rattle

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: 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!)