rosanicus | Entries tagged with books: other

Thought I wasn't going to get much in for this and then I had an insanely good evening yesterday.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Buried: An alternative history of the first millenium in Britain by Professor Alice Roberts
- I bought this after Goodreads pushed my brother's partner's review of it onto my timeline despite the review being several years old. It's an excellent read and I have NO regrets - such a thoughtful and kind examination of historical burial practices, the limitations of archaeology, and the ongoing quest to discover exactly what happened on this little island after the fall of Rome. The second chapter is quite heavy going - it's about infant burials - but the author is upfront about it and even invites you to skip it, which I thought was nice. I did read it though because I wanted to learn more about it and ended up with lots of info about surgical abortions in the Roman era, which was COOL. Honestly, a lot of the info here was just cool to me, I love archaeology and grew up watching Time Team obsessively.
Donut Squad: TAKE OVER THE WORLD by Neill Cameron
- The boys in my class won't stop going on about this so when I saw it half-price at Waterstone's I picked it up (along with an enamel pin of Anxiety Donut, I'm not made of stone) and it is, irritatingly, really funny. It has the vibe of Beano or the Bash Street Kids, which makes sense since it's a compilation of strips from the kids' magazine The Phoenix. The strips are all four panels centering on a particular character or plotline (either world domination by the Donut Squad or the evil machinations of their enemies the Bagel Battalion) and they are genuinely very good. My favourite doughnuts are Sprunky the unpredictable (who does things like write communist propaganda on the walls of Buckingham Palace) and Chalky (the ghost of a murdered Victorian doughnut). It's very silly and it only took about forty minutes to read.
Pride by Eric Huang
- This one was another impulse buy at Waterstone's. It's a picture book about going to Pride as a child with your gay parents, and I loved it. So sweet and gentle in a way which will definitely not appeal to the boys in my class but that's fine, I'll lend it to the Reception teacher who was on our Sherlock Homos quiz team last term. I love children's books which deal with queer identity in this matter of fact way, it gives one a bit of hope.
Biggles Takes It Rough by W.E. Johns
- Reviewed here!
What it was like to be an Ancient Maya by David Long
- Research for next term's History topic and also the only book I could find at Waterstone's about the Maya. The book was simple and easy to follow, being a Barrington Stoke title, and I would describe it as largely inoffensive. It's an underrepresented period in children's books on this side of the Atlantic, abandoned in favour of the more dramatic and bloodthirsty representations of the Aztecs and Inca (I am not immune to the Pachacuti song from Horrible Histories). I learned just enough to discover that the scheme the school buys into has, once again, been massively reductive and occasionally outright incorrect. Great!

What I'm Reading Now

STILL Blood on Satan's Claw, I promise I'm reading it on and off it's just heavy going while we wait for the teens to get on with the rituals.

What I'm Going To Read Next

I plucked Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane off my bookshelf this morning and am very excited to get into it! I fucking love Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places is one of my favourite books ever.

The parents at school very kindly gifted my WIFE and I a Foyles gift card as a wedding gift (we're married) (it's great), and with it I bought several books. One such book is the Penguin Weird Fiction anthology, which I miraculously read after a horrible reading dry spell.

My taste in short stories is definitely suited to this book. There's a good mix of authors in here, stories I've heard of and a few I hadn't. In the tradition of my old Goodreads reviews I will therefore present a power ranking, least favourite to most, because I enjoy putting my opinion on the Internet.

DNQ: A Wicked Voice by Vernon Lee
The only story I completely bounced off. Something about the narrative voice really annoyed me and I couldn't get past it :( Maybe one day!

8. The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft
This is my first Lovecraft story and honestly I'm disappointed by how sane the narrator remains for the whole thing. The racism was more intertwined with the narrative than I expected which gave the whole thing an unpleasant aftertaste, unsurprisingly. I enjoyed the epistolary elements though, and it's nice to have a reference point for all the Lovecraftian media made in response.

7. Where Their Fire is Not Quenched by May Sinclair
I think this one is about the perils of retreating into piety after treating other people badly and/or being sinful, which is less effective as someone living in 2025 who thinks Oscar Wade sounds like a bit of a cunt. The protagonist's growing terror and disorientation was effective though, and I loved the gut punch of an ending.

6. Kerfol by Edith Wharton
Would've enjoyed this more if it went full Martin's Close with the historical part of the narrative. The ideas behind this were more interesting than the execution, I think, but I did like the ideas!

5. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
It's dramatic, it's hard to parse, it's got horribly long sentences and obvious social commentary. It's got literal death gatecrashing a party to say Fuck The Rich. It's a great time and I'm glad I read it - probably my favourite Poe I've read yet, although Amontillado is obviously close at heel.

4. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
I mean obviously this one is a banger. I've read it several times and every time I'm struck by how genuine the bond of love is between the parents and son before it's all destroyed by an understandable greed. Endlessly parodies and imitated but ultimately that last image of the open door - damn. Really good.

3. The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle
Realistically this isn't better than The Monkey's Paw but it's a speculative piece of horror sci-fi from ACD about a pilot that finds a sky jungle at 40,000 feet and then gets killed by massive sky jellyfish. So it's a yes from me, gang. I didn't realise until the pilot mentioned unscrewing his "air bag" that the aeronautics was mostly theoretical as well, so kudos to ACD for some very plausible technobabble.

2. Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster
HAUNTED FUR BOA. This is an oversimplification but it's true, so. I am yet to read Flight of the Heron despite a combination of desire and motivation so thus is my first Broster foray and I had a FANTASTIC time. It's such a potent mix of deserved retribution and undeserved manipulation, a real Jamesian wallop at the end with the return of A Creature and a wonderful amount of implication and subtext as to what exactly Augustine Marchant has been up to in Prague...

1. Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad' by M.R. James (my beloved)
We all knew this was coming. I adore MRJ and this really is one of his best. It's funny in a dry and understated way, it contains many references to MRJ's hatred of golf, and it also happens to be genuinely frightening, both in its descriptions and in the way it builds that sense of unease in the environment and the things that Parkins shrugs off and the audience Just Knows is going to go badly for the poor professor. I like Parkins! I hope he and the Colonel had a lovely assignation on the links and he returned to Cambridge a better and less cynical man.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Two books this week! I read The Missing Page (the next Steeley adventure) on the train to London, which was an enjoyable little yarn. I really do love Tubby's narration, it feels so companionable, if a bit lacking in homoerotic thoughts about Steeley this time. The mystery, such as it was, was fine, and I liked Mrs Ridgeley a lot. I think WEJ's biases about women come out a lot more in these books, especially regarding which ones he treats respectfully and which he doesn't. Usually the sign of a Bad Woman is that she's old, large and drunk, which is a bit of a stock character now in Steeley despite only being four books in.

On the train back from London, I read Fighting Proud: The Untold Story of the Gay Men Who Served in Two World Wars by Stephen Bourne, as recommended by

black_bentley while we were perusing the IWM bookshop. Buying it helped to ameliorate the impact of the two Canelo Biggles editions I also picked up (Secret Agent and Goes to War, two faves) and I really loved the reading experience. It's a moving overview of the lives of a number of queer servicemen (the book briefly acknowledges the existence of bisexual men and then uses gay as an umbrella term), including two members of the Endurance expedition, and I was extremely pleased by the inclusion of a chapter on Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, who I became briefly obsessed with after reading Moon Over Soho for the first time and still have in my Spotify rotation. It's what I wanted Bad Gays to be structurally, but clearly has the aim to inform rather than analyse. I think I'd quite like to read an analytical companion to this book now!

What I'm Reading Now

LMAO I'm not really reading anything at the moment due to work feeling a bit like a slow-motion car crash (very stressed, bullying situation being dealt with, children all falling out simultaneously, new planning structure still to implement...) but I have hopes for finally reading Persuasion which has been hanging about one chapter down for about three years.

What I Plan To Read Next

Making plans for these things is generally useless BUT I did receive a copy of Where The Golden Eagles Soar from Archie this weekend so I might crack that open.

London was delightful, by the way! It was lovely to meet

gattycat and

tweague, and to see black_bentley and Archie again. Getting the VC gallery tour from BB is an experience not to be missed, so it's a shame the gallery is closing this year due to what I can only assume is Tory nonsense.

A real game of two halves this weekend! And a lot of catching up from the past month...

Starting with the bad, I finally finished reading Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. I didn't like it! Annoyingly, I was initially really excited to read it (three years ago, when I started reading...) because I'd listened to and enjoyed a few episodes of the podcast, but as a book it felt poorly structured and I really disliked the way it subconsciously draws equivalence between varying levels of 'badness', as if being a Nazi and being mildly kinky are equally worthy of inclusion in this book's bloated, YFIP list-esque chapters. Not a fan.

In the Biggles world, I read Sergeant Bigglesworth, C.I.D., Biggles' Second Case, Biggles of the Interpol and Biggles in the Baltic. I really enjoyed them all, with Interpol being probably the least favourite due to inconsistency between stories, and my favourite being Baltic. I'd been putting it off due to the Evil vS, but it's a really cracking adventure and features such breathtaking insane thrills that I just can't resist. The bit at the end where Raymond admits that everyone thought they'd be dead in a day was truly fantastic, Biggles was SO CROSS. I hope they got at least a few days to unwind after this, but knowing Biggles he probably got involved in bringing down a spy ring while trying to walk in the park.

CID and Second Case were fun adventures as well. I love Bertie becoming an integrated member of &Co, I really do love him, and the drama and whump potential was really good stuff for my id. I do wish the polar bears had been given a bit more play, but to be fair I always feel this way about giant animals in Biggles books. I admit it's been long enough now since I read them that I only have faint memory of the actual plot, but the huge pit of Chekov's land mines was probably the highlight, especially when they vaporised a Nazi.

Finally, I read Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, which was excellent. It pushed me past two of my misgivings, which are that I usually bounce off first person POV (with the notable exception of Rivers of London, and now this!) and also that I haven't always enjoyed ambiguity in fiction. But here it is: an ambiguous gothic novel in the first person which had me up past midnight to finish it. Lenore is a fantastic protagonist, closed off and traumatised and working so very very hard to win a game rigged against her. The point where she snaps is built up to with such fantastic tension that the pay-off had me actually clapping in delight. The structure where nearly every chapter ends with a hook for the next also worked extremely well, to the point I was turning to my partner basically every chapter to say 'You won't BELIEVE what happened NOW'. Extremely readable, slightly haunting, highly recommended.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Gimlet Mops Up, The Ravensdale Mystery and All's Fair, all by W.E. Johns (as is to be expected at this point. Mops Up was a very enjoyable tale, and once again delivered Gimlet whump in spades - I think WEJ just enjoys hitting him over the head from time to time and honestly I can't blame him (sorry Gimlet, ILU really!!). The plot moved along at a fair clip and there was a decent amount of action as well as a bit of espionage with Cub's trip to the church. Speaking of, the chapter title 'Cub Goes To Church' really tickled me. We also got some fun Copper and Trapper bits, although Trapper continues to be the most weakly characterised of all the cast due to his main trait being 'has a French accent, is happy to murder', as opposed to characters like Cub ('is young, happy to murder, in love with Gimlet'). Speaking of I am starting to shamefully ship Cub/Gimlet in a one-sided and hopeless way which Gimlet would be horrified to find out about. Cub goes out for a drink with Ginger and ends up trying to commiserate about age-gap crushes. Unfortunately Ginger has levelled up the relationship and has to try and conceal that fact for as long as possible.

The Werewolves were described in a suitably creepy fashion and their use of knockout gas was an effective way to incapacitate the characters in a believable way. The scene at the Lorrington Cottage Garden Show was great, and also the fact that the Lorrington Cottage Garden Show is a thing in this book I can mention brings me great joy. WEJ seems very attached to Gimlet as landed gentry trying to Do It Right, which is probably some sort of Imperialist impulse but I can't get over the idea of Gimlet, freshly scrubbed clean of Nazi blood, turning up to award a rosette for Best Lamb In Show to a rosy-cheeked child.

The Ravensdale Mystery was a delightful surprise! A girl's school story which I can happily rec to my mum, we follow Joan Scott - a previously sickly child who grew up in a colonial state (wherever did he get that idea...) - who has finally started school after years of reading books on her own. Her father is in Intelligence and her mother isn't mentioned, but one hopes that she's alive even against all the odds. Joan is a lovely lead character, so very clearly a teenager with a lack of experience in the world but still very intelligent and adventurous in a way which surprises even herself. She self-consciously thinks she doesn't have friends - especially Diana, who is described as a quintessential British schoolgirl, being attractive and very good at sports but not much for her lessons. Diana is also said to rib younger students a lot in a good natured way, which Joan objects to. Despite all this I do believe that she has a pash on Joan and her actions in the last part of this novella definitely bear it out. Joan/Diana 4ever.

Joan's adventure begins when she is hiding in a gorse bush to avoid Diana and her friend Tick, and ends up witnessing her French mistress - the only teacher she doesn't get on with, of course - emerge from Ravensdale, an area the headmistress has declared off limits for students. This kicks off a very fast-paced mystery involving German spys, secret messages and hidden passages. It's great fun, and I have no doubt it's part of a genre of WW2 story which I just haven't come across in my reading before. I would happily read a dozen more of these and honestly it did remind me a bit of Murder Most Unladylike, which is all to the good!

All's Fair was a bit rubbish.

What I'm Reading Now

Technically Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, but after a strong start for me where I read about eighty pages in a day I've completely fallen off it. I really enjoy Emily's narrative voice so I'm hoping I'll manage to re-engage with it without too much trouble. Also a Biggles Buries A Hatchet re-read, as a treat, which I believe was spurred by the point last week that a child in my class threw a shoe at me.

What I Plan To Read Next

Since Christmas is coming up, I might go back to Connie Willis's Miracle anthology of short stories, which I got off my parents but haven't read since I was about fourteen and couldn't appreciate all the nuances. Possibly also going to dive back into some of my British Library Tales of the Weird, since I have about six I haven't finished yet after a strong period with Botanical Weird and Weird Trees.

This is the first time I've had enough reading built up for this specific post format and I'm EXCITED.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani and Murder by Air by W.E. Johns.

I picked up Piranesi at the charity shop near work on Monday and then read all of it yesterday, including about sixty pages during silent reading time (which I extended much longer than usual out of a selfish desire to keep reading Piranesi... forgive me). It's such a gorgeous book, surprising nobody, and I absolutely loved the narrator and the way he engaged with the House on a religious and personal level. He's so empathetic and careful and deeply traumatised, many things I enjoy in a character, and the fact the entire book is epistolary caused me extreme joy. I knew I was going to like this one, but I'm very pleased by how much I loved it - a five star reading experience for sure.

On Zionist Literature was a very interesting text on the history of Zionist thought as viewed through the form of the novel in the Western world and beyond, from the early 1800s up to the date of publication in 1967. It came up as a PDF on Tumblr a few days ago and I thought, ooh, that looks interesting, and ended up reading it over the course of two evenings! I do think that reading it in translation made some of the author's points a little unclear, especially with how some academic terms were translated, but overall I was really engaged with it in a way that academic texts rarely draw me in. I thought the section about the early 19th century was particularly effective, although I wasn't always convinced by the author's arguments on specific texts. I'll definitely seek out more work by Kanafani, but might look up reviews to check whether the translation is more accessible.

Finally, the obligatory Johnsiverse book. Murder by Air is the third Steeley book and objectively the best plot so far. There were so many twists and turns which were always well thought out, engaging and thrilling. I really liked the Count as an antagonist and especially Helene (both of her!), another example of W.E. Johns' blase attitude towards crossdressing in the pre-war period. He engages with it as if it's the same level of disguise as, like, a false moustache, and I enjoy it! Obviously in my heart Constantino got his egg cracked by this experience and then miraculously escaped the plane crash at the end so that she could turn over a new, transgender leaf. Fingers crossed!

What I'm Reading Now

This is always a complete crapshoot but AT PRESENT, I am working on Blood On Satan's Claw, which is the very late novelisation of one of my favourite horror films of all time. The pastor has gone on a short walk and stumbled upon the future site of some rather nasty satanic rituals, but it's clearly already a Place Where Terrible Things Happen... all mysterious and etc., I'm enjoying it but because the original film is quite atmospheric the book is relying heavily on narration and setting description, which could become quite a slog if the pace continues as it has so far.

What I Plan To Read Next

Possibly yet another crack at Biggles Follows On. I also bought a slim volume by Ernest Shackleton which I believe to be a long extract from South!, which I will dive into when I feel like reliving polar agonies but don't feel depressed enough to rewatch The Terror.

Picked this back up after a long break this evening and whizzed through the last 75% in the last few hours!
( Spoilers! )

Overall I really enjoyed my time with this one. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who misses the more adult tone of the WW1 Biggles books, and/or is looking for yet more homosocial relationships for a WEJ based queer studies paper.