Summer is winding to a close, in a way. It’ll still feel summery for a while, September is usually pretty warm in northern Nevada, but the kids are already back at school and pumpkin spice lattes are on the menu, and honestly once we get past Labor Day, my brain refuses to think of it as anything besides fall.

In Books…

• The Last Werewolf: This book came out in the wake of the Twilight phenomenon, and Glen Duncan seems determined to ensure that the reader understands that this is not That Sort Of Werewolf Book. Oh no, this is an Edgy Werewolf Book. There is graphic violence, there is a lot of sex, there are a lot of c-bombs thrown around (also, if I don’t have to read the word “sly” in conjunction with a c-bomb again it will be too soon). It does do some cool things! The world-building is excellent, Duncan creates an intriguing shadow world in which werewolves are no longer able to transmit their condition through bites, and a religious-turned-paramilitary organization that hunts them down (hence why there’s a last werewolf). But where it fails spectacularly is character development. Jake Marlowe, the titular final lycanthrope, spends most of the first 150 pages of the book despairing at his status in the world and preparing for his own death. It really does not make for a compelling reading experience. The character beats that are hit are largely very similar throughout the book, until a second main character is introduced about halfway through, when Marlowe gets a second set of beats to hit, though this character remains at a remove despite a lot of words being used to describe them. And that’s the other thing. The prose, while not terrible by any means, tends towards the overwritten and this does not do anything to make it more dynamic. Some books I read quickly because I can’t stop turning the pages, and some I read quickly because I want to get on to the next thing and this was the latter.
• Tin Man: This month’s book club pick was slim but packed an outsize emotional wallop. It’s a sweet, wistful story about a pair of young men, Ellis and Michael, growing up in Oxford, and the bond between them that shifts as they grow up and their circumstances change, and how Ellis winds up alone in his 30s. It’s all character development, very little in the way of plot, which tend to be the books that work best for me. The prose is simple but poignant. It doesn’t use quotation marks to set off dialogue, which some readers find irritating but I found worked just fine in context. I really really loved it, it was beautiful and heartwarming and heartbreaking.
• The King Who Had To Go: If you’re at all interested in the British Royal Family, the abdication of Edward VIII will be familiar to you. The broad outlines of the story are no less scandalous for being fairly straightforward: less than a year into his reign, before he’d even had a coronation, Edward renounced his throne for the sake of a singularly unsuitable woman, Wallis Simpson…not only American, not only already once a divorcee, but still married to her second husband. As the head of the Church of England, which did not sanction divorce, and with the unpopularity of Simpson herself, he had no choice but to abdicate if he wanted a future with her. This book is not particularly interested in the Edward and Wallis of it all (though there’s naturally some of that), but rather in exploring how, exactly, the abdication came to be from a government perspective. It’s fact-heavy, relying on primary sources like contemporaneous diaries and memoirs and full of detail about Cabinet meetings. I think it would be a bit too dry for many readers, though the writing itself is pretty lively and it’s pretty easy to tell who author Adrian Phillips likes (like Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), and who he doesn’t (like Edward and Wallis) because he does not pull punches with his opinions. As someone who works in politics for a living, I found it really interesting because I’m well-acquainted with the way behind-the-scenes political dramas play out and the way they are often quite different than what is presented to the public. I enjoyed this and learned a lot from it, but if you’re looking for something more focused on the Royal Family itself this may not be for you.
• Oscar Wars: I’ve been a dedicated Oscar-watcher for ages, and have seen all but less than a handful of the movies that have ever won Best Picture. So it was super thoughtful of my mom to buy this book for me, which looks at the history of the Academy Awards since their inception nearly 100 years ago to now! It focuses on a few storylines per decade that exemplify trends in the movie industry at large, touching on everything from the tempestuous relationship between Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, to the Blacklist, to the fraught history of race in Hollywood, to the Harvey Weinstein of it all and everything in between. I found it a really enjoyable read, with stories both familiar to me as a longtime listener to You Must Remember This and ones that were entirely new to me. One theme that resonated with me in particular throughout was no matter how much people today carp about the Oscars having become “too political”, they literally have always been political. The Academy itself was founded to establish relationships between different groups in Hollywood (actors, producers, writers, etc) in an attempt to avoid labor issues. You don’t have to have a super-deep understanding of film culture coming into this book, so it’s accessible for casual movie-watchers who want to learn more as well as entertaining for people who love this stuff already!
• Wolf Winter: The best version of this book is a historical fiction murder mystery. It still wouldn’t really work for me, it’s a little grim and dark for my tastes, but it would work better. In 1717, a Finnish family, Paavo, Maija, and their daughters Frederika and Dorotea, arrive as settlers in Swedish Lapland (as I remember from reading Stolen a couple months back, this is not the correct term…the people are Sami and the region is Sapmi, but Lapps/Lapland are the terms the characters would have used). Shortly after their arrival, the girls find a murdered man in a clearing. The plot centers around the puzzle of his death, which resonates not just among the family, but among the fellow homesteaders on Blackasen mountain, the Sami people who range through the area in the winter, and the religious authority in the area, a priest who had once been a close friend of the King but has wound up in an isolated, frigid hamlet. This all is executed proficiently enough, with Ekback’s depiction of the tensions that can arise in the wilderness during the endless night and cold of an Arctic winter, particularly after a gruesome death, feeling very real. But the novel also features a supernatural element, and this was where it faltered for me. It was well-written enough, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and I wished she’d either excised it or leaned into the magical realism of it all harder. Perhaps if it had been cut, it would have made room for a richer discussion of the political situation in Sweden at the time, which was a major factor in the plot but was never really appropriately explained in the text. I appreciated the character work that Ekback pulled off, I definitely got invested in all of the protagonists and their various plights. Like I said, the overall grimness of tone (which is relatively common in Scandinavian literature) didn’t really work for me, nor did the pacing, with the plot being resolved very quickly at the very end.

In Life…

• I went to see Adele with my sister: I will freely concede that this was WAY too expensive, but with her having had her son at the end of 2020 and me having had mine in the beginning of 2022, with the pandemic of course having predated even my nephew’s arrival, we hadn’t spent time together just the two of us in AGES. Adele was obviously great and it was super fun to have some time with my sister!