The Shadow of Albion

Jan22 by Anna

By Andre Norton and Rosemary Edghill

When I first read this book, I recommended it to Kinsey as “the best time-traveling, regency romance, espionage fantasy book you’ll ever read” and I stand by that, even if it isn’t time-traveling so much as alternative realities, but that’s splitting hairs a bit, I think.

The only drawback is that the authors pack the plot so full of intrigue and plot threads that they weren’t able to tie them all up in this book, or even the sequel, and then most unfortunately, Andre Norton passed away in 2005, and I’m just a little resentful that Rosemary Edghill didn’t finish off the third one on her own. (The second one has a blurb at the end saying that they are working on the third! Also, the sequel was published in 2002, and Norton didn’t die until 2005, so what were they doing those three years?!)

Anyway, the premise is a little difficult to explain, especially with my very murky knowledge of history. The year is 1805, and our heroine, Sarah Cunningham, is introduced both dying in her ancestral mansion in England and orphaned in colonial Maryland. In order to fulfill mystical oaths to the land, the living Sarah is brought from her world (our world) to take the place of her dying double in a world in which magic exists. Magic!

So, in this other world, each artistocratic land owner is magically tied to their land, and each king is tied to his country through even greater magic, which means two things: one, overthrowing kings is much trickier to do, so the Stuart family still rules England; and two, Napoleon is playing even more havoc with Europe than he did in the mundane world. Politics!

Also, in this other world, Sarah turns out to be betrothed to the dashing and dangerous Duke of Wessex, who of course she has never met. Wessex is also an undercover agent for not one, but two government agencies, where he foils assassinations and facilitates treaties. Espionage!

Honestly, I don’t know why I’m trying to summarize the plot for you – dukes and duchesses, kings and queens, spies, assassins, fairies – honestly, that should be good enough, just read it!

I’m not even going tell you anything about the sequel, except that it has all of the above, but shifts the setting to the new world, where there are pirates, native mysticism, and the Marquis de Sade, communing with very real demons. Read it!

The Poison Eaters and Other Stories

Jan17 by Rebecca

The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
by Holly Black
2010

I checked this book out of the library less because I actually wanted to read it and more because I was testing out the ability to check out kindle books. (It works! I love it! I can get books when the library is closed, when it is snowing out, and without getting dressed for the day.)

It also wound up being an interesting book of short stories. This is clearly the author experimenting with different characters and plot points. Some of them work better than others, but they’re all quite interesting. It makes me think that I need to read more of her Black’s books, because I really do think these stories were testing grounds for her books, and I want to see what she made of the more successful stories.

I thought it was pretty funny that one short story, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, is set in the same universe as the author’s book, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, but has an entirely different set of characters and plot arc. There’s a single throw-away line in the book that references the events of the short story. I really liked both the book and the short story, but I am left wondering: who does the author think is the coldest girl in Coldtown?

I’m virtually sure that The Land of Heart’s Desire is set in the same universe as Black’s Modern Faerie Tales series, using characters that I would recognize if I had read those books. And it probably would have made more sense if I had recognized them and thus knew their various backstories. I might need to go ahead and read at least one of those books to see.

I liked the short stories, The Night Market and The Coat of Stars, both of which are complete in and of themselves in a way that most of the other stories in this compilation are not. The rest tend to be character studies (Going Ironside) or plot summaries (The Dog King and The Poison Eaters) or single interludes from larger universes (Virgin). So while they’re interesting, they don’t really stand on their own. I enjoyed them, but I don’t necessarily recommend them.

Not Actually Fanfiction

Jan10 by Rebecca

As should be obvious, I really enjoy fanfiction. They are (often) fun stories by (presumably) amateur authors who can sometimes do amazing things unconstrained by thoughts of salability. They write because they have ideas they want to get out. And sometimes, it’s not actually fanfiction. Sometimes an amateur author, in the same spirit of fanfiction, will write an original story and post it online for anyone and everyone to enjoy.

There are even a few archives specifically for these types of short stories, presented like fanfiction except for being entirely original. The parallel for Fanfiction.net is FictonPress.com. ArchiveOfOurOwn simply added a category for Original Fiction.

Here are a few recommendations for original short stories presented online:

Suite for the Living and Dead
By Inland Territory
Summary: When he was twenty three years old, Mike Lafayette took it on himself to write an oratorio for a people without a god.
Why I like it: This is just beautiful. A beautiful concept and beautifully written, but also speaks directly of the particular pain of seeing a deadly and important conflict happening in front of you and, for one reason or another, not joining the fight.
Extra comment: This feels a bit like a fanfiction story in that it references a much more epic story with main characters who are minor characters here. It makes me wonder if there is a book out there this is connected to but I haven’t been able to find. My current assumption is that it is that the author of this short story has an idea for a book and maybe she’s even half-written it, but it’s not available anywhere.

Toad Words
By Ursula Vernon
Summary: Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
Why I like it: One of the problems with traditional fairytales that I (and many other women) are increasingly aware of is how they often reward young girls for being quiet, polite, beautiful, and awaiting rescue, while punishing young girls for being outspoken, ugly, and actively attempting their own rescue. This takes one such fairytale and shows the repercussions, and how a curse can ultimately be made a reward and a blessing can ultimately be a punishment.

Never the Same
By Polenth Blake
Genre: science fiction
No summary, but the first paragraph: Everyone thinks my brother is nice. He set up a rescue centre for birds, after the terraforming accident poisoned the lake. That’s always the image of him, holding a bird covered in sludge. The birds are never the same after they’re cleaned, but the gossips never talk about that.
Why I like it: This is a lovely little mystery, with a main character with mental health issues. With a somewhat unreliable narrator investigating a situation in a highly biased community, the story looks into the difference between right and wrong actions and right and wrong motivations.

The Emperor’s Last Concubine
By Yamanashi Moe
Warning: this has explicit sex in it
No summary, but I bookmarked it as: a story of love and politics
Why I like it: This story has the standard Cinderella structure but focuses on what happens after the handsome prince whisks his beloved away and the difficulties faced by both prince and beloved as they both become aware of the golden cage the palace makes.

Maya Angelou

Jan3 by Rebecca

I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing in high school after my particularly awesome English teacher won her stare-down with the school board. Unfortunately, I don’t actually remember it all that well and didn’t remember much about the author either, for all her name recognition. Clearly that needed to change.

So for my Christmas road trip, I picked up (thank you public libraries!) three of Maya Angelou’s audio books, each of which she read herself. I like audio books that have been read by their authors. All readers add their own nuances to texts and when the authors read them you know it’s the intended nuance. Maya Angelou has the added benefit of actually being a professional performer and reciter.

Curiously, her speech pattern reminded me of William Shatner’s, and I wonder if he modeled his after hers. Very well enunciated, and with frequent, intentional pauses. She carries the style off better, though.

A Song Flung Up To Heaven
2002

Maya Angelou had a pretty amazing life with many ups and downs. Where before my impression of her was as this iconic individual almost out of sight on a pedestal, this autobiography shows her as fully human with all the attending strengths and weaknesses. One of her many strength is surely her willingness to show the world her weaknesses.

Rather than a single long book, this felt like a themed collection of short stories. Rather than telling the story of her life, she’s telling stories from her life, giving the reader a look at different times and events. Each chapter could potentially stand alone and be well worth reading.

Mom & Me & Mom
2013

Wow. Maya Angelou’s mother, Vivian Baxter, sounds like a truly amazing woman who lived her life to the fullest. As tumultuous as Maya Angelou’s life has been, her mother’s seems to have been that much more so. This book focuses on Maya’s relationship with her mother, which was excellent, but I also wish there was a full biography of Vivian Baxter, because just the glimpses we see into her life as it intersected with her daughter are pretty amazing. She was strong and determined and opinionated and just an amazing woman but she was not necessarily a comfortable woman to be around. She seems to have been utterly and completely herself and lived out loud.

Letter To My Daughter
2009

This struck me as pretty much a perfect graduation gift (highschool? college? some other major life transition where you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing next?). Many of the chapters are slightly edited versions of chapters from her other books, but they’re collected here for a reason. The overall message of this book is that life is going to throw a lot of different things your way, some wonderful opportunities and some awful experiences, so stay strong and try your best to take advantage of the first and get through the second.

I recommend all of these.

Gabriel: A Poem

Dec31 by Anna

By Edward Hirsch

Perhaps I should add a tag for “mourning” here? I feel like I readreadread as much escapist nonsense as I can take in, but then suddenly get jerked to a stop by some book that looks like it might address my reality in an important or useful way. I saw this headline from NPR on my facebook feed: “A Poet On Losing His Son: ‘Before You Heal, You Have To Mourn’”, and I thought, that sounds promising; I don’t feel like I’m healing much at all yet – maybe I just need to mourn some more.

I’m actually not that big on poetry, either; I have great respect but little understanding for it. The following excerpts caught ahold of me, though:

Some nights I could not tell
If he was the wrecking ball
Or the building it crashed into

*****

Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him

Turns out this…was not an easy read. It has taken me two months to get through 78 pages of short lines of poems (and an additional month to post about it). I’ve been reading other books, too, of course, because I couldn’t bear to take this one on my commute with me. So, I read a few pages at home until I needed to stop and then I waited until the next day.

I truly don’t really get poetry. Even reading this, I don’t understand how Hirsch has managed to capture so much of what I’ve been going through more accurately in like 15 words than the various prose books have in pages and pages of text.

Hirsch dedicates the majority of the poem to describing Gabriel and their history together. And there were so many similarities: Gabriel was adopted like Thomas, was raised in an upper middle-class and highly academic family, and had serious teenage rebellion that included drug use and short stints of homelessness.

Toward the end of the poem, Hirsch describes his own mourning, and there were even more similarities: the desperate practicalities that have to be done even though you are barely holding yourself together, the agonizing over what you were doing the exact moment your loved one died, what you were doing just before that when you could maybe have done something to prevent it instead.

Yeah, this was a tough read, but a lot of the lines continue to echo in my head, and I know that I will read it again in a year or two, as well, when hopefully things are a little better.

—Anna

The Best of the Rest of 2014

Dec30 by Kinsey

I’ve said here before that when I read a really great book, I am so excited to share it with people that I immediately write a blog review. Hence, my short list of the best things I read this year would be The Goldfinch, The Signature of All Things, Love, Nina, and Americanah. (I was looking at the list of the books I read this year and wondering why it was so much shorter than last year–I read about 45 books this year, rather than my typical 80-100. Maybe it’s because I spent half the year reading giant doorstop literary novels that took forever? At least most of them were good; let’s just not talk about The Luminaries.)

But I did read a few other things in 2014 that I loved but that never made an appearance here. So before this year runs away from us entirely, let me put in my vote for a few more things:

1) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

I have a love for the first Bridget Jones book that I cannot explain. I just think it’s brilliant and is working on about four different levels and I still reread it once a year. Even Helen Fielding would probably admit that the second one went off the rails a bit, but I really, really enjoyed this third Bridget installment. Rather than picking up where things left off, the book ages Bridget and puts her in an entirely different situation. Bridget is still recognizable, but she’s gown up a little, and as predictable as the book was, I found it charming and surprisingly touching.

2) Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

I am kind of obsessed with the Soviet Union, but I find it really difficult to find things to read about it. Nonfiction books tend to be incredibly dense, academic tomes along the lines of “and then that other diplomat issued a statement that countered the previous statement . . . ” And fiction tends to be unbearably dark, which is understandable but difficult to read (Child 44, you still give me nightmares). This memoir uses food–from pre-revolutionary excess to the siege of Leningrad to Soviet institutional cafeterias–to show how the Soviet state affected the everyday life of it’s citizens. And it shows how one family rebelled against that state, at least partly through food. Really charming, although I’m not likely to cook any of the recipes provided.

3) Meaty

If you are not already reading the website Bitches Gotta Eat, you should go do so immediately, because it is one of the funniest things on the Internet (assuming you’re over 18–if you’re not, please go look in our YA tag for something more appropriate, because this sure isn’t). Meaty is a collection of essays by Samantha Irby, who writes the site, and it is equally funny. However, I should warn you that she uses the essay format to also tell some less funny stories about her life, including one about her mother that was so sad it made me put the book away in a drawer for several months so I could recover. But the funny stories are really funny, the sad stories are stunning, and Irby definitely deserves a bigger outlet than she’s gotten so far.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Dec27 by Rebecca

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
2010
Read by Judith Brackley

This was an interesting look into the both the rare book collecting community and the criminal mentality as a journalist recounts her research into an unrepentant book thief and the book seller who tracked him down to bring to justice.

It reminded me of a combination of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, with its quirky book lovers, and The Art of the Steal, with its discussions of how con jobs and thefts are both implemented and guarded against. With a side of Marching Powder, with it’s unpleasant main character who just gets less sympathetic the more he tries to explain his perspective.

And actually, regarding that last bit, Gilkey’s (the thief) attempts at gaining sympathy and explaining his rational is so crazy that even the Bartlett (the journalist) is completely taken aback by it. But she’s still more accepting of it than I am, to the extent that her writing almost reads like an unreliable narrator as she first recounts a conversation verbatim and then describes how he still seems like such a nice, polite guy… and I’m going: nope!

But it’s still quite fascinating and does make me want to visit a rare book convention and see the stalls where different book sellers set up with their books with prices that range from less than a $100 to more than $100K.

Books You Already Knew I Was Going To Tell You To Read

Dec23 by Kinsey

I was on the road quite a bit in December and read a whole pile of books I enjoyed. But none of them quite seemed to warrant their own review, since none of them are going to come as a surprise to anyone who’s spent any time here. So a list seems appropriate, so I get to mention a few things that I heartily, if predictably, recommend:

1) Landline by Rainbow Rowell. I saw Rainbow Rowell speak in person earlier this fall, and that woman is made up entirely of curly hair and charisma, and the stories she told about writing this book had the audience literally screaming with laughter. This is no Eleanor and Park, but I’m not sure my heart could handle another one of those, so this story about a marriage and a magic telephone will do just fine.

2) Dreams of God and Monsters by Laini Taylor. Quite a while back on the blog I mentioned the first book in this trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. That book was your fairly standard YA, magical realism, independent female narrator, star-crossed lover sort of story. And then book two, man, book two took a turn. It got dark and weird and tragic and bloody, and I actually put off starting the third one for months because I was scared of where things might go. But I ended up really liking how the story resolved, and I promise you, you have not read anything like this.

3) One Plus One by Jojo Moyes. I’ve already raved about Me Before You and The Girl You Left Behind, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that Moyes’s latest was equally heart lifting/breaking. (Note, because I know my readers: don’t worry too much about the dog. It will work out.)

4) The Secret Place by Tana French. This wasn’t my favorite of the Dublin Murder Squad novels–that would be The Likeness–but it was a compelling read. While the plot and mystery of this one didn’t grab me the way some of them have, it still delivered on the two things I think Tana French does best–unsympathetic but fascinating characters, and a romance-free vision of modern-day Ireland.

All Seated on the Ground

Dec21 by Anna

By Connie Willis

Years ago, author Connie Willis released a collection of delightful Christmas-themed scifi stories called Miracle. The two best stores are considered annual reading in my family: one is about a woman who gets “haunted” by a Christmas spirit that insists on granting her heart’s desire; the other is about an invasion of puppet-master type aliens during Christmastime. My extremely brief summaries here do not at all capture how funny these two stories are, which is what makes them so wonderful (not all the stories in the book are funny, and be warned, when Connie Willis goes serious, she goes very serious indeed.).

Then, in 2011, Willis released the novella “All Seated on Ground,” which I put off reading due to my dislike of novellas (they always seem both too short and too long), even though it sounded like it recaptures the tone from her earlier Christmas stories. Unfortunately, I felt that it recaptured her earlier writing a little too much, becoming a bit of a retread. Once again, aliens have come to earth, but in this scenario, they have landed and then proceeded to stand around, saying nothing but glaring disapprovingly, while an array of academics and politicians attempt to communicate with them. This has been going o for nine months until just before Christmas, when they react to something for the first time by promptly sitting down upon hearing the line “all seated on the ground” in a Christmas carol.

The novella then follows the rush to determine what they are reacting to and what their reaction is trying to communicate. I love the idea of having to deal with disapproving aliens on top of all the other holiday stresses, but the implementation was just so similar to some of Willis’ other stories that while it was still quite funny, it was just not as surprisingly funny as some of her earlier work.

—Anna

P.S. – In case you are looking for a quick holiday-themed distraction at work, may I recommend Cracked’s “6 Things People Get Wrong About the Bible’s Christmas Story”? This line made me snort on the metro: “It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that the magi began to be described as kings, largely to make the New Testament story better match the Old Testament messiah prophecies, and probably because ‘kings’ sounded better than ‘magical spice perverts’.”

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Dec11 by Anna

By Sheryl Sandberg

So, clearly, there has been a ton of buzz about this book, which tends to turn me off a bit, but when it came up at Rebecca’s work, we decided to bite the bullet and read it (I just beat her to it here on the blog). I entered with super low expectations—I had imagined some sort of 80’s powersuit, dog-eat-dog type of guide—but I have to admit that I very quickly changed my mind.

After reading the introduction, where Sandberg directly addresses how complicated and potentially problematic it can be to try to give blanket professional advice to women across all lifestyle choices and financial situations, I thought, okay, this might not be so bad. After the first couple chapters, I started to find points relevant to my own work behavior, and by a third of the way through, I was completely sold on Sandberg.

Now, I did have to tailor the advice to my own situation, of course. I am not a particularly aggressive or ambitious person, pretty much directly opposite to Sandberg herself, but one of the most important take-aways for me was guidance on how to work with aggressive and ambitious people (especially being vigilant about not letting cultural indoctrination lead me to react poorly to women in particular being this way).

So, I guess I’m just jumping on the very crowded bandwagon to say that this book is both a worthwhile read and actually a pretty entertaining one, as well. (In the acknowledgments page, she thanks her editor “who never heard an anecdote that couldn’t be expanded on” and I’d like to extend my thanks to her, too, since I love a good anecdote!) So even if you don’t think it is your type of book, you may very well enjoy it.

—Anna