I’m actually doing this on a Wednesday Woohoo! And again I have a backlog as I don’t seem to be able to write these posts on a weekly basis. Here is the book I have read so far in 2020.

France Hardinge: Deeplight Hardinge once again creates highly original work in The Myriad, a cluster of islands which has, up until 30 years ago, been ruled by a number of gods, residing at the bottom of the sea. But one day they all rose to the surface and killed each other, and the people had to learn to live without gods. Hark and Jelt are street urchins, and one day they find something in the water. Something that can heal. But healing has a very steep price.

Everything I have read by Hardinge I have liked and this book is no exception, even if Jelt is a character type I heartily dislike. Well, there is a reason for it. And I bet the theme of the book is a remark on current trends in the UK and elsewhere, though they are subtle enough not to bother a child reader.

Susann Cokal: The Kingdom of Little Wounds It’s the late 16th century and in a fictitious Scandinavian country (possibly located at the Faroe Islands), the King’s oldest daughter married to a Swedish prince; Magnus, the Mad count of Oestergotland. But the princess dies on the wedding night, and two servant girls suddenly find themselves caught in the middle of some very dangerous court intrigues. The seamstress Ava and the enslaved nursemaid Midi Sorte (Black Midi) don’t like each other, but they have to trust each other, or they may not survive.

This was not an easy read. Several characters are ill, and both illness and cure are described in very vivid detail. Both Ava and Midi suffer from sexual abuse, and Midi has also been mutilated, which has rendered her mute. Bad smells, which were undoubtedly very much around in the 16th century, are minutely described.

But I still thought it rather good. Ava and midi are not always likable, but their resourcefulness, intelligence, and resilience makes them interesting. The world-building was also very good. Some made-up, like a French invasion of some parts of Scandinavia, mixed with some real history. There really was a mad prince Magnus of Sweden, the only one of Gustav Vasa’s four sons who didn’t become king of Sweden, because he was so unbalanced. Not that the other ones were sane either, rik XIV suffered severe psychotic episodes, during one of them he killed his step-uncle and cousins, and Karl IX was probably bipolar. But I digress. It's clear the author has a very good grip on this particular historical episode, and a good handle on language as well.

Kristi DeMeester: Beneath A horror novel about a female reporter who investigates a snake-handling cult in a small Appalachian town. It began quite well, but it soon turned repetitive, with an abrupt and odd ending. There were also some stylistic choices that chafed. It was sent in 1988, which I could find o other reason than people not having cell phones. But with a lot of supernatural things going on that could easily have been arranged anyway. You see, it had the kind of ending that really must take place in the now, or in the near future to work, not 30 years in the past.

L. M. Montgomery: A Tangled Web After two rather depressing books I took a pause and re-read this one. Montgomery is always a safe bet.

Stephen King & Richard Chizmar: Gwendy’s Button Box Another re-read. Basically a thought experiment, What would happen if a child gets the power to destroy the world? I like this novella, and it held for a re-read.

Richard Chizmar: Gwendy’s Magic Feather 25 years after Gwendy first giót the button box, it suddenly returns to her, without explanation. The novella wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really necessary either. Gwendy’s Button Box is a complete story, and a sequel must really be adding something new to be interesting, which this one didn’. The antagonist’s action in the first novella is well built into the narrative and the conclusion works well. Here the reveal of the antagonist is purely deus ex machina and pretty much out of nowhere. Somehow this read more like a fanfic than a “real” sequel, to me.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden when I grew up we had bookcases in every room, apart from the bathroom. In the hall stood the art books, and on the bottom shelf, the books of my parent’s childhood. I found several gems there, not least Montgomery's Anne and Emily, and my perennial favourite Elizabeth and the Garret Theatre by Gwendoline Courtney. And the Secret Garden. It fascinated me on so many levels, the strange life Mary lives in India, the change when she came to England, the mystery of the secret garden, and the mystery of the cries at night. But most of all, I loved the idea of a secret garden, something tucked away and forgotten, and brought back to life. Then, as now, I lost much of my interest when the story’s focus shifts from mary to Colin, who I always found rather tedious.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: A Little Princess When I was around ten I was given a bunch of books from Aunt Elsa, my grandmother’s best friend. They had been hers, so they had all been printed in the 1920s. Most of them I read and forgot, but < Little Princess as well as Jean Webster’s Just Patyy was read and re-read several times over. Even as a child I found it annoying that no one thinks of asking of Sara’s name, but I forgive it for the joy of reading of the transformed room in the attic.

As I have Frances Hodgson Burnett’s collected work I tried my hand on the Lost Prince, but couldn’t get past the first chapter. So boring! Do you have any recs for Burnett? What should I read by her?

Jean Webster: just Patty This is a prequel to When Patty Went to School. Patty attends the last year in a girl’s school and has a number of adventures due to a sunny nature and an almost total disregard for school rules. I haven’t read this book in about 30 years and I realise now that when I reread Daddy Long-Legs I always feel that bits are missing, but in reality, it was bits from Just Patty I remembered. I still found it very enjoyable apart from a cringe-worthy chapter where Patty dressed up as a Romani woman. Perhaps not so surprising in a book written in 1917 and taking place in the 1890s, but definitely not comfortable reading today.

Almost through my backlog!

F. G. Cottam the Memory of Trees An arboreal expert is engaged by a billionaire to restore a medieval forest. Even before he begins the land is strange, there is an old chapel with a curious stained glass window, a giant thorn bush which seems to be curiously and malignantly alive, and an ancient cairn that seems to speak. And when he starts to plant the trees he soon finds more trees growing than he knew he had planted… I liked the book apart from it being glaringly obvious who was going to die but then it may just be because I have read a lot of horrors, so I know the tropes.

L. M. Montgomery Jane of Lantern Hill Eleven-year-old Jane lives with her mother, grandmother, and aunt in a large house in Toronto. Her grandmother is very wealthy, and also a very strict woman who only loves Jane’s mother and is very jealous of everyone else, especially Jane, who is very aware of it. Jane, who has always believed her father is dead, learns her parents are only estranged. She is told several conflicting stories as to why, none which paints her father in a favorable light, and when her father suddenly demands she is to spend the summer with him, she goes there hating him. Only to find he is very easy to love.

I’ve never read this Montgomery before, and I quite liked it. Perhaps Jane was a tad too domesticated for my taste, and the parent's eventual reunion was evident from the get-go, but I found Jane’s development from a timid child to a confident teenager psychologically sound. This book also had two unusually distinct antagonists in Jane’s grandmother and her paternal aunt Irene. Two very different, but equally poisonous character. I did feel the ending was a little abrupt, though, and I would have liked to see more of Jane's friend Jodie's happy ending.

Laurie R. King Lockdown I don’t much care for King’s Mary Russell-books, but I usually like her other works. This book follows a number of people all getting ready to attend Career Day at a high school. I did enjoy it, but it felt a little unbalanced, somehow.

Pete Basset She Ye standard trope of grizzle detective inspector 8maale) and perky young detective sergeant (female) and a serial killer. I liked the descriptions of tracking down a very elusive killer but thought the murders both icky and uninteresting. A fit of a whole series, which I will not read.

Adam Nevill The Reddening People start to disappear in a rural part of England after an old cave system has started to be excavated, evidently stirring a very ancient evil. I found it a bit too much full of geriatrics painting themselves red and running around naked- it became more ludicrous than scary. It also seemed to take forever for action to actually start.

Johan Theorin Utgrävningarna i Rölla ödekyrka (The excavations of Rölla Old Church) Johan Theorin writes supernatural stories taking place at Öland, Sweden’s second-largest island and a province in its own right. My youngest aunt lives there, so I have spent a lot of time there, and I enjoy Theorin’s books in large part because I know the place so well. This short story is about a couple of men who dig under the church in the hope of finding a cure for their afflictions. It makes use of both of the landscape of öland as well of Lovecraft’s mythos, and the result is pretty good, though a bit too short.

Rölla is a real place, albeit without an abandoned church. But I think some of the inspiration comes from Källa Old Church with its pagan holy well on the church grounds.

Genevieve Cogman The Secret Chapter another installment of The Invisible Library series. In this one, Irene and Kai are forced to participate in an art heist. It was enjoyable, but I’m not as fascinated by Kai as the writer and Irene. I much prefer Vale, who has barely been seen in the last couple of books. I also don’t care much for the way secrets are teasing the reader book after book after book...

Anna-Karin Palm Jag vill sätta världen i rörelse (I want to get the world to move) A biography over the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. I thought this very good. Palm is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and she has a lovely language. Sometimes biographies get overly dry, but Palm makes Selma alive, both with quirks and lovable sides, without fictionalizing her life. Highly recommended, though, of course, only available in Swedish.

I really need to speed up these posts as I, of course, read more books all the time, and so my back-log grows longer. And I’d like to be back on track come January.

JD Kirk A Litter of Bones and Thicker Than Water Very cheap Kindle deals. A little too gory, and the first book hit on my personal dislike of descriptions of broken bones. I also found them easy to predict, and a bit too short. Lots of build-up, and a climax that feels abrupt. What I liked best were the character descriptions. The first is a return of a serial killer- the biggest problem is that he is under lock and key. The second one deals with the disappearance and murder of a young woman.

Rhys Bowen The Victory Garden The book is set in England during WWI. A young upper-class woman is chafing under her parents who are reluctant to let her leave home to help with the war effort. While waiting to reach majority she meets an Australian soldier at a hospital nearby. At turning 21 she joins the war effort by being a land girl. Eventually, she finds herself all alone and a baby on the way. She finds a job as a gardener at a dilapidated manor house, living in a small cottage.

I liked it, without finding it spectacular. I thought it tapped well into the changing views of women in society that WWII brought. I liked Emily, the main character, as well as the minor characters. I also like that even if Emily has two love interests, the main theme was actually female friendship, working with and supporting one another.

F. G. Cottam Dark Echo I’ve read several of Cottam’s book before, and liked some, and haven’t cared for others. This one is the one I like best. Dark Echo of the title is a boat, built in the 1920s, and now is built by an elderly millionaire who wants to renovate it and then cross the Atlantic on it with his son. The problem is the boat is said to be cursed, and as the renovations progress, it seems the curse is very much still around. The son’s girlfriend, who is a researcher, starts to diffing around in Dark Echo’s past, and slowly realise it’s up to her to save her boyfriend and his father.

Horror stories always have to balance saying enough to keep the reader's interest, but not explain too much. I think this book balanced this very well, and I also felt the finale worked well too. Often horror books have a spectacular end, and then it falls a bit short. This end was more lowkey, and I like that. I also enjoyed the slow unraveling of the past. The book ties into other of Cottam’s books; it’s definitely a stand-alone, but the evil society the original owner belonged to make an appearance in several other novels.

Keith Houghton Don’t Even Break Another of those Kindle deals, and I actually had to look it up on Amazon because I couldn’t remember it. A body of a woman is found, the problem is that this woman died 20 years ago. I found the plot both implausible and easy to predict. First of a series, but I won't read any more of them.

Anders Fager Doris Malmberg möter Djävulen (Doris Malmberg Meets the Devil) This is a free short story; if you can read Swedish you can find it here. Fager writes excellent if violent, horror stories in which he mixes Lovecraft's mythology with Swedish, though minus the racism and misogyny. This story is about Doris Mallnberg who really wants to be a famous author. The only problem is that she is mediocre. So one night she finds herself at a crossroads to make a deal with the devil. This short story is very short, and I suspect it will one day be part of a collection of short stories. Fager debuted with such a collection, and in the end, you realise they are all more or less connected with each other, This story was a fun read, but it feels it need other short stories to lean against.

Stephen King The Institute I find King very uneven, so I never know what I will think of a book. I was a bit suspicious of this one as it shares many plot elements with Firestarter, which I dislike, but I actually thought it was really good. The plot is fairly simple, children, usually in their teens, are kidnapped and experimented on in an effort to use their psychic terror. The book’s main character is a boy who apart from being mildly psychic, also is a genius, and how he decides to try to flee and expose the organization. Reading about children being kidnapped and tortured in the name of science isn’t fun to read, but apart from that, I thought it well worth reading.

Lindsay Jayne Ashford Whisper of the Moon Moth This one has been languishing on my Kindle for ages. I think I was expecting a biography over Merle Oberon, but this is a fictionalized book about her, up until the point she marries Alexander Korda. Born as Estelle Thomson, she was the daughter of an Englishman and a mother whose parents were from England and Ceylon. Estelle’s mother was only 13, so she was raised by her grandmother, who herself was only in her late twenties when Estelle was born. Apparently, she thought her grandmother was her mother until she was an adult. Being bi-racial she could pass for white, and when she moved to England and became a movie star her grandmother came along but was officially called a housekeeper, as to not expose Merle’s real origin. I’ve always been fascinated by her life, and the psychological stress she must have lived under, but though this book wasn’t exactly bad, it wasn’t especially good either. Estelle/Merle was often very passive, which didn’t quite gel with a life that must have demanded a very strong and disciplined will. Now things just seemed to happen to her, which felt a bit too pat. I also felt the book ended rather abruptly. It left me feeling I would like to read a real biography over Merle Oberon.

Yay, I’m actually doing a reading post on a Wednesday. Of course it isn't only for a week, but on the other hand, I’m busy sewing, so I don’t read much at the moment.

Richard Vanderbeets: George Sanders, An Exhausted Life. Feeling Memoirs of a Professional Cad was, most of all, an attempt to not actually showing the reader who George Sanders really was, I dug out an actual biography. I enjoyed it; he certainly had an interesting life, if not, a very happy one, but the sense of someone being fiercely private about his inner life, remained. And, of course, MiPC ends on a positive note with Sander happily married. Sadly his marriage ended only a few years later when his wife died of cancer, the same year as his mother and brother died as well. Paired with some unsuccessful economic decisions as well as his own physical and psychological decline, his choice to commit suicide in 1972 wasn’t so strange. Still very sad.

Jonathan Kellerman: The Wedding Guest. I always say I’m not going to read any more Kellerman, and then I always do. Truth is that I find his writing style enjoyable, and even if the conclusions rarely satisfy me, he is quite good at setting up stories. This one was pretty average.

L. M. Montgomery: The Story Girl. Montgomery is pretty much always charming, but this book wasn’t particularly engaging. Two brother goes to live with relatives while their father works abroad, and not much happens. The Story Girl is one of their cousins who has the gift to tell a story, so the narrative is interspersed with her stories. The problem is that they aren’t very engaging. It is noted that she has the ability to make a dull written text exciting when she retells it- the problem is that we only have the written text. I understand why this book is never listed as anyone’s favourite.

Elizabeth Peters i>Crocodile on the Sandbank. I’ve been recommended the Amelia Peabody-books for about 20 years, so I guess it was time to finally pick one up. Amelia is a Victorian well-to-do spinster who goes to Egypt, picking up a companion with a complicated past, and gets embroiled in a mummy-mystery. I found it a fun read and I may read more, but I don’t feel any urge to jump to the next book. Amelia as a type feels very familiar, and the plot wasn’t that complicated- I figured out the twist before Amelia even came to Egypt.

Dot Hutchison: The Vanishing Season. I’ve read the previous three books in this series about a group of FBI-agents, and enjoyed them, even if the plots are on the more outrageous side of believable. In particular, I have enjoyed the descriptions of friendship, and how we get to follow the victims and see how they deal and survive their trauma. This book, however, feels more like the author wanted one more ebook because she has fallen in love with her characters and don’t want to let go. An 8-year-old girl disappears, and what first seems like a coincidence- she is the spitting image of the sister of one of the agents, who was kidnapped years ago, it soon turns out to not be a mystery at all.

The problem with this book isn’t so much the mystery or the characters, but the pacing. The search for the girl is engaging, but it's interspersed with long sequences about the main character's inner life. Which isn’t uninteresting per se, it's just that I don’t you sit down and deal with your own traumas (unrelated to the mystery) when you are busy finding an abducted child. Especially as it’s stressed repeatedly that this character is hyper-focused and forgets to sleep and eat when she does that. But she has time to deal with a several-year-old breakup… It made the narrative choppy, and as less than half the book was actually about the abduction, the conclusion gets very rushed and happens much too easily.

Memoirs of A Professional Cad by George Sanders. Being on a bit of a George Sanders-trip I remembered I bought this on Kindle ages ago. It’s short, so it only took me two evenings to finish it. It’s not exactly great literature- it’s a couple of anecdotes in loosely chronological order. I strongly suspect a lot isn’t true as sanders cheerfully contradict himself, often several times over. But it’s also very funny and I laughed out loud several times. I think he must have been a very funny man if you caught him in the right mood at a party. It also gives me the impression that he was very intelligent and didn’t have the least interest in actually exposing himself in literary form. Some things ring true tough, like his view on therapy (it’s not so much the kind of therapy that counts, but finding what works for you). Or when he contemplates Ruben’s Saturn Devouring His Son and wonders why one chooses to paint something like that. I checked it out, and it’s a deeply disturbing piece of art, so I kind of agree. In short, a fun book if you are a fan of Sanders, but not more than that.

Some time ago a scene from a book came to mind. A man is traveling in an underground labyrinth, and part of it are catacombs, filled with the mummified remains of young and beautiful people. He’s told they were sacrificed to an evil god a very long time ago. While walking the labyrinth he and his companions are followed by some kind of malignant being, and they realise they have to get through the labyrinth quickly. The corpses they pass are first more or less decomposed, but eventually, they come to a part where they look like they are sleeping. A woman wakes up and speaks to him, telling him they are not truly dead, their soul is still within them, but only until the evil god reaches them and take their soul and they will truly die. She gives the man a talisman for protecting before sinking back in her deathlike sleep.

It was a very vivid memory, but it took me a while to remember in which book I read it. Then I remembered it’s from a Swedish fantasy trilogy by Bertil Mårtensson, I read in my early teens. They are not translated but translated they are called The Road Away, The Road Back and The Road Out, collected under the name The Roads of Power. Having not read the books for about 35 years I was a bit apprehensive of re-reading them. What you love when you are thirteen may not be what you love now.

But I enjoyed it. The fantasy world is very clearly inspired by Tolkien, Watership Down and Greek mythology, but also Scandinavian mythology, most notably trolls, described pretty much like John Bauer paint them.



It begins with a young man, Jarel, who shows up in a mountain in without any memories of who he is. He gets entangled into a fight against the evil Aulor, a fight led by Jore who owns an enchanted golden bow, and Andira, a beautiful woman who sometimes is a man; Ander. The two first books are really just two parts of a continuous story, the last is set 10 years later. I was surprised over how diverse and nonjudgemental the books are, considering they were written around 1980. Especially Andira who is never judged by owning her sexuality, and for liking being a man on occasion. Well, she is judged by other characters, but not by the author.

There are several highly effective scenes and interactions. Like “the fright” a kitelike construction with bells attached which can only be used by someone who has been genuinely wronged. The fright follows the victim at a distance, but don’t actually do something. However, as everyone knows a person followed by a fright must have done something terrible, the person quickly gets shunned. And imagine being followed by something wherever you go ringing bells. In the end, the victim either commits suicide or try to destroy the fright. But in destroying it, they always kill themselves. Or the grey sexless humanoids created from earth which just relentlessly walk forward, but kills everything they touch.

There is also a lovely little sub-story about a man who has learned to speak rabbit. While imprisoned a female rabbit finds him to give him a message, but when she realises he is caught, she stays with him, and later successfully plans to free him.

But on occasion the prose is clunky, and sometimes a lot happens which is only mentioned. Sometimes I don’t mind, like when Andira is imprisoned by a man who proposes to love her. She just needs to stop becoming a man and be a “real” woman. And to convince her he resorts to beatings and rape. We are, thankfully, only told in passing about that. But then there are scenes like the one where the little rabbit breaks into the prison and frees her human. And we don’t get to see it. Suddenly he is free and she’s sitting on his shoulder, and we are told he has been rescued. And I had really looked forward to seeing them meet for the first time!

All in all, I enjoyed my reread, but the prose is not as good as the characters and the settings. I actually think it would make a great TV-show; the fantasy world Mårtensson created is very good and there are a multitude of interesting characters, settings, and situation which would work great on screen.

Den dag jag blir fri (The Day I Will Be Free) by Lawen Mohtadi; a biography over Katarina Taikon, author, Swedish Romany activist and leader in the civil rights movement. Romani have lived in Sweden since the early 16th century, and as in most other countries they have been met with considerable prejudice and aggression. Nowadays they are considered a national minority in Sweden along with Jews, Sami, Sweden Finns, and Tornedalians. Katarina Taikon who was born in 1932 didn’t learn to read and write until she was 30, and then she wrote the book Zigenerska (Gypsy Woman) which was a very prominent work in the struggle to finally allow Romani to live in hoses instead of tents and caravans and to go to school. In 1969 she started to write the Katitzi-series, biographical novels for children. It begins when Katitzi is seven. Her mother, a Swedish farmer’s daughter who ran away to marry, dies when she was a baby and when her father remarries when she is five, friends of the family takes in Katitizi. But as they are not allowed to adopt her, she eventually returns to her father. As a small child, Katitizi’s father was quite wealthy, and her foster family was too, but now her father, who runs a tivoli, is a lot poorer. For Katitzi who has forgotten her family, the return is a cultural shock. She quickly grows close to her three older siblings, but her step-mother, who also is Swedish, dislikes her step-children, and in particular Katitzi. In the course of several books the step-mother’s abuse escalates and when Katitizi is fourteen her father marries her off to a man several years older, as a way to remove Katitzi from her step-mother. Her husband, despite having promised to not have sex with Katitzi until she is older, rapes her and after a miscarriage, she runs away and eventually manages to get a divorce. The series ends when Katitzi is sixteen, she lives in a girl’s home in Stockholm and is starting a movie career. Resonating through the books are Katitzi longing to go to school, and also her anger over the prejudices she encounters.

The biography was very interesting. Katarina Taikon suffered a cardiac arrest when she was only 50 and was in a coma for 13 years before she died. The author draws heavily on interviews with Katarina’s older sister Rosa, who was a very interesting person as well. She was 36 when she learned to read and write and then went to art school and reinvented her father’s profession as a silversmith, traditionally something only Romani men did. You can find her work in museums today. Anyway, it was very interesting to learn how accurate the Katitzi-series are in regards of Katarina Taikon life, and gave a very interesting background to how Kalderash Romani came to Sweden in the late 19th century, and what Swedish attitudes and laws in regard of Romani looked like then. We also get an account of Katarina and Rosa’s lives as adults and their work for Romani rights.

But it also has some curious holes. There is nothing about Katarina’s older siblings as adults, which is especially odd as her brother Paul was murdered in the early 60’s, a murder which never got solved, probably largely because the murdered was Swedish. It is also very little about the stepmother and the younger half-siblings. Katarina’s own mother evidently adapted well to Romani culture and her marriages were happy, despite an age difference of nearly 25 years. But her step-mother, who ran away from husband and children t marry Katarina’s father, never integrated with her husband’s family, and could never understand why she, a blond Swedish woman, was met with the same prejudice and hate. It’s clear from the books that her abusive behaviour in large part is due to her own unhappiness. So there was a large chunk of things missing. I can imagine this is because a lot of these people are still alive, or have children who are, and may not want to be featured in a book. But overall it was a very interesting read.

I’m still reading Diana Wynne Jones. Soilers are under the cuts.

A Tale of Time City It’s 1939 and Vivian is evacuated from London. Only she gets kidnapped by two boys from the Time City, a place which consists outside time. They think she is a person called the Time Lady and the want her to stop the imminent destruction of the city and help find Faber John, the Time Lady’s husband and co-founder of Time City. It’s impossible for me to not see Romana and Four as these characters, especially since Faber John’s name means John Smith, and the book contains a lot of time travels. It’s more SF than fantasy, and a book I didn’t like much when I first read it, but now enjoy very much.

Conrad's Fate Fantasy meets Downton Abbey. Conrad has been told he has very bad karma and the only way to fix it is to start working at the Stallery, a huge manor house and find the person who he was supposed to murder in a previous life. He starts working as a trainee valet, along with a boy called Christopher. As in Christopher Chant, future Chrestomanci, who is looking for his friend Millie who has run away. I thoroughly enjoy this book, which is partly a parody of the romance of the big house with its numbers of happy servants. I also like Christopher more when he isn’t just the awe-inspiring Chrestomanci, even if he has wonderful dressing gowns.

The Pinhoe Egg Chronologically speaking this is the last Chrestomanci-book, written from the viewpoint of Cat Chant, and a girl, Marianne Pinhoe, living in a village close to Chrestomanci Castle. Her family is witches who have spent generations hiding from Chrestomanci, as they don’t want him to have opinions on their use of magic. But when her grandmother, the family’s matriarch, becomes senile, things start to dissolve quickly. And it certainly doesn’t get better when she befriends Cat and gives him an egg they find in her grandmother’s attic- an egg which turns out to be of a ( Read more... )

House of Many Ways This is the third Howl-book, and I find a little uneven. I like the heroine- bookish, sheltered Charmaine who dreams about working in the King’s library and is drafted to take care of her wizard-uncle’s house when he is ill. I love the concept of the house, which is like the TARDIS- bigger on the inside, and I Like the magical dog, Waif. And it’s always lovely to meet Sophie, Howl, and Calcifer again. ( Read more... )

I felt inspired to start re-reading Diana Wynne Jones. She is one of my favourite authors and I feel that even her weakest books are still a good read. Despite recurring themes like; multiple universes, a protagonist with no, or weak magic really being very powerful, abusive parental figures and clever cats, she never gets boring, and the books always take unexpected and interesting twists.

( Spoilers for Dogsbody, Charmed Life and Howl's Moving Castle )

Meme nicked from liadt

1.What shows you watching these days?
This autumn I have watched/still watch;

Doctor Who I really like Thirteen, and I like the new companions too, but somehow I find this season a bit- lackluster. I don’t hate anything, but I don’t particularly love anything either.

The Good Life I like this show more and more. The idea is original and clever, and I like the actors. Even, surprisingly, Red Danson who I never cared for before.

Brooklyn-Nine-Nine I know, I know, this show have been around forever, but I haven’t watched it before. It shouldn’t be something I like, but I love it, much to my surprise.

Charmed I’m a bit unsure about this reboot, but so far I haven’t stopped watching. I’m very meh about all the love interests though- I only like the police girlfriend, and now she seems to be gone. *mutters*

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina I enjoyed it a lot, and it was vuísually stunning, but it felt a bit wobbly at times. I definitely think it has potential. I can get why not everyone cares for it.

The Man In the High Castle I liked this season better than the second, but it was also very obvious it already knew there is a fourth season cleared. It also managed to give me two really awful nightmares featuring Rufus Sewell's John Smith. Which says something of how scary I found that character, and how well Sewell plays him.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair Beautifully filmed and well-acted, but also hiuínged on a few things which I found extremely unlikely. Like an author writing about a real crime NOT checking up the background on one of the major characters? Wouldn’t happen. But I enjoyed it while I watched.

The kid and I are taking a break from Supernatural (we’ve finished season 4) and are watching Penny Dreadful. I enjoy the re-watch and he enjoys getting to know the show. He may look like his father, but he sure is his mother’s son when it comes to interests and taste. I’m also curious about the spin-off set in the 1930’s. It can go both ways. And I hope we get to have some of the characters from the original. Several of them are immortal, after all.

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I still have a terrible backlog, only the first three are books I've read since I posted a reading post last.

Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent This was an odd one. Probably because I thought it was a fantasy, which it isn’t. It’s Essex, it’s the 19th century, and rumours of a sea dragon is afoot. It’s beautifully written, but I didn’t take to any of the characters, and, even if that is unfair, it wasn’t what I expected. I don’t think it’s a bad book, only just not for me.

L. M. Montgomery The Blue Castle I read this book for the first time not so long ago, but felt I wanted to re-read it again. I quite love it, a great book to lift your spirits!

Phil Rickman All of A Winter’s Night The last in the Merrily Watkins series; about a female priest who is also an exorcist, who gets involved in solving a murder. I always enjoy these books because I like the character gallery, but the murder case is often rather uninteresting. Not so this time; I found it unusually suspenseful. I also learned about Church of St Mary and St David, which is a church with some really weird and interesting sculptures. And about Border Morris, which seems to be very different from the morris dancing I knew about.

Catherine F. King The Ninety-Ninth Bride This is a re-telling of the Scheherazade-story in One Thousand and One Nights. Dunya is the neglected youngest daughter of the Grand Vizier, until the day she is given to the sultan to be the next bride-for-a-night. But when she enters the bridal chamber she is met by a beautiful woman, Zahra, who says she is Dunya’s sister, and that she, not Dunya, is the sultan’s bride. To Dunya’s surprise, everyone accepts this, and Zahra’s stories prolong her life, night after night. I enjoyed this story a lot. I like Dunya and her efforts to solve the mystery of Zahra, and also her own political awakening. Highly recommended!

Robin McKinley Deerskin Another re-telling, this time the fairy tale Donkeyskin. When the queen dies she elects a promise from her husband he only can remarry if he finds a woman as beautiful as she is. Unfortunately for their daughter, the kings decide she is the one. In the fairy tale, the princess tries to stall the wedding by demanding a number of difficult-to-produce gowns; this re-telling takes the story in a slightly different direction. I’ve read this book once before, some twenty years ago, and though I usually like McKinley a lot, I never felt the need to re-read it until now. And it’s not that I don’t like this book- I do, but it’s not an easy read. It contains one of the most horrific rape scenes I have ever read, and the lingering trauma Deerskin suffers makes this book difficult to read at times.

Emma Donghue The Wonder This novel takes place in Ireland in the 19th century. A young English nurse is hired to take care of a little girl who, everyone says, hasn’t eaten anything in several months. The general belief is that it’s a miracle and the girl is destined to become a saint. The nurse believes it’s a hoax, but try as she might she can’t determine how the child has survived for so long. She takes a great liking to her, and becomes increasingly more worried as it’s clear the girl is starving to death, she refuses to eat, and her family and neighbors seem to accept it without questions.

Based on rather horrible historical facts, throughout several centuries deeply religious children starved themselves to death, and was seen as saints by their surroundings. I read this book in one day; it was very gripping, if not particularly easy. I recommend it, but if you find sexual abuse of children triggering, then you should stay away.

I missed posting this on Wednesday, as that was my day off, and I aim to not sit in front of the computer when I’m off work. On the other hand I thought I had finished more books, but I’ve actually only have several books “almost finished.”

L M Bujold's Penric and Desdemona novellas (“Penric's Demon”, “Penric and the Shaman”, “Penric’s fox”, “Penric’s Mission”, “Mira’s Last dance” and “The Prisoner of Limno”) i’ve read them all before, but I craved some nice comforting reads, and these fit the bill perfectly. They are set in Bujold’s Five Gods Universe. It’s set some hundred years after The Hallowed Hunt, and a couple of hundreds of years before The Curse of Chalion. A young man, Penric, accidently becomes a sorcerer when a demon inhabits his body after her previous sorceress unexpectedly dies in Penric’s arms. And her, in this case, are the collective memories of 1he ten women the demon has lived in before. Penric, in a way to cope, names his demon Desdemona. The first three novellas takes place during various times in Penric’s twenties. The last three are really just one story where Penric, now 30, is sent on a secret diplomatic mission where everything goes wrong. Apart from the bit of falling in love. Not that it isn’t problematic when one carries around a demon who acts like ten older sisters…

I adore almost everything Bujold has ever written, and the Five Gods Universe is one of the best fantasy realms I know of. Bujold seems to enjoy writing in these bite size novellas, and I hope there will be more Penric soon!

Your Beauty Mark by Dita von teese and Rose Apodaca. One day in the distant past; my early teens, I was allowed to use some of my mum’s makeup to go to a school dance. She didn’t wore much makeup, so my selection was a blue and a brown eye pencil as she vetoed eyeshadow. After much consideration I decided to wear the brown, as I thought it contrasted better with my blue eyes. At the dance I was told, in no uncertain terms, by one of the “cool girls” in my class, that if you had blue eyes, you could only wear blue eye makeup. And I thought “Why?”. And from then one I read everything about makeup I could find, making a whole book out of cuttings, and reading every beauty book I could find. And learned that my “cool” classmate wasn’t so knowledgeable-te tone on tone eye makeup was by the hopelessly dated, something belonging to the 1970’s. (Check out the girls in Anna for an easy reference). Now, in the early 80’s, makeup trends were exploding. I also developed an interest in using makeup, and for several years I didn’t go outside without it. Nowadays my approach I a lot more relaxed, but I still think makeup is a lot of fun, and I still enjoy reading books about it.

And Your Beauty Mark was a fun read. I could have done without the name-dropping and the product placement, but this book is certainly more than that. You get sound advice written in a chatty and friendly style. You kind of get the feeling you have Dita sitting in your boudoir offering advice as your new best friend. I’m aware we are talking about a public persona, but that persona comes across as a very approachable one. Lots of beautiful photos too.

Roger Delgado: I Am Usually Referred To As The Master by Marcus K Harmes. I’m a big fan of Roger Delgado who was Doctor Who’s first, and IMO best, Master. So of course I couldn’t resist reading this biography. If you are a fan you are likely to enjoy it, as there are a couple of things I have never heard of before; for example his first marriage. And I enjoyed reading about his work, especially as the Master. But the author decided to group delgado’s work after studio, or TV, or A-movie, which makes the book go back and forth on the timeline which was slightly confusing. The writing could have used some more editing, as if was fairly repetitive and with an overabundance of descriptors. I mean, you don’t have to write “his unhappy first marriage” every time you mention it.