2026/050: You-Gin One-Gin — Douglas Robinson

"I met her on the alien spaceship."
"Oh really."
"Don't take that arch tone with me, Volodya. You're dead, remember? You don't get to be arch."
"What, there's a rule? You die, you forfeit your right to rise above a situation?"
..."Hell, I don't know. Be arch. You're Vladimir Nabokov. If you're not arch you're, I don't know, Raymond Carver."
"Anything but that," I say with a histrionic shudder. I've read his work. It feels as if he wrote it with a hammer. [loc. 3018]

A riotous, fast-paced, exuberant metafiction -- or 'sort of a novel', per the subtitle -- set at a (fictional) university in Liberal, Kansas. The story starts with a stage production of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which not only breaks the fourth wall, but features Pushkin himself as a character. Theatre professor Kip Knurl is playing Pushkin, and his immersion in the role threatens his marriage. 

Then Kip is apparently shot -- though the x-ray shows no bullet -- and the action switches to hapless playwright Douglas Robinson, along with alien-abductee barista Sherry and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov, as they try to discover why the play (or the character) has been targetted, and whether the chair of the theatre department has really been possessed by the spirit of a medieval poet. It's at the local lingerie league football game, though, that things get really weird...

This was great fun, witty and playful. I liked the framing narrative in which the manager of the Liberal State University Press disclaims any knowledge of or responsibility for the events portrayed within: and I really enjoyed the beats of the playscript which forms the first third of the novel. Nabokov's exchanges with the character Douglas Robinson (surely not to be confused with the author Douglas Robinson) are a delight: it's Nabokov's 'joke' pronounciation of the play's title that becomes the novel's title. And I appreciated the ways in which the novel interrogated Eugene Onegin, and how that work has been reduced from Pushkin's own metafiction to just another failed romance. (See Tchaikovsky's opera for details.) 

I would have liked the female characters to be a little more independent, instead of being defined by their relationships to men, and I'm still not wholly sure about what happened at the end of the story. But a fun, clever read which blends ghosts, literary theory, alien abduction and campus life.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. Already published!

2026/049: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires — Grady Hendrix

"He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”[quote]

This does exactly what it says on the cover, and it is a delight. Patricia Campbell is a stay-at-home mother, married to Carter, who is a patronising git who cheats far from the ideal husband, though he does earn enough to keep Patricia and the kids -- Korey and Blue -- in the style to which they are accustomed. Patricia quits one book club because she'd bounced off Cry the Beloved Country and was encouraged to leave by Grace, the woman who ran the book club: instead, she joins a newly-formed book club that mostly seems to read true crime.

Which is probably why, when the charismatic James moves in next door, her initial liking quickly warps into suspicion. Kids -- Black kids -- are going missing, Patricia has been attacked by an elderly neighbour, and her mother-in-law Miss Mary is savaged by a horde of rats. ("She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?") James, though, seems so pleasant, even if Miss Mary did take an instant dislike to him. And the book club's menfolk think he's great, and that he'll bring them fortune and prosperity with the investments he encourages them to make.

When Patricia voices her concerns to Carter, his response is to prescribe her antidepressants.

The book club ladies aren't heroic, or super-powered, or even especially confident: they're also somewhat racist (though of course they'd deny that), in that it's a Black woman who has to push the plot along. There is also a great deal of misogyny in this novel, larded with religion, strict etiquette and 1990s politics: enough to make it a horror novel in a subtler key even without the revelation of James' nature.

I really enjoyed this audiobook. Bahni Turpin's narration is smooth, and the story flowed slowly but inexorably. Very impressed, too, by the characterisation of the various women, each of them an individual with a background and a life. And by the fact that their success was rooted in their domestic skills, rather than anything magical or superpowered.

Warnings for violence both mundane and vampiric; for racism (and white saviour-ism); for misogyny; for (off-page) rape and sexual assault.

Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot carpool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

2026/048: A History of the World in Six Glasses — Tom Standage

Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Standage explores the histories of six 'period-defining' drinks, from beer in the Neolithic to cola (Coca-Cola vs Pepsi) in the modern era, and explains how each beverage has shaped history.

The drinks in question are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Cola: there's an epilogue focussing on water, contrasting the lack of safe drinking water in parts of the developing world to the modern Western fad for bottled water -- often pretty much the same stuff as comes out of the tap.

There were some really fascinating connections and remarks in this book. I learnt that the Coca-Cola Company supplies 3% of humanity's total liquid intake; that Caligula drank century-old Falernian wine; about the role of rum in the slave trade and in the European colonisation of America; about the all-male coffee houses that spawned the Stock Exchange and Lloyds of London; that tea was initially vastly more expensive than coffee, and how it sparked the Opium Wars; about anti-Coca Cola sentiment in the Communist Bloc, and how Coke came to represent America while Pepsi cornered the Soviet market. (Krushchev was a fan.) There's also a fascinating appendix on how to taste ancient drinks, from King Cnut's Ale (St Peter's Brewery) through retsina to Fentiman's Curiosity Cola.

Again, this audiobook wasn't a wholly great experience. I missed being able to highlight interesting sentences, and I found the narrator's voice rather bland. But this was an interesting book and I'd recommend it as an accessible -- albeit Western-biased -- guide to the history of popular drinks.

2026/047: The Blue, Beautiful World — Karen Lord

The entire planet was at a tipping point, ripe for salvation or destruction, angels of deliverance or barbarians. And, in the meantime, bread and circuses made life bearable and occasionally diverting. [loc. 354]

Earth is struggling with the effects of climate change. A disparate group of people -- rock star Owen, VR pioneer Peter Hendrix, Kanoa and his friends in a World Council Global Government workgroup, the mysterious Tariq -- are trying to prepare the world for first contact with various alien factions, some of whom are already present on Earth.

Listening to this novel did not work well for me: I lost track of who was who, and didn't appreciate the abrupt changes of focus (from Owen's gigs to Kanoa's studies to Peter's discussions of identity). The narrator's various accents jarred, and for much of the time I had no idea what was going on. 

This is a problem with me, rather than with the book: but I suspect it didn't help that this is actually the third in a trilogy, a fact I wasn't aware of from the book's page on Libro.fm. I didn't engage with most of the characters (though I did like Kanoa, and what little we saw of Owen's sister) and I kept wanting more detail, more background.

I'll definitely read another novel by Karen Lord, but I will read it in (e)print, rather than listen to an audiobook.

2026/046: Night Life — John Lewis-Stempel

I keep looking around the dark corridor for secret drinkers, then understand that the beeriness is the fermenting combination of all the midsummer scents, and it is old and original. A Neanderthal standing on the bank of the river, spear in hand, would have known it. [p.108]

Subtitled 'Walking Britain's Wild Landscapes After Dark', this is a short collection of pieces about Lewis-Stempel's thoughts and experiences of walking at night -- on the Welsh coast, in the Lake District, and on the Thames Path at Hammersmith (adjacent to the London Wetland Centre). He's a farmer, and in some of the essays there is a lovely sense of comfortable familiarity with his land. I realise that I miss having 'my' land, the places I'd walk every day, the places so familiar that I notice any change and every seasonal recurrence.

Lots of fascinating facts and observations here: I learnt that birds flying in a V formation can fly almost twice as far as one bird flying alone; that the word 'delirium' is rooted in the notion of going off track when ploughing; that brent geese are named for their dark colour, 'brent' being a corruption of the old Norse 'brantr', burnt.

I appreciated his unease when in London ('I'm fritted by the city at night') but could not help thinking that I would not be keen on walking alone, at night, along the darkest part of the Thames Path. (Men's fears are different from women's.) Overall, though, I really appreciated his observations and his sheer joy in existing as part of the natural world.

2026/045: The Casefile of Jay Moriarty — Kit Walker

"...since when do children’s authors incite hate crimes?”
“In this case, just within the last few years,” Jay said. “If Clay was a bigot before that, she at least kept it to herself.” [p. 139]

Collects the first five instalments of the 'Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran' series, in which Moriarty is a brilliant hacker (and trans man) and Moran is ex-SAS. Together, they fight crime... The setting is contemporary London: the crimes they fight range from a cover-up of lethally-faulty aviation software to -- as per quotation -- a transphobic children's author, Anya Clay, revealed to be appropriating money from her own charity.

I read the first of these novellas, which is available for free at Amazon, and promptly purchased the collection, because I like Moriarty (and his evolving relationship with Moran) so much. Fun, pacy, violent and cunning: highly enjoyable, though animal lovers may wish to skip 'Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger'.

2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming. [loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

Then, one night at a charity event -- where Tuesday encounters local tycoon Nathaniel Arches, and maybe flirts a little -- a flamboyant old man named Vincent Pryce drops dead in front of Boston's finest. And somehow Tuesday, Dex, Nathaniel and Dorry wind up playing Pryce's post-mortem game ('an adventure of intellect, intuition and imagination that begins now and will culminate on the night of my funeral'), with a prize that might be a share in Pryce's vast wealth ... or an item from his collection of haunted artifacts.

This is a multi-layered novel: the puzzles of the quest itself; a murder mystery; Tuesday's growing, and reluctant, attraction to 'Archie'; ghosts, Edgar Allan Poe, Goth culture, karaoke bars and urban exploration. I loved how centred Tuesday was, and related to her liking for solitude. I liked the ways in which the protagonists each had something haunting them (not literally) and how each of them confronted their past and their future. The descriptions of Boston made me want to go back. (It's been decades.) And the supernatural (or magic realist?) elements -- Amelia Earhart's goggles! -- were a delight. Plenty of humour, and a compassionate and hopeful vibe.

I've owned this for years, and only got around to it because it fitted one of the reading challenge prompts ('day of the week in the title'): I loved the novel, and I'm so grateful for that prompt! Looking forward to reading Racculia's other novels...

... when you gender-flip Indiana Jones, you don’t come up with Lara Croft—the last thing Lara Croft is is a fallible everywoman—but instead an independent, knowledgeable, determined…spinster. Indiana Jones is a spinster: self-supporting and self-contained, unmarried and unlikely to pair with any one partner.... Indy’s singleness, however—if it’s remarkable at all—is aspirational, not pejorative. So Tuesday Mooney was also inspired by an attempt to play with that double standard, to investigate ideas about independence and partnership, family and friendship, and all the other forms of love and human connection that make a life full. [Excellent interview with the author (which also explains why the title is Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts in the US]