My late summer, early fall witchy reads: Witchcraft is nonfiction and tracks the history of witch trials and modern versions of them up through Stormy Daniels. Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos is a historical fantasy set in 19th c. Nashville. I’m a huge fan of the All Souls Trilogy and will read anything Harkness writes! The Familiar is my first Bardugo book, although she is very prolific. I chose this because, well, witches and historical fantasy. And Giddings’s 2022 novel is set in a dystopic, patriarchal society where men control women’s bodies and the historical narrative. Favorite worlds: Harkness’s and Bardugo’s. But Giddings’s theme/message is impossible to ignore.
If you devour tales with fickle characters like faerie kings (Maas) or Slavic witches/vedma (Houston), you might enjoy both of these, but also Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries. Favorite lines, the wedding vows in The Bone Roots: “I promise to be with you as long as you’ll have me, and to keep my word to you and your secrets for as long as my shadow is long. . . I promise to share with you in good luck and bad, and to never willingly bring sorrow into your life.”
What can you say about a book this beautiful? It is about everything life is—love, loss, longing, the paradox of human being. This novel reads like poetry and philosophy but traces generations, evokes places, makes real individual lives. It took my breath away and reminded me of reading Rilke’s poetry for the first time. I found a favorite passage on every page, but here is one: “Perhaps consciousness only occurred when there were enough humans alive to generate the spark, to seal the circuit, the critical mass for the grain of sand to become the dune, the synapse to allow a flock to change directions in an instant” (19). What an absolute pleasure. https://www.annemichaels.ca/
An ambitious historical fantasy addressing colonialism in the 19th century. Favorite aspect: How Kuang takes translation theory and turns it into a magical system.
The jacket cover says it best—”a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history.” A fascinating and detailed account of the research required to finally identify Hannah Crafts as the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by a Black female novelist. Particularly interesting if you are familiar with the geography of the Carolinas, but a history lesson regardless on the shifting economics behind American slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries and the vile practices and rationalizations slave-owning families engaged in. Hecimovich, a fellow at Harvard and an English professor at Furman, demonstrates how Crafts interwove personal experience and her deep understanding of Dickens’ Bleak House as well as male and female slave narratives. The sophistication of the intertextuality of her tale led historians to doubt for decades that the author could have been an enslaved individual until Hecimovich. Learned a lot.
Idra Novey’s Take What You Need speaks to the teen in me who took welding in high school (metal shop was required) and is grieving the loss of a complicated person. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Northern Appalachia, this beautifully written novel is about so many things. It’s an exploration of the place a young woman is from and her return there to a profound sense of not belonging. It’s a lesson in modern female artists (sculptor Louise Bourgeios, 1911-2010, and painter Agnes Martin, 1912-2004): “No real art, Bourgeois said, was possible without a fight with one’s material.” It is about the loss of a parent: “This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for a complicated person.” It’s about imposter syndrome, an affliction of even the most successful of artists, let alone a middle-aged woman finding her way to metal sculptures of immense proportions in her living room. It’s about how Northern Appalachia has changed in the last decades, economically, politically. The book is a commentary on making art in desperate times. You will find other themes here. I’m glad I found this book, as I make a concerted effort to read authors writing about Northern Appalachia, where, low and behold, I grew up. (Northern Appalachia = 235 counties in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.) Quick craft note: Novey toggles deftly between alternating POVs, one in first person present, the other first person past, allowing the reader to experience two timelines until they converge. Thanks to WANA (Writers Association of Northern Appalachia) for recommending the novel.
Favorite line: “You have to become more than yourself is what Louise said when she passed sixty-five. . .”
My grandmother used to say (frequently) that a day without learning something new is a day wasted. Raised in the foster care system, she left high school during World War II to work as a switchboard operator on Long Island because she was sick of not having enough money for decent clothes. She compensated for her lack of formal education (which she deeply mourned) with an insatiable curiosity. She loved Thomas Jefferson, beating other old people at bridge to pay for her new iPads, and listened to nonfiction audiobooks while keeping up with the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine until she passed away this month at 97. I have known since I was a teenager that I would write about my grandmother. She will be looking down to make sure I actually get it done. In the meantime, from a trip this weekend . .
Spume is a word for froth or foam that has been a part of the English lexicon for more than 600 years. An early example is found in a 14th-century quotation from the English poet John Gower: “She set a cauldron on the fire … and let it boil in such a plight, till that she saw the spume [was] white.” “Spume” was borrowed from Anglo-French espume or “spume,” and can be traced further back to Latin spuma. “Spuma” is also akin to Old English “fām,” a word that is the ancestor of the modern English “foam,” a synonym of “spume.” Another relative of “spuma” is “pumex,” the Latin word for pumice, a volcanic rock with a somewhat foamy appearance that is formed from a rapidly cooling, frothy lava.1
There was spume drifting up and down the beach on Friday evening. No trace of it come Saturday morning. Spume transforms the barrier island briefly into a wintery landscape, even at 60º.
Pluff Mud Porter with boiled peanuts.
pluff : or more specifically, pluff mud : South Carolina Low Country stinky marsh mud. “A unique substance, ranging in texture from a clay-like density to a fluffy chocolate mousse-like consistency, pluff mud is quite literally what the Lowcountry marsh ecosystem is built upon.”2 Also, a delicious porter made by Holy City Brewing in North Charleston. To be clear, spume is way fluffier than pluff mud.
See this article from The Charleston Magazine on the specifics of and the locals’ love of pluff mud at https://charlestonmag.com/features/pluff_mud_0, or read most SC beach novels in which pluff mud features as the true indicator of the protagonist’s low country creds.
mångata (Swedish) : the road-like reflection of the moon in the water.3
And lastly, it appears we are not alone in the universe or at the beach. . .
To my grandmother, Carolyn Langford, who first took me to the South Carolina beaches (and gave me coffee with lots of milk and very sweet wine and made sure I flew on an airplane). You liked to be first. ❤️
A short story collection in which the stories range widely in time and place but are gently linked. Displacement and diaspora. Whispers of places, textured (New York City, Russia, Japan, Korea). Belonging. Violence. Ann Patchett likens these stories to Fabergé eggs. Favorite story: “At the Post Station,” which takes place in 1608 on Japan’s eastern sea route and deftly teases out the relationship between two Japanese warriors and an orphaned Korean boy. https://www.paulyoon.com/
“Come commiserate with us” is one of the quips on the Poe Museum’s website. Despite 30º weather, Richmonders lined up to toast Poe on the anniversary of his birthday, January 19th! I just happened to be poking around that day and was curious to see what quirky objects and tidbits the museum has collected from the life of the master of gothic tales and early science fiction. There was a Timothée Chalamet look-alike portrait and a memorial presented by Edwin Booth (yes, John Wilkes’s brother) more than three decades after Poe’s passing. And, of course, recountings of lost loves and demise (many from tuberculosis and Poe’s own mysterious death). Also, snippets of hair (Poe’s and others’). About as Victorian as it gets. 👻
First start-to-finish novel of the new year. A not-too-heavy gothic fantasy continuing Alix Harrow’s penchant for portal fantasies, this time with a 26-year-old protagonist who sometimes sounds younger than her years. (We all know someone like this, don’t we?)
Alternating POVs in 1st and a not-too-close 3rd. Theme: the legacy of exploitation of women and African Americans by Kentucky mining capitalists, while speaking to ghostly inclinations for revenge and larger themes of personal and community healing. Favorite part: the protagonist Opal’s propensity to weigh what she needs versus what she wants and to jettison the distinction. Rather meta of Harrow, since novelists are taught to know the difference between wants and needs for their characters. See “A Whisper in the Weld” for a blast furnace ghost story by Harrow. https://www.shimmerzine.com/a-whisper-in-the-weld-by-alix-e-harrow/ and her 2019 Hugo Award-winning short story: https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/ In 2020, I came across Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches from which point on, I decided to follow all things Harrow. https://alixeharrow.wixsite.com/author
