2025/004: The Fox Wife — Yangsze Choo

A hundred years ago, the family might have called in an exorcist and then I might really have been in trouble, but as it was, his steward could only regard me with nervous suspicion. [p. 209]

Manchuria, 1908. A woman known as Snow is searching for a Mongolian photographer; an elderly man named Bao has been asked to discover the identity of a woman found dead outside a house. Complicating the story is Snow's dual identity (she is also a fox, though she remains in human form throughout the novel), and Bao's ability to recognise when somebody is lying. There is also a family curse that's falling due, a long-lost childhood sweetheart, and a trio of youthful revolutionaries.

Snow's story is a tale of revenge, told in the first person; Bao's story, more reflective and more mundane, is the hunt for a murderer, and is told in third person. This, and their very different concerns and perceptions, make their voices distinct and complementary. Choo's depiction of Manchuria in the last days of the Qing dynasty is vivid and believable, though occasionally she over-explains some aspect of that place and time. The slow adoption of twentieth-century technology and culture was fascinating, too. I liked the two protagonists very much, and in general the story was well-paced, though towards the end the revelations and explanations came rather too quickly. I'm looking forward to reading more of Choo's work.

For the 'A book with white in the cover design' prompt of the 2025 #SomethingBookishReadingChallenge.

For the 'title is ten letters or fewer' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

2025/003: number9dream — David Mitchell

The fortress-grey mountain-faces, the green river snaking out of the gorge, the hanging bridge, mishmash of roofs and power lines, port, timber yards, school soccer ground, gravel pit, Uncle Orange’s tea-fields, our secret beach, its foot rock, waves breaking on the shoals around the whalestone, the long island of Tanegashima where they launch satellites, glockenspiel clouds, the envelope where the sea seals the sky. [p. 45]

Eiji Miyake is twenty years old and has grown up in rural Japan: the novel opens with his arrival in Tokyo, in search of his father. Eight chapters later, he's made contact with a parent, witnessed some appalling violence, fallen in love, benefitted from the kindnesses of others, and had (or dreamt) a conversation with John Lennon about the song 'Number Nine Dream'.

It's fair to say that number9dream is something of an emotional rollercoaster. It's stylistically exuberant, springing from cyberpunk to thriller to murder mystery to family saga to gang warfare to surreally fantastical -- with Goatwriter, who is a writer and also a goat. (Like all writers he devours his drafts.) There is a lot going on, and not all of it is reliably narrated. Eiji is prone to daydreams and fantasy, and he's naive in some ways and melodramatic in others. He has a difficult family history (sister dead, for which he blames himself; mother alcoholic and absent; father married to someone else and absent) and he once sawed the head off a thunder god with a hacksaw from a junior carpenter set.

I found some of the violence difficult to read, but I enjoyed the rapid switches of mood and genre, and the depiction of life in modern Tokyo. And I greatly appreciated the ways in which Eiji was open to kindness -- both in acts of kindness towards others, and in being able to gracefully accept help and support. Mitchell's writing is dense and allusive (everything is connected! but not always in obvious or even realistic ways) and often very funny, though I think I like his landscapes best. And there is an actual cat.

I bought this in October 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

For the 'title starts with letter N' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

I imagined there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who I really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake. When I went to sleep and dreamed, he woke up, and remembered my waking life as his dream. And vice versa. [p. 407]

2025/002: The Bride of the Blue Wind — Victoria Goddard

"Never once," said Sardeet, "did he ask me my name." [chapter 5]

I started reading this expecting a novel: it's a novella, the first in Goddard's 'Sisters Avramapul trilogy', featuring the three daughters (Sardeet, Pali and Arzu) of the Bandit Queen of the Oclaresh. This is the story of how Sardeet became the bride of a powerful spirit, the Blue Wind, and how Pali and Arzu rescued her. It's a version of the Bluebeard story with an Arabian Nights flavour, intense and poetic. 

I think I would have liked it better if Sardeet (later to be known as the most beautiful woman in the Nine Worlds) had been older, but she's fourteen when the Blue Wind makes her his bride -- and yes, she's consenting and happy (or thinks she is), but I couldn't help thinking of her as a child.

I'm looking forward to the other two novellas in the trilogy, though. Possibly I will like Pali more if I read about her youth: and I know so little about Arzu, the Weaver...

For the 'A book with an adjective in the title' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge. Blue!

2025/001: The Masquerades of Spring — Ben Aaronovitch

Later, when I told Lucy about the love that dare not speak its name, he held me close and said that it may not speak its name, ‘But it sure as shit sings the blues.’ [loc. 263]

New York in the Roaring Twenties, the height of the Jazz Age: a city where an expat English magician can listen to the best jazz in the world, seek out the company of like-minded (i.e. queer) men, and avoid the attentions of the Folly, who took a dim view of his youthful japes. Augustus Berrycloth-Young, man about town, has a Black lover (Lucien, or Lucy), a Black valet (Beauregard, who arrives under mysterious circumstances), and a taste for the finer things in life. But he's loyal to his country. When the Folly's chief fixer, one Thomas Nightingale, arrives from London on the trail of an enchanted saxophone, Gussie rises to the occasion and assists, financially and esoterically, with Nightingale's investigations.

This was immense fun, a great start to 2025, and features a drag ball, the Harlem Renaissance and a tantalising catalogue of (sadly fictional) volumes in 'The Further Adventures of the Remarkable Beauregard', which seem to have a Jeeves and Wooster vibe, and make me suspect that there's much more to Gussie's valet than meets the eye. I'd love to read them...

For the 'Set in Spring' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

For the 'Seriously Long Series' prompt of the 2025 Speculative Fiction challenge. This is part of the 'Rivers of London' series, though it's a side-story rather than the main arc.

2024/184: Antiemetic for Homesickness — Romalyn Ante

and while your house grew with gifts -
a rooster crowing in a bayong,
a sack of corn, whiffs of ripe jackfruit, 

     a patient woke
     and accused me of stealing
     her job; 

[from 'The Shaman, the Servant: for my grandfather']

I first became aware of Ante's poetry via the Guardian's Poem of the Week column, and liked her interweaving of Filipino and British culture. Ante, who's from the Phillipines, has worked as an NHS nurse. This first collection of her work -- published in 2020, when things had become much worse -- is full of vignettes of NHS life. The women who've reminded her of her mother, the casual racism, the Filipino migrant community, the memories of a home to which she can never return ... 

There's a 'Boodle Fight of Words and Terminologies' at the end of the book, though this doesn't explain every unfamiliar word of phrase: there are also notes on some of the poems. (In some cases, the notes made me realise I had completely missed the point of a particular poem!)

Fulfils the ‘A Poetry Collection by a Non Caucasian Writer’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge. I bought this in paperback, and read it very slowly over about five months, sometimes rereading a poem two or three times. A slow, thoughtful, beautiful book to list as my last for 2024.

2024/183: How the Light Gets In — Louise Penny

"...He’s spending most of his time in some small village in the Townships, and when he’s not there he’s distracted by Beauvoir. It’s too late. He can’t stop it now. Besides, he doesn’t even know what’s happening.” [p. 190]

Culmination of the arc that began in Bury Your Dead, or perhaps earlier: perhaps all the way back to Still Life, the first of the Gamache novels. Luckily, it is not the last of the series: but I feel I can relax and take a breath now.

This novel is set some months after the events of The Beautiful Mystery. Beauvoir has gone to work for Francoeur, Gamache's nemesis, and is once more addicted to painkillers: his relationship has broken down, though he still parks his car outside his ex's flat to mourn. Gamache's Murder team is fragmented, with many agents reassigned or quitting. And there are at least three crimes under investigation here: the apparent suicide of a woman, the death of another woman who was the last survivor of a set of quintuplets, and a wicked conspiracy that dates back more than a decade, to one of Gamache's few failures. Gamache knows that he's being marginalised, and he knows, more or less, who he can still trust. He's not sure about Agent Yvette Nichol, but he and his allies need her help to hack into police and government records. Luckily, they can't easily be traced to Three Pines, where there's little internet and no mobile signal...

I will probably need to reread this (quelle domage) because I raced through the final third, barely pausing to marvel at the cinematographic brilliance of Penny's scene-cuts and structuring. Everything does come together in a shocking conclusion -- which, luckily, takes place in the penultimate chapter. The final chapter ties up quite a few loose threads, but is very definitely a new beginning for several of the characters. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series ... but not quite yet.

2024/182: The Balancing Stone — Victoria Goddard

"I've heard that if you whisper a question into their ears, you'll be sure to find out the answer. Though it probably won't be an answer you want to hear."
"Is that what the stories say?"
"That's what all stories teach us. [p. 49]

A brief, calm and uplifting interlude on the edges of the Greenwing and Dart series. Hope Stornoway, who's in love with Jemis Greenwing's friend Hal (who happens to be the Duke of Fillering Pool) is staying in Ragnor Bella over the Winterturn festival. In order to claim her inheritance, she needs to discover her true name ... 

Luckily Ragnor Bella's reputation for dullness is wholly undeserved, and when Hope goes for a walk she encounters interesting rocks, a two-tailed fox and a bookseller who offers oddly specific philosophical arguments in answer to Hope's dilemma. Short and sweet: I'm really looking forward to the next full-length novel in this series!