Books read, October 2023
Nov. 1st, 2023 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerNoting here for posterity: in October I started reading the Shahnameh. I mention this because my edition (which isn’t even complete!) is nine hundred and sixty-two pages long. I will still be reading it next month. I will still be reading it next year. I will always be reading the Shahnameh. I will always have been reading the Shahnameh. O_O
But on to the things I finished this past month . . .
The Outskirter’s Secret, Rosemary Kirstein. Second in its series, and I see what people have been telling me about the story growing deeper as it goes. I really liked how Kirstein develops Outskirter society -- particularly the fact that it’s not homogenous; the Outskirters Rowan and Bel encounter near the settled lands are different from (and in Bel’s view, degenerate compared to) those further out, who are themselves different from the Face People, the tribes who live on the very far edges of the Outskirts, where survival becomes the next best thing to impossible.
I continue to be fascinated by the setting here, and by the way Kirstein doles out clues to what’s going on: the process sort of makes a steerswoman of the reader, because you’re learning and (at least if you’re me) theorizing as you go. In my review of the first book, I called the world post-apocalyptic; now I’m thinking that we’re looking at a terraforming situation instead, though it’s still unclear why technology is so little understood by most of the characters, and how things got to this state. Those of you who have read the whole series to date may enjoy a good laugh if I continue to be wrong!
Narratively, I expected this volume to be much more about the protagonists locating the ridge where Bel’s gems came from and investigating what they found there. In reality, that doesn’t come until the very end of the book; the bulk of the story is about their travels through and difficulties in the Outskirts, the latter being both physical and political. The climax was very different from what you see in most books, and while a certain bleak component of it was not my favorite sort of thing, I appreciate the way the meaning of the title ultimately shakes out.
Wicked Gentleman, Ginn Hale. Two novellas glued together into a book, both concerning the same characters -- the diabolical Belimai Sykes, and the more upstanding Captain William Harper -- in an odd, quasi-Victorian world where the forces of Hell struck some kind of truce with the angels, but their descendants (like Belimai) are very thoroughly discriminated against and often mistreated by the powers that be.
I basically wanted more of this. Because both halves of the book are more or less freestanding novellas -- the plot of the second touches on the first, but is its own independent conflict -- neither one got developed in as much depth as it might have been. That particularly disappointed me in the first half, because there was good material here for a noir mystery, but the actual mystery was necessarily quite thin. And there doesn’t seem to be any more from Hale with these characters, not that I’ve been able to find, so I’m left being interested by the setting -- especially the hybrid law enforcement/clergy setup of the police; Harper is technically a priest -- but not quite given enough meat to sink my teeth into with the characters and plots.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 1 Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I’ve watched the TV show The Untamed, which is based on this series, but I was interested to see what the book version was like.
The answer is, pretty good so far! In fact, there are ways in which I think this story wasn’t ideally suited to TV adaptation, because a lot of what I’m finding tasty here is nuance that doesn’t translate well to the screen: details of the politics and culture of the cultivation world, and the relationships between secondary characters that I know will ultimately become pretty important, but which in the show felt like they came somewhat out of left field.
I’m particularly interested to look at the structure as I continue, since the show is kind of notoriously a mess in that regard. (It starts off with a few episodes in present day, then leaps into the past for a thirty-plus-episode flashback before returning to that moment.) So far, the interleaved approach here is working much better for me.
The Valkyrie, Kate Heartfield. Disclosure: Kate is a friend, and in fact she sent me a copy of this because we’d organized a joint online event, since we both had Norse-inspired books out in close proximity to one another.
I frankly bow down in respect at what she’s done here, in terms of braiding together not just Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied but a couple of other sources as well to write a story that has one foot in mythology and one in history. Thanks to that history, this is not a cheerful book -- I mean, not that the core narrative is a cheerful one in any version, but it’s a little grimmer when you know it’s touching on actual historical populations and events rather than just mythological figures. (Attila the Hun shows up. It doesn’t go well.) It’s a fascinating glimpse at a period and a region I barely know at all, and one that’s practically untouched in fantasy fiction.
Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House, Nancy Berliner. This turned out to be much less about Chinese architecture than I expected -- only about the last quarter of the book, I’d say. Which isn’t ultimately bad; I just had to adjust my expectations!
The first quarter of the book is an overview of Huizhou, the region where Yin Yu Tang was built: its geography and climate, and how those have affected the ways people there have historically earned their livelihoods, especially as merchants and (later) pawnbrokers in other cities. The second is an in-depth view of what we know about the branch of the Huang family that built the house circa 1800 and lived in it thereafter; this part reminded me of nothing so much as Gail Lee Bernstein’s Isami’s House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family, albeit briefer. I’ll admit it got a touch tedious in places, but it did help to get a sense of how the house was used, because you understand who was using it and under what circumstances.
The last bit, however, is exactly what I was hoping for. It goes into everything from what we can surmise about how much labor was required to build the house, to the materials used, to a room-by-room analysis of the different parts of the structure. My favorite touches were the workmen who helped dismantle Yin Yu Tang for transport (more on that in a sec) opining on where the original carpenters cut corners because the owner probably wasn’t there to oversee them, and the details on not just the items placed in the structure for good luck but what was sometimes done elsewhere to curse the inhabitants. Put a tiny model of a urinal pot up in the rafters, and you can make it so that just as the owner is drifting off to sleep, his children will suddenly need to pee!
Regarding that dismantling: it turns out I can visit Yin Yu Tang! Without going to Huizhou, I mean. The current generation of the Huang family decided the house no longer served their needs, so they struck a deal with the Peabody Museum to have it taken apart, studied, and then reassembled in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s only about an hour from where my in-laws live. One of these trips, I may try to go there . . .
Worrals on the War-Path, W.E. Johns. I was in the middle of reading the next book in this list when I had an inexplicably bad day and just wanted something fun to read. Fortunately, I knew I could trust Worrals to deliver!
This installment of her adventures sees Worrals proposing a plan to set up a secret refueling depot in the Cévennes, a mountainous region in southern France, which Britain can use to send planes through to the Mediterranean. Naturally, no sooner do she and Frecks arrive there than fecal matter meets the fan, with a murder, suspicious activities by the French Resistance, and the reappearance of the nemesis she acquired in the previous volume. Given how quickly this book reads, you could tie a pretty good one on by drinking every time Worrals or Frecks steals a vehicle from the enemy -- drink twice if it meets its fate in an accidental crash, three times if the heroines deliberately put it over the edge into a ravine. It was exactly what I needed that particular day.
Circe, Madeline Miller. With full acknowledgment of the hypocrisy inherent in the author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent saying this, I think I’m starting to want this type of book -- the life story of X famous historical or mythological figure -- to not start at the beginning. I did ultimately like this novel, but the beginning dragged a bit, as I wanted to get past the opening throat-clearing and into the meat of the story. A less linear approach would have helped with that.
Throat-clearing out of the way, I really appreciated the way Miller wove through the existing myths while still telling her own story. It did the thing I like (and have done myself, albeit only in short fiction) of thinking about gods and so forth as families; it matters here that Circe and Pasiphae are sisters, that Medea is niece to them both. And I very much enjoyed the ambiguity of Odysseus: the complexity of how he’s presented and how he changes over time worked really well for me. The cynicism toward the gods worked a touch less well, but I warmed to it in the end, mostly because Athena managed to come off reasonably well despite everything (why yes, I am an unabashed partisan, why do you ask).
Miller has another novel, The Song of Achilles, that I may check out. I’m not especially interested in him personally, but I like how well Miller knows and works with her material.
The Living Wisdom of Trees: A Guide to the Natural History, Symbolism and Healing Power of Trees, Fred Hageneder. I knew when I got this that it was going to contain a certain proportion of woo, and it does; among other things, Hageneder is eager to tell you what the Bach flower remedies of these plants are good for. But I’m willing to read past woo for the stuff that’s more about the traditional folklore around its subject.
Unfortunately, I am profoundly dubious about anything Hageneder says on that front. I caught him in errors both mythological and philological: I have never seen Cardea referred to as a goddess of childbirth, only of hinges, and while of course one can see the metaphorical connection between those two thresholds, the lack of reference to the latter association -- even when it would have supported his point about hawthorn’s symbolism -- made my eyebrow go up. He asserts that Yggdrasil is actually a yew tree and not an ash on the basis of a quotation whose precise origin he does not cite, and it’s a hell of a linguistic stretch to say that the Japanese name for yew, ichii, means “tree of god” when the kanji used to write it actually translate to “first rank.”
Those are just a sampling of the places where I knew enough to cast doubt on what he was saying, but there are plenty of others where he makes claims with such confidence that I immediately question it. Not everything in here is wrong, but I can only be sure of the bits I’ve seen corroborated elsewhere, which limits the utility of anything in here that’s new.
Hidden Turnings: A Collection of Stories Through Time and Space, ed. Diana Wynne Jones. Believe it or not, I didn’t pick this up because it’s edited by Diana Wynne Jones; I picked it up because Geraldine Harris has a short story in it.
I left this volume out when I did my DWJ Project because the story she has in it, “The Master,” is also collected elsewhere, and I was concerned more with what she’d written than what she’d edited. But her flaws as a short story writer have no bearing on her skills as an editor, so I was mildly interested to see what the anthology was like, apart from Harris’ story.
The answer -- as is the case with most anthologies -- is a mixed bag. I genuinely think Jones’ story is one of the weakest in here; “The Master” is acceptable if not great for most of its length and then cheeses out so hard in the final page, I can’t even. “The Vision” by Mary Rayner is pretty aimless and Helen Cresswell’s “The Sky Sea” is slight, while Douglas Hill’s “True Believer” kind of plays the Lovecraftian game with its structure, minus the cosmic horror -- not my favorite thing. And Zelazny’s “Kalifriki of the Thread” mostly annoyed me with its sexism.
Others, however, are much better. I liked Harris’ “Urgeya’s Choice,” which centers on a rite of passage undergone by a pair of twins, though I think I wanted to ending to play out with just a touch more detail. Tanith Lee’s “Ceres Passing” falls in a similar bucket. And a few of them -- Robert Westall’s “Fifty-Fafty,” Garry Kilworth’s “Dogfaerie,” and Terry Pratchetts’ “Turntables of the Night” -- were very pleasingly voice-y.
She edited one other collection that I know of, Spellbound; I may seek it out, just for completion’s sake.
Peruvian Myths and Legends, ed. Fernando Rojas F., trans. Mabel Borja. Another gift from my parents’ travels, an extremely brief tour through both the older mythology and some newer legends of the region. The translation is awkward in places and almost none of the stories are longer than about two pages, but since I previously owned precisely zero books of Peruvian folklore, this is still a welcome addition! I particularly appreciate that the stories, despite their brevity, convey the sense that there were actually quite a lot of groups of people in the area of the former Incan Empire, with their own (often contradictory) myths -- this was absolutely not a homogenous culture.
A Magic Steeped in Poison, Judy I. Lin. Chinese-inspired secondary world fantasy built around the idea of tea-based magic: trained practitioners can use different infusions to create a variety of effects in the drinker.
Fundamentally, my central gripe here is no fault of the book itself: I quite simply wanted it to not be YA. I wanted more meat on the bone, deeper intrigue, a relationship that didn’t leap straight to “the protagonist is besotted with this guy” so quickly, and so forth. The descriptions of the food and tea are excellent, but I wanted everything to have that feeling of detail and immediacy, and it didn’t -- in ways that owe more to the length and pacing of YA than any flaw I would chalk up to craft. Having talked with a friend about where the plot goes in the sequel (which I believe concludes a duology), I don’t think I’ll be reading it, but people who are less burned out on the conventions of YA than I am might enjoy this.
The High Place, James Branch Cabell. Apparently if I were to read only one Cabell novel, it should have been Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, but this is the one we had on our shelf (from god knows where; neither my husband nor I recall buying it). Since I’m trying to spice up my new purchases with books that have been sitting unread in our library forever, and I periodically enjoy dipping into the early fantasists, I decided to give this one a shot.
The context around it is kind of fascinating. It turns out this is part of a whole series Cabell wrote, called the Biography of the Life of Manuel, where the conceit is that the “life” or story of Manuel is passed down through his descendants -- of which Florian, the central character of this book, is one.
Florian is profoundly unlikeable, and meant to be so. The High Place is written in the style of high romance, but its subject matter is sordid; Florian, having briefly seen a Sleeping Beauty-type woman as a child, remains obsessed with her as an adult, and has murdered four wives (along with at least one male lover) because they don’t measure up to her. He eventually makes a deal with the devil -- convincing himself that this will have no detrimental effect on his soul, because Florian is nothing if not a master of justifying all his actions -- in order to win his coveted Melior . . . only to discover, of course, that he doesn’t much like her, either. Meanwhile, religion of any stripe doesn’t fare much better than the notion of fairy-tale romance, with hypocritical saints and so forth.
The book does a very good job of marinating you in Florian’s unbearable sophistry, to the point where near the end I was unsure if I wanted to spend any more time with him. Fortunately, the last few chapters pull up in some interesting ways: Melior gets a splendid monologue at Florian, the devil and an archangel have a kind of intriguing conversation, and the final chapter pivots around in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. So overall, I did enjoy this, though I’m not likely to seek out Jurgen (or any of the other components of the Biography of the Life of Manuel) unless somebody tells me I really should.
What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People, Joe Navarro. Back in April I reported on Navarro’s later book, The Dictionary of Body Language: A Field Guide to Human Behavior. That one goes very anatomically through the parts of the body and what messages they send -- as in, not just “the face” but the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, etc. Based on what was said there, I expected this one to be organized more by mood, but it’s still pretty anatomical, albeit more broadly; there’s a leg chapter, a torso chapter, etc.
Having said that, it was useful to refresh my memory on Navarro’s points. As with the later book, he is very explicit that there is no behavior which says “this person is lying;” instead there are only behaviors that indicate discomfort and stress, and furthermore, those have to be measured against the baseline of the person’s normal behavior, because what’s most relevant is a sudden change in their body language. Look to what provoked the change, and investigate that further.
I’ll probably keep both books because I have them and so why not, but if you’re only going to get one, I’d suggest this title. In particular, it devotes an entire chapter to the topic of deception, pointing out that even trained law enforcement professionals do little better than a coin toss in directly detecting lies under most circumstances. Contrary to what the clickbait subtitle here implies, good interrogation takes time, and it’s better served by a neutral demeanor that gives the subject room to react than by the confrontational behavior we’re used to seeing on TV. Patiently following up on the hints provided by stress reactions is what brings results, not getting up in somebody’s face and yelling at them until they break: as Navarro points out, the latter is how you get false confessions.
Naamah’s Kiss, Jacqueline Carey. I very much enjoyed Carey’s first Kushiel trilogy and was rather less fond of the second. The nuances of the reasons escape me now, but I know a core issue was that I just . . . didn’t care about the central relationship in that one, and since a great deal of the plot was driven by that relationship and the political problems it caused, I wound up less than engaged. But I like the worldbuilding of her Terre d’Ange novels, and this would be a new character, so I decided to give it a shot.
Not just a new character, but a new perspective: although Moirin, the protagonist of this trilogy, has a d’Angeline father, she herself is Alban -- the unChristianized British analogue of the setting. I really enjoyed that aspect, first because of the chance it gave Carey to develop in depth a group of people previously seen only from the outside, and second because Moirin’s initial experiences in Terre d’Ange let us see them from the outside. If her culture shock maybe wears off faster than it should, well, the reader doesn’t necessarily want to be dragged through that forever.
There are also plot things I quite liked, chief among them what goes on with the Circle of Shalomon -- probably I read the wrong sort of fiction to have encountered more depictions of why trying to summon daemons is a bad idea, but what we get here illustrates that in a really great way (because it’s not just Proceed Directly to Horror, Do Not Pass Go; it's much more subtle than that). And although I’m a poor audience for the melodrama of people being stuck in screwed-up relationships, I thought that was well-done.
Alas -- and you probably heard this coming -- there were things I didn’t like as well. Most centrally, the role played by Moirin’s diadh-anam. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel that leaned so hard on destiny to steer its plot: not only is Moirin aware that she has one, but again and again she feels promptings from her diadh-anam that say no, you can’t stay here; yes, that person will be important to you; okay, it’s time to go engage with this bit of the story now. It’s not fully straightforward -- she misreads it in a few places -- but that device is used to pitchfork her to the other side of the planet where she tags along with a plot that honestly would have nothing to do with her, were her involvement not fiatted by divine intervention. (Not in a stereotypical “white savior” way; more as an adjunct at a couple of key points.) And that blatant shoving by the Hand of the Author made it a lot harder for me to care about what was going on.
I also felt like the richness of the setting got thinner once Moirin reached Ch’in. This is purely me speculating, but it felt to me like the collision of three issues: first, Moirin isn’t there long enough to become deeply familiar with it, and possibly Carey doesn’t have the level of knowledge and comfort with the region necessary to write it from a standpoint of deep familiarity. Second, because of the politics around a white author writing about an alt-history China, Carey may not have felt as free to make up interesting stuff the way she does with her (more thoroughly alternate) unChristianized Europe. And third, really digging into the massive culture shock Moirin would probably experience would all too easily tip over into feeling like exoticism or even xenophobia. But with those three things off the table -- deep familiarity, inventive additions, and alienation -- there’s . . . kind of not a lot left to make that part of the setting feel as vivid and rich as other parts of it do. So Moirin kind of skims along the surface of it, tagging along with a plot that only involves her because of deus ex machina, and the result is that the last third of the book was much less engaging to me.
Having said that, I’m not so put off by it that I have no inclination to read the second and third books. For one thing, I have an inkling the story is going to regions I’m interested to see -- even if my ultimate reaction ends up being like the above.
The Ghosts of Rose Hill, R.M. Romero. This was a highly unusual read for me, in that it’s written entirely in verse. (It’s not super long; I suspect it’s a novella by word count. I read the whole thing in less than an hour and a half.)
I almost bounced out of it very early, because honestly, most of the poetry didn’t do a lot for me. A few bits here and there resonated nicely, but a lot of it is free verse of the sort where you could probably remove the line breaks and the reader wouldn’t notice anything odd, apart from how little there is of the conventional narration and transitions we expect out of most prose fiction. And that is not my cup of poetic tea.
However, just as I was about to decide this wasn’t for me, the story began to kick into gear. Ilana, a Jewish teenager of Czech and Cuban descent, is sent from Miami to spend the summer with her aunt in Prague, where she’s supposed to be studying for the SAT so she can have the future her parents want, instead of the future she wants as a violinist and composer. As she begins clearing the overgrowth from a neglected Jewish cemetery, she begins to see the ghosts of Jewish children . . . and also Rudolph Wasserman, an increasingly sinister figure who encourages her music in ways that set off warning bells.
The folklore in here was just gorgeous (though I wish Wasserman’s side of things hadn’t been interleaved so early; I would have liked to be left in doubt about him a little longer). In addition to the core story, there are little nods to things like “The Red Shoes,” and many other echoes of folktale motifs. My own tastes as a reader mean I probably would have liked this better as a prose narrative -- which also would have helped it be just a touch clearer in a few places where I found things muddy -- but it says something about how much I liked the narrative that I wound up reading the whole thing despite my tepid reaction to the verse.
The Case for God, Karen Armstrong. Like the above (but for very different reasons), I almost abandoned this book in its first few pages. An early line in the Introduction comments on “The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions” -- and sure enough, the footnote is to Joseph Campbell (which, uhhhhh, no). Armstrong also makes confident declarations not only about how people thousands of years before the advent of writing practiced their religion, but how they felt about it, which is fundamentally a thing we cannot ever know.
But I got far enough to realize that I was reading this book through the wrong lens. Armstrong is not advancing an anthropological argument; she’s advancing a theological one. Said argument is complex and dense enough that I don’t think I’ll be able to summarize it well, but I can get at a portion of it by saying: I’ve known for some time that “inerrant biblical literalism” is very much new development in Christianity (only about a hundred and fifty years old), but the latter half of Armstrong’s book shows how that developed out of an older shift in western Christianity, going back to the beginning of the modern period (about five hundred years ago). Her argument is that this shift was a wrong turn and has led to the disaffection with religion that many western Christians feel today.
What’s the shift? Essentially, it’s the attempt to treat God and questions of theology scientifically. Early modern theologians were very enthusiastic about this prospect and thought science could totally prove everything we need to know about God, but they instead reduced God to "like a person, but bigger," opened the door to science dismissing religion, and put the entire conversation on the wrong footing. Armstrong refers often to the contrast between mythos and logos, and like Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria,” says they operate differently and serve different purposes; shifting religion from mythos to logos is bad for both religion and science.
That’s the second half of the book. The first half is why I wound up persisting and reading the whole thing, because it lays out the theological mentality which existed before that shift -- largely in Christianity, but with some side excursions taken into Judaism and Islam, and to a much lesser extent into Eastern and pagan Greek religions. Per Armstrong -- and here I suspect she’s on vastly more solid ground than she is in those early bits -- not only did earlier theologians not feel you could rationalize your way to an understanding of God, they often asserted the ultimate unknowability of God. As in, made statements to the effect of "it is wrong to say that God is good, because God's goodness is not like the goodness you can experience and understand" and “it is wrong to say that God exists, because by doing so, you reduce God to the status of any other being that exists in the world.” Far from being interpreted as literal facts, scripture was more often seen as a symbol to help you get at something so transcendent, language is futile; only by confronting rationality-thwarting paradoxes like “God is both One and Three” and "God exists but does not exist" can you reach the point where words fail and you’re left with a silent glimpse of something beyond yourself.
Which made me think of 1) Zen koans and 2) of all things, H.P. Lovecraft. His schtick, of course, is cosmic horror: even a fleeting brush with the Old Ones exposes you to something so far beyond human comprehension that it shatters you forever. This book left me thinking about cosmic wonder, a concept where the divine is equally incomprehensible, but an encounter with it leaves you the exact opposite of a broken wreck afterward.
I was a little disappointed that Armstrong didn’t go into more detail on one of her other core assertions, which is that religion has only ever made sense within the context of its rituals; it is a practice, a thing you can only understand by doing it, not by just sitting and reading about it. (Then again, I recognize the irony of my disappointment: arguably I could only really grok Armstrong’s point through practice of my own.) I also think she needed to make more than one brief nod toward the likelihood that not all religious practitioners shared the refined views of the theologians she quotes here -- again, the anthropological side reared its head -- but she successfully convinced me that my vague sense of how pre-modern theologians understood Christianity was badly tainted by modern assumptions. I would not, for example, have guessed that both Augustine and John Calvin were firmly of the opinion that religion shouldn’t get in the way of science and if the two seemed to contradict each other, then you needed to reinterpret your religion.
I could quibble with other aspects here, like the extent to which Armstrong seems to buy into the pop-culture notion of the “Dark Ages” (a period she largely pole-vaults over, leaping from the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century to the tenth or eleventh century with far more minimal attention than she devotes to later ages). Still and all: I read four hundred pages of theological history over the course of three days, which tells me I was getting something of interest out of it, quibbles and all.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dg3XOT)
But on to the things I finished this past month . . .
The Outskirter’s Secret, Rosemary Kirstein. Second in its series, and I see what people have been telling me about the story growing deeper as it goes. I really liked how Kirstein develops Outskirter society -- particularly the fact that it’s not homogenous; the Outskirters Rowan and Bel encounter near the settled lands are different from (and in Bel’s view, degenerate compared to) those further out, who are themselves different from the Face People, the tribes who live on the very far edges of the Outskirts, where survival becomes the next best thing to impossible.
I continue to be fascinated by the setting here, and by the way Kirstein doles out clues to what’s going on: the process sort of makes a steerswoman of the reader, because you’re learning and (at least if you’re me) theorizing as you go. In my review of the first book, I called the world post-apocalyptic; now I’m thinking that we’re looking at a terraforming situation instead, though it’s still unclear why technology is so little understood by most of the characters, and how things got to this state. Those of you who have read the whole series to date may enjoy a good laugh if I continue to be wrong!
Narratively, I expected this volume to be much more about the protagonists locating the ridge where Bel’s gems came from and investigating what they found there. In reality, that doesn’t come until the very end of the book; the bulk of the story is about their travels through and difficulties in the Outskirts, the latter being both physical and political. The climax was very different from what you see in most books, and while a certain bleak component of it was not my favorite sort of thing, I appreciate the way the meaning of the title ultimately shakes out.
Wicked Gentleman, Ginn Hale. Two novellas glued together into a book, both concerning the same characters -- the diabolical Belimai Sykes, and the more upstanding Captain William Harper -- in an odd, quasi-Victorian world where the forces of Hell struck some kind of truce with the angels, but their descendants (like Belimai) are very thoroughly discriminated against and often mistreated by the powers that be.
I basically wanted more of this. Because both halves of the book are more or less freestanding novellas -- the plot of the second touches on the first, but is its own independent conflict -- neither one got developed in as much depth as it might have been. That particularly disappointed me in the first half, because there was good material here for a noir mystery, but the actual mystery was necessarily quite thin. And there doesn’t seem to be any more from Hale with these characters, not that I’ve been able to find, so I’m left being interested by the setting -- especially the hybrid law enforcement/clergy setup of the police; Harper is technically a priest -- but not quite given enough meat to sink my teeth into with the characters and plots.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 1 Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I’ve watched the TV show The Untamed, which is based on this series, but I was interested to see what the book version was like.
The answer is, pretty good so far! In fact, there are ways in which I think this story wasn’t ideally suited to TV adaptation, because a lot of what I’m finding tasty here is nuance that doesn’t translate well to the screen: details of the politics and culture of the cultivation world, and the relationships between secondary characters that I know will ultimately become pretty important, but which in the show felt like they came somewhat out of left field.
I’m particularly interested to look at the structure as I continue, since the show is kind of notoriously a mess in that regard. (It starts off with a few episodes in present day, then leaps into the past for a thirty-plus-episode flashback before returning to that moment.) So far, the interleaved approach here is working much better for me.
The Valkyrie, Kate Heartfield. Disclosure: Kate is a friend, and in fact she sent me a copy of this because we’d organized a joint online event, since we both had Norse-inspired books out in close proximity to one another.
I frankly bow down in respect at what she’s done here, in terms of braiding together not just Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied but a couple of other sources as well to write a story that has one foot in mythology and one in history. Thanks to that history, this is not a cheerful book -- I mean, not that the core narrative is a cheerful one in any version, but it’s a little grimmer when you know it’s touching on actual historical populations and events rather than just mythological figures. (Attila the Hun shows up. It doesn’t go well.) It’s a fascinating glimpse at a period and a region I barely know at all, and one that’s practically untouched in fantasy fiction.
Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House, Nancy Berliner. This turned out to be much less about Chinese architecture than I expected -- only about the last quarter of the book, I’d say. Which isn’t ultimately bad; I just had to adjust my expectations!
The first quarter of the book is an overview of Huizhou, the region where Yin Yu Tang was built: its geography and climate, and how those have affected the ways people there have historically earned their livelihoods, especially as merchants and (later) pawnbrokers in other cities. The second is an in-depth view of what we know about the branch of the Huang family that built the house circa 1800 and lived in it thereafter; this part reminded me of nothing so much as Gail Lee Bernstein’s Isami’s House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family, albeit briefer. I’ll admit it got a touch tedious in places, but it did help to get a sense of how the house was used, because you understand who was using it and under what circumstances.
The last bit, however, is exactly what I was hoping for. It goes into everything from what we can surmise about how much labor was required to build the house, to the materials used, to a room-by-room analysis of the different parts of the structure. My favorite touches were the workmen who helped dismantle Yin Yu Tang for transport (more on that in a sec) opining on where the original carpenters cut corners because the owner probably wasn’t there to oversee them, and the details on not just the items placed in the structure for good luck but what was sometimes done elsewhere to curse the inhabitants. Put a tiny model of a urinal pot up in the rafters, and you can make it so that just as the owner is drifting off to sleep, his children will suddenly need to pee!
Regarding that dismantling: it turns out I can visit Yin Yu Tang! Without going to Huizhou, I mean. The current generation of the Huang family decided the house no longer served their needs, so they struck a deal with the Peabody Museum to have it taken apart, studied, and then reassembled in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s only about an hour from where my in-laws live. One of these trips, I may try to go there . . .
Worrals on the War-Path, W.E. Johns. I was in the middle of reading the next book in this list when I had an inexplicably bad day and just wanted something fun to read. Fortunately, I knew I could trust Worrals to deliver!
This installment of her adventures sees Worrals proposing a plan to set up a secret refueling depot in the Cévennes, a mountainous region in southern France, which Britain can use to send planes through to the Mediterranean. Naturally, no sooner do she and Frecks arrive there than fecal matter meets the fan, with a murder, suspicious activities by the French Resistance, and the reappearance of the nemesis she acquired in the previous volume. Given how quickly this book reads, you could tie a pretty good one on by drinking every time Worrals or Frecks steals a vehicle from the enemy -- drink twice if it meets its fate in an accidental crash, three times if the heroines deliberately put it over the edge into a ravine. It was exactly what I needed that particular day.
Circe, Madeline Miller. With full acknowledgment of the hypocrisy inherent in the author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent saying this, I think I’m starting to want this type of book -- the life story of X famous historical or mythological figure -- to not start at the beginning. I did ultimately like this novel, but the beginning dragged a bit, as I wanted to get past the opening throat-clearing and into the meat of the story. A less linear approach would have helped with that.
Throat-clearing out of the way, I really appreciated the way Miller wove through the existing myths while still telling her own story. It did the thing I like (and have done myself, albeit only in short fiction) of thinking about gods and so forth as families; it matters here that Circe and Pasiphae are sisters, that Medea is niece to them both. And I very much enjoyed the ambiguity of Odysseus: the complexity of how he’s presented and how he changes over time worked really well for me. The cynicism toward the gods worked a touch less well, but I warmed to it in the end, mostly because Athena managed to come off reasonably well despite everything (why yes, I am an unabashed partisan, why do you ask).
Miller has another novel, The Song of Achilles, that I may check out. I’m not especially interested in him personally, but I like how well Miller knows and works with her material.
The Living Wisdom of Trees: A Guide to the Natural History, Symbolism and Healing Power of Trees, Fred Hageneder. I knew when I got this that it was going to contain a certain proportion of woo, and it does; among other things, Hageneder is eager to tell you what the Bach flower remedies of these plants are good for. But I’m willing to read past woo for the stuff that’s more about the traditional folklore around its subject.
Unfortunately, I am profoundly dubious about anything Hageneder says on that front. I caught him in errors both mythological and philological: I have never seen Cardea referred to as a goddess of childbirth, only of hinges, and while of course one can see the metaphorical connection between those two thresholds, the lack of reference to the latter association -- even when it would have supported his point about hawthorn’s symbolism -- made my eyebrow go up. He asserts that Yggdrasil is actually a yew tree and not an ash on the basis of a quotation whose precise origin he does not cite, and it’s a hell of a linguistic stretch to say that the Japanese name for yew, ichii, means “tree of god” when the kanji used to write it actually translate to “first rank.”
Those are just a sampling of the places where I knew enough to cast doubt on what he was saying, but there are plenty of others where he makes claims with such confidence that I immediately question it. Not everything in here is wrong, but I can only be sure of the bits I’ve seen corroborated elsewhere, which limits the utility of anything in here that’s new.
Hidden Turnings: A Collection of Stories Through Time and Space, ed. Diana Wynne Jones. Believe it or not, I didn’t pick this up because it’s edited by Diana Wynne Jones; I picked it up because Geraldine Harris has a short story in it.
I left this volume out when I did my DWJ Project because the story she has in it, “The Master,” is also collected elsewhere, and I was concerned more with what she’d written than what she’d edited. But her flaws as a short story writer have no bearing on her skills as an editor, so I was mildly interested to see what the anthology was like, apart from Harris’ story.
The answer -- as is the case with most anthologies -- is a mixed bag. I genuinely think Jones’ story is one of the weakest in here; “The Master” is acceptable if not great for most of its length and then cheeses out so hard in the final page, I can’t even. “The Vision” by Mary Rayner is pretty aimless and Helen Cresswell’s “The Sky Sea” is slight, while Douglas Hill’s “True Believer” kind of plays the Lovecraftian game with its structure, minus the cosmic horror -- not my favorite thing. And Zelazny’s “Kalifriki of the Thread” mostly annoyed me with its sexism.
Others, however, are much better. I liked Harris’ “Urgeya’s Choice,” which centers on a rite of passage undergone by a pair of twins, though I think I wanted to ending to play out with just a touch more detail. Tanith Lee’s “Ceres Passing” falls in a similar bucket. And a few of them -- Robert Westall’s “Fifty-Fafty,” Garry Kilworth’s “Dogfaerie,” and Terry Pratchetts’ “Turntables of the Night” -- were very pleasingly voice-y.
She edited one other collection that I know of, Spellbound; I may seek it out, just for completion’s sake.
Peruvian Myths and Legends, ed. Fernando Rojas F., trans. Mabel Borja. Another gift from my parents’ travels, an extremely brief tour through both the older mythology and some newer legends of the region. The translation is awkward in places and almost none of the stories are longer than about two pages, but since I previously owned precisely zero books of Peruvian folklore, this is still a welcome addition! I particularly appreciate that the stories, despite their brevity, convey the sense that there were actually quite a lot of groups of people in the area of the former Incan Empire, with their own (often contradictory) myths -- this was absolutely not a homogenous culture.
A Magic Steeped in Poison, Judy I. Lin. Chinese-inspired secondary world fantasy built around the idea of tea-based magic: trained practitioners can use different infusions to create a variety of effects in the drinker.
Fundamentally, my central gripe here is no fault of the book itself: I quite simply wanted it to not be YA. I wanted more meat on the bone, deeper intrigue, a relationship that didn’t leap straight to “the protagonist is besotted with this guy” so quickly, and so forth. The descriptions of the food and tea are excellent, but I wanted everything to have that feeling of detail and immediacy, and it didn’t -- in ways that owe more to the length and pacing of YA than any flaw I would chalk up to craft. Having talked with a friend about where the plot goes in the sequel (which I believe concludes a duology), I don’t think I’ll be reading it, but people who are less burned out on the conventions of YA than I am might enjoy this.
The High Place, James Branch Cabell. Apparently if I were to read only one Cabell novel, it should have been Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, but this is the one we had on our shelf (from god knows where; neither my husband nor I recall buying it). Since I’m trying to spice up my new purchases with books that have been sitting unread in our library forever, and I periodically enjoy dipping into the early fantasists, I decided to give this one a shot.
The context around it is kind of fascinating. It turns out this is part of a whole series Cabell wrote, called the Biography of the Life of Manuel, where the conceit is that the “life” or story of Manuel is passed down through his descendants -- of which Florian, the central character of this book, is one.
Florian is profoundly unlikeable, and meant to be so. The High Place is written in the style of high romance, but its subject matter is sordid; Florian, having briefly seen a Sleeping Beauty-type woman as a child, remains obsessed with her as an adult, and has murdered four wives (along with at least one male lover) because they don’t measure up to her. He eventually makes a deal with the devil -- convincing himself that this will have no detrimental effect on his soul, because Florian is nothing if not a master of justifying all his actions -- in order to win his coveted Melior . . . only to discover, of course, that he doesn’t much like her, either. Meanwhile, religion of any stripe doesn’t fare much better than the notion of fairy-tale romance, with hypocritical saints and so forth.
The book does a very good job of marinating you in Florian’s unbearable sophistry, to the point where near the end I was unsure if I wanted to spend any more time with him. Fortunately, the last few chapters pull up in some interesting ways: Melior gets a splendid monologue at Florian, the devil and an archangel have a kind of intriguing conversation, and the final chapter pivots around in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. So overall, I did enjoy this, though I’m not likely to seek out Jurgen (or any of the other components of the Biography of the Life of Manuel) unless somebody tells me I really should.
What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People, Joe Navarro. Back in April I reported on Navarro’s later book, The Dictionary of Body Language: A Field Guide to Human Behavior. That one goes very anatomically through the parts of the body and what messages they send -- as in, not just “the face” but the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, etc. Based on what was said there, I expected this one to be organized more by mood, but it’s still pretty anatomical, albeit more broadly; there’s a leg chapter, a torso chapter, etc.
Having said that, it was useful to refresh my memory on Navarro’s points. As with the later book, he is very explicit that there is no behavior which says “this person is lying;” instead there are only behaviors that indicate discomfort and stress, and furthermore, those have to be measured against the baseline of the person’s normal behavior, because what’s most relevant is a sudden change in their body language. Look to what provoked the change, and investigate that further.
I’ll probably keep both books because I have them and so why not, but if you’re only going to get one, I’d suggest this title. In particular, it devotes an entire chapter to the topic of deception, pointing out that even trained law enforcement professionals do little better than a coin toss in directly detecting lies under most circumstances. Contrary to what the clickbait subtitle here implies, good interrogation takes time, and it’s better served by a neutral demeanor that gives the subject room to react than by the confrontational behavior we’re used to seeing on TV. Patiently following up on the hints provided by stress reactions is what brings results, not getting up in somebody’s face and yelling at them until they break: as Navarro points out, the latter is how you get false confessions.
Naamah’s Kiss, Jacqueline Carey. I very much enjoyed Carey’s first Kushiel trilogy and was rather less fond of the second. The nuances of the reasons escape me now, but I know a core issue was that I just . . . didn’t care about the central relationship in that one, and since a great deal of the plot was driven by that relationship and the political problems it caused, I wound up less than engaged. But I like the worldbuilding of her Terre d’Ange novels, and this would be a new character, so I decided to give it a shot.
Not just a new character, but a new perspective: although Moirin, the protagonist of this trilogy, has a d’Angeline father, she herself is Alban -- the unChristianized British analogue of the setting. I really enjoyed that aspect, first because of the chance it gave Carey to develop in depth a group of people previously seen only from the outside, and second because Moirin’s initial experiences in Terre d’Ange let us see them from the outside. If her culture shock maybe wears off faster than it should, well, the reader doesn’t necessarily want to be dragged through that forever.
There are also plot things I quite liked, chief among them what goes on with the Circle of Shalomon -- probably I read the wrong sort of fiction to have encountered more depictions of why trying to summon daemons is a bad idea, but what we get here illustrates that in a really great way (because it’s not just Proceed Directly to Horror, Do Not Pass Go; it's much more subtle than that). And although I’m a poor audience for the melodrama of people being stuck in screwed-up relationships, I thought that was well-done.
Alas -- and you probably heard this coming -- there were things I didn’t like as well. Most centrally, the role played by Moirin’s diadh-anam. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel that leaned so hard on destiny to steer its plot: not only is Moirin aware that she has one, but again and again she feels promptings from her diadh-anam that say no, you can’t stay here; yes, that person will be important to you; okay, it’s time to go engage with this bit of the story now. It’s not fully straightforward -- she misreads it in a few places -- but that device is used to pitchfork her to the other side of the planet where she tags along with a plot that honestly would have nothing to do with her, were her involvement not fiatted by divine intervention. (Not in a stereotypical “white savior” way; more as an adjunct at a couple of key points.) And that blatant shoving by the Hand of the Author made it a lot harder for me to care about what was going on.
I also felt like the richness of the setting got thinner once Moirin reached Ch’in. This is purely me speculating, but it felt to me like the collision of three issues: first, Moirin isn’t there long enough to become deeply familiar with it, and possibly Carey doesn’t have the level of knowledge and comfort with the region necessary to write it from a standpoint of deep familiarity. Second, because of the politics around a white author writing about an alt-history China, Carey may not have felt as free to make up interesting stuff the way she does with her (more thoroughly alternate) unChristianized Europe. And third, really digging into the massive culture shock Moirin would probably experience would all too easily tip over into feeling like exoticism or even xenophobia. But with those three things off the table -- deep familiarity, inventive additions, and alienation -- there’s . . . kind of not a lot left to make that part of the setting feel as vivid and rich as other parts of it do. So Moirin kind of skims along the surface of it, tagging along with a plot that only involves her because of deus ex machina, and the result is that the last third of the book was much less engaging to me.
Having said that, I’m not so put off by it that I have no inclination to read the second and third books. For one thing, I have an inkling the story is going to regions I’m interested to see -- even if my ultimate reaction ends up being like the above.
The Ghosts of Rose Hill, R.M. Romero. This was a highly unusual read for me, in that it’s written entirely in verse. (It’s not super long; I suspect it’s a novella by word count. I read the whole thing in less than an hour and a half.)
I almost bounced out of it very early, because honestly, most of the poetry didn’t do a lot for me. A few bits here and there resonated nicely, but a lot of it is free verse of the sort where you could probably remove the line breaks and the reader wouldn’t notice anything odd, apart from how little there is of the conventional narration and transitions we expect out of most prose fiction. And that is not my cup of poetic tea.
However, just as I was about to decide this wasn’t for me, the story began to kick into gear. Ilana, a Jewish teenager of Czech and Cuban descent, is sent from Miami to spend the summer with her aunt in Prague, where she’s supposed to be studying for the SAT so she can have the future her parents want, instead of the future she wants as a violinist and composer. As she begins clearing the overgrowth from a neglected Jewish cemetery, she begins to see the ghosts of Jewish children . . . and also Rudolph Wasserman, an increasingly sinister figure who encourages her music in ways that set off warning bells.
The folklore in here was just gorgeous (though I wish Wasserman’s side of things hadn’t been interleaved so early; I would have liked to be left in doubt about him a little longer). In addition to the core story, there are little nods to things like “The Red Shoes,” and many other echoes of folktale motifs. My own tastes as a reader mean I probably would have liked this better as a prose narrative -- which also would have helped it be just a touch clearer in a few places where I found things muddy -- but it says something about how much I liked the narrative that I wound up reading the whole thing despite my tepid reaction to the verse.
The Case for God, Karen Armstrong. Like the above (but for very different reasons), I almost abandoned this book in its first few pages. An early line in the Introduction comments on “The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions” -- and sure enough, the footnote is to Joseph Campbell (which, uhhhhh, no). Armstrong also makes confident declarations not only about how people thousands of years before the advent of writing practiced their religion, but how they felt about it, which is fundamentally a thing we cannot ever know.
But I got far enough to realize that I was reading this book through the wrong lens. Armstrong is not advancing an anthropological argument; she’s advancing a theological one. Said argument is complex and dense enough that I don’t think I’ll be able to summarize it well, but I can get at a portion of it by saying: I’ve known for some time that “inerrant biblical literalism” is very much new development in Christianity (only about a hundred and fifty years old), but the latter half of Armstrong’s book shows how that developed out of an older shift in western Christianity, going back to the beginning of the modern period (about five hundred years ago). Her argument is that this shift was a wrong turn and has led to the disaffection with religion that many western Christians feel today.
What’s the shift? Essentially, it’s the attempt to treat God and questions of theology scientifically. Early modern theologians were very enthusiastic about this prospect and thought science could totally prove everything we need to know about God, but they instead reduced God to "like a person, but bigger," opened the door to science dismissing religion, and put the entire conversation on the wrong footing. Armstrong refers often to the contrast between mythos and logos, and like Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria,” says they operate differently and serve different purposes; shifting religion from mythos to logos is bad for both religion and science.
That’s the second half of the book. The first half is why I wound up persisting and reading the whole thing, because it lays out the theological mentality which existed before that shift -- largely in Christianity, but with some side excursions taken into Judaism and Islam, and to a much lesser extent into Eastern and pagan Greek religions. Per Armstrong -- and here I suspect she’s on vastly more solid ground than she is in those early bits -- not only did earlier theologians not feel you could rationalize your way to an understanding of God, they often asserted the ultimate unknowability of God. As in, made statements to the effect of "it is wrong to say that God is good, because God's goodness is not like the goodness you can experience and understand" and “it is wrong to say that God exists, because by doing so, you reduce God to the status of any other being that exists in the world.” Far from being interpreted as literal facts, scripture was more often seen as a symbol to help you get at something so transcendent, language is futile; only by confronting rationality-thwarting paradoxes like “God is both One and Three” and "God exists but does not exist" can you reach the point where words fail and you’re left with a silent glimpse of something beyond yourself.
Which made me think of 1) Zen koans and 2) of all things, H.P. Lovecraft. His schtick, of course, is cosmic horror: even a fleeting brush with the Old Ones exposes you to something so far beyond human comprehension that it shatters you forever. This book left me thinking about cosmic wonder, a concept where the divine is equally incomprehensible, but an encounter with it leaves you the exact opposite of a broken wreck afterward.
I was a little disappointed that Armstrong didn’t go into more detail on one of her other core assertions, which is that religion has only ever made sense within the context of its rituals; it is a practice, a thing you can only understand by doing it, not by just sitting and reading about it. (Then again, I recognize the irony of my disappointment: arguably I could only really grok Armstrong’s point through practice of my own.) I also think she needed to make more than one brief nod toward the likelihood that not all religious practitioners shared the refined views of the theologians she quotes here -- again, the anthropological side reared its head -- but she successfully convinced me that my vague sense of how pre-modern theologians understood Christianity was badly tainted by modern assumptions. I would not, for example, have guessed that both Augustine and John Calvin were firmly of the opinion that religion shouldn’t get in the way of science and if the two seemed to contradict each other, then you needed to reinterpret your religion.
I could quibble with other aspects here, like the extent to which Armstrong seems to buy into the pop-culture notion of the “Dark Ages” (a period she largely pole-vaults over, leaping from the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century to the tenth or eleventh century with far more minimal attention than she devotes to later ages). Still and all: I read four hundred pages of theological history over the course of three days, which tells me I was getting something of interest out of it, quibbles and all.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dg3XOT)
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Date: 2023-11-01 12:27 pm (UTC)So, yes, recommended, if you can make it there sometime.
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Date: 2023-11-01 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-01 07:44 pm (UTC)That is an incredibly effective curse.
"Ceres, Passing" was the first story I ever read by Tanith Lee, in that anthology when it came out.
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Date: 2023-11-01 09:02 pm (UTC)I love how petty it is. Fiction goes straight to things like "this curse will kill your entire family," but no, a real-life curse might just aim to make you suffer incredibly mundane annoyances.
"Ceres, Passing" was the first story I ever read by Tanith Lee, in that anthology when it came out.
I read some of her fiction manymany years ago (like, high school) -- what title or titles would you recommend the most?
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Date: 2023-11-01 09:44 pm (UTC)Some Yiddish curses operate on this theory. Like, you have the hardcore hell-headfirst-and-bake-bagels, marry-the-daughter-of-the-angel-of-death school, and then you have the one which curses the recipient to need to dash to the bathroom every three minutes or every three months. There's also one about working very hard to open a store which never has what its customers want, which I feel is just vicious.
I read some of her fiction manymany years ago (like, high school) -- what title or titles would you recommend the most?
Ack. She was formative for me, which makes this question difficult, as does her ludicrous prolificacy. All four of the Secret Books of Paradys (1988–93), with the proviso that The Book of the Dead (1991) is by far the weakest; conversely, Faces Under Water (1998), but not necessarily the rest of the Secret Books of Venus (1998–2003). Her YA novels Black Unicorn (1991) and Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl's Adventures Upon the High Seas (2004) and don't bother with any of their sequels. For science fiction, Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1979), which function just fine as two-thirds of a never-completed trilogy, and The Silver Metal Lover ( 1981), which didn't need its late-breaking sequel. Her one historical novel The Gods Are Thirsty (1996). I love her classically derived Mortal Suns (2003), but know people who do not; on the other hand, I know people for whom her Tales from the Flat Earth (1978–2009) was rewiringly crucial and I enjoy them, but they didn't do the same number on my head as The Book of the Damned (1988). I don't think her short stories have ever been completely collected because there are so damn many of them, but Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), Tamastara, or the Indian Nights (1984), and The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (1985) are particularly good as the themed collections go; her novella "Into Gold" (1986) is one of my favorites of anything she wrote—it is post-Roman Arthurian Demophoon—and for years could be found only in her collection Women as Demons (1989), lately became more available in Redder Than Blood (2017). The short story "Sirriamnis" (1981) is another favorite, fortunately more often collected, I quoted a line from it when writing about South of Algiers (1953). I can try to explain more about any of these titles if it would be useful. I didn't connect so much with many of her early, epic fantasies, and she went through a sort of mid-late horror stretch which was very hit or miss for me, and her actually late work is very difficult to find thanks to having been published almost strictly through small presses, but I enjoy far more of her fiction than not and will still try any new title of hers no matter the results. I learned a lot about language from her. She was open about her influences in a way I didn't understand was unusual at the time, e.g. she admitted to poaching the hero of Kill the Dead (1980) straight from Paul Darrow in Blake's 7 (1978–81), which she wrote for. I am still incredibly annoyed she's dead.