The Merciful Crow, Margaret Owen, narr. Amy Landon. Having very much enjoyed Owen’s Little Thieves trilogy, I’m backtracking to an earlier duology. This one is set in a less historically-inspired secondary world, one that’s very much systematized: there are ten or twelve castes (I’m now forgetting which is the correct number) all named after birds, with not just specific roles in society but specific magic that crops up in their bloodlines. Crows are the “untouchables” of this society, constantly nomadic and subject to oppressive regulations, but necessary because they’re the only ones not vulnerable to the so-called Sinner’s Plague, an affliction that can kill people and strip all the life from the land. Therefore, they serve as undertakers to bring “mercy” to sufferers and burn their bodies before the plague can spread (and, incidentally, it’s believed that those afflicted are later reborn as Crows). Among the many woes faced by the Crows are the Oleander Gentry, a group that is essentially the KKK: they mask themselves and ride out in white robes at night to harass and murder Crows, ostensibly on the belief that the Crows are actually the cause of the plague. When Fie’s band of Crows strike a deal to smuggle a prince and his bodyguard to safety, she bargains for that prince, when he takes the throne, to protect the Crows against the Oleander Gentry, who are covertly supported by his rival, the empress.

There is a lot of oppression in this book, and less sense of fun than in the Little Thieves series. (The main character is not a con artist reveling in her ability to pull things over on other people.) The lives of the Crows are poor and brutal, with hardly anybody showing more than the most forced and perfunctory gratitude for the work they do. Fie, the prince, and the bodyguard spend quite a lot of the plot traveling under increasingly desperate conditions to try and reach safety that may or may not be there, while Fie beats her head against the wall of the prince’s privileged lack of understanding for her people’s plight. It is not, however, quite as “rocks fall, everybody dies” as I at one point thought it would be, and the cover copy for the second book indicates that it’s likely to get into the questions lurking in the background of this one: what exactly is the Sinner’s Plague, and why are the Crows immune to it? I’m looking forward to finding out the answers.

Beneath the Mists, Camilla Sten and Vivica Sten, trans. A.A. Prime. Second of the Swedish middle-grade fantasy/mysteries passed along to me by my mother. Kudos for some creepy and threatening fog in this one! It also introduces a threat which is dealt with for now, but not permanently; I’m very much hoping the third book in the trilogy gets translated, as otherwise I’ll never find out what the rest of the story is there.

Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, William T. Taylor. A very brief book that covers everything from the evolution of horses in the first place to their role in the world today. You could probably say a lot more on any of the fronts presented here, but it’s a good, quick overview. It especially benefits from being recent enough to take advantage of a lot of new archaeological discoveries, which have significantly changed our assumptions about the timeline of horse domestication and riding. I was particularly intrigued to find out that — to leverage the cliche, which the book does not shy away from — the cart does in fact belong before the horse, in the sense that we had carts (pulled by donkeys and onagers) before we ever hitched them up to horses instead.

The Hexologists: A Tangle of Time, Josiah Bancroft. Sequel to the first novel, which I greatly enjoyed. This one was fun, too, with its main flaw being that it contains a trope I personally find disappointing (rot13 spoiler: guvf crefba lbh gubhtug jnf n tbbq sevraq vf npghnyyl lbhe rarzl). But the narrative voice remains extremely strong and I remain delighted by having a happily married pair of grown-ups as the investigative protagonists, which is a feature often hard to come by in fiction.

The Dungeon Book, Gareth Hanrahan. This is bonkers and delightful. The echo of The Jungle Book is deliberate, as the protagonist, Bait, has been raised in a D&D-style dungeon by monsters, but it’s not only that idea with nothing else going on.

I very much appreciated that, although Hanrahan took as his epigraph Le Guin’s quote about the darkness being a nourishing place, he doesn’t fall into the mode of “the monsters are good and the Real Monsters are humans” — the dungeon is not a nice place! They have a social order of sorts, enforced by the Master who oversees them, which says you’re not allowed to attack anybody in their lair . . . but if you’re in the corridors, then you’re fair game. Bait has that name because the goblins who initially raise her dangle her out as literal bait for their enemies; later on, when she outgrows the goblin warrens, there’s a very real question of whether she’ll be allowed to claim a lair of her own or be hunted down and eaten as a human interloper. The human world, meanwhile, is every bit as mixed, with both good people and bad.

I became aware of this book due to a review that was boggling at how anybody is referring to it as “cozy.” And I see that reviewer’s point, but also . . . I dunno, I kinda see the cozy angle, too? Is “grimdark cozy” a thing? (Hanrahan’s other novels apparently go full grimdark, so I am unlikely to read them.) Tons of bad stuff happens here, especially when the dungeon’s resident dragon goes on a rampage, and yet somehow there’s enough goodheartedness in it that my heart felt warmed instead of stomped on. I think a lot of that has to be chalked up the the narrative voice, brought to you by the talking skull of the dungeon’s ex-Master. He’s not a good person, but he is funny, and the humor there does a lot to carry the book out of the shadows.

The Tao of Craft: Fu Talismans and Casting Sigils in the Eastern Esoteric Tradition, Benebell Wen. Read this as research for both the Omnu Trilogy and a potential future project. I don’t think I quite realized, when I bought it, that it’s straight-up a book of modern esotericism; it’s full of advice about how to consecrate and charge your own Fu talismans, ways they can be melded with Western pagan beliefs, etc. But it’s also thoroughly grounded in the history of the tradition, with copious images and quotations from medieval Chinese talismans and books about them, so it’s useful reading even for someone who doesn’t intend to engage with this as a spiritual practice.

Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Frank M. Snowden, narr. Eric Jason Martin. It took me a while to get through this rather long audiobook, and at one point I thought about quitting out and transferring to text because I find Martin’s narration to be oddly choppy. I got used to it over time, though, and worked my way piecemeal through the audio version over a couple of months. (I have very little audiobook-listening time in my life, so something that’s 24+ hours takes quite a while to complete.)

Be warned that the audiobook version at least has a foreword talking about covid, and the end of the book is extremely pessimistic about how prepared we are to deal with novel respiratory diseases/the likelihood that new ones will continue to emerge. In between that, however, what you get is a fascinating overview of some major epidemic diseases — bubonic plague, smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, ebola, and so on — and their effect on society. (By this he largely means Western society, but given the scope of his topic, I can’t entirely blame him for not being able to go into equal detail on how other parts of the world. And he does address those in places, e.g. Africa for ebola or East and South Asia for the third plague pandemic.)

This is a long book because Snowden takes that “effects on society” thing in an extremely broad sense: reading or listening to this, you will get not only a detailed tour of the effects of those diseases and the treatment measures used against them in their heyday, but also the evolution of medical knowledge, religious and artistic responses, evolutions in public policy, and even how these diseases influenced fashion! (Tuberculosis in its romantic era introduced a forerunner of “heroic chic” for women; then, when it entered its unromantic era of being understood as contagion, it was largely responsible for the early 20th century decline in men’s facial hair, which was seen as being a trap for and vector for spreading germs.) So I found it fascinating. Just be aware that Snowden does not hold back in describing what an outbreak of disease was like; come at this one with a strong stomach.

Folk Tales of Japan: 25 Japanese folk tales with cultural commentary, Kyota Ko. Another collection from a YouTuber I like. Some of these are familiar stories, like “Earless Hoichi” or “Urashima Tarō,” but he’s not limiting himself solely to the ones most likely to be known in the West. They’re broadly grouped according to theme, and as with the book of his I read previously, the cultural commentary often goes haring off in a direction only tangentially related to the tale. But that’s fine; I’m here for both things.