Read recently
Aug. 25th, 2014 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidWhere 'recently' means 'since the last time I posted about books'.
Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House
Jane and the Ghosts of Netley
Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (Stephanie Barron)
So I'm completist, and there's just three more to go.... These are becoming more implausible (to me, not that I'm a scholar of Jane Austen), though still "period," but much more politics, especially when she has $LoveInterest.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs), a novel of speculative fiction, based on/inspired by/using old black and white photos of impossible achievements (levitation, invisibility, and such like). Loops of story, with what's real, made this enjoyable, but the ending felt like it was designed to be a springboard for a sequel, rather than a satisfying conclusion. Still, intriguing storytelling.
Gentlemen of Bacongo (Daniele Tamagni) is short articles with lots of photos of Sapeurs (Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance) of the Bacongo neighborhood of Brazzaville, in Congo. The photos are intense, showing dapper gentlemen in impressive outfits; the contrast with their surroundings can be extreme. What's fascinating is not just the clothing, however; the movement is about not being violent, or racist, as well. The only part I really didn't care for is the apparently-obligatory cigar (though some have a pipe instead). Fascinating window to something I'd known nothing about.
Trees at Risk (Evelyn Herwitz) looks at the history of trees in Worcester as a case study about urban trees in the United States, starting from the time of the first European settlers and what they found when they arrived. I hadn't thought about street trees and public parks before, and learned more about the dangers of monoculture in street tree species, and how it used to be the role of prominent citizens, not the municipality, to organize them. (Also, anyone could grow apples, but growing pears was gentlemanly!)
Hollow City (Ransom Riggs), being the second novel of Miss Peregrine's peculiar children, is an adventure across a war-torn country, being hunted, trying to beat a deadline of no return.... with another ending that is clearly leading into the next book. Still, enjoyable bizarrity.
Princess Academy (Shannon Hale) is a YA SF novel that turns out to be far less mush than the title might imply. Girls from a remote mining town are forced to attend a school because the royal foretellers determined that the next princess would be from there, but our heroine uses her hard-won knowledge along with the way the miners talk to start an economic turn-around, not to mention saving many from bandits.
Flight Behavior (Barbara Kingsolver) is a novel about climate change, through the lens of one woman living in the backwoods of Appalachia who finds that the King Billies (monarch butterflies) have come to their backlot for the winter, rather than to Mexico. It's a book about change, and possibilities, too.
Portuguese Irregular Verbs (Alexander McCall Smith) feels more like a series of short stories all revolving around one German professor of philology, Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, amusing, thoughtful, yet quiet, too.
Duplicate Keys (Jane Smiley), a novel about the aftermath when one of a group of friends finds two others of the group murdered. Set in Manhattan, it soon had me looking at the publication date (1984) because the casual now feel of the book was off how things would be in actual now. It felt more like a genre read than a regular novel, though at times I wondered about the narrator's reliability. The solution didn't feel as compelling as I would have wanted, unfortunately.
How to Be a Victorian (Ruth Goodman), subtitled "A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life," which pretty much describes the book, though I must note that she did a great job in all chapters about discussing the range from the beginning to the end of the period, over the gamut of social classes, and for both genders. She wrote with particular authority not only having done her research but also having lived "period" for a long while for some show or other, so able to compare the sensation of wearing the clothes, or living without much heat, and so on.
Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House
Jane and the Ghosts of Netley
Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (Stephanie Barron)
So I'm completist, and there's just three more to go.... These are becoming more implausible (to me, not that I'm a scholar of Jane Austen), though still "period," but much more politics, especially when she has $LoveInterest.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs), a novel of speculative fiction, based on/inspired by/using old black and white photos of impossible achievements (levitation, invisibility, and such like). Loops of story, with what's real, made this enjoyable, but the ending felt like it was designed to be a springboard for a sequel, rather than a satisfying conclusion. Still, intriguing storytelling.
Gentlemen of Bacongo (Daniele Tamagni) is short articles with lots of photos of Sapeurs (Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance) of the Bacongo neighborhood of Brazzaville, in Congo. The photos are intense, showing dapper gentlemen in impressive outfits; the contrast with their surroundings can be extreme. What's fascinating is not just the clothing, however; the movement is about not being violent, or racist, as well. The only part I really didn't care for is the apparently-obligatory cigar (though some have a pipe instead). Fascinating window to something I'd known nothing about.
Trees at Risk (Evelyn Herwitz) looks at the history of trees in Worcester as a case study about urban trees in the United States, starting from the time of the first European settlers and what they found when they arrived. I hadn't thought about street trees and public parks before, and learned more about the dangers of monoculture in street tree species, and how it used to be the role of prominent citizens, not the municipality, to organize them. (Also, anyone could grow apples, but growing pears was gentlemanly!)
Hollow City (Ransom Riggs), being the second novel of Miss Peregrine's peculiar children, is an adventure across a war-torn country, being hunted, trying to beat a deadline of no return.... with another ending that is clearly leading into the next book. Still, enjoyable bizarrity.
Princess Academy (Shannon Hale) is a YA SF novel that turns out to be far less mush than the title might imply. Girls from a remote mining town are forced to attend a school because the royal foretellers determined that the next princess would be from there, but our heroine uses her hard-won knowledge along with the way the miners talk to start an economic turn-around, not to mention saving many from bandits.
Flight Behavior (Barbara Kingsolver) is a novel about climate change, through the lens of one woman living in the backwoods of Appalachia who finds that the King Billies (monarch butterflies) have come to their backlot for the winter, rather than to Mexico. It's a book about change, and possibilities, too.
Portuguese Irregular Verbs (Alexander McCall Smith) feels more like a series of short stories all revolving around one German professor of philology, Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, amusing, thoughtful, yet quiet, too.
Duplicate Keys (Jane Smiley), a novel about the aftermath when one of a group of friends finds two others of the group murdered. Set in Manhattan, it soon had me looking at the publication date (1984) because the casual now feel of the book was off how things would be in actual now. It felt more like a genre read than a regular novel, though at times I wondered about the narrator's reliability. The solution didn't feel as compelling as I would have wanted, unfortunately.
How to Be a Victorian (Ruth Goodman), subtitled "A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life," which pretty much describes the book, though I must note that she did a great job in all chapters about discussing the range from the beginning to the end of the period, over the gamut of social classes, and for both genders. She wrote with particular authority not only having done her research but also having lived "period" for a long while for some show or other, so able to compare the sensation of wearing the clothes, or living without much heat, and so on.