So people keep giving me books to read and I have been so way behind on posting about them, so uh I'm just going to post something quick about a few, even though they deserve much longer posts.
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The Girl from Rawblood (Catriona Ward) - 4/5 - this one part of the Catriona Ward kick which is all the fault of
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rachelmanija. I really liked this one! I felt that
Sundial, while compelling, also didn't invest me overmuch in the characters, except for Callie, and that took a while -- but this book I felt both had compelling characters and a deep compassion for all of them. I read this in conjunction with
rachelmanija over chat (we'd make sure we were synched for each chapter) which was super fun, although it did mean that occasionally we'd figure out plot twists ahead of time that I'd never have figured out on my own (since we were having twice the amount of epiphanies/making twice the number of connections that we would have by ourselves, as well as discussing after every chapter instead of my barrelling straight through). But also ALL THE WARNINGS (most flagrantly, content note for early-20th-century insane asylums and also there is a very graphic bit with rabbit dissection that both of us skipped -- lots of other terrible stuff too, but those were the ones that were so bad that I, who have basically no triggers or squicks, flinched). This was also a good book to read with someone else because we could stop ourselves from reading chapters late at night. (...There are definitely chapters you don't want to have read late at night and be trying to sleep after reading. It doesn't have a terrible awful no-good ending -- in fact, there's a lot of grace to the ending -- but the book itself is a Gothic horror book.)
rachelmanija's much better review
is here.
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Josephus,
The Jew of Rome,
Josephus and the Emperor (Lion Feuchtwanger) - 4/5 -
selenak mentioned these as part of her never-ending quest to feed me books and history I am ignorant of, and I was like, wait, the Josephus of
Antiquities of the Jews? Sign me up! (We read bits of Josephus in my college Bible class, and I'd always meant to read more of his work.) I found these quite interesting -- Josephus, the titular and main character of the saga, had a much more interesting life than I had realized (I knew basically nothing about him except that he'd written that one book), and Feuchtwanger makes him a complicated character who can sometimes be frankly unlikeable at times, but whom I found always fascinating. Feuchtwanger was Jewish, and these books were written in the 1930's and 1940's... much of the books is concerned with the Jews of that time and their relationship with the Roman Empire, both as a whole (e.g., the wars, as well as various Roman policy) and in individual cases (Josephus himself being the prime example of someone whose life, as Feuchtwanger portrayed it, was continually clashing between his Jewish identity and his Roman identity).
It also brings up nascent Christianity and Josephus' investigation into Christianity's roots (which
selenak told me is the only reason why Josephus' work was saved in the first place, as opposed to his rival Justus, who is a minor but important character in the book (I hilariously was convinced that if there was a fandom for this book, Justus/Josephus would be the juggernaut ship -- there are a lot of very shippy tropes and language surrounding their relationship) whom we only know about because Josephus mentioned him in his books). And at one point it raises the question, what's the role of deceit in religion? In the sense of, is it okay if a religion (Christianity, in this case) is founded on a lie? Or on stories that may have some truth but other parts of it are not truthful? (Uh, doubly relevant for me, which is why it struck me so profoundly even though it's a quite small part of the book.) Anyway -- there's a lot going on in these books, more than the... margin of this post will contain. I haven't even gotten to the great plot thread with my fave Lucia in the third book! :P Anyway, very interestingly chewy books, I thought! Perhaps more interesting to someone who is already interested in the subject material (I was interested in both Josephus and the meta questions Feuchtwanger brings up).
(His book
The Oppermanns is supposed to be re-released this week in English. (The link goes to a 2001 print version but I believe the print is being rereleased this week with the e-book.) This is a contemporary novel about a German Jewish family during Hitler's rise to power. I'm going to check it out, when I surface from Yuletide-related reading...)
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Luckenbooth (Jenni Fagan) - 3+/5. This was an odd and interesting book, courtesy of a rec by
cenozoicsynapsid. I am not quite sure I liked it so much as I admired it -- it's a story of, well, various events that take place in a single building in Edinburgh during the 20th century, in a sort of dystopian-magic AU of our world, and it's doing some interesting things structurally, with each of three sections being the weaving together of stories of three different sets of people in slightly different but overlapping eras (each section is in a distinct time era and has its own arc): so, nine different sets of people. This sometimes worked well and sometimes not as well -- some sets were interesting stories, both for the way they intersected with the through-line and in their own right (the medium! the miner who is afraid of daylight!), though there was at least one set (perhaps not surprisingly, the one with William Burroughs -- if any of the others were people I should have heard of, I don't know it) where I just didn't care about the set of people in those chapters. This was definitely one of those books where I had no idea what was going on for a while (I'm still not sure I figured out everything), and I do enjoy that. I also feel like it was odd enough that I'm not sure I recommend it! But I'll probably put it on my Hugo ballot, because it needs more challenging material and less The Same Five Authors Over And Over Again, not that I am bitter. This one also has all the warnings! graphic murder, rape, etc.
