January was a long cold month, which began in Montreal with friends staying for New Year. I flew to Florence right at the end of the month. I read twenty books, and on the whole they were excellent.
We Are the Perfect Girl — Ariel Kaplan (2019)
Version of Cyrano de Bergerac set in high school, and it really works. Very often putting an older story in a modern setting fails because the older story is obsessed with purity, the need to keep secrets, and restrictions on behaviour that modern people just don’t have. High school though, where people don’t tell each other how they feel, reputation is everything, and people have an unhealthy obsession with looks? Yeah. This story moves fast, has the emotion in the right place, and indeed manages to make Cyrano work in the modern world, while also doing interesting things with family dynamics and school athletics. Kaplan is great, this is the third book of hers I’ve read and I thought they were all excellent, gripping, and powerful.
Letters From an Imaginary Country — Theodora Goss (2025)
I was reading this new Goss collection to write an introduction for it, which I am still doing. Theodora Goss is one of the most vital, exciting people writing in genre right now, and you should be reading her. These stories are thought-provoking, numinous, and also fun. It’s incredibly great, even with the high expectations I had for it. Coming soon from Tachyon, with an intro by me saying what I’m about to say here: read this book, it’s amazing.
These Tangled Vines — Julianne MacLean (2021)
I thought this was a romance novel set in Italy, and it sort of is, but not really. A woman goes to Italy because her birth father has died, and she’s very close to the dad who brought her up, who is in a wheelchair because of an accident that happened in Italy before she was born. She finds out the truth of her conception and his accident, inherits a vineyard and a business, and meets her father’s other family. The only romance is back before she was born; she doesn’t meet a partner. It’s well-written and has a lot of good family dynamics, but also a lot of spoilt rich people.
The Bone Clocks — David Mitchell (2014)
Re-read. Gosh this is good. As it explains and resolves a lot of the metaphysics that’s going on in the background of the other books, it’s probably better to read this one last, and re-read the others afterwards in light of The Bone Clocks. I do not recommend starting here, I very much recommend getting here and having this reading experience. This book begins with a teenager in 1978 and ends with the same character as an old woman in the future about twenty years from now, extrapolating past the present of when it was written into its, and our, future. The future is dystopian but not as Luddite and nonsensical as the future parts of the disappointing Cloud Atlas. This book is both science fiction and fantasy, and I guess also horror in parts. But where it is best is its masterful use of point of view to illuminate life and history. The points of view here are all so different and so real and effective, the whole thing is a tour-de-force. There are situations here that are staples of the way stories are told, and then he uses the genre elements to do something utterly different with them. This is a thing I always say about genre—that you can tell better stories about human nature if you can contrast it with something else, or put it in different circumstances—and here we have a beautiful example of Mitchell doing just that.
Frederica — Georgette Heyer (1965)
Re-read, bath book. Frothy Regency romance about a girl who has come to London to give her beautiful sister a chance at a season and a better marriage, and wants to use her dead father’s rich but self-centred friend to help her in this project. Contains a hot air balloon, witty repartee, and much humour arising out of situation. The romance works surprisingly well, you can see how the two of them get through each other’s shells and then have to negotiate a way of admitting to themselves and each other that they are in love. There’s also a mildly funny bit with a dog which is the only thing anyone ever seems to mention about this book for some reason. Delightful.
Kate Hardy — D.E. Stevenson (1947)
A woman writer rents a little house in an English village, she stirs things up, and does not end up with the person you think she will end up with. Very slight, but a pleasant read.
Field Notes on Love — Jennifer E. Smith (2019)
Romance novel set… on a train! How could I resist a novel about people falling on love on Amtrak? And how can I resist nitpicking things like the fact that you don’t get lunch on the Lake Shore Limited unless it’s running very late, it gets to Chicago mid-morning—it’s due in at 9:15, I think. However, that said, this is an excellent book, where two young strangers about to go to college, one of them British, take a train ride across America, and discover that they like each other a lot… no, more than that. Also they meet lots of people on the train. This is very much in the “feel good” category of romance, and it really worked, it felt good. I especially liked Mae’s relationship with her grandma and her dads.
In the Courts of Memory, 1858-1875 — Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone (1912)
Free on Gutenberg. An American young lady with some talent for singing goes to Europe and meets and marries a rich American in France, where they make their life, visiting the court of Napoleon III (a lot) and other European courts. This is “from” letters, and it’s shaped like letters, but they’re not her authentic actual letters, they’ve been added to and edited by de Hegermann-Lindencrone at a later date. She’s an awful snob, and I found myself thinking she probably doesn’t sing as well as she tells us she does, but nevertheless this was an interesting angle on a moment of history. The best bit was during the Paris Commune when they’re holed up in their house in Paris as everything is going pear-shaped around them and there isn’t much room for her self-aggrandisement. I was much more interested in that than the charades they put on for the emperor and empress and how much everyone adored her singing.
One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross — Harry Kemelman (1987)
Another in the Rabbi Small mystery series; this one has a mystery set in the Israel of 1987, and it reads very oddly now, even though the story and the characters are as satisfying as ever, but because the world has changed so much from the world in which this was written.
Florence on a Certain Night — Coningsby Dawson (1914)
Free on Gutenberg. A collection of poems by a poet previously unknown to me. The title poem was great, the others tended to the mode of Victorian overly-sentimental views of death. Not sorry I read them, but won’t be seeking out more.
Love Your Life — Sophie Kinsella (2020)
Re-read. Romance novel set in Italy, that’s mostly about coming home from that sort of romance novel and trying to make two different people’s lives work together, which is hard work. It’s also very funny. I think this was my first Kinsella, and it was just as good as I remembered.
The Wednesday Wars — Gary D. Schmidt (2007)
Re-read, book club. Middle grade. Excellent story, set in the Sixties, of a boy and a teacher and Shakespeare and family and friendship. It’s a joy to see the way the protagonist responds to Shakespeare in such a real way. In the book club discussion, one participant explained that the teacher is Black, without this ever being mentioned specifically, but it is cued in various ways, most of which require you to know something about sport in the US. This changes the perspective on the story, but only makes it better. Highly recommended.
The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge — Vera Keller (2023)
In the generation before the Royal Society, Francis Bacon’s generation and a little before, people in England were beginning to experiment with all sorts of things, mostly in the attempt to make a profit. Some of them were Dutch. This “interloping” with various projects led to breaking down barriers between disciplines of knowledge and sometimes to things being discovered, but whether any specific thing worked or not, it led to a new attitude towards the world and towards finding out how things worked. Most of the book is details. It’s interesting in terms of how we think about Science and Discovery, and also of this historical moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The science fictional relevance is obvious.
Theory of Bastards — Audrey Schulman (2018)
Science fiction, about a scientist researching bonobos who has a theory. It’s different from most such, because the scientist is a woman with chronic pain who is recovering from recent surgery that might or might not have fixed her endometriosis. We see her whole life and career up to the point she goes to the research facility, and then things go on. It’s set in the near future, and there are many ways in which it is great. I have some critique of the specifics of what happens, in the kind of way I often do when I read SF written by a mainstream writer, but I think the experience of reading this unspoiled in terms of what happens is more valuable than any nitpicks I might want to share. This is a very interesting and well-written book.
The Black Prince: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici — Catherine Fletcher (2016)
Biography of Alessandro de’ Medici. Sadly disappointing. There’s an odd tendency among historians and biographers to ignore mothers, as if people are descended only from their fathers. There are a lot of people mentioned here who are cousins through their mothers, and it affects everything they do, but Fletcher never mentions it. She says for instance that Cardinal Cybo was from Genoa, which makes him seem like a stranger in Florence, but his mother was Alessandro’s great-aunt, they’re cousins. There was some interesting stuff here, but the reading experience resembled death by paper-cuts.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — David Mitchell (2010)
Re-read, bookclub. This one is where you want to start with Mitchell, this doesn’t require any previous context at all. It’s a historical novel (secretly fantasy) set in the Dutch trading post of Dejima, near Nagasaki, in Japan in 1799 and while it should have a content warning for some horrible things happening in it, it’s also really great and worth it. There’s a level of immersion that is like the best you get in SF, and it all feels absolutely real.
The Voyage of the Beagle — Charles Darwin (1839)
Free on Gutenberg. A young naturalist goes around the world on a sailing vessel, and pays attention to geology and wildlife and people and customs. Written as a diary, but obviously edited for publication. It’s a delightfully readable book. I was surprised how much time he spent on shore, and how little attention to the actual voyaging there is. I was also expecting the Galapagos Islands to take up more pages, because that’s the only thing about the trip I knew in advance. But no complaints. He climbs a lot of mountains and rides a lot of horses, and he’s interested in everything in that way that makes everything interesting to me, and delighted in many things. He talks about having his altitude sickness cured by seeing some suddenly interesting geology. He’s really opposed to slavery. Darwin finds the world fascinating, and I enjoyed his company on the voyage.
Holidays With the Wongs — Jackie Lau (2020)
A collection of novellas in which three Chinese-Canadian siblings find love, each one a different genre of romance—one-night stand becomes love, second chance, fake date, boy-next-door, etc. This was fun and breezy and I enjoyed it well enough.
Rome: A History in Seven Sackings — Matthew Kneale (2017)
It’s an interesting way to decide to tell the history of Rome, recounting the circumstances of each sack in turn, from Brennus the Gaul to Hitler, then talking about how Rome had changed since the previous chapter, then talking about daily life now, then talking about the circumstances leading up tothe sack, then talking about the sack and the consequences. It left large gaps, but it was pretty good, and you could do a lot worse. I have read better things on the Sack of Rome in 1527, and better things about Rome during WWII, but I have no other single book that covers both of them, let alone all the rest. The weird thing is that it skips the entire classical period, when I’d have zoomed in on the Second Triumvirate, which is at least as much a sack as the Risorgimento. Oh well.
Whispering Wood — Sharon Shinn (2023)
Fifth and last of the Elemental Blessings series, in which we see a romance of a hunti (wood and bone) woman, completing the set. Looking at the whole series, the worldbuilding is great but it felt like a stretch to have enough plot for all of the books. It’s also interesting how overall they drift into being about kings and princesses and people who are important to the kingdom. Looking at this book alone, it’s great—I like the uptight heroine who’s such a contrast from the wilder heroines of the earlier volumes, I like the romance, I like the resolution to the action plot, and, as always with Shinn, I like the details of daily life and how well the magic integrates into everything else.
