Always Read

In which Some Nerd blogs about the books they read; be they good, bad, or just kind of odd.

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102. Spanish Gold, by David Cordingly

Owned?: No, library Page count: 253 My summary: Woodes Rogers was the man who was supposed to solve the pirate problem. Sent out to Nassau to be the governor of the notorious pirate haven, Rogers already had a sailing career and a bestselling book under his belt at the time. When he arrived in the Bahamas, some of the pirates were ready and willing to accept the legitimate life - but others would be pirates to their deaths. This, then, is the story of Woodes Rogers, and what awaited him on the other side… My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

I don't like Woodes Rogers. I know, hot take, I've got beef with a man who died in the eighteenth century. But really, what I don't like isn't him, per se, it's his legacy and how he is discussed in the modern day. Woodes Rogers was meant to be the man who took down piracy, the arm of the law in the British Caribbean, the doom of pirates from the second his ship hit the shores of Nassau. The truth is…a little more pathetic than that. Rogers did bring word of the Act of Grace which pardoned pirates who had committed their crimes before a certain date, but 'King George signed a bit of paper' hardly equates to 'Rogers was a hero'. Many of the pirates just…accepted that pardon without a fight. And of those who did fight, Rogers wasn't the one who took them down; at best, he just deputised the people who did. But above all of that, what I hate about modern-day depictions of Rogers is that they tend to glamourise and lionise him for being on the side of good…despite the fact that the man was an active slave trader throughout his entire life, and gained his money by buying and selling human beings. It would be one thing if the books I read about Rogers acknowledged this. But the ones I've seen tend to just neatly brush his active role in the slave trade under the carpet, as though it isn't important or worth mentioning. For me, that's low. That's the cowardice of trying to create a 'good guys' and a 'bad guys', a hero and a villain, when the truth is that a lot of awful, immoral things were legal and widely practiced at this point in time. We shouldn't sacrifice the nuances of history when we speak about it. But we often do.

This book is another in a long line of books that conveniently ignore Rogers' part in the slave trade. I believe it's briefly mentioned, but nothing more than that. And what's left of Rogers to discuss is…well, not a lot really. The guy didn't do all that much. He found castaway Alexander Selkirk on an island - Selkirk's story is interesting. He sent people after pirates like Vane and Blackbeard - their stories are interesting. But Woodes Rogers was just sort of there the whole time, not doing much. His governance of Nassau left a lot to be desired, and wound up with him sick and in debt, falling into an early grave. This book struggles to keep its focus on Rogers because of that, straying away into other contemporary pirates and sea battles just to keep things interesting, but all that really serves to do is make Rogers look even more pathetic, because this book about him keeps refusing to be about him. And that's really all there is to say about that.

Next, pirate women!

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101. A Sailor of King George, by Captain Frederick Hoffman

Owned?: Yes Page count: 182 My summary: Captain Frederick Hoffman was a sailor between 1793 and 1815, riding in position from a Midshipman to a Captain across several ships. This is his memoir of his time sailing, the things he saw in foreign ports, how he grew from the lowest officer rank on ship, and the unpleasant end to his career after two months as a prisoner of war in France. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

This one's a bit more tenuous in its connection to research. The thing I want to write will be set around the Golden Age of Piracy, the 1710s, and Captain Hoffman was active in the late 18th and early 19th century. Still, I want to read primary sources from the Age of Sail in general where I can find them, and there's always the odd tidbit here and there that's relevant or interesting. Captain Hoffman seems reasonably typical for his day and age - pompous, racist, and kind of a windbag. When he depicted the speech of Black people, it was always in eye dialect and stereotypical for how white people of the era perceived Black people. He also described Black people in caricaturised ways. Par for the course for a white man of the era, I suppose, though not exactly fun to read. He had some fun stories to tell though, I liked when he branched out into little pen portraits of his shipmates or more humorous anecdotes about his time at sea. Made the reasonably dry sailing narrative a little more palatable. I don't really have a lot to say about this one, it was exactly what I expected it would be; no more, no less.

Next…more pirates. Look, the fiction book I'm reading right now is long, okay?

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100. On The Account In The Golden Age, by Joseph Gibbs

Owned?: Yes Page count: 229 My summary: The story of the Caribbean pirates, in the words of the age. Here are extracts from books, newspaper articles, letters, and trial transcripts that describe some of the Caribbean's most notorious pirates, from the actual time that they were active. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Yet another piracy book, I'm afraid. The draw of this one was that it has extracts from contemporary writings about pirates - it's a collection of more primary sources, which is useful for a few reasons. One, if I want to emulate what people of the time were saying about pirates, it's useful to know what was actually being published! Two, it helps me get into the writing style of the time. But more importantly, three, it lets me know the attitudes of the time, how these people were seen and how they were being portrayed. We have characters like Elizabeth Swann from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies who are portrayed as being pirate fangirls in the era that the pirates were active, but that attitude is somewhat anachronistic - we didn't necessarily start romanticising the pirate's life until after this era of piracy was a memory, and it's important to bear that in mind if I want to strive for historical plausibility.

But anyway, this book had a lot of good information. Some of it I'd seen before, in various sources, but that's not exactly a bad thing. I really enjoyed reading what must surely be a piece of creative fiction, the supposed transcripts of conversations preacher Cotton Mather supposedly had with some convicted pirates before they were hanged, in which each of them tearfully confessed all of their sins, came to Jesus, and warned against falling down the same deplorable moral paths that they had trodden. I am sure that all of these conversations definitely happened and that Mather wasn't publishing this to fill his agenda at all. Still, it's fun to see just what was said of pirates at the time. This book isn't groundbreaking by any means, but it's useful! And that's just what I'm looking for.

Next, another account of seafaring life!

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99. Model Home, by Rivers Solomon

Owned?: No, library Page count: 282 My summary: Ezri and their siblings don't go back home anymore. On paper, they had the perfect life. Growing up black in a gated community was never going to be easy, but at least they had their big, comfortable home, right? But a house isn't a home when it's trying to kill you, and Ezri and co got out as soon as they could. Now they're back, after their mother and father's deaths. And all kinds of truths are coming home to roost… My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I've been on a bit of a horror kick lately, huh? Between this, Molka, Spoiled Milk, and The King in Yellow, I've been reading a variety of spooky fiction with various angles on the idea. This is definitively a haunted house story. The whole narrative centres around the house in which protagonist Ezri and their family lived when they were younger; a house that seemed to swallow up children, that killed animals, that moved the kids around in the house and hid them in hard to reach places, that made them sick, that spawned a woman with no face and with which nightmares which the siblings could not love. Part of that is due to their Mama, an overbearing woman who wants perfection from her children - understandably so, given that as the only Black family in their gated community, they feel the pressure to prove themselves to their racist neighbours. But it's still not the best kind of place to grow up in, and when the siblings return to the house as adults to find that their parents are dead, they know what to blame. This was a really interesting horror book, in the vein of what I've come to expect from Solomon, and I enjoyed it a lot! But I will be spoiling it under the cut, so be warned.

Ezri is an interesting character. I've read a few of Solomon's books at this point, and so I know what to expect from their sort of character - invariably a Black person with some kind of nonbinary identity and a lot of issues. That's not a criticism, some authors just have a niche. Ezri is explicitly autistic and traumatised from their past experiences with the house, as well as experiencing periods of dissociation. They are trying to be a good parent to their teenage daughter, Elijah, but the death of their parents plus everything with the house being brought up again means that they are struggling, not helped by their sisters, who have their own issues to contend with. Their head is an interesting one to spend time in - they're contemplative, aware of their own faults but not always able to contend with them, wanting to do better but stopped by their own trauma and everything that's gone on in the house. I found them a very engaging protagonist.

This book revolves around the house that Ezri and their siblings grew up in, which they know to be haunted. The story begins with Ezri getting weird texts from their mother; it transpires that the children were often sick, that a woman with no face lived in the attic, that they'd wake up in strange spots around the house, that animals like the class pet were mysteriously and violently killed in the house, that a child went missing one day and never appeared again. All inexplicable, all terrifying. These occurrences have taken a toll on Ezri and her siblings, to the point where all of them moved far away from that house as soon as they could. This is intercut with a profile of Ezri's mother; an imperfect parent, but not a monster. Ezri spends a lot of time contemplating the ways in which they and their siblings were failed by their mother, but never condemns her completely for all that happened. It's a nuanced view of a parent out of their depths with all that's happening, and a very good character study.

The reveal was interesting. As it turns out, there's nothing supernatural about the house at all. The hauntings, the weird things happening - everything that went wrong in the house was orchestrated by their neighbour, Laurie, who was grooming Ezri throughout their childhood. This is something that Ezri has blocked out, because of the trauma they experienced. Laurie is a racist, and wanted Ezri's family out of her community, and in so doing traumatised and gaslit them as well as abusing Ezri, who was forced into a protector position over their siblings. Ezri's parents didn't want to move, though, because of their pride - this community should be open to them, this is their home. But in making that choice, they failed to protect their children. It's a horror not supernatural but mundane, and while in some cases this shift could just seem like a fake-out, I think it really works here. It's a symptom of a larger societal problem, a problem that all Black people have had to face one way or another. But the ending is not all that bleak, and though the siblings are rocked by the revelations, they still have each other in a way they didn't before. They can heal. Their children can heal. And sometimes, that is enough.

Next, more research books! Are you sick of reading about them yet?

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98. The King In Yellow, by Robert W Chambers

Owned?: No, library Page count: 103 My summary: A cursed play. A man set to be heir to greatness. A sculptor who has discovered a mysterious substance which turns everything to marble. A lost traveller meeting a strange woman on the moors. A yellow sign. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

A while ago, for some reason, I had Lovecraft on the mind. It's going to be my spooky season read, after all - I've had a complete collection of Lovecraft stories just sort of sitting on the shelf for a long time, and I thought I'd get around to it this October. Now, eagle eyed readers will notice that this book was not, in fact, written by HP Lovecraft. But it is something that gets retroactively tied in to the Lovecraftian mythos, and was cited by Lovecraft himself as an influence on his work. Why is any of this relevant to this book? Well, it just happened to be conspicuously sitting on a shelf around the same time that I had Lovecraft on the brain, and it's a slim enough volume that I thought it'd be some kind of appetiser, to whet my whistle for October. Besides, it's considered a classic of weird fiction in itself. Why not try it out?

In this edition, there are five stories - The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, The Yellow Sign, The Demoiselle d'Ys, and The Prophet's Paradise. There are other stories in other versions of The King In Yellow, but for some reason this copy only has those five. All are connected by the motif of the titular fictional play, and some share implied worlds and characters. The first was the most disturbing of the group. It revolves around an incredibly unreliable narrator, Hildred Castaigne, who is supposed to be the heir to the Last King of the Imperial Dynasty of America. See, in the far-off future of 1920 (actually 25 years after this book was published) the USA has prospered, by Castaigne's metric, by getting rid of 'foreigners' and installing suicide booths, among other things. Of course, Castaigne recently took a blow to the head and spent some time in an asylum, so who knows what's really true? Notably, his perception of reality is contradicted by his cousin at multiple times, and we really only have Castaigne's word for any of it. It's a well-told, chilling story, and the fact that we never really know exactly what's going on just adds to the mystery and the eeriness of the story.

I won't give you the same recounting of the other tales; they were all interesting in their own ways, all carrying this motif of a play that, when read, will drive you to insanity. Now, obviously this carries so many ableist overtones in the here and now. That kind of thing is to be expected when dipping into the Lovecraftian mythos, though obviously that doesn't make it okay. I really liked the device of showing us the smallest extracts and ideas from the play, that the reader can imagine how it reads in short snippets, that was a nice touch. Some of the language used in the stories is a little too stuffy and archaic for my personal tastes, but that was okay. Really, the only story I didn't click with here was The Prophet's Paradise - it's more a collection of prose poems on a theme, and I just found it to be too abstract to follow. Still, I'm glad I read it. Roll on October!

Next, a house haunted by horrors.

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97. The Other Within, by Yirmiyahu Yovel

Owned?: Yes Page count: 404 My summary: The Marranos were Jewish people, who when facing expulsion from Spain and Portugal under the Reconquista, decided to convert rather than flee. Some kept remnants of their Jewish faith, practicing the rituals they remembered despite not having contact with any other Jewish people. Not fully Jewish, not fully Christian, the Marranos lived in a strange no-man's-land between the two, the Other within Christian society. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

It's not really hyperbole to say that I've been looking for this book for a long time, without even knowing it. See, this is another research book for the novel I plan to write - and one of the side characters in said novel, set in the early 1700s, is a Spanish man from a Jewish family which, on the surface, converted to Catholicism during the Reconquista, but secretly considers themself Jewish and practices Judaism. The problem I faced was that I had absolutely no idea how people in that situation might act or practice their secret faith. After all, it's not like people secretly practicing an illegal religion meticulously wrote down what they believed and how they were doing it, or anything like that. Because, you know, if the Inquisition found it, that'd be as good as a confession. This book, which I found in a second-hand book shop, makes the case that the Marranos were in a sort of no-man's land - not Jewish, not Catholic, sort of both and neither at the same time. Detached from Jewish traditions which were passed down by word of mouth, but keeping apart from mainstream Catholicism despite the danger that the Inquisition posed to anyone who did so, the Marranos formed a culture of their own, Other to both Catholicism and Judaism.

It's a really interesting history, and this book makes a compelling and meticulous case, covering a lot of ground as it discusses the realities that the Marranos faced, famous Marranos both convicted of practicing Judaism and who made impacts on Catholicism, and everything in between, even going through to modern day people of Marrano descent who still practice the customs and traditions of their ancestors, even while the threat of exposure to the Inquisition is obviously no longer an issue. The historical information is very informative and well-researched. Honestly, it was the sort of information that I have been searching for this whole time, and just stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop, which is neat. Despite its dense nature, it was surprisingly readable, and I didn't really struggle with it at all, like I have with some of the longer research books I've read. So, kudos! An interesting book all round.

Next, a cursed play and all it brings.

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96. Spoiled Milk, by Avery Curran

Owned?: No, library Page count: 336 My summary: Briarley School For Girls, 1928. A bright, popular girl falls down a stairwell and dies. Emily Locke, Violet's best friend, knows it is no accident. She just needs to prove it. One of the other girls lends her a book on spiritualism, which leads them to a strange incident. Could Violet's spirit be warning of future dangers to the girls? Who was behind her fall? And why is all the food in the pantry rotting? My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Weird horror books! I just love me a weird horror book, and I've been on a bit of a kick lately. This is a relatively new book, which sounded intriguing just on the premise. Mysterious deaths, the shadows of Empire, spiritualism, and a haunting…what's not to love here? And overall, I found it to be a pretty solid novel. There's a creepy, unsettling atmosphere throughout; both the alienness of the upper-class boarding school environment almost one hundred years ago to the modern reader, and the things that are happening in the school which are getting the girls into more and more danger. While I thought there were some aspects of this book which could have been treated a little better, I think that overall it's a spooky story with something to say about Empire, Britishness and British values, and how we treat one another. I really enjoyed it!

Our main character is Emily, narrating from some unspecified point in the future about the events at Briarley. She's a suspicious, cynical girl who harboured a perhaps less than healthy obsession with the deceased girl Violet, to the point where she instantly sees Violet's death as a murder and demands to find culprits. She's bossy, headstrong, and a fair bit snooty about the other girls, but that doesn't make her point of view unreadable or make her any less interesting as a character. The other girls, too, all have a little more to them than their Enid Blyton counterparts. There's a depth to them, more going on. Violet was ambiguously suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Emily is completely ignored by her family. Two of the other girls are in a clandestine relationship with each other, which is semi-known and semi-ignored. These characters have depth and interest to them, and I very much enjoyed spending time with them.

The specific haunting in this book manifests as a sort of rot. First, food starts going off in the pantry, forcing the school to survive on tinned goods and whatever they can scavenge. Then people start acting strangely. Violet, as a ghost, starts to try and manifest in the real world. Another death occurs. Things go from bad to worse, and there's o stopping it, but the girls keep trying to get to the bottom of it, in part because of Emily's insistence that Violet was murdered and almost pathological need to investigate. There's some really creepy imagery in here, from the ectoplasm that emerges when Violet wants to make her entrance known to the repeated idea that the school itself actively wants to harm them. There's pages taken out of the Gothic, but also a more 1920s flavour of spiritualism mixed up in the girls' attempts to make sense of what's happening to them. The book isn't afraid to be a little gross and a little gory when it needs to be, too; major deaths are recounted almost with a relish, and the body count just climbs over the last third.

But the real horror here isn't just ghosts and ghouls; the commentary is on Empire, and Britain, and British ideals. The boarding school, or at least this particular style, is a quintessentially old-fashioned English experience, with its moneyed pupils and jolly-hockey-sticks outlook. When the headmistress has succumbed to the haunting, one of the thing she does is constantly play patriotic music on a loop - normal classes are held in strange ways, teaching about the glory of the Empire above all else to the point almost of parody. There's a surreal horror to it, seeing the brainwashing propaganda peddled in places like that as the rot spreads across the house…an unsubtle metaphor perhaps, but still a potent one. It's interesting, and much to think about.

Next, the story of an Other.

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95. Molka, by Monika Kim

Owned?: No, library Page count: 278 My summary: Molka - a spy camera, secretly installed in a public place, to capture images of women without their knowledge or consent. It is happening everywhere. It could be happening to anyone. But for Dahye, any threat seems far away. She's embroiled in a romance with the dashing, rich Hyukjoon. Until footage of them together leaks online. Hyukjoon's sudden relocation to New York to escape the scandal leaves Dahye crushed. Meanwhile, a man in her office - Junyoung - has cameras of his own. When he forms an obsession with Dahye, he will stop at nothing to have her… My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Molka is a Korean word, but it's not a uniquely Korean problem. People are creepy towards women worldwide, and with the advent of modern technology - and, in particular, smaller recording equipment - people use the opportunity to creep on women while being largely undetected. This is a story about this particularly misogynistic horror, that creepy men are using hidden cameras to creep on women, and see them in intimate moments as well as sharing the footage with other people online, without that woman's knowledge or consent. Such a thing can be completely life-ruining and traumatising, but many men treat it as almost a game, a bit of fun to be had with partners or strangers, without thinking of the consequences. This is a story about that horror, and for the most part it's a successful one. I do, however, have some problems with it, which we'll discuss under the cut.

The book doesn't shy away with showing how horrific hidden cameras can be when you're the one they're spying on. The book opens with Junyoung spending his work day looking at women on his hidden cameras, which he seems to have installed in every women's bathroom in his office, to the point where he knows all of the women he's surveilling by name and intimate details of their lives, despite them not knowing who he is. It's uncomfortable, it feels so sleazy and invasive; even though there's more traditional horror on display in this book, the idea of being surveilled while using the bathroom or in intimate moments is skin-crawling, and this book displays how that would negatively affect a young woman's life really well. Dahye's life crumbles the second that a video of her sleeping with Hyukjoon is leaked onto the internet - this footage is being shown on the news, online, and sure her face is blurred but still. The uncensored footage is, also, everywhere. Dahye goes from holding down an office job to being a recluse, having an argument with her parents that forces her to move out, and being a dissociative mess almost overnight. Other women shown having been victim to this sort of behaviour have had their lives ruined in other ways. It's horrible, and moreso for how real it is.

There are two problems I have with this book, however. The first is that the characters feel too simplistic. It's not that I object to Hyukjoon and Junyoung being the villains of the piece on account of being creepy men; my problem is that creepy men is all that they are. Hyukjoon was deceiving Dahye about his true intentions, and that's all there is to him. We don't get any depth or nuance. Junyoung has a bit more, but that only serves to characterise him as a stereotypical creepy basement dweller who lives with his mum. There's no humanity for either of them, and as such they come across as shallow stereotypes. The messaging is more 'all men, individually, are Evil' than 'men as a social class have the power to ruin women's lives and are often forgiven by the same society that will shame those women for existing'. Which doesn't exactly jibe with reality. This is the problem, there's just a lack of nuance and a lack of understanding about the material social conditions which make men feel like they can get away with stuff like this - and often leads to them getting away with stuff like this!

And the other, more insidious problem comes with a detail later on. Dahye ends up killing Hyukjoon and dismembering him, but in particular cutting off his penis and keeping it. This is a common trope in the rape revenge fantasy, but it feeds into something horrible transmisogynistic in fiction. See, certain types of people act like the penis is the rape organ - that it is always justified to be wary of someone with a penis because they have the capacity to rape. This, of course, ignores that rape and sexual assault aren't just done by penises. Hands, mouths, other objects; they could all be used to rape someone, but you don't see a specific minority being excluded from social spaces that should be theirs because they have hands. Whereas this idea about the penis is often used to exclude trans women, on the flimsy grounds that trans women have been 'male socialised' and have penises, therefore they're all rapists, or at least potential rapists. Which is blatantly untrue, and horribly bigoted. I'm not saying the author here necessarily thinks all of that consciously, but it's like I said before. The criticisms in this book are not criticisms of societal, structural issues, they're of individual men. So this book identifies the penis as the problem, and not the structural inequalities that allow men to take advantage of women. And that's such a let-down, to be honest.

Next, a 1920s English boarding school, and the rot within it.

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94. Edgedancer, by Brandon Sanderson

Owned?: No, library Page count: 265 My summary: Lift is doing fine. She's blessed by a goddess to never grow older, and she's awesome. So awesome, in fact, that she has to keep moving. With her pet Voidbringer, she's taking herself from city to city, eating all their food and never staying in one place for too long. There's someone following her, after all. Darkness, a man who wants her dead, and everyone like her. But Lift reckons she can best him. After all, she's awesome. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I have a confession. Well, two. The first is that I probably should have read this before I read Oathbringer, but I forgot it existed in time. The second is that I didn't really like Lift the first time I met her. There's this balance you have to strike, when writing semi-realistic fiction, where you have to keep things from being too modern-seeming, and Lift, with all her talk of 'awesomeness', sounded like a teen character from the 90s moreso than a kid from a fantasy realm. She had an interlude chapter in one of the earlier books, a chapter that made up the first chapter of this book, and she kind of got on my nerves. So I was more than a little apprehensive about this book, given that she's the main character. As it turned out, I did like it! But not without any reservations.

So let's talk about Lift. She's a bouncy, bubbly kid who doesn't know much about being Radiant, and also doesn't care. She's under the impression that her spren is a Voidbringer, she uses her powers recklessly, and doesn't listen to her spren at all, ever, about anything. She's very different from the more buttoned-up Dalinar, and in that way, she's a bit of fresh air from the more self-serious parts of the Mistborn series. On the other hand, she is somewhat realistic as a kid - especially because, when she's childish for her age, it comes with the heavy implication that this is something of a survival technique for her, shielding herself from the idea of adulthood and growing up and responsibility, all things that she's scared of. I also liked how compassionate she was, how much she was willing to put herself on the line to help other people. She's unorthodox, she doesn't do things the standard way, but like, she's got an ability to work things out. And I also liked that she didn't compromise on things she wanted to do. She's gonna eat all those damn pancakes, whether anyone else wants her to or not. So, fair enough, Sanderson. You won me over on this one.

What else? This book serves to bridge a gap between the second and third books, mainly how it relates to the character of Darkness and a significant change of attitude he had between books. That was fine, I don't have much to say there. There was an element, as I often find with Sanderson books, of infodumping exposition about yet another place in this world, largely because Sanderson is a demon when it comes to constant worldbuilding. But overall, this was a very readable little book. I literally read it in, like, a single bus journey. Pretty good! Looking forward to the next Mistborn...eventually.

Next, over to Korea, for the story of...some creeps.

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93. The Gentleman's Daughter, by Amanda Vickery

Owned?: No, library Page count: 294 My summary: Women's lives are not always well-studied. But from the texts they left behind, we can learn a lot about the women who lived and died, and had perfectly regular lives, in times before us. Amanda Vickery is here to discuss the lives of women in Lancashire in the long 18th century. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Wait, didn't I just do this one? No. I read a very similar book by the same author, but that one was about domestic lives in the 18th century, not about women's domestic lives specifically. You fool. Joking aside, this is another of the non-ficiton books I found recently in the basement at work that seemed interesting, or at the very least, sounded like books I should probably read about the 18th century. Because I've got to know absolutely everything about the 18th century, apparently. This is just what it's like being me, it's so fucking boring. I just read about the 18th century until my brain melts out of my ears and then hang around in a library for a bit and then read about the 18th century some more. Anyway.

The reason that I've been rambling so much is because I have little to say about this book that I didn't say about the other Amanda Vickery book I read recently. It was very good, very comprehensive, and it had a lot of information! It was also pretty dry just to read through, but like, that's what's going to happen if you're reading serious history books, you know? I do like getting this view into the lives of regular people, real women. It was still a pretty middle-class look at the lives of women in this century - that's part of the scope, unfortunately, there's much less working class writing that we can use today to get an idea of how people who weren't rich lived. But there were a lot of people's experiences profiled, a wealth of different information taken from a few different angles - it was great! Good information.

Next, back at it again with the Brandon Sanderson.

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92. Queen of the Sea, by Dylan Meconis

Owned?: Yes Page count: 394 My summary: Margaret has always lived on the Island. She knows it inside and out - the nuns, the livestock, the storms that wash over the ocean. But when the supply ships bring new arrivals, her world is about to be upturned. First is her new friend William; then Eleanor, the banished former queen. And Margaret will soon find herself hopelessly entangled in the queen’s plans… My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Queen of the Sea! I've talked about this one a few times before. It's one of my favourite standalone graphic novels, and it's literally just something that I found in a comic shop in London one time. I love the soft, pastel colours, I love the slightly more realistic look at (a lightly fantasy version of) Tudor England, I love that we have a female protagonist who is a credible person for her time and place and isn't an anachronistic girlboss. Seriously, I hate the anachronistic girlboss thing. Anyway. Because I've made a few posts about this one in the past, I'm not gonna spend all too much time on it, but I am gonna talk about a few things that struck me this time.

This comic is very accessible for children, like, it's the kind of thing I could very much see the eight-to-ten year old version of myself reading. But it doesn't shy away from depicting bigger themes and political ideas in a way that this audience could understand, which I very much appreciated. It's about a succession crisis - the king is dead, one of the princesses has taken power and exiled another, but there's (spoiler!) a secret fourth princess from a secret fourth marriage which, if proof of it is found, could leave Margaret as being the only legitimate heir to the throne. The complicated politics of that are discussed, as well as the idea that Margaret, as a child raised as a nun in exile on an island, could definitely not step in to run the country on her own as it is, because she knows nothing about politics. But she's still the one with the gumption to get them off the island and set things in motion to go back to Albion and take the throne. She's not useless, she's just got limitations. And I really like that! Plus, Margaret is such a sunny, upbeat character. I really love her.

Next, more non-fiction about the 18th century. Who's surprised?

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Do you have a Goodreads?

Believe it or not, I actually have this instead of having a Goodreads, because I only have the time and energy to know how One Webbed Site works, and also I lowkey find a lot of Goodreads reviews to be really fucking annoying.

So, uh, no, I just have a niche tumblr instead

Because I'm normal

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91. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

Owned?: No, borrowed from a friend Page count: Unknown, not numbered My summary: The small town of Rainbow Ridge is a typical mining town, run by wealthy miner Barnabas T Bullion. His daughter, Abigail, is coming to live with him for the first time, all he wants is to keep her safe. But Abigail has other ideas. But when she joins a band of masked bandits, she learns some harsh truths about her father's legacy… My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Technically, when I said 'borrowed from a friend' up there, what I actually meant was 'bought this for a friend and read it before I gave it to her'. As is my right, honestly. Anyway. Big Thunder Mountain! So I've been to Disneyland Paris…four times, now. Once as a ten year old, once in my early twenties, then twice in the last couple of years. And it wasn't until trip number three that I first rode BTM. To be fair, I was too much of a coward the first time, and it was down for maintenance the second time. Anyway, BTM isn't my favourite, but it is a solid ride. In Paris, I'm really into how it ties into the wider Thunder Mesa lore, which encompasses my favourite Paris ride, Phantom Manor. But my friend Megan fell in love in an instant. So when we found out that there was a comic adaptation of Big Thunder…well, her birthday present was kind of a no-brainer. But what did I think of it?

It was alright. I mean, it was a bit obvious the whole way through. Teenage girl who doesn't want to be a silly girly girl and goes out in town dressed as a man out of a vague sense of rebellion? Check. Sexy bandit-with-a-heart-of-gold that she falls for who's undermining her dad? Check. Rich capitalist who just doesn't realise how bad his actions have been who has a face turn at the end? Check. Evil overseer character who is there so that the real bad guy doesn't have to be the person with the actual power and wealth and influence? Check. Stereotyped Native character who's treated weirdly antagonistically who ends up having to sacrifice herself to save the good guys despite the capitalist man ambiguously killing her entire family then taking her in as a servant leaving her with a perfectly justified grudge? Yeah, that…was not good. The story was pretty typical for the genre, and honestly I have little else to say about it other than that. The Haunted Mansion comics are better, SUCK IT.

Next, another graphic novel, and one I love very much.

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90. The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong

Owned?: No, library Page count: 322 My summary: Tao is a teller of small fortunes, travelling from small town to small town with her donkey and her wagon, just trying to live her life. She doesn't tell greater fortunes, she doesn't stay anywhere for too long, and she doesn't want trouble. But trouble has a way of finding her anyway. Soon on the road she finds new companions - Silt and Mash, an ex-thief and a mercenary looking for Mash's young daughter, and the nervous baker Kina. But fate has more in store for them than just the road and its challenges. And when war comes to the land, Tao must reckon with her past… My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

The cosy genre seems to have gotten bigger and bigger in recent years. I first saw it in the whole 'cosy crime' thing, which has existed in essence for a while, but only seems to have been named and become an actual codified Thing in more recent times. There's also a measure of cosy fantasy, which I've seen in the Legends and Lattes series among others. And this book! It's very much a cosy book - the stakes are lower, the characters are more normal people than Chosen Ones, and the world is familiar. I don't have a problem with the cosy book existing. Literature is a wide medium and needs every kind of genre to be inside it; for every dark and edgy book there's gonna be something lighter and cosier, and that's okay. Not every piece of fiction needs to be Hard Hitting and Meaningful, after all. You may have noticed at this point that a lot of what I'm saying sounds like damning the book with faint praise, and uh…yeah. See, the thing is that I ordered this book from the library because I thought it sounded fun and cute, and what I got was exactly what it said on the tin and nothing more. This book is exactly what it says it's going to be, which is fine. It's fine. You know? And I'm a little disappointed with it, to be honest.

So the problems that I have with this book start with the characters. We have Tao, a teller of small fortunes on the run from her past; Silt, an ex-thief who wants to reinvent himself; Mash, a grizzled mercenary looking for his young daughter; and Kina, a not-so-stellar baker from a small town looking to see the world. Thing is, there's not a lot else to them but that. Well, there is, but…like, Mash is said to be a gentle giant type who likes poetry and cares for his kid, which seems like it's meant to show his depths beyond the grizzled mercenary thing, but like the first time we see him, he's reading poetry. And the first thing we learn about him is that he's looking for his kid. So it's not really a hidden depth so much as the initial buy-in for the character. And even then, these characters never really elevate that far outside of the stereotypical - the gentle giant with a heart of gold is a character we've seen time and time again, after all.

Another issue here is the stakes. Things keep looking like they're going to escalate, then stubbornly fail to do so. Mash's daughter got kidnapped by raiders? No, she fell asleep in a boat then got taken in by a kindly family. She was never actually in danger. Tao is being chased by the Mages Guild? They just want her to have a big vision, they don't want to hurt her. Tao has to return to her family? Turns out her mother really cared for her the whole time and instantly forgives her. There's war on the horizon? Nah, it's fine, it's not actually gonna reach the country our characters are in. Everything had an easy answer and everything refused to have actual stakes, which like - if you don't want stakes higher than the character arcs going on here, don't introduce kidnapped kids and wars and stuff into the narrative.

And like, finally, I had some issue with some of the greater worldbuilding here. Like, Eshtera is a vaguely medieval European fantasy setting, and yet Kina is getting big bags of sugar from every town she comes across? Are we going to address how the sugar gets to our vaguely European medieval fantasy world? And is apparently cheaply purchasable? Because that implies horrible, horrible colonial acts just happening offscreen in our cosy fantasy here. Ditto cinnamon and other spices. Eshtera didn't feel like a real enough world to me, it was just a generic setting the same as many other generic settings. And at the same time…Tao is from a China-equivalent called Shinara, but like. We never really see much of Shinara or the Shin people other than Tao and her mum, and when Tao sees that Shinara is going to have a civil war instead of invading Eshtera everyone's fine with that? The Shin people weren't treated like they were all that important, and that's such a…weird choice. I just…I wanted to like this book more. But alas, there wasn't that much to it.

Next, the wildest ride in the wilderness.

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89. Redder Days, by Sue Rainsford

Owned?: No, library Page count: 258 My summary: Twins Adam and Anna live mostly alone. It's just them and Koan, the elderly leader of what was once a commune, dedicated to waiting for the end of the world. Anna, with her sun-sensitive skin, keeps watch in the night; Adam takes the daytime. There are so few things that they know. They make devotion every day. They kill those who are infected. Their mother left them, a long time ago. The red is coming to choke their lives. But when a figure from the past reappears, even that is thrown into question… My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

This one was recommended by a colleague, and it's a weird book. Like, it sets out to be a weird book, there's nothing else it could be. But it makes it somewhat challenging to talk about, because in all honesty, I'm not entirely sure how much I understood of what was happening in this book. I mean, I got it, and it was a pretty good read. But like, I'm sure I missed some of the nuances of what happened here, just because of how uncompromisingly opaque this book is. There's nothing that this book is explaining to you, at least not in simplistic ways. I'm not a stranger to weird fiction or anything, but it does make it hard to talk about it here. Um. I'm just rambling at this point. More rambling under the cut.

So the apocalypse in this book is characterised with the 'red', a mysterious red substance that covers people's bodies and makes them act in mysterious ways. Exactly what it is, and what it does, is not fully explained. All we know is that Anna and Adam have been told to be constantly watchful for their red appearing - indeed, the only reason they were born at all is because they're twins, and apparently that means that the red gets split between the two of them, and doesn't fully infect them, at least not at first. The red is sort of ambiguously real or not - there's always a sense of doubt that this is something is real, and that Koan and co didn't just invent it, but on the other hand we do see it and its effects. One particularly chilling sequence is where Anna and Adam see a couple of teenagers approaching, and they're scoping out the kids to see if they're infected, but Anna sees red on them and has to take them out with a shotgun, something they are stoic about, but a little regretful for. The reader doesn't have the best idea of what was going on, and the story doesn't have easy answers.

And it's this sense of ambiguity that persists throughout. I never really knew who to trust or what to believe. The POV circulates between Anna, Adam, Koan, and a few others, and jumps around in time so that you never get a full picture of what's going on, just glimpses here and there that you have to pull into a wider picture. It's a very mature narrative, but it does walk that line of being obscure for the sake of being obscure and being obscure for a narrative purpose. I don't know how much me not getting it all the time was to do with my own comprehension, and how much of it was because it's just being opaque for its own purposes, you get me? Which makes it so hard to talk about in any meaningful way. I don't know. Tl;dr, anything I can say here doesn't really capture what this book is. Read it for yourself if you want a good impression of what's going on. Or don't! That's your choice.

Next, a fortune teller reads small fortunes in towns and villages.

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88. Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Owned?: No, library Page count: 391 My summary: Natalie Heller Mills is living the life everyone wants to have. Her idyllic ranch, her beautiful children, her hardworking husband - and, of course, her Instagram where she showcases that life to everyone as well as advertising her brand of bespoke cookware. But all is not so shiny behind the scenes. The nannies who are most certainly off-camera. The producer who is sleeping with her husband. The fighting, the anger. And one day, when Natalie wakes up to find all of her carefully hidden modern appliances gone, and an 1850s date chalked onto the wall? Natalie's life is falling apart… My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

This one came highly anticipated. The premise is just so juicy. A modern-day tradwife gets sent back to the 1800s to learn exactly how hard that lifestyle really was when you don't have millions of dollars and a carefully planned social media account to fall back on. It's also a commentary on how artificial much of the tradwife lifestyle is - you can spend all this time home-cooking meals because you don't actually clean or do any childcare, you had the capital up-front to buy this idyllic farm and hire plenty of people to work it for you, that kind of thing. I had it on order from the library for a while, and when I finally got a chance to read it, I managed to devour it in just a few sittings. It's really gripping, really engaging, and strikes the right kind of balance to make the points it's trying to make. I found bits of the narrative, particularly around the twist, to be a little fuzzy and incoherent, but overall it's a pretty damn solid book. Which I will be spoiling under the cut, so be warned!

The world of the tradwife is one that I have not, funnily enough, interacted with myself all that much. You see smatterings of it appearing over the horizon, mostly from other people criticising the lifestyle. And, you know, with good reason. The American tradwife particularly harks back to a romanticised, idealised version of the 'pioneer' lifestyle. Men and women (white, preferably blonde) making a life on the frontier, and it might be hard, but they struggle through because that's the American way. Except they don't visibly struggle, because this way of life is the best way to live, of course. It's natural! It's what their ancestors did! They didn't need phones and stores and vaccinations! And of course it's a lie, from start to finish. Life in this era was hard, it was hours of endless labour for very little, scratching out a subsistence living from the land. And of course, the other side of the coin is the right-wing ideology that follows this lifestyle. Native Americans are 'savages' against whom the 'pioneers' must defend, and the fact that the 'pioneers' are squatting on their land is not acknowledged by anyone, for one. And all of these questions are brought up by the narrative, all are shown through Natalie's growing radicalisation into the far right and into the tradwife lifestyle.

Natalie herself is an unreliable narrator. Part of that is because she is severely mentally ill - turns out that the tradwife lifestyle is hard even despite her hidden mod cons, and being constantly 'on' for the camera is taking its toll. Part of it is because she's lying to herself, in some ways, and her perspective of the world is distorted by her politics, and also by just how nasty as a person she is. She assumes that every other woman is jealous of her, because she lives the perfect life and they don't. She considers herself to be the only smart, only sane person in the world, even though she's breaking apart at the seams and is desperately struggling to stay afloat in a life that she increasingly didn't want to live. Untangling the truth from her bullshit does take some work on the part of the reader, but it's ultimately rewarding, and she's such an interesting protagonist - she really walks the line between being a completely awful person who you would never want to associate with in the real world, and being an interesting character to read about, which is often quite a hard line to walk.

And this is the part where I talk about the twist. Natalie's not been kidnapped, she's not gone back in time - after abuse allegations killed her career, she decided to retreat to a false 1800s and live the actual pioneer lifestyle with her newer children, but living on nothing in the woods is incredibly difficult even when you're not dealing with your deteriorating mental health. She just forgot about ten years of her life, because she's unwell, and abused her newer children even more by undernourishing them, not getting them medical care, et cetera. It's an interesting twist, and I think it does work overall, but the initial revelation that this is still the modern day almost feels like the book is bailing on its premise at first, before it recontextualises everything that's been going on. It took a little bit of sticking it out towards the end, but it was worthwhile. This is how this story ends, we've seen it play out so many times in the real world. It's nice to be reading a fictionalised version of this story where no real person actually got hurt to tell it.

Next, the end of the world, as everything turns red.

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87. Barbary Pirates, by S.E. Al-Djazairi

Owned?: Yes Page count: 231 My summary: The Barbary corsairs were pirates of the Mediterranean - often Muslims, often working on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. In works about them by the white Anglosphere, both fact and fiction, the corsairs tend to be treated as though they were irredeemable monsters. They were slavers, they were torturers, they were murderers and rapists. Except this is just one perspective. Drawing on primary sources from the era that the corsairs were active, S.E. Al-Djazairi is here to break through the stereotypes and the propaganda, in order to find the truth of the corsairs. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

If you've been reading my Posts About Pirate Books for a while, you might have noticed a bit of a running theme when it comes to Mediterranean pirates, known as corsairs. And that theme is 'most of the authors I have read can't stop being fucking Islamophobic when it comes to the corsairs'. Some of them, you can tell how close it was to 9/11 by the vitriol which they direct to corsairs. They're 'Islamists', they're enslavers, they're rapists, they did all these awful things to Christians, and yet the books are often curiously silent on what those same Christians were doing at that same time. So when I saw this book, actually written by a Muslim, I wanted to see what the other side of this story was. What the corsairs were, outside of the propaganda of the Christian world which has been justifying Christian attacks on Muslims since…forever, basically. And that is what I got! I just have some more reservations.

The thing that really frustrated me with this book was its tone. I want to be careful about how I say this, because the last thing I want to do is to tone-police this author. This book is wonderfully informative when it is sharing academic information, but the first thing you get off the bat is the author insulting other authors of non-fiction about this period and calling them either liars or collaborators, trashing them in a somewhat juvenile way. And it's like, I am not going to criticise Al-Djazairi for having a chip on his shoulder. The Christian world has treated Muslims like shit for at least a millennium. But the tone of the earlier parts of each chapter is not something I would have expected from an academic book looking to be taken seriously. And it really drags it down, because the rest of the book is making some really good points. Christians have been invading Muslim lands and terrorising them for at least a thousand years, and there's some really good research done here as to how they were seen at the time, the arguments that were made by both Christian and Muslim writers of the era, and how that is relevant. It's all really solid stuff!

The other part I was less enthused by was the last chapter, where Al-Djazairi talks about how Christian slaves were treated in the Muslim world (the argument being that they were treated far better than Muslims enslaved in the Christian world - a fair amount of Christian slaves were ransomed back to freedom!) which doesn't really acknowledge that, you know, slavery is bad no matter who is doing it to whom. I get that this is not the point of this book, really, but like…while I completely buy that Muslims treated enslaved Christians far better than the reverse, there is almost a sense of apologia here that I'm not sure the author intends, and it opens him up to criticisms of whitewashing when enslaved Christians were treated badly. Which I don't think he's doing, I'm just not sure it was the best way to present his argument. But on the whole, this was really interesting and full of a lot of good information! I'm glad I got to read it, I've been really looking forward to it.

Next, a tradwife falls into disgrace, and discovers the downfalls of her wanted lifestyle.