August was a terrific month! It started with being with friends in Chicago, then I flew to Rome where I met up with a friend and spent a couple of weeks travelling around: Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, Rome, Siena, Pisa. I caught trains, and saw lots of great art, and even caught a Vivaldi concert in Venice. I read nine books, and I’m adding in one that I read earlier but couldn’t count at the time for an August total of just ten.
Colors Passing Through Us, Marge Piercy (2003)
Re-read. This is a poetry collection with a wide range—love, life, nature, politics, loss, food—and it’s full of Piercy’s typical intensity and vivid phrasing. Some writers just bite into whatever life has to offer and describe the taste, and I feel Piercy’s really great at that aspect, both in prose and poetry. I really enjoyed reading this again.
The Escapement, K.J. Parker (2007)
Third in the Engineer trilogy, do not start here, it would make no sense. Mostly satisfying conclusion to this long story, but my goodness Parker has a very weird and alien conception of love. Indeed his conception of love is so odd that I only vaguely recognise it, like a Latin root word embedded in a sentence of incomprehensible garble. There is a lot of very good stuff in this trilogy, but… maybe he’d be better off not having female characters at all, and concentrating on stories about men in sieges? I really like a lot of what he’s doing—I like stories about the details of siege warfare, OK—but I am really puzzled by this weird alien thing he’s calling love. Actually… I am wondering if Parker may be secretly an Atevi.
Baby, Would I Lie?, Donald Westlake (1994)
Re-read. Very funny and clever mystery set in Branson, Missouri, which I assumed was satire the first time I read it but turns out to be a real place. This is a book about country music. It’s funnier if you’ve read Trust Me On This but it works alone.
A Place Like Home, Rosamunde Pilcher (2021)
Short story collection by Pilcher, not as good as her other two short story collections. This was put together after her death, from her published stories, and doesn’t have the flow the others do, but I still enjoyed it. Very gentle romances, very easy to read, very few of them with any sting at all.
Citadel, Marko Kloos (2021)
Why is it that I feel in volume 3 of this series that it’s just getting going? However, it’s great, Kloos is still writing excellent combat sequences (almost nobody is good at combat sequences) and things are coming together and we are starting to find out what’s actually going on. I pre-ordered this and started reading it the day it came out.
Barberry Bush, Kathleen Thompson Norris (1929)
Recently released as an ebook. I am still reading Kathleen Norris because I never have the faintest idea what’s going to happen in her books, except that I now understand the underlying metaphysics of morality in her universe. Very odd novel about a girl kind of taking a long time to grow up in 1920s California, with Norris’s odd class consciousness and excellent description. I thought for a while she was asexual, but she turned out to be just a very late developer.
The Infinite, Patience Agbabi (2020)
Middle grade first novel by brilliant poet Agbabi. It’s a children’s book, with what you’d expect from that, but it’s about kids born on February 29th who are leaplings, people who can jump through time under their own power. Elle, the heroine, is autistic, and the granddaughter of Nigerian immigrants to London. She has a great first person voice, which carries the book. The plot is a little obvious—but I’d have loved it when I was eight—and it’s full of fun details. Good kid friendships. Definitely pick this up for your middle grade-reading friends and family. There’s a sequel, Time Thief, which I’ll get to soon.
The One & Only, Emily Giffin (2014)
Compelling but very strange novel about a woman who is obsessed with American football and in love with her best friend’s father. It has that “can’t put it down” quality Giffin often has, but it also kept raising my eyebrows. It’s good. It’s well written. I’m sure the stuff about football culture is well researched. But it’s odd. Also, it has the flaw that many of Giffin’s books have of being obsessed with rich people and brand names
The Young Rebecca: Writings 1911-1917, Rebecca West (1992)
I’ve now read most of West, and sadly this volume isn’t really worth it. There are flashes of her later brilliant self, but mostly this is journalism and reviews covering women’s suffrage in the years leading up to and during WWI. Fascinating as historical documents, a bit of a slog to read. I thought it might be interesting to see West developing as a writer, but it wasn’t really, or it didn’t get far enough into it.
And the extra book, actually from several months ago, when I was lucky enough to listen to an early draft in our online regular reading Covid bookclub:
How to Take Over the World, Ryan North (2022)
Hilarious book about science and logistics, disguised as a manual for supervillains. The chatlog explanation of climate change is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, even if you’re not lucky enough to hear Gretchen McCulloch read it aloud. This is even better than How to Invent Everything because the conceit is so neat. Like, you’re a supervillain. You’ll need a base, obviously. How can you have a really safe base? How self-sufficient can it be? Can it be underwater? In space? You’re going to run into the following well-thought-through logistical constraints… Highly recommended, and like the previous one a perfect gift for a curious teen. And really, who isn’t curious about becoming a supervillain? Don’t miss this one.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and fifteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her novel Lent was published by Tor in May 2019, and her most recent novel, Or What You Will, was released in July 2020. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.
“….Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, Rome, Siena, Pisa. I caught trains, and saw lots of great art, and even caught a Vivaldi concert in Venice.”
Envy meter twitching HARD to the right…
Yep, Branson is a real place, and a fun place to visit — there’s a variety of activities and stores, including an old-fashioned five & dime shop.
They’re so real that in ’10 when my folks and I were there asking for a state map of Missouri, they looked at us like they didn’t know the state existed and it was just Branson, USA. (We did get a state map at the Springfield visitors’ center.) Which would make for some interesting speculative fiction–what if they thought it was just them and someone walked through a portal and found out about St. Louis, Mansfield, Springfield, etc.
Branson, home of an almost full-sized TITANIC replica. The whole town is a strange tourist mecca. Donald Westlake wrote one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read where two kidnapped people are trying to communicate through their gags. It did not go well. Westlake is a great recommendation to someone who enjoys classic mysteries with funny twists.
I loved your comments about The Escapement, Jo… When I finished it, I thought, “Wow, Parker is so incredibly cynical about love in this series… who hurt him?”
Did the exact same thing with the new Kloos book: devoured it the day it downloaded to my Kindle app. He says that he only needs one more book to wrap up the series, but like you I still think we’re early in Act 2.
Rosimund Pilcher was the master of short romance stories. She could get you emotionally invested in a character in just a few hundred words. Brilliant.
So envious of your travels.
What a wonderful assortment of books. Ah, Italy! I hope there was gelato.
I read Devices and Desires earlier this summer, and it was a little off-putting because I couldn’t tell if it (where?) was meant to be funny.
I hope Marko Kloos is wrong about the series as I agree, it feels as if we are just getting properly going with Citadel.
Another view of Baby, Would I Lie, from a web site that has reviewed all (well, almost all) of Westlake. https://thewestlakereview.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/review-baby-would-i-lie/
I’ve been to Branson several times (though not since the kids have grown up) … very recognizable in Baby Would I Lie? The country singer character is also a very recognizable version of the legendary singer George Jones. It’s a funny book, and also — I almost sensed against Westlake’s original intentions — is rather sympathetic to the people and milieu he’s satirizing.
Oh, yeah, and exactly that about Parker’s concept of love. In the Engineer Trilogy, since the whole thing turns on believing that actual people act like that because of love, you kind of have to accept that they are aliens — perhaps atevi, as you suggest. I still find his stories utterly involving — and partly, to be sure, for the engineering details, so entertainingly conveyed — but, yeah, very few people are like that about love.
Emily Giffin is originally from my home town (though she’s much younger than me and I certainly don’t know her) so I’ve taken an interest in her work, but haven’t read it. My wife has read a couple, though, and she thought they were OK but gave up on them, partly, I think, because of the rich people/brand name obsession you mentioned.
Ecbatan — so which Parker that I haven’t read should I read next time I want a book about a siege? I’ve read the Holt historicals you love, I’ve read Sharps, I’ve read these, I’ve read the Walled City ones, I’ve read the first two Fencer ones and stopped, horrified, and I absolutely loved the collection of novellas and shorter work.
If you must have a siege, I’m not sure … I don’t remember if The Folding Knife has one. I don’t think The Hammer does, nor The Company. The Two of Swords is incredibly complicated, changing POV with every chapter — I think there were some sieges in there. (I read it in the serialized form, at least at the beginning, and I probably missed some stuff by forgetting between installments.)
I also like to mention “Told by an Idiot”, which is one of the few not set in any version of his extended faux-historical setting … it’s a Shakespeare story (or at least Elizabethan playwrights), as might be clear from the title. It was in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and also the second Parker collection, The Father of Lies. No sieges, though.
I’m just finishing a very good book – Or What You Will – and I realized, as I was reading p. 283, that while this book was being written, I was a figment of the author’s imagination. Not in the sense that the narrator is, but someone imagined by the author but never encountered. The reader.
Most unsettling.
Raskos: A little while ago, someone who was born in 1999 emailed me that they’d just read my first novel, The King’s Peace, published in 2000 but written in 1997. They literally did not exist when I wrote that book! And yes, I enjoyed the opportunity to point out that you the reader exist in liminal space.
Since we were discussing Westlake, the Parker about a siege that comes to mind is Butcher’s Moon.
I was just assuming if it was full length Parker it would be about a siege…