ms_minerva

I am happy to report that Joan Aiken had mercy after all, and started Dido and Pa with the reunion between Dido and Simon which she denied us at the end of The Cuckoo Tree. At long last they see each other again! They are delighted to be reunited and have a lovely supper at an inn.

However, their reunion is short-lived, as Dido hears a song that reminds her of her father’s tunes. She goes out to investigate (musing all the time that her father never played for her, not once, in her entire childhood) and runs into her father, who informs her that her sister is extremely ill! and wants to see her! so just get into this carriage and stop asking questions!

You will be unsurprised to hear that Dido’s sister is not ill. Indeed, Dido’s father has no idea where Dido’s sister is. He is kidnapping Dido to make her take part in another wicked Hanoverian plot. This plot has been slightly complicated by the fact that the last Bonnie Prince Georgie just died, oops, so the Hanoverians no longer have a contender to the throne, but never fear! They will come up with a way to plot wickedly anyway.

(I was reading a history book the other day which mentioned Hanoverians and I needed to pause a moment to remember that Hanoverians are (a) real and (b) not constantly wickedly plotting in real life.)

Dido’s father starts this book as a terrible father and only goes downhill from there. He is also music master to the Hanoverian ambassador and actually a wonderful musician and composer, which causes Dido painful confusion. How can he be such an awful person and such a wonderful artist? I feel you, Dido. If only the two were incompatible, things would be much easier for us all.

But he continues to be the worst, up to and including walking whistling away from a burning building with over a hundred children in the basement, while also being such an amazing musician that his music actually has healing properties. (Pity Queen Ginevra in The Stolen Lake didn’t discover the life-extending properties of music rather than porridge made from the bones of children.) Beneath the barmy plots, Joan Aiken is a stone-cold realist about the contradictions of human nature.

osprey_archer

Exciting news from the Hummingbird Cottage: a Canada goose is nesting by the lake, right across from my patio! There are two geese, actually, and sometimes one is on the nest and the other patrolling, but sometimes both on the lake, dipping their heads underwater so their white back ends stick up in the air.

So far no sign of goslings, but I’m keeping an eye out. The pond might be christened Gosling Pond.

However, I also believe that there’s a kingfisher (!!) in the area, and if I can get a positive ID on the bird, the pond will likely be Kingfisher Pond instead. I am not very confident in my bird identification skills and even less so than usual in this case because I would LOVE to have a kingfisher, and therefore fear deluding myself. But I’ve seen it more than once and feel cautiously hopeful that I have not after all led myself astray.

Other birds in the area: lots of robins. Cardinals. Blue jays. A lot of little brown birds that I vaguely classify as “sparrows,” although I’m sure some of them are chickadees. A lovely little red bird, smaller than a cardinal and without the distinctive crest, very red at the front and fading to brown at the back. I saw that one in the tree outside my office window, which is on the second story so I am of a height with the birds in the trees.

The office is a fancy name for a table pushed up under the window, where I do my Sunday Writing Mornings. Mostly I’m working on short stories, and I’m building up a little stash: seven so far! This is also the room where I practice my dulcimer (most recently working on “Scotland the Brave”), and think about practicing my tin whistle, but I haven’t managed to take the plunge on that one yet.

It’s getting warm enough to plant, so I need to get started in the garden. There’s a rosemary plant that appears to have overwintered, as there’s green coming into the tips of its gray leaves, and some very happy mint on the shady side of the house. Not sure what kind. I brought a little inside and Bramble was very interested, starting whizzing around the house, and then either jumped or fell off the upstairs balcony into the living room. (He was fine. He has been courting this experience for weeks, as he considers the balcony rail a fun enrichment opportunity for cats.)

My composting efforts were met with great enthusiasm by the wildlife community, by which I mean that something dug them up repeatedly until it ate every last bit that it found appetizing. Strongly suspect the agency of a possum that I saw waddling across the patio one morning. This is probably a heartening sign of biodiversity, but as I don’t wish to open a buffet for possums, the composting is on hold as I consider next steps.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ella Young’s The Tangle-Coated Horse and Other Tales, a 1930s Newbery Honor book that retells some stories from the sagas of Finn MacCool. Some lovely descriptive passages but not memorable overall.

I also finished Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories. Some of the stories I’ve forgotten already (what happened to the titular Cicely?), but others have stuck in my mind, like the story of three southern girls living in genteel poverty because Family Tradition says they mustn’t work… until they realize that their grandmothers worked very hard indeed when they first came to Kentucky, and conclude that surely this older Family Tradition trumps the newer one.

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, the Boffins have just decided to adopt an orphan boy whom they will name John Harmon, to the astonishment of the Wilfers’ lodger Mr. Rokeworthy, whom I strongly suspect is the real John Harmon in disguise who is lodging with the Wilfers in secret to see if he wants to marry their daughter Bella, as their marriage is the condition under which he could inherit the fortune that, as everyone believes John Harmon to be dead, has currently gone to the Boffins.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided that once I finish Our Mutual Friend, I will at long last tackle Elizabeth Barrett Brownings’ Aurora Leigh!

kitewithfish

What I’ve Read

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison – This is my fourth time thru this book, and different things stood out to me that the first time. A major turning point for Maia in the novel that I had really not remembered was him shifting from a mindset of, How can I please everyone who is making demands of me? to, Since it’s impossible to please everyone what do I think is the right thing to do? And as a person who only recently discovered that disappointing people is not legally punishable, I felt that in my heart. This audiobook version was great - Kyle McCarley had a lot of character to each voice and it felt like it made sense for the choices he made.

I have also read a good deal of Star Wars fic by Blackkat that are all slightly too short to be counted as novels, but special attention to Cor Cordium - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52209091

What I’m Reading
His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Novik – I picked this up to keep my post-vacation chill mood intact, and then the library took it back. Treason! I will return to it, tho. Honestly, I feel like this one of those book series that I think I would give to any kid who lives near an ocean.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian – Since the library took Novik’s book back too early for me to finish, I figured I would go to the source material that inspired her, and start reading this! It’s about the sea and also about how being English is great because you get to fight people about stuff – wild nonsense. Jack Aubrey is a certified dummy and I think I love him – how can you not notice that the people around you are speaking Catalan and not Spanish, you hot mess of a captain. I think audiobook is the right choice for this, as it allows the longer passages about how a sailing ship works can just glide past my ears.

The Antarctica Conspiracy – Derin Edala made the least normal space ship in the world and the second half of the story is not any less wild. We started with a murder!

Male Order – Unwrapping Masculinity -edited b y Rowena Chapman

What I’ll Read Next
The Memory Librarian - Janelle Monae - crossing book club

HUGOS – This is my first year as a voting member, and I want to try and read everything (that is a single book- too many series and I will fall over). I know there is packet that goes out containing some of the books but I think it might arrive too late for me to get to all the books, so I have decided to start with what my local library can get me and work from there.

I found out about two different interesting nonfiction books recently that I want to read:
Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity by David D Gilmore which is from 1990 and came up in a recent "If Books Could Kill" podcast episode where the host got really interested in the description of how masculine social roles construct nurturing differently than for feminine roles. It sounded interesting!

I also found a book from 1925, The English Language in America by GP Krapp, which came up in a Tumblr post about the way 'eye dialect', aka, phonetically writing out nonstandard spellings to portray dialects in writing, is used to portray people speaking in dialect as ridiculous and stupid (which is a dick move). I started to skim this book after finding the wikipedia article on 'eye dialect' and I found it so interesting in just the portion of the discussion where he gets into New England town hall records as a primary source for linguists to understand how colonial America was using English. I want to read it some time in more detail, or at least skim the interesting points. I realize it is literally a century out of date but I'm not a scholar, I am doing this for fun!

osprey_archer

Years ago I read and really liked Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, so I was pleased to have a chance to read his earlier book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, not least because this solved the mystery of Ayers’ otherwise puzzling decision to start The Thin Light of Freedom smack dab in the middle of the war.

But either Ayers really grew as a historian between the two books, or I’ve gained a lot of Civil War knowledge since I read The Thin Light of Freedom, or possibly both. I found In the Presence of Mine Enemies much less interesting and insightful than The Thin Light of Freedom.

However, it did spark off a number of thoughts, none of which are things that the book exactly explores in itself, so this is not so much a review as a couple of things that it made me think about.

1. The beginning of a popular war apparently feels just terrific. I’ve read this sort of thing about the beginning of World War I, too (or America’s entry into World War I), where you’ve had months of lead-up, ages of aching tension, furious argument on all sides, and suddenly the war is declared and everything seems clean and clear and unanimous and everyone is running through the streets waving flags and singing patriotic songs and throwing tomatoes at the windows of the few old windbags who are muttering “This isn’t going to be as much fun as you think.”

This lasts until the first defeat (if that long), at which point everyone realizes that the war is indeed NOT going to be as fun as they think, and also all those political divisions that it seemed like the war had transcended are back! and more furious than ever! and somehow we have to deal with that while also fighting a war! Because of course you are still stuck with the war after the first euphoric glow wears off.

2. Every war is different, and presumably there have been wars where crusty old geezers send innocent young men to die for fun and profit, but in the Civil War at least the young men were wildly in favor of going to war while the old men were, overall, the ones going “But have we considered NOT going to war.”

I say this because there seems to be something of a canard that young men go to war because they have been duped by old ones, and in this case if they were duped by anyone it was by themselves and their own conviction that they could whip Those Dirty Whosits by Christmas.

osprey_archer

Not so long ago,

skygiants acquired Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Kelpie, which is about a girl during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 who is fated by a seer to meet with someone four times.

“Hmmm,” we said. “This sounds similar to D. K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron!”

Conveniently, I just recently unpacked the paper copy of Flight of the Heron that I found at John K. King Books in fall of 2023, and felt like rereading it anyway because I’d never read it on paper before, so I gave it a spin before

skygiants sent me Quest for a Kelpie.

Although it is of course possible that Frances Mary Hendry read Flight of the Heron at some point, I wouldn’t bet on it based on Quest for a Kelpie. Although the two books have the same setting and almost the same premise (in Flight of the Heron it’s five meetings instead of four, of course), their thematic preoccupations are completely different.

Flight of the Heron is interested in honor, particularly the moments when honor and duty clash with desire and prudence - not just in the repeated meetings of Ewen and Keith, but in Lochiel’s decision to rise for the Prince because he promised his support, even though he knows that the Prince’s choices have made this particular rising unlikely to succeed. It’s interested in people on opposing sides of a war who would have been friends under different circumstances. And, of course, gorgeous men being wounded and tenderly nursed back to health by a friend in a desperate situation.

Quest for a Kelpie is interested in women’s work, work in general and the way that small subsistence-level communities survive, the effect of war on the poor who have little say in whether war comes or not, the devastation wrought by war (to be fair, Flight of the Heron is cognizant of this too; it’s not a main theme, but it comes up insistently nonetheless), the fact that we are all human despite divides of class or caste or race, and the way this is so easy to forget and the forgetting so easily leads to our devastation.

( Spoilers )

This was Hendry’s first book, and it’s not as polished and memorable as Quest for a Maid. (I can’t be the only one who thought of Quest for a Maid and the heroine’s streak of white hair where her witch sister struck her when I first saw Frozen.) But it’s thematically resonant with the later book, and shares many of the same overriding preoccupations.

Quest for a Maid was the only Hendry published in the US, so Quest for a Kelpie is hard to come by. Would anyone like my copy? I’d be happy to mail it within the US.

osprey_archer

Yesterday evening, I decided I might as well get started on my 2025 Newbery reading, and picked up Kate O’Shaughnessy’s The Wrong Way Home to read a couple of chapters before bed. Then I read the whole book in one sitting, and lay awake for the next three hours or so thinking about it.

This is particularly impressive because I felt lukewarm about the premise of the book. Our heroine Fern starts off in a back-to-nature cult in New York, only to be yoinked out by her mother who drives her across the country to California to start a new, mainstream life.

Now, I love cult stories, but to be honest I’m much more interested in the cult aspect than the “return to mainstream life” thing. I know what mainstream life is like. I want to read about a day in the life of the cult, I want cult rituals, I want a deep dive into cult beliefs. My favorite cult story is the movie Midsommar, which ends with Dani ecstatically joining the cult of flower-bedecked Swedish human sacrificers. I mean, yes, technically bad, but don’t we all practice a spot of human sacrifice from time to time – what is the death of the uninsured but a human sacrifice on the altar of Freedom and Capitalism! – and, more importantly, Dani feels held by them.

The Wrong Way Home grasps that in order for Fern (and the reader) to root for Fern to stay out here, she has to find a mainstream community that she also feels held by, without the cult drawbacks of “when you come of age you have to go on a coming of age ritual which might kill you.” Driftaway Beach is Fern’s mother’s tiny oceanfront California hometown, and although her mother’s parents died long ago, her godmother Babs is still there, running an extremely pink teashop called Birdie’s after her dead wife.

Then Fern starts school. She’s much more enthusiastic about this once she realizes the school has computers, which she can use to help her find the Ranch’s address so she can write to Dr. Ben to come save her. And her science teacher is pretty cool, and really concerned about the environment in a way that makes Fern realize that you can care about the environment and also NOT live in an isolated rural compound that you never ever leave, and she starts to make friends, and also Babs invites her to come to the teashop for treats anytime she wants, on the house, and she hasn’t had sugar in years and the petit fours completely blow her mind…

But she still really misses her friends back home at the Ranch, and the chickens and the forest and the feeling of building a community that will sustain life in a future wracked by climate change and societal collapse.

And she’s also having trouble finding the Ranch on the internet, not least because she hasn’t used the internet since she moved to the Ranch when she was six. So she hires a private investigator, using money that Babs is paying her to clear out a bunch of clutter left behind by her wife’s sudden death years ago.

But earning money takes time, and a private investigation also takes time, and time is what it takes to put down roots. And when you hire a private investigator, well, he might turn up more than you’ve bargained for…

Just an incredibly readable book. I really meant to put it down and go to sleep, but I kept having to read just another chapter or two, and then somehow the book was done.

osprey_archer

I have been ill, so this Wednesday Reading Meme is alas two days late!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I reread Francesca Forrest’s “The Bee Wife,” (Amazon link here, but available through other retailers as well), which I have been gently prodding her to publish ever since she first let me read it. A lovely sweet and sad story about a beekeeper who loses his wife Joy, and the bees try to comfort him by forming a replacement Joy…

Love the magic of the bees and the characterization of the children, five children over a wide span of ages trying to understand the appearance of this new mother, and the story’s grounding in Catholicism. Is this a miracle? Witchcraft? Can the magic of the bees be holy, since we thank them specially for their candles at Easter? Shout out to the overwhelmed priest who is not at all sure what to do about an apparently resurrected Joy showing up at the church door, and even less sure when she assures him, “I am a new creation.”

What I’m Reading Now

My mother kindly delivered my hold on Our Mutual Friend when it arrived at the library, so I have at long last started reading it! So far, it’s about making your living by pulling dead bodies from the river and emptying their pockets of all their moveables before handing them over to the police (the river always seems to turn pockets inside out, the boatman says ingenuously), and a guy who is reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to a pair of retired servants who have come into a fortune.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been eyeing the latest Newbery winner, Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, with misery and dread since I got it from the library, but I suppose I’d better get it over with.

kitewithfish

What I've Read:

The Javelin Program Time to Orbit: Unknown #1 by Derin Edala This is the first half of a long web novel about an extremely fucked up space ship. Our protagonist starts out in the very media-est res, waking in the middle of a journey to be told, the ship is broken and you have to fix it! Things spiral. The characters have really interesting discussion of their decisions, and I'm looking forward to finishing the story in the next book.

Order 66: Star Wars: Republic Commando #4 by Karen Traviss
This is a fucking BUMMER of a book but it has to be - this series is about a set of clones in the Star Wars universe who are determined to escape the trap they've been born into. Traviss writes a good war story and this series has morally complex people doing good and bad things and feeling absolutely fine about it while they leave wreckage in their wake. Absolutely a must read series for anyone who is interested in the Mandalorian cultural canon - Traviss built most of of it from scratch.

What I'm Reading:

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - 82% - Started Apr 4, 2025 This re-read is great, the voices are excellent

The Antarctica Conspiracy
Time to Orbit: Unknown #2 Derin Edala -10% - Started Apr 7, 2025 like I said, the second half of the larger story.

What I'll read next
Book club - Janelle Monet short stories but I cannot recall which yet.

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ms_minerva

October 2020

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Reading

Book Review: Dido and Pa

Hummingbird Cottage News

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme for April 16 2025

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Flight of the Heron and Quest for a Kelpie

Book Review: The Wrong Way Home

Wednesday Reading Meme on Friday

Wednesday Reading Meme for April 10 2025

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October 2020

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