Books this last little while
Happy Birthday fomorian, my favourite brother-in-law!



Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon. Fifth or sixth re-read. Someone in the comments to my last books post said that Sayers "wrote her own fanfic" with these two, which struck me as bizarre -- you can't get more canonical, surely? -- and who wouldn't think breathing novels about real people better than clever little mysteries with clockwork revolving figures? There are bits of the prose of Gaudy Night that leave me breathless, and I think what she was doing in Busman'd Honeymoon is something almost nobody has done -- examining the "happy ever after". I sometimes compare these two to Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Other times I compare Gaudy Night to Tam Lin.

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark. Continuing with the same theme, most of the Moon I've read has been fast-paced enjoyable adventure. This is different, and quite astonishing. It's the story of an autistic bioinformatics programmer in the near future as he is forced to consider undergoing an experimental operation to make him "normal", from his own POV, which is alien, limited, and utterly fascinating. Brilliant. Read it.

David Nobbs I Didn't Get Where I Was Today. Autobiography of comic writer David Nobbs. I shouldn't have read this on the train, because it made me laugh until I wept, and then when I read out what had made me laugh to the deeply embarrassed Zorinth it had the same effect on him. Beautifully written, much more honest than most such books, and with a wonderful sense of timing. If you haven't read any Nobbs, though, you should start with Second From Last in the Sack Race.

Ursula Le Guin Gifts. A short, brilliant, original fantasy novel, with note-perfect solid description, a lovely world, and a great voice. This has everything I love about Le Guin's writing and none of the problem of trying too hard for the distant view and tripping over the feet at hand. I loved it. I can see already that this is going to be one of those books I read frequently. I wish I could write like that.

Anita Diamant The Red Tent. Recommended by adrian_turtle. This is a retelling of the Jacob/Joseph part of the bible from the POV of Dinah. It's female-centred in a very odd way indeed. I liked it, and I thought it a reasonable reconstruction from the story and the archaeology, but it had the same kind of problems mythological retellings often have of having to deal with odd weightings when they touch the known.

Marge Piercy Living in the Open Poetry collection. I read this in between most of the above. It's one I never managed to find before. There's a lot in it that's lovely, but nothing that really burned through me the way her very best work does. Despite the title, I could sense a lot of holding back, probably because I'd read her later poetry collections and her autobiography. I mustn't give up on finding the Piercy poetry I don't have, even though looking is so seldom fruitful. I found this in one of the lovely second-hand bookshops in Kingston.

Marge Piercy Fly Away Home, nth reread. Reading the poetry made me feel like re-reading one of the related novels. This one is set in Boston, in very specific places that made me sorry I hadn't gone on a "Fly-Away-Home literary tour" while I was there for N4. I was going to say it's about arson and divorce, but in fact it's about the nature of evil. If you can stand to read books about middle-aged women in the real world, this is a very good one.