What I’ve Read
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers (audiobook, narrator Ian Carmichael)
Ok, this is the kind of book that almost makes me love the English, tho they do not deserve it. Dorothy Sayers wrote this book, and it’s such a careful look at this one small town in this one backwater place with one magnificent church in it with a set of also magnificent bells. Both this and Murder Must Advertise have a reputation in the Sayers fandom (such as I am aware of it) as being The Weird Books – where you just have to follow Sayers into her latest obsession and trust that you’re going to get an exciting story out of it on the way. And you do! It honestly felt like it has some spiritual overlap with Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, about the women who provide so much support and life to the little parishes around England. This is set thirty years earlier and with a far more rural view, but man, it does have those careful little inside views of an English parish. Do I understand anything more about English style change ringing? Only the barest crumb! Did I enjoy myself? I had a wonderful time!

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
I feel I should recant my opinions from last week. I was irked by the audiobook narrator, who, I admit now, had the thankless task of attempting to narrate a book that starts in binary. I have seen a better light. Here’s the story:

I talked to a friend (thank you, bookclub gods, for nerds who read fast) and expressed my woes about how the book was slow and dumb and not scary and I didn’t care about any of the people who were dying and the genre mashup was not working for me because the book couldn’t decide if people know about specific monsters from literature (Dracula is in this book, did I mention?) or not (the space computer did not believe in werewolves) – and she said, “I don’t think it’s trying to be scary. I think it’s camp.”

And lo, in retrospect, it was pretty clearly camp. Not serious, and not scary, and one of the monsters is a mummy named Steve and the creature called Frankenstein is an art project gone wrong and the werewolf is gay. It’s fucking camp. I’m glad my friend reeled me back in, because I actually had a wonderful time reading this book and I feel moderately unstoppable riding that high.

What I’m Reading

The Artists Way – Week 4 – AKA, the week where you are supposed to not read anything and see how you fill the empty space that you had previously taken up in your life by reading and generally distracting yourself with things. It’s been a day. I hate it. I hate it so much. I walked up to a little free library with delight and said, “FUCK, I can’t read any of these!” to the delight of my amused spouse. I have also had three very meaningful conversations, taken a nice walk with my spouse in the windy fall day with deliciously crunchy leaves, cleaned and refilled several of my fountain pens, changed out the annoying keycaps on my work keyboard for better ones from my stash, bought replacement HVAC filters, and wrote a long tantrumy letter to a friend. So. Uh. It might be working.

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?

What I’ve Read

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer – As I wrote in more detail last week, this book is a really great overview of the Ottoman Empire, in the opinion of someone who knows very little about the Ottoman Empire. Baer’s style felt approachable and clear and made a point of grouping developments both thematically and in a clear timeline.

I will concede, I felt more positively about the book last week, but that’s not a writing failure. The latter half of the book is a downward slide from religious tolerance and multicultural assimilation into a larger Empire (good or bad, it did allow upward mobility!) to an ethnic and religious paranoia of the non-Turkish elements of the failing state. The book’s coverage of the Armenian Genocide was, in fact, both horribly clear and quite personal and made me very very sad.

I again recommend this book and if anyone has other books that look at the Ottoman Empire’s history, I would like to read them!

Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy Sayers (narrated by Ian Carmichaels, thank you again anon donor of audiobooks!) – Hilariously funny and also deeply goddamn bleak. It does a very compelling job of showing Wimsey’s doublemindedness while he’s undercover – at times, he truly thinks of himself as Mr Bredon, advertising copywriter in a quirky little office, and occupies that role with humor and warmth. Then he has to come back to being Lord Peter Wimsey, investigating the death of a young man at that same office, and knowing that he’s likely to do real damage to at least one person involved in a real and dangerous criminal ring at the advertising firm. The tension is well structured and given breaks of humor around the office, but has clear stakes for individual people we meet who are harmed by the crimes the scheme is covering up.

( Spoilery reflections on the ending of this book and on The Unfortunateness at the Bellona Club )


What I’m Reading

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove – I tried the audiobook – I really did! But the main narrator was much too annoying to continue. (I’d mention them by name but this appears to be an ensemble audiobook with several narrators and I can’t tell which one this was.) The book is unfortunately for a book club – I would have bailed by now, if it were up to me, just because the pacing is so glacial. It’s trying to do Murderbot and failing to make it fun.

A key failure is the description impedes the pacing. When you come across our Computer Main Character doing a normal thing in an unusual way because they are a computer, not a human, you get a description of how that action is completed in computer-y way. And the first time, that’s great. But. You get that same description over, and over, and over. As a result, instead of grabbing the reader swiftly and towing them excitingly thru realizing, gasp! your ship is full of CORPSES! Then the WEREWOLF attacks! - the text plods. Pauses. Observes. Describes. And then plods again.

This is rapidly proving to be the sort of book I would read ONLY via audiobook because the text is too irksome, but the audiobook sucked! The narrator is very very English and very very irksome. So on I plod, reading a book that doesn’t trust me to remember that computers are different than people.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers – I almost mention this book in self defense against the accusation that I’m bored by Of Monsters and Mainframes because I only like sexier and dumber writing. (No one has made this accusation, other than the hobgoblins of my mind.) This is an English countryside murder mystery that doesn’t get to the discovery of the body until our main character has been introduced to the little town via their New Year’s Eve change ringing performance that involves 8 men ringing church bells for nine hours in precise mathematical permutations. It’s fascinating, and compelling, and I don’t actually care that I’m not able to perfectly understand everything that’s happening, because the book’s momentum is taking me forward at a satisfying clip. The people of the town are interesting, and there’s a blatant self-insert of Sayer’s childhood self in a precocious little teen who wants to be a writer. (I love her.)

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison - for next week, I have read the first half, I should get on this!
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?