guy gavriel kay

Reading Round-Up: June & July 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

Two months’ worth of reading in one post today. Here are the books I spent my time with so far this summer.

June:

  • Glamorous Powers (Susan Howatch)
  • LaserWriter II (Tamara Shopsin)
  • Rattle #72 — Tribute to Appalachian Poets
  • What If? (Randall Munroe)
  • The Anthropocene Reviewed (John Green)
  • The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
  • Ultimate Prizes (Susan Howatch)

July:

  • Mrs. Sherlock Holmes (Brad Ricca)
  • Alice Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
  • All the Seas in the World (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Second Sleep (Robert Harris)
  • Rattle #73 — Tribute to Indian Poets
  • Ragnarok (A S Byatt)
  • Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (Stephen King)
  • Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (Dolly Parton)
  • Rattle #74 — Tribute to Prisoner Express
  • Leviathan Wakes (James S A Corey)
  • The Holiday Swap (Maggie Knox)

I quail a bit at the thought of finding something to say about all of these at once — but let’s see if I can give them each a sentence or so, anyway. Working back to front:

The Holiday Swap was light and charming, which was a nice palate cleanser after Leviathan Wakes, which blew my mind (if you like detective noir and/or space opera, give it a go!). Dolly Parton is funnier than I knew, Rita Hayworth and the Etc. was better than the already excellent movie it inspired, and it was nice to encounter Norse mythology in a non-MCU setting in Byatt’s Ragnarok. The Second Sleep fell a little flat for me at the end but was still worth reading (don’t look up any blurbs or synopses for this one, just read to the end of Ch. 2 and you’ll know if you want to continue). All the Seas in the World made me cry more than once, Alice Through the Looking Glass was enticingly zany, and Mrs. Sherlock Holmes‘s interesting subject matter was thoroughly let down by its structural issues and terrible writing.

Moving on to June. Ultimate Prizes is another excellent exemplar of the Starbridge series, but best to start from the beginning with these. The Joy Luck Club was much more moving than when I read it in high school, and The Anthropocene Reviewed was tender and sincere. I only finished What If? by occasionally wrestling it out of Anselm’s hands (we keep renewing it and he’s read the whole thing through, oh, at least eight times). LaserWriter II had its own post here, and Glamorous Powers requires a brief suspension of disbelief re. psychic powers but hangs together well if you can get over that.

Rattle continues to be one of the best poetry magazines out there. The issues blend together in my mind, of course, but all of them have their share of turned-down corners marking poems that particularly touched me for one reason or another.

On deck for August: I’m eagerly awaiting Susan Howatch’s Scandalous Risks (coming via Inter-Library Loan and so arriving anytime between now and next year, apparently) and Caliban’s War, the book that follows Leviathan Wakes. Hurry up, library! (My friend Rebecca put me on to this series & has resorted to buying some of the books when the library holds list was too long — after reading Leviathan Wakes I understand the impulse!)

Reading Round-Up: January 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

Ah, the first books of 2022! It was a big month for fiction in general and fantasy in particular. And you know that thing where you discover a new author, and you enjoy the first book of theirs you read, and then you decide to just read… all of them? Yes, that. Here’s the rundown:

  • Princess Academy (Shannon Hale)
  • Princess Academy: Palace of Stone (Shannon Hale)
  • Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters (Shannon Hale)
  • Austenland (Shannon Hale)
  • Midnight in Austenland (Shannon Hale)
  • Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch)
  • Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold)
  • Welcome to Dunder Mifflin (Brian Baumgartner and Ben Silverman)
  • The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Wandering Fire (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Darkest Road (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Postman (David Brin) *did not finish

My kids love Shannon Hale’s early reader series, The Princess in Black [and the yada yada] and I thought I’d try out her Princess Academy series, which is more middle grade. It’s nothing like you’re probably assuming from the name, and all three books were great reads. (And fast — there’s nothing like reading three novels in three days to make you feel like you’re starting the year off right!) Miri lives a simple life with her father and sister on a Mount Eskel, where her village mines for valuable linder stone. But when a prophecy reveals that the next heir to the throne will marry a girl from her village, Miri finds herself in the “princess academy” from which the prince will choose a bride in a year’s time. Needless to say, things don’t turn out to be as straightforward as advertised. This was a really enjoyable little trilogy.

Austenland is one of Hale’s adult novels, a light romance set at an exclusive — like, sign-an-NDA-exclusive — Jane Austen-themed retreat where staff and guests live a fully immersive Regency-era experience (albeit with indoor plumbing). Pride and Prejudice-obsessed New Yorker Jane Hayes is gifted a fortnight at the retreat courtesy of her aunt, who hopes that it will help Jane to sort out her romantic ideals. Guests at Pembrook Park can enjoy some genteel flirting with the actors who fill out the scene — but where is the line between handsome “Mr Nobley” and the man who plays him? And is he in love with “Miss Erstwhile,” her Regency-era alternate identity, or with Jane herself? It’s a light, fun read.

I went into Midnight in Austenland blind, expecting more of the above. It’s still a quasi-Regency romance set at Pembrook Park, with some recurring characters as well as a new protagonist — but it’s also a creepy murder mystery, complete with actual corpse. Um, what? Still enjoyable, but it also kind of gave me whiplash.

Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet is definitely the most fascinating book I read this month. McCulloch is a linguist with a particular interest in informal writing, something that we’ve never really been able to study at any sort of scale until the advent of the internet. Why do some people think it’s passive-aggressive to punctuate the end of text messages? What’s with the parallel evolution of emoticons and emojis? How did we start using ~sparkle text~ for irony and the “/s” tag for sarcasm? Why do Boomers capitalize so much of their messages (LOL)? How (and why) do memes work? Gretchen McCulloch will tell you!

Cryoburn is either the 15th or 18th or 22nd installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s sprawling Vorkosigan saga, depending on if you’re counting in internal chronology or publication order, and whether or not you think short stories or only novels count as “installments”. At any rate, it’s well towards the end of the series, and of the read-through I started back in the fall. I don’t even know where to begin in terms of summing things up, but it’s all glorious space opera, and if you’re a sci-fi fan even a little, they’re worth your time. Start with either Cordelia’s Honor or The Warrior’s Apprentice.

Welcome to Dunder Mifflin was my only other foray into the nonfiction section this month; it’s a collected oral history of The Office drawn from interviews conducted by Brian Baumgartner for his podcast… The Oral History of the Office (hmm). I’d listened to most of the podcast so there wasn’t really any new information in the book for me, but hey, at least there were pictures.

The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road make up Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. I was first introduced to these books, and to Kay’s writing, when I was assigned The Summer Tree as an independent reading project in grade nine (thank you, Mrs. R), and I scored an omnibus edition at a library book sale when I was in undergrad. He is one of my favourite fantasy authors now, and this trilogy has been a companion of mine for many years. The story begins when five Toronto men and women go to hear a public lecture at UofT’s Convocation Hall — but are then summoned by the mage Loren Silvercloak to his home world, the world from which all worlds are spun, Fionavar. Although they are only supposed to be there for a week or two, as an exotic present for a reigning king, they are quickly drawn into magic, intrigue, and a desperate war against the fallen god, Rakoth Maugrim. It’s fantastic stuff.

Finally, The Postman by David Brin. I don’t usually keep track of books that I don’t finish, but I read enough (about 2/3rds, plus the last chapter) that I think it counts. The Postman is a post-acpocalyptic novel set in the United States around the turn of the millennium. After years of pandemics, nuclear attacks, and civil skirmishes, what’s left of the country has dissolved into small pockets of survivors: communes, nascent fiefdoms, dens of burglars, and lone wanderers. Gordon Krantz is one such wanderer, who comes across a USPS uniform in Oregon, dons it, and begins conning a nation back into being. The Postman has been made into a movie and won a whole bunch of awards, and I wanted to like it. But while the concept is very interesting, I found the writing clunky and dated, and Brin kept bringing his characters to the brink of action and then using chapter breaks to fast-forward right past it. Great idea, less than stellar execution. This was a disappointing read.

And that’s a wrap!

Reading Round-Up: October 2018

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

As it’s November 15th, this post is pretty belated compared to usual — nevertheless, here’s a look at what I read in October:

  1. Small Animals: Parenting in the Age of Fear (Kim Brooks)
  2. Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik)
  3. Mandy (Julie Andrews Edwards)
  4. Step Aside, Pops! (Kate Beaton)
  5. Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices that can Transform Your Life and Relationships (Curt Thompson)
  6. The Fourth Bear (Jasper Fforde)
  7. The Last Light of the Sun (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Small Animals was already treated in its own post.

My only other nonfiction read last month was Dr. Curt Thompson’s Anatomy of the Soul, which took me most of the month to get through, reading it piecemeal in between other things. I will be the first to admit that the title makes it sound like total New Age woo-woo, but the opposite, in fact, is true. This book is a fascinating peek into developments in neuroscience related to the brain’s relative plasticity (or ability to change over time, something that was once thought impossible), attachment theory, and their intersection with traditional Christian spiritual disciplines/practices. Thompson talks a lot about how the way that things functioned in our families of origin can follow through our lives — unhealthy relationship patterns, modes of (non)communication, etc. — and how we can actually re-wire our brains with an understanding of how they work and the help of the Holy Spirit. He includes many exercises which one can complete singly in small groups. I think it’s a tremendously useful book for anyone who feels stuck in old patterns; it is helpful and hope-full. Even with that title.

For the rest of October, I glutted myself on fiction. Hey, sometimes a girl just needs to read about some fantasy Vikings, you know? In no particular order:

Mandy is another children’s novel by Julie Andrews Edwards, which I grabbed from the library after re-reading her The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles back in late September. It’s a sweet tale of an orphan girl named Mandy, who discovers a cottage on the estate abutting her orphanage. She determines to fix it up herself as a secret place, but trouble starts when her best friend wants to know where she goes by herself. There is a lot of good reflection on friendship, truth-telling, and similar moral lessons without ever being heavy-handed about it. And of course, the requisite happy ending!

I picked up a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at a thrift store, in part because I already own The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and thought I might as well make it a set, and in part because I hadn’t read it since grade nine or so and wanted to give it another go. This is a controversial novel, not least because of its copious use of the n-word to describe Jim and the other slaves who appear in its page. Does having racist characters  make it a racist book? I don’t know. Certainly the reader is brought on a journey with Huck as his eyes are opened to Jim’s fundamental humanity and they embark on what I do think is a real friendship. Twain shows us a lot of racial ugliness, but I don’t think he condones it. It’s a funny book, and a profoundly sad one in many ways as well. I had forgotten, however, that Tom Sawyer is an insufferable twit — I’m glad that he was only present in the last few chapters.

Guy Gavriel Kay is a Canadian fantasy writer whose work I have read and admired for many years; The Last Light of the Sun takes place among the aforementioned fantasy Vikings, as well as the Celts. And the Britons. And fairies. And lots, lots of bloody swordfighting. The Last Light of the Sun is set in the same world as The Lions of al-Rassan (one of Kay’s absolute best, for my money) and the duology of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors.

Step Aside, Pops! is a collection of Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant comics, which have stopped running but are still accessible on her website. It’s mostly historical and literary silliness; here’s Charlie and the Marvelous Turnip Factory, and some Canadian stereotypes.

Jasper Fforde writes some wonderful books — I first found him through the (incredible) Thursday Next series, which starts with The Eyre Affair and goes on for… another five? or six? I’ve lost count. Anyway, he has also written a spin-off series of Nursery Crime novels, featuring detective Jack Spratt and a zany crew of literary costars, including an incredibly dull alien named Ashley (aliens have come to earth and it turns out that they are boring). The Fourth Bear involves a missing journalist known as Goldilocks, human/bear political machinations, a giant homicidal gingerbread-man, and nuclear cucumbers. It’s a fun ride.

Last, but certainly not least, we come to Spinning Silver, the latest of Naomi Novik’s fairy-tale-esque books. I read her Uprooted a few months ago, and promptly put Spinning Silver onto my library holds list. It’s a broad retelling/resetting of the Rumpelstiltskin story, with ice fairies and fire demons and it was so immersive that I read it in a day, and probably would have read it in one sitting if I hadn’t had to keep stopping to do things like feed my children. As one does. Spinning Silver was perhaps even better than Uprooted — and that, I think, is saying something.