FF: More Comments Than Usual

Persephone Reads

This week I have more to say about my reading than usual.  Don’t consider these reviews, just my thoughts as I go along.

A reminder.  The Friday Fragments is not a book review column; it’s a list of what I’m reading and maybe a bit about my opinions.  I always read the comments section and enjoy learning what other people are reading.  Oh, and I don’t usually list shorter works unless in a collection or articles, I also don’t usually list scattered research reading.

Completed:

Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones.  Audiobook.  Twelve-year-old Conrad has had instilled in him that in his past life, he did something terrible.  Now it looks as if that deed is catching up to him.  Features Christopher Chant at about age fifteen.  And has an epilogue taking the characters into young adulthood.

Among the Gray Lords by D.J. Butler.  Third book featuring sword and sorcery duo Indrajit and Fix.  Beneath the spiraling-out-of-the-protagonists-control plot rests a quietly deeper tale about the value of friendship and loyalty.  Read for the romp, stay for the resolution.

In Progress:

American Ghost: A Family’s Extraordinary History on the Desert Frontier by Hannah Nordhaus.  Non-fiction.  Audiobook. Nordhaus decides to investigate her ancestor Julia Staab, who ostensibly haunts La Posada in Santa Fe.  Nordhaus states repeatedly that the book is more about herself than about Julia, so I’ll add that I’ve seen a lot of the places she mentions, and she definitely projects her interpretations onto everything from the burro statue in Burro Alley to the landscape, and, of course, onto Julia Staab.  Read as a personal memoir of the author, not as scholarly analysis of a historical figure.

Witchy Eye by D.J. Butler.  Very solidly researched alternate history into which a classic “hidden heir” Fantasy plot is convincingly integrated.  The second edition (which I am reading) includes an excellent essay on how the author’s alternate “America” evolved.  One of those rare alternate history works in which scrupulous attention to worldbuilding does not mean characterization takes second place.

Also:

Finished the latest American Archeology.  Some good pieces in there, including one on all the different ways dating of sites and artifacts can be done.  Now starting the latest Smithsonian.