Books Completed March 2023

 Comically late for some reason. Wait, the reason is I worked too much this month. Whoops!

 

 

A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne - Another little free library find. I think I was expecting more of a classic "young man's adventure story", but this was written while that pattern was still being figured out. Heck, this might have set the pattern: You had your genius, eccentric know-it-all; your taciturn, inexhaustible strong man; and your somewhat clueless youngster along as a cipher, off to some mysterious destination. I did not expect the first several chapters to be dedicated to solving some random cryptogram. Also, spoilers for a 100+ year old book, just because the journey is to doesn't mean they actually make it there, which... weird to a modern reader. I liked the mushroom forest and its inhabitants, and the sea monster fights, which for some reason played out in my mind like Harryhausen scenes.

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - This is the first book I think I've read with multiple Achewood references. I struggle with books with large casts or shifting narratives, which is basically the point of this series, but I keep coming back to it and just going limp for some parts. It's probably deserving of a more focused reading (or reader), but I'm having fun. Getting some gaps from the previous two books filled in by a long series of flashbacks was appreciated and well-told.

 

I don't like that it's continuing an apparent trend in modern sci-fi authors of "whoops, Earth got too bad, better build a lot of spaceships and move everyone to another planet". I hope we can start realizing that fixing what we've got is so much less complicated than this trope. I realize it's a story hook, but I worry it's being popularized this way.

Irish Fairy & Folk Tales by W. B. Yeats - Coincidentally finished this on St. Patrick's Day, which was neat. This collection from 1892 grabbed me for how grounded in places it was. A lot of fairy tale collections have been polished or aggregated to be "long ago and far away". These were "two hundred and eight years ago, there". Like, the history of specific rocks. Many of the tales were written in dialect and ostensibly collected directly from cunning folk who had direct contact with the faeries, or just one degree of separation. The quality of this actual edition was really bad unfortunately, with offset pages and tons of scanlation errors.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire - I wonder if knowing this was part six of a series before I read this Christmas present would have influenced my read at all. It's a standalone story, but maybe there were established patterns I could have grabbed on to. I felt adrift in this one. There were maybe five acts, and the connections between them felt weak, with characters just kind of drifting out of the story. It lost a point for "and then someone knocked her unconscious" at least once. I probably just wasn't the audience for this one. I did like the attention that was paid to how the main, human character having feet would interact with a world where all the inhabitants had hooves, at least.

Work (The Nib #13) - Another nice and pointed collection from The Nib. Always glad when one of these show up. The bumps about obsolete jobs of yore were great. I'd read the entry about the Pinkerton Agency online before, but it was good to get a refresher on these bastards. "Not Working" was a hopeful piece, and I'm wondering what I can do to help that along.

Bea Wolf by Zack Weinersmith, illustrated by Boulet - I preordered three copies of this and then forgot about them. Nothing like a present you get for yourself (and each of your siblings' kids). What a fun approach to this classic. I should go back and read some more bits aloud, the language really feels both ancient and modern at once. The illustrations are a pleasure as always, particularly the villains, and I liked their attention to having a diverse cast of kids. The afterward was interesting too, and has led me to order a copy of Headley's new translation that I'm looking forward to.