Top Ten Tuesday: Mainstream Authors

Posted November 14, 2023 by Nicky in General / 42 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is one I’m not totally sure how to answer, because I don’t really know what counts as “mainstream” for these purposes, and I have pretty eclectic taste. Let’s have a shot: the theme is “Mainstream Popular Authors that I Still Have Not Read”.

George R.R. Martin. Okay, he’s a fantasy writer, but pretty much a household name by now, right? Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him — and I definitely haven’t read the Game of Thrones series.
James Patterson. I do have one of his books on my to-read list because it involves postcards (and I review books about postcards for Postcrossing’s blog), but I haven’t read any yet.
Zadie Smith. I think I audited a course that had one of her books on the list, back in university, but I wasn’t actually sitting the course so I didn’t do all the reading.
Elena Ferrante. I try most stuff, but her books don’t really appeal to me, so I doubt I’ll give them a shot any time soon.
Hilary Mantel. I’ve got a couple of her books to read, but I’ve not touched them yet. Oops?
Jonathan Franzen. Something about his work just super does not appeal.
Michael Chabon. I own a couple of his books, I’ve even intended to read them very strongly at times… but I’ve never actually got round to it.
Sally Rooney. I don’t actually know much about her books? They’re not squarely in my wheelhouse, or I’d know more about them from others at the very least, but it’s not like I’ve made a firm decision not to try them. Rather, what I’ve seen/heard is fairly limited, and I’ve made no decision, but nothing’s drawn me in either.
Amy Tan. I have a copy of The Joy Luck Club somewhere, or I used to, but I never touched it. Oops.
Steig Larsson. His books never really called to me from all I heard about them, though they were such a thing for a while that I had my eye on them.

Do I have surprising gaps here? Is there something you’re curious about whether I’ve read it or not?

Just… don’t try to argue with me whether these are mainstream or not. I just found a list or two of mainstream authors and cherry-picked from that!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Heads You Lose

Posted November 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Heads You Lose

by Christianna Brand

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 159
Series: Inspector Cockrill #1
Rating:

Synopsis:
Pigeonsford Estate is playing host to a group of close friends when one of their number, Grace Morland, is found dead in a ditch. The murder is made even more unusual by the fact that Grace was wearing her friend Francesca's hat, the same hat that only the day before she'd claimed she wouldn't be caught dead wearing. Inspector Cockrill has known most of the friends since they were children. They are all from good families and very close to one another; how, then, could one of them be a cold-blooded killer? And if one of them had murdered Grace which one was it and why had they done it?

Heads You Lose did some very interesting things, from my point of view: the sympathy with a particular character was genuinely affecting, to me at least, and I’m noting some patterns with her work that intrigue me. As a story, though, there were a few things that bothered me. It’s a bit spoilery to go into them in depth, so I’ll just start by saying that I think in the end I’d say it was worth reading, at least for me as a fan of this period of mystery/crime fiction, but I do have caveats and content warnings to go with that.

The main caveat is the fact that the plot hinges on the oft-derived trope of a mentally ill killer, one who has blackouts and commits crimes unbeknownst to himself. That means the third-person narration is sometimes a bit unreliable, as it sticks close to particular characters’ POV, and thus misleads the reader. You have to read very closely to catch the clue, and of course you’re not looking there for it.

I did think that the ending was rather better than the “psycho killer with blackouts” trope portended. There’s a lot of pathos in the ending for that particular character and how it comes about.

I would also note that there’s a Jewish character who is treated somewhat sympathetically, and yet at the same time with some anti-Semitic tropes. Of course this was common in the crime fiction in and around the Golden Age (Dorothy L. Sayers did similar in Whose Body?), but it’s worth knowing going in.

I am noticing that Brand doesn’t do much bringing her villains to justice. They usually die in some kind of appropriate way — not in the way that some other detective novels do, with a “you should write a confession and shoot yourself, or I’ll put the police in possession of what I know”, but still, they each die. It has less of a “detective as judge and jury” ring, and more like… “the universe will put things right, somehow”. Either way, an interesting thing to note, as I read more of Brand’s work.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Christianna Brand, crime, mystery

Review – Buzz

Posted November 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

by Thor Hanson

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
In Buzz, the award-winning author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young.

From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.

As informative and enchanting as the waggle dance of a honeybee, Buzz shows us why all bees are wonders to celebrate and protect.

Thor Hanson’s style is quite enjoyable — conversational, personal, but usually to the point. We’ll see some scraps of his family life as he talks about making experiments with his son, for example, but it doesn’t veer off into three pages of some scenario about a mid-life crisis and turning to bees or something like that (which can be a bit of a hazard with books of this genre). Mostly, he’s focused on the bees, and his enthusiasm for the bees.

I actually didn’t know much about any type of bees other than honeybees, so I really enjoyed hearing about sweat bees and alkali bees and learning a bit more about bumblebees and their tiny amount of honey.

Of course he also addresses colony collapse disorder, and the general decline of bee species worldwide, with some room for hope and some much-needed warning. Bees are just “cute” enough that I hope humans are going to come through for them.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Thor Hanson

Review – Tread of Angels

Posted November 11, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Tread of Angels

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 201
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Celeste, a card sharp with a need for justice, takes on the role of advocatus diaboli, to defend her sister Mariel, accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the ruling class of this mining town, in a new world of dark fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse.

The year is 1883 and the mining town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity from the high mountains of Colorado with the help of the pariahs of society known as the Fallen. The Fallen are the descendants of demonkind living amongst the Virtues, the winners in an ancient war, with the descendants of both sides choosing to live alongside Abaddon’s mountain in this tale of the mythological West.

I really enjoyed Tread of Angels. I was probably only partly on board, right up until the end, because it felt like the main character (Celeste) was being a bit stupid about something that was right in front of her face. It felt like everything was going to be just a bit too predictable — enjoyable, but not something that would stick in my mind. And then, at the end… consequences.

In the end, I still can’t give it five stars, because holy crap, Celeste, how are you so stupid? And how do you keep taking such terrible advantage of everyone around you? It’s a wonder you’ve managed any friends at all… That part didn’t quite make sense to me, because the profound selfishness of Celeste made me wonder how her friends hadn’t seen it.

But something about the ending surprised me; I don’t want to say too much, but it made me re-evaluate a certain character and decide that he probably was more interesting than I’d initially written him off as. The book from his point of view certainly would’ve been something.

In the end, it strikes a sad note, but it works really well.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Rebecca Roanhorse, SF/F

Review – Accident by Design

Posted November 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Accident by Design

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 199
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Templedean Place in the Cotswold Hills of England was among the last of the truly aristocratic estates, where old family traditions still ﬂourished. When Gerald Vanstead arrived from Australia with his family, to attend his father in his last illness, other, more deadly things flourished.

Gerald's wife was the bickering kind; he drank too much, was given to feuding with the chauffeur, and seemed excessively tightlipped and disagreeable—and so no one was particularly sorry when one day the brakes on Gerald's car failed to hold, and he and his wife were killed.

A family picnic ended in the accidental death of another Vanstead, a fire destroyed what might have been a clue, and there was a night of horrible suspense before Inspector Macdonald could say who hated Gerald Vanstead the most and who, in a house of cultured, well-bred men and women, was most capable of murder.

I’ve said for a while that E.C.R. Lorac is one of my favourite authors from this period, and that’s in part because she can sketch in a place and a cast that one can care about, often full of decent people trying to do their best, and driven by her humane and careful detective, Macdonald.

Accident by Design is another case of that, but it subverted my expectations somewhat in the way the characters were set up, proving that Lorac was careful not to get too formulaic. It would be easy to slip into looking for a certain character type, and to feel sure that they are guilty, but Lorac doesn’t make it so easy.

In the end, it isn’t one of my favourite stories by Lorac (I think that still goes to Death of an Author, which isn’t even a Macdonald book, and is rather clever instead of being atmospheric), but it’s a solid example of her work. Perhaps best enjoyed once you’re used to her tendencies, so you get the surprise I did…

I continue to think Lorac’s one of the best of her generation of mystery writers — and that’s despite a fairly prolific output.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery

Review – Fossil Legends of the First Americans

Posted November 9, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Fossil Legends of the First Americans

by Adrienne Mayor

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 488
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils?

Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries.

Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees.

Fossil Legends of the First Americans felt a bit… slower than Mayor’s book on the fossil knowledge of Greek and Roman culture. In part, it’s because there’s just more ground to cover, but also there’s a certain repetitiveness to each chapter in her gradual survey of the whole area.

I do see her point that these indigenous peoples definitely interacted with fossil bones, and definitely came to an understanding of them — seeing them as evidence of deep time, and even perhaps a form of evolution — but sometimes (as with the other book) it feels like grasping at straws. “Perhaps” they thought this or that, but we can’t know that. So much knowledge has been lost, and so much is kept by indigenous communities and not shared with white people (for good reason).

It’s an interesting survey of attitudes toward fossils and stories about fossils in indigenous American cultures, but that’s as far as it can go.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Adrienne Mayor, book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, science

Review – Unto the Godless What Little Remains

Posted November 8, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Unto the Godless What Little Remains

by Mário Coelho

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 104
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
The internet is a lonesome god.

Liverloin is a fractured man, a collection of personas—artificial constructs of wants, fears and needs—created by underground science-artists to help him hide in a hyper-connected world. But he can’t hide from Big Momma.

She is the living internet, a benevolent AI who knows everything and everyone… and somehow is in love with Liverloin.

Agent Stevly works for DAIS, an AI on the other side of the internet: the darkness to Big Momma’s light. DAIS’s agents manipulate news, information and media and pull the strings behind world events, but DAIS cannot control Big Momma or understand why she loves Liverloin. Agent Stevly, bound body and soul to DAIS, will stop at nothing to find the answer.

Unto the Godless What Little Remains is very much designed to be a novella, and as such it gets away with things that would frustrate me otherwise, like the constantly switching point-of-view and time in the continuity of the story. It’s still a little frustrating, especially for the chapters with Stevly (which are in a horrible format with less punctuation and few capital letters), but it mostly gets away with it at this length.

The story itself isn’t too surprising to me: AI have learned to predict everything humans think, do, like or want, because everything is part of a chain of causes and effects. The AI Big Momma rules the world, and everybody lets her, because life’s easy that way. But Big Momma’s fascinated with a human, Liverloin, who acts and thinks in ways that she just cannot predict — and obviously others have a vested interest in stopping her getting obsessed with him. Liverloin flees both her and them, confused, and running from something in his past.

It all comes together pretty well; it doesn’t feel startling or surprising to me, but it was entertaining enough.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Mário Coelho, SF/F

Review – Death of Mr Dodsley

Posted November 7, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Death of Mr Dodsley

by John Ferguson

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 256
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Mr Richard Dodsley, owner of a fine second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has been found murdered in the cold hours of the morning. Shot in his own office, few clues remain besides three cigarette ends, two spent matches and a few books on the shelves which have been rearranged.

In an investigation spanning the second-hand bookshops of London and the Houses of Parliament (since an MP’s daughter's new crime novel Death at the Desk appears to have some bearing on the case), Ferguson’s series sleuth MacNab is at hand to assist Scotland Yard in this atmospheric and ingenious fair-play bibliomystery, first published in 1937.

I found that Death of Mr Dodsley was a bit too slow for my tastes — or at least, too slow in bringing together the strands of the plot and making it clear as to why the book opens in the Houses of Parliament! Much of the novel seems to have little to do with that, and though it’s obvious it will tie in somehow… it never quite did so properly, to be honest. The red herring is only very slightly tinged, and I never believed in it.

All in all, that made it a little frustrating, as the evidence-gathering is rather slow, and it also vacillates about which detective, precisely, it wants to follow (starting with the police and later moving on to MacNab).

It wasn’t a bad read by any measure, but not one of my favourites, despite being focused around a book written by one of the suspects, and set mostly in a bookshop, no less! But alas, that didn’t add enough charm to keep up sparkling.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, John Ferguson, mystery

Top Ten Tuesday: Headlines

Posted November 7, 2023 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

It’s been a while since I participated in Top Ten Tuesday, but I’ve been kind of a hermit for a bit and I’d love to get back in touch with the wider blog-o-sphere, so let’s give this a go! This week’s list theme is “titles that could be headlines”. Hmmm…

Well, first up, a lot of mystery novels are perfect for this task. I’ll stick to only a few of those, and see if I can find some other neat ones as well, but to get us started…

Requiem for a Mezzo, by Carola Dunn. One of the early Daisy Dalrymple novels. I could actually use the titles of this series for quite a few answers — Murder on the Flying Scotsman, Fall of a Philanderer, Death at Wentwater Court, anyone?
Murder in the Dark, by Kerry Greenwood. I do love the Phryne Fisher series, but I think I’ve only ever read this one once. I should carry on with my reread of this series!
Post After Post-Mortem, by E.C.R. Lorac. You can just picture a headline with that kind of snappy alliteration and mystery-causing, right? Also, this is a really good book, though personally I found it a bit harrowing due to the themes.
A Very English Murder, by Verity Bright. I haven’t read this one, but I can still picture it on the front page of some newspaper or other.
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L. Sayers. I can see a particular sort of “respectable” newspaper choosing something kind of… restrained to refer to a murder.

Now let’s see if we can get a bit more adventurous and grub up some other headlines…

Black Ops and Beaver Bombing, by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall. It sounds kinda weird, definitely like one of those headlines they use to pique your interest. As it happens, it’s about British wildlife. I haven’t read it, so I can’t honestly answer you about what the beaver bombing is about.
Unmasked by the Marquess, by Cat Sebastian. Okay, this probably isn’t a modern headline… but nobody specified that, right? And the book is fun, too.
How Long Till Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin. A pertinent question, after all.
Europe at Midnight, by Dave Hutchinson. I haven’t read this one yet, but I can envision this being the big blocky headline of the Daily Mail or whatever.
The Dos and Donuts of Love, by Adiba Jaigirdar. What headline can resist a pun? Cute book, too.

There, whew, I did it.

Have any of the titles piqued your interest? I’ve reviewed a bunch of these, so let me know if you’re interested in my take and I’ll grub up the links!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – For the Love of Mars

Posted November 6, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

For the Love of Mars

by Matthew Shindell

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 247
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. Due to its vivid color and visibility, its geologic kinship with Earth, and its potential as our best hope for settlemen, Mars embodies everything that inspires us about space and exploration. For the Love of Mars journeys through the red planet's place in the human imagination, beginning with ancient astrologers and skywatchers and ending in our present moment of exploration and virtual engagement.

This book isn’t really about the science of Mars — though that comes into it — but is more of a cultural history: an attempt to understand what Mars has meant to people, the framework in which people have understood it in different ages, and how that has shaped how we understand Mars now and the kind of assumptions we hold about it.

I found it a surprisingly slow read for the length, comparatively speaking; it was perhaps a bit drier than I expected for a book about Mars (which just goes to show how we think about Mars, I suppose), and spent rather a long time recounting the stories that people told about Mars, e.g. a detailed explanation of Dante’s Paradiso.

I did expect a cultural history from the blurb (though it seems other people were misled), but I suppose I’d expected something focusing more on the modern part of it. I did really enjoy the chapter that discusses the Mars rovers and people’s intense, surprisingly emotional reactions to them.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Matthew Shindell, non-fiction, science