bloodygranuaile

I read H. A. Clarke’s The Scratch Daughters and it was basically everything I wanted; i.e., it was super gay and had lots of Mr. Scratch in it. The story picks up several weeks after the end of the first book, and things are not going well for Sideways. Not having her soul is fucking her up. The rest of the Scapegracers are trying to balance helping Sideways get her specter back, not getting their own specters stolen, and Chett-hexing local assholes on behalf of the women they have hurt. This balancing act is not working for Sideways, who is in basically a constant dissociative state and keeps getting phantom thoughts and feelings of what Madeline is doing. The girls descend into some pretty bitter fighting and Sideways goes off half-cocked all on her own (or sort of on her own, she’s got her stolen bike and Mr. Scratch, after all) to hunt down Madeline Kline, and separately, Madeline Kline’s specter. Various things go entertainingly wrong but Sideways survives and eventually pulls it out of the bag because, while the world is full of awful people, it’s also full of good ones, and Sideways has some of the good ones on her side—in addition to her coven, she’s got her fantastic dads Boris and Julian, and a stray queer kid that she finds in the woods whose identity would be a massive spoiler. Much like the last book, the plot is eventful and witchy and fun enough, but the real fun of the book is in the characters and the general vibes. There is some very cool creepy magic and Sideways continues to lick her teeth a lot (they are her favorite bones). I had a great time and hope the third book happens in a timely fashion!

It was time to reread H. A. Clarke’s The Scapegracers so that I could remember what happened now that the sequel is out, and also for reasons relating to my particular book shelving system. The second time around, this book is still quite a vibe. Very character-driven, very gay. The plot is fun enough to hang the story on and I do want to know what happens next, although mostly I am reading the sequel because I want more Sideways and more Mr. Scratch. It’s definitely more YA than I’m used to reading these days but it’s still quite good. My one major criticism is that Sideways needs to do her laundry and soon; the cool disheveled thing stops being cool real fast when you become the smelly kid.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

This weekend I read the third in the trio of Alternate Historical Witch Books About Terrible Religious Men that I’d wanted to read. The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow I think is as good as The Year of the Witching, making them both a bit better than The Witches of New York, although all three books were enjoyable, particularly if you like the sorts of elements they have in common (which I do). It’s got driven young witches and some dreadful religious zealots and even a mysterious plague.

One thing that makes this one a bit different than the other two is that it has three protagonists. Our main characters are Bella, Agnes, and June, a trio of sisters who, at the time the action takes place, end up fitting neatly into the archetypal roles of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. They all grew up on a farm under the thumb of their dad, who was a batterer and a drunk. For various reasons they all wind up in the city of New Salem (Old Salem, the one that is meant to be the alternate history version of Massachusetts’ now-beloved Witch City, was essentially smote out of existence by Inquisitors in this version of the witch trials). New Salem is going through some political unrest–there is a mysterious fever sweeping the city, and people are also getting all upset and scandalized by the extremely bourgeois and respectable suffragist group that is agitating very politely and entirely legally for the vote, and a factory with the absolutely fictional and original name of the Square Shirtwaist Factory has recently burned down, killing numerous garment workers.

In the middle of all this, the three sisters finding each other again–after having been estranged for seven years, due to a complex sequence of meddling and misunderstandings–kicks off some magical shenanigans, which inevitably causes a panicked backlash among the more uptight sectors of the city, which is most of it. Thus do the sisters decide to actually do the thing they keep getting in trouble for, and form a secret society of witches with the goal of bringing back the lost power of real serious business witching into the world, via the semi-mythical lost tower of Avalon, put together several hundred years ago by the Last Three Witches of the West (known only as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone) and hidden until such a time as it is called back. From here the shenanigans get wilder and more dangerous and start pulling in all other sorts of issues of political repression and social injustice–you’ve got the secret society of witches of color who are sort of dubiously watching the antics of the secret society of mostly-white witches to see how much trouble they’re going to get everyone into, the union men who secretly use bits of “boys’ magic” to rust railroad tracks and tie people’s shoelaces together, the remnants of the city’s Underground Railroad from before the war, immigrants and natives and queer people.

For all that it leans heavily into the “magic as a power fantasy of the oppressed” thing, it’s not a light or fluffy story; it’s a power fantasy for morbid weirdos like me who want to read brutal, violent, high-octane stories where characters have to continually choose between the crushing pain and mortal danger of being attached to other people and the crushing pain and mortal danger of being alone. And it delivers the blood and guts and existential despair in spades, tempered with more wholesome witchy favorites like the Power of Librarianship and the Power of Fashionably Cross-Dressed Lesbians.

I liked the depiction of the tensions between the respectable suffrage association and the more militant witchy types, and I appreciated that it wasn’t portrayed as quite as simple as “the respectable ones are dumb and small-minded”--the strengths and pitfalls of each strategy, as well as reasons why someone would wind up supporting one over the other, are shown pretty sympathetically. The costs of even respectable activism are high; the costs of magic are higher.

I’m not sure there’s anything real deep or insightful for me to say about this book since part of how it winds up at 500 pages is that it definitely makes all its viewpoints very explicit. This is fine as I am in agreement with basically all the viewpoints, and the book doesn’t come off as thinking its own viewpoints are a lot more radical than they are, the way The Witches of New York occasionally did. But it was a great 500 pages to spend a bitterly cold January weekend with.

It’s September, which means it is the beginning of spooky season, which means I figured I’d better get onto my spooky season reading before I accidentally found myself halfway through October desperately trying to fit in an appropriate couple of books around whatever else I’d found myself bogged down in. For my first spooky season read I decided to finally tackle Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692, as various circumstances have found me flitting in and out of Witch City on several occasions lately. Also, it’s been sitting on my shelf since 2018 and I am on a mission to knock out at least a certain number of books acquired before this year so they don’t just sit around forever while shiny new releases jump to the front of the line.

The contents of The Witches weren’t as new to me as they would have been had I read the book in a more timely fashion upon purchasing it, as it covers a good amount of the same ground as the first season of the podcast Unobscured; if I recall correctly, Schiff was interviewed fairly extensively for the podcast. However, given that I don’t always retain information super well when it’s delivered in audio, and that it was a couple of years ago, I found it quite worthwhile to revisit the same information in book form, especially the stuff that didn’t make it into the accounts of the witchcraft trials that I learned in my more formative years--the relationship between Massachusetts and the Maine frontier never made it into my high school discussions of The Crucible, neither did the fallout from the various Indian wars and the high number of refugees among the afflicted.

Looking at some of the other reviews of this book on Goodreads, I am in the somewhat peculiar position of not always having liked it, but coming from the opposite direction of everyone else about why. I loved the wealth of details, the digging into the minutiae of life in a stifling, hardscrabble New England Puritan settlement town, the squabbles and gossip of a small and ideologically fanatical community. I liked reading about everyone’s financial stakes and political ties that may have motivated various key figures’ reasoning; I even enjoyed the psychological speculation and found it fairly believable (it helps that I have some familiarity with gossipy and ideologically driven New England communities; I’m in one or two). In short, I already knew the basics, I’ve already seen the fictional dramatized versions, I was reading this specifically because I wished to be beaten over the head with court transcripts and whiny letters and ancient op-eds and other stuff documenting what happened and what people thought about it, and I was pleased when I got that.

What I did not enjoy was the attempts to make the book more exciting and readable for non-academic audiences, to live up to the promises of “an oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller” made on the front cover and “a work of riveting storytelling” on the back cover. The first chapter is a lot of atmospheric stage-setting that doesn’t tell you much in the way of actual historical context type of stage-setting, or at least not as much as I wanted. The end also winds up with more editorializing than I really cared about, although it does also contain some fun information about the sharply divergent legacies of Salem town and the town of Danvers, formerly Salem village. While I have more patience than a lot of modern readers for overwritten atmospherics in my fictional Gothics, I find I have less patience than a lot of other people for attempts to make nonfiction hip and spicy; I would like my nonfiction to be either straightforward quick reads, accessible and short on fluff, or I would like them to be as dense as they need to be to say the things they need to say to a serious, adult reader. I don’t really need footnotes with pop culture references to make an intermediate-level lay history book accessible; I am perfectly content reading about what a self-important douchebag Cotton Mather was.

The middle chapters were fascinating to me, however; they focused a lot more than much of my previous exposure to the witchcraft trials on the judges and magistrates, and on their political backgrounds and other conflicts of interest/possible sources of motivated reasoning, whereas I feel like I’m used to hearing mostly about either the bewitched girls or the hanged witches (and Giles Corey, of course).

So, overall: Glad I read it, learned a bit, mostly enjoyed it but not quite as much as I was expecting to. Definitely recommended if you’ve already been interested in the witch trials and want to delve a little deeper than whatever you covered in high school or on a walking tour in Salem, but if you prefer podcasts to reading you can get basically all the same information (with bonus Massachusetts accents) from Unobscured.

At the last Readercon—which was, sadly, not last year, but the one before—I largely gravitated toward buying little pretty witchy books, including Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York. It seemed a vaguely atmospheric choice to read through another long, rainy summer week, so that’s what I did.

The story follows one Beatrice Dunn, a seventeen-year-old orphan who was raised by her eminently sensible aunt in upstate New York, as she goes into Manhattan to work as an assistant in an occult shop. This being New York in 1880, there’s quite a lot going on—spiritualism is in vogue, exciting new scientific technologies are reshaping fields from medicine to communications, suffragists are agitating for the right to vote, and of course a load of religious zealots are skulking about being quite horrified of all of this. In short, it is a perfect time for Beatrice to develop the ability to see ghosts.

Under the tutelage of the two women who run the occult shop--Eleanor St. Clair, a quiet, botanically inclined lesbian, and Adelaide Thom, a former street urchin and sideshow seer with one eye missing from an acid attack--Beatrice begins training as a witch, and gets involved in ghost-seeing for the benefit of a few other people in her employers’ circle, including a woman who owns the ghost-riddled Fifth Avenue Hotel and a doctor and “alienist” who lost his arm in the war. Everything’s going well except for the church lady trying to get Anthony Comstock to shut the shop down, and some minor nasty business with one of Eleanor’s exes, and the fact that someone in town is kidnapping girls who are witches or who he thinks are witches and murdering them. Because this is a tidy little story that does basically what you expect it to, the someone is a fire-and-brimstone priest who is being tempted by demons to get real arrogant about his ability to tell who else is being tempted by demons, and takes famed Puritan douchebag Cotton Mather as his hero and role model (except he’s not as smart and considerably murdery-er).

The book doesn’t really delve too deeply into the politics of the time except as set dressing, which… is basically fine, that’s just the type of book it is. Overall it’s pretty enjoyable, a tasty little addition to the canon of feminist-witchy fiction--some fun historical tidbits, a gloss of girl power, good triumphing over evil, ghoulies and ghosties and wee wicked beasties (i.e. cute animal companions), and some convenient light romance to tie the end up all neatly (though fortunately not involving Beatrice).

I have had this copy of Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Maid in my possession for approximately a hundred billion years, or at least 25, as the inside cover features an ancient address and an ancient phone number. I have distinct childhood memories of starting it on multiple occasions, but it’s hung out on my “to-read” shelf since I started separating books into read and to-read shelves, as I cannot for the life of me remember if I ever finished it or not. It’s a middle grade book of the sort of early-medieval girl’s historical fiction that constituted many of my favorite childhood reads, like Wise Child and Catherine Called Birdie, and that has continued to fascinate me as an adult with books like Hild. So it seemed like a good candidate for like, escapist bathtub reading.

For a middle grade book, it took me entirely too many baths to get through, especially given that I tend to take two-hour baths. I’m once again not really sure why. It’s certainly not that it was too hard to read, like it might have been back when I first got it; it’s a middle-grade book. Something about it just tended to not draw me in as much as books that are exactly like this generally do and seem like they ought to. I can’t identify anything particularly wrong with it, I just kept not being real hooked. I got a little more invested near the end, once a bunch of shipwrecks got involved, but I didn’t really care about any of the characters except sometimes the Maid; they all just sort of came off as collections of meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories. And I say this as someone who generally would be quite interested in meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories! I think some of the difficulty with getting into it might be that if you’re going to talk that much about clothing that doesn’t exist anymore, it might be useful to have pictures or something, so that I don’t spend so much mental energy trying to visualize the difference between a garde-corps and a cote-hardie, or trying to differentiate between all the terrible medieval hats. I cannot google “barbette” in the bath, the point of reading in the bath is to get away from my google machines, and I certainly can’t remember what a “barbette” is no matter how much medieval nonsense I read, because I hate hats too much. Usually this does not bother me that much, but something about this book had me unusually bored for a book about a girl whose older sister is a regicidal witch and who constantly winds up in near-death scrapes.

In September there was a day that, probably coincidentally but maybe not, was a big publishing day for YA by trans and non-binary authors, and my social media feeds were flooded with them, in one memorable case all arranged by cover color theme in a rainbow. I remember that particular display because I remember, skulking gothically all the way at the purple end, a matte black book with lavender-silver foiled lettering and some vaguely occultish-looking drawing on the front, titled THE SCAPEGRACERS. I had not been in a very YA mood lately but I also have been around publishing for long enough to know that people work very hard on book covers and you absolutely should judge them, so I clicked through, surmised that it was supposed to be sort of like The Craft but gayer, and decided that I had to read it ASAP, given this year’s rules for fiction reads. I admit I had some apprehensions because the author is like 22 and I am not ready for the zoomers to be publishing—they are too powerful already—but there are a limited number of books about socially inept queer goth girls with magic powers, and I had already read the other two earlier this year. So I borrowed THE SCAPEGRACERS as soon as I could.

THE SCAPEGRACERS takes place over one intensely action-packed week in the life of one Sideways Pike, a pile of insecurities and trauma in a leather jacket, who until this week had mostly skulked around the school being friendless in the tradition of YA protagonists--although in Sideways’ case it is because she is deliberately scary and weird and an actual witch, not because she is a quiet mousy Book Girl who the narration is convinced is sweet despite being a condescending ass to everyone (Sideways’ narration dunks on this trope pretty hard, in fact, because Sideways has a modicum of self-awareness). (As someone who moved from mousy to goth basically because it was easier than learning real social skills, I loved this.) Sideways is also extremely gay; she is known as the school’s resident lesbian while the town’s other queer girls are quietly figuring themselves out, and her narration contains a sustained intensity of Feelings About Girls that is very endearing but also definitely trips my “how do allo people live, this sounds exhausting” cranky ace wiring. Sideways lives with her two dads (actually her uncle and his partner) who run an antique shop in a house full of gothy nonsense, which is insanely adorable.

Our plot kicks off when Sideways is invited to do magic at a Halloween party hosted by the three most popular girls in school. The magic works surprisingly well, until it is rudely interrupted for mysterious reasons, and then things start getting weird, even by the standards of Sideways Pike’s life. The ensuing plot involves such rollicking shenanigans as getting kidnapped by terrible religious zealots, daringly escaping from said terrible religious zealots, breaking and entering into a magical book dealer’s to look for magical books, reluctantly befriending a disembodied demon type thing that talks like a 1950’s news anchor, another outrageous party with magic that goes uncontrollably awry, and Sideways making an absolute fool of herself over a mysterious hot girl that goes to the other high school. Since it all takes place in early October, it’s got extra Halloween vibes on top of everything else, which is extremely rad.

But the main plot point, the thing that carries the book, is that SIDEWAYS FINALLY MAKES FRIENDS, a thing she is singularly bad at. Sideways’ attempts to Not Fuck Up friend-having are very funny and should be relatable to any undersocialized disaster queer. Despite the extremely short timeframe, this book doesn’t take the tack that teenage girl friendships are fake or shallow just because they are highly volatile; rather, they are extremely intense, and that intensity gets across very well. The popular girls here--Daisy, Jing, and Yates--are also all really entertaining characters. Daisy is the mean one, not in the catty way that “most popular cheerleader” characters are often portrayed, but just openly, over-the-top casually bloodthirsty in a way that probably would have had people concerned that she’d be the next school shooter if she were a guy. I found her hilarious. Jing is slightly more normal and Yates is actually nice, which sometimes makes her the odd one out.

One thing that sort of jumped out at me and made me feel very old is that there’s a lot of casual physical affection among the friends, not just hugs but also things like impromptu piggyback rides and piling on people because it is amusing to squish them until they can’t breathe. I had to stop and think a minute and be like “Were we that touchy-feely as younguns?” and the answer is absolutely yes, I had just completely forgotten when I grew out of it. (I’m not really sure how, given that I had a number of friends over the years who were dudes between 1.5x and twice my body weight, and in the social circles where I was one of the smaller people, I was therefore the most hilarious to sit on.) Anyway, I’m old, and several months of the “stay six feet away from everybody at all times” thing appears to have sunk into my limbic system and made me even more uncomfortable getting anywhere near other humans (except, oddly enough, in big crowds, which feel nice and normal), so all this entirely normal behavior--which, objectively speaking, is probably the least weird stuff in the book--struck me as strange and confusing.

Like with any good YA book I could probably spend a lot of time discussing what it says, both implicitly and explicitly, about identity and finding your place in the world and the way you present yourself to the world, but instead I’m going to keep it brief and just say: I have never read a YA book that is so unapologetically long-winded about the joys of feeling goth as fuck, like there is an entire page about the magical potential of surrounding yourself with gigantic-ass Hammer Horror movie type candles, and Sideways’ relationship to her leather jacket is practically talismanic, which I find very relatable.

This is certainly one of my favorite reads of the year, up there with the Locked Tomb series, and for very similar reasons--extremely funny and dramatic; lots of excellent female characters; representation of self-conscious goth girls with poor social sense makes me feel Seen--and I will for sure be grabbing a copy of The Scratch Daughters as soon as it is published next year.

What with being largely housebound for the past however many months and likely to continue being housebound for the next year or so, especially when the winter comes and escaping into parks and backyards stops being an option, I have been attempting to read books about domestic space, partly because I have a contentious relationship with the one I’m currently in (I am still not over getting gentrified out of the place in Allston, especially after I had battled so many shitty roommates to keep it), and partly because I thought it would be very funny to write a piece for the PEWG blog about the politics of Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and Erica Feldmann’s HausMagick: Transform Your Home with Witchcraft. I am probably not going to get around to actually writing it, but after the politics book club read the first two (neither of which I suggested, actually) I finally got around to reading HausMagick on my own.

I’ve been a big fan of HausWitch Home + Healing in Salem for years, and having blown many a money there on candles and rocks, I knew I had to pre-order HausMagick as soon as it was available. That was well over a year ago, because I buy far too many books to actually read. I probably could have gotten through this one a lot earlier if I’d realized what a fast read it is; though it is normal reading book-sized and not what I think of as coffee table book-sized, it is still in many ways a coffee table book (just perhaps for tiny urban apartment coffee tables)--full of glossy pictures of neat rooms and with plenty of white space around the double-spaced text.

Much like the store, this little compendium of modern urban cottage witchcraft dabbles in a little bit of this and a little bit of that, with a focus on small items and easy practices that you can do without requiring too much in the way of time, space, or resources. There’s a bit of astrology and a bit of tarot and a lot of rocks, and some guided meditations and some do-it-yourself cleaning supplies. Feldmann is a witch after my own heart in that she focuses a lot on scent--for example, preferring to pick appropriately scented candles rather than colored or shaped for spells--which does tend to mean that my hauswitchcraft is limited very strictly to my room and cannot be extended to any other part of my apartment. (This is not stopping me from eyeing the LightHaus line of cleaning products’ Solstice Lemongrass and Tea Tree Shower and Bathroom Cleaner for Lightness and Willpower, however.) Possibly the most useful thing for me personally in the book was the discussion of crystals, since I buy nearly all mine from HausWitch anyway and I have a terrible time remembering what they’re all about afterward unless I actually use them, but I don’t use them if I don’t remember what they’re about. So having the official HausWitch word on what they all are good for written down somewhere with big easy-to-find pictures should help. Some of the interior decorating tips are good, too; my own interior decorating style is a lot darker than HausWitch’s--the store is very cute but there’s way too much white and beige for me to be comfortable hanging out there for very long periods of time, even with all the exposed brick; I wouldn’t want my own space to look that light. Apparently this is because I’m a Scorpio. (I don’t generally believe in astrology but I do believe in Scorpios, which is… apparently a common position among Scorpios.)

There are a couple things that I cannot help but find goofy, such as the meditation for community psychically with your pets, and the assertion that HausWitch saves people money (possibly other people it does, but not me) (I suppose technically dropping $100 on candles and room sprays every season in a desperate attempt to block out the scent of your downstairs neighbors’ chain-smoking is cheaper than, say, buying a new couch, but nobody buys a new couch every three months, do they?).

Anyway, it will certainly be a useful addition to my shelf of witchy nonsense, which is unfortunately tucked away in a corner of my room where it’s harder to see and access than I’d ideally like it to be, but unfortunately I cannot figure out how to rearrange things so that it’s more accessible without seriously fucking up my ability to use, like, the doors in my room. (I told you I had a contentious relationship with my space.) Although with so much new homebodying advice in my brain lately, maybe it will soon be time to grab a measuring tape and seeing if I can’t move a few bookshelves around. It may also at some point be time to invest in replacing a few of the more falling-apart storage pieces in here with some stuff with more capacity, but that would require braving some stores in person and there’s only so much of that I’m willing to do mid-pandemic.

I also, I must admit, desperately need more lamps, or to replace my reading lamp at the absolute minimum. I have been trying not to let these sorts of books push me into buying more furniture type stuff but having a clip lamp that continually falls off its post because the clip is broken and it is held in place with duct tape absolutely does not spark joy, no matter how cute and whimsical the duct tape is.

(Someday, I will live alone, and then I will go absolutely nuts with this kind of thing. Someday.)

One of the things that I think surprised me a little bit about HausMagick, which probably shouldn’t have, is that I already knew quite a lot of what was in it, or at least it was familiar to me even if I can’t remember it all of the top of my head (see: rocks that aren’t amethyst or howlite; astrology that isn’t Scorpios; plants), which I guess just goes to show for how long I have been marinating in eclectic witchy stuff without ever getting real serious about any of it. Overall I am OK with that, and I will likely just continue dabbling shallowly and paying enterprising young businesswitches to do the complicated stuff.

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but how could I possibly resist that little black-and-purple, tattoo-art number, contrasting so beautifully with the neutrals of the Hauswitch shop floor? And especially emblazoned with those enticing words: Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, by Silvia Federici.

Alas, my love for slim purple volumes has again landed me in a world of disappointment. Unlike the pirate book, however, this book isn't actually bad, and the problem is hardly that the subject matter barely exists. In fact, the only real issue I had with this book is one that I walked squarely into by picking up this book instead of Caliban and the Witch, like a lazy dumbass. Namely: This book is very short, barely 100 pages; it's meant to build on and update the arguments in Caliban and the Witch; and is largely (to the extent that there is a "largely" in a book this small) transcripts of talks that Federici has given rather than being stuff that was developed to be read as serious academic theory. The result is bite-sized; vague; a bit sweeping; and frequently lacking in dates, statistics, specific locations, explanations of how precisely increases and decreases in violence are being measured, methodology, and other such stuff I expect to find in serious scholarly works -- probably because it isn't one. I should have sucked it up and suggested we read Caliban and the Witch instead, as now I have to go read Caliban and the Witch on my own, with no book club, and only some weird lefty podcasts and YouTube videos to share it with, which is not the same at all as actually having in-person book clubs where I can participate in the discussion instead of merely consuming it.

The biggest issues with the very condensed format ended up being a) feudalism seemed to get sort of glossed over or even squished out of history sometimes, like we went straight from pagan Dark Ages stuff and then Christianification and the birth of capitalism were talked about at the same time, sort of like they were the same thing, even though I think there was several centuries of Christian feudalism in between there, and b) claims of violence against women "increasing," rather than changing form, with little discussion of how we were measuring violence or what constitutes violence or how we knew there was less of it beforehand, which is the sort of thing that pings a little "alarmist rhetoric alert" bell in my head. I am sure that violence increases and decreases, societies go through periods of stability and instability, but I expect a little more backing before I'm willing to just take it as fact that a disruptive or unstable period necessarily means that violence, overall, is increasing rather than becoming more visible. A lot of very stable societies have a lot of institutionalized violence as part of their everyday operation, even if they don't have people being cut down in the streets the way a war zone does.

The rhetoric here gets a bit more solid as the scale shrinks to discussions of specific forms of economic and social violence in the "new witch hunts" in India and Africa, where she does discuss particular economic policies and institutions in particular countries. And with some actual content to illustrate it with, the theory gets a lot more interesting! The influence of American fundamentalist sects on Africa and the other colonized nations where they do "mission work" is something that ought to be of as much concern as the actions of the big institutions of international governance, but it's also worth noting that "witch hunting," while popularly portrayed as some backward medieval mystical shit -- after all, who believes in witches? -- is essentially a playbook for capital accumulation.

Anyway, I'm weighing the likelihood of my being able to squeeze in a read of Caliban and the Witch before Memorial Day weekend, and the forecast doesn't look good.

Since it is Labor Day weekend, I felt very strongly that I did not want to do anything that could be considered productive if I did not have to; in addition, I was in need of a palate cleanser after reading the educational and distressing Evicted. In other words, it was Cheesy Vampire Novel O'Clock.

I decided upon Deborah Harkness' The Book of Life, the third book in her witch/vampire romance All Souls trilogy, a set of doorstoppers stuffed with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, time travel, srs bsns historical research, fake genetics, wealth porn, gratuitous Frenchness, the obligatory impossible vampire pregnancy plotline, elite academia, sexy libraries, and lots of wine (some vampires never drink... vine. These are not those vampires). In short, it's like Outlander for vampire nerds (and less racist, not like that's the world's highest bar to clear).

My biggest issue with this book is entirely my own fault, which is that it's been like six years since I read Shadow of Night and I forgot a lot of what happened? I remembered they went back in time to 1591 and Diana got pregnant and met Matthew's several-decades-dead terrifying vampire patriarch, Philippe. And that there was a Scottish vampire who had been a gallowglass and now his name was Gallowglass, just in case you were afraid we were going to leave out the sexy Scotsman from this time-traveling vampire romance. But this is a very big complex story with many threads and many, many characters across timelines, and vampire families are huge hierarchical monstrosities of tangled pack dynamics and generational sprawl, and so I was very lost for quite a lot of it. That's what I get for acquiring too many books and not finishing series in a timely manner, I suppose.

Like many vampire books, huge chunks of this series are basically just wish fulfillment for nerdy ladies. While some of the wish fulfullment aspects do not reflect any of my wishes and therefore fall a bit flat ("He's authoritarian and broody but he's also terribly tall" is basically Why I Do Not Read Romance Novels, also, I honestly consider "interested in genetics" to be a huge red flag, although perhaps it is less red flaggy for actual genetics researchers), other aspects of it go right to my lizard brain, like "has magical powers" and "gets to live in multiple fancy homes from multiple interesting historical time periods," not to mention "elite access to extremely fancy libraries" and "can actually memorize mystical shit beyond half the Tarot deck" (I have been reading Tarot for 15 years and only have half the deck memorized; this is how much I don't rely on my own brain for things). Diana also apparently goes months without checking her email, which annoys all the other characters but honestly sounds fucking glorious.

The book also features interstitial excerpts from Diana's commonplace book from the 16th century in which she takes notes on the signs of the Zodiac, and if you think I'm not going to copy them into my own little baby Book of Shadows later this morning, you have underestimated how much I am witchy pop culture trash.

I only bought one book in Nova Scotia, which is pretty disciplined for me. The book in question was Witchcraft: Tales, Beliefs, and Superstitions from the Maritimes by Clary Croft, which I bought at a museum gift shop in a historic house in Dartmouth, because that's how I do things (it was not, as far as we were told, a witch's house).

This book is not by Helen Creighton, who is apparently the No. 1 Canadian folklorist and the person whose books I should be buying, but Mr. Croft is her student and Witchcraft quotes her stuff extensively, so now I've got more reading material should I decided I need to learn all the Canadian folklore, which I will get right on after learning all the folklore from a bunch of other countries too.

The book is short and contains a lot of short tales about random supposed witchings in and around Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick. Most of the stories are from the 19th century or the earlier 20th century, but some legends go back much longer. People familiar with witch beliefs from any of the six main cultures that settled in the Maritimes or with Native American shamanistic beliefs will see some familiar stuff in the tales collected. A lot of reported instances of witchcraft have to do with people being suspected of hexing their neighbor's cows and other livestock, though mostly cows. Other stories are about people getting mysteriously sick, for a value of "mysteriously" that probably means "We hadn't invented good medical practices yet." Many of the ways of breaking spells fall into a couple of themes, some of which were pretty familiar to me—Bible-related stuff such as quotes or using the physical book as a protective talisman; blocking windows or doors with brooms or iron bars, burning stuff—but other types of cursebreaking that popped up over and over again I hadn't heard of before. Putting needles and pins into things was a big one; Maritime anti-witchcraft lore also seems to have a bit of a thing about using bottles of urine (sometimes from the bewitched human and sometimes from bewitched cows/horses/etc.; on some occasions, from the suspected witch). A widely held belief seems to be that when someone does a counter-spell to break a spell or out a witch, the witch will try to borrow or beg something from the person casting the counter-spell; if the witch is given what they ask for, the charm will be broken.

A good number of the stories involve witches who are men; this is not enormously unusual, but it seemed to me like this collection had a higher proportion of male witches than one usually hears about.

Overall the book was an interesting look into a bunch of folklore I didn't know anything about, which is just what I wanted from it; it also seems like the kind of thing that will be fun to mine for writing ideas, which is a nice bonus.

This past weekend was Readercon, where, for the first time, I only went for one day, a decision I regret and will not be repeating. (I have been unusually bad at scheduling and time management in 2017, for some reason, so I keep missing stuff I actually want to do.) Anyway, one of the guests of honor was Naomi Novik, the author of Uprooted, which I've been meaning to read for at least a year. After having some logistical difficulties trying to form or execute a workable plan for myself to buy a copy of the book and get it signed, I wound up borrowing Gillian's freshly signed copy off her, and promising I'd actually read it and give it back in a reasonable amount of time (unlike the copy of Kelly Link's Get In Trouble that's been sitting on the TBR Shelf of Doom for ::mumblemumblecough::).

I accomplished the reading bit in record time for a borrowed book, starting it first thing Sunday morning and finishing it just before dinner, because Sundays in the summer are for lounging around reading entire books in one sitting.

Uprooted follows in two of my favorite longtime fantasy traditions, which are "books based on fairy/folk tales" and "books about teenage girls with magic powers." Mostly it draws on Polish fairy tale traditions that I'm not super familiar with (for example, I did not catch that the witch Jaga was Baba Yaga until she was actually referred to as "Baba Jaga"—but I do know who Baba Yaga is). The premise of the book refers clearly to the well-known fairy tale trope of dragons capturing or demanding princesses and/or village maidens—a trope I've enjoying seeing upended since Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and that I think more authors should do stuff with—although it becomes pretty clear the second it is explained that the Dragon here is actually a wizard that we're looking at more of a Beauty and the Beast type of situation.

Beauty and the Beast, obviously, is a not entirely unproblematic sort of situation to be in, and Uprooted features a bunch of tropes that are sort of problematic if you think about them seriously, or that some readers might be tired of, but they were also the sorts of things that I was expecting and I think they were handled about as well as they could be without turning it into too serious of a novel. There is the usual Mr. Darcy problem that someone who is a gigantic asshole but really is nicer or better in some way underneath, or otherwise is an asshole for a reason, is still an asshole, because being terrible to people is bad. Agniezka, our heroine, does at points confront the Dragon about the ethics of terrorizing the village by taking one of its girls every ten years, even if he doesn't do anything bad to them; there is, of course, no way to actually make it not terrible that he's been scaring the shit out of his entire constituency for a century. He's also an awful, awful teacher at the beginning, well into being abusively so, especially when there's no communication about what it is that he's actually teaching. While we're at it, feudal monarchy is a terrible form of government.

Also, this is one of those books where the main character is special, and while she's not good at everything, the one thing she is really good at she is the best at. You are either in the mood for this sort of story or you should go read something else. I like this sort of story when it's executed well; this one, because of the nature of Agniezka's magic, has some parallels to Tamora Pierce's Immortals series, which was one of my favorites when I was wee.

The initially really harsh mentor is a fairly common fantasy trope that probably is bad praxis for anyone trying to become a teacher, and the "has important knowledge but is hilariously bad at actually teaching" trope is a less common one but a situation that I always find sort of hilarious (although the prize for this goes to Alabaster from N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series, if only for the bit where Essun has to teach the basics of teaching to him before he can teach her the magic stuff). The inevitable romance between the Dragon and Agniezka actually only ends up happening once they figure out how to work their two very different types of magic together, and as a result, even though the Dragon spends most of the book being almost Edward Cullen-level intolerable as a person, the resulting romance, born as it is out of highly charged drift-compatible magic workings, ended up being more compelling to me than most other Obligatory Romantic Subplots. (Magic is sexy, OK?)

The villain in the book is the Wood, which is, as one would guess from the name, an evil forest that periodically sends out all sorts of horrors to carry people off and infect cows with some sort of grotesque hell-demon disease and make people go mad. The term used throughout the book for the malevolent essence of the Wood that gets into stuff is referred to just as "corruption," which I like, because it avoids having to use the word "darkness" for what is basically the age-old fantasy convention of having to defeat Darkness as a sort of literal force, like we see in The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time and that one Dead Alewives sketch where a dude casts Magic Missile at it. So it's the same idea, but corruption has a sort of dirty rotting biological feel to it rather than grand moral absolutism; a little more like Hexxus in Ferngully except it doesn't sing and is not played by Tim Curry. Eventually Agniezka does figure out what the Wood is and starts to fix it, but not before a series of events with a numbingly high body count, especially considering that the rest of the book is generally not that dark. In fact, I found the final battle to be perhaps the weakest part of the book, but I admit that writing climactic battles is very tricky to pull off.

The real key relationship in the book, though, isn't between Nieshka and the Dragon, or between the Wood and all the people around it, or between all the various intolerable political factions. It's the relationship between Nieshka and her childhood best friend Kasia, played in my brain by the late Russian model Ruslana Korshunova. Kasia was the one everyone assumed the Dragon would pick, because she was beautiful and clever and brave and kind and basically perfect, whereas Nieshka was basically a slatternly mess who was really good at gleaning mushrooms and berries and stuff in the woods, but nobody noticed because Kasia was around.

Ruslana Korshunova, the "Russian Rapunzel." RIP.

Kasia and Nieshka's friendship apparently cannot be ended by anything, whether it is the lifelong knowledge that Kasia will be taken away, or any of the strange things that happen to her after Nieshka is taken instead. Their friendship endures a lot of separation and some embarrassingly soul-baring magic as they both slowly transform into increasingly bizarre and powerful creatures, Nieshka essentially being the second coming of Baba Jaga, and Kasia turning into some sort of preternaturally strong tree warrior. I want a sequel of Kasia's adventures kicking ass and taking names and being a warrior-dryad. The I want an animated movie of it.

Overall, this is a very delightful book that was exactly the sort of thing I find restorative and comforting to read, provided you don't overthink it, and it makes me wish I knew more Polish fairy tales.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published in 2005, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, when I was 17. By this point, I had largely stopped rereading books on any sort of regular basis, which is why I've only read this one three times: Once when it came out, once when I reread the series before Deathly Hallows came out, and this winter. My strongest memory of the summer it came out was that viral video of some guy yelling spoilers out of a car and making people cry. That never struck me as a thing very much in keeping with the spirit of the series, frankly.

Anyway. Considering I was not inspired to reread it very often, it turns out that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is just as devastatingly good as all the other books. Clearly it's me that has changed, not the quality of the story.

It is worth it to say that the lighthearted, whimsical children's book world of Sorcerer's Stone is by now nearly gone, in the same way that the safe, economically stable, end-of-history world of Bill Clinton's '90s as viewed through the lens of a small nerd girl is now gone, and we are now maybe a vassal state of Russia and China is going to declare war on us by Sunday. Half-Blood Prince is DARK. The war is on, everyone knows Voldemort is back, people's family members are starting to go missing, and somebody is half-assedly trying to commit unnecessarily elaborate murders at Hogwarts. We do meet our first halfway decent Slytherin, a schmoozy type named Horace Slughorn who, while frequently annoying, is more of a regular kind of status-conscious rather than being murderously evil.

In this year at Hogwarts, Harry mysteriously becomes good at Potions due to help from a heavily annotated used textbook; Snape finally becomes the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher; Ron is still having self-esteem issues about being Keeper; and Harry starts taking private lessons with Dumbledore.

The private lessons in question are basically all trips into the Pensieve, a sort of magical receptacle for memories. It turns out that Dumbledore has been painstakingly piecing together the backstory of Tom Riddle and his eventual transformation into Voldemort. It's a fascinating, Dickensian story of pride, resentment, alienation, greed, revenge, fear, and ambition. It also illustrates well the self-defeating cycle of poverty and bigotry that occurs when people hold onto the idea that they are "better" than others when they don't have anything else to hold onto, but the resulting entitlement makes them such lazy assholes that they refuse to do anything to better their circumstances or develop any kind of community that could help them. (There's even an excellent dig at Merope Gaunt's father and his refusal to do housework.)

There's still some funny bits, though, and the best ones relate to the magical luck potion called Felix Felices. This includes one of the funniest drunk scenes I have ever seen — at Aragog's funeral — and an interesting study on the placebo effect on Quidditch performance. But overall, the experience of reading this book in one day was emotionally exhausting in ways I haven't been emotionally exhausted in years. I cried a bunch of times (ESPECIALLY AT THE END), because I am officially a sappy old lady now. I felt like all my feelings had been beaten up. It was great. This book is a freaking masterpiece.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Felix Felices," Harry and the Potters

I remember when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire first came out. I remember the hype, the breathless reports that in this one, someone was going to die. I remember everyone trying to guess who it was. (We were all wrong, obviously, since it was a newly introduced character.) I remember how it was a huge deal that it was 734 pages long, because that was utterly unheard-of for a children's book at the time. (Sixteen-and-a-half years and one English degree later, I laugh at the idea that any book under 800 pages could be considered "long.") (I also look at the book and go "How is this less than 1,000 pages; how freaking thick are these pages" but that's another ramble.)

I remember trying to keep track of how many times I read this book and losing track at thirteen. I'm going to guess the current number is somewhere between twenty and thirty. It had been ten years since my last reread.

In those ten years, a lot of things have happened. One is that I grew up enough to look back critically at my memories of the series and note that Voldemort and his followers were basically just magic Nazis, and that, while effectively villainous for a children's series, I guess that ultimately it was a bit simplistic and not that original. It followed a grand tradition of British and American writing about fighting Nazis or Nazi-esque villains, because that's about as satisfyingly simple and uncontroversial a bad guy as you can get, and it is, after all, quite important to teach small children not to tolerate Nazis, but not that sophisticated.

Another thing that happened, but mostly only over the past year rather than over the course of the whole ten, is that -- suddenly, or seemingly suddenly -- Nazis have been making a bit of a comeback. As a result, "Nazis are bad; fight them" suddenly has a lot more emotional resonance and immediacy than it did not too long ago, and also I've been reading a lot of very informative articles about Nazis.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is when the series starts to be ABOUT NAZIS.

As mentioned in previous reviews, the earlier books did make it clear that Voldemort was basically a magic Nazi, although to me the earlier books' portrayals of his followers and his movement always made me think more of the Klan. And there's some of that here too, especially with the Muggles being hung high in the air with magic for fun (and at a family-friendly sporting event, too). But this is the book where we learn that they’re called Death Eaters and they have a special symbol that’s utterly taboo and something has gone very wrong if you see it, something the sight of which viscerally shocks normal wizards the same way that seeing the big red swastika banners as tall as houses hang down viscerally shocked me the first time I went to see The Sound of Music on Broadway. It is the book where we learn how many of them went back to regular society and got jobs and had families and basically pretended to be normal people (apparently none of them moved to Argentina though). As the Death Eaters all gather around their newly re-embodied leader at the finale, we get to see not just Voldemort as a lone villain, but the leader of a movement—and we start to see how that movement functioned.

But, not is all Nazis and death in this book. There is the usual whimsical nonsense in the beginning, where the Weasleys engage in an entertaining comedy of errors at the expense of the Dursleys’ living room to come and get Harry so they can attend the Quidditch World Cup match between Ireland and Bulgaria. Fred and George turn out to be clever at sports betting, and Mrs. Weasley is shocked, shocked that there is gambling going on here, although she shouldn’t be when jolly meathead Ludo Bagman is involved. Everyone makes fun of Percy for being pompous about his consumer protection work on cauldron bottoms, although I personally was totally on Percy’s side for this. There are leprechauns and veelas and a Bulgarian Minister of Magic who pretends not to speak English so Cornelius Fudge makes a fool of himself miming things all day.

Then we are back at Hogwarts, where there is, as usual, a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. This one is a grizzled old ex-Auror with a giant magical eyeball and a penchant for shouting “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” at the students. In short, Mad-Eye Moody is great. Or at least we think he’s great.

The big story at Hogwarts is the Triwizard Tournament, where a champion from each of Europe’s three prestigious magic schools competes against the other school’s champions in tasks of magical daring and cleverness and stuff. After all three school’s champions are chosen, Harry is also somehow chosen as champion number four, which isn’t supposed to happen, but apparently does because he’s Harry Potter. Harry is tormented by a nosy journalist and goes through a lot of school drama as he prepares for his tasks. Several beloved bit characters show up to help him prepare in various levels of cheating, including Dobby and Moaning Myrtle (PS I want a bathtub like the one in the prefects’ bathroom), and then Hermione as usual is the one who trains him on regular-ass spells he needs, like Summoning Charms. There are many French characters, whose dialogue is written in thick French accents, and after all these years it is still inordinately fun to read those bits out loud.

In the hands of a lesser writer there could be severe mood whiplash in this mix of delightful and dangerous, or the goofy names for things could undercut the severity and suspense of the more dramatic bits. But J.K. Rowling did not become the richest woman in Britain for no reason, and the reason is that she can make a story told by a drunk elf that refers to herself in the third person into an emotionally exhausting, poignant, critical piece of the puzzle.

I think this was the first time reading this book where I’ve cried, because apparently I am going sappy in my old age.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Save Ginny Weasley," Harry and the Potters

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is not really when the series starts to get dark, but it feels like it is.

It's not hugely long, being only a little bit over 400 pages. And there's no real character deaths, although obviously it deals with the fallouts from several past murders, as do all the books.

But it is the book where we meet the dementors, and so begins to really look at fear and despair and power in a more complex way than it had previously. And it is the book where we meet Sirius Black, which means it is also the book that starts complicating the long, deep web of trusts and betrayals that so inform the rest of the series. This isn't just unknown quantity Quirrell hiding his allegiances for a year; this is the decades of secret drama Voldemort sowed among families and close friends. We've spent the first two books learning history, both common knowledge and hidden, and now we start to learn about the ways that our understanding of history can be wrong. But to do that, we have to first learn about fear.

In this book, we learn that Harry's biggest fear is fear itself, which Franklin D. Roosevelt would be very impressed with if he were around, but since he isn't, kindly secret werewolf professor Remus Lupin does it instead. (Side note: While it is eventually revealed that Lupin was bitten as a child, it is never explained how his parents knew to name him something so wolf-y as Remus Lupin.)

In and around all the scary stuff about Harry being supposedly hunted by an escaped mass murderer and the deep stuff about fear and cowardice, there are plentiful infusions of the series' signature hopefulness and good humor. Harry starts the book off by making the dreadful Aunt Marge swell up like a balloon, and spends a whimsical three weeks ogling broomsticks and eating ice cream in Diagon Alley after a short adventure pretending to be Neville Longbottom. At school, he discovers the Marauder's Map and sneaks into Hogsmeade. Harry and Ron start taking two new classes; Hermione takes ALL the new classes. Gryffindor finally win the Quidditch House Cup. And the cure for exposure to dementors -- the embodiments of depression -- turns out to be, of course, chocolate.

Somewhere along the line of five bajillion new characters are introduced, both inside and outside the school, every single one of whom will show up at least once more in the series, with the possible exception of the clerk in the pet store who sells Ron rat tonic. It's impossible to thoroughly list all the delights in this book and the little bits and pieces of the puzzle that are so carefully set up. Rowling knows how to set up a Chekhov's gun (or wand, as the case may be).

This book is still in the "I have read it upwards of fifty times" part of the series to me, and now that none of it is surprising, I feel I can fully appreciate just how masterful and delightful every bit of it is. Every word is precisely where it should be. I refuse to even try to nitpick the time travel stuff. My brother has our old broken-in copy so I have a distressingly shiny new one. Its crisp, creamy pages and straight binding seem to rebuke me for not showing them any love over the years since I have acquired this copy. I can't let this happen again. This book is one of my best friends.

Current Mood: geeky

2016 having been an epically exhausting year on a number of fronts—including the reading one, where I skimped on fiction and instead subjected myself to many math-heavy poker books—I decided to end it with a nice reread of the Harry Potter series during my week off. I got started pretty much the second the Christmas festivities were over, spending most of the 26th curled up either on the couch or in the tub with my first American edition of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

While I remember the basic storyline and many of the most pop-cultural moments very, very well indeed, what with having read this book at least a hundred times before (I was an early adopter), I still found myself surprised at just how familiar some of it was: I could remember the exact flow of entire sentences and paragraphs as I'd read them previously, years and years ago; I could remember pronunciations I'd gotten wrong in my head back when I read it last. I don't think I've read these books since the seventh volume came out about five years ago.

Somehow, probably because the books eventually get so serious and because they had such a profound effect on myself and on our culture, the one thing I had managed to sort of forget was just how freaking funny they are. Things aren't super heavy in this book yet, although we are introduced to the basics of Voldemort's story, and the finale is pretty damn creepy. Mostly things here are still a little bit cartoonish, with a similar vibe to other snarky British children's fantasy like Roald Dahl, featuring amusingly gross wizarding world hazards like troll boogers. The images in my head of this one are still heavily shaped by Mary Grand-Pre's drawings and a lifetime of watching Muppets more than they are the actual Harry Potter movies (Hagrid is the Ghost of Christmas Present, pass it on), since the movies didn't start getting made until nearly half the series was published.

The book itself is still a delight to hold and to read, with nice creamy parchment-y paper and that jauntified Copperplate lettering at the top of every page. I admit I did a lot of uncontrollable nostalgic giggling and a good deal of reading sentences aloud to myself just to delight in them. Rereading this one was a beautiful and pure experience that put me back in touch with my inner child and was overall GOOD FOR MY SOUL, a well-deserved and much needed joy, from "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much" to the typographic note at the end.

Well, I am on a roll with reading books wrong. In the case of Diana Gabaldon's Voyager, the third book in the Outlander series, it's because I got it out of the library, only read 25% of it before I had to return it about two months ago, got back in line, and read the rest of it last week when it finally cycled back to me.

While Outlander took place almost entirely in Scotland, and Dragonfly in Amber brought us as far as France, the aptly named Voyager brings us basically everywhere. Acting on news from the research project she, Brianna, and Roger started in 1968, Claire moves from Boston back to Scotland, travels back through the stone circles at Craigh na Dun to sometime in the 1760s, tracks down Jamie in Edinburgh, and from there a relentless flood of shenanigans takes them all around Scotland, then to France, and then back over the Atlantic to the Caribbean. And that's just the main plotline, from Claire's perspective. We also get POVs from Jamie, as he does all sorts of dramatic Highlander things like hide in a cave for seven years and escape from an English prison; from Roger; and from one Lord John Grey, who seems to have a bunch of his own spinoff novels now.

The book is also kind of all over the place in other ways, too. Some of it is very serious--Jamie's time in Ardsmuir, for example, is pretty dark, treated with all seriousness and mostly not filled with highly improbable action-hero hijinks. Other bits are, uh, not--once they get on a boat everything basically becomes "Highlanders of the Caribbean" and it's all very colorful and almost absurdly action-packed, and develops a serious case of Les Mis-level small world syndrome (you know how in Les Mis, Paris has like twenty people and one policeman and one apartment to rent? In Voyager, the entire British Empire has about twenty people, one ship, and two military officers).

One of the big effects of leaving the rural Scottish highlands is that there are a lot more people of color in this book, which is a thing that can obviously go very wrong very quickly, especially considering the time period is really the height of British colonial power in the New World (it's like, 10 years before the American Revolution starts, I think) and the slave trade is in full swing. I have... mixed feelings about how this is handled. It's clearly well researched, which certainly helps it avoid some of the more common myths and pitfalls about the time (most notably, Gabaldon knows what involuntary indenture is and the ways in which it is similar to and different from chattel slavery; this shouldn't be noteworthy but it is). But the general approach she takes to characterizing pretty much all ethnicities--which is not so much to avoid stereotypes, but to deliberately walk straight into them and then try to build up more perspective/characterization on top of it--works slightly less well with, for example, the one Chinese character--a short, frequently drunk man with very bad English whose skillset is basically a grab bag of Chinese Things, including Chinese herbal medicine, acrobatics, calligraphy, acupuncture, and, of course, magic--than it does with any one of the ten billion Scots that populate the series. (Granted, one of the things I do kind of like about the books is that every culture the characters come into contact with has its own magical traditions and they all appear to work equally well, but the execution can still feel a bit clumsy--like, this random English lady keeps finding herself in situations where every time she meets new people she gets to witness their magic in action. Every single time.) The one Chinese dude is an especially interesting case of both being an interesting character and giving me wincy feelings because he's a fairly major secondary character and he gets a good amount of page time. He's known throughout the book as Mr. Willoughby, which is obviously not his name but was bestowed upon him in a well-meaning but ultimately worse-than-useless attempt to help him blend in. He's sometimes a comic character but other times a very tragic one, especially when you finally learn his backstory--something I found particularly interesting was that a major part of his backstory is that he is actually kind of a sexist dillweed, in the hopeless-romantic-with-ludicrously-unrealistic-views-of-women method that made me like him a bit less as a reader but is clearly a huge point of commonality between him and a lot of the white dudes in the book. By the end of the story I actually did like him, but there were a couple of cringeworthy scenes to get to that point.

Also cringeworthy is an appearance of one of my least favorite tropes EVER, actually I don't really know if it's a trope but I have seen it in one other book at least, which makes two too many--where a nice white lady who is very opposed to slavery gets so upset about it that she winds up owning one, because that is totally a thing that happens, and it is very upsetting, because clearly the important thing about slavery is how hard it would be on anti-slavery white people to be landed with one, and now she has to decide how best to go about being a good white savior, which in both cases I've read have inexplicably involved steps other than "ask person what they want and do it." I partly don't like this trope because it smacks very strongly of "author's personal self-examination and thought exercises leaking onto the paper"; in this case, many of the compounding issues that cropped up in the Jackie Faber book where this happens are thankfully avoided, but at least in the series so far, I can't help but think that the entire subplot with Temeraire could have been completely excised with no harm done to the rest of the book whatsoever.

These are the low points. There are many, many other things going on in this book (these books tend to be pretty densely packed with a wide assortment of Things), including the reappearance of Geillis Duncan (who is a major creeper), our first gay character who isn't predatory and terrible, hints of family backstory and things for Claire's Boston doctor friend Joe Abernathy (JOE ABERNATHY IS GREAT), lots of ladies with lots of agency in different ways all along the moral spectrum, and, as usual, a lot of sex, although kilts have been sadly outlawed at this point so Jamie is reduced to constantly wearing breeches. And have I mentioned the MELODRAMATIC ADVENTURES ON THE HIGH SEAS? It is everything you could want out of a melodramatic adventure on the high seas; I think Gabaldon had a checklist of Stuff That Happens When Adventure On the High Seas and made sure every point got in there somewhere--there is kidnapping, espionage, shipwrecks, slave revolts, an outbreak of plague, naval battles, pirate attacks, smuggling, big storms, seasickness, hardtack with weevils, a Portuguese pirate with too much jewelry and a cutlass, stowaways, a parentally disapproved-of romance, and even a dude with a hook for a hand, although the said dude is Fergus, who we actually met in the last book and who lost his hand long before becoming a sailor. At one point there is even a big hat. (Note: People for whom melodramatic pirate adventures are NOT catnip might find this half of the book frustrating, the way I find cartoon physics in non-cartoon movies frustrating, because it kind of pushes against one's suspension of disbelief sometimes. I'm just willing to overlook this because for me, melodramatic pirate adventures are SUPER CATNIP.)

On a more serious note, the looks we get into the British penal and colonial systems, in Scotland and elsewhere, are really, really well done, I think--they're very informative but also very emotionally engaging, and involve a lot of heavy stuff about power and identity, which is especially apt since the British relied even more heavily on eradicating people's identity to conquer them than they did on brute force (not like brute force wasn't a major component, of course). I particularly appreciate the looks at the basically decent English people who were still complicit in and perpetrators of these colonial systems that very definitely weren't at all about "helping" or "civilizing" any of the people in the lands the British took over and who the English definitely never saw as their fellow countrymen, even the sort of nice ones, no matter what the official imperialist rhetoric was.

This book's story arc never particularly wraps up--it just leads right into the next book, which I have dutifully added to my library queue. The line is shorter than it was for the last few books, so with luck I will have it within a few weeks.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: Skye, Bear McCreary

GOOD LORD AM I BEHIND ON MY MARK READS OR WHAT.

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up on Witches Abroad, which I vaguely remember as being "the Cinderella one." Which it is! But I'd forgotten most of the rest of it.

Like many Discworld books, this one is about stories; like many of the Witches books in particular, it is about fairy tales; but this Witches Discworld book, specifically, is about Disneyfication.

The "abroad" where the witches go is a city-state called Genua, which seems to be based in part on New Orleans, but which is being sanitized and forced into basically becoming the Magic Kingdom (it also reminds me of the walled city in Shrek). It's really just Magrat who is supposed to go, officially—after all, Desiderata Hollow left the magic wand to her when she died—but obviously Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax aren't going to let Magrat go off and do anything on her own, so all three of them go, with Granny complaining about "forn parts" the whole way.

While Granny is staunchly (and meanly) provincial, Nanny Ogg is a belligerently enthusiastic and clueless tourist, bulldozing her way through Genua with a hodgepodge of incorrect common phrases from a variety of languages, apparently under the impression that "foreign" is a language and she speaks it. It's hilarious, and probably very embarrassing for Magrat. Magrat is, as usual, ineptly well-intentioned, and can't figure out how to do anything with the wand except turn things into pumpkins.

The entity Disneyfying (Disnifying? Disnefying?) Genua is a fairy godmother named Lilith, who uses mirror magic. This Evil Queen trope makes her scary as hell because she can basically always be spying on people; her whole magical system bears more resemblance to George Orwell's Big Brother than anything else: She's always watching, and she can have you disappeared if you don't behave according to the exact code expected of you. Her goal is to provide everyone with a happy ending, whether they like it or not, which on second thought also has weird Communist dictatorship overtones. I think there's some underhandedly political commentary about authoritarian utopianism going on in this book, y'all. I always missed it because I was too busy focusing on the fairy tales aspect and the puns!

The fairy tale tropes are deconstructed mercilessly, especially once you find out more about Lilith. It involves more mirroring, in a way.

While the sanitized/gentrified/Disneyfied aspect of Genua is handled brilliantly, the New Orleans-y stuff underneath falls a bit flat sometimes—Pratchett is clearly very familiar with his fairy tale tropes and the way they differ from messy reality generally, but he's not as familiar with the voodoo stuff he's incorporating as he is with the rural British cultures he draws on in places like the Ramtops, so some of the jokes feel more obvious than I generally expect from Pratchett and some of them are just plain racially awkward. (Lilith's whitewashing of Genua would have been SUCH a powerful layer if it had been handled a bit better!)

Overall, though, it is basically everything you'd expect and want out of a Witches book, and then a little bit more.

Current Mood: hot as heck
Current Location: a heat wave in september
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Entries tagged with witches

Sideways, Scratch, and the Scapegracers take on Chetts and Chantrys

Reign of Scapegrace

Memory, memes, and mysterious parentages

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

Diseases of astonishment

To catch a witch

In which there are some wee bairns and a witch

In which there is good goth representation in YA literature

Witchy minimalism (and maximalism)

In which I am inspired to start doing bicep curls again

The witch as a lazybones whomst doesn't read

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again

Put a pin in it

In which a cranky wizard lives in my dream house

Felix Felices makes me feel invincible

Nazi wizards fuck off

In which reading is Sirius business

The Boy Who Lived and The Girl Who Read

Highlanders of the Caribbean

Not like I didn't have a blast at Disney World though