What I'm Reading Now

Stella Hayward, The Good Boy

On her 30th birthday, a woman is granted a wish by her magical grandmother. This is a family tradition -- every grandmother gives every granddaughter a wish on their 30 birthday. But Genie, a bit drunk and traumatized by life, accidentally wishes her beloved dog was human -- and voila! 

This is an adorable book. The best part is Rory, the dog turned human who still acts and thinks like a dog. He's a golden retriever with his own traumatized past, and he's just great. (The trauma is off the page and kept non-explicit.) There's a romance (not with Rory) and it's fine and charming as well, but Rory is the best part. If you're looking for a well-written, charming read with a happy ending, this is your book.

Elly Griffith, The Frozen People

This is sort of science fiction, so I suppose I could have included it in one of my review columns. But it's really SF-ish, so I decided not to. It's a good book, mind you, and kept me interested all the way through -- this division in the English civil service handles "cold" cases (so cold they're frozen, get it), by which they mean cases that can only be handled by sending witnesses back through time to observe the murder. That's the only science-fictional part about the novel, the time travel. Otherwise it's a straight-up murder mystery.

The main plot concerns a powerful minister in the government, bruited as a possible Prime Minister some day, who is writing a book about his family history and wants to clear up the rumor that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a serial killer. So our main character is sent back to 1850 to act as a witness, and gets stuck there. Meanwhile in the future/present, the minister is murdered. Are the two connected?

I love time travel novels anyway, but this one is also very well done. Good writing, great characters, and a couple of cranky cats. If you like a little SF in your murder mystery, this might be worth picking up.

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

Helen DeWitt wrote one of my favorite books, The Last Samurai. This is a bit different, and much shorter (really a novella) but every bit as good. An 18 year old, raised in Morocco and various cities (Paris, London) by fabulously wealthy parents, reared by those parents to be spectacularly well-bred (never doing anything mauvais ton), suddenly learns that (a) her parents are not her parents and (b) she has very little money left indeed. What she does about it is one of the surprises of the book. 

As with Samurai, DeWitt plays with form and structure here. She does it very well. This book is a delight, and it's short enough to read in a few hours. 10/10, no notes.

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

This one is also (sort of) science fiction/fantasy. A woman on the eve of her 40th birthday figures out how to return to her 16th birthday. There's a portal, sort of. But it will only ever take her back to that one day, her 16th birthday. She can, however, change things, which changes her life in the future. The one thing she keeps trying to change is the death of her father, who in the initial story is dying of lung cancer. The thematic arc is she has to learn to accept her father's death. 

It's not a bad book -- nice writing, and the characters are pretty well done. But it's the kind of SFF which people who don't read much SFF end up writing. (To her credit, Straub knows this and lampshades it in the book.) The science fiction convention that features heavily in the various timelines is really well done. Straub's father is Peter Straub, so that makes sense. 

The notion of 1996 being the ancient past kind sent me.

Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever

I read this one so you won't have to. Lee is famous for having written every high school teacher's favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird (I also loved this book as a kid) and then never publishing anything else. Because of this, it was a truism among the (male) writers in my MFA program that Truman Capote had "actually" written Mockingbird. 

Anyway, now that Lee is dead, her heirs are publishing her trunk novels and uncollected works, including Go Set a Watchman in 2015 and this collection of short stories and essays this year. It contains several short stories written when Lee first started writing, none of them terrible but none of them very good, and several pretty bad essays about nothing in particular. 

Only read this if you're a completist like me.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I read this as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, so this is a re-read.

It's a lovely book. Joyce writes like an angel. Sadly, this one is overshadowed by his (incoherent and frankly overrated) later novels. If you actually like to read and don't just want to look like a hipster, this one and his short stories are where you should spent your time.

What I'm (Re)reading Now

I mentioned that my library isn't buying enough new books lately, or at least not enough books that I actually want to read. I keep forgetting that I can download books from my library's e-book collection and also from such sites as Gutenberg. Clearly I need to start looking into those options. Meanwhile, what am I re-reading?

Georgette Heyer, Frederica, The Grand Sophia, Arabella, Friday's Child

These are books my library has LARGE PRINT versions of. Large print helps me at night when my eyes are tired but my insomnia won't let me sleep. These are two of my favorite Heyers. I also re-read A Civil Contract, which they only have in regular print. Heyer changed my mind about romance novels. If you like Jane Austen, you'll probably like Heyer. I do not like her mysteries, but you might!

Frederica is about a young woman who must marry well to provide for her siblings; A Civil Contract is about a young man who marries a rich but not noble woman to provide for his family. The Grand Sophia is about a young woman raised abroad by her father during the Napoleonic wars who must marry so that her father is free to marry. No novelty in the plotlines, but Heyer's characters are charming, and she writes very compelling prose. TW for classicism and anti-Semiticism.

Anne McCaffery, Dragonsinger

This was the first McCaffery I ever read, back when I was like 14, and my library had a LARGE PRINT, so I re-read it. So light it is almost vaporous, but I read the whole thing. This is set on Pern, which is a world in which dragons exist because of genetics and magic, and have to defend the planet from "threads," which is to say a toxic lifeform that leaps from one planet to the next, devouring everything it touches. But this novel focuses not on the threads but on Harper Hall, a guild of musicians responsible for carrying culture and news over the planet, and on Melony, who is a musician on a world in which women are definitely second-class citizens -- indeed, barely human. Very much a novel of its times (the 1970s).

M.R. Carey, The Book of Koli

Not large print, but I never finished reading it the first time, so I re-read it. Carey wrote a novel I recently read to review it, Infinity Gate, and I liked it a lot. This one was just okay. Set in a future England, after civilization collapses, maybe because humanity destroyed themselves by getting hubristic when it came to technology. There's a hint that genetic engineering might have been one of the causes, but there's also a lot of left-over policing robots and drones. Koli is a kid in a village which is slowly dying out due to inbreeding, as are most villages, because it is too dangerous to travel from place to place, so the genetic pool is whatever six or seven hundred people your town happens to have available; and that's not enough, obviously.

I like what this one is doing with genetics, which is also what I am doing with genetics, sort of, in my novels, so I bought the next two book via Thriftbooks. (The library does not have them.) We'll see how they hold up.

Joe Haldeman, Infinite Dreams

Not large print, but my library had it, and I hadn't read it for about 30 years. Science fiction short stories, not that good. Everyone is male, and they have science-related adventures. Unless you're a Haldeman fan, you can skip this one.