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landingtreeDark Reflections, by Samuel Delany.
Realist novel about the life of someone with many of Delany's own marked identity traits - black gay writer in New York before and after Stonewall - who is deeply unlike Delany in various ways, most notably: his writing career remains largely unrecognised, and he is ill at ease with his own sexuality. Interesting project, kind of makes me want to go off and compare Delany's favourite writers with the ones Andrew, the protagonist, likes - not going to be a favourite of mine but I like being inside Delany's writing.
The Merlin Conspiracy, by Diana Wynne Jones.
Every so often over the years I’ve remembered that there is one Diana Wynne Jones novel I never read (not counting The Changeover.) I’m not sure why I didn’t get around to it, except for a vague sense of lack of hype. But it does mean that now I’ve had the treat of reading one last Jones novel as an adult whose plot I did not know! Also not a favourite but I enjoyed it a lot and made guesses about the plot that were totally wrong (see under the cut.)
It never occurred to me that this book might be a thriller, and it mostly isn’t, but I did think the early sequence in the magic security detail of a prince attending a cricket match, combined with the appearance of super-badass Romanov, was the book waving at other ‘The proper noun common noun’ titles.)
It feels weird to be reading this last, like putting a puzzle piece into a jigsaw without having known there was a piece missing. Partly this is listening to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones (and I read this now partly so as to have thought about it well in advance of the podcast getting to it), partly it's having read all the other late DWJ: it feels close to Year of the Griffin, having a dyslexic character whose magic is backwards, and a broader point to make about how a particular system of education in wizard’s magic gives access to only a tiny blinkered subset of magic's real possibilities - and also they're both structured around a sequence of striking people showing up. The book starts out in the retinue of the King of Blest (very nearly Britain), which constantly travels the country to maintain its magics. And in fact it is a book about touring Blest to maintain its magics, although not quite in the way the retinue is supposed to.
I really expected the allegedly-friendly magid grandfather to be the villain in this one! He turns up so conveniently next to everything that goes wrong! He arrives just when the prayermaster has been murdered offscreen, he's there when Nick is sent travelling between worlds, and he's the person who could have lied about the trustworthiness of the Merlin. I want to reread it to see if I think this was a deliberate red herring or just my own paranoia. Only when he set about rescuing the salamanders did I question my guess. In the end, this is a book without secret evildoers: the conspiracy of the title is not much hidden from the reader, only from most of the authority figures in Britain - which is bad enough.
Peregrine: Primus by Avram Davidson.
Read this, preferably aloud, for wit and flowing language and classics jokes. Do not read it for plot or character or women doing things. It is a pure picaresque, pleased with its own prose style (and with some reason to be.) I found two-thirds of this book boring, was delighted by the middle third mainly because that was the bit I read aloud to myself and was in the mood for, and on the balance of all this, am selling my copy, having kept it around unread for more than ten years because Michael Swanwick put it on a list of recommendations.
Currently reading:
I'm halfway through the sweet collection of letters between a group of booksellers and an overseas customer who they become friends with, 84 Charing Cross Road. It is very short and I will finish it this week.
I am also halfway through The Power Broker, the Robert Moses biography, but that is a very different halfway through! I will probably post about it at more length at some point, it is very good, but I've got to the point where I need to take a break, because Robert Moses was in many ways not a wonderful force in the world to begin with but I think I'm at the pivot-point where the last of his redeeming features evaporate, and I need to take a deep breath first. (For a big chunk of the book, he is very good at getting things done, in situations where things desperately need to get done. But now he has reached the point where he's too powerful for anyone to stop him and also too busy to check whether the things he's doing are actually good; but of course they're good! He's the one doing them! Gosh I hate Robert Moses.) For several weeks I have been responding to almost entirely unrelated bits of conversation with, "This reminds me of something I learned about Robert Moses, a man I hate," so like I said, deep breath.
Realist novel about the life of someone with many of Delany's own marked identity traits - black gay writer in New York before and after Stonewall - who is deeply unlike Delany in various ways, most notably: his writing career remains largely unrecognised, and he is ill at ease with his own sexuality. Interesting project, kind of makes me want to go off and compare Delany's favourite writers with the ones Andrew, the protagonist, likes - not going to be a favourite of mine but I like being inside Delany's writing.
The Merlin Conspiracy, by Diana Wynne Jones.
Every so often over the years I’ve remembered that there is one Diana Wynne Jones novel I never read (not counting The Changeover.) I’m not sure why I didn’t get around to it, except for a vague sense of lack of hype. But it does mean that now I’ve had the treat of reading one last Jones novel as an adult whose plot I did not know! Also not a favourite but I enjoyed it a lot and made guesses about the plot that were totally wrong (see under the cut.)
It never occurred to me that this book might be a thriller, and it mostly isn’t, but I did think the early sequence in the magic security detail of a prince attending a cricket match, combined with the appearance of super-badass Romanov, was the book waving at other ‘The proper noun common noun’ titles.)
It feels weird to be reading this last, like putting a puzzle piece into a jigsaw without having known there was a piece missing. Partly this is listening to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones (and I read this now partly so as to have thought about it well in advance of the podcast getting to it), partly it's having read all the other late DWJ: it feels close to Year of the Griffin, having a dyslexic character whose magic is backwards, and a broader point to make about how a particular system of education in wizard’s magic gives access to only a tiny blinkered subset of magic's real possibilities - and also they're both structured around a sequence of striking people showing up. The book starts out in the retinue of the King of Blest (very nearly Britain), which constantly travels the country to maintain its magics. And in fact it is a book about touring Blest to maintain its magics, although not quite in the way the retinue is supposed to.
I really expected the allegedly-friendly magid grandfather to be the villain in this one! He turns up so conveniently next to everything that goes wrong! He arrives just when the prayermaster has been murdered offscreen, he's there when Nick is sent travelling between worlds, and he's the person who could have lied about the trustworthiness of the Merlin. I want to reread it to see if I think this was a deliberate red herring or just my own paranoia. Only when he set about rescuing the salamanders did I question my guess. In the end, this is a book without secret evildoers: the conspiracy of the title is not much hidden from the reader, only from most of the authority figures in Britain - which is bad enough.
Peregrine: Primus by Avram Davidson.
Read this, preferably aloud, for wit and flowing language and classics jokes. Do not read it for plot or character or women doing things. It is a pure picaresque, pleased with its own prose style (and with some reason to be.) I found two-thirds of this book boring, was delighted by the middle third mainly because that was the bit I read aloud to myself and was in the mood for, and on the balance of all this, am selling my copy, having kept it around unread for more than ten years because Michael Swanwick put it on a list of recommendations.
Currently reading:
I'm halfway through the sweet collection of letters between a group of booksellers and an overseas customer who they become friends with, 84 Charing Cross Road. It is very short and I will finish it this week.
I am also halfway through The Power Broker, the Robert Moses biography, but that is a very different halfway through! I will probably post about it at more length at some point, it is very good, but I've got to the point where I need to take a break, because Robert Moses was in many ways not a wonderful force in the world to begin with but I think I'm at the pivot-point where the last of his redeeming features evaporate, and I need to take a deep breath first. (For a big chunk of the book, he is very good at getting things done, in situations where things desperately need to get done. But now he has reached the point where he's too powerful for anyone to stop him and also too busy to check whether the things he's doing are actually good; but of course they're good! He's the one doing them! Gosh I hate Robert Moses.) For several weeks I have been responding to almost entirely unrelated bits of conversation with, "This reminds me of something I learned about Robert Moses, a man I hate," so like I said, deep breath.
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Date: 2025-11-20 02:39 am (UTC)It is a brilliant and entertaining book, though, too.
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Date: 2025-11-20 02:39 am (UTC)