Liv's pals

Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, eds., Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation. This is a collection of essays by translators who are either working in global minority languages or global minority situations, with a wide range of thoughts and attitudes. Very cool stuff, very interesting if you're interested in translation generally, which I am.

Joe Boyd, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. This could fruitfully have been much shorter. Boyd did a lot of work in the music industry and is sometimes speaking of his personal experience of different parts of world music (separated by chapter geographically except when not). When he leaves his personal experience, he gets both less interesting and less reliable--I believe, for example, that the events he discusses being privy to in Jamaican music are real and even interesting, but his brief comparisons with Trinidad and Tobago, from my own knowledge of those musical subgenres and their cultural context, are far more suspect. Anyway it's a giant weird book, and I'm glad I read much of it, but also gosh was it a relief to be done.

Hayan Charara, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. Intense and varied, personal, political, natural, all the things. Sometimes bookstore shelf-talkers are the greatest.

Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery. Kindle. I've seen the recent filmed version of this, and uh. "Version" may be too strong. This was fun but not one of her more outstanding efforts IMO (the secret society plot that this era tends to do is a hard sell for me whether it's in book version or movie version), but the transformation of it was...well. I guess they could put "Agatha Christie" on it to draw people in. Meanwhile I do like how exasperated the young women were with how they were perpetually underestimated.

Dorothy Dunnett, King Hereafter. Reread. There sure is a lot of this, and all of it Dunnett, start to finish. Patterns of melodrama and withholding of information: check. Characters who make vividly self-destructive choices: check. Oh Dorothy. I continue to maintain that if you try this one and don't like it, there's no need to go on to the two longer historical series. But I will love her forever for noticing that Macbeth's world was the North Sea world and for going all-in on that, and this is one of my favorites. And despite its size it's far less of a commitment than either series.

Alix E. Harrow, The Slantwise Histories. Discussed elsewhere.

Rochelle Hassan, The Spell for Unraveling. The last in its series, and I don't recommend starting here, start with the first one like a sensible person. One of my major questions was how Hassan was going to treat the plot where a person's One True Love was treated like a metaphysically real thing rather than a personal choice influenced by circumstances, and uh...almost well? but not really well? I'm not sure there was an ending with that plot that would have satisfied me, but otherwise this was a reasonably nice YA contemporary fantasy trilogy, sort of like YA contemporary fantasy used to be but with more varied characters, and I'm glad I read it.

Oliver K. Langmead, The Killing of a Chestnut Tree. Discussed elsewhere.

E. C. R. Lorac, Murder By Matchlight and Two-Way Murder. Kindle. These sure were Lorac mysteries. The first one was both written and set during WWII, which I always find interesting. I am just continuing to get these as the library makes it possible.

Tessa McWatt, ed., Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Some of these essays were about WRITING (in Canada), some were about writing IN CANADA, some were about indigeneity, some where about immigrant experience, there was a really good breadth and also some very specific good depth. This could have been a much more mediocre/standard-issue book, and I'm thrilled that it was as specifically good as it was.

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. What a weird lovely thing this is. I think if you don't read leftist oral history at all it might not hit as hard how very good they are at what they're doing. It's not a novel, per se, there's not a linear plot that's going somewhere, it's a vision of a multifaceted future. I wouldn't want everything to be like this, but I'm delighted that this particular thing is like this.

C.L. Polk, The Feywild Job. I haven't read a D&D novel in over 30 years, but I read everything Cee puts out, so I read this. I had some "wow I have been out of the loop moments," such as when I learned that Baldur's Gate is a D&D thing (I really felt like Roger De Bris in The Producers saying, "I for one did not know that the Third Reich meant Germany," and boy was my godson happy to explain more to me on this topic), but on the whole it was a fantastic-romantic romp that was very Cee. I think it will also be satisfying to those who have been up on the D&D developments of, uh. This millennium, but I'm the wrong person to ask.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Reread. Definitely there's a reason I am rereading Macbeth stuff, but not an immediate reason. In any case I thought a lot about the witches. It looks to me pretty transparent that they displayed their evil spirits to Macbeth later in the play for Doylean reasons (specifically to make the scenes more varied and do some impressive stage effects but not do them enough to run out of budget/ability to accomplish them). Also thinking about dynasties is wild, that's what I have to say about that.

Kristen Stapelton, The Modern City in Asia. Kindle. Really interesting stuff about how colonized and non-colonized cities modernized, how war affected these questions, very short and pithy, good stuff.

Jane Yolen, Briar Rose. Reread. I was not done mourning Jane (nor yet), so this is what came to hand. It's warmly and sweetly done, which sounds like a strange thing for a Holocaust novel, but...it's also a granddaughter/grandmother novel. And I need more of that in my life. Recommended if you come into it braced.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I'm kind of delighted by this title, which signals its short story collection nature even more clearly than a semicolon and "stories" would do. And it fits, these do very much come at their source material at an angle--not always the same kind of source material, not always the same angle. There are fairy tales and tall tales and histories and love stories and tales of death. I think one of the things I particularly appreciate is how much there's a pervasive awareness of class in this collection, a sense that these are not characters who will have their way smoothed seamlessly by wealth and power. Not all of them are what I'd call mid-Southern US in their setting and influences, but a lot of them are, in a way that is grounded and textured, and I really appreciate it.

I'd read most of these in their original publications, but not all, and having them collected gives a sort of rhythm to the enterprise that I appreciate being able to see. I feel like the variety of this kind of collection is one of its strengths, but that means that there may be a few stories you like less than others, and that's okay too--the joy of a collection is that you can just skip to the next one and know it'll be different.