I began March in Florence, with friends. I had a totally asymptomatic case of Covid, where I took a lot of long walks outside and read and worked inside. Halfway through the month I flew to Chicago to go to the Renaissance Society of America conference, where I told a lot of surprised academics that I loved their books. Then we started preparing for this year’s papal election of 1492, which is just going to eat April. I read eight books, and as usual they’re a mixed lot!
10 Things That Never Happened — Alexis Hall (2023)
So there are contrived set-ups where you throw the book across the room, and there are contrived set-ups where you sigh and go with it, and there are contrived set-ups that actually work. The difference is the motivation of the characters. If you’re in someone’s head and the ridiculous thing is a thing they would do, or if things are moving too fast for them to stop without making things worse, then the most implausible things can work. That’s the case here. Hall gives us long enough to get to know our first person narrator Sam before he gets hit on the head. The way that in his concussed fuddle he feigns amnesia then makes that feigned amnesia just seems like a thing he would do, for reasons that, if not perfectly sensible, are at least reasonable to him, and therefore to us, his invisible audience.
It’s a case of complicity, really, getting us to go along with it and be invested in it by having the character be a person who would totally do this nonsensical thing and be unable to back down from it, and having him confide in us why he is doing it and make us go along with it. This is a lot of over-thinking for a sweet romance of two guys who are very different but who each need what each other has to offer, but I got thinking about why it works. Sam’s voice is great, I was invested in his worries before the concussion so that his solution made sort of sense. The fact that other characters who were in on it also thought it was bonkers helped. So, in conclusion, sweet romance, excellent other characters, contrived premise: Hall is a very good writer.
Pietro Bembo on Aetna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist — Gareth D. Williams (2017)
This is a non-fiction book about Pietro Bembo’s 1496 account of his ascent of Mount Etna in Sicily, including the text of Bembo’s book both in the original Latin and in translation. It analyses everything about Bembo’s life, his father’s life, his choice to make the book a dialogue between them, his classical allusions, the volcano, the printing of De Aetna—it’s a very thorough book with tons of detail and discussion. If you’re interested in Bembo, in the Renaissance relationship with nature on the one hand and antiquity on the other, or early modern books, then this is great. It’s well written, but very long.
Selected Poems 2009-2021 — Roz Kaveney (2022)
A collection of Roz Kaveney’s poetry, showing her immense range of subject matter. The thing that unites these poems is a powerful ability with metre and rhyme, combined with Roz’s intense emotional engagement with her subjects. Although Roz is a fantasy writer, these are not for the most part genre poems; they deal with history, people, transition, queer and trans issues, life and death. Some of the most moving are those addressed to recently dead friends.
Murder by the Book — Martin Edwards (2021)
Another collection of Golden Age short stories, these themed around books and writers, and almost all of them excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed reading even the slightest of them, and some of them were truly engaging. I didn’t find any new-to-me authors I wanted to read more of this time, sadly, but what was here was great.
The Fair Miss Fortune — D.E. Stevenson (1937)
I wanted to read this for ages after Claire of the Captive Reader blog said that it was about twins setting up a teashop, which means there is an entire subgenre of twins setting up teashops in the 1930s. (The other two are Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus.) I was therefore disappointed that the teashop in this book remains an unaccomplished intention and never actually opens. This is one of those romance novels in which the setup provides all the obstacles. There are secretly two Miss Fortunes, they’re identical twins, so sometimes Jane isn’t as kind as other times because she’s actually Joan. All ends happily ever after, and though this is a very slight book it’s a pleasant enough read. Sometimes Stevenson is very good, and even at her shallowest her descriptions are sprightly and funny. So I wouldn’t start here, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
Defiance — C.J. Cherryh (2023)
Volume 22 of the Foreigner series—talking about “don’t start here,” I think this would be completely incomprehensible if you did start here. This series is very strange. It starts off jerkily, which doesn’t do it any favours, and then it gets brilliant from books 2 to 6, and then it, weirdly, becomes a kind of soap opera set on an alien planet in which we are concerned with characters, most of them aliens—there’s one major human character, and some books have a handful of others. As so often with Cherryh, they are about being between cultures, between species, alone in a place where nobody is like you and home isn’t home if you go there. But what can I say about volume 22 except that I didn’t need a long recap at the beginning (even if it is on a train) and I no longer believe that the subplot with the Shadow Guild is actually resolved when it has seemed to be actually resolved too many times now. I’m just going to keep reading these for as long as Cherryh wants to keep writing them.
You Can’t Hurry Love — Portia MacIntosh (2017)
Sequel to Bad Bridesmaid. Sequels to romances are tricky, because the romance reader contract requires that the characters are happy ever after at the end, and if you undermine that it’s bad, and if they’re happy ever after, how do you have a plot? This is a story of Mia Valentine, who changed her life so she could be with her true love, but she did actually like her life and she misses it, and she does want to be with him forever but she doesn’t want to have a big fancy wedding…so essentially there are misunderstandings to do with her career and wedding, but they never really question each other’s love. It almost works, and it is funny.
Two Years Before the Mast — Richard Henry Dana Jr (1840)
Re-read. Terrific memoir of a trip Dana took as a Harvard dropout on a sailing ship from Boston to California (then part of Mexico) around Cape Horn, as a common sailor. The details of the sailing of the ship and the working conditions, along with Dana’s own nineteenth-century point of view, are fascinating, and so is the account of the industry of California—hide curing—and all the detail of how he lives on the beach and gets picked up again by the ship, and how he’s worried about staying too long and not being able to get back to being anything but a sailor. There are also some very dramatic storms off Cape Horn. It’s also notable that when the Gold Rush happened a few years later this was the only book about California, so everyone read it, and his description of what a great location San Francisco would be for a city is one of the reasons it’s a city.
