it's a rodeo, but it's not my first one
It’s so hot here in Chicago that a couple times I’ve started to feel drunk just by sitting in my office and sweating myself into inebriation.
My plans for the weekend include alternately getting ahead on some of my work projects and playing Just Dance 2019 while chugging some pedialite.
No one is invited.
Bit of a slower month this month. June really passed me by without me noticing.
Escaping From Houdini is the third installment in the Stalking Jack the Ripper series, one of the most popular properties of James Patterson’s Little, Brown imprint, jimmy patterson. These YA murder mysteries center on an ahead-of-her-time(TM) young woman, Audrey Rose, studying mortuary sciences and forensic medicine from her eccentric uncle alongside her snarky love interest, Thomas. She runs up against social stigma, since these are not very womanly professions. Also, we hear roughly once a book about how Audrey Rose is 1/4 Indian, but honestly it’s a cop out and doesn’t come into play. She is treated as white for all but one sentence per installment, to the point where it feels a bit odd that this is a part of her backstory. It’s like Maniscalco decided to take a stab at representation and then just went nowhere with it. The supposed feminism of the books is superficial and anachronistic, and the books do little to grapple with the realities of the era. Audrey Rose rejects the trappings of Victorian femininity without examining the underlying social causes or the interiority of other women in the fiction. It’s Cool Girl fiction, but with a protagonist who is also a crime solving mortician.
This particular installment unsuccessfully attempts to launch a love triangle subplot, but undercuts it at every step by having Audrey Rose reassure us that she would never ever ever give up on Thomas. The crimes are given a fun sense of urgency since the entirety of the book takes place on a trans Atlantic cruise liner, so that’s cool. I know that this series’ entire gimmick is inserting historical figures into the crime narrative, but the whole Houdini subplot was just tiring and could have been lifted entirely without impact.
I’m not going to pretend these books are good. They aren’t. They’re empty calories where people die, you get to read about Victorian autopsies, and a good portion of the narrative is devoted to the love story between Audrey Rose and Thomas. At this point I’m committed to the series and I’ll see it out through the fourth and final installment, but I wouldn’t recommend you pick it up if you already haven’t. This is best consumed as mindless background noise. Enjoyable enough to kill some time or help round out a commute. And I’m not about to pretend that I’m in any way above this kind of potato chip entertainment.
A Book of Tongues is the first installment of Gemma Files’s Hexslinger series. It’s a Weird West tale that follows a band of outlaws headed up by a disgraced preacher turned cowboy wizard and his sassy gunslinger whoreson boyfriend. They’re being spied on by a Pinkerton trying to collect scientific data on wizards.
I’m a sucker for the Weird West, and I love a narrative with villain protagonists, so I thought this would be totally up my alley. I think I liked this book(question mark). It was compelling and I will likely pick up the next installment to find out what happens.
However, I think there might have just been too much going on. Also, I listened to it as an audio book and I think that made it a little harder to follow than just reading it on the page might have been.
But seriously. This book.
An incomplete list of things featured:
It was maybe just one too many concepts thrown in. I’m still sussing out exactly how I feel. I would gladly spend one more book in this world to figure out what happens next, but this is the first of a trilogy and for some reason that fills me with a little dread.
Heads up that characters in this book use racial epithets and hold attitudes that are appropriate to the postbellum West. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, but the horrors of Manifest Destiny and the white settlement of the American West are examined and commented upon within the narrative.
I absolutely loved Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and my best recommendation is to go into it knowing as little as possible before you start. It’s a surprisingly intimate and moving look at life in England from 1910 up through the end of World War II, following the life of Ursula Todd, the middle child of five in an upper middle class English family.
I’ve seen a few friends on Goodreads mention that they couldn’t get past page 50. I will admit that it takes a bit to get into. You really need to spend about 100 pages getting used to what’s going on, and the unconventional flow of the narrative. If you aren’t sold by page 125, then it’s safe to give up. But it does require more of a chance than some books.
While researching subgenres and tags for categorizing this book I learned about the concept of “slipstream” books. From Worlds Without End:
Slipstream deals with “mainstream” themes but contains a speculative element. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a speculative future, for example, but is marketed as a mainstream novel.
http://www.worldswithoutend.com/resources_sub-genres.asp
The more you know!
I decided to read Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country in advance of the HBO series coming out, which I will definitely be watching.
This book goes down quick and it’s a natural choice for a television adaptation. The structure itself is fairly episodic and the action escalates quickly. It does not rely on the typical horror novel structure of building slowly with uncertainty about the provenance of the evil until the last quarter of the narrative. You’re pretty clear on what (or who) the evil is from the start, and each section is a tale of how our main cast outsmarts and outlasts that evil.
Lovecraft Country exists in the universe of novels that take the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s works and examines the racism and utterly banal human evil underneath it all. Having read a lot of Lovecraft when I was a teen, I love narratives that recontextualize and expand Lovecraft’s universe to better reflect our own.
Lovecraft Country is a great addition to this literary canon. It’s thoughtful, at times funny, and above all entertaining. A must read for readers interested in the modern expansion of Lovecraftian mythos.
I spend probably far too much brainpower devoted to making sure that my cats know that I love them equally and that I don’t have a favorite. I don’t know if it’s working.
My two cats, Darien (the tuxedo cat) and Aliester Meowley (they grey longhair cat), have very different love languages and methods of getting my attention.
Darien is a gentle bean, gregarious and fun loving, but doesn’t really open up emotionally until he gets to know you pretty well. He loves being near people, almost cuddling, except for when he’s feeling particularly vulnerable or lonely, in which case he will headbutt the softest part of you repeatedly until settling down for a brief snuggle. He likes to be on things. Any time I clean off a surface (countertops, the bed, my dresser, the china cabinet) he needs to be there. He thinks tidying up is a game for his benefit.
Aleister is terrified of new people, but once it’s just the three of us, he’s the real master of the house. He needs to be held and petted and kissed nearly constantly, and when he’s feeling neglected he will exfoliate my entire face with his tongue. Batting him away does no good. He’ll just keep coming back until either he’s done, or I decide to pay him the attention he thinks he deserves. He’s constantly climbing all over me with his little needle fists, kneading my mushy bits and accidentally giving me tiny little stabs.
It’s easy to give in to Aleister and snuggle him constantly, but sometimes I worry that Darien feels left out so I try to pay Darien special attention.
I finally got them both cat scratch lounges so they don’t have to fight over the one. Whenever I want a moment to myself I sprinkle cat nip over the scratch lounges. It’s the only way for me to get any peace.
