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Reading Round-Up: April 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion / Leave a comment

April reading brings May rehash: let’s get right to it, shall we?

  • The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Brandon Sanderson)
  • Ramona the Brave (Beverly Cleary)
  • Negotiating with the Dead (Margaret Atwood)
  • The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher)
  • Standing in the Rainbow (Fannie Flagg)
  • Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi (Christine Pennylegion)
  • Stranger Planet (Nathan W. Pyle)
  • Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
  • Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven (Fannie Flagg)
  • The Whole Town’s Talking (Fannie Flagg)
  • These Old Shades (Georgette Heyer)

First this month was BrandoSando’s delightful The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, a slightly bonkers multi-dimensional-travel blank-room novel; by “blank-room” I mean that when the book opens the protagonist has no idea who or where he is, à la Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) or Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold). John wakes up in what appears to be medieval England — except that magic appears to be real, as are the Norse gods. Mistaken for an aelv, he’s captured by the local lord and things only get crazier from there. It’s funny; I enjoyed it. This was the second release from Sanderson’s four-book kickstarter campaign last year, and so far I’ve been very glad that I bought in!

Ramona the Brave is a bit of an outlier on this list. I’ve been reading through the Ramona series with the kids at bedtime, and normally I don’t keep track of the books I read to the children, because that list would get out of control very quickly. But I enjoyed this one so much that I read ahead about five chapters on my own to finish it, so I think that counts! Cleary’s books hold up very well, and it’s been a pleasure to share Ramona, companion of my childhood imagination, with my own kids.

Negotiating with the Dead is one of Atwood’s nonfiction offerings, a book about writers and writing that was constructed around a series of lectures she gave about twenty years ago. I think I’ll be buying a copy of this one at some point; it’s a retrospective on her own career, but it’s also a fascinating meditation on the writing life and the writer’s social role (or lack thereof). There is also a very interesting discussion of the duality of authorship — of being at the same time the “Margaret Atwood” of literary fame, and the “Peggy Gibson” of her regular life. Fascinating stuff.

Also a memoir, albeit of a very different sort, Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist revolves around the filming of the first Star Wars movie and her long-rumoured love affair with Harrison Ford. It contains excerpts from the diaries she kept at the time, along with a lot of terrible teenage poetry (no shade; I’ve got a few piles of that myself). More interesting to me, however, were her accounts of growing up in the shadow of her parents’ fame, and the ways that celebrity has affected her own life and sense of self, for good and ill.

About midway through the month, I was paging through my book log — or perhaps it just fell open, I’m not sure — and I found my list from April 2019, which included a couple of novels by Fannie Flagg, which reminded me how much I enjoy novels by Fannie Flagg. (My poor working memory is about 80% of the reason that I keep this log.) So I read some! Standing in the Rainbow and Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! were both new to me, and I accidentally read them out of order, which honestly didn’t matter particularly much. Both these and the two others (Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven and The Whole Town’s Talking) are set in the fictional town of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, although a good part of Welcome takes place in NYC. They’re definitely character-driven books — I mean, they have plots, but the plots are certainly not the narrative driver — and I’ve enjoyed seeing how Flagg further opens up the interior and exterior lives of Elmwood Springs’s inhabitants with every sequel. The timelines in each book overlap with the others, and it’s a pretty deft trick to interweave them without too many inconsistencies. (There were several errors in The Whole Town’s Talking, which Flagg’s copyeditor should have caught, but none of them were of narrative-ruining size.)

When I was preparing Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi for publication, I must have skimmed through it half a dozen times getting the formatting and everything set up. But it had been many years since I actually sat down and properly read it straight through, as if someone else had written it. It might not have been since after my thesis defense, in 2016, now that I think on it. Anyway; I read through it and I thought it was pretty good. Ha.

Stranger Planet is Nathan W. Pyle’s second comic collection featuring the “Beings,” a charming race of aliens who live in a world very much like our own — but different. The kids love these comics, especially Anselm, for the way Pyle makes the ordinary stuff of our lives whimsical and unfamiliar through clever renaming. Toast? That’s a twice heatblasted doughslice. Smoke alarm? That’s a hot danger screamer. Coffee? Hot jitter liquid — not to be confused with my beverage of choice, hot leaf liquid. Kissing is mouthpushing. Salad is a leafbucket. It’s all wonderfully silly; here’s the (very relatable) comic that started it all.

To finish off April, I read Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades, which takes place somewhat earlier than most of her novels, in this case, in Paris and England during the reign of King Louis XV. Lord Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon and notorious for his debauchery, is quite literally run into in the street by a peasant urchin fleeing a difficult family situation. Instantly captivated by Léon’s distinct colouring, Alastair buys the youth into his service — setting off an insane chain of events involving mistaken identity, kidnapping, unrequited love, and all sorts of nefarious plots. It’s quite the romp. These Old Shades is the first in a series of four; the next book, Devil’s Cub, takes place about twenty years later and features Alastair’s son. I didn’t realize it was a series, and in fact I read the third book, Regency Buck, many years ago. Perhaps it’s time to revisit it.

Reading Round-Up: March 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion

I don’t know why I wait so long to write these round-up posts. No; sometimes that’s a lie, actually. I know exactly why it’s taken me so long this month, and it mostly boils down to “I’m doing other things and these take more brain than I want to expend right now.” What can I say? April’s been busy. But at any rate, here’s what I read last month:

  • A Wizard’s Dilemma (Diane Duane)
  • A Wizard Alone (Diane Duane)
  • Wizard’s Holiday (Diane Duane)
  • Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton)
  • Wizards at War (Diane Duane)
  • Uncanny Valley (Anna Wiener)
  • A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane)
  • The Blue Castle (L. M. Montgomery)
  • Games Wizards Play (Diane Duane)
  • Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Mary Norris)
  • Rattle #79 — Tribute to Irish Poets
  • Millionaire Teacher (2nd ed.) (Andrew Hallam)

These five Diane Duane novels took me to the end of her Young Wizards series (until/unless she writes more of them). I’ve been reading library copies the whole way through, but for some reason my local system doesn’t have Games Wizards Play — which is too old for me to suggest as a recommended title. Since ILL seems to take a thousand years — long enough that, on more than one occasion, I’ve had no memory of having ordered a book when it finally shows up — I just bought my own copy. It was a very satisfying cap on the series; I also particularly enjoyed A Wizard of Mars. I’ll read these again one day, when I’ve forgotten about all of the weird chronology issues.

Also on the fiction end of things, I greatly enjoyed my reread of The Blue Castle, which is probably one of my favourites of all of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels. I first read it in 2017 as part of my LMM reading project, and I’ll let my post from that time serve to sum it up.

March was another memoir-heavy month. I posted briefly about Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, which was… moderately interesting, but not a standout to me.

Kate Beaton’s Ducks, a memoir of the years she spent working to pay off her student loans in Canada’s oil fields, on the other hand, was engrossing, beautiful, and agonizing. It’s a monster tome of a graphic… memoir (I wanted to day graphic novel, but of course it’s not fiction; it’s told in comics, however we might label that in terms of genre), beautifully written and illustrated. Beaton doesn’t shy away from the complexities of the oil fields: tensions between homegrown Albertans and the economic migrants who come to work there from both inside and outside of Canada, the frigid beauty of the north, the perils of being a woman in work camps where well over 90% of the population is male, the tensions between economic necessities and environmental impacts, the way we sometimes find family when and where we least expect to. Even before I finished Ducks I found myself paging back to read some sections over again. (NB: Sensitive readers should be aware that her narrative deals with multiple sexual assaults.)

Last of the March memoirs, I devoured Mary Norris’s Between You & Me. Norris is a copyeditor for The New Yorker: she’s a style and grammar wizard as may be expected and also, it turns out, hilarious. This one’s great fun, and not just for language nerds. (Bonus: her wonderful Comma Queen video series.)

This quarter’s issue of Rattle featured Irish poets in its latter half — some really lovely poems in the there.

And last but not least, I read Andrew Hallam’s Millionaire Teacher. This is one I constantly see recommended on personal finance-orientrd social media and I wish I had read it when I was eighteen. (Admittedly this would have been quite a trick given that it wasn’t published until 2017.) While I was already broadly familiar with a lot of the concepts he covered, there were some new ideas in there for me, and I found the book extremely informative and digestible without ever being dry. Also I know how to rebalance a portfolio now, so that’s something. Highly recommended.

Reading Round-Up: January 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

2023 already! Preposterous. I suppose I should be getting used to it given that we’re now into February, but there’s a certain part of me that perpetually expects it to still be 2002, and yet another part that’s sure it’s March 1,129th 2020. Time is, as they say, out of joint… but at least there have been things to read in the meantime. Here’s what I got through last month:

  • Tress of the Emerald Sea (Brandon Sanderson)
  • The Dutch House (Ann Patchett)
  • The Running-Shaped Hole (Robert Earl Stewart)
  • Playing Under the Piano (Hugh Bonneville)
  • Rattle no. 78 — Poetry Prize Finalists
  • Smashwords Style Guide (Mark Coker)
  • Persepolis Rising (James S A Corey)
  • Tiamat’s Wrath (James S A Corey)
  • Leviathan Falls (James S A Corey)
  • Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (Sofija Stefanovic)
  • Art Matters (Neil Gaiman)
  • Boys and Girls Together (William Goldman)
  • The Trouble with Goats and Sheep (Joanna Cannon)

I was delighted to start the year with Tress of the Emerald Sea. In early March 2021, Brandon Sanderson announced that over the shutdowns in 2020 he had written a full four novels in secret, in addition to his scheduled output on previously-announced projects. He launched them in a record-setting kickstarter campaign, and I bought in at the ebook tier; Tress was the first of the quarterly book releases. It ties in with his Cosmere novels in a small way, and was also thoroughly delightful as its own thing.

Early in January — or possibly late in December — I listened to an interview with Ann Patchett on the Spark & Fire podcast about writing The Dutch House and I immediately put a library hold on it. It was beautiful and sad and completely engrossing, and I spent a large part of a Saturday morning reading it on the couch. Lovely.

And speaking of engrossing, I finally finished the last three full-length installments of Corey’s “The Expanse” series, which… wow. It wrapped up in a really satisfying way that dealt with some of the big questions raised all the way back at the beginning of the series and felt true to established characterization. These three books took over my life for about a week, as this screenshot from my phone’s screentime report testifies:

On the other end of the enjoyment scale, we find Boys and Girls Together, which was an absolute stinker. The blurb billed it as a coming-of-age story about five friends putting on a play in NYC. It turned out to be 600+ pages of thoroughly unlikeable people behaving incredibly nastily to one another, and the only one worth rooting for (spoiler alert) kills himself in the penultimate chapter. I honestly don’t know why I finished it; I think I was waiting for it to get better, only it never did.

I did get one good thing out of Boys and Girls Together, though — well, sort of. It’s this little excerpt from Goldman’s foreword to the novel:

Anyway, the day I was done I was alone in the house and stared at “the end” when I wrote those blessed words, got up, went outside to the backyard, where we had a child’s swing set up for our daughter Jenny, then all of a year. I sat in it, smoking, and suddenly I had this realization:

I had told all my stories.

Every one.

I sat there thinking it couldn’t be true, because that would mean the end for me as a writer, then luckily I remembered the story of the mother who dressed her son in her clothes …

No, I’d put that in the novel, given it to Branch.

I went through them all and I’d given them all away. That’s my chief memory of that afternoon, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. (I did not realize at the time that two years down the line, in that same university town, over Christmas vacation, these two outlaws named Butch and Sundance would ride up from South America to save me.)

William Goldman, foreword to Boys and Girls Together

It’s a good reminder not to hoard our best ideas, and to trust the creative process in the hope/knowledge that once they’re spent, there will be new best ideas in their place.

The creative process brings us to Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters, which is a pocket-sized collection of four or five of his most popular essays, charmingly illustrated by Chris Riddell. It took less than ten minutes to read in its entirety, and if I had paid the suggested Canadian list price for such skimpy content — $24.99 as I recall — I would have been pretty annoyed. As it was a library copy, it was fine, but I will note that all of its contents are available separately elsewhere.

I love a good memoir, and last month’s reading featured three: The Running-Shaped Hole, Playing Under the Piano, and Miss Ex-Yugoslavia — all very different and all enjoyable in their own ways. The Running-Shaped Hole had the extra excitement of taking place in a city I know, which always brings out my inner Pointing Rick Dalton:

The Smashwords Style Guide is exactly what it says on the tin: if you want to format a Word file for Smashwords’ automatic conversion to epub format, this will tell you how. I learned some new tricks with MS Word, which is good I guess? Not much to say about this one, or about the latest issue of Rattle, except that it remains one of the best poetry magazines going.

Finally, I closed out January with Joanna Cannon’s wonderful The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. Set during the great UK heatwave of 1976, the residents of a council estate gradually give up their secrets as ten-year-old friends Grace and Tillie try to find out why Mrs Creasy has disappeared, and also, if they can manage it, where God has gotten to. Cannon’s prose is beautiful, if occasionally a little hard to believe in Grace’s first-person chapters, and the whole thing wraps up on an ambiguous note that still has me thinking it over a week later. Excellent stuff.

Reading Round-Up: November & December 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

It’s always hard to judge when I should start writing up my December round-up post. As we edge past Christmas and toward the new year, I start to wonder: can I finish this last book by the 31st? Should I wait until January? The answer for 2022 is a definite no — I’ve got a good 400 pages to go and that is not happening today. So without further ado, my last two months of reading:

November:

  • Mary Poppins Returns (P. L. Travers)
  • The Burning Page (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Lost Plot (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Mortal Word (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Secret Chapter (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Dark Archive (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Untold Story (Genevieve Cogman)

December:

  • Shepherds Abiding (Jan Karon)
  • How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind (Dana K. White)
  • Something Wilder (Christina Lauren)
  • Rattle #77 — Tribute to Translation
  • A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
  • The Firm (John Grisham)
  • Decluttering at the Speed of Life (Dana K. White)
  • The Machine Stops (E. M. Forster)

After reading P. L. Travers’s sequel to Mary Poppins, which was as bizarre and delightful as the first, I dove headfirst into the rest of Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library series (I read the first one in October). This was an incredibly engrossing series, and I was very happy that my library had electronic copies of all of them so that I never had to wait for the next one! It wrapped up in a very satisfying way, tying up the loose ends and following through on clues established all the way back in the first book. A++ would read again.

I started December in a Christmassy mood with Jan Karon’s Shepherds Abiding, a shorter addition to the Mitford canon. Father Tim works on restoring an antique Nativity crèche as a surprise for his wife, as he and the other Mitford residents prepare to celebrate Christmas. It’s sweet and comfortable reading, just like the rest of Karon’s sprawling series. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol scratched a similar itch for me — though no matter how often I read it or watch one of the film adaptations, the Tiny Tim switcheroo still makes me cry.

Something Wilder was a departure from Christina Lauren’s usual M.O., which was surprising and fun. It’s still a romance, but it’s also a thriller involving puzzles, manslaughter, multiple gunfights and hostage situations, and searching for Butch Cassidy’s lost treasure stash in Utah’s labyrinthine slot canyons. It certainly was “something wilder” and I hope to read more from Lauren in this vein. 

The Machine Stops was simultaneously one of the best and the very worst book I read this month. Forster’s sci-fi novella was first published in 1909 and is set in a world where humanity’s needs are wholly provided for and overseen by a vast Machine. All of human experience is mediated by the Machine, and the story’s parallels to a world dominated by social media and the almighty algorithms are… spookily prescient.  That’s what made it one of the best books. It was the worst book this month because my edition had very obviously been neither copy edited nor proofread, and was absolutely riddled with errors. It was outrageously sloppy, and my reading experience was frustrating-bordering-on-enraging. (If you want to read a clean copy, there are several ebook formats available for free here.)

I enjoy Grisham novels, most of them at any rate — but especially in his earlier books like The Firm I can’t help but laugh/sigh at his hilariously terrible understanding and descriptions of female anatomy. This one contains gems like “The [woman’s] breasts were resting comfortably on the table” (just… what? no! those words don’t go together) and this absolute masterpiece:

She coughed, a hacking, irritating cough which reddened her face and gyrated her huge breasts until they bounced dangerously close to the typewriter keys.

Ladies, if you ever find your breasts gyrating off your keyboard — or anywhere else, for that matter — you need (1) a better bra and (2) to make an appointment with your doctor. 

Moving on!

The two Dana K. White books were really clutch for me this month. Clutter and organization is something I’ve struggled with my entire life, and I’ve tried and failed many different systems and methods over the years. But with Dana I’ve found something that just works for my brain, not just with the system she uses but also just helping me to reframe the way I think about these things. Like how it’s a process, not a project; and you can clean and declutter without making a bigger mess in the first place; and how the goal is not “finished” (house stuff will never be finished; I will be doing dishes and laundry for ever and ever amen) but “better” and “less”. And that sometimes (a lot of the time) the problem is not that we don’t have a good organizational system, the problem is that we just have too much stuff. On that note I took about seven boxes to Goodwill this month and have another two ready to go… and I don’t think anyone in the family has even noticed what’s left the house. (If that’s not a sure sign of “too much,” I don’t know what is!)

I’ve been recommending her books in person to people when it won’t come across as a passive-aggressive dig at the state of their home — but as I cannot see your home, dear reader, consider this recommendation a gift rather than censure. These books are so helpful. Start with How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.

Rattle, as ever, remains one of the best poetry magazines going, and well worth the annual subscription fee.

And that’s a wrap. Happy New Year!

Reading Round-Up: September & October 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

It’s fall! Chilly, leafy, busy busy busy fall. Since the beginning of September Anselm and Perpetua went back to school, we resumed all extracurricular activities, I relearned how to pack school lunches (can you believe I have to feed these kids every day?), I started a business, we all got covid, and we began our annual holiday gauntlet: birthday, Thanksgiving, birthday, Hallowe’en, All Saints, birthday, Advent, Christmas, phew! Also I started watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix and now literally all I want to do ever is watch it while crocheting.

Somewhere in between all that, I read some books… although it feels like I began and abandoned almost as many as I finished, particularly in October. It’s been a month since my bout of covid, and although it really felt just like a particularly bad cold at the time, I’m still struggling with a lot of lingering physical and mental fatigue. It’s not always easy to concentrate on a book, and I find it harder than usual to keep track of plot threads. So there were a lot of books where I read 20-70 pages or so and then put them away, and even more that I checked out of the library and then returned without ever cracking the cover. It was a weird month, you know? But anyway, here’s what I did get through:

September:

  • Run, Rose, Run (Dolly Parton and James Patterson)
  • A Life in Parts (Bryan Cranston)
  • Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls (Kaela Rivera)
  • Babylon’s Ashes (James S A Corey)
  • Available Light: Poems from the South Shore (Marty Gervais)
  • The Last Graduate (Naomi Novik)
  • What If? 2 (Randall Munroe)
  • The Lincoln Highway (Amor Towles)

October:

  • Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
  • Ajax Penumbra 1969 (Robin Sloan)
  • The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)
  • Mary Poppins (P. L. Travers)
  • The Invisible Library (Genevieve Cogman)
  • As You Wish (Cary Elwes with Joe Layden)
  • The Masked City (Genevieve Cogman)

One of the nice things about the lists above — and maybe this is a consequence of how many books I abandoned — is that I enjoyed every single book I finished over the past two months. Every one! So I can recommend all of them, although I will only single out a few in this post.

First on that list is Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library, which came to me as a thoroughly delightful surprise and was everything my reader-y heart desired. My local library branch had a shelf of paper-wrapped “mystery books” to choose from, and really, who could resist something like this?

Rare books, magic libraries, fairy tales, and steampunk? Oh be still, my beating heart. And there are eight in the series! Eight! Wonder of wonders.

Now, let’s see…

I reread Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate (the second book in her Scholomance trilogy) in preparation for the release of The Golden Enclaves. I’ve mentioned this series before, and now that it’s complete I recommend it even more wholeheartedly; Golden Enclaves was a remarkably satisfying end to the series. Novik does it again!

The Lincoln Highway is Amor Towles’s latest — he rose to fame with A Gentleman in Moscow, and rightly so. The Lincoln Highway follows young Emmett Watson, who is freshly released from juvenile detention for manslaughter and intends to begin a new life with his eight-year-old brother, Billy. But when he discovers that two of his former co-inmates have stowed away in his car, the story turns into a chase/heist narrative that felt like some version of Ocean’s 11 set in the mid-50s. Be warned, though: the ending is super-duper, unexpectedly sad.

I picked up Mary Poppins (actually an omnibus edition of the first four books) for bedtime stories, but I lost my voice partway though and haven’t gotten back to it as a read-aloud. I did keep reading on my own, however, and I’ve been particularly intrigued by how different they are than the Julie Andrews movie version we all know so well. The broad outlines of the story are the same, and Mary Poppins is still mysterious and magical — but where Andrews’s version is sweetness and light, the Mary Poppins of the books is vain, capricious, conceited, and wild. She is much less Disney’s good fairy and much more the Fae, changeable and fierce. I’m here for it.

Reading Round-Up: August 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

Oh, August. Is it the worst month of the year? Very probably. But at least there were books to read to take my mind off things:

  • Some Great Thing (Lawrence Hill)
  • Caliban’s War (James S. A. Corey)
  • Abbadon’s Gate (James S. A. Corey)
  • Nothing More Perfect (Marty Gervais)
  • The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass on Tour (Adrian Plass)
  • Cibola Burn (James S. A. Corey)
  • Nemesis Games (James S. A. Corey)
  • Book Lovers (Emily Henry)

At this point you may be sensing a theme. In August I continued my foray through James S. A. Corey’s sprawling “Expanse” series of sci-fi doorstops. The trouble with reading them all in a row is that they’ve blended together in my mind to a certain degree — which makes sense, I suppose, since they’re telling one big story. In the first book of the series, Leviathan’s Gate, humanity has populated the solar system but not beyond; the sudden and violent introduction of an alien virus/technology/something changes solar geopolitics (solarpolitics?) forever, as well as the lives of countless people on Earth and far beyond. In these further installments, Corey expands the original cast and continues to explore the political, scientific, and social ramifications of that upheaval, with the requisite amount of wacky sci-fi stuff, space battles, alien landscapes, etc. Interestingly, the focal shift from book to book also engenders a tonal shift. Nemesis Games was very personal and intimate, and included a lot of character backstories that I’d been dying to read. Abbadon’s Gate was a bloodbath, easily the goriest of the series so far. Cibola Burn was almost a settlement-of-the-West-style colonial narrative. I’m always curious to see how the next book is going to shift, as well as to find out what happens next in the overall story.

Nothing More Perfect is a short book of poems by Canadian poet Marty Gervais. They’re have a sweetness and a sincerity about them that a lot of contemporary poetry eschews, but it’s quite refreshing, actually.

Lawrence Hill rose to fame in Canada with his powerhouse of a novel, The Book of Negroes (American title: Someone Knows My Name), which won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, among others, and was later adapted as a mini-series. It wasn’t his first novel, however; that space is taken by Some Great Thing, which follows Mahatma Grafton, a cynical journalism graduate who moves back to Manitoba and takes a job with The Winnipeg Herald at the height of the controversy over official French-English bilingualism in the 1980s. It’s sharply-biting satire, and seriously funny.

Book Lovers delighted me, because it’s romance that plays with rom-com tropes in a brilliant and deliberate way. We all know the Hallmark type of story where the protagonist moves to a small town to support their ailing parent or bail out the family bakery or whatever, meets a wholesome hayseed, ditches their terrible career-focused city love interest, and lives happily ever after in Podunk, Wisconsin. But what happens to the person they left behind? Nora Stephens, a cut-throat New Yorker literary agent, has been dumped for the podunk life four times. Is lasting love just not possible for someone like her? (Spoiler alert: it is.) I also really appreciated that the things keeping the star-crossed love interests apart were not dumb romance tropes (She can’t admit she has amnesia! He’s really his own twin!) but simply the facts that life is complicated, practical circumstances can be big barriers, and sometimes you have to work through your own stuff before you’re healthy enough and ready enough to be with someone else. It’s a clever, clever book. Also quite smutty in parts. Reader be advised.

Adrian Plass on Tour is one of the “Sacred Diarist” series of short and hilarious novels by Adrian Plass (the author), featuring Adrian Plass (the character) and a bevy of his fictional friends and relations. In this installment, Adrian is going on tour as a Christian speaker, along with his wife Bridget, his son Gerald (now a wisecracking Anglican vicar), their irrepressibly-odd friend Leonard Thynn, and Thynn’s new girlfriend, the improbably-named Angels Twitten. Adrian Plass (actual person) is always a pleasure to read, now being enjoyed by a third generation in my family — my parents introduced me to his books, and I’ve introduced them to Anselm! They’re heartwarming as well as hilarious (The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn may be one of my all-time favourite books.)