jenett | The past several weeks of reading

Originally published at Books of promise. You can comment here or there.

I spent late June with my brain being fried by the end of my work year. My reading included (along with a number of things I’ve now forgotten):

Two of the Mercedes Lackey Elemental series.
Three of the Martha Lawrence mysteries.
Two of the Laurie King Mary Russell novels.

Total books I recorded in June: 13.

I’ve also been watching (thanks to Netflix) Bright Young Things which is based on Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

I have a great fondness for Waugh (also, incidentally, the only author I was forbidden to read until I got older. My mother was surprised I’d actually followed that - but his satire and dark humor (and topics) really do require a bit of mature understanding of the world to truly appreciate.) The movie is delightful (must go read the book again now): directed by Stephen Fry, and with a wide number of well-known and fantastic actors doing Waugh’s deadpan but over the top set pieces in amazing ways.

And then I went on vacation:

This tends to produce reading.

Right before I left, I read Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham (my thanks to Jo Walton for mentioning this on a panel at the 4th Street convention, as I very much liked it.) It’s a (more or less fantasy world, but there isn’t much overt magic exactly, other than poets) with a rich combination of cultures, politics, and interpersonal manuvering.

And then I got on a plane:

Threshold by Caitlin Kiernan: urban fantasy/horror, gotten in a book swap. It made good airplane reading. It’s a little darker in the horror side than I normally pick up for myself, but the blurb mention of geology got me fascinated.

Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabine: A re-read, as I’m working on a longer commentary about it for this blog.

Rosewood’s Ashes by Aileen Shumacher: A mystery involving a historical mystery and a modern day research project. Decent, and I might check out others in the series, but it stood on its own well enough.

The Way of the Traitor and The Concubine’s Tattoo by Laura Joh Rowland: mysteries set in 17th century Japan. (These are actually books 3 and 4 in the series, and now I need to go track down more.) I enjoyed them quite a bit, but don’t know enough about that period of history to know how accurate they are.

(The above three books are what happen when you realise you’ve read more than the useful amount of books with you by the second day of your trip and get a chance to go to a used mystery book store with a friend.)

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips: Borrowed from my mother, it’s sort of a cross between chick lit and heroic epics. Sort of. (Mom got it because Greek mythology is a family thing: my father was a specialist in ancient Greek theatre.) It was actually better than I thought it might be, but it’s really in the chic lit style of pacing, which often doesn’t do a lot for me.

Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan: Read because Mom wanted my thoughts on it - the author is a Smith graduate a few years younger than I am (I’m a Wellesley grad) and the book follows the story of four friends through college at Smith and post-college. I’ve got mixed feelings about it: the most coherent right now is that my college experience is quite different, and so is the way I talk about it. (On the other hand, I fell in with a group of wonderful, amazing, fascinating people based on shared interests, not shared living space, and I think that changes a bunch of dynamics.)

Introduction to Pagan Studies by Barbara J. Davy: Read because I’m trying to catch up on the flurry of recent Pagan Studies publications that have come out of the academic side of the world, and the library had this one handy. More commentary to come sometime in the future: my general take is that it’s a good start, but there are a number of places the author makes inferences and does broad-brush painting that I don’t think sufficiently highlights distinctions.

Spiritual Mentoring by Judy Harrow: Read for future deeper commentary: will come back to more here. (This is actually a re-read: I got it and read it when it first came out.)

Books so far in July: 10.