A historical novel set in 7th century Northumbria, or, as it was at the time, the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. The main character was a real person, St. Hild of Whitby, whom we know about from Bede's 8th century Ecclesiastical History of England. We don't know much, though, just one short chapter of Bede's book, and only a sentence or two about the first half of her life. This novel ends long before the events Bede writes about, and Hild isn't even baptized until more than halfway through — the book takes place at a time when most people see little difference between the god that Roman and Irish priests are talking about, and the more traditional Anglisc gods like Woden and Thunor.
Hild was the niece of King Edwin, the most powerful Anglisc king of his time. For most of the novel, from a very early age, she's the king's seer, one of his councilors, sometimes the king's fist, the leader of gesiths and a brutal killer. She's widely seen as uncanny, sometimes called ælf or hægtes, but the novel makes it clear that there's nothing supernatural about her. Hild, along with her mother, sister, and half-brother, are vulnerable people trying to survive in a dangerous and shifting time and a treacherous political environment. Hild's reputation as seer is partly luck and circumstances, and partly that she's unusually observant, unusually intelligent, unusually tall and strong, and alert to new powers like literacy. She makes herself useful to the king as seer because, as one of her mother's women tells her, “Useful men stay alive.”
Recommended. I like the way that the novel depicts the daily texture of life in a very alien society: gesiths drinking and boasting in the hall, pregnancy and birth, the public performance of kingship, women spinning and weaving, the complicated trade relationships between all the different kingdoms and peoples.
There's now a sequel, Menewood.
Rereading for the obvious reason.
The first book of The House of Niccolò, a series of historical novels set in the mid 15th century. This book takes place after the fall of Constantinople, but not long after. It's a time of complicated politics, including the Wars of the Roses and the War of the Neapolitan Succession, and a time when the lines between merchants, artisans, adventurers, mercenaries, and nobles are sometimes blurry.
The book begins in the merchant city of Bruges, in Burgundian Flanders, where very few people would call the main character Niccolò. Later parts of the book include Brittany, the Kingdom of Naples, and places in between. As the title suggests, the main character's status by the end of the book is very different than at the start.
A novel about small-town university life in the first half of the 20th century, first published in 1965 and more recently republished by NYRB Classics. It's the life of its main character, William Stoner, a professor of English at the University of Missouri.
On the first page we're told that “Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.” Nevertheless his life was eventful.
The party continues north, with various encounters. Frieren continues to reflect on the legacy of heroes, and Fern goes on a date.
The story of Don Diego Vega, a.k.a. Señor Zorro, fighting injustice in the small pueblo of Reina de los Ángeles and up and down the length of El Camino Real in Alta California. It was originally published as a serial in 1919, then republished in book form in 1924 as The Mark of Zorro after the success of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film. Is this the first instance of a novel released as a movie tie-in? It must be one of the first, anyway!
One part that hasn't aged well: the injustice that Zorro is fighting is solely injustice against the friars and the caballeros. What they're hoping for is “When those who have founded a rich empire here shall receive the true fruits of their labor and daring.”
A classic ghost story, first published in 1898. Being Henry James, it's a character study at least as much as a ghost story. As with Lovecraft, who started writing a decade or two after The Turn of the Screw, the descriptions are quite vague. We know much more about the narrator's feelings about what she saw than about what she saw or fears. It's clear that her sense of evil and horror is primarily moral.
There's a lot of ambiguity in the story, and some influential critics have a reading in which the ghosts aren't real, although I don't think that's a terribly interesting way of looking at it.
The conclusion of the exam, including a dungeon raid.
The exam for first-class mage certification has begun, and Frieren meets someone she hasn't seen for a long time even by her standards.
The third and last Martin Hench novel, and the first in chronological order. It's Martin's origin story: a young MIT dropout (6-1, surprisingly, not 6-3) in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in the early 1980s, at the beginning of the personal computer era.
“But my point still stands: I love this town.”
“And my point still stands: it won't love you back. San Francisco has had gold rush after gold rush, and each one was a disaster. Nearly everyone went broke. The city was mobbed and everything the locals loved about it was destroyed. Sometimes it even burned down. They chopped down all the fucking redwoods. This gold rush won't be any different, mark my words.”
One other thing that gold rush of 40 years ago had in common with others that came earlier and later: with the money came crime.
I'd never heard of Bioy Casares before, and picked this book up more or less at random. According to the introduction, he was one of the most important Argentinian novelists of the 20th century, and he was a friend, collaborator, and protégé of Jorge Luis Borges. This book is dedicated to Borges, and Borges wrote the forward.
The Invention of Morel, published 1940, is a short book that takes place on an island, and was inspired in part by The Island of Doctor Moreau. It's as creepy as one would expect given that fact. The narrator recounts events that are impossible and inexplicable, sometimes seemingly aware or the impossibility of what he's describing, sometimes not. Eventually there's an explanation, and perhaps a bit of ambiguity about whether the reader should accept the explanation at the end any more than the impossible events earlier on. There's a passage that's very reminiscent of the Turing Test, written a decade before Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
Apparently this book was the basis for the film Last Year at Marienbad, which I haven't seen. I ought to.
The journey north continues to the city of Äußerst where Frieren and her apprentice Fern can take the exam to be certified as first-class mages. Frieren is of course an extraordinary mage already, but she can't usually be bothered with certificates since the authorities that issue them come and go so frequently; the Continental Magic Association has been around for less than a century, after all.
A short science fiction novel from 1968. Tom Carmody, an ordinary New York office worker, is visited one evening by a Messenger who informs him that he is a winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstakes and he needs to come to Galactic Centre to retrieve his Prize. The world beyond Earth is sillier, and getting back to Earth more complicated, than he might have imagined. I wonder whether this book might have been one of Douglas Adams's inspirations.
Frieren continues her journey north. By the end of the book it's starting to look like a proper party of adventurers: a mage, her apprentice, a warrior, and a priest.
I think I only read The Red Badge of Courage once, back in high school. I reread it to refresh my memory: I recently watched the fifth season Deep Space Nine episode “Nor the Battle to the Strong,” and it reminded me of what I'd vaguely remembered. Yep, that episode is indeed clearly inspired by The Red Badge of Courage. Supposedly it's also inspired in part by Ernest Hemingway's experiences in WWI, but there I don't get the reference. It doesn't seem at all similar to A Farewell to Arms, which is the only Hemingway WWI book I've read.
Frieren now has an apprentice, a war orphan named Fern with a talent for magic whom one of Frieren's companions adopted late in life. In this book they join the young warrior Stark, the last apprentice of one of Frieren's other companions, and together the three of them start traveling north. The Demon King is long gone, but other demons are still around to make trouble.
The first page shows a party of D&D-like adventurers returning from defeating the Demon King and saving the world. Three of them settle down, while Frieren, the elven mage, goes off collecting spells and such. Her first visit back to the capital city is fifty years later, which is in time for her to be with her old companion Himmel the Hero when he dies of old age. That's all the first chapter. The beginning of the second chapter is Himmel's state funeral, and Frieren's decision that she needs to spend more time traveling through the world to understand humans and human mortality. The rest of the book, and I think the rest of the long manga series, is her journey.
Frieren was written in Japanese, of course. I read an English translation, but I can't find the translator's name.
A love story including a 25 year hiatus. It's not exactly a story about second chances; it's less conveniently shaped than that. Some of the mysteries are never resolved, and some of the loose ends are never tied up. It does at least end with increased self-knowledge, and parts of it along the way are surprisingly sweet.
Murakami says that this book is in some sense a companion novel to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and that it was originally intended as part of that book but that he removed it because it didn't seem to fit. Either he changed it an awful lot from the first draft, or there's some thematic connection I'm completely missing.
The most highly regarded novel of James's early period, set in the 1870s and published in 1881. It's a very long book, with ultimately a fairly simple story and a relatively small cast of characters, richly drawn. A spirited young woman from Albany is taken to visit Europe by her rich aunt, and her life become entangled with sophisticated Europeans and expatriates. It doesn't end happily.
A collection of mystery stories, arguably a fix-up novel. The first story was published in 1901, and the book was first published in 1925. It's available on Gutenberg.
The Old Man in the Corner was apparently once famous: he's one of the fictional detectives whom Agatha Christie spoofs in her 1920s Partners in Crime. I don't have the sense that it's read much nowadays. To the extent that Orczy is remembered today, it's probably for The Scarlet Pimpernel.
The second Martin Hench novel. Parts of it are set on Catalina Island during the dotcom bubble. Other parts are more recent, although still some years earlier than Red Team Blues, and some of them are uncomfortably topical.
The title is a word coined by J. K. Galbraith referring to undiscovered embezzlement: the time “when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.” It was a useful concept in Galbraith's day, and it still is.
The first Martin Hench novel, and, at least as currently planned, the last in chronological order: the sixty-seven year old freelance forensic accountant doing one last job before his retirement. It's set in the Bay Area, including places that are very familiar to me, and it takes place in the intersection between big money, technology, and crime. (If you think that maybe cryptocurrency is involved, you're right.)
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, and this book is published by a science fiction publisher, Tor Books, and in some ways it feels like science fiction, but it isn't. It takes place in probably about the same year as it was published, 2023. The characters and some of the corporations are made up, but the world isn't. We're already living in the future.
A reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of the man whom Huck calls Jim. It deserves all the attention it's been getting.
A big part of the book is the difference between what James is really like and what the whites see when they look at him—which is partly, although not entirely, a matter of what he chooses to show them. Here's one bitterly funny scene where he's giving a language lesson to his daughter and some of the other children.
“Good, good. You all are really sharp today. Okay, let's imagine now that it's a grease fire. She's left bacon unattended on the stove. Mrs. Holiday is about to throw water on it. What do you say? Rachel?”
Rachel paused. “Missums, that water gone make it wurs!”
“Of course, that's true, but what's the problem with that?”
Virgil said, “You're telling her she's doing the wrong thing.”
I nodded. “So, what should you say?”
Lizzie looked at the ceiling and spoke while thinking it through. “Would you like for me to get some sand?”
“Correct approach, but you didn't translate it.”
She nodded. “Oh, Lawd, missums ma'am, you wan fo me to gets some sand?”
“Good.”
If Christie is to be believed, air travel in the 1930s was very different than it is in the 2020s.
Not exactly a sequel to The Element of Fire. Both books take place in the fictional country of Ile-Rien, but The Death of the Necromancer takes place more than a century later. The capital city of Vienne now has gas lighting and telegraphs and railroads; there's a strong Sherlock Holmes or Arsène Lupin vibe. And yes, necromancy shows up right in the first chapter.