I have read so many duds and books recently that I gave up on because their meh factor was way too high. These are the pearls in a bit of a swamp, the ones I actually finished. Bea Howe, Lady With The Green Fingers. The Life of Jane Loudon I rather unfairly only think of … Continue reading Books I Want To Keep
Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, which I found completely delightful, is the fourth of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer novels. The first novel in the group, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet (2014), initially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, was nominated for six literary prizes, including the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Women’s … Continue reading Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
Oriel Malet, My Bird Sings
Oriel Malet's name has been wafting past my attention now for years, probably decades, and I've never paid much attention to her before now, which is a bit shocking. She was an accomplished novelist, Welsh, from a titled family, and her second novel, My Bird Sings, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1946, and … Continue reading Oriel Malet, My Bird Sings
More good books
Books that have shone out during my recent long run of duds as being really splendid reads, giving me faith that good books are out there if you keep at it long enough. Gossamer Years This is the revised translation by Edward Seidensticker from 1960 of a nameless 10th-century Japanese noblewoman’s complaints about her very … Continue reading More good books
Strange Horizons
From time to time I review books in the online science fiction & fantasy magazine Strange Horizons. I was impressed, but not in a good way, about Paul Kincaid's new study of Brian Aldiss. Kincaid: good. Aldiss: awful. I reviewed the new edition of J D Beresford's fascinating Edwardian pandemic novel A World Of Women. … Continue reading Strange Horizons
I Have Doubts
More sour remarks about books I tried and found wanting. Hugh Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair This 1925 novel pops up regularly in lists about the supernatural canon as a gem of twentieth-century Gothic horror. It is certainly horrifying, but it’s a novella stretched out painfully beyond the natural length of its … Continue reading I Have Doubts
Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell
This biography of Gertrude Bell begins slowly, rockets up to high speed, but goes a bit flumph at the end. As the Guardian's review back in 2006 noted, Howell seems to regard Bell's thwarted love affair with a married man as the central moment of her subject's life, and is not interested enough in the … Continue reading Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell
Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt
This 1938 memoir by the prolific and highly skilled author Elinor Mordaunt (not her birth name) floats airily between the firm land of fact and history and the boundless seas of improbable possibilities. Mordaunt is an extraordinary character. I commissioned the publication of a collection of her supernatural short stories last year, and I was … Continue reading Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt
J D Beresford, A World of Women
I reviewed the new MIT press edition of J D Beresford's Goslings (US title: A World of Women) for Strange Horizons. It's good!
Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina
I lived outside the UK from 2001 to 2016, so I missed a lot of new books I would otherwise have gobbled up on their first publication. (There were good English bookshops where we lived, but I still missed things.) I only realised that this exceptional biography of Lydia Lopokova existed because I met a … Continue reading Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina
Kate Macdonald 