cyphomandra

Hickory Dickory Dock, Agatha Christie (1955)
Third Girl, Agatha Christie (1966)
The Rowan, Anne McCaffrey (re-read)
After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian
The face in the frost, John Bellairs
Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke
The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica
Trial run, Dick Francis
Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher
The tournament, Matthew Reilly
Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read)
How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White

Hickory Dickory Dock & Third Girl, Agatha Christie. Tidying up some Agathas. Hickory and Third Girl are definitely in Christie’s “modern times are rather poor stuff and the young people all wear terrible clothes” era, and while it is interesting to read her take on student hostels (Hickory) and flat sharing (Third Girl), Hickory has a lot of unexamined racial stereotypes and actual racism, and Third Girl (which I think was new to me) had a rather unbelievable denouement and a plot line in which a doctor marries his patient, which I never like.

After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian. Patrick sells books in 1968 New York, sleeps with most of the gay male population of Greenwich Village in his spare time, and on his philanthropic landlady’s prompting offers a job at the bookshop and shelter there to Nathaniel, alone and obviously traumatised but reluctant to share his past, just before Nathaniel’s sister-in-law, a famous folk singer, shows up with a week-old baby and a “your husband just died in Vietnam” telegram. I thought I was going to like this more than any other Sebastian I’ve tried so far, and I probably do, but it runs on vibes and having all its sympathetic characters be terribly politically sound, and about two-thirds of the way through it was like someone pulled out the bath plug and all the remaining tension drained out of it. But I liked it and I’d probably re-read it once, although I’d set my expectations lower.

The Rowan,Anne McCaffrey (re-read). Why am I re-reading this when I never liked this series much in the first place and if I were going to re-read any of hers it should be Dragonflight? Weakness for psychic powers and a touch of contrariness, plus I still want to find my original paperbacks rather than use the library ebook. This has good bits (the psychic powers, the training, the way in which one trainer passes on their biases and unnecessarily traps all those training under her) and a lot of terrible, terrible romance and gender opinions, and from what I dimly remember this only amplifies in subsequent books. Maybe I should try and find my McGill Feighan books if I really want to read psychics working as shipping agents to the stars.

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke. Tradwife influencer Natalie takes us, the readers/audience through a day on her idyllic farm in a way that highlights her hypocrisy (the unacknowledged/unfilmed staff, the financial backing by her right-wing in-laws, the uselessness of her husband at any farm chores means they constantly have to replace the cows, who all have the same names, etc, etc). The next day she wakes up, prepared to do it all over again - but there’s no power, no staff, no technology at all beyond the 1800s, and even her children are similar but not the same. It’s a great set-up and Natalie herself is a great, awful, character and, obviously, the true villain is the patriarchy. However I was only about 2/3rds convinced by the twist and I did think the ending moves the focus away from society to one individual’s choices in a way that lets society off a bit.

The face in the frost, John Bellairs. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and while I enjoyed it (Bellairs is so great at making even the most mundane thing superlatively creepy in only a few sentences), I might have missed the window for loving it. I like both Prospero and Roger Bacon, I love the magic and the world-building and the horror, but I found the denouement a bit too ex machina and the characters not as compelling as the leads in his children’s books.

The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica (trans. Sarah Moses). The nameless narrator is a nun in a convent of horrors that is nevertheless a sanctuary against the catastrophes that have devastated the outside world. She writes her memoirs in blood and dirt, documenting the daily torments inflicted on the nuns in the name of enlightenment, retelling her past, and, possibly, finding hope and love. I thought this overdid the tortures and horrors, but possibly I am just a hard sell on evil religious cults in post-collapse dystopias. I would probably read another by the same author but it looks like the other one currently out is industrial cannibalism, which is not really my thing.

Trial run, Dick Francis. One I have not previously read! Possibly there are others out there but I don’t really want to check in case there aren’t. Ex-steeplechaser Randall Drew (unable to compete now that he needs glasses) reluctantly travels to Moscow on behalf of the royal family, who want to ensure that one of the equestrian team about to compete in the Moscow Olympics will not be tainted by a rumoured scandal. The good bits in this are all the bits about Moscow - I can see Dick and Mary on their tour there with a bunch of notebooks and their cameras - but unfortunately the spy/conspiracy plot does creak rather and there is a surprising lack of horses, although there are classic Francis bits with a fall into a freezing Moscow river and a limited and insufficient supply of antidote to a fatal poison (and also the most doomed proposal sequence ever, even for Francis).

Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher. Reprint of previously self-published fantasy, with a goblin troop catapulted by magic out of a war and into a distant forest with an elf who is basically James Herriot and a mysteriously abandoned village. This is more Pratchetty than others of hers (as well as Herriotish) and it’s a fun read with a bit more going on underneath. The villain didn’t quite work for me but the magical creature vet problems are good.

The tournament, Matthew Reilly. Young Elizabeth I travels to Constantinople with her tutor, Roger Ascham, to watch a chess tournament between the representatives of the great and powerful; they are then caught up in investigating a murder. This is not Reilly’s natural territory (no clockwork building-sized traps with nifty diagrams) and although he flings himself into the research with enthusiasm, it’s not really his natural element. As with The Detective, Reilly also has a particular issue that he wants the reader to understand is Evil, and while with The Detective it was racism, here it’s pedophilia; there is an evil ring of Catholic priests exploiting children, yoked uneasily to a plot line in which Elizabeth’s companion, Elsie, describes her consensual sexual escapades in the pursuit of the local prince in a luridly detailed fashion to Elizabeth, only to have the prince dump Elsie in a brothel chained to a bed once he sleeps with her, thus making the young Elizabeth swear off sex forever. The detective bits are all right.

Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read). I was on a roll. The TV episode is more compelling than the book but I still find both fundamentally bland; possibly I am just too traumatised by fannish coffee shop AUs to ever enjoy sassy smoothie maker/customer convinced smoothie is game-winning good luck charm.

How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White. Home organisation book that does not assume you want to be an inherently tidy and organised person; surprisingly useful. Focuses on making small changes and having you explicitly acknowledge the positive impact of these, thus creating virtual circles, rather than shaming you for failing to match up to their expectations.

I keep intending to post and getting caught up in all the things I feel I should have written up, so here's something recent to get started. I have moved back from the UK and into a new house, which has obviously been somewhat disruptive, but for the last six weeks or so I have been totally consumed by the Final Fantasy VII remake (first I played Remake, which I finished the night before Rebirth came out, and then I played Rebirth up until 3 am last Sunday, when I finally finished the final final no really final battle, and now I am doing a few leftover combat challenges and trying to work out whether I now play Crisis Core or replay the original game and then play through Remake and Rebirth again with the Japanese VAs). It's so good and it has brought back all the feelings I had about the original game, which I played for the first time in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake back in 2011 (my house and almost all my stuff were in the red zone, so I bought myself a PS3 and huddled up in a rental with my dog, in limbo for months with ongoing aftershocks).

Ahem. Anyway. While I will no doubt return to FFVIIR, here is everything I read in March when I was not physically attached to the PS5.

To shape a dragon’s breath, Moniquill Blackgoose.
Broken rules, Michaela Grey.
Crystal singer, Anne McCaffrey (re-read).
Everything is true, Roopa Farooki.
Proof, Dick Francis.
Contract season, Cait Nary.
Season’s change, Cait Nary.
The grimmelings, Rachel King.
Peter Cabot gets lost, Cat Sebastian.
On call, Ineke Meredith.

( Reviews. )

I have not updated here much recently as events took over - my city went back into lockdown on the 17th August, after one Delta strain COVID-19 community case, a fact which involved a lot of international & local commentary about over-reacting. Numbers obviously then increased, and eventually & slowly, decreased. We eventually hit single figures for daily cases - and then COVID-19 got into the homeless population, people with low levels of vaccination and little reason to trust any governmental organisations, and we lost control. Inevitable, but still hard.

On the date we went into lockdown less than 20% of the population were fully vaccinated, and about 1/3rd had had one dose. We’re now coming out of lockdown and moving towards a living with COVID-19 model, averaging about 160 cases per day. COVID-19 is moving downwards and throughout the country, popping up now in places that have never had cases, but now 82% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated (no vaccines yet for under 12s here) and 91% have had at least one dose. This is good but rates are much lower in certain areas and in certain typically disadvantages populations, especially Māori (running at about 62% double vax’d, and with younger average populations that mean more people aren’t yet eligible). Vaccine mandates are now in effect for a number of jobs, and as the numbers unvaccinated get smaller, the protests and dialogue get more bitter and more violent.

(on the bathos rather than pathos front, my local FB group had a massive schism as one of the admins is an essential oils marketer who deleted any and all mentions of COVID-19 and/or vaccination that weren’t about how terrible the vaccine was)

Anyway. I’ve been working and home-schooling, and reading - and even writing - but I haven’t been posting. Here is November (so far):

Just finished:
( King, Merriman, Durst, Francis, Harper, Mejia )

Still reading:

The Heart Principle, Helen Hoang. Her latest, this has Anna, a performance violinist stuck in a musical block, a loveless relationship with a guy who only wants her because she makes his life so much easier, and the expectations of her family, who never see her for herself. When the terrible boyfriend decides he wants an open relationship for a bit she rebels by joining a dating site for a one night stand, and meets Quan, best friend of Michael from The Kiss Quotient. He’s struggling to trust his body after cancer surgery, and also not looking for anything long-term - however, that’s what they both get. It’s a sincere, heart-felt book, about female autistics who mask until they’ve lost sight of their own selves, about the pressure on family caregivers and the pressure from family; Quan is a little too perfect and easy-going, but Anna’s fantastic.

Planetside, Michael Mammay. I can’t remember where or why I picked this up but I am on chapter 2 and it’s deeply irritating old-school military sf with a really annoying lead character. I might give it another couple of chapters but will probably dump it.

Up next:

At school each term there’s a book club from Scholastic, and I normally let the kids pick out books up to $20. The last one we got, my son stared wistfully at a boxed set of 8 volumes of the Amulet graphic novel series, which was definitely more than $20, and I said that given that I was a totally terrible example at resisting book temptation he could have it if he didn’t have anything else for the year. Naturally then we went into lockdown and he finally got it last week, several months later, and is now wallowing in it, and I want to read them too.

I can try climbing again tomorrow night, woo hoo. I've also had 2 doses of Pfizer COVID vaccine; the first gave me a sore arm and a wave of fatigue that evening, the second gave me a very sore arm and a vague sense of tiredness, which I will definitely take as evidence that my immune system is doing something.

Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota (as audiobook read by the author). Yumiko grew up in Singapore and England before moving to Australia for the last bit of high school and medical school; she always worked hard, made friends, was smart, kind, and responsible, and ticked off one career box after another until she ran headlong into the Australian surgical training scheme, which systematically exploits all would-be surgeons and is not remotely hesitant in discriminating against any one outside the white male Australian norm. Yumiko wrote a blog post about her experiences that went viral, and it’s a useful shorthand for the book; what the book adds is more context, sexual assault by superiors in training (she changes the names but it’s not hard to work out who she’s talking about), and a prolonged and difficult recovery. The writing tends towards restating the obvious, and – oddly – she never seems to have made a mistake in her medical career – but it’s compelling.

Hot Money, Dick Francis. Ian’s estranged father Malcolm is immensely wealthy and has five ex-wives and an assortment of bickering adult children; when the most recent wife is murdered and someone tries to kill Malcolm, he asks Ian (an amateur jockey, natch) to protect him. It’s competent enough, but in order to keep the field of suspects open Francis makes most of the extended family rather unpleasant. The incredibly wealthy tour of international horsey bits is fun.

The Duke of Shadows, Meredith Duran. Emmaline survives the shipwreck that kills her parents on her trip out to India to meet a fiancé, who as so often in these cases turns out to be a rotter, while the British Raj society consider Emma tarnished irretrievably due to her rescue by passing sailors; Julian is an heir to a dukedom and part Indian, an outside and one of the few people who can see – if not stop – the coming uprising (it’s 1857). It’s Duran’s first novel, and it’s good – it doesn’t have the feel for India that MM Kaye’s books have, but she’s strong on character and Emma, in particular, gets to be angry and destructive in a way that romance heroines often don’t show.

The Sins of Lord Lockwood, Meredith Duran. Liam Lockwood disappears on his wedding night to Anna, who holds Scottish lands in her own right and thinks that the deal she made with Liam in order to keep these means that he must havenever had any feelings for her beyond convenience. However, rather than sporting on the Continent Liam was kidnapped by his evil cousin and sent to a hellish prison colony, and his return is part of his plan to trap his cousin – but he wasn’t expecting Anna to find out and interfere. It’s an interesting set-up and Duran gives both characters depth and authority. There are also some great bits with the convicts Lockwood has brought back with him, but Anna isn't as convincing a character as her other female leads.

Auē, Becky Manawatu. Domestic violence, gangs, child abuse, interwoven into the stories of two (and a bit) generations of Māori living in the South Island. It’s won lots of awards and the writing is great. I personally didn’t think keeping the timeline opaque added anything to the story and it does have that “of course they’ll shoot the dog” feel to it. It may be a generational thing but for me the bone people will always be my touchstone for Aotearoa/NZ writing about domestic violence and it's the book where I find the violence most disturbing.

It might sound cliché, Jessie G. All-too-appropriately titled short. Rocco can’t forgive his lover Nino for torching their family restaurant, even as he works himself to the bone to rebuild it; he heads out of town to a snowbound cabin to relax and, naturally, finds Nino there, along with the news of what really happened. Forgettable.

The Covert Captain, Jeannelle M Ferreira. This took me quite a few goes to get into, not because it’s not good but because it’s a very elliptical read, focussed very tightly on period-specific setting and dialogue and leaving a lot of the conventional emotional work to the reader, as well as much of the usual narrative interstitium. I liked Eleanor/Nathaniel a lot, Harriet less so, and would happily have read many more bits with horses; I think I’d prefer more historical to more romance by the author.

Fall Out, Lisa Henry and M Caspian. M/M romance. Former highschool boyfriends reunite at college – then Bastian is in a car smash and ends up struggling with chronic pain and feelings of inadequacy. A camping/research trip (Jack is doing a PhD in environmental science) looks like a possible chance for them to get back together – until there’s an ugly incident with a motorcycle gang and then volcanic ash starts falling from the sky. I was not expecting volcanic eruption and the really rather rapid decay of society, along with lots of rape and murder, and although the (sympathetic) characters are well done, it’s tense, and the volcanic eruption is a fantastic complication, I really prefer Henry’s more conventional romances. Haven’t read anything else of Caspian’s.

Chase in Shadow, Amy Lane. First in a series about the guys who work at Johnnies, a gay-for-pay porn video company. Chase has a terrible father and blames himself for his mother’s suicide; he is also deeply in the closet and engaged (to a woman), but once he takes the job (telling his fiancée it’s in construction) he falls for another guy, and everything begins to unravel. The set-up works really well for Lane and it’s a competently handled cast of characters, with a lot of interesting hints at the next books. The ending lurches into sentiment, as her books tend to do, but I cheerfully downloaded the next one.

Just finished:

Experimental Film, Gemma Files. Lois Cairns is a film critic/lecturer suddenly without a job, who in an otherwise uninspiring short film sees a sample taken from much older footage; a glimpse of a field in harsh sunlight, people working in it, and a woman in a dazzling white veil with a sword. She becomes obsessed with this, and the two stories behind it. One is of an unknown early amateur Canadian filmmaker, Mrs Whitcomb, who made the film, hid it, and disappeared under strange circumstances from a locked train carriage; the other is a Wendish tale about Lady Midday, who comes to workers in the fields and offers them dangerous choices. All of these stories run together, the echoes building on each other in unnerving near-similarity.

Lois is also a mother to Clark, who is autistic, and whom she loves with a difficult, believable tension that is only aggravated by her own mother (there is a deeply black comic moment where Lois forces her mother to look at an Asperger's Syndrome checklist and compare it with Lois' own childhood behaviours, to which her mother can only tell Lois; "It's bad enough as it is. Don't try to make this all about you.").

I liked this a lot; the evocative writing, the daylight horror of Lady Midday, the disintegration of Lois (and I loved that her husband Simon provides support and optimism in the way of someone who feels he's been through far worse). I did feel that Lois told me that things would get worse, be more terrible etc, at least three more times than I would have liked, and the human villain never quite feels real (also while I know nothing about Canadian film history and it all sounded good, I did have a slight internal lurch when the book hit an area I do know about and managed five errors of fact in as many sentences). I intend to read more by her.

Going back before that, towards the end of January I was booked for a much-anticipated five day guided bush walk, and then had a sore throat on the first morning and so couldn’t go, which is disappointing enough, but the associated drama (initially they said I could go, then changed their minds and left me in a small town with no transport, a cousin living vaguely locally offered to have me stay and then when I finally made it there changed his mind and said I’d have to sleep outside, the (rather expensive) guide company are refusing to give me even a partial credit towards another walk, etc, etc) was pretty crushing and I ended up reading a ridiculous number of books as a coping mechanism (all following were in January).

Wonder City Stories, Jude McLaughlin. Adventures in a city of superheroes. Started as a weblog and still rather bitsy; on the plus side, queer and trans representation, ethnic diversity, and I liked that we got a range of ages. Didn’t leave me with a desperate desire to read more but I’d give another work by the same author a go.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Lois Bujold. I’ve sort of been avoiding this since it came out (I even got an ARC) because initially I had formatting & compatibility problems and then - well, I wanted to see if I could forget how much I’d disliked Cryoburn and Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance and the answer is nope, not yet. Did this help? Not really. In it we get the revelation that Aral had a longstanding relationship with his aide (Jole) that Cordelia was perfectly happy with (I’m okay with that, although I note concern from other readers that Aral seems to have started the relationship before discussing it with Cordelia) and that, more dubiously from my pov, involved no concern over power dynamics.

For plot, Cordelia is planning to have at least six girls via uterine replicator and offers some “eggshells” to Jole to have his own kids via combining his and Aral’s DNA. The science is dubious on this - three party IVF does exist now, but it relies on 2 female parents (one provides mitochondrial DNA, one egg/DNA) and one male (sperm/DNA). I suppose by “eggshell” Cordelia means that mitochondria are also present, but having both sets of DNA from the male parent would, in current time, cause problems due to disorders of imprinting. However possibly future technology has fixed this; it also seems to have greatly enhanced the success rates of any IVF procedure from about 20% to a near inevitability. Cordelia & Jole also get together and there’s a bit of worldbuilding as we’re back on the same planet as Shards of Honor. Disappointingly, given how thoughtful Bujold was about childbearing in the early books, here she has adopted the Abbey/Chalet School approach of bestowing on her favourite characters large numbers of enchantingly named children. Miles and Ekaterin have six; Cordelia plans another six; Jole loses one eggshell and thinks dolefully about only being able to manage three. In accordance with my concerns about her previous books, favoured individuals - especially Cordelia - will always make the right decisions and organisations need to be overruled.

There are some nice moments - I actually liked the bit where Cordelia suggests to Jole that once he tells people about considering parenting he will see a new side of them, and this happens - but I think my fundamental split with this series happened when Bujold gave Miles the Auditor job and didn’t make him ever face up to the consequences of what he did in Memory. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed some of the books since then, and this irritated me less than Cryoburn, but it’s a pretty low bar.

The Searcher, Tana French. Cal Hooper, Chicago detective, quits the force and moves to a small town in Ireland, where he spends most of his time fixing up an abandoned house; then one of the neighbourhood kids asks him to find a missing sibling. It’s really about the journey rather than the destination; the town, the people, the weather, the shifting undercurrents that can suddenly suck you under that French does so well. The ending is a bit of a letdown - the suspect is obvious, the denouement reinforces beliefs rather than challenges them - but it was an enjoyable read.

The Girls of St Cyprians, Angela Brazil. Mildred is prone to laziness and day-dreaming but is also a talented musician; a competition between the five schools of the town (with contests in music, drama, arts etc) may be the spark she needs to really develop her talent. Quite a lot going on here - Mildred is also an orphan, whose rich relations invite her to stay with them and then expect that she will continue to do so, rather than with the poorer aunt & uncle who raised her, and there are tensions at school - and also a terribly racist bit with one of Mildred’s new-found cousins pretends to be a Māori relative to trick their brother (who fooled Mildred and a friend into each thinking the other was a suicidal medieval fantasist who needed humouring (they were both exploring a ruined castle)) which, argh, I was not expecting at all. Also the denouement has Mildred winning a musical scholarship to study in German for several years (as well as lots of musical Germans in her English town) and was published in 1914 so reads rather oddly in context.

The Lion and the Crow, Eli Easton. Beefy upstanding knight (the Lion) is trying to rescue his sister from her abusive noble husband, and ends up travelling with the beautiful, sneaky, youngest son (the Crow) of a bullying father, who is desperate to escape for his own reasons; forbidden passions ensue. This was much less irritating that Alex de Campi's The Scottish Boy, which is similar era (1200/1300s) and which I have some grumpy notes about somewhere, but I don't know, still not really hitting the spot for me.

Nerve, Dick Francis. Starts with a fellow jockey blowing his brains out at the races, and then follows Rob Finn, an aspiring steeplechaser and a disappointment to his musical family, as he uncovers a viciously successful plot to undermine jockeys and, in the process, becomes a target. I can see echoes of the more complex machinations in Come to Grief here; both works deal with the corrosion of character rumour can induce. Solid B grade.

Currently reading:

Beware of Dogs, Elizabeth Flann. Alix is a geologist who accepts an offer from a former neighbour to come to his family's holiday house; what he doesn't tell her until she turns up is that it's on a private island (he knows she is terrified of boats) and that he and the friends he brings with him intend to rape, torture, and murder her. The book starts with Alix hiding in a cramped cave with very limited supplies, having overheard some of the plans; she is experienced in the bush, but surviving - and escaping - is going to take her to the edge of her endurance.

I opened this tonight because it was due back in two days and I wanted to see what it was like, and now I only have fifty pages to go so yes, it's compelling, Alix is prickly and competent, and the set-up of survival vs landscape and human predators is great. It is a first novel and the backstory regarding Alix' family (cult-inclined missionaries who dragged Alix and her brother to Madagascar, then sent Alix away to a brutal boarding school in the UK) isn't always well-integrated, but I'm enjoying it a lot and hoping it can stick the ending.

Up next:

The last volume of Silver Spoon arrived at the library! And I do want to finish Death Sets Sail. I also appear to be reading three of MM Kaye's Death in ... books and a volume of her memoirs.

Abandoned:

Romancing Mr Bridgerton, Julia Quinn, in audiobook. I would have skimmed it in hardcopy but even yanking the speed up didn't help. Very, very, slow, and oddly unengaging. I still like Penelope but not as much, and Colin is very ordinary.

Dear Mrs Bird, AJ Pearce. WWII Britain; enthusiastic and naive Emmy dreams of being a war correspondent, but accidentally ends up becoming the assistant for a dour and puritannical agony aunt. I might go back to this.

Books read, January

I’m jumping forward because October last year I was travelling and read far too many books, and I’m starting to forget ones I’ve read this year. Come to Grief and Silence of the Girls were my favourites of this lot.

Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read)
Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand
The Children of Castle Rock, Natasha Farrant
Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker
High Stakes, Dick Francis
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix
Cells at Work, Akane Shimizu, v1 & 5
Scoop for Ann Thorne, Rosamond Bertram
Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O’Neill
The Mangle Street Murder, R.C. Kasasian
One Kick, Chelsea Cain
The West Wind, Samantha Harvey
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku
Odds Against, Dick Francis (re-read)
Whip Hand, Dick Francis (re-read)
Come to Grief, Dick Francis (brand new to me!)
( “Assorted )

Over a month's worth.

Finished:

Tana French, The Trespasser. I liked this, although still not as much as The Secret Place. It follows Antoinette Conway from that book, investigating what appears to be an open and shut case of murder of a young woman and dealing with the fact that the rest of the squad apparently dislike her to the point of sabotage. It does not have a moment when Antoinette says, "This was the moment when I had the chance to do something different, but instead I stuffed everything up," (or similar) and it has a happyish ending, and there are lots of bits I liked about it (the resolution of the storyline with her father), but the case itself didn't grab me on this one.

Dick Francis, Comeback. Solidly middle-tier Francis in which a diplomat between posts finds himself investigating sabotage at a veterinary practice. The main character spent time in the town as a child and has his own memories of people/places, but because his name is different and he is now an adult there is an element of working undercover, which I liked, and there’s a vivid and startling image when the sabotage turns to murder, but the rest of this is fairly forgettable (the love interest is appealing as a character but the romance works even less well than usual).

A Notable Woman: the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited Simon Garfield. Mentioned elsewhere. This was great. I put heaps of little bookmarks in when reading, but had no time to go back through it; basically, though, an excellent example of illustrating the general through the particularly, but also an excellent example of a particular experience - that of a single woman - that is all too often overlooked. You do get a sense of her crystallising in her 40s; the journals are shorter, her attitudes less flexible, and I do think about this as I'm in the same decade. I think it's common but not inevitable; Doris Lessing's memoirs don't do this for one, although I'm not keen to emulate her in many other respects.

Matthew Reilly, The Four Legendary Kingdoms. Latest in the series that started with Seven Ancient Wonders and is counting down, this one has Jack West Jr kidnapped to participate in the deadly games of a secret underworld kingdom that will serve the dual purposes of signalling to extraterrestrial intelligences that Earth's existence should continue and also granting power to one of the secret kingdoms that rule the world. Also, Scarecrow (from Reilly's other series) shows up as a rival competitor. I am not remotely in these for anything other than the ride, and on that level they work fine. I particularly like all the little diagrams of the ridiculously over-engineered challenges. If you are going to read any of Reilly's books I would pick this series or Hovercar Racer, although I really should read his first two as well.

Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call, or The Distinguished Thing. 1930s set murder mystery with East End (London) theatre backdrop; I really liked the worldbuilding and the characters, who are vivid and complex and interact with each other in interesting and unexpected ways, but then it fell apart at the end. This, I think, is largely because the murderer themselves is not so well characterised, and so the denouement falters.

[redacted for Yuletide] 2 books.

And then I discovered how to load ebooks from the library's extensive digital catalogue onto my Kobo *and* had to spend a lot of time sitting in a darkened room with it.

JL Merrow, Played! – actor hiding out in Shamwell before taking up the finance job his father favours entangles himself with local dyslexic repairman, who he gets to coach as Bottom in the local theatre group’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hard to go wrong with this set up.

JL Merrow, Out! Closeted workaholic quits his job and offers to take in teenage daughter when ex-wife is having trouble coping, and gets entangled with a charity worker who is not going to pretend not to be gay for anyone. This is a lot slighter and after I finished it I kept wondering if I’d forgotten to read the end.

Courtney Milan, Trade Me. Tina Chen is a poor student who, after an argument, swaps lives with Blake Reynolds, the handsome billionaire who just happens to be in one of her classes. I read this for Tina, really, because she's a great character who actually has a family and friends and a context, but I didn't have much time for Blake and the denouement with his dad and the product launch felt horribly cringe-inducing.

Stephen King, Blockade Billy. Novella length piece about baseball, pretty much all voice and imagery, but it stuck with me.

Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller: writing lessons and more from 27 years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. Part history/memoir, part teaching guide. Bits of this were more helpful than others (there's some repetition as well), and it's also very much an original Clarion book (I went to Clarion West) in talking about the Clarion experience itself. Worthwhile.

KA Mitchell, Ready or Knot books 1 (Put a Ring on It) and 2 (Risk Everything on It). Marriage-themed collection about 4 gay friends. Book 1 has the up-and-coming Broadway director Theo and his introverted Korean IT boyfriend dealing with the fallout after Theo’s massively public all-singing, all-dancing, Times Square proposal goes viral, book 2 is closeted former child star Jax starts a relationship with recently separated Oz, who parents two foster children with intermittent involvement from his scatty (male) ex, and does not want any more drama or lack of commitment. I do like that KA Mitchell has a lot of non-white protagonists (Oz is black and his ex Latino), and I do actually like the characters, but these are pretty slight. Everyone is super successful and rich, and there’s a lot of skimming over things – in book 1 both characters go off and have relationship epiphanies off-stage (at different times), then come back and narrate them to their partner, which successfully dulls the impact. Book 3 will deal with the last two friends, who have an on-again, off-again thing going, which is not my favourite trope but if the library has it I suspect I'll read it anyway.

In progress:

[Redacted for Yuletide]

Elin Gregory, Eleventh Hour. Historical m/m. I got about one chapter in and got distracted by something, will go back.

Lyn Gala, Mountain Prey. Contemporary small town m/m with a lead who is out on forest patrol when a handsome stranger seeking revenge on a criminal bad guy captures him and ties him up a lot, which is great because Stunt (the lead) really likes being tied up. I think this is just not working for me but I'm not sure why, given some of the stuff I've happily put up with previously.

Kate Sherwood, Dark Horse. M/M contemporary romance with the most glacial slow build ever - I think I was about 300 pages in before anyone had sex (and not within what I presume is the end-game relationship) *but* this is mostly because the lead, Dan, is grieving the loss of his long-term partner and also because he does have a job - training horses to compete in eventing - and there's a lot of horse in here, too. I do think it could have done with an edit, but it's doing quite a bit that I don't usually see in m/m (other details redacted for spoilers) and it's worth reading.

Up next:

I have been eyeing up my unread manga pile wistfully, but realistically All Yuletide All the Time.

My book order from the Book Depository showed up on Friday, so yesterday I sat on the couch and read Elizabeth Wein's Rose Under Fire, another excellent WWII novel, this one about an American pilot working for the ATA who ends up in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I will get back to that, and Ginn Hale's The Rifter, also excellent, when I have more time, but as I was on a roll yesterday I also finished the last of my (overdue) library books, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles.

( Let us pretend I am not spoiler-cutting for a narrative that is over two and a half thousand years old. )

Mercedes Lackey, Trio of Sorcery. Three shorts, a Diana Tregarde at college story (potentially interesting setup, too much explaining the obvious to like-minded individuals), a Jenny Talldeer I have totally blacked out, and a technomage story with a monster in a MMORPG that went exactly where you'd expect it to. This collection also comes with irritating forewords pointing out all the old technology, lack of smart phones and internet etc.

Dick Francis, Bonecrack. Sometimes, I want to read about a competent protagonist, emotionally guarded to the point of dysfunction, who is forced out of his comfort zone and has to be competent in an entirely different arena while fighting malevolent forces, suffering stoically through viciously personal assaults, and forging new functional (and unexpected, or at least non romantic) relationships. Horses a plus. This totally met all my needs.