Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. This is Valentine’s Day week — so, a good time to think about my top 10 literary crushes over the years.
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Top Ten Literary Crushes
It’s time for #6degrees. Start with the monthly read, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the 6 Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.
February 2021’s book is Redhead By the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler. is about a “Tech Hermit”, Micah Mortimer, whose neat, routined life goes topsy-turvy when guests appear uninvited at his door. This made me think of various house guest experiences, especially for some of the more reclusive literary characters.
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Behold, Here’s Poison by Georgette Heyer
Behold, Here’s Poison is a good example of how difficult it must have been to investigate back in the 1920s. There were no CCTVs, camera phones, voice recognition, or DNA analysis. Even fingerprinting really just started in 1901. All the police had: post-mortem (never as sophisticated as forensics today), witnesses (mostly unreliable), and criminal psychology (quite dodgy). There’s also a certain disdain towards police among the upper classes, which makes it difficult to make honest inquiries.
That’s why Inspector Hannasyde and his very-chatty Sergeant Hemingway are in a bit of a pickle. Old Mr. Matthews has been poisoned by nicotine overdose, and his entire remaining family is suspect. Then his sister dies, also by nicotine poisoning, and the police none the wiser. The Inspector knows that Randall, the extremely snarky dandy heir to Matthews, is hiding something. But Randall just won’t spill the beans.
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The Lord of Dreams by C.J. Brightley
A human girl gets translocated to the Fae world for mysterious reasons. There, she meets the Nightmare King, who sets her a task to help rout the Unseelie invaders. Not an easy task! The rules of the Fae world are strange, and Claire has very little to guide her. Even the Nightmare King, once the Lord of Dreams, seems to oscillate between villainy and madness. Can Claire be the hero she always wanted to be, in The Lord of Dreams?
Six words to describe this book: gentle, folkloric, dream-like, odd, confusing, hypnotic.
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Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer
Echo North is the latest retelling of the East of the Sun and West of the Moon folk tale. To give it a new twist, Meyer has added in elements of Beauty & the Beast, and Tam Lin (one of my favorites).
Echo is forced to make a bargain with the White Wolf in order to save her dying father. As part of the bargain, she must live in a strange, magical house with the Wolf for one year. But Echo soon realizes that the Wolf is not a wolf (as you do) and to save him, she must challenge the wicked Queen of the woods.
: that title alone makes you want to grab the book. Since its publication in 1908, the book has gone through a series of covers, each better than the next:
How we Begin:
The book begins with a poem called the ‘Nightmare’ which seems to suggest that it’s all just a horrid old dream. The first chapter presents a psychedelic imagery of red brick houses, red sunset and a red haired man, i.e. the Saffron Park. Very dream-like indeed, till two poets begin to debate on whether Order or Chaos is the true spirit of poetry. I kid you not — one of these poets is an underclothes policeman name Gabriel Syme and the other poet is an anarchist named Gregory.
It seems that the Anarchists in the early 1900s regularly shot people and Presidents and caused ‘reigns of terror’ (). In that sense, every secessionist movement and every terrorist outfit is essentially a manifestation of anarchism?
Anyway, to cut a long story short: the debate gets really heated. Our genius and poetic hero, Syme, finally outwits Gregory into exposing some unsavory secrets. Using those secrets, he then manages to infiltrate a band of anarchists called the Council. Each member of this Council is named after a day of the week (here lies a hint), and Syme gets appointed as “Thursday”. Syme’s real goal is to flout the plans of the Council, save the world, and expose the notorious head of the gang, the man everybody calls “Bloody Sunday”. Will Syme succeed?
Stop here, if you don’t want me to ruin the book for you with my spoilers.
I recently read Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West — and it was just what I’d been looking for! Hilarious relook at old blockbuster movies, with tons of punchlines thrown in. Nobody is spared (not even the movie , which as per West is ““, haha) and every single movie trope and trick is held to the microscope for a close and hysterically funny analysis.
Trust me, this book makes you laugh like crazy. Pick it up on one of those downer days, and watch your gloom evaporate.
“I write fantasy because it’s there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. Making it tell the same tale over and over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke.
It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can’t be transformed into food for the imagination. It must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.
Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.”
~ Patricia McKillip, in Faces of Fantasy by Patti Perret
Lately, I’ve been consuming speculative fiction centered around Japanese mythology / Shinto creation mythology. Putting up a few reviews here as part of the Japanese Literature Reading Challenge 2021.
Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara
This book is part of the Tales of Matagama series but you can also read it as a standalone. Saya lives in the village, with no memory of the past. She finds comfort in her worship of the God of Light and his children. But the God of Light has been at eternal war with the Goddess of Darkness, and only the Water Maiden can wield the Dragon Sword and bring that war to an end. Saya’s world comes crashing down when she discovers that is that Water Maiden.
Kindred by Octavia Butler was published in 1979 and is my second book for the Vintage Science Fiction Month (not a reading challenge) of January 2021. I chose to go with the graphic novel version from Damian Duffy (adaptation) and John Jennings (illustration).
is not “comfort read”. It’s not the book to choose when you’re down with pandemic fatigue. But it IS a science fiction classic that is a must-read for understanding the issues of race and slavery in Antebellum South.
