lightreads

Lent by Jo Walton

I read ¾ of this and just can't be bothered. It is more than competent, I just do not give a damn about Italian religious history, and I've read much more engaging versions of what if this old religious belief was literally and specifically true. Also, way to surgically remove every iota of the numinous, you know? I've said before that I think specfic books about religion where the theology is literally and observably and indisputably true and adherent to understood mechanical laws take the emotional heft out of faith. I think that the same can be said of certain kinds of magic. You have to have that emotional risk, that bit of free fall when you don't know if the god or the magic will catch you, but you're jumping anyway. If you don't have that, you've just got a whole lot of complicated rules about how god/magic works, and that's boring.

Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich

I am the target audience for thoughtful books on the intersection of medicine and wellness-mania (AKA ableism under a different name). And this one started out well with a discussion of over-testing, because there really are medical tests that will show positive most of the time and yet mean nothing and result in no meaningful change in behavior. But you could have heard the record scratch from space when, in chapter 1, she was all "so I had breast cancer and I was traumatized, and then I was retraumatized by an ambiguous follow up mammogram that turned out to be nothing, so I decided to stop getting mammograms because clearly they are not necessary, and I'm using a throwaway comment by a random doctor to justify it." Wow. What even. I am saying this as the partner of a cancer survivor – you can make a case for the over-scanning of healthy people (and there are specifically lingering questions over whether we are over-mammogramming people in their 30's) but a cancer survivor is in a different cohort and trauma responses are not a good way to frame thoughtful books.

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

Yeah, IDK, sometimes you just take against a book before you're even far enough into it to know why. This is a post climate apocalypse book where most land mass is gone (or that's my guess based on the bit I read). But I am just so over post apocalypse traveling circuses and their *gestures* everything. I can't think of another book featuring one at the moment and yet: I am over it.

Lady Sophia's Lover by Lisa Kleypas

Very old school historical het romance. Couldn't hack the thing where he wants to "master her" and she likes him infantilizing her, and that's not kink or anything, that's just how men and women are. It's very porny, though, if that's of interest. Like, hello, boner in sentence one.

Farthing by Jo Walton


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
1949, alternate England where Churchill was forced out and Hitler holds the continent. This starts out as a classic English country home mystery, with alternate sections from the daughter of the house (married to a Jewish man! Scandale!) and a Scotland Yard detective. Then in the last third the alternate history politics ratchets tighter and tighter, until I had my hands crunched up in my sweater as I read.

A good book, but you have to give it time. I love this sort of genre-bending thing, though it would have worked better here if the cozy country house mystery was, um, yeah, that's the only word – if the mystery was better. Because it really slumped in some sections, and the slackness wasn't made up for by the charm and quirkiness you expect from this sort of thing. It was a comfortable three stars for that reason, until the last quarter, when all the quietly grim little hints burst through the surface and bam, I was reading a plausible, awful alternate history about lies and social fictions and political power. And it scared me.

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