What I'm Reading Now

Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar, A Shilling for Candles

These are rereads. I love Tey's books, which are British mysteries from that sweet spot of British mystery writing, the 1930s through the 1950s. A Shilling for Candles is her first novel, and she's already a pro. It's one of her Inspector Grand novels. Brat Farrar is about a British upper class family in which the heir was killed/went missing as a child of 13, except now that son returns. Or does he? (No, it's an imposter, which is not a spoiler, since the novel reveals that he's an imposter at the very beginning.) The mystery here is what happened to the missing child; but as always with Tey, the delight is in the setting and the characters. I recommend these highly if you want a 'nice' book to read.

K.J. Charles, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen

I like Charles's books a lot, but they are mostly e-books, and I really like real books, especially for reading at night when I am tired. This is the first print-copy of Charles my library has purchased, so I snapped it up. It borrows a bit of its setting from that Georgette Heyer novel about smugglers, but it's a fresh take. The young heir to a smuggler's den strikes up a romance with the young baronet, and complications ensue. Charles does this kind of romance very well. I also love the smuggler's dialect, of course. Dialects are my jam. This one has a sequel coming out -- a sort of sequel, it looks like it's set about ten years in the future, and concerns a minor character in the first novel. Anyway, a ripping yarn. I need to seek out more K.J. Charles.

Jonathon Kennedy, Pathogenesis: a History of the World in Eight Plagues

Kennedy's thesis is that communicable diseases did as much or more to shape the world than any human agency, specifically by killing off great swaths of people whenever two previous isolate groups came into contact -- as, for instance, when h. sapiens met up with h. neanderthalenis; or when the Roman empire was struck by the bubonic plague due to trading and invasion from various points, leading to the the fall of the empire. And, of course, the Native American populations, both in North and South American, were nearly wiped out by diseases brought with explorers and colonists, which allowed European populations free access to the continents. In other places, Kennedy argues, such as Africa, where the local population infected the invading population (Europeans, mostly), such conquests did not happen as easily. He also cites Haiti, where a plague of yellow fever kept the French from taking back the country after the slave uprising. The slaves, many imported from Africa, were far more resistant to the fever than the French army, and so the uprising succeeded (at least in part.)

This is a readable book, if a little more shallow than it should be. 

Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book, Blackout, All Clear

These are a re-read. I do love Connie Willis. These books, which are all set in the Oxford Historian/Time-Travelers AU, have gotten a lot of (justified) criticism for their inauthenticity. Willis is an American, and writes about Britain, like, a lot. I don't think she's ever lived in Britain, or known a British person; she gets a lot of details wrong. Apparently she's basing her notion of the British world on the British mysteries/television/movies she's watched. 

Also none of her people in 2060 Oxford have cell phones or the internet. Instead they have to do research in newspaper morgues and by looking things up on microfiche. This was maybe understandable when she first wrote in this universe -- Wikipedia tells me "Firewatch," which I think was the first story featuring Oxford Time Traveling Historians, was written in 1982. But the later works, including Blackout and All Clear (a paired set of novels, a MASSIVE duology) were written after the internet had appeared, and our time traveling historians still don't have cell phones. This is so Willis can set up the problem/interference/interference/ solution pattern which she loves so much, and which to be fair is really effective.

Anyway, I started out saying that Willis's works have garnered a lot of criticism from British readers, but if you're not a British reader, these are wonderful books, especially The Doomsday Book, which I just love. Science fiction, or rather science fantasy. Passage is probably Willis's best novel, and probably the one which comes the closest to getting the science right. I might re-read that one next.