-century-of-the-japanese-...

In The Aosawa Murders, the identity of the killer is made clear quite early on; you are told that they were identified but killed themselves before they could be convicted. Initially it looks like the mystery we’re untangling is not who did it, but why they did it – but by the end of the book, you’re once again asking, was it really that person’s fault? Or was another hand involved?

This complex story is also narrated in the form of a book about a book about the murder. We are told early on that the crime being investigated is the mass murder of the rich, well-known Aosawa family, through poison delivered in the form of a gift of bottled drinks at a multigenerational birthday celebration. Twenty-seven people are killed, leaving only a housekeeper, who swallows some poison but survives, and young Hisako Aosawa, the beautiful, visually-impaired daughter of the family, who didn’t drink anything. The delivery man, thought to be the killer, is tracked down by detectives, but not before he has already committed suicide. Decades later, Makiko Saiga, a neighbour and one of Hisako’s many admirer-friends, writes a book about the murders, trying to uncover why a seemingly unconnected man would want to kill so many people in an apparently motive-less crime. Her book, The Forgotten Festival, is the only thing she ever publishes, a deeply-researched nonfiction account that has since been forgotten. A few decades later, the Aosawa Murders is purportedly a book about this book, looking back at the events of the murder, the book that followed, retracing Makiko's steps, and re-examining the clues that have since emerged.

If this sounds too complex, it doesn’t feel that way when you read it. Each chapter is in the form of an interview with the nameless author, who talks first to Makiko about her book, and then to various people involved, including the detectives, a friend of the killer, the housekeeper Kimi, the book's publisher, and finally, the beautiful Hisako herself. On first reading, the end of the story might seem ambiguous – but if you’ve been paying careful attention, and you go back, all the little clues fall into place, and you’ll know exactly what happened, even if the author hasn’t laid out explicitly in so many words. The careful, attentive reader is rewarded (which explains so many discontented Goodreads reviews). I enjoyed it.

>87 labfs39: Haha. There's limited value in this one, I think! Could have been an article.

>88 lisapeet: Thanks! I wonder if there's something to Empire of Dirt. The writing is actually good, but I didn't care for the story.

>89 rv1988: I've put that one on my library list.

94. Tara Isabella Burton - Here in Avalon (Simon and Schuster 2024)



I saw a few reviews that suggested an intriguing premise, so Tara Isabella Burton's Here in Avalon ended up on my TBR. Unfortunately, it doesn't live up to the fulsome praise it seems to have received. I notice, increasingly, that reviews are starting to look more and more like rephrased publicity copy.

The protagonist of this book, Rose, is a 28 year old coder living in New York. Her childhood was chaotic: a largely absent mother left Rose and her older sister, the beautiful, witty, and talented Cecilia, to fend for themselves. Largely through Cecilia's ingenuity, they remained clothed, fed, and moderately educated. Both Cecilia and Rose, as adults, have reacted to this childhood. Cecilia sees romance and adventure in everything, flitting from opportunity to opportunity without ever really following through, and slinking back home whenever things fall apart. A talented pianist, she turns down a music scholarship to play in bars. Rose, organised, efficient, and responsible, lives a tightly-controlled life. Her fiance, a finance bro, and she, listen to improving podcasts and go the gym. He disapproves of flighty Cecilia and the way Rose is constantly bailing her out.

Cecilia returns home one summer, more distracted and confused than ever. One night, drunk, she confesses to Rose that she impulsively married a man named Paul, and then abruptly leaves him. She's become involved with a strange group of people, perhaps a cult, who perform a cabaret on a boat. It culminates in a vicious argument, and the next day, Cecilia vanishes. For a while, Rose assumes she's just off once again, but the more Rose hears about the cabaret called Avalon, the more concerned she is that Cecilia might be in danger. Over her tech bro fiance's distaste, Rose teams up with Cecilia's husband Paul, and together they begin to hunt for Avalon. When she finds the cabaret troupe, Rose starts to wonder whether they are truly real, or if she has stumbled into some sort of alternative reality. Is Cecilia really 'away with the fairies'?

The story had an interesting premise, as I said, but the author cannot carry it through. Every single point, every aspect of every relationship, every character development, is beaten to death with a club from the Department of the Painfully Obvious. It's clear that the author is trying to develop a very romantic story, but it's not romantic, it's just annoying. There's a certain character type she's aiming for: highstrung, damaged women, who yearn for sentimental, magical worlds. Done well, it can be enchanting; done badly, it will make you (horrifically) sympathize with the actual villain of the story, a finance bro who just wants to listen to his podcasts and drink his protein shakes.

More book news from India: the JCB Prize for Fiction (which I had forgotten about, entirely - but usually has a list of interesting titles) has their longlist out for 2024.

Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, Context/Westland
Hurda, Atharva Pandit, Bloomsbury India
Of Mothers and Other Perishables, Radhika Oberoi, Simon and Schuster India
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Speaking Tiger Books
The Distaste of the Earth, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, Penguin India
Talashnama: The Quest, Ismail Darbesh, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy, HarperCollins India
Maria, Just Maria, Sandhya Ramesh, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India
Sanatan, Sharankumar Limbale, translated from the Marathi by Paromita Sengupta, Penguin India
Leaf, Water and Flow, Avadhoot Dongare, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan, Ratna Books
The One Legged, Sakyajit Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee, Antonym Collections

_

Out of these, only the Ismail Darbesh book was already on my radar - I have a copy but haven't read it yet. The Nongkynrih book also looks interesting - I have his other book, Funeral Nights on my reading list already. Nice to see so many translations.

There's a detailed article with short descriptions of each book here. https://scroll.in/article/1072901/2024-jcb-prize-for-literature-five-translation...

>92 rv1988: Fun review! But I’ll pass on the book, thank you.

>94 rv1988: Nice to see so many translations.
I agree! Thank you for the link :-)

>61 rv1988: Cocoon by Zhang Yue Ran, translated by Jeremy Tiang won the Singapore Translation Prize for 2024. As I'm sure you can see by my review, I think it was very well-deserved.

The fiction prize went to Nine Yard Saree by Prasanthi Ram which I'm looking forward to reading.

https://www.bookcouncil.sg/slp-2024

95. Bae Suah - A Greater Music (Open Letter 2016, translated from the Korean by Deborah K. Smith)



This is a very difficult book to review, but I enjoyed reading it. It's written as series of fleeting recollections, interspersed with the narrator's thoughts on language, music, and belonging. The narrator is a Korean woman, visiting her sometime-lover Joachim, in Germany, and house-sitting for him for a few months. During this visit she recalls her previous stay in the country, when she attempted to learn the German language with a series of tutors. One of these was a woman, K., who was older, very refined and cultured, and someone with whom the narrator had a passionate relationship, with an abrupt and painful end. In the course of relating these memories, the narrator attempts to explain what it means to grapple with learning to communicate a new language, to be surrounded by people who speak while you listen, uncomprehending. There's a deep anxiety about belonging, understanding, translating and communicating at the heart of the book. In contrast to language, is the author's relationship with music, and at one point, she reflects on whether her relationship with K might have been different if the basis had been music rather than the study of German, as it would require less of the agony of translation. A short, but challenging read.

>97 rv1988: I googled Nine Yard Sarees: it looks very interesting!

>98 rv1988: I loved this book! It was so atmospheric and layered. And I quite liked Cocoon too if the combination is right and it is indeed the novel titled Le clou (ie, "the nail" as in the metallic spiky thing) in French.

>99 Dilara86: I'm not sure if that is the French translation, but it was very atmospheric and layered, as you said, so we might be talking about the same book!

96. The Best American Mystery Stories 2020, edited by C.J. Box (Mariner Books, 2020)



This seemed, once again, like a very uneven collection - some absolute gems, and some very strange choices. Jeffery Deaver’s “Security" was probably the best of the book, with a young woman taking on a sleazy politician. I also liked John Sandford's "Girl with an Axe", about a woman's friendship with her much older neighbour, and her distaste for the neighbour's greedy family who divide up possessions after the neighbour's death. "Miss Martin" by Sheila Kohler has a teenage girl dealing with her parents' divorce: help comes, surprisingly, from her dad's new, young wife, and no one else. Pamela Blackwood's "Justice" was also very good: a grieving widower, struggling to parent his two young daughters alone, finds distraction in attempting to solve the mystery behind a local murder of a young boy. I also quite liked Lisa Morton's "Whatever Happened to Lorna Winters?", about a young man working in a store that digitizes old DVDs, who finds footage of long-missing noir movie star. Rick McMahon's "Baddest Outlaws" was ok: a rural cop attempts to pin down an outlaw family, unsuccessfully.

Several other stories were just, to me, odd choices. Jake Lithua's "Most Powerful Weapon" was a cheesy Hollywood action script, as was Wallace Stroby's "Nightbound". And in 2020, I think they could possibly have done more than three woman authors - but I suspect that can be attributed to series editor Otto Penzler, whose views on women writers are as notorious as they are despicable.

97. Kotaro Isaka - The Mantis (Harvill Secker 2023, translated from the Japanese by Sam Malissa)



Continuing my vague endeavour to read as many mystery/crime novels from as many countries as possible, this is a Japanese hitman story with a little, somewhat predictable twist at the end. 'Kabuto' is a professional hitman; his family thinks he is a paper salesman. He does in fact have a job as a paper salesman, but from time to time, a handler called 'The Doctor' will contact him to conduct an 'operation'. Kabuto finds, increasingly, that he has no time to see his family, i.e. his wife and his teenage son. Wanting to retire, he finds that the Doctor will not let him - he has to keep up a job that he finds increasingly difficult to balance against his personal life, or find a way to settle the Doctor altogether.

A major theme in this novel is Kabuto's somewhat exaggerated fear of his wife, amplified by the depiction of her as an unpredictable harridan who appreciates nothing about him. Adding to the mix is Kabuto's son, who asks why he won't stand up to his wife now and then. Kabuto exercises a lot of self-regulation that he feels is necessary to keep her happy, instead of communicating like an adult. Yet, from the narration, it seems pretty clear that she's a fairly normal, well-adjusted person who is struggling to essentially raise her kid alone while also working a full-time job. Unaware of her husband's part-time hitmanning, she is, I thought, quite justifiably concerned about his long hours, frequent unexplained absences, and the effect it is having on their kid. It felt like a very misogynistic take, all well-buried under an "I care so much about my harridan wife" perspective. I thought this sort of "ball and chain" story died decades ago. I wont be reading more from the author.

98. Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation (Riverhead 2024)

review reposted to new thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364689#8637899

99. Anne Michaels - Held (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Review reposted to new thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364689#8637900

>104 rv1988: What a beautiful review. Thank you. You managed to capture the very essence of this book and convey the exquisiteness that makes this book speak to us so loudly so softly.

>105 kjuliff: Thanks! I really enjoyed your review, too. I think this book is one of the highlights of my year.

>103 rv1988: I think this is a book that I really need to read. I know bits and pieces of Singapore’s history, and then only from an Australian pov. I was heavily influence by the Chinese refugees who fled to Australia in the 1960s, and stories of members of Australian armed services who fought on the Malaya peninsula in WWII.

There were still remnants of the old Singapore when I first visited the country before Lee Kuan Yew‘s policies had really taken effect - yes that’s how old I am - and looking back on it now, the closest Western parallel I can see is Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “sanitation” of NYC this century. Though of course Giuliani’s policies pale in comparison with those of LQY’s.

I’ve put The Great Reclamation on my tbr and hope to get to it next year. Thank you for your very interesting review.

>102 rv1988: Have you read the first volume of this series? My library has a copy of it.

>16 rv1988: Thanks R. I had just come across The Midnight Feast and nearly bought it. Saw you’d read it so searched discussions. You’ve saved me some time.