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What I Finished Reading This Week
The Angel Of The Crows – Katherine Addison
This book was a mixed bag: better than many I've read but my least favorite by Addison. Much of this is because it's Sherlock Holmes fanfic. I have consumed so many pro and fanfic Sherlock adaptations by now that an author is really going to have to directly hit my narrative likes to make an impression, and unfortunately, Addison hits them much more squarely in her other books. Nor do I care much about wingfic one way or the other.
Addison follows the original plots pretty closely, for all that she includes angels, vampires, and sundry other supernatural elements. It’s by no means lazy writing, but it does make for lazy reading because I knew what roles the characters would play and how the story would conclude from the outset. One of the things I love about Addison’s other books is how they’ve kept me on the edge of my seat since both wonderful or terrible things can happen to her characters at any time, and I have no guarantee when reading which it will be. That is emphatically not the case in this book. It only really clicked for me when Addison started building out the supernatural elements, and honestly I wish she'd gone further off script to develop them more than she's able to within the confines of Arthur Conan Doyle's plots. I would read about her vampire hunts or her angelic social structures for days. The inclusion of the Jack the Ripper murders as a unifying plot thread was interesting but conversely seemed to dilute the book's focus.
I did enjoy her digs at the original stories: of course there are multiple reasons why someone's watch case might be scratched, and so on. The rest of my thoughts are cut for spoilers. The big reveal, of course is that Watson (here J.H. Doyle) is a woman who lives as a man. My initial reaction was "Meh. It doesn't change the story in any way," but that, of course, is its genius, because it shouldn't change the story. Nonbinary people just are, just as any other category of person is. That a character like Doyle spends any time thinking or agonizing about that aspect of their identity is only because society forces them to by refusing to accept their just-is-ness. So that was a masterstroke, and I was honestly a bit disappointed by Doyle's "how I kept the army from divulging my secret" speech at the novel's conclusion because it went against this grain. (And really, I'm far more interested in more prosaic elements, like the logistics of managing menstruation while living as a military man in the isolation of an Afghan mountain range, than that particular explanation.)
As fascinating as Addison's worldbuilding was, she does misstep here and there. If clairvoyants can see the past by touching an object, why aren't Crow or the police using them to find a missing boot, say, or solve any of the other crimes they encounter? Similarly, Crow's inability to understand human mores leads to his making multiple tone deaf proclamations, yet he somehow realizes the need to not remark on Doyle's identity. To conclude: this novel is well-written, and I loved the supernatural elements, but it never really captured me beyond that.
Witch Animals Of Japan - C.S. Uasal
To knock this one off my list.
The Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking – T. Kingfisher
I really enjoyed this charming book despite its several faults. And oh my, it is charming. First the good. A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking blends settings, tropes, and character types from my favorite fantasy novels. The city where it’s set, Riverbraid, is one part Ankh Morpork (sludgy rivers, monster infestations, the Shades, endearing city guard) and one part Kingsbury (vaguely continental European capital vaguely at war with other city states). In fact, its opening scenes, from the bakery and its folksy customers to the main character reluctantly heading to court to have her name blackened to the Duchess, share broad strokes with Howl’s Moving Castle. Knackering Molly—perhaps my favorite character—is a cousin to Pratchett’s C.M.O.T Dibbler. The magical system is similar to that of Charlie Holmberg’s The Paper Magician, only here the underdog manipulates dough and baked goods instead of paper. The main character spends a lot of time on the run, relying on others to hide and protect her, one of the aspects I most enjoy in Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel.
A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking is much earthier than many fantasy novels: you’re going to hear about the sewage when characters sneak through the sewers. I was initially nonplussed by, but ultimately enjoyed this aspect because most fantasy novels eschew that side of realism. Also realistic is that death is permanent in this novel and can happen to anyone.
The main character is a delight: her blend of early adolescent world weariness and belief that adults have the power to solve everything was very true to her age. Her love for her family anchors the novel. Her interactions with her baked creations were delightful and frequently made me laugh aloud. Kingfisher balances the protagonist’s character growth and vulnerability very well. I loved her conflicted feelings about the Duchess and heart-to-heart with her uncle. The romance focus of much recent fantasy YA is nowhere in sight.
I suspect she rushed the novel through to publication. The book is pretty lazily edited, both for grammar and story. Major, easy to spot errors start at the ¾ mark and continue through the end of the story. We’re talking everything from missing words to characters’ names being misspelled. Canals are a major feature of the setting in the novel’s first half, but by the second Kingfisher’s forgotten they’re there, and they play absolutely no role in the invasion of the city, another inexplicable inconsistency. Ditto the zombie crawfish. The worldbuilding is inconsistent elsewhere too: it feels like fantasy Venice, but one of the main characters speaks like a Dickensian street urchin. The very non-Renaissance word “okay” makes frequent appearances.
More aggravating are the characters' inexplicably foolish choices at multiple crucial junctures. The protagonist learns early on who is responsible for multiple murders and disappearances—for which she was almost framed—and that someone witnessed the culprit entering her home shortly before a murder was committed, and then…never tells her family, let alone the authorities.
When said killer is apprehended after murdering the Duchess’s royal wizard, the Duchess refuses to summarily execute him because justice demands that he be tried for his crimes. When his co-conspirator, the Duchess’s Lord Inquisitor, is apprehended for the crime of raising a barbarian army in the countryside to overthrow the city after he’s tricked the Riverbraid army into deploying far away, the Duchess summarily exiles him to the countryside instead of putting him on trial BECAUSE WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG WITH THIS PLAN.
Sure enough, the Lord Inquisitor heads straight to the barbarian army he’s raised and leads them to attack the defenseless city. Letting him go makes no narrative sense: why wasn’t he thrown in jail, especially given that his partner in treason was? If Kingfisher needed to reunite him with the army, she could have had sympathetic nobles spring him from jail, which is exactly how she frees the killer. There are other examples, equally glaring. But, all that said, the protagonist was awesome enough, the setting new yet familiar enough, and the humor delightful enough that I really enjoyed this book.
片づける 禅の作法 – 枡野俊明 (Katazukeru Zen no Houhou – Makino Shunmyo)
This book definitely held up to a reread. I like Makino’s Buddhist emphasis on cleaning and decluttering, particularly that acquiring that “one more thing” will never lead to the permanent state of satisfaction your brain tells you it will, and that cleaning is not an end state but a process that gets easier if you do it for its own sake instead of focusing on how you’d rather be doing something else. I also like how he integrates elements of a broader Japanese worldview into the act of cleaning, such as attention to the seasons and omotenashi. The prose is simple and clear, and also very enjoyable to read.
That said, Makino at times harks back to a rosy past Japan that probably never existed, some of his statements about Western culture are uninformed, and—in a trait he shares with other cleaning/decluttering authors—his suggestions are at times divorced from reality. No, “the sight of you repeatedly cleaning without complaint” will not “instinctively inspire your family to want to not mess up the carefully organized rooms” and telling these readers (let's be real: in Japan they're exclusively wives and mothers) “to clean for the sole purpose of perfecting yourself” no matter how often their labors are unappreciated and undone is disingenuous. More broadly, the sort of wholehearted devotion to cleaning Makino recommends is probably far more feasible in the regimented life of a Buddhist temple than elsewhere, where responsibilities like employment or childcare duties compete for people’s time.
But half the point of these books, I think, is to motivate people who dread cleaning but want to do it to actually get started, which this book does very well.
What I Am Currently Reading
Complete Book of Ceremonial Magic – Lon Milo DuQuette & David Shoemaker, eds.
This week I read chapter 4, “Alchemy,” by Dennis William Hauck, which was clearly written and informative. It’s pretty interesting that when you strip away the scientific aspects of medieval and Renaissance alchemy that became today’s chemistry, you’re left with practices that look very much like Buddhism in their focus on emptying the mind and cultivating non-dualistic thought.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week I read the chapters on Candlemas and Valentine’s Day. McNeill’s discussion of these holidays has notably fewer connections to pre-Christian Celtic festivals than those for Halloween and Christmas (do people not make Brighid’s crosses in Scotland?), although there’s some interesting information on how the Roman festival of Lupercalia evolved into today’s Valentine’s Day. At any rate, I’ll pick the book up again when we get closer to Fastern’s E’en.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
The Angel Of The Crows – Katherine Addison
This book was a mixed bag: better than many I've read but my least favorite by Addison. Much of this is because it's Sherlock Holmes fanfic. I have consumed so many pro and fanfic Sherlock adaptations by now that an author is really going to have to directly hit my narrative likes to make an impression, and unfortunately, Addison hits them much more squarely in her other books. Nor do I care much about wingfic one way or the other.
Addison follows the original plots pretty closely, for all that she includes angels, vampires, and sundry other supernatural elements. It’s by no means lazy writing, but it does make for lazy reading because I knew what roles the characters would play and how the story would conclude from the outset. One of the things I love about Addison’s other books is how they’ve kept me on the edge of my seat since both wonderful or terrible things can happen to her characters at any time, and I have no guarantee when reading which it will be. That is emphatically not the case in this book. It only really clicked for me when Addison started building out the supernatural elements, and honestly I wish she'd gone further off script to develop them more than she's able to within the confines of Arthur Conan Doyle's plots. I would read about her vampire hunts or her angelic social structures for days. The inclusion of the Jack the Ripper murders as a unifying plot thread was interesting but conversely seemed to dilute the book's focus.
I did enjoy her digs at the original stories: of course there are multiple reasons why someone's watch case might be scratched, and so on. The rest of my thoughts are cut for spoilers. The big reveal, of course is that Watson (here J.H. Doyle) is a woman who lives as a man. My initial reaction was "Meh. It doesn't change the story in any way," but that, of course, is its genius, because it shouldn't change the story. Nonbinary people just are, just as any other category of person is. That a character like Doyle spends any time thinking or agonizing about that aspect of their identity is only because society forces them to by refusing to accept their just-is-ness. So that was a masterstroke, and I was honestly a bit disappointed by Doyle's "how I kept the army from divulging my secret" speech at the novel's conclusion because it went against this grain. (And really, I'm far more interested in more prosaic elements, like the logistics of managing menstruation while living as a military man in the isolation of an Afghan mountain range, than that particular explanation.)
As fascinating as Addison's worldbuilding was, she does misstep here and there. If clairvoyants can see the past by touching an object, why aren't Crow or the police using them to find a missing boot, say, or solve any of the other crimes they encounter? Similarly, Crow's inability to understand human mores leads to his making multiple tone deaf proclamations, yet he somehow realizes the need to not remark on Doyle's identity. To conclude: this novel is well-written, and I loved the supernatural elements, but it never really captured me beyond that.
Witch Animals Of Japan - C.S. Uasal
To knock this one off my list.
The Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking – T. Kingfisher
I really enjoyed this charming book despite its several faults. And oh my, it is charming. First the good. A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking blends settings, tropes, and character types from my favorite fantasy novels. The city where it’s set, Riverbraid, is one part Ankh Morpork (sludgy rivers, monster infestations, the Shades, endearing city guard) and one part Kingsbury (vaguely continental European capital vaguely at war with other city states). In fact, its opening scenes, from the bakery and its folksy customers to the main character reluctantly heading to court to have her name blackened to the Duchess, share broad strokes with Howl’s Moving Castle. Knackering Molly—perhaps my favorite character—is a cousin to Pratchett’s C.M.O.T Dibbler. The magical system is similar to that of Charlie Holmberg’s The Paper Magician, only here the underdog manipulates dough and baked goods instead of paper. The main character spends a lot of time on the run, relying on others to hide and protect her, one of the aspects I most enjoy in Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel.
A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking is much earthier than many fantasy novels: you’re going to hear about the sewage when characters sneak through the sewers. I was initially nonplussed by, but ultimately enjoyed this aspect because most fantasy novels eschew that side of realism. Also realistic is that death is permanent in this novel and can happen to anyone.
The main character is a delight: her blend of early adolescent world weariness and belief that adults have the power to solve everything was very true to her age. Her love for her family anchors the novel. Her interactions with her baked creations were delightful and frequently made me laugh aloud. Kingfisher balances the protagonist’s character growth and vulnerability very well. I loved her conflicted feelings about the Duchess and heart-to-heart with her uncle. The romance focus of much recent fantasy YA is nowhere in sight.
I suspect she rushed the novel through to publication. The book is pretty lazily edited, both for grammar and story. Major, easy to spot errors start at the ¾ mark and continue through the end of the story. We’re talking everything from missing words to characters’ names being misspelled. Canals are a major feature of the setting in the novel’s first half, but by the second Kingfisher’s forgotten they’re there, and they play absolutely no role in the invasion of the city, another inexplicable inconsistency. Ditto the zombie crawfish. The worldbuilding is inconsistent elsewhere too: it feels like fantasy Venice, but one of the main characters speaks like a Dickensian street urchin. The very non-Renaissance word “okay” makes frequent appearances.
More aggravating are the characters' inexplicably foolish choices at multiple crucial junctures. The protagonist learns early on who is responsible for multiple murders and disappearances—for which she was almost framed—and that someone witnessed the culprit entering her home shortly before a murder was committed, and then…never tells her family, let alone the authorities.
When said killer is apprehended after murdering the Duchess’s royal wizard, the Duchess refuses to summarily execute him because justice demands that he be tried for his crimes. When his co-conspirator, the Duchess’s Lord Inquisitor, is apprehended for the crime of raising a barbarian army in the countryside to overthrow the city after he’s tricked the Riverbraid army into deploying far away, the Duchess summarily exiles him to the countryside instead of putting him on trial BECAUSE WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG WITH THIS PLAN.
Sure enough, the Lord Inquisitor heads straight to the barbarian army he’s raised and leads them to attack the defenseless city. Letting him go makes no narrative sense: why wasn’t he thrown in jail, especially given that his partner in treason was? If Kingfisher needed to reunite him with the army, she could have had sympathetic nobles spring him from jail, which is exactly how she frees the killer. There are other examples, equally glaring. But, all that said, the protagonist was awesome enough, the setting new yet familiar enough, and the humor delightful enough that I really enjoyed this book.
片づける 禅の作法 – 枡野俊明 (Katazukeru Zen no Houhou – Makino Shunmyo)
This book definitely held up to a reread. I like Makino’s Buddhist emphasis on cleaning and decluttering, particularly that acquiring that “one more thing” will never lead to the permanent state of satisfaction your brain tells you it will, and that cleaning is not an end state but a process that gets easier if you do it for its own sake instead of focusing on how you’d rather be doing something else. I also like how he integrates elements of a broader Japanese worldview into the act of cleaning, such as attention to the seasons and omotenashi. The prose is simple and clear, and also very enjoyable to read.
That said, Makino at times harks back to a rosy past Japan that probably never existed, some of his statements about Western culture are uninformed, and—in a trait he shares with other cleaning/decluttering authors—his suggestions are at times divorced from reality. No, “the sight of you repeatedly cleaning without complaint” will not “instinctively inspire your family to want to not mess up the carefully organized rooms” and telling these readers (let's be real: in Japan they're exclusively wives and mothers) “to clean for the sole purpose of perfecting yourself” no matter how often their labors are unappreciated and undone is disingenuous. More broadly, the sort of wholehearted devotion to cleaning Makino recommends is probably far more feasible in the regimented life of a Buddhist temple than elsewhere, where responsibilities like employment or childcare duties compete for people’s time.
But half the point of these books, I think, is to motivate people who dread cleaning but want to do it to actually get started, which this book does very well.
What I Am Currently Reading
Complete Book of Ceremonial Magic – Lon Milo DuQuette & David Shoemaker, eds.
This week I read chapter 4, “Alchemy,” by Dennis William Hauck, which was clearly written and informative. It’s pretty interesting that when you strip away the scientific aspects of medieval and Renaissance alchemy that became today’s chemistry, you’re left with practices that look very much like Buddhism in their focus on emptying the mind and cultivating non-dualistic thought.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week I read the chapters on Candlemas and Valentine’s Day. McNeill’s discussion of these holidays has notably fewer connections to pre-Christian Celtic festivals than those for Halloween and Christmas (do people not make Brighid’s crosses in Scotland?), although there’s some interesting information on how the Roman festival of Lupercalia evolved into today’s Valentine’s Day. At any rate, I’ll pick the book up again when we get closer to Fastern’s E’en.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
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That said, it's been a day since I finished it and I'm still in the reading afterglow. :) It's very much in the same vein as Pratchett's City Watch and Tiffany Aching novels in terms of its humor and serious themes, which I think is why I like it so much.