james s a corey

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: 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.)

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!)