Piranesi is fantasy fiction but at its heart, it is a mystery. And what a mind-boggling, thought-provoking mystery it is.
A house with at least 7000 halls, giant statues, sea tides and migratory birds has only 2 inhabitants: Piranesi and The Other. Where have all the other humans gone? Does the House leave secret messages for Piranesi, even as he struggles to record all that he sees there? And why is The Other searching for secrets of immortality and other occultist knowledge?
This little gem of a passage, from The Blue Cross, in The Complete Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton:
"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen."
I really wanted to give this book a 10-rating, to put it in my Top 10 of 2021 list later in December. Unfortunately, while The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was interesting and certainly novel, I just couldn’t fall in love with this book.
Aiden Bishop finds himself trapped at Blackheath Manor, where he has been invited to attend the homecoming party for Evelyn Hardcastle. It should have been a happy occasion. But night after night, Aiden finds his “spirit” transmigrated to the body of a different guest at Blackheath — all on the same day. If Aiden can figure out who wants to kill Evelyn, he can escape this repetitive time-loop. Trouble is, Aiden has “competitors” in this game, and only one victor can escape Blackheath.
I discovered a cool meme recently, The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. The topic for March 31 is TV Shows I Binge-Watch(ed). Here they are, and maybe you’ll find something new-to-watch here!
Why I binge-watched: the “neo-Noir” tones, a Marvel Comics hero rediscovering confidence, great friendships, Krysten Ritter as Jessica, David Tennant as Kilgrave, and Melissa Rosenberg’s screenwriting.
Available on Netflix. A public prosecutor teams up with a cop to fish out the corrupt, while their two departments remain at loggerheads. Realistic but still marvelously uplifting.
Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs was like water after a reading drought! I was half afraid that the series would have lost its charm, but I needn’t have worried. Happy to report that this was an awesome read.
It’s been a while since I read any contemporary YA, think the last one may have been Thirteen Reasons Why and Some Boys Do. So, I took up Karen M. McManu’s One of Us is Lying with some trepidation. It came highly recommended in last week’s Top 10 Tuesday posts. And it was actually quite good.
Simon’s been running a gossip app in high school, and has made a lot of enemies because most of that gossip is perfectly true. Ouch! Then Simon and 4 other classmates get called to detention over somebody else’s prank, and Simon ends up dead. Who killed Simon, and what secrets had Simon discovered that he needed silencing?
Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.
Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.
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.
: 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:
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.
The Friday Face Off meme was created by Books by Proxy and hosted by Lynn. For each week’s theme, we select a matching book and compare its different book covers across editions. Perfect for a visual fix!
()
Theme for Friday Face Off #1 is:
In Wilkie Collins’ , there is literally a character dressed in white, a mysterious figure at the heart of this classic Gothic mystery from 1859. A gallery of a few of its book covers below:
My own personal favorite from these is the Vintage Collins edition in the middle row, to the left. I think that cover captures the theme of the mysterious lady seen at night, dressed in all white, very well indeed. This has been a fun Friday Face Off!
