February was personally a great month, I was in Florence the whole time, I had friends staying, and we ate great food and looked at art. As far as the rest of the world goes, good gracious. It was hard to stop doomscrolling. The best analysis I have is that we’re now living in a Philip K. Dick novel. (Did I ever mention how much I hate Philip K. Dick?) I read ten books, most of them terrific.
A Scatter of Light —Malinda Lo (2022)
Re-read, book club. This time I knew the genre of the book going in; it’s a mainstream YA book about a girl discovering her sexuality in the Bay Area in 2014. It’s about art and science and figuring yourself out, and it’s very well written. It has a terrific relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, and a well done but difficult relationship between teenage daughter and her (divorced) parents. It deals with some uncomfortable issues very well. We had a great book club discussion about the ethics of choices. All sorts of interesting class stuff going on here too. And we talked a lot about the end, and how there was a thing that could have happened at the very end that would have been too pat and would have ruined the whole carefully balanced book, but that would have been a very normal and conventional thing to do. (I’m tiptoeing around trying to avoid spoilers, because this genuinely is a good book and better read unspoiled.) Some of the book club readers were holding their breath through the whole last chapter in case Lo made this bad choice—which she didn’t. But if she had, it would have retrospectively spoiled our enjoyment of the whole thing. Which leads me to…
Letters From My Windmill —Alphonse Daudet (1869)
Free on Project Gutenberg. But I’m not recommending it. Most of this book is a set of reports purportedly written to Daudet’s friends in Paris, but actually intended for publication, from a windmill he has rented in Provence. The chapters consist of descriptions of lavender, farmers, sunshine, the wind in the trees, the taste of wine, local festivals, etc. Up to 85% of the way through I was planning to tell you it was slight but charming, if you want to read this kind of thing. Then suddenly there was a really horrible chapter of anti-Semitism that is possibly the most anti-Semitic thing I’ve ever run across unexpectedly in the wild—and I did a lot of research for the Small Change books. It was so yucky and abrupt and unnecessary that it did in fact completely ruin every shred of enjoyment I’d previously had in the book.
There’s nothing here worth the shock of seeing Daudet being cruel and vile and expecting you, the reader friend, to be laughing and approving. People talk about period racism, and yeah, one sometimes reads something (Dickens) and thinks oh, this is normally racist for the period, and one sometimes reads something (Trollope) and thinks this is worse than normal, and one sometimes is fortunate enough to read George Eliot or Dorothy Canfield Fisher and see someone better than normal for their period. Here was have someone much, much worse than normal, and all the charm and beauty of the writing was utterly negated. I kept on reading in the hope he’d be slowly eaten by a crocodile. This did not happen.
The Pomegranate Gate —Ariel Kaplan (2023)
So you may have noticed that I read all of Kaplan’s real-world YA novels before reading this, and that was because I knew it was a fantasy novel about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and that event is so awful and huge that a) I didn’t want to read about it and b) I wanted to be sure Kaplan could deal with the material without trivialising or drowning in it. Sometimes with real things like that, the weight of them rips right through the gossamer threads of story. Not here. This is brilliant, well-balanced, powerful, and deeply immersive. It has excellent characters, which I expected—her YA has excellent characters, and it has great worldbuilding and plot too, and it deals with the bad stuff without trivialising or sensationalising or getting the balance wrong. This marks Kaplan as a major writer.
This is a very long book, and it is half a story. (Look out for views on the sequel in March’s post, I’m reading it now.) However, even unfinished, it’s brilliant. This is what our genre is for, being able to tell stories like this, being able to take real and terrible things and make beauty out of them. Now it has better volume completion than if it stopped a chapter before the end, but I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t expect it to disappoint me. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I didn’t expect Letters From My Windmill to suddenly become horrible, indeed, but this is more than that. I trust Kaplan with her material. I might be wrong (find out next month) but there’s a slow-earned trust that’s hard to explain but which I have here. But I feel that even if where it’s going ultimately disappoints me, the journey itself makes it all worthwhile—which it didn’t with Daudet, and it wouldn’t have with Lo, if she hadn’t pulled off the end.
The Last of the Wine —Mary Renault (1956)
Re-read. Renault’s first historical novel, about Socrates, and love, and the Peloponnesian War. I have read it so many times I almost have it memorized, but I wanted to read it again. I especially wanted to read the parts that are about democrats under tyranny.
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight—Jennifer E. Smith (2012)
YA romance. I didn’t enjoy this as much as her book about people falling in love on a train, but this book about people falling in love on a plane is pretty good. I wonder how many other forms of transportation Smith can make this work for? The love interest was too good to be true, but I liked the relationship with the parents, and like Lo, she really gets the in-between-ness of being a teenager.
Inventing the Renaissance —Ada Palmer (2024)
Note, Ada is a friend, and I read this in progress and am thanked in the acknowledgements, so this isn’t going to be an impartial review. This book is terrific, though—erudite, funny, clever, informative… everything you didn’t know you needed to know about the Renaissance. I wish this book had been around when I started reading about it, and I think it will be a wonderful starting point for lots of people. It’s not just about the Renaissance, it’s also about the concept of progress and how we think about the way events turn into history. Ada is an academic, of course, but it isn’t an academic style book. If you’ve read her blog, Ex Urbe, this book is like that, only with footnotes. It’s long, but you wouldn’t know it because the style is such that you just race through it. If you only want to read one non-fiction book, definitely read this one. If you want something that will both distract you from current affairs and give you better ways to think about them, grab it with both hands. I believe it comes out in the US on March 21st; the UK edition is already on bookshelves in Florence.
The Secrets of Latimer House —Jules Wake (2021)
This is an excellent novel, set during WWII in England, and centering three women, a German Jew in exile, a working-class woman, and an upper-class woman, who are all working at the same top secret facility and rooming together. It’s not another book about Bletchley and Enigma, it’s doing something else. They all find friendship, and love, and fulfillment in their work, and it doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of sexism and prejudice. It’s not a spoiler to say they overcome their problems and that the good guys win WWII. This is well written and much better than the other Wake I have read, and I have enjoyed quite a few of her books. It doesn’t back away from the real horrors going on, but it is a positive and upbeat and really enjoyable book.
So I Have Thought of You —Penelope Fitzgerald (2008)
I think I am unusual in reading books of letters by people who I’m not necessarily terribly interested in. Fitzgerald was a UK mainstream novelist, I read one book of hers (Offshore) and didn’t much care for it. But there aren’t enough books of letters, and this was available, and she was a writer, and I read it. It’s very long, I was reading it for a long time. And the editors made a very strange choice, one I’ve not encountered before, where they arranged the letters by recipient, not chronologically, so you’d have all her letters to her older daughter, then all her letters to her younger daughter, then all the letters to her editor, and so on. This meant you went through her life multiple times, and as many of the family letters were kind of boring this was an odd experience. I think it would have been even if I were a big Fitzgerald fan. Normally the mundane “I am sick/broke/worried” letters would be interspersed with letters about writing and publication; here it was all separated out. I did feel I got to know her, but it was weird. I wonder if you could do a novel like this, and I can see how it would work, going through the same events but from different angles. Not sorry I read it, but unlikely to read it again.
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales —edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (2007)
These anthologies are very uneven. There were some stunning stories in here, but also some that just didn’t work for me at all. Highlights, unsurprisingly, included Delia Sherman, Patricia McKillip, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I think trickster stories are especially challenging to do well, and to make different from other trickster stories, so a whole volume is a little much.
The Four Graces —D.E. Stevenson (1946)
… but clearly written in 1944 before they knew how the war in Japan would come out. A charming novel of four sisters in an English village, very loosely part of the series that starts with the wonderful Miss Buncle’s Book in that there are a few minor characters that cross over. It’s interesting to see this moment of the war, and attitudes, with rationing and servants—very different from The Secrets of Latimer House where it’s all researched, where this is just Stevenson being there and putting in things at random. This is sweet and fun and not much more than that, but sometimes sweet and fun is what you want.
