I've seen some descriptions of this book as a mystery novel, or a thriller, or even noir. That really isn't the tone of the book, even though it might sound like it from the plot description. It mostly takes place in an isolated hamlet outside a smallish village, near the Czech border. The main character and narrator is a loner who usually likes animals better than humans, and a few of her neighbors, one by one, start dying by accident or violence. She has her own theory, which she writes incessantly to the police about: they were murdered by the deer and other animals, taking revenge on hunters. Most of the book is her meditations on astrology, the nature of the world around us, what we're like.
As soon as the Sun came close to the horizon, a family of Bats began to make regular appearances. They'd fly in noiselessly, softly; I always thought of their flight as being fluid. Once I counted twelve of them, as they flew around each house in turn. I'd love to know how a Bat sees the world; just once I'd like to fly across the Plateau in its body. How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise?
Toward evening I would sit outside and wait for them to appear, to fly in one by one from over the Professor's house, as they visited each of us in turn. I gently waved to them in greeting. The truth is I had a lot in common with them—I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn't suited to living in the Sunlight.
The title comes from Blake, as do all of the epigraphs. I recognized some of them, since some are famous enough to be recognizable even to someone like me who doesn't read much poetry, but only some. This book must also have posed a challenging problem for the translator! Part of it is about translation: the main character and one of her few friends are working on translating Blake. In one chapter they quote a short poem in the original English and compare four possible Polish versions, discussing the nuances of the word choices, which the translation I read, of course, rendered back into English.
Part of the InCryptid urban fantasy series.
Grandma sighed. “You're right, honey. Alex, I'm sorry. You know we're only worried about you, right? Lycanthropy is nothing to play around with.”
The most recent novel in the Tyrant Philosophers series. The book lets us see from the viewpoints of many different characters and it's broadly sympathetic to almost all of them, including the ones who have made bad mistakes or done terrible things. “It's just the things he has to do, for his army, for his nation. None more dangerous in the world than someone who thinks he can do bad things for a bad cause, but remain a good man.”
C'era una volta…
— Un re! — diranno subito i miei piccoli lettori.
— No, ragazzi, avete sbagliato. C'era una volta un pezzo di legno.
Pinocchio was first published as a serial in Giornale per i banbini beginning in 1881, and in book form in 1883. There have of course been many translations into English and other languages, but many of them have been sloppy or heavily abridged or heavily adapted, often more novelizations of the 1940 Disney cartoon than actual translations of Collodi's book. I read Perella's late 20th century translation in an excellent dual-language edition published by University of California Press, also including a long critical essay and the original illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti.
A mystery novel including Richard III must, of course, have a callback to The Daughter of Time. This is a 20th century country house mystery where the host and his guests are all Richard enthusiasts, members of a society dedicated to proving that he was framed. Crimes ensue, which seem to be related to the events 500 years earlier.
“Though the infernal path is paved in corpses, savor the journey, for one day you will be a body on the road to another's ruin.”
“Uh, thanks?”
“Poem I wrote when I left home and all that shit behind.”
A novella in the Tyrant Philosophers series, the backstory of one of the main characters in Days of Shattered Faith. It begins when the main character is a small girl, some time before the first book of the series, City of Last Chances, and finishes just before the beginning of Days of Shattered Faith. As the author's note at the end of the story says, the series as a whole is “about small people being caught in the wheels of history.”
A novella, as opposed to one of James's ginormous novels. The subtitle is “A Study,” and it is indeed a study of the young American tourist Daisy Miller, as seen theough the eyes of the slightly older American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne. It's at least partly about a contrast between two subtly different classes of wealthy late 19th century Americans, and it's not clear that either of the two main characters understand each other even at the end of the book.
A complicated what-might-have-been, with magic.
A scavenger manages to get her hands on a mysterious new technological artifact, and there's more to it than appears at first sight. It's partly a story of survival and revenge, and partly a love story.
A novella set at roughly the same time as The Nightmare Stacks. Bob Howard is in Tokyo on a joint operation with the Miyamoto Group, the Laundry's Japanese counterpart. Hello Kitty is scary.
A Laundry novella, A Conventional Boy, and two bonus Laundry short stories, “Overtime” and “Down on the Farm”, with an afterword about the D&D moral panic of the 1980s.
A Conventional Boy takes place some time after The Fuller Memorandum and before The Rhesus Chart. The main character is Derek Reilly, who appears as a minor character in other Laundry books, and he's a victim of that moral panic: at the beginning of the story he's been imprisoned for decades in a secret camp for dangerous wizards and cultists because the Laundry, just like the more mundane authorities, had trouble realizing at first that D&D was just a game.
A historical fantasy about a different version of the late 18th century, where one of the great struggles between aristocrats and commoners is the right to practice magic, and where slavery is even more horrific than in our world. All but one of the main characters are historical figures, I think, including the revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins in Paris, and the parliamentarians and abolitionists William Pitt and William Wilberforce in London. It's obviously the first of a series.
The book reminded me in some ways of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the parts about the French Revolution reminded me of Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. I was amused to see, in the author's photo on the flyleaf, that both of those books are clearly visible on the bookshelf behind her.
Also published as The Hollow Man. It's a classic locked-room mystery, including a chapter where the detective gives a lecture on the general theory of locked-room mysteries.
Sequel to Witch King, and a continuation of the story. Or a continution of both stories: both books have the same dual-timeline structure, alternating the story of a revolution against the Hierarchs, and a story set generations later in a world that's still trying to rebuild.
I finally understand why the previous book was called Witch King. I don't understand why this one is called Queen Demon. Only two of the characters are demons, and neither of them is a queen.
A late Gideon Fell book, published 1958, just a few years before Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It starts off as a midcentury American small town novel about academics with unhappy marriages, and then we get the locked room mystery. The mystery itself is inspired by a (fictional) unwritten Wilkie Collins novel, including letters from Collins to Dickens hinting at the clever trick.
It's a long novel with no single central character, but with several interlocking and overlapping storylines. It's carefully plotted, and the different storylines and groups of characters mesh together like gears.
This is also one of the books that reminds you that Dickens can be very funny, and sometimes it's the most horrible characters who are the funniest. My favorites are probably the two fortune-hunting swindlers who married each other because each of them mistakenly thought they were marrying money. The first passage that literally made me laugh out loud was when “that horrible old Lady Tippins (relict of the late Sir Thomas Tippins, knighted in mistake for somebody else by His Majesty King George the Third, who, while performing the ceremony, was graciously pleased to observe, “What, what, what? Who, who, who? Why, why, why?’) begins to be dyed and varnished for the interesting occasion.”
It begins with someone stealing hats and putting them in whimsical places, then we get the theft of an Edgar Allan Poe, then a murder. Yes, all is connected.