I finished four books last month:
Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers. The third of the Peter Wimsey novels. I’m reading one each month with a group. The first two are slow going, we agreed, but this one everyone flew through. Was it a candidate as a good entry point to the series? No, given the appalling racism. But the mystery was good, and the villain memorably compelling. Also, one of my favorite clues: a ham sandwich. And one of my favorite lines: “the weather had been damp and warm and there had certainly been weasels.”
Something is Killing the Children, volume 1, by James Tynion IV, Werther Dell-Edera, and Miquel Muerta. I tore through this first edition of the horror comic series. It reminded me a lot of Stranger Things, but with its own flavor, and intriguing mythology. Dark and scary and gory and good, if you like this sort of thing.
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang. with the #NYRBWomen24 group, another revelation of a book and author I’d never heard of. One of the blurbs reads “Jane Austen with the gloves off” but I disagree, if only because part of what’s delicious and particular about Jane is that everybody always has their gloves on. Chang’s stories, written when she was in her twenties and published beginning 1943, have an acid commentary on men, women, and society’s intrigue that reminded me more of Edith Wharton, with lots of arresting visual imagery: “a roar of wild azaleas was blooming across the hill, the fiery red stomping through brittle grass, blazing down the mountainside.”
And finally, disappointingly, The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century by Josh Cook. I’m working in a bookstore again. I think I missed a calling as a librarian along the way, and bookseller is a close approximation, a job I’ve dipped into and out of over decades. I heard about this book from Kyle Francis Williams’s essay, “There is No Such Thing as a Good Book” at Public Books. After a few chapters, I put it down. I wasn’t vibing with Cook’s take on bookselling, or the way he wrote about books. The former read to me as self important, and the latter didn’t engage me. Yet after a few days, I picked it up again and finished, somewhat begrudgingly. It never established a rapport with me, and I often didn’t enjoy it, but his dogged thoroughness about something so relevant to me in my day job and my favored hobby made me continue to the end. There was some good stuff about reading and books, and retail under COVID, and the chapter on American Dirt. But it could’ve, should’ve been much shorter.
What were your favorite books of last month?
K.J. Boldon 