The first month of the new year is over! 2024 got off to a laid-back start (I love non-session years!), but things will pick up next month and beyond! Let’s look at what I got up to and read!

In Books…

• The Warm Hands of Ghosts: One of my most-anticipated reads of the year, this was an advance review copy I was thrilled to receive (out in just two weeks, on February 13th!). Katherine Arden followed up her fantastic Winternight trilogy with a quartet of middle-grade horror novels, but this is her first foray back into fiction for adults. Though those looking for the more playful fantasy of Winternight may find this overly grim, I really liked this story of Canadian siblings caught up in World War I. Laura Iven is a combat nurse, and a very good one, but a serious leg wound sends her back home…unfortunately, just in time for the Great Halifax Explosion. The disaster kills both of her parents, leaving her brother Freddie as her sole surviving family. When she receives Freddie’s effects in a irregular manner, though, she finagles a way to return to Europe to find out how her brother died…or maybe even if he died at all. The story is told through both Laura’s perspective and Freddie’s, so we know very early on that he is, in fact, alive. He finds himself trapped on the battlefield with a German soldier, Hans Winter, and the two form a bond as they struggle back to the front. Both Laura and Freddie separately find themselves, when they are most in need of succor, in a mysterious hotel being run by an even more mysterious man, a violinist who calls himself Faland. This hotel and its proprietor loom large as the siblings continue to try to find one another. I have become a bit of a World War I head, so this book was extremely up my alley. It’s an incredibly under-understood time period in American culture, and I appreciate that Arden shines a spotlight on it with this novel. The thing about World War I, though, is that it was a cataclysmic event, causing just staggering amounts of loss and destruction. Naturally, this makes for a much darker tone than her previous work. This book is largely about trauma, and survivor’s guilt, and the way people coped (or tried their best to do so) in the face of what was without exaggeration the end of the world as they knew it. Arden’s clear, eloquent writing and the plot’s forward momentum keep it from getting bogged down in despair, but it definitely falls on the bummer end of the spectrum. I personally love a bummer book, so it really worked for me. I’d definitely recommend it, especially for people curious to learn more about World War I!
• To The Lighthouse: This book club pick was my second Virginia Woolf, and since I’d read Mrs. Dalloway several years ago, I at least had some idea of what to expect stylistically going into it. And that’s the point, really, with Virginia Woolf anyways, that stream-of-consciousness style. It’s certainly not plot, as not much happens here. The book is divided into three sections: in the first, the Ramsays, a large family with eight children, are at their home in the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland and discuss whether or not they will take a trip to the local lighthouse the next day as they host a dinner party with many of the friends that have become a part of their orbit. In the second, ten years pass (coinciding with the years of WWI) and a handful of deaths occur. And in the third, several but not all of the characters from the first section reunite at the house, and the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse occurs. It is, naturally, not “about” the plot at all. It’s about people, and Woolf takes us straight into their heads to give us a chance to see them from the inside. I found it particularly effective during the dinner party, because the anxieties being experienced by the various participants about whether they should have come at all or what they’re going to say, or if they’ve just said the wrong thing entirely, feel so relatable even nearly 100 years later. She’s often sharply witty in her observations of relations between men and women, highlighting the ridiculousness of male plays for female attention. I found her curiously minimalist on the subject of The Great War, though, mentioning it only through the death of one of the characters in combat. It seems odd that she just kind of glides past it, though maybe she felt she’d already said what she wanted to say in Mrs. Dalloway. As much as I get what she’s doing with the stream-of-consciousness choice, I have to admit I find it something less than enjoyable to read. It requires so much active attention and is rarely really worth the reward. It’s a good book, very much worth reading and something I liked, but the style is best in very small doses.
• I Capture the Castle: One of the reasons I read so much backlist is that I feel like the cream rises to the top over time, and this is one of those books that gets recommended over and over and over again. It is indeed quite a charming read! Cassandra Mortmain, seventeen years old in the 1930s, starts keeping a journal as a writing exercise. In it, she records the daily life of her family, including her father (who once wrote a modern novel that was very well-received and has done nothing that would bring in any money, writing or otherwise, since), her stepmother (an artist’s model who enjoys communing with nature by walking around naked outside), her younger brother Thomas (a mostly normal teenage boy), and her beautiful older sister Rose. They live in a castle, but it’s a crumbling ruin and they are selling off the furniture to afford even the scanty food they eat. But the family’s luck turns when the person who owns the estate on which the castle is located dies and his young American nephews come to check out the place they’ve inherited. Of course, romantic intrigue develops. The real star here is the narrative voice Dodie Smith gives to Cassandra, who is delightful and witty and has a sweetness that avoids being saccharine. She feels like an actual person, and one you’d like to know. The plot is entertaining enough and well-paced but was not really the point, at least for me. It’s a winning book and one I’d recommend if you’ve managed to miss it thus far (especially if you enjoy coming-of-age stories!).
• Before The Ruins: An online group I’m in decided to do a book club, and chose this for our “mystery” month, which worked out great for me because I’d actually already wanted to read it! It turns out that maybe I should not have wanted that. The book uses a dual-timelines structure to tell a story about Andy, who is a grown adult lady when we meet her, with a fancy job and disposable income. She gets a sudden call from the mother of her childhood best friend, Peter, whom she’s mostly grown apart from over the years, to ask for her help in finding him, as he’s disappeared. And then we meet teenage Andy, as she recalls a summer in her late teens when she, Peter, Andy’s boyfriend Marcus, and their sweet, artistic friend Em spent time hanging around an abandoned manor house in their rural English hometown. This Andy is half-feral, her alcoholic mother having neglected her through much of her childhood. The book tacks back and forth between these two timelines, one in which adult Andy searches for Peter and the second in which teenage Andy and her friends meet David, who appears out of nowhere at the manor one day. He’s their same age, and the group spends the summer playing a game in which they hide fake diamonds around the manor for the others to find, inspired by an actual theft of a diamond necklace at that manor in its glory days, but nothing good can last. Sounds intriguing, right? Alas, this book has so many issues. First and foremost is the completely bananas pacing. Virtually nothing happens for the entire first half of the book, it’s all setup. I’m a character-focused reader, so I don’t usually mind if “nothing happens”. But the characters don’t work either. They feel very thinly sketched, and then we get to the back half and not only does the plot start hurtling forward frantically, the character moments feel like they’re trying to cash checks that were never actually written. Very little about the relationship of the characters to each other makes any sense, in either timeline. The prose is fine, a little on the flowery side, which feels almost jarring because it’s swinging for these moments of insight and clarity that the book never really earns or even seems to be earnestly seeking. It’s so messy that it’s hard to identify just one or two things that might have made a positive difference. A big mess.
• The Left Hand of Darkness: I read (and enjoy) more fantasy than I tend to think I do, but I read very little of fantasy’s half-sibling, science fiction. Ursula K. LeGuin is one of those authors who has been on my list forever and ever, though, so I picked this one up to give a try. Set in a distant future, it follows Genly Ai, who has traveled to a world called Gethen as an envoy to attempt to persuade its leaders to join the galactic alliance that our Earth has become a part of. While the people of this world mostly resemble humans (it’s supposed that they descended from a long-abandoned colony), they have one important difference: for most of any given month, they are “ambisexual”, neither really male or female. But for a week or so, they become gendered, more or less at random. Anyone can sire a child, anyone can become pregnant. As someone who is constantly gendered, the natives view Genly as a bit of a pervert, and he has a hard time seeing them as something other than bizarre. There are two major nations on this planet, one (Karhide) ruled by an autocrat and the other (Orgoreyn) ruled in a kind of parliamentary system, and when Genly finds his principal sponsor in Karhide, Estreven, suddenly disgraced, at least in part because of his connection with Genly, the work of two years seems likely to unravel. There’s a lot in this novel about politics, both internal to each nation and between them. Indeed, world-building is what really shines here. LeGuin has thought a lot about what this world might be like, not just politics but geology and biology and even religion and folklore. It’s intricate, and I was a bit sad to leave it behind at the end because I found it immersive and engaging. The plot has elements of a travelogue, as might be expected, but an adventure story as well, and of course the aforementioned political intrigue. Character development honestly wasn’t a standout, but she managed to tell a moving story of a friendship even despite that, which is a bit of a neat trick. There were moments when I thought I wasn’t going to end up liking this very much, but by the end I was sorry to close it. I’d recommend it but also note that it might require some patience!

In Life…

• Michigan football won the national championship: Anyone who knows me knows how deeply I am emotionally invested in Michigan football. This has been mostly to my detriment over the past few decades. But this year, we won the title and I am oh so happy! I am going to be SO annoying about this!