Recently read and loved
May has passed in both a blur and a pile of books. The books, however, are mostly research for my next novel, on topics like the relationship between women and the dead in antiquity, medieval relics, and the papacy during the Italian Renaissance. I kind of feel like I’m back in grad school, which isn’t a bad thing, but is sort of a weird one.
Anyway, there has been some reading for fun, and so I wanted to share with you a few recommendations of things I’ve recently loved.
The Photograph, Penelope Lively. I first read Lively in high school. We were assigned Moon Tiger and I adored it. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to look into other books from her, but I’ve been reading through her work recently, and The Photograph was astounding. It’s beautifully written and elegantly constructed and does absolutely terrific character work.
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. This was a smart, fun SFF mystery in the Holmes and Watson vein. It’s set in a rich and interesting world, and I mean that not just in the SFnal sense, but in the sense that the people and politics of the setting are well developed and important.
The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. I’m cheating a little with this one because I have only dipped in and out of the poems, rather than finishing the entire book, but I am really enamored. Here is one of my favorites.
Courtney Summers’s newsletter. She writes so interestingly about the art that moves her and about her own creative process.
The Garden, Clare Beams. Imagine a women-only fertility clinic set at Hill House. Now imagine it narrated in knife-edge prose by a woman who doesn’t give a fuck whether you or anyone else likes her. That’s this book. I thought it was brilliant.
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