What I’m Reading (Mid-February Edition)
Some months I read as though the only way I can navigate the world is through words.
The War of Dolls by Michelle Painchaud
This is a book you can’t read (yet) because it hasn’t been published (yet). Instead, I have to point you towards Pretending to be Erica which you both can read and is awesome.
This book, that you can’t read (yet), is also awesome. Think of Battle Royale mixed with Attack on Titan, but in a world that’s pretty much pure fantasy, and with all girls, and a world who’s mythology is mysterious and detailed and filled with strangeness like China Mieville.
That’s the frustrating thing about reading another writer’s unpublished work. You want it to be published. YOU WANT IT TO BE PUBLISHED so others can read it. Because it deserves to be in the world because you will love it.
So there.
Chapelwood by Cherie Priest
M & I like Cherie Priest a lot. Her series that takes place in the late-1800s and deals with a pseudo-zombifying drug and steampunk alternate history is amazing for its world-building, but mostly for its characters. She can get you to care about someone from 0 to 100 in ten words flat.
This book is a sequel to Maplecroft, a book positing Lizzie Borden as the last defense for humanity in a small town slowly being overrun by Lovecraftian horrors. It’s beautiful and amazing and fascinating and dark. It’s also told in an epistolary fashion, which takes a second to get used to, but creates a special tension where you know the speaker is going to live but everyone else might die, and has already done so by the time the account is being written.
Chapelwood takes place thirty years on from the events in the first novel, meaning Borden is now in her fifties/sixties, which creates an interesting take on the action hero. Here is essentially Miss Marple with an axe. I was slow to be drawn in at first (despite the last sentence) because the novel focuses on other characters first, but once Borden officially involves herself in the plot, the book doesn’t let go.
A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon
This book was a Christmas present from my mom. We share books and authors and a love of reading, so we’re constantly trying to gift each other with our favorite writers, hoping our joy translates.
Leon made a name for herself writing mysteries taking place in Venice and focusing on Brunetti, a Venetian policeman. I’ll just say now that these books don’t drag me inside their pages easily. There’s a distance to the writing that puts me off, or maybe there’s just a sort of lazy progression in terms of the plot which doesn’t hook me in for just one more chapter.
This isn’t to say that the book isn’t enjoyable. What I loved most was seeing the different in culture, and learning how justice works in other countries. For example there many different kinds of police in Italy, and their jurisdictions often overlap, creating a sort of clandestine infighting as to who is responsible for investigating what.
Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon
So, the basics out of the way, (see above entry) I just want to say one of the strange things about Leon’s book is how Brunetti is often not solving a mystery or bringing someone to justice. The mystery is often resolved separate to upholding the law, and many of the evils revealed by Brunetti don’t have any recourse under the law. He may find out someone is abusing their power as a doctor to destroy other people’s lives, spreading private information for rigidly moral reasons, but that’s not something which can be prosecuted.
For example, one of the tragedies in this book involves children being made orphans. Couples who can’t have children are buying them from immigrants, and then a year to a year and a half later, the police are taking those children away, but not returning them to the original parents, and not allowing the parents who’ve been caring for them for so long to adopt officially. The lives of everyone involved are scarred and/or ruined, but there is no solution offered. The book simply becomes a meditation on the cruelty of the world and how justice is not concerned with happiness.
Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World by The Project on Disney
If you like reading Marxist criticism of the largest and most iconic theme park in the world, then this book is for you!
No, really, it is for you.
Honestly, I love reading criticism and reviews and pop-culture think pieces, and that’s what this book contains. What does Disney mean in American or world culture? What does it mean to work at the rat, and how does it mold/destroy who you are? Is Disney about consumption or about conformity?
This book was published in 1996, I read it first in 2001, and again this past month. It still reads as fresh and real and traumatizing and glorious.
And now I want to go to Disney World again.
