The Penguin Book of Dragons

 From the TBR stacks: The Penguin Book of Dragons, edited by Scott G. Bruce

I don't remember the first stories I heard or read about dragons, but they have always been my favorite mythical creatures. Maybe because I associate them with cats? My ideas of dragons were shaped first by Ursula Le Guin, in her Earthsea books. Then I fell deeply in love with Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, with their dragons and fire lizards. I wrote what was technically fan-fiction when I wrote myself into the books - of course I Impressed a queen dragon. It was magical meeting someone at college who shared my love of those books. Just a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that my sister-in-law, whom I've known for almost 40 years, also read and loved the Pern books. And then there is J.R.R. Tolkien's Smaug.

I still read stories of dragons with delight, particularly when the dragons are complicated characters. Among my recent favorites:

• The Termeraire series by Naomi Novik - the Napoleonic Wars with dragons (at least the early books, I gave up on the series when the war moved to Russia)
• Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton - Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage, with dragons
• When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill - women become dragons to escape, to revenge themselves, to be free
• And one of the best books I read last year, To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose, which just won a Nebula award - Anequs, a Native American girl in an America colonized from Scandinavia, becomes bonded to a dragon hatchling - and is immediately forced to attend a colonizers' dragon academy.

I bought a copy of The Penguin Book of Dragons as soon as I saw it advertised, back in 2021. I finally picked it up a couple of days ago, thinking it would be a book to dip in and out of. To my surprise, I couldn't put it down. It covers so many aspects of how dragons have been written about and reported on, going back to ancient China, India, Greece, and Rome. It ends with stories by Kenneth Grahame and E. Nesbit, who were part of a trend of domesticating dragons, especially for children's stories. The editor, Scott Bruce, connects this to the current popularity of dragons in books and TV/film, down to Game of Thrones (which I couldn't read and didn't want to watch). 

I was familiar with the Christian connections of dragons to Satan and the fallen angels, from the Book of Revelation. I didn't realize though how seriously people took dragons. There are lengthy extracts from two 18th century naturalists whose books combined historical overviews of dragon lore down to current events involving dragons, which they firmly believed were authentic. I also enjoyed the stories from Asia, including one from the Rig Veda (1500-1200 BCE) of the storm deity Indra battling a dragon who is holding the world's water hostage - the earliest dragon story the editor has found.

One thing I didn't know: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is a political and religious allegory, where dragons represent the sins and evils of the Roman Catholic Church. The excerpts included from that were rather gruesome.

More of a reading/books diary? Also, new books

I read a recommendation for a book, The Imposter Heiress by Annie Reed, and I had that "I need to read this" feeling that has led to the TBR stacks. That didn't stop me from ordering a copy (since it comes out tomorrow, I couldn't find a copy to request through interlibrary loan). 

I was excited to learn that Ovidia Yu has released a new book in the "Mystery Tree" series, The Angsana Tree Mystery, though the print copy doesn't come out until September. I have really enjoyed this series, but I have to admit, I'm glad that the latest book takes place after the end of World War II. I recently read Hawker Dreams, by Oanh Ngo Usadi, a memoir of her family relocating to Singapore from the US for three years, for her husband's work. Singapore is one of the places I hope to visit one day, in no small part thanks to Ovidia Yu.

One of my favorite books of last year, To Shape a Dragon's Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose, won a Nebula award last night. I am so happy to see that. It is an amazing book, an alt-history where America was colonized by Scandinavians rather than the British, but the Native American population suffered just as much - as did their dragons. 15-year-old Anequs finds a dragon’s egg and bonds with its hatchling, only to be forced into an academy for dragon companions, where as a Native American women she is most unwelcome. I have high hopes for a sequel. Probably not coincidentally, I am currently reading The Penguin Book of Dragons.

Just read off the TBR stacks: My Fair Concubine, by Jeannie Lin. A version of My Fair Lady, set in China's Tang dynasty. It has a really vivid sense of place, and I loved Yang Lin, the foundling from a tea house who is recruited for a diplomatic marriage (to replace the hero's sister, who eloped to avoid the marriage).

52 books project - first quarter

I am pleased and surprised at how well my "52 books" project has gone so far. My goal is to buy only 52 new books - meaning books I haven't read yet - over the course of the year.

As of April 1st, I've bought 10 new books. I've read three of them:

Deborah Crombie's A Killing of Innocents

Paula Tarnapol Whitacre's A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time

Seanan McGuire's Backpacking Through Bedlam

One book I decided wasn't for me, Talia Hibbert's Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute. I enjoy her adult romances but I don't read a lot of young adult, or New Adult for that matter. I was happy to donate it to the library sale.

Of the 10 books that fall under the project, listed over on the right, most have been anticipated pre-orders. Only one recently, The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, was an impulse buy. I heard it reviewed on a podcast and decided not to wait for a library copy.

I haven't spent much time in bookstores lately, which feels OK, not like a deprivation. I am visiting the library on my usual weekly visits and bringing home stacks of books that I don't usually get around to reading. That's where I do my browsing these days.

Otherwise, I've bought four books that I read originally as e-books and wanted to have on my shelves, from Victoria Goddard's Greenwing and Dart fantasy series.

What I haven't managed to do is cross too many books off the TBR list. I've been re-reading a lot lately, including Anthony Trollope for the first time in years. It's been a complicated time at work, and I had to travel to Oregon for a family memorial service. It was my first trip since COVID, which added to my usual travel anxiety. There were a couple of posts on the Tor website in the past months that mirrored my reading and re-reading. First, Malka Older wrote about "Comfort Reading" (this was before I was introduced to her via podcast). Like her, I have been looking for kindness in books lately. Second, Molly Templeton wrote about "Reading in a Fallow Month." Her post really spoke to me.

I have a couple of books to pre-order for May, including a new fantasy novel from Martha Wells that I am very excited about, Witch King. I'm also looking forward to the long Easter weekend, with some extra time for reading. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on the TBR stacks, and carting books home from the library.

A Killing of Innocents, by Deborah Crombie

This book is published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. I was very glad to see that the HarperCollins workers' union (Local 2110 UAW) reached an agreement with the publisher this week after more than three months on strike. The union did not ask people to boycott HarperCollins books, but many readers refused to review or publicize HC books in solidarity. This was the first HC book I've had to write about since getting back to blogging.

This is the 19th book in Deborah Crombie's long-running series of police procedurals, featuring married police officers Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. In the early books, Gemma was part of Duncan's team at Scotland Yard. As their relationship became personal, they kept it secret until Gemma earned a promotion and moved to her own team. In later books their cases often overlap, or one or the other finds a reason to get involved.

The previous book, A Bitter Feast, was published back in 2019, and I had started to wonder if it might be the last. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a new book announced for April of this year, and it immediately went on my "52 books" list. It was an even bigger surprise when the publication was moved up to early February. I had started re-reading some of the more recent books in the series, since it's been a good while, and I'm glad I started with A Bitter Feast, because I didn't have as much time for re-reading as I'd planned!

A Killing of Innocents takes place a few months after the last book, so before COVID. It's apparently set in 2018, since there is a reference to Lin-Manuel Miranda in "Mary Poppins Returns." In such a long-running series, with the first published in 1993, I don't think that Deborah Crombie is tying the books to a current timeline.

The story opens in London with the death of a young doctor in training, Sasha Johnson. She is stabbed one evening while walking through a crowded Russell Square, and the only one who even notices her fall to the ground is a five-year-old boy. The case falls to Duncan and his team out of the Holborn station. As always, the story has a real sense of place, with a beautifully detailed map of the area of the investigations. Running parallel with the investigations are side stories with Duncan's team, particularly his sergeant Doug, Gemma and her sergeant Melody, and Gemma and Duncan's blended family of three children, and their family and friends. It was lovely to meet these characters again and to catch up with their lives, but I could see it might be a little confusing to a new reader. There are also new characters to follow, particularly Duncan's team in Holborn, with sections written from their points of view. It does take the focus of Gemma and Duncan, though they remain central to the story.

While the mystery is resolved very neatly, the story ended with two minor cliffhangers, for Duncan and Gemma and also for Melody. This isn't the first time Deborah Crombie has done this. I remember that the last page of The Sound of Broken Glass had me quickly flipping through the blank end pages, unable to believe that there wasn't more. The cliffhangers here give me hope that Deborah Crombie has another book in mind.

N.B. This was book #4 in my "52 books for 2023", and well worth a place.

This Grand Experiment, by Jessica Ziparo

The subtitle of this history is "When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War-Era Washington, D.C." I learned about it from references in Walter Stahr's biography of Salmon Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury in Abraham Lincoln's Civil War cabinet. I had some vague knowledge that women first came to work for the U.S. government during the Civil War, Clara Barton being perhaps the best-known example, but I didn't know much. I was curious to learn more, and the description of this book made me add it to my reading stacks:

"In the volatility of the Civil War, the federal government opened its payrolls to women. Although the press and government officials considered the federal employment of women to be an innocuous wartime aberration, women immediately saw the new development for what it was: a rare chance to obtain well-paid, intellectually challenging work in a country and time that typically excluded women from such channels of labor. Thousands of female applicants from across the country flooded Washing with applications. Here, Jessica Ziparo traces the struggles and triumphs of early female federal employees, who were caught between traditional, cultural notions of female dependence and an evolving movement of female autonomy in a new economic reality. In doing so, Ziparo demonstrates how these women challenged societal gender norms, carved out a place for independent women in the streets of Washington, and sometimes clashed with the female suffrage movement."

Ziparo makes it clear from the first pages that this is not a story of triumphal achievement for women. They were paid significantly less than men, they had to put a lot of time and effort into getting a position, they faced hostility and sexual harassment from their male coworkers, and there was no job security. Women were also crowded into corners and attics, as supervisors struggled with adapting work spaces for women (hoop skirts took up a lot of room), and working out how men and women could share offices. In addition, Ziparo acknowledges that most of the sources for her history privilege white middle-class women's experiences. Working-class women, both Black and white, have left fewer archival sources and are often left out of contemporary accounts.

Despite the challenges they faced, however, once women got a foothold in government employment, they never lost it. They were not pushed out of jobs after the Civil War in the same way they would be in the 20th century, to make way for the returning soldiers. In part, as Ziparo explains, this is because of the way the women's work was framed. Many of the jobs, like cutting out currency bills or binding government publications, were seen as "women's work." Men didn't compete for those jobs. Hiring women was also presented as a means of assisting the widows and orphans of the brave Union soldiers, making it more acceptable for them to work outside the home, and they still needed that assistance after the war ended. In reality, they were often supporting a home, with parents or children dependent on them.

It was sobering to read the letters of female applicants, who desperately needed work, but also needed male patrons with influence in the government offices or in Congress. The traditional work open to women outside the home was teaching or domestic work. As noted above, the jobs in the government offices, though paying women half what the male employees received, was still some of the best-paid work available. And while some of the work was repetitive and boring, like counting currency, it still got women into the nation's capital and into the proverbial halls of power. As Ziparo notes, it also normalized women's presence in government buildings and in public life.

One of the women whose career Ziparo follows through her history is Julia Wilbur, who kept a diary during her years in Washington. I was disappointed to find that the diary has not been published, though it has been digitized and transcribed. I did find however a biography, A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time, and I decided it was worth a spot on my 52 books for the year.

A lot of re-reading

Twice a month, the Smart Bitches Trashy Books website posts a prompt: what are you reading?  I always enjoy seeing what other people are reading, and the responses usually add books to my own lists. Today I found that I am not the only person whose 2023 reading has pretty much been re-reading so far. Despite weekly visits to the library, and the TBR stacks around me, I have read only one new book, The Candid Life of Meena Dave (from the library). Otherwise, it's been diving back into books, some of which I haven't taken off the shelves in ten years or more.

Two of those were sudden impulses. I fell into a rabbit-hole of watching on YouTube the Turner Classic Movie annual tributes to the stars lost each year. (On a side note, I will never understand why TCM doesn't offer a streaming service, for those of us who don't have cable packages.) That led me to pick up We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood, by Emily Kimbrough, which I first read and reviewed back in 2011. I don't know what reminded me of Eva Ibbotson's Madensky Square, my favorite of her books, but I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Vienna in 1911. I think I'm due to revisit some of her other books as well now.

I've also been working my way back through a couple of science fiction/fantasy series. I've written before about my love of Martha Wells' Raksura series, and I just finished re-reading the two volumes of short stories. I would still love to see more stories set in this world, though I was also happy to see the announcement this week of a new Murderbot novel coming this year, as well as a stand-alone book, Witch King (I've reserved space for both on the 52 book list). And I've been slowly reading my way through Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkoskigan saga - slowly, because she does love to put her characters (and her readers) through the proverbial wringer. I finished one of my favorites, Memory, last night. I was going to take a break before starting the next one, Komarr, because it has a toxic and abusive marriage at the center of the story. I had thought instead to read one of LMB's "Five Gods" books. It's been so long since I read Komarr that I couldn't remember how the story started, so this morning I took it off the shelf just to look at the first chapter. Now I'm half-way through.

I don't know if this will be a year of re-reading, or it's just my reading mood for now. I never do quite know where my reading will take me.

Two recent posts on Tor.com caught my eye. The first was "Learning to Love Paper Books Again." I've never stopped of course, and I am still reading (re-reading) in paper. I just can't focus on ebooks right now and I'm not sure why. I'm sure the right book will come along at some point and lure me back (maybe a new Bujold, since she is publishing first in ebook now).

The second was "Admiring Five of Fantasy's Best Cats." I've written before about my love of fictional cats, not just in fantasy. I was happy to recognize some of the cats in the comments, including one from the Vorkosigan saga!

The Candid Life of Meena Dave

The Candid Life of Meena Dave, by Namrata Patel

As I've said elsewhere, I have re-read so many books this month that it feels like an accomplishment to have finished a new-to-me book. I came across this on the "new books" cart at the library, and the cover caught my attention.

The title character is a photojournalist with a career that takes her around the world. As the story opens, she is sitting in a lawyer's office in Boston, trying to understand how she has inherited an apartment in the city's Bay Bay neighborhood from a woman named Neha Patel, whom she has never heard of. She is also grappling with conditions on the bequest: she cannot sell the apartment for a year, and she can only sell to one of the four other owners in the condo. Meena has no interest in the apartment or in Boston.

What Meena finds in the building is history, both her own and her community, and mystery. She is the adopted child of white parents, and she knows nothing about Indian identity beyond what she has experienced in her travels. She knows nothing about her own heritage, or her own history. Her parents were killed in a explosion at their home when she was 16, and Meena (who was at school at the time) lost everything but her backpack. She has made her own way since, never putting down roots and never making connections with anyone besides her college friend Zoe. Renting a bedroom in Zoe's London flat is the closest thing Meena has to a home base.

In the building, she finds a community of Indian Americans, descended from students who came to study at MIT in the late 1940s, so that they could return to help India transition out of colonialism. Namrata Patel explains in an author's note that in writing this story she drew on the experiences of the real-life students. She notes that growing up, she did not know much about the history of Indian immigration to the United States, which dates back to the colonial era (via the East India Company). Like her, I thought Indian immigration dated from the 1960s, when restrictive laws that had blocked most immigration from Asian countries were repealed.

Meena quickly meets the three women who own the other apartments, which are entailed to descendants of the students, along with a lone male owner named Sam. The building is a warm community led by "the aunties." They try to welcome Meena into that community with food and chai and chat, but she resists, because she isn't staying. Sam, who works in film and has an adorable puppy named Wally, is harder to resist.

As Meena reluctantly spends time in the apartment, trying to figure out what to do, she finds notes that Neha has hidden all over the place. The notes are cryptic, but Neha clearly knows who Meena is, and more importantly, who her birth parents are. The notes disturb Meena, but they also demand her attention. At the same time, the aunties are giving her a crash course in culture, food, language, holidays, and even how to wear a sari.

There is so much going on in this story, almost too much at times. Meena carries a heavy burden of grief and anger at the loss of her parents, and the game that Neha is playing with her notes adds a lot of stress. She keeps trying to escape, from the apartment and from any relationship with Sam. She wants to know about her birth parents, and she doesn't want to know. The story felt a bit repetitive sometimes, as this cycle kept playing out. I found myself thinking that Meena could really use a therapist (she did have help after her parents' death). When the mystery is finally solved, she has to find a way to make peace with her past and figure out her future, starting with whether she will keep the apartment.

Meena also spends time exploring Boston. The author herself lives in Boston, and the story is very firmly rooted in the city. At times it reads a bit like a travelogue, but it did remind me of my years living in western Massachusetts, when a trip to Boston was a great treat. Meena's adoptive parents lived in Northampton in the western part of the state, and she finally takes a long-overdue trip back to her former home (or the site of it at least).