Jan 06 2022

The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O’Connor

with notes and an afterword by Ellendea Proffer, who is smart enough to put all her illuminating, excellent content at the end in order to avoid spoilers. That said, I rather wish there’d been a bit of footnoting to direct readers to this area, tho understand that this isn’t meant to be an annotated version.

Lord knows, I could have used one, tho. You know how there are some books that you read and you realize “this was not written for me”? Well, this was not written for me. My familiarity with Russian culture and history is broad but not deep; similarly with my grasp of Christian history. Yet a more than working familiarity with both these subjects is integral to the enjoyment of this modernist novel, that was written with decidedly Romantic sensibilities while under a repressive Soviet censorship system. On its face, it’s a perfectly acceptable, madcap satire that reworks the tales of both Pontius Pilate and Faust into a post-Revolution Moscow setting. For people with little to no familiarity with Russia/Christianity, it reads like a fever dream. Its pathos and sophistication only become apparent once you learn about its direct influences, as, in my case, through Ms Proffer’s excellent endnotes.

Essentially, a practitioner of black magic named Woland (who is, perhaps, the Devil himself) comes to Moscow and wreaks havoc among the literati and associated circles. The otherwise nameless Master has already been confined to an insane asylum prior to Woland and co’s arrival, but his faithful lover Margarita will do anything, including dealing with the Devil himself, both to restore the Master to her side and to restore the novel that he burned before being sent to the sanatorium. Interspersed with the goings on in Moscow are chapters from said novel, reimagining the tale of Pontius Pilate in his dealings with Jesus of Nazareth.

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Jan 05 2022

Shapes & Patterns in Nature by Magdalena Konečná, Jana Sedlackova & Štěpánka Sekaninová

This gorgeous picture book is a riot of color and shape, feeling just as much art book as nature guide.

While ostensibly aimed at children, there’s so much for readers and art aficionados of all ages to savor in Magdalena Konečná’s dazzling illustrations, pleasingly arranged by shape and color around various biological/geological themes. The organization reminds me a bit of those challenges you occasionally see on social media, where artists practice drawing fifty or so discrete items in a category, e.g. animals or flowers, in one cohesive piece.

There are twelve main categories in the book, each spread across two pages that invite investigation and contemplation. The labels are great, but the pithy little paragraphs that accompany the images are decidedly not. Some of the word choices were head scratchers from the very beginning, with, for example, chameleons being referred to as monkeys: cute as a colloquialism, but out of place in a science book. Readers of most ages know, ofc, that lizards aren’t primates, but later paragraphs talk about insects’ noses, which is just one lax euphemism too close to misleading for me.

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Jan 04 2022

The Perfect Escape by Leah Konen

This page-turner of a thriller will have you either sighing with satisfaction at the ending or grimacing with dismay, depending on your personal worldview.

Three friends have decided to take off from the hurly-burly of New York City in order to have a girls’ weekend upstate, all while nursing wounding sorrows. Diana is hiding from her stalker ex Brandon, while our two viewpoint characters, Sam and Margaret, are mourning the ends of their own marriages. Sam’s husband left her for his own needy ex, while Margaret’s marriage broke down irreparably after the loss of their baby. In an effort to pamper themselves and push all thought of disappointing men out of their minds, the three women embark on a road trip for a cabin in Saratoga Springs, where they’re planning to soak in a hot tub, sip wine and indulge in a lot of sheet-mask-related self-care for a few days.

Only they never reach Saratoga Springs. The key to their rental car goes missing while at a rest stop on the way, stranding the women overnight in Catskill, New York. They decide to make the most of it anyway, finding a rental to stay in and heading out to a bar, before realizing that at least some of their exes are in town, too. Sam’s encounter with her ex Harry is particularly mortifying, its aftermath the lowlight of her whole evening… until she reunites with Margaret and they realize that Diana has disappeared.

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Jan 03 2022

Dracula: Curse Of The Vampire by Jonathan Green, illustrated by Hauke Kock

Happy New Year, readers! Here’s to another wonderful year of reading and discovery for you all!

Back in 2020, we told you about the very cool Kickstarter campaign for Jonathan Green’s gamebook Dracula: Curse Of The Vampire. I received my copy partway through 2021, but didn’t have time to sit down and read/play through it till the recent winter holiday. I admit that I’d been missing RPGs quite a bit, so this felt like a nice light-to-medium-weight solo stopgap till at least one of my groups picks up again in the New Year (tonight, even!)

Tho I’ve certainly read more than my fair share of vampire novels, I’ve never been a big Dracula aficionado. And tho I love rpgs (enough to design a few games myself,) I can be a little iffy on following rulesets. While D:CotV is set up so you can just read through your options without rolling any dice or marking up the game sheets in the front (which was the approach I took for a number of reasons while reading game books as a teenager,) I thought I’d do this the “proper” way, so sat down one evening once the kids were in bed and started reading through the several pages of instruction. As RPGs go, the rules are fairly simple, tho still more complicated than people whose only exposure to the genre are Choose Your Own Adventure books might feel comfortable with. And that’s okay! The rules are here for those who want the crunchy experience of rolling dice and marking points: the book works just as well if you skip those aspects altogether.

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Dec 31 2021

Lent by Jo Walton

In Lent, Jo Walton takes the life of Girolamo Savonarola both seriously and literally. Not only his life, the whole framework in which he lived that life: God, demons, Purgatory, the Rule of St. Benedict, the Dominican Order to which Savonarola was dedicated, his desire to create a new Jerusalem in Italy, and ever so much more. She opens the book with Girolamo and two other Dominican brothers called to a women’s cloister in the dead of night to banish an infestation of demons. Girolamo can see them in all their grotesqueries and hear their shrieking and their mocking laughter.

Lent by Jo Walton

Brother Domenico can see nothing unusual, but “I think I can hear something—it sounds like distant laughter. It’s very unsettling. I can see why the nuns might be disturbed.” Brother Silvestro adds, “I don’t see or hear anything, but I feel an evil presence here.” (p. 12) Girolamo sees so many at the convent that he wonders whether the Gates of Hell have been opened, and he almost despairs that his brothers, the most sensitive among his order, can sense so little. He banishes them, even the one who has possessed a young novice, even the vast number of demons apparently drawn to a book that was a recent bequest by the King of Hungary. “‘God has given me these gifts, I must use them for the good of all,’ he says, in complete sincerity. ‘I will keep this book, if I may, or it will draw them here again. Them, or worse things.'” (p. 22)

Girolamo is sincere in his desire to help, and in his piety, but he is not above fault, as Walton shows just a few paragraphs later.

“Is it true that the Magnificent Lorenzo is dying?” [the First Sister of the convent] asks.
“Yes, everyone is saying his death will be on him soon.”
“And is it true that you foretold it?”
“Yes,” he says, baldly. It annoys him that she asks, treating him as some kind of oracle. It annoys him too that God has vouchsafed to him such a worldly prophecy, such a petty matter as the death of a gouty merchant prince. Girolamo has never met Lorenzo de’ Medici. He has in fact avoided him, for reasons that are partly pride and partly a confirmed distaste for hobnobbing with the rich. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, after all. (p. 22)

Lorenzo is in fact dying; he has already received last rites. Girolamo meets his impressive daughter and his petulant son, both kept from their father’s presence a little longer while he speaks with the Dominican. To the surprise of everyone except Lorenzo — and perhaps Marsilio Ficino, a Platonist and scholar in the Medici orbit, and also a Walton favorite from her Thessaly books — he is dying in a state of grace. “Not old, middle-aged only, but certainly dying. There is nothing unusual about him except the celestial light shining from him.” (p. 42) It’s not obvious at the time, but the scene with Lorenzo is pivotal for the whole book, and worth an extended quotation.

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Dec 30 2021

Outside the Gates of Eden by Lewis Shiner

There’s a live recording of a Bruce Springsteen song — “The River,” I think — with a long spoken introduction in which Springsteen talks about his difficult relationship with his father. The elder Springsteen, a veteran of World War II, didn’t understand what his son was doing with his long hair and his late nights and his rock n’ roll and all of that business. He tells his son just wait until the army gets you, they’ll make a man of you. Well, Bruce’s draft number comes up. By the time he’s supposed to go in for his physical, he’s too scared to say anything to his parents, so he takes off for a few days with his friends. When he gets back, his old man asks him where he’d been. Bruce said he’d been to the induction center for his army physical. “So what happened?” “They didn’t take me.” “That’s good, son. That’s good.”

Outside the Gates of Eden

Like Springsteen, Jeff Cole (“But everyone calls me Cole”) has a difficult father, a World War II veteran who came back to work as an accountant in the oil business. He’s moved the family around — Mexico, Egypt, Midland (Texas), “one armpit to another” as Cole puts it — and at home he always has the TV on too loud for conversation, but insists that Cole get up and change the channel if for some reason a music group comes on. Outside the Gates of Eden opens in 1965 on Cole’s first day at a new school, St. Mark’s, a pricey private school in Dallas, the latest oil-patch stop. Cole is a junior, and he’s paired for tennis practice with Alex Montoya — “small and wiry, light-skinned despite the Mexican name. Short black hair parted on the left. Good-looking and confident—hell on women, Cole figured.” (p. 3) Cole is new, and a scholarship kid; Alex is established at the school, and rich.

It’s the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Outside the Gates of Eden begins in 1965 and ends, not quite 950 pages onward, at an unspecified “Later” some time after 2016. Cole and Alex are still alive and still friends, despite some of their best efforts on both counts over the course of the intervening years. They bond over cars and sports and, most of all, music. Cole’s admiration for Alex is already visible in the sentence quoted above. Shiner shows what Alex sees as he brings Cole home for dinner the Friday after that first tennis set:

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Dec 29 2021

Animal Adaptations: Unique Body Parts by Radka Piro & Lida Larina

And so, here is my last review of the year, dear readers, the review of a gentle but thoroughly intelligent, beautiful and extremely accessible book that encourages curiosity about the world around us. Hopefully, it’ll be a harbinger of the year to come!

Why yes, I am an eternal optimist in many regards.

But to this delightful board book, which is the perfect way to get young readers interested in zoology, emphasizing the weird and cool of the animal kingdom without overwhelming with too much information. It’s a slender volume, in keeping with the format, brightly illustrated and concisely written. While brief, the vignettes are thoughtfully selected. Honestly, this book taught me stuff even I didn’t know about animals!

Animal Adaptations: Unique Body Parts is divided into five, um, parts. Each section begins with a question and hint about a particular body part/adaptation, with a cunning peekaboo cutout to pique readers’ interest in the answer. With said answer comes four more illustrated facts about animals related to the first one showcased in the section. The illustrations are cute while staying faithful to biology, and the shading and colors just gorgeous, with a slight but not overwhelming tendency towards a pastel palette.

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Dec 28 2021

The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling

A delightful paranormal romance that balances a sweet and steamy romance with small-town magical shenanigans.

Vivienne Jones is nineteen years old when she meets Rhys Penhallow one magical summer in her small hometown of Graves Glen, Georgia. He’s here to take summer classes at the university close by, and the two embark on a whirlwind romance that ends abruptly after he confides in her that he has to return home to Wales. The reason? To break off the betrothal his father Simon is looking to arrange between Rhys and another properly vetted witch. Aghast at the thought of sleeping with a “claimed” man, Vivienne very loudly and angrily dumps him. Rhys goes back across the pond and a drunk Vivienne, with the help of her sympathetic cousin Gwyn, decides to exorcise all thought of Rhys with a joke curse. But Graves Glen isn’t the kind of place where curses, even joke ones, can be made lightly…

Nine years pass, and Vivienne is now a lecturer at the town’s Penhaven College. While she, Gwyn and her aunt Elaine fully embrace their witchy heritage, Vivi is still a little reluctant to hang out with the witch populace at large, so stays almost exclusively on the unmagical side of academia. She loves her job, tho, and has a fulfilling life hanging out with her family and friends, even if a few drinks too many will have her looking up one particular ex on social media from time to time.

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Dec 27 2021

The Case Of The Unwelcome Visitor (Bad Machinery #6) by John Allison

It’s become a tradition of recent years for me to use the Christmas holiday to read another Bad Machinery book, to just sit finally and take the time to put my feet up and enjoy these books that perfectly distil everything I like about reading. Mystery: check. Humor: check. Empathy: check. A hint or more of the paranormal: check. The fact that it features British schoolkids in a graphic novel format is just icing on the cake for me.

And so this year, a bit belatedly due to my sister needing extra days to confirm a negative COVID diagnosis post-exposure before we could celebrate in earnest, I finally got a chance to immerse myself back in Tackleford with our young sleuths. Or most of them anyway: Mildred and Sonny are off to France for the summer, while Shauna is going to Disneyl– er, Mouseville before heading to Margate to stay with family. This leaves only Linton, Jack and Charlotte in town when a series of mysterious occurrences start plaguing the Gravel Pit, a down-on-the-heels housing estate that Charlotte’s mom’s boyfriend, in particular, thinks unsafe for kids.

Charlotte isn’t super thrilled that Colin has moved in with them, but she is pleased that her older sister Sarah and Sarah’s dreamy boyfriend Dr Julian are moving back up to Tackleford. Her pleasure is short-lived, however, when fussy old Colin wants to implement a 7 p.m. curfew for her after Linton and Jack come round asking for her detecting help one evening. Linton’s dad was just promoted to police chief and is worrying over his new responsibilities in the face of rising crime. Being a good son, Linton wants to help his dad close a bunch of cases, including the weird goings-on by the Gravel Pit. But Colin thinks running about solving nocturnal mysteries is far too dangerous for thirteen year-olds, much to Charlotte’s ire. After all, foiling monstrous creatures of the night is complicated enough without also dodging worrywart father surrogates whom you never particularly liked in the first place.

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Dec 26 2021

Agency by William Gibson

Readers who made it through the first few unforgiving chapters of The Peripheral and went on to enjoy the rest of the book will find the beginning of Agency easier going, with the essential setup unchanged and many of the characters returning. In the main timeline sometime late in the twenty-second century, humanity has mostly overcome the interlocking crises that Gibson calls “the jackpot” and is now generally managing the planet without major additional damage. The price has been very high.

Agency by William Gibson

The central conceit of The Peripheral, Agency and the third part of the trilogy, which Gibson has said is simply called Jackpot, is that advanced computation has worked out ways to contact alternative pasts to the characters’ present, known in the book as “stubs.” Once contacted, the possibilities from that past branch off and lead to different futures, thus preserving causality at the future end. It’s all a bit handwavy, as it must be, but it works within the book because the limitations feel real, and Gibson keeps the rules consistent once he establishes them.

The Peripheral featured one stub, but implied the existence of many more. Gibson sets Agency in motion by having Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer mention someone who had been a “hobbyist of hellholes.” (Ch. 2) Known as Vespasian, he apparently developed a method for intervening in stubs that led to dramatic changes away from the history known by the main timeline. Lowbeer has had him killed in the meantime, but she thinks she can adapt the method toward radically better outcomes than the main timeline. He had also made contact with a stub that was much further back than the others that Lowbeer and company had managed. The stub’s present is 2017, and its history saw the rejection of Brexit and the election of Hillary Clinton as US president in 2016. Unfortunately, as contact from the twenty-second century begins, the world is also in a crisis that threatens to escalate into nuclear war.

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