I’d like to take a moment here to say that if it seems like I’m reading a lot, it is because it is a coping mechanism of dubious use, and often feels like the mental equivalent of getting a hand cream that smells nice from a big-box store.

With that out of the way, perhaps some of these books will make appropriate gifts for your friends and family? I mean, probably not, but there are holidays fore and aft of us. And if you feel like throwing some money at organizations, here’s a few that I really like.

But we’re here to talk about books. As usual, links go to Bookshop.

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The cover of *Legendborn*, which makes it YA nature pretty clear.

First up this month was Legendborn by Tracy Deonn, the first in a projected series, which was brought to my attention by one of the good people behind this blog (we’re in a Facebook group together). Legendborn follows sixteen-year-old Bree as she navigates both an early college program at UNC-Chapel Hill, maintaining friendships, the mysterious circumstances surrounding her mother’s death — and, of course, the fact that there’s a cabal of magic users who trace their lineage back to Arthur and his knights, which is currently faced with an immense incursion of demons. It’s a big story, and ends with the characters at a bit of a crossroads — but it is tackling big subjects. Bree, who is Black, not only must contend with a heady blend of YA romance and dark academia, but also the racist history of the institutions in which she becomes enmeshed. But Bree, and by extension, Deonn, handles it with aplomb, and I’m definitely looking forward to the sequel.

The cover of *The Death of Jane Lawrence*, featuring almost the same hand positioning as the previous book.

Next, I finished The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling. Dedicated readers of these round-ups may recall my affection of Starling’s prior novel-length outing, and The Death of Jane Lawrence, while working in a very different genre, does not disappoint: combining a sly alternate history with occultism and personally-costly magic, the novel follows Jane Shoringfield, a young woman with a head for numbers but not for interpersonal interaction, as she embarks on her plan to marry Dr. Lawrence — which she does, only to discover that Lawrence’s family home hides an unfolding series of dark secrets. Without giving too much away, I was repeatedly delighted by the twists taken in the course of the novel, and Jane herself is a compelling heroine, whose gifts are too often only a whisper away from her flaws.

Another find from the KU Library stacks, I next completed Haec Mihi Fingebam: Tibullus in His World by David Bright (this link goes to a Bookfinder.com search for the title, since it’s unsurprisingly not listed on Bookshop), which I wanted to read to support another project I’m working on. I would definitely note that this is an academic work, resolutely not intended for a popular readership, and certainly not close to my first recommendation for those seeking greater insight into the (undeservedly) least popular of the Latin elegists. With that caveat, Bright provides a compelling look at the Tibullan context: while he spends more time than I’d like on “the real Tibullus,” he also offers a series of relatively close readings of the poems that make up the first two books of the Tibullan corpus, reading them in groupings more or less based on their subject matter (the Messalla poems, the Delia poems, et cetera). To his credit, Bright owns that Tibullus is definitely expressing homosexual desire and was probably himself bisexual; I didn’t expect even that much, so I’ll take what crumbs I can. It was solid, overall, and certainly useful for my purposes.

The cover of *Redemptor*, which pairs beautifully with its predecessor.

I followed it with Jordan Ifueko’s Redemptor, the sequel to Raybearer, which I discussed previously. A worthy conclusion to that already-delightful story, our heroine Tarisai is now the empress of Aristar — the first, more or less, ever. But Tarisai made some serious promises when she took the throne, and this novel deals primarily with her attempts to follow through on them, even in the face of terrifying visions, court intrigue, rebellion in the country, and, of course, her impending voyage to the underworld, which she swore to undertake to end a terrible curse. But while Raybearer covered Tarisai’s life from very early days up to her late teens, Redemptor covers a much briefer period, characterized by much higher stakes, and Ifueko is no less equal to that tighter timeframe than she was to the bildungsroman that was the first book. And her worldbuilding is truly lovely: she offers a setting built on a plurality of different cultures, all of which were richly developed without slowing the narrative. I am excited to see where she goes from here.

The cover of *No Gods, No Monsters*, which, like the novel, is sick as hell.

After that, and also in audiobook form, I positively devoured No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull, which I cannot praise highly enough. The novel, which moves through several different viewpoint characters — sort of? There’s some very fun things happening with the novel’s structure, and its narrators — begins with the revelation that there is real magic in the real world, its sections even demarcated by when, in relation this new knowledge, they are set. But that revelation happens because of leaked video footage of a young man being murdered by the police, and the fallout of it reverberates outward, from the sister of the victim as she learns her estranged brother’s true nature, through her husband and his anarchist bookshop, and outward to a child named Dragon and the organizations that have known that there is magic in this world the whole time. Turnbull’s imagery is truly beautiful, moving from close observation of the world as we know it through visions that seem closer to Escher than any more conventional contemporary fantasy and back again. It, too, is the first of a projected series, and I await the follow-up with near-breathless anticipation.

The title page from a roughly contemporary printing, via Wikipedia.

It was a tough act to follow, but follow it I did by finally finishing Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s truly fucking weird sixteenth-century epic, in a prose translation by Guido Waldman. Despite the name, Orlando is only one of several central characters, including not one but two badass lady knights, in the Matter of France. But Ariosto was by inclination a classicist, and it really shows — and besides that, his imagery and the world he posits for his characters has less in common with the Chanson de Roland than it does to the kind of weird proto-fantasy of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Characters travel the globe on a hippogryph, fight each other for Hector’s armor, and one guy even goes to the moon(!); they fall in and out of love, and, in the case of Orlando himself, descend into a truly terrifying vision of madness; there are some lengthy “prophesies” that are basically just Ariosto sucking up to his patron, Ippolito d’Este. And while I normally eschew prose translations, Waldman does, as far as I can tell, a good job of making clear, readable English of Ariosto’s Italian (which I can only imagine must be really… something). I am not sure why I have wanted to read it for so long, but I have, and now I am glad that I have. I think it might explain some things? But that’s a subject for those more learned than I.

The cover of *The Past Is Red*, featuring an illustration by John Hendrix, which I love.

During that time, I went to my local library to get a COVID booster (get yours, KC!), and had the good sense to peruse the shelves a bit, where I found two books I had been wanting to read for some time. The first one I finished was The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente — which is also the first of her books that I’ve read, period, despite having followed her career with some interest, and even sending her an email asking for advice on graduate school (to which she did not respond, but no hard feelings). The Past Is Red is both a fix-up and a conclusion to The Future Is Blue, which was written for an anthology and forms the first part of the novella and follows Tetley Abednego, the most hated girl in the world, as she navigates life on a floating continent built from trash, aptly named Garbagetown. Despite broadly falling into the two-part novella structure, of which I am not a fan, it was a fun romp: a little on the nose, but that’s okay; Tetley was both compelling and difficult to read, partially because she seemed to narrate her own story in a voice much younger than her stated age; a late-story revelation added a certain strange depth to things that would have been nice earlier. Overall, though, I enjoyed it.

The other book I got from the library was Lee Mandelo’s Summer Sons, about which I’d mostly heard that it combined Appalachian gothic with a dark-academia vibe, and that it was queer. This felt calibrated to my interests, so I was excited to read it; it did not disappoint. Andrew, our protagonist, was supposed to follow his beloved adoptive brother, Eddie, to graduate school at Vanderbilt — but mere days before Andrew was supposed to arrive, Eddie dies in mysterious circumstances, leaving Andrew to not only navigate a graduate program whose intrigues are opaque, but also his belated brother’s drag-racing friends, who seem to know more than they’re letting on. Add to that the increasingly-intense visions from which Andrew suffers, which seem to stem from a mysterious childhood accident in which Eddie played a role, and Andrew is in over his head. Basically, the plot was solid, but what kept me hooked were Mandelo’s powers of observation and description, especially of men interacting with each other: body language and presence, gesture and loaded silence — all were characterized with aching intensity, and I absolutely ate it up.

Unfortunately, I struggled to finish the ebook of Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. Newitz, a noted science journalist, explores the rises and falls of Catalhoyuk, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, seeking to describe what caused these places to grow, how people lived there when they lived there, and what, eventually, caused those people to seek better lives elsewhere. It’s a compelling premise, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I did — but while Newitz excels in discussing what these cities can teach us, she is less skilled at covering the history of private life, which she often attempts in this book. Cameron has spoken highly elsewhere of one of her other books, and I may check that one out in hopes that it plays better to Newitz’s strengths. I am also open to the thought that perhaps it was simply the format in which I read it, but I was disappointed here.

A poster for a revival of one of the plays in the collection, *The Pitchfork Disney*, via a review of the revival in *The Scotsman*.

Closing out this round-up, I’ve got Plays 1 and Plays 2, the Methuen Drama Series collections of Philip Ridley’s plays up to the early aughts. For full disclosure, I did actually finish Plays 2 on 1 December, which was also my birthday, but it seems like a good place to end this piece. Ridley is an artistic polymath: a painter, writer, and film director in addition to a playwright; he is very upfront about his background in London’s East End, and his theatrical works are often discussed in the same breath as Sarah Kane’s in the context of In-yer-face Theatre. But where Kane’s focus was violently, terrifically inward, Ridley’s plays are a sort of lashing-out-laughing, pockmarked with tenderness amidst an often self-conscious transgressiveness — the latter quality, often, to their detriment. The Overton Window analogy, after all, doesn’t only apply to political ideology but also to public speech, and what was once transgressive runs the risk of aging badly. And while that’s certainly true of elements of the plays collected in these volumes, it’s not universally so. I already liked Philip Ridley — The Passion of Darkly Noon is a weird fucking movie and I love it, and I had the good fortune to have In the Eyes of Mr. Fury as the first piece of contemporary queer writing I encountered — so I was ready to wade through for the gems, but that may not be true for everyone.

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A good solid month, then. If you liked this, you can follow me or Cameron on Twitter, where I post extremely infrequently and he posts somewhat more often.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, November 2021