Sunday Sum-Up: October 1, 2023

Kim @ Traveling in Books

Oct 1

We rushed through September, and now it is October. Spooky Season is officially upon us. I plan to read some gothic tales, rewatch my beloved show Penny Dreadful, and generally enjoy the fall weather that will hopefully be upon us after summer's last gasp ends in a day or two. I plan to make the most of October with a couple of day trips to nearby state parks. It will be a busy sort of month at work, though, as several of my coworkers have vacation scheduled, but I'm hoping it doesn't get too squirrelly there. If it does, then at least I'll have all the autumnal things to relax with when I get home at night.

Obligatory Mina Photo:

We had a string of pleasant days early in the week, and Mina noticed. She returned to her habit of dashing through the apartment, bouncing off the couch to change direction, and leaping onto my craft table so she might hop the gap and sit on my printer for a minute or two before repeating the process another few times until she wears herself out and goes off to whichever blanket is her favorite at the moment to take a nap.

Since it's been hot this weekend, zoomies are in short supply (despite the air conditioning inside, she knows), but I anticipate their return come Tuesday, when a cold front is due to come through and bring truly autumnal weather with it.

What I Finished Reading Last Week:

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwyn
Cold Earth (Shetland #7) by Ann Cleeves, audiobook narrated by Kenny Blyth
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

I was browsing at Barnes and Noble earlier this week and found a beautiful copy of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and though I already had a copy at home, I couldn't resist picking this one up instead. It's the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition that's well-made with French flaps, deckled edges, illustrations by Pablo Picasso, and a new introduction by Cristina García. It still has Merwyn's translation from 1969 (which is when my first copy dates from, and which I ultimately decided to keep, since it's such a slim volume). I reread the book that evening and was once again blown away by how earthy and passionate the poems are. Have I found love poems quite this evocative? I don't think so. There's a reason this little collection made Neruda a literary star at the age of twenty, and has been printed and reprinted ever since.

In Cold Earth, the seventh of Ann Cleeves' Shetland series, Jimmy Perez is attending an old friend's funeral when a landslide occurs, taking out a major road on the island and destroying a house in the process. When rescuers go into the house, they discover a woman's body. They think at first that she was killed in the slide, but the coroner rules her death to be a homicide. Jimmy's investigation is hampered by the fact that they don't know the woman's identity, where she came from, or what she was doing on the island. DI Willow Reeves is called in from Inverness to help with the investigation. I didn't enjoy this book as much as I have the other installments in the Shetland series, and it took me a while to figure out the reasons. The first reason was pretty straightforward: I didn't like Jane's perspective, and ultimately I didn't understand why it was there. To complicate matters? They were already pretty complicated, but then I had to spend a good deal of reading time hearing about a woman I'd never heard of before dealing with issues that didn't really pertain to the story. Perhaps her perspective was meant to increase the tension when it came to figuring out who the murderer was, but I don't think it added much overall. The other main issue I had was that it increasingly feels like a character from earlier installments was fridged for the sake of another's character development and so another relationship could start to form. Honestly, I'm tired of that happening in the mystery series I watch and read. It makes me not want to read the last book in the series.

Thornhedge is a novella that tells a traditional fairytale (Sleeping Beauty) with a twist. Little Toadling was a human child taken from her parents and replaced by a fairy changeling. She is raised in a lovely, if unlovely, home with a group of eerie water fairies, but once she is an adult, she is asked to complete one simple task: to return to the human world and place a protection spell around a newborn child. Of course things go wrong for poor Toadling, and so she spends the next few centuries living among the vast thorny hedge that has grown up around the castle. Then one day, a knight comes to the wall of thorns because he has heard there is a curse there waiting to be broken, and he feels obliged to do so, though Toadling will do anything to keep the thornhedge standing. I knew going into this novella that I would enjoy it, as I have liked everything I've read by T. Kingfisher, and while I guessed early on where the story was going, that didn't lessen my enjoyment. I'm not a reader who needs to have twists and turns on every page. I don't care if I can guess what's coming- a well-told story is a well-told story, and there is enjoyment to be found in quality work alone. I loved Toadling from page one and would have followed wherever she had chosen to go among the thorns and brambles. Halim was a wonderful character, too, and I liked seeing the two of them interacting. I thought the climactic scene at the end was over a little too quickly, but that's okay. I enjoyed the story, and I love Kingfisher's take on fairytales.

What I'm Currently Reading:

The Ivory Tomb (Rooks and Ruin #3) by Melissa Caruso (33/480)
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (179/448)
Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell trilogy #1) by Hilary Mantel, audiobook narrated by Ben Miles (48%)

After spending months looking at The Ivory Tomb on my shelf and thinking, 'I should read that so I can finish the trilogy at last', I finally started reading it. I'm only a few chapters in, so I don't have many thoughts on it so far, except that it picks up right where the second book left off, and is one of those fantasy novels that I will ultimately rate as 'just fine, I enjoyed the characters but had some issues with the structure and prose'. I'll have more to talk about next week.

I've made a little progress in Landmarks. In the chapters I read this week, Macfarlane talked about Roger Deakin's nature writing and their friendship that lasted until Deakin's untimely death of cancer in 2006. I have the same reaction every time I pick this book up: I feel an intense desire to go back to the UK, and I want to spend the next day out in the countryside here, wandering around the salt marshes or walking through what passes for a forest. Macfarlane's love of nature, his connection to it, and the vocabulary surrounding it is so clear in his writing that it makes the reader fall in love with the land, too. I think I'll feel a little sad whenever I finish this book.

Yes, I'm reading Wolf Hall again. You see, I found out that Ben Miles (who played Cromwell in the stage production of Wolf Hall in the West End) recorded both Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, which means we now have a version of the entire trilogy narrated by a single person. Before, the books had been narrated by Simon Slater, Simon Vance, and the third was narrated by Miles. I was too excited to hear Miles' version of Wolf Hall to wait, so I downloaded the audiobook via Hoopla and started listening almost immediately. I have to say that I prefer Miles' narration more than Simon Slater's. His version of Cardinal Wolsey feels more powerful, and his Thomas More is more charismatic than Slater's. While Thomas More is presented- in Cromwell's view- as something of an antagonist, he did achieve a great deal of power and influence in a court where fortunes rose and fell thanks to a careless word or a well-timed favor. Were More and Cromwell enemies? Perhaps. They were on opposite sides of the most important issues in Henry VIII's court during the late 1520s and early 1530s, but did Cromwell destroy More? No. It's always seemed to me that More did that to himself by not conforming to Henry's will in every way, shape, and form. Miles' version of Cromwell, too, is balanced more toward the common-born man who ran away from home, saw the world, and worked his way into wealth and power. I can't wait to listen to the second half of this book, as it has some of my favorite quotes of the entire trilogy.