Year of the Reaper

Year of the Reaper

By Makiia Lucier

The past never forgets . . .

Before an ambush by enemy soldiers, Lord Cassia was an engineer's apprentice on a mission entrusted by the king. But when plague sweeps over the land, leaving countless dead and devastating the kingdom, even Cas' title cannot save him from a rotting prison cell and a merciless sickness.

Three years later, Cas wants only to return to his home in the mountains and forget past horrors. But home is not what here members. His castle has become a refuge for the royal court. And they have brought their enemies with them.

When an assassin targets those closest to the queen, Cas is drawn into a search for a killer...one that leads him to form an unexpected bond with a brilliant young historian named Lena. Cas and Lena soon realize that who is behind the attacks is far less important than why. They must look to the past, following the trail of a terrible secret--one that could threaten the kingdom's newfound peace and plunge it back into war.

I really enjoyed this one! I think it's like a light YA, in the sense that it involves young adults, and isn't suuuuper heavy on complex plotting, but there's certainly some flexibility there, and definitely some dark moments, when we find out what happened to the sick woman (spoiler alert!).  

It reminded me in many ways of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, which, aside from the protagonist sharing a similar nickname (Cas/Caz) along with the ability to see ghosts, recent release from an unjust imprisonment and a badly scarred back, also has a similar castle politicking/adjacent to royalty vibe with the same kind of medieval fantasy flavor. I mean, the plots are totally different, so it's weird that the protagonists have so many surface similarities, but I love Curse of Chalion, so the similar parts were welcome, and the differences were entertaining. 

There definitely could have been more world building.  We enter into a situation with two warring countries trying to make peace with a political alliance, and beset by a vicious plague.  Cas' backstory involves three years behind enemy lines, and the storyline involves a huge political marriage, but we never spend any time in the next country, or know what they think about, you know, the marriage, or the baby, or the plague, or the fragile detente.  Who IS ruling the country next door? It was never clear to me.  [And how on earth are they going to gloss over the ol' switcharoo when the next ambassador comes a'calling? A question alluded to, but never answered].  So although the story felt satisfying in many ways, it also felt weirdly like it was the second in a duology, or maybe that there was supposed to be another book after this one, perhaps exploring whatever Cas' brother is off to. 

The mystery of what is going on with the attacks is not that hard to figure out - the real question was always going to be be "why is the former queen so pissed off" but I guess when you abandon someone to die and then then marry their fiance and have a kid and then it turns out that the person you abandoned not only didn't die, but was spirited away to be tortured under the guise of medical experimentation, then that all makes sense. But seriously, there are at least three prominent people who survive the plague just in this book, you'd think people would want to see the person dead and buried, especially if one is the QUEEN.  Don't just drop her off at the nearest trauma ward and assume she's going to kick the bucket.  And what if someone recognizes her?  I mean, if nothing else, Cas' brother deserves to be banished for going along with such a stupid plan.  

I was reading a thing the other day about how boys/men don't have "toxic friendships" the way that female characters do.  They're limited in the way their relationships are expressed.  And initially I was going to applaud how fraternal and lovely the brothers' relationship was (and it is), but it's also interesting that the author of that article felt really right, that it seems like in books with male protagonists, you usually wind up with these ride-or-die friendships or no friends. It would be interesting to see a book about toxic male friends.  Not that I, necessarily want to read a book about toxic male friends, but I think it would be good to have one.  The one I can think of about toxic female friends was The Best Lies, and that one drove me crazy.  

 

15: A Book by a Pacific Islander Author

The Thirteenth Tale

 The Thirteenth Tale

By Diane Setterfield

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness—featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

I hated all of the characters, but I enjoyed the plot!  As was probably to be expected, since this whole thing was steeped in gothic overtones, and involved terrible family members and secret babies and incest and murder children.  I mean, I say all that, and I'm like, "Heck, yeah! I love murder children!" but I spent most of the book so over everyone's antics and trying to figure out how Vida Winter was lying, since she definitely was, and it was annoyingly distracting.  Also, I hated Aurelius.  So you were abandoned as a baby! So your ancestral home burnt down in a terrible fire! So the woman you believed to be your mother denied your existence! Get over it!  

 

Not to mention the narrator's obsession with her conjoined twin, which she dealt with like her parents (mother, really) murdered her in front of Margaret Lea and spat on the grave. Hey, maybe it's okay for your parents not to have told you at age 5 about a really traumatic thing that happened to them when you were barely born.  It's not such a personal betrayal that you then need to spend twenty years investigating twins to make up for it.  Everybody decided to be THE MOST DRAMATIC that they could be, and it drove me crazy.  But not like, proactively dramatic.  More like, laying across the divan, with your hand across your forehead, saying, "What is to become of us now?!"

The whole twin thing was so overweening, in fact, that I do blame it for not realizing that there were three kids involved in the main storyline. Alright, that's not really true, I picked up on some hints, but thought it was a blonde boy, haha, who didn't look like the "emerald-eyed, red-haired" twins. I'm not sure why I thought he was blonde, but you know, that's on me.  By the end of the book, I did begrudgingly think that it was very cleverly done, a-ha, now all those parts of the story make sense again, but I'm still not going to re-read any of it. 

I very much craved a Cold Comfort Farm Flora who could have shown up, put all of these ridiculous doom-and-gloom ("That twin jest ain't right") matters to rights and sent everyone on their way.  I had high hopes for Hester, in fact, and her section was when I started making better progress in the book, but of course she had to buy into some weird twin-eugenics ideas and end up succumbing to the general atmosphere.  I think that's partly why I liked Mexican Gothic so much: yes, everybody was off their rockers, but they were being poisoned by fungi!  It made sense!  They were Yellow Wallpapering because the actual wallpaper was killing them!  I mean, maybe that's the case here, there is a wealth of description about how terrible the house is, and it's moldy and falling in, so maybe there's bad mushrooms to blame here too. 

But in the end, do we even really need poisonous mushrooms?  Since it turns out there's one stupid twin, and one violent twin, and one girl who was pretending she didn't exist (for reasons that are still unclear - just tell the lawyer that Charlie had a baby, it's not like Charlie is going to gainsay you) and everything is perfectly in character from thence on.  And I suppose the twins' eccentricities can be explained because incest, and Charlie and Isabelle's eccentricities can be explained by oh, wait, nevermind, I guess we do need poisonous mushrooms after all because otherwise I guess it's just a freaky family of sadists and the stoic servants who enable them. 

For all that it has mysteries, in the end, I wondered whether or not this really was a "book about a secret" but I suppose Vida Winter's true identity has been a secret (twice over), not to mention the fact that she kind of murdered the wrong twin, and then kept the other one holed up in her house for sixty years. So, yeah, okay it works.

 25: A Book about a Secret

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

By Carol Rifka Brunt

1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down.
 
But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life. At the funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail containing a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and that this unexpected friend just might be the one she needs the most.

So I was super pumped about this when I started, I was a few chapters in and immediately hooked.  And then... I started to hate it.  The main character, June, is supposed to be 14-15, but feels more like 11-12, she has no social or emotional maturity, is deeply and weirdly in love with her uncle Finn who is dying of AIDS (and even weirder, we find out at the end of the book that Finn's partner, Toby told Finn that he (i.e., Finn) would make her fall in love with him, like that's a normal thing to say about an uncle-niece relationship) and is really off-putting to everyone around her. 

This infatuation/all-encompassing love she has for her uncle was really what made me reluctant to keep going. If she were actually dating him (which it sounds like she wanted to do[?!]), she'd be a plethora of possessive red flags.  She's mad other people aren't as upset as she is by his death, she doesn't want to share her time with him at all, she gets mad that other people know things about him that she doesn't know (like his partner! who lived with him for years!), she's totally undone by the idea that some of the things she thought were Finn's (like a jar of guitar picks) actually turn out to be his partner's, etc., etc. Like dangerous levels of obsession here. And after Finn's death, she does the exact same thing to his partner, Toby.  Like, at one point she steals her passport so she can take Toby on a trip to England, like that's a totally normal thing for a 14 year old to suggest to this adult man who was living with her uncle, whom she has known (and known of) for probably two whole months, if that (Finn died February 5th, and the book wraps up around the end of tax season). 

I forced myself to keep going, and started to get back into around the 3/4 mark, where she starts to see her various lies beginning to unwind, and she actually has a conversation with her sister, Greta (instead of assuming the worst about her). I felt worse for the people around her than I did her.  She sounded like a petulant, ignorant child, always thinking in these totally black and white terms, like her mother is horrible for what she did to her brother, Finn (even though we find out Finn stayed longer in England because he met Toby, thus eliminating the chance for them to work as artists together), and how if people don't do things just exactly the way she has it in her mind, they must HATE HER, because SHE'S SO WEIRD. If this is meant to be a picture of someone with a social disorder, kudos.  Because like I said, I cannot imagine a 14 year old, even in 1987, who thinks it's reasonable to be a caregiver for her uncle's lover, and that said caregiving would involve a trip overseas. 

Around the 3/4 mark, as I've said, the action starts to pick up, and we spend less time mooning about how wonderful Finn and June's relationship was (despite the fact that she *GASP* never knew that Finn couldn't drive, how dare she not know that???) and how deeply she's grasping onto Toby, and there's actual action, regarding the painting she and Greta have been defacing, regarding Greta's habit of getting drunk and lying down in the woods, and Toby's illness. I did tear up a little when she rescues him from Bellevue Hospital, but I don't know if the ending saves the rest of the book. I could definitely have used less in the middle, when we spend all this time hearing about how wonderful her uncle was and how only he understood her, truly, (even though she apparently knew very little about him or his life), and how every single thing that Finn ever touched was precious, precious to her!  She does remind me a lot of Gollum, actually.  Obsessive, unpleasant to be around, always assuming the worst of people, pretends, 'oh, woe is me' even though she's pretty much 100% self interested herself.  

I know I chose this for the 1980s, and the AIDS crisis looms large, but aside from that, it just didn't feel super 80s to me.  The Sun Down Motel felt more 80s for all that the time period didn't even matter as much in that book.  

 

13: A Book Set in the 1980s

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

By Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper

A weekend roaming narrow old lanes, touring the faded glories of a country manor, and quaffing pints in the pub. How charming. That is, unless you have the misfortune of finding yourself in an English Murder Village, where danger lurks around each picturesque cobblestone corner and every sip of tea may be your last. If you insist on your travels, do yourself a favor and bring a copy of this little book. It may just keep you alive. 

Brought to life with dozens of Gorey-esque drawings by illustrator Jay Cooper and peppered with allusions to classic crime series and unmistakably British murder lore, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village gives you the tools you need to avoid the same fate, should you find yourself in a suspiciously cozy English village (or simply dream of going). Good luck! And whatever you do, avoid the vicar.

I can vouchsafe that this can be read in one sitting because I did, in fact, read it all in one sitting, while I was improbably stuck without phone or kindle with a sleeping baby on top of me.  The only book within grabbing distance* was Your Guide and serendipitously, I managed to finish the whole thing without waking the baby.  

It's one of those books that I've always found a bit gimmicky, you know, one hit wonders that are charming enough to pass the time, but are more for gifting, reading once, and then putting to the side and forgetting.  That being said, it was still delightful.  I'm probably a core audience member for it, since I got really into Midsommer Murders during the first year of the pandemic** and (as you may know) am very much into country house murder books by Agatha Christie***. And if you like Midsommer Murders and enjoy the idea that these little villages are constantly beplauged by murders, you will enjoy Your Guide. It covers all the bases, the village fete ("A nice way to spend a summer's day and thin out the local population"), people who leave messages ("All messages in a Murder Village are bad news. It means someone Knows Something. Don't leave messages. Don't hang around people who do."), the Folly ("It's a small, fake temple at the far side of the pond, perfect for picnics, trysts, and casual strangulations"), the farmer ("Constantly fielding offers from city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center and fielding tthose same city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center.") and of course, the vicar ("When you see the vicar, run.").

There's cute in-jokes about (ironically) the same trope that Connie Willis mentions in To Say Nothing of the Dog, i.e., that the butler did it for the first fifty books and then he became the most obvious suspect, so they had to use other people. And a couple of quizzes which test your knowledge and ultimately teach the greatest lesson of all: that sometimes, [SPOILER] in order to avoid being murdered, you must become the murderer.  True wisdom.

*Untrue, I had three books within grabbing distance, because I was still in my own house, after all, but How the Word is Passed isn't exactly light reading to pass the time while a ticking time bomb is waiting to go off on your stomach at any time, and the other book was soft cover and hard to hold without using both hands.

**I still enjoy them, but lack the time to watch them, what with the aforementioned baby and all.

***Mrs. Marple is probably closer to the Your Guide vibe, but I hate Mrs. Marple.  I know I've talked about this before****, and I know I should try again as an adult, but man, it's annoying to feel like half of Christie's oeuvre is unavailable to me because of that old bat.

****Maybe I haven't talked about this before! I loathe Mrs. Marple, her allusions to things like "Oh, it reminds me of the vicar and the bookblack boy" and then you find out the vicar stole the bootblack boy's money and the bootblack boy stood up in the middle of service and denounced him and the vicar went off and became a pirate out of shame, and so that's how you know that the real killer was the cook, because the cook was also doing it out of revenge, are so obnoxious as a reader, since we DON'T KNOW ANY OF THESE PEOPLE OR SITUATIONS and it feels like a cheat to keep the clues away from the reader to avoid spoiling the mystery too soon, and also Mrs. Marple acts so self-effacing, but she's just as self-satisfied as Poirot.  Call a spade a spade, at least Poirot acknowledges his own non-humility. 

*****This doesn't have any corresponding note above, so you shouldn't even be here but I also wanted to point out that Maureen Johnson is the author of the Truly Devious series, so I'm now a real fan of hers, and Jay Cooper's illustrations have a fun, Edward Gorey-esque tone to them which greatly enhances the book.

24: A Book You Can Read in One Sitting

These Witches Don't Burn

These Witches Don't Burn

By Isabel Sterling

Hannah's a witch, but not the kind you're thinking of. She's the real deal, an Elemental with the power to control fire, earth, water, and air. But even though she lives in Salem, Massachusetts, her magic is a secret she has to keep to herself. If she's ever caught using it in front of a Reg (read: non-witch), she could lose it. For good. So, Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly by Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans.

But dealing with her ex is the least of Hannah's concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire. Evidence of dark magic begins to appear all over Salem, and Hannah's sure it's the work of a deadly Blood Witch. The issue is, her coven is less than convinced, forcing Hannah to team up with the last person she wants to see: Veronica.

While the pair attempt to smoke out the Blood Witch at a house party, Hannah meets Morgan, a cute new ballerina in town. But trying to date amid a supernatural crisis is easier said than done, and Hannah will have to test the limits of her power if she's going to save her coven and get the girl, especially when the attacks on Salem's witches become deadlier by the day. With everything she loves on the line, Hannah must confront this murderous villain before her coven--and any chance she has with the new girl--is destroyed.

I thought this would be more of a fun "real witches in Salem" and "getting over ex-girlfriend who you also have to work with" but this wasn't that much fun.   The description is the most fun part.  The story itself is a weird plot-driven teen "mystery", banging along hitting various cliches without really being satisfying at any point. 

To begin with, the whole break-up between Veronica and Hannah is never really described. Apparently the author wrote a separate short story that gets into it, but in These Witches, it basically drives most of the emotion of the first part of the book and we don't even know what happened.  No clue why blood witches are so bad (except that one hurt Hannah in revenge for something Veronica did), no clue why Veronica thinks Hannah broke up with her, while Hannah thinks Veronica initiated it, no clue why Veronica thinks they're going to get back together. 

And there's a bunch of incidents, which look really suspicious, but they all happen to be done by all different people, just a coincidence, nothing to worry about!  That goth kid kills the raccoon, Nolan throws the brick, Morgan wrote the glyphs and Barton is a witch hunter.  It feels like the author is trying so hard to misdirect people that they included all this stuff which actually just makes the fact that they're all supposedly unrelated even more glaring and weirdly unrealistic.  And it doesn't work, either, the witch hunter is obvious. 

PLUS, we're told that witches who reveal themselves to Regs are excommunicated and potentially executed, and YET, Veronica and Hannah are both out there spraying magic around like it's going out of style: put this fire out, put that fire out, increase this fire, use an honesty charm, escape from a submerged car. I'm sorry, I know teenagers are idiots, but surely if they were told (and legitimately believed) they could be killed for doing this stuff, I have to believe they'd be more circumspect.  It all just feels... cardboard-y, like someone's putting on a play of what this book should be, but there's a lack of structure behind it.  It's flimsy.  Anyway, it's totally readable, but I definitely started losing interest by the THIRD time Veronica insisted they they were getting back together (even though she was also banging someone else?) and Hannah bailed on Morgan for the FIFTH time, and insisted there was a blood witch around.  And as you can see, my irritation with the book only grew as I looked back on it.  

16: A Book About Witches

The Sun Down Motel

The Sun Down Motel

By Simone St. James

Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.

Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.

This was one I was excited by, and I liked it a lot even though I don't generally get into ghost stories. There's ghosts in the book, but they're fairly matter of fact, mostly there to point fingers at murderers and rain righteousness down. It's a bit like The dollhouse Murders in that sense, and can you believe one of my teachers read that in class? I have to go read that again. 

Anyway, after her mother dies of cancer, Carly decides to go investigate the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York, where her aunt disappeared thirty five years ago.  Her aunt, Viv, tells her story in alternating chapters. As it turns out, Viv's encounters at the Sun Down progress from ghosts to serial killers.

 

What I liked about this book is that both Carly and Viv are smart enough to take precautions - although Viv narrowly escapes a bad hitchhike upon her arrival in Fall, she quickly learns the ins and outs of identifying and avoiding predators.  And Carly is the 21st century, smart phone using kind of girl, who has grown up with the "stranger danger" idea.  But the author still manages to put them in real danger without making them stupid (at least, not until the finale which feels so good you don't mind how unrealistic it is). 

I also really liked the setting - small town, sure, but also the 1980s aspects of it were fun to dig into.  We get a lot of purple eyeshadow and funky haircuts, and while I would never want to live through the 80s, like Stranger Things, it's got a good nostalgic kick to it, and feels somewhat fresh.

48: A Book with Two POVs

Black Water Sister

Black Water Sister

By Zen Cho

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies.  As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

I zipped through this book. First of all, I was excited to read it, since "dead grandmother controlling daughter in the name of a mad god, committing felonies" sounded amazing.  And it felt really fresh when I was reading it.  Sometimes it feels like everything is very much same-old, same-old.  So Back Water Sister, which is set in Malaysia (like The Night Tiger, which I also loved, and which also incorporated a good deal of Malaysian history and ethnography) and involves a lesbian Generation Z graduate just trying to make it while she's being possessed was a delightful change of pace.  

That being said, it did feel a little disparate sometimes.  There's a lot to dig into, like her parents' re-entry into the country and family life after getting sick and losing their jobs, but it didn't really pan out the way it seemed like it might.  There was a weird scene about her mother going to a church group meeting that felt like it was supposed to have undertones, but I couldn't figure out why it mattered at all. 

Although I used Gaudy Night for multiple languages, and although everything in Black Water Sister was in English, it felt more multi-lingual, what with the particular cadences of the languages and the layan, lah, etc which were sprinkled throughout.  

It did feel sufficiently spooky, and Jessamyn (Min) felt wholly realized as a character.  She doesn't gain any superpowers (apart from when she's inhabited by spirits) and isn't much cleverer than other people around her, so she's also really easy to root for.  She seems kind of depressed, but not in a self-pitying way, and her love for her parents is sweet as well.  And she's neatly counterbalanced by her grandmother, who, like my own grandmothers, is somewhat manipulative and determined that she's in the right.  [Side note, I heard this nonsense on the radio recently about some new study that showed the special bond between grandmothers and their grandchildren, and first of all - no study on grandfathers, huh? And the study measured this bond by having the grandmothers look at pictures of random people and then their own grandchildren, like yeah, I too, like my own family and prefer them to random strangers, but how is this newsworthy? Also, some grandmas are buttholes.]  In some ways though, Min and her grandmother and mother and uncle are all more memorable characters than the Black Water Sister, which means maybe she isn't scary enough.  For example, in the Diviners, Naughty John, the antagonist, is WAY memorable, a significant actor in their own right.  The Diviners series was a huge disappointment and I hated it by the end, but that wasn't John's fault, as he was absolutely pants-pooping terrifying in the first book. 

Anyway, the actual plot isn't bad.  Min hears voice, gets dragged to the temple and immediately winds up in some shit, then has to maneuver her way between Malaysian gangsters and mad spirits, both of whom want a piece of her (in different ways).  There's a lot of familial love there, and some twists that you kinda expect, but ultimately she's able to lay her various problems to rest.

12: A Book about the Afterlife

The Word is Murder

The Word is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

A woman crosses a London street. It is just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, and she is going into a funeral parlor to plan her own service. Six hours later the woman is dead, strangled with a crimson curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric man as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. And Hawthorne has a partner, the celebrated novelist Anthony Horowitz, curious about the case and looking for new material. As brusque, impatient, and annoying as Hawthorne can be, Horowitz—a seasoned hand when it comes to crime stories—suspects the detective may be on to something, and is irresistibly drawn into the mystery.

But as the case unfolds, Horowitz realizes that he’s at the center of a story he can’t control, and his brilliant partner may be hiding dark and mysterious secrets of his own.

Finally getting back on track with my reading program - although I was reading (To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is greatly improved when you catch all the little clues and asides when you already know what happens) I was steadily ignoring all the books on my e-reader which I'd checked out and then turned off my wifi so the library wouldn't take them back, since they're all weeks and weeks overdue. This includes Summer House Party which I thought could work either for favorite season or book with a party in, but didn't like at all (it was three novellas and I stopped after the first one, and frankly, can't even remember it anymore) and Olive Kitteridge, which is very well written, but sort of depressing, so I got a few chapters in and couldn't pick it back up. Anyway, I'm expecting some others to turn up soon in my library queue, so I figured I had a limited amount of time to actually read ANY of them before the wifi was turned back on and they disappeared, so I read The Word is Murder in one day and enjoyed it very much. 

One of the most unique things in the book - the self-insertion of the author - was also one of the most off-putting at times. I found myself wondering how Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg feel to see themselves given roles in a fictional book about real people, and I can only assume poor Damian Lewis (who was the other lead in Homeland), bears the brunt, as he bears so much resemblance to the fictional actor Damian Cowper (apart from being murdered, that is - spoiler!).

Unlike Gaudy Night, I found it satisfyingly mysterious. I did have an inkling who the murderer was (as well as the side-mini mystery) but still found the conclusion entertaining and engrossing, if a bit too Ruth-Ware-victim-walks-straight-into-the-murderer's-clutches at the end.  In that way, Horowitz as narrator is genius, since it allows him to be a little bit smarter than the readers, but not as smart as the detective.  A good stand-in for the reading public, although I also wondered at times if the whole thing was a set-up on a much larger scale, i.e., The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which appears multiple times in To Say Nothing of the Dog, so perhaps I was over-primed in that direction). 

It also has the wonderful publicity of making me curious about Horowitz's other books, particularly the Alex Rider series, since he mentions them so much.  Subliminal advertising.  I've also only just realized that Horowitz is responsible for much of Midsommer Murders, which I absolutely adore and watched at least the first five seasons back in the initial pandemic rush of entertainment consumption. It's an excellent companion to a jigsaw puzzle. 

I found it to be a bizarre mix of real and fake, but engaging and a good mystery, for all that, and perhaps more importantly, I am back on track with forward momentum!

14: A Book with Cutlery on the Cover or in the Title

Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night

By Dorothy Sayers

When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the "Gaudy," the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters—including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup."

Some of the notes threaten murder and one of them involves a long Latin quotation, which makes Harriet suspect that the perpetrator is probably a member of the Senior Common Room. But which of the apparently rational, respectable dons could be committing such crazed acts? When a desperate undergraduate, at her wits' end after receiving a series of particularly savage letters, attempts to drown herself, Harriet decides that it is time to ask Lord Peter Wimsey for help. And when the mystery is finally solved, she is faced with an agonizing decision: Should she, after five years of rejecting his proposals, finally agree to marry Lord Peter?

This is the first Sayers I've read, and not for lack of recommendations.  I tried once, earlier in my life, and just... couldn't.. get... into... it, and I have avoided carefully ever since all efforts to get me to enjoy her Wimsey series.  (In this way, I treat Sayers like I do Georgette Heyer - often recommended based on the types of books I enjoy, but no matter how much I try, I simply do not like these authors, and to avoid further wastes of time, I don't even bother with any of their books anymore).  

Anyway, I chose this because someone on Goodreads said it has Latin in it, which it does, factually speaking, but I think it's a bit of a waffle to say that this has two languages in it.  That being said, Sayers did that even more annoying thing of using two languages and then not even bothering to translate.  [Fun sidebar, when I was in second grade, I took Latin [Minier sidebar: can you believe a public school teaches Latin to second graders??] and the only thing I retained was what I later realized was a drinking song for young collegiates. So maybe I would have fit right in at Oxford in the 30s.  We also put on a play about the death of Iphigenia - very educational].   Which fine, one passage is about harpies (not in favor, I assume, based on context) and then the last bit, I'd already been familiar with, since I read Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is really why I was interested in Gaudy Night to begin with (something Willis took so much inspiration from couldn't be all bad, could it?) and anyway, now I'm re-reading To Say Nothing of the Dog and enjoying it quite a bit more than Gaudy Night, so maybe it's not a waste.  Gaudy Night doesn't have any sense of humor about itself, and maybe that's why I can't get behind Sayers. Everyone is such a caricature, but no one recognizes it.  At least in Christie, Poirot knows he is ridiculous, and uses it to great effect. Sayers feels snobby, all the academic elitism that's going on,  like rich, aristocratic people who wear terrible clothes because they can afford not to care what other people think.  The poor are crazy, the rich merely eccentric.   

Anyway if you want a very wordy, "highfaultin'" mystery, by all means, read Gaudy Night, or perhaps The Name of the Rose, which also has the distinction of being more literary than mystery and thus failing at both being a good mystery or fun to read.  Not that I thought that the Gaudy Night mystery was nearly as bad as Name of the Rose, it just felt like supremely low stakes (a somewhat indiscriminate poison pen whose main threat for most of the book, is bad publicity), and easily solvable (and not to rag on myself, but if I know who it is and the main character is being told "You mean you still haven't figured it out? Apply a little thought to the problem", then what's to enjoy?), and for a 460 page book, those are both grave sins.  

Anyway, I would recommend this book to people who want to appear smart, or for those who want to spend endless agonies debating whether educating women makes them unfit for family life, an idea which (I think) we're meant to assume is absurd, given that it's a cherished notion of the clearly insane person at the heart of the criminal activity, and yet we spend an enormous amount of time going over and over it.  To be fair, Harriet also seems to think that smart women are wasted as wives and mothers, so maybe it was just one of those funny 1930s ideas which were all the rage at the time, like Hitler.  And yes, it is always so weird to me how books from the 1930s foreshadow WWII unintentionally.  It's hard to get a sense here whether Sayers was pro- or anti-Hitler, which seems damning in retrospect, but also explains why there were so many goddamned British nazis.  

Also, I had a similar problem as other readers, which is to say that I really couldn't distinguish between any of the academic suspects, except that one of them was bad at writing a book, and another had a similar name to Harriet (a key plot point, as it turned out!).  And that's okay, since I didn't have to, but seriously, 460 pages and the suspects are almost entirely interchangeable?  Using two languages here myself: No bueno.

42: A Book That Features Two Languages

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

By Jessica Pan

An introvert spends a year trying to live like an extrovert with hilarious results and advice for readers along the way.

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs?  With the help of various extrovert mentors, the author sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

 

 I fell into this one because I loved the title, and the book didn't let me down.  I felt Pan's pain, as I, too, would rather not, and doing improv and stand-up comedy sounds like a terribly bad time.  It's funny, but also blends in both semi-science and tips/suggestions so that people looking to expand their social skills and friend groups could probably use this as a guidebook as well.  I don't know that the science adds very much - it feels a little shoehorned in, a little teach-y in a book which would otherwise work well as a straight memoir, but at least it doesn't detract much.  

Pan begins the book bemoaning her lack of social life, but more importantly, her loneliness.  As someone who would certainly qualify as an introvert, I sympathized strongly with both the desire for close friendships and support, but also the anxiety that comes with trying to find those people and the effort of putting yourself out there to strangers over and over.  

For all that it dealt with social anxiety and trying to overcome loneliness, it's pretty funny. Bits like this made me laugh:

When I tell other people I'm going to try stand-up comedy, they always touch my arm, furrow their brow, and say, "You are so brave," followed by, "That is my worst nightmare," just in case I was considering making them do it, too.

As far as using the book like a self-help book, I felt pretty good about myself for the first part of it. I don't have a problem talking to strangers or making presentations (although I choose not to; I'm definitely guilty of pretending not to speak English when confronted by a friendly stranger in a foreign country, but honestly? I like being alone. This is how my husband and I are different: when he comes home,  he tells me about random people he meets in bars and on planes and at races, and I am like, "That sounds awful." but he enjoys it.  He still calls himself an introvert, a term I took exception to, until reading this book.  Apparently he would qualify as a gregarious introvert or "grintrovert". I am happily still a shintrovert.) and I have less than no interest in doing either improv or stand-up comedy. It is a bit wistful though, I mean, it sounds like for all that it does sound unpleasant, Pan has a good time, in the end.  And if not a good time, then at least a good story. You have to respect someone who so boldy faces their (and my) worst fears.

And I appreciate anyone who is game for a scenario like this:

Kate goes through the order list. Vivian volunteers to go first. And then there's silence. Kate studies the rest of us.

"I need the people  who brought a lot of friends to perform last so that their friends stay the entire time. Who has no friends? I want you to go in the first half."

I put my hand up.

30: A Book with the Name of a Board Game in the Title