Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.

The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what’s become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who’s going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the “Seven Wonders,” and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say “basically” because it’s deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it’s one of them.)

I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who’s responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there’s a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation — for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.

Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.

I did come around to liking him, don’t worry. But when your protagonist’s firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he’ll never have to attend an event like this one again, it’s hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he’s less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.

The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for “vivid” rather than “realistic.” It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one’s a desert! this one’s a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn’t have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.

Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked — but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don’t look for deep exploration of what that’s going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren’t put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!

A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I’m not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not — I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people’s conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you’ve read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven’t read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.

The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I’ve known about Holland’s historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they’re occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It’s good, though, and I’ll certainly look up more of Holland’s work.

A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur’s Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn’t work as well for me as the others I’ve read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.

Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea’s worst royalty; in this case, that’s Yeonsangun, during the period when he’s become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who’s targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.

The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn’t hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that’s . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it’s hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who’s targeting royal officials — until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I’d been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he’s doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot — which takes up a significant portion of the book — was “meh.”

I recommend Hur’s books overall, but I wouldn’t start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.

The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I’d forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn’t quite hook me (the emphasis on “I’m not a nice person”), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN’T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.

Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.

This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that’s still very much present. Some of them I’d read before, like “The Dybbuk in Love” and “The Trinitite Golem,” but many were new to me. There’s a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn’t have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn’t catch on my own, as I’m sure there were some.

The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to — and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.

These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you’re here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the “Dies Irae” at them until half of them slink away in shame.

Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.

It must be admitted up front that I’m always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they’re assassins for a good cause. In this case, the “Museum” — that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to — was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y’know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.

However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.

Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn’t always get along despite generally being friends.

But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of “get revenge at last for all the sexism you’ve battled throughout your career,” that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that — because they’ve largely been offstage — I didn’t much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to “I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum” and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act — wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who’d had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry — I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn’t quite get either.

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher, narr. Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. This is the first of Kingfisher’s novels I’ve read (well, listened to), and I had a bit of tonal whiplash. On the one hand, there is some really awful stuff that happens here; on the other hand, the rest of the book feels almost . . . cozy? Like, by and large this is a story about people realizing a character is being abused and going to great lengths to show her kindness and help her escape her abuser. But also, abuse — along with brutal murder and various other things. I wonder if I would have found it less whiplash-y on the page than in audio, where the narrators’ voice wouldn’t have been setting a particular mood. I also suspect I was not well-served by knowing the folktale that ostensibly underlies this story; in truth, the novel bears very little resemblance to that tale, and expecting more caused me to wildly misread one character until fairly late in the game.

The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues, Beth Lincoln. Sequel to A Dictionary of Scoundrels, which I noted at the time felt like it had reached a good conclusion and didn’t really need a sequel (though I would read more about the Swifts at other points in time, maybe). Turns out, Lincoln had a good answer to that! This book takes Shenanigan Swift and various other relatives across the Channel into France, there to deal with their distant — and deeply estranged — cousins, the Martinets. This book is every bit as bonkers as its predecessor, but it introduces enough sorts of new bonker-dom to not feel like it’s treading water. And there is more fun with language, which is absolutely part of what I’m here for. I hope there will be a third book, and more after that!

Buddhist Folk Tales, Kevin Walker. This was an odd collection. The author is apparently a professional storyteller who converted to Buddhism, so this mixes both actual traditional stories (many of them from the Jataka tales) with others he’s made up — or in one case, a story made up by students of his, used with permission. Mostly it left me feeling like I should get a straight-up collection of Jataka tales, as I didn’t find this book all that satisfying.

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul, Eleanor Herman. Do not read this if you are easily nauseated by descriptions of gross things. If you can tolerate those, however, it’s fascinating.

Although the title references poison, and Herman does spend a little time talking about deliberate attempts to off people with various toxins, the focus of this book is really in the subtitle: Herman’s thesis is that people in the late medieval and early modern period had WAY more to fear from their environment than from any would-be murderers. Poor sanitation, contaminated food, and so, so much lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony, sulfur, etc. basically guaranteed that any person of wealth — the same people who feared poisoning — had a lot of ways to fall suddenly and suspiciously ill. And when medical science isn’t yet advanced enough to distinguish the cause of your stomach pains or difficulty breathing, it’s easy to declare you’ve been poisoned.

The central part of the book delves into that in depth, because it’s a series of case studies about historical individuals who were rumored to have been killed by poison. Herman gives the background on the individual and looks at the contemporary accounts of their symptoms and demise, then turns to modern analyses of the evidence (including, where applicable, forensic examination of their remains) to give a verdict on their most likely cause of death — which occasionally was indeed a massive and likely deliberate dose of poison! This was my favorite part of the text, but also rather hard reading, because most of the people under discussion did not have an easy passing. (For my own curiosity, I also did some side research on whether they could have been saved with the medicine of the time, had anyone known what was really going on. Most of the time, the answer was no.) Then it closes with a brief discussion of poison use in our own era, especially the extensive Russian efforts to develop exotic and unprovable means of murder.

Vespertine, Margaret Rogerson. I really enjoyed Rogerson’s novel An Enchantment of Ravens, which is unrelated to this book. This is a world where, following a cataclysm a long time ago, the dead don’t rest easy unless they are given proper rites; to ensure that — and to deal with spirits that escape the net — there is a religious order dedicated to handling their ghosts. Furthermore, some of those spirits get bound into artifacts so their powers can be used by priests and nuns for the defense of the realm.

I don’t mean it as a sideswipe when I say this reads a lot like the fantasy sibling of Ninefox Gambit. When a massive wave of malevolent spirits threatens the countryside, the main character, a novice named Artemisia, inadvertently finds herself wielding a high relic: an artifact that contains the most powerful type of spirit, so strong that it actually possesses her. Since she never got trained in how to do this, she doesn’t know how to banish it back into the relic, so she’s going through the story in an uneasy alliance with an entity that will happily take over her body and use her to murder everybody in sight.

The ISFDB lists Vespertine as the first (and so far only) book in a series, but it works well enough as a standalone. If there do wind up being sequels, though, I’ll happily read them; this was an engaging story in an interesting world.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Tabitha Stanmore, narr. Anna Wilson-Jones. I liked this one enough that after listening to it in audiobook from the library, I turned around and bought myself a physical copy.

Stanmore is explicitly pushing back against the internet view of medieval and early modern magic, i.e. “female witches keeping alive ancient traditions get persecuted by the mean men in the Church.” Citing tons of historical case evidence, Stanmore shows that people at the time — particularly in England, though she does touch on other parts of Europe occasionally — absolutely distinguished between witches (bad, and of either gender) and cunning folk (good, and of either gender, though over time there is a drift towards men), and they made regular use of the latter. Service magicians, as Stanmore terms them, filled a number of needs in society; when they show up in court records, it’s because they had a disappointed client suing them for fraud, or they strayed too far into dangerous territory (e.g. trying to curse someone to death).

So yeah, if you saw that post going around Tumblr about priests doing “wizard shit” and telling their superiors they keep trying to explain to their flocks that it isn’t real but everybody expects them to do wizard shit, this is basically That: The Book. But very well-supported with citations.

The Lies We Conjure, Sarah Henning. I am not generally an eager audience for the genre of Rich People Behaving Badly, even when it’s the fantasy variant thereof. The premise of this one, however, was interesting: a pair of sisters get hired by a rich old woman to masquerade as her granddaughters for a night at a family reunion. It’s only after someone’s been murdered and the estate has been locked down that the sisters realize literally everybody else there is a witch and assumes they are, too — and that odds are very good they’ll be killed if this secret cabal of powerful people learns they’ve been infiltrated by outsiders.

Over the course of the next several days, as they get sent on a both a murder investigation and a kind of magical scavenger hunt to figure out who will be the next leader of the witches, there are of course tons of ugly familial secrets that come tumbling out. I was slightly disappointed that the sisters don’t have to dance harder to convince everybody they’re who they claim to be — the witches assume early on that the girls’ memories have been magically manipulated to make them forget what they used to know — but that would have required them to be master con artists rather than two teenagers who happen to look enough like the old lady’s granddaughters to pass muster, so I’ll cut it some slack. This had interesting characters and good tensions between them, and I enjoyed it.

The Serpent Called Mercy, Roanne Lau. This does the thing I really like, where there’s a ton of worldbuilding that isn’t strictly needed to make the plot go, but it makes the setting feel more three-dimensional and lived in. The core of the plot focuses on gladiatorial-style battles between “conquessors” and magical beasts brought in from outside the city, and a pair of poverty-stricken friends (who do NOT wind up in a romance together!) who decide to risk their lives in the arena in the hopes of winning enough money to raise their status in a highly unequal society. But around that there’s all kinds of other stuff, like the religion one of them practices very devoutly, and the backstory of how their ancestors came to live in that area, and the weird magical powers people can sometimes access for a very brief time — there used to be other magic, but their ancestors lost it when they migrated — and so on and so forth.

Much like Vespertine, this tells a complete story. Here, however, there is an obvious dangling thread for sequels, in the form of a notorious thief whose exploits against the wealthy keep being mentioned in passing, so I suspect there may be at least one more book, sales permitting.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, Nicola Clark. As Marissa Lingen noted in her review (which is where I heard of this book), by “Tudor queens” what we actually mean is “queens of Henry VIII.” But I guess “Henrician queens” would not be as catchy.

That’s not a slam on the book overall, though. Much of the reason Clark takes this period as her focus is that Henry VIII’s serial matrimony — often to an attendant of a previous queen — made this an unusually tumultuous time to be a lady-in-waiting. Not only are the royal households repeatedly being dissolved and reconstituted, but the intrigues surrounding the behavior of certain queens and the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow meant there were opportunities both to advance your family’s interests at court, and to get you and your family in a great deal of trouble. And what does “loyalty” mean when you’ve sworn your oath of service to a woman who is now out of favor with the king you also serve? Some ladies-in-waiting stayed fiercely faithful to their mistresses; others dropped them like a hot iron. Throughout the book, Clark is very clear that being a lady-in-waiting didn’t mean you were a piece of furniture: they were an essential part of the machinery of court as well as active political agents in their own right, albeit ones whose actions were constrained by the sexism of the time. Very much recommended for anybody who would like a look at that court machinery, insofar as we can reconstruct the smaller pieces from the documents that survive.

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan. Sequel and conclusion to the Radiant Emperor duology, which presents an alternate version of the transition from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty to the Han-led Ming one.

There is not enough therapy in the world for some of these characters. Two of them are basically powered by rage and self-loathing; another has replaced that with howling amounts of dissociation. Even the most functional character here (the protagonist) still has a nigh-terminal case of “it’s impossible for this not to happen when I want it so much.” If you want a front-row seat to trauma playing out, here ya go. I think it’s very well done overall, though after a time I started wishing that each individual instance of watching somebody spiral down into their own personal hell was just slightly less in-depth, as the amount of time spent marinating in those was quite large. But for all of that darkness — and boy howdy is there a lot of it — things actually turn out pretty well. Not for everybody, of course, but the fear I had at the end of the first book did not materialize. This is ultimately an alternate history, so even though you still end up with a Zhu Yuanzhang founding a Ming dynasty, it’s not the same Zhu Yuanzhang, and so there is every reason to believe it might have all the good features of the actual Hongwu Emperor’s reign, with less in the way of murderous purges.

When Among Crows, Veronica Roth, narr. Helen Laser, James Fouhey, and Tim Campbell. Probably a novella, based on the audio length. Contemporary, Chicago-set fantasy focusing primarily on creatures from Polish folklore, but not exclusively; there’s mention made in here of . . . I may not be remembering the name correctly, but I think it was the O’Conner-Vasquezes, a blended banshee/llorona family, which was a nice touch. This plays out over the course of just a few days, but it does a good job of packing enough intensity into the events that I believe in the relationships that get built along the way, as a visitor from Poland strikes a bargain to get help in seeking out the witch Baba Jaga. As seems to be a theme with this month’s titles, this works perfectly well as a standalone, but there’s a sequel coming later this year.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks. I’ve seen a couple of books lately that center on train journeys, so I guess that’s having a Moment right now, but by and large this is a very different setup from a lot of the novels out there, which is part of what drew me to it. It’s the late nineteenth century, I think (I forget the exact year), and it’s years since Siberia suddenly and inexplicably became overrun with . . . something. Some kind of strangeness dangerous enough that the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was an even bigger undertaking than it was in reality, and now passengers are cautioned not to spend too much time looking out the windows, as even seeing what’s out there can have odd effects on the mind.

The novel is entirely the story of a single journey, from start to finish (with a little bit before and after). There are a few moments in here which edge toward horror, but the number one word I’d use to describe it is tense. As in, one night I took a break from reading it because there were so many things poised to go disastrously wrong, and I didn’t know which one was going to blow up first. The ending is not a downer, though, and the narrative even has some sympathy toward characters who honestly brought their fates upon themselves. So long as you don’t mind never actually getting an explanation for what happened to Siberia — that is not a question this book has any interest in answering — it’s very well-done. The only reason I didn’t inhale the whole thing faster was that my nerves couldn’t take it.

I’m baaaaaaack!

I know I started posting again about my reading last month, but, like, this month I’m really back. As in, I am finally reading fiction again, not because there’s a book club meeting I want to go to, not because I owe a blurb, but because I felt like it. And I’m reading a lot. Still a surprising amount of nonfiction mixed in there — I would have expected myself to go off that for a while — but this feels more like what I’m used to.

Sea Beyond 1 My own work doesn’t count. Though I’ll note that part of the reason for the pivot toward reading, away from the video games I’ve been playing so much, is because I was putting in long hours at the computer on revision and didn’t want to stay there when leisure time started.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, Mark Forsyth. First of the two books that sparked this post the other day; this is the one I particularly praised for drawing its examples from modern song lyrics as well as classics like Shakespeare and the Bible. It also does something that I liked at first, which (unfortunately) got a little grating as I went along: basically every chapter ends with him saying something like, “that quote is also an example of [next figure of speech]” or “if the author had said XYZ instead, it would have been [next figure of speech].” It was a nice segue the first few times, but it became a bit too much over time. Then again, if I read the book more slowly, spacing out those transitions would probably have helped. Regardless, I highly recommend this if you want to know more about the tricks of rhetoric!

The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, ill. Zenchu Sato. I haven’t yet gotten around to monasticism in my Patreon essays, but research for The Sea Beyond made me realize just how much my knowledge of the subject is specifically Catholic-inflected. This is the first of three books I wound up reading this month on Buddhist monasticism, and it makes for an interesting contrast with how “Zen” is conceived of in the popular Western consciousness — it’s not all serenity and enlightenment! In particular, the image of monks being forcibly dragged to meetings with their teachers is rather at odds with the quiet, dignified image we have of such matters. This book also helped me better understand the role koans play in Zen teaching (which itself is not a monastic thing, of course, but still interesting in its own right).

Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, trans. David Bowles. I have another collection of Aztec poetry I read a while back, by Miguel León-Portilla, but that one’s more focused on literal translation of the surviving corpus, whereas here Bowles explicitly tries to make his translations read like poetry. It’s useful to have both! Though worth noting that Bowles was making free aesthetic decisions about how to shape his poems; we don’t really know what the underlying principles of Nahuatl poetry were, other than that they were often sung. So these are not translated “in the same form,” but rather are transposed to meters and such that Bowles thought would create a suitable effect. Very glad to have both this and León-Portilla’s work on my shelf together.

On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Kate Marsden. Picked this one up semi-randomly because Marissa Lingen posted about reading it, and for starters, just look at that title. How can you resist? (Probably many of you can resist just fine. I, clearly, did not.)

This is a late 19th-century account of a nurse who went deep into Siberia on an ostensible quest to find an herb used there to treat leprosy, reputedly with efficacious results. But it’s a weird book because the herb gets forgotten more or less immediately; mostly it’s an account of how she got people to fund her expedition, the trials and travails she faced along the way, and the horrendous conditions under which most lepers in Siberia at the time were forced to live, which she agitated to improve with the construction of dedicated hospitals. (Plus some side strands about things like her evangelizing to criminals in prison, because she also kinda sorta wound up inspecting jails from a health-and-sanitation perspective.) Ultimately, what this book was really meant to do was to silence her detractors who thought she’d just gone off on a pleasure jaunt in Russia and surely did not do the things she’d claimed. Since there were apparently memorials in her honor erected later on in Siberia, and this book quotes extensively from the letters and reports of people she dealt with about what she was doing, I think it’s fair to say her detractors were full of hot air. (Also full of homophobia: Wikipedia tells me there were accusations later on, which, because of the mores or the time, significantly tarnished her legacy at home.)

Anyway, I mostly picked this up because I thought it would be useful and interesting to read about how travel at the time was effected. And I was not wrong! Yeesh, what a difference a train makes to a place like Siberia.

Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home From the South Seas, Śramana Yijing, trans. Li Rongxi. Hah, so, um, yeah. I’m fairly certain that when I bought this book, as part of my “let’s learn something about Buddhist monasticism” bender, I didn’t read the description in much depth. In contrast with the Zen book, written in the twentieth century, this one is from . . . the seventh. It is literally just a translation of a Chinese monk’s writings home from India, which can be summed up as “guys, we’re doing Buddhism wrong.”

Which, I mean — that’s kind of fascinating in its own right! At least if you’re the type of nerd I am. You learn things about how Buddhist concepts got adapted — and in some cases, warped — in translation from India to China, accommodating stuff like a different climate (clothing that’s fine in the tropics will kill you with hypothermia in a more northern winter) and different cultural expectations. But also, um, this is full of things like very precise instructions on how you’re supposed to filter water before you drink it so as to avoid killing any insects. It gets nitty-gritty, is what I’m saying. And that is probably not something most of us feel deeply compelled to read about.

Mexican Bestiary/Bestiario Mexicano, David Bowles. A short, bilingual work on supernatural creatures of Mexico, by the same author as the translations above. As a matter of personal taste, I would have liked this to focus a bit less on modern cryptids and more on traditional material, but it’s still a nice addition to my library.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, Valerie Hansen. I enjoyed this book, but I also ranted about it at some length to my patrons in the monthly New Worlds book review.

The heart of my issue is that, while I recognize that popular nonfiction benefits from having a hook — in this case, the idea that globalization really “began” around the year 1000, i.e. when the (brief) Norse contact with North America meant that for the first time, trade networks formed a daisy-chain of (potential) contact around the globe — I would have preferred Hansen to simply write more broadly about long-distance networks before the early modern period, instead of going for the gimmicky premise. Reading this book, it was blatantly obvious that the date 1000 C.E. comes with error bars of several centuries to either side, rather than being an actual turning point I found persuasive.

Whereas, had this been broader in focus, it could have been organized with an eye toward what gets transmitted over long distances, and what factors shape the answer to that question: when and why is it raw materials like metals, when and why is it religious ideas, when and why is it slaves. Hansen might also not have wound up in what felt to me like a weird middle ground, where the book neither really explores the historical specificity of a given place and time in depth, nor doesn’t explore it — you get these random blobs of detail here and there, which mostly made me want the book to either be longer and do more of that, or shorter and do less.

Interesting reading in that it covered areas and eras I frankly know very little about, but I kind of want that other book I imagined instead.

Discipline & Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Michael Lempert. Third book of my “let’s read about non-Christian monasticism” binge. This one wound up being slightly off-topic from what I expected, but in ways that are differently useful.

The focus here is on Tibetan Geluk (or Gelug) monasteries that have been . . . transplanted? re-founded? whatever verb you pick has implications . . . in India, and how traditional life there butts up against modern politics around Tibetan sovereignty. Lempert’s thesis is that the Dalai Lama, in order to gain necessary Western support, has promoted a certain image of Tibetan Buddhism, while the religion as it’s practiced in the monasteries Lempert looked at doesn’t entirely fit that image. “Violence” here is meant in a more diffuse sense than I originally thought, though, as it encompasses things like very confrontational (and deliberately asymmetrical) debate practices as well as physical discipline of monks.

Tibetan politics are another thing I’m woefully ignorant of, so this was as beneficial in teaching me something about what’s been going on in that whole corner of the world as it was in telling me anything about Tibetan Buddhist monasticism. Though it was that latter, too.

The Palace of the Dragon King, Matthew Meyer. Fifth of his yōkai books, illustrated as usual with his own art. The focus this time is generally on water, culminating in a look at the idea of the Dragon King of the sea and his court.

Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, Arthur Quinn. This was the other rhetoric book I read recently. Older and shorter than The Elements of Eloquence, with much more of a focus on older examples of the figures, I still found it very entertaining. It also groups the figures according to their nature much more than Forsyth’s book does, which I liked.

The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. Illustrated short story Clarke was commissioned to write. Being a short story, naturally it’s very slight; the illustrations do not really a whole book make. I ultimately found it not all that compelling, though I like and agree with Clarke’s point that honestly, saints might very well come across as weird rather than plaster figures of piety.

Mother of Rome, Lauren J.A. Bear. Historical fantasy novel about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, the first of whom is the legendary founder of Rome. Although I wasn’t a fan of how much it relied on long, italicized flashback scenes, I did like the book overall; in particular, the key maneuver it uses to keep Rhea involved in the plot throughout made a lot of sense to me. I also like that — spoiler, but one I think is worth spoiling, since otherwise certain readers who might enjoy this would otherwise be put off — it denies the interpretation where the god Mars raped her, and instead has Rhea being an active and enthusiastic agent in getting pregnant. Fair warning, though; there is still a lot of violence against women here, including some perpetuated by other women. Utopian “back in the Good Old Days of matriarchal paganism” this is not.

Sound the Gong, Joan He. Second half of the Kingdom of Three duology, which gender-flips and eventually presents a very alternate version of The Romance of Three Kingdoms.

I say “second half of the duology,” but really, it’s the second half of a book published in two volumes. As in, this one literally starts with Chapter 26 (or whatever the actual number was). Enough time had passed since I read the first one that I really could have used more of an on-ramp to get me back up to speed — for pity’s sake, at least a recap at the front! — but I enjoy the duology enough that I persevered and was soon right back in the swing of things. He does not pull punches on the consequences of her premise; be prepared for scads of betrayal and some really gruesome murder. (Her afterword points you at a bonus story on her website if you need some healing afterward.)

. . . oh, and yeah, ostensibly the main characters here are, like, teenagers. It’s the Six of Crows thing where you just ignore that and the rest of the text reads just fine with you imagining them as grown adults instead. This does not read as trope-y YA, in large part because, well, look at the source material.

Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. First book of a duology, though I didn’t know that when I picked it up, and I think this one arrives at a reasonably acceptable stopping point.

I also think this must have read very differently when it first came out. The starting premise is that, in the face of multiple waves of a deadly flu pandemic sweeping the globe (. . . yeah), the U.S. decided to build first one, then two walls to close off the border with Mexico (. . . yyyyyyyeah). The eponymous town of Santa Olivia is one of the ones caught in the fifty-mile zone between the walls; everyone who chose not to abandon their home was informed they henceforth lived in the military installation of Outpost 12. Oh, and they’re no longer U.S. citizens.

Yeah.

Now, if I stop and look at this through a rational lens, I suspect the setup falls apart. There is zero mention made of agriculture or really any other productive industry in the former Santa Olivia; basically every job there is a service job, whether that’s directly serving the military (running restaurants and bars, prostitution) or serving the other residents of this Outpost. Even allowing for the worldbuilding details about lots of stuff not being available anymore or not getting replaced when it breaks down, the only plausible explanation is that Outpost is wholly dependent on the U.S. for, uh, absolutely everything, to support a community that is way more than what’s needed to maintain the military base. While also pouring effort into making sure nobody ever gets out of Outpost to tell the world what’s going on there. For decades on end. I’m not sure I actually believe that over just forcibly relocating everybody.

But those were post-book thoughts, and while I was reading the book, Carey did a good job of creating a tense and plausible atmosphere. One which had much, much less to do with what’s described in the cover copy than I thought: while it’s true that the main character, Loup, teams up with some friends to do vigilante things as the town’s eponymous saint, Santa Olivia, that’s a surprisingly small portion of the book. Much of the rest has to do with the monthly boxing challenges organized by the commander of the base, who 1) really really loves watching boxing matches and 2) has promised that if any Outposter manages to beat whichever army champion he puts them up against, they and one other person will get a ticket out of there, back into the U.S. I, uh, don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this offer turns out to be less than honest and fair. Really, my thought while reading this was “did Carey take up boxing and then write this book?” It very much has the feel of an author building a story around their new hobby. I don’t mean that as a criticism, though; I liked the detail on that front, and I think she did a good job of building some interesting twists into the plot.

Not sure if I’ll read the second book, though. Based on the cover copy, it sounds like it would be very different in a lot of respects, and I’m not sure I’m that interested in where that goes.

Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao. Sequel to Iron Widow, but this is not a duology. Whether it will be a trilogy or more, I don’t know, but this is most definitely not the end.

Kinda hard to talk about this one given how much it builds on key elements from the end of the previous book. The best I can do is to say that I did not expect the mecha + kaiju + primal scream against the patriarchy blend of Iron Widow to expand to include, uh, <checks notes> a communist revolution? But it does, and Zhao goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of that than I usually see in fiction — without landing simplistically on a “yay, good!” or “boo, bad!” result. If there’s a way to pursue the good ideals of such a revolution without falling into excess and cruelty, the characters do not find it here, but boy howdy do they try. I also thought the relationship between Zetian and a certain new character (the one introduced at the end of the first book) was excellently complicated, with all kinds of admirable and horrifying elements blended together until there’s no separating them anymore.

Once again, the ending majorly shakes things up, though it takes a bit more time in the shaking and so avoids the worst of Iron Widow‘s feeling of the wheels coming off the car as it screeches across the finish line. Warning for a lot of gender-based violence as well as regular violence, though — which, come to think of it, also applies to Santa Olivia. Between these two and Mother of Rome, plus Sound the Gong‘s very non-gendered violence, I did not have a lighthearted month for fiction . . .

Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. Pretty sure I’ve read this before, but if so, it was roughly twenty years ago. And this book wasn’t new then (it was originally published in 1969), so yeah, I could probably be reading something more recent. But it was on my shelf, and I was not wrong in remembering that it’s quite readable, and I have several different story ideas rattling around my head that would benefit from being firmly seated in actual medieval life rather than the watered-down, microwaved, fourth-generation photocopy that infests popular media, so I read it. They use Troyes in France as their focal city, but there are also comments in here about how things are in Italy or England around the same time (1250), and for the purposes of writing in a secondary world, that’s enough for me.