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108. The Deathless Girls, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Owned?: No, library Page count: 304 My summary: Lil and Kizzy are just trying to live their lives. Twins, Travellers, newly seventeen, and on the eve of their destinies being revealed, their world is torn asunder when their home is ravaged and they are carried away as slaves. Now the girls are struggling to survive in the castle kitchens, under the red eye of the Boyar. And their fate is yet to be discovered… My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

So I didn't know what this book was actually about going in. I mean, I knew what this was about, but there's a twist at the end that I proooooooooooobably should have seen coming, but didn't. Anyway! Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an author I fucking adore. I had, before this book, read exactly two of her books - both of her adult novels, The Mercies and The Dance Tree - but I'm always keeping an eye on the 'M's at the library just in case. Then this came in - a YA novel, and one that's kind of fantasy-historical! I love that! So of course I wanted to give it a try. Dark fantasy with vampires. What's not to love.

(I'm gonna spoil The Thing at the end of this, so there's your forewarning.)

Let's talk about Kizzy and Lil. They're twins from a Traveller community, who are enslaved by the Settled people and want to get free. Most of their community were murdered, but their brother is mostly alive but separated from them. Of the twins, Kizzy is the more attractive one, which leads her into obvious problems when the pair are captured. Lil is our point of view character; she's a singer, where her sister is a bear-dancer, but neither wants to use their skills for their captors. Lil is more willing to knuckle under and keep a cool head, whereas Kizzy is more argumentative and willing to fight back, both of which aren't always the best way to deal with their predicament. They provide two different sides to someone trying to survive slavery; Lil going along with it leads to her further subjugation, whereas Kizzy going along with it leads to her further abuse. Ultimately, escape is all they can do to try and get out of this hellhole. Even with Lil's less hotheaded attitude, she's a really engaging character, and you can't help but root for both her and Kizzy throughout, they're interesting young women.

The girls are Travellers - it's never said exactly where they are, country-wise, but it's somewhere in Eastern Europe that has Boyars. I can't speak to representation of the Traveller community, but the oppression and subjugation of Travellers is, sadly, a very real and still ongoing issue. And I think Hargrave portrays the terror and general awfulness of the plight that Kizzy and Lil face very well - there's a moment where they are 'inspected' to prove that they are virgins, and it's a horrible scene, and Hargrave toes the line so well with making it explicit what's happening, but not so explicit as to be exploitative. Kizzy and Lil's traditions and culture are never dismissed or degraded or treated like they are not real. We are shown how they live, we are shown that they just want to live their lives, and we are shown the threat that the Settled people pose to their lives, for no real reason other than that they are an Other, someone to dehumanise and mistreat. Hargrave strikes a good balance here, and the result is genuinely unnerving.

Oh, also this book has vampires in it. Remember vampires? They're here, and they're the ruling class, and they're also a metaphor for exploitation, in the way of classic vampires. A lot of this book is Lil and Kizzy attempting to escape being targeted by the vampires, and in particular the Dragon, the highest vampire in the land. Dracul. Oh yeah, this is a stealth prequel to Dracula. Kizzy and Lil are two of Dracula's brides. Which…granted, with all these vampires and this talk of the Dragon, I probably should have clocked way earlier, but hey ho. Yeah, I'll admit the Dracula thing didn't quite do it for me - it felt a bit out of left field that Kizzy and Lil would suddenly be 100% on board with becoming vampires, when all they really wanted to do was get free and return to their community and maybe save their brother, if he's still alive. It's not a bad ending or anything, but it was kind of a weird one. The girls just giving it all up and throwing their lot in with Literal Fucking Dracula I don't think was necessarily built up enough? But hey. It was still a good read. I'm not knocking it, and I still really enjoyed it.

Next, more research!

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107. Heresy, by Catherine Nixey

Owned?: No, library Page count: 274 Summary: ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ says the Gospel of John. This sentence – and the words of all four gospels – are central to the teachings of the Christian church and have shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind.

Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled those who opposed him, the Jesus who sold his twin into slavery and the Jesus who had someone crucified in his stead.

Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviours, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable – even heretical – and they faded from view. Now, in Heretic, Catherine Nixey tells their extraordinary story, one of contingency, chance and plurality. It is a story about what might have been.

My rating: 1/5 My commentary:

I am a Christian. I was raised Church of England, but my religious affiliation these days is more 'I believe in God, I don't believe in the Church'. And I am saying this at the top of this post so that I am clear and explicit about any biases I might have, so that you understand fully my perspective on this book. I picked this up originally because I am interested in the historicity of Jesus Christ - regardless of what you believe religiously, the idea that there was a Jewish man known as Jesus Christ who lived somewhere between 10 BCE and 40 CE, who was crucified, and whose followers began the Christian faith is pretty well accepted historically. It's just whether or not you think the man walked on water and came back from the dead and other such things that's a matter of your individual religious perspective. And, you know, I'm open to reading about Christianity from a more academic, scholarly perspective, I think how the religion has grown and developed over the years is interesting. So this book, ostensibly about both the texts about Jesus considered either apocryphal or heretical by the church and other figures from the same time period who are similar to Jesus, piqued my interest in that regard. 'Ostensibly'? Well, this book wasn't actually about that in practice, not really. I've copied the Goodreads summary for this one rather than writing my own to show what it says it's about, so give that a read and bear it in mind when reading the rest of the post. But short version? It annoyed me, and I don't think it does what it claims it wants to do.

So, we've talked about my biases. Let's talk about Nixey's. She was raised Catholic, and her parents were a monk and a nun. She opens with this, in fairness, so the reader knows this going in. But when I say that this book reads like Nixey has a grudge, that's why. See, it's not actually about other versions of Jesus, or other Jesus-like mythological figures. It's about why the Church is evil and bad and a cause of harm in the world and has always been a repressive, tyrannical figure. Which…is a perspective, I suppose. But it feels disingenuous when that is not what the book was meant to be about; it just feels like Nixey's getting on her soapbox and ranting against Christianity. Now, she's entitled to her opinion on Christianity, and I'm not going to say that her feelings and personal faith (/lack thereof) are invalid just because I have a different perspective. There are plenty of valid reasons to feel alienated or persecuted by the Church, and I'm not here to whitewash Church history or Christian history, because we've been responsible for a lot of awful things over the centuries. (Understatement of the year…) What I'm interested in is if her claims 1. are founded in historical evidence, 2. are relevant to her topic, 3. make sense logically. I don't think that's a high bar to clear for a book like this. And yet, she falls flat in every account. And that's what annoyed me about this book, not the content of the argument. I know, I know, I'm protesting a little too much here. But I really want to emphasise that the fact that this book is written by someone anti-Christian is not what bothered me, it's the lack of proper historical fact and emphasis on pop-culture history.

Speaking of, let's talk pop-culture history. Nixey never says it in so many words, but she seems to believe in the idea that Christianity brought about regression to the places it touched - that Christian areas were always backwards in terms of culture and science. I want to hone in on a few specific examples she gives. One is that a person walking across Rome at the height of the Roman Empire would see a diversity in religious buildings around them - temples to various gods, synagogues, etc - whereas a few centuries later it would be mostly churches. The point being made is that the 'pagan' Roman Empire was far more tolerant of other faiths than the Christian one. I'm sure all of the Jewish people enslaved within the Roman Empire would agree. Look, I'm no expert, but I have done some reading on the period; the Roman Empire, like all empires, hated anything that would subvert its authority. They cracked down on cults popular with women and slaves. They persecuted anyone who wouldn't pay proper obedience to the Emperor. They were not a bastion of religious freedom, is the point I'm making. Nixey seems to want to whitewash Roman history in order to make Christian history look worse.

Another example is when she talks about sexual repression; her argument is that the Roman attitude to sexuality was healthier. One of the examples she gives is of a Roman writer saying that if he wants sex, he can just use a slave. Now, where I stand, that's a pretty clear-cut example of rape, and not a healthy sexual expression. Sure, Christian sexual repression isn't exactly good, but there's nuance there - to claim that all Christians all the time forever were all in favour of complete abstinence is to flatten the myriad Christian thinkers of the time down to a single viewpoint that didn't exist. Nixey also frames Christians as believing the Earth was flat en masse, which is a myth I thought we'd dispelled. Look, I'm not denying that some Christian thinkers might have thought that, but to imply everyone did is the kind of thing you'd read in a history book from the 1800s, not modern historical belief.

This book was also very unfocused. The nadir of this was a chapter that started out very strong - an account of an early bishop talking about a cult that focused on sex, with the revelation that said cult was actually a Christian sect. Interesting, right? I wanted to know more. And then the chapter goes on…to talk about the Apostle Paul, how he was supposed to have travelled 1000 miles giving his teachings, and how that wasn't even a big deal because it was the Roman infrastructure that allowed him to do that. The cult that opened the chapter was just a non-sequitur. And this carries on throughout; there was precious little actual information that fit the scope of the book. Sure, the book mentions apocryphal gospels and other Jesus-figures, but that's sprinkled in between these huge polemics framing Christianity as inherently backwards and regressive. Some are only mentioned in passing. There's this implication throughout that the Church (meaning the Catholic church, and specifically the one Nixey grew up in) are hiding the existence of these other gospels, when various churches around the world acknowledge, talk about, and even follow them! There are a lot of different Christian beliefs! I grew up in the Church of England, and I barely know anything about the doctrines of other English churches, let alone the Eastern Orthodox or Ethiopian or other foreign churches. And even in the CoE, I've seen academic works on apocrypha and their place in the modern Christian tradition.

And none of this is to say that the book never made any good points! It briefly talks about the horrific destruction that the Crusades left in their wake, for example, and the absolutely genocidal viewpoints that Crusaders had of anyone who wasn't Christian. The thing was, though, that an argument against Christianity was not what this book advertised itself as. It was meant to be about, well, parts of Christianity now considered heresy. And there was precious little of that within its pages. Instead, it's just a badly argued, ahistorical, ill-thought out argument against an entire religion that rehashes pop culture talking points rather than anything academic. This book pissed me off, and I wish I hadn't read it.

Next up, deathless girls against the world.

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106. The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker

Owned?: No, library Page count: 324 My summary: Sing, O muse, of the women of Troy. Sing of the defeated, of the captives, of those who lived on the sidelines, barely mentioned as anything but a war prize. Briseis is one of these women, whose city fell and found themselves enslaved to the conquerors. She is Achilles' prize, and must adjust to her new life. But the war is not over yet… My rating: 2/5 My commentary:

I don't really know how to talk about this one. It wasn't my pick - it was a work book club pick, hot on the heels of A Thousand Ships a couple of months ago, and with a very similar subject matter. There's a lot of retellings of Greco-Roman myths and legends from feminist or otherwise female-centred perspectives on the shelves at the moment. I gotta admit, I'm kind of leery of them. Some of these sorts of stories don't seem to understand the myth that they're adapting at all, and the worse ones manage to make the story less feminist than it started. And with the oversaturation of the genre, the idea of the female-led mythology feels like a gimmick at this point - are you adapting this story because you have a unique perspective on it, or because it'll sell copies? Nonetheless, I was willing to give this a try. After all, I really liked A Thousand Ships, and though I don't know that much about the Trojan War or the Illiad, I was a Greek mythology kid. (Well, Percy Jackson kid, which is much of a muchness.) So, I went into this with about as open a mind as I could. But…unfortunately, it fell short in some really key areas.

First of all, this book's whole premise was somewhat suspect. The Silence of the Girls is, in fact, about one of the girls, Briseis, with other characters barely getting much of a look-in. It's not really focused on the women of the places conquered by the Greeks, it's about her and her story. Except for when it's about Achilles, which is a lot of the time. He even gets to narrate the odd chapter, which is stylistically weird; the book is presented as Briseis narrating in the first person from some unspecified future point in her life, looking back on the war and its turmoil, but also she's narrating what Achilles was up to when she wasn't around to see him and knows what he was thinking? It happens a few times throughout. And furthermore, the story itself isn't really about Briseis? It's more of a retelling of the end of the Trojan war, with focus on Achilles, and Briseis is just the observer that this narrative is using to show the war's conclusion. She doesn't really change as a person or have an arc. She just kind of…watches Achilles, I guess. Occasionally ruminates on how bad a life it is when she is enslaved and specifically forced into sexual slavery for whatever man 'owns' her, but that's about it.

And that's my biggest problem with Briseis - she doesn't do anything! Achilles does, he acts, he changes, he has something of an arc, whereas Briseis is just sort of standing around watching everything happen. She doesn't really act, she doesn't effect change - alright, she's enslaved, but there's ways of writing a person in a situation where they have been forced into helplessness where they still feel like an agential character having a meaningful arc. We don't learn much about her except through the framing of what she's lost. She's just on the sidelines, existing. And as I said, there's not really any other major female characters that take up any of our focus. It's just about Achilles. And occasionally Patroclus. And not to sound awful, but I kind of figured that being enslaved by the men who conquered my city and killed my brothers would be a bad time. This book doesn't give any kind of new perspective on this character, other than just talking about how bad a time Briseis is having.

Which also brings me to my Historical Fiction Pet Peeve - Briseis, even after being enslaved, is still in a position of privilege. She was a king's daughter and a king's wife, she's treated as a prize. How much more interesting might this story have been from the perspective of one of the nameless common women who are used far more harshly than her? Briseis has a relative freedom of movement within the camp, Achilles doesn't treat her too badly, and she doesn't seem to have to work all that hard. I'm not saying that she has an easy time - again, she's literally forced into sexual slavery - but she's still having a better time than the women who are treated like dirt, forced to work all the time, and are basically confined to one space. How much more powerful might this story have been if it was about one of those nameless, faceless women who are treated like less than nothing, and not even mentioned in the Illiad?

I also had beef with its treatment of the supernatural elements. Briseis treats the idea of Achilles being invulnerable but for his heel as ridiculous, which is weird given that 1. Apollo sent an actual plague to the camp, 2. Achilles being the son of a sea goddess is taken as read, 3. we literally see said sea goddess appear to him, and 4. she summons supernatural armour for him in the final battle. The gods are actually, tangibly, definably, provably real in this book…but Achilles being mostly invulnerable is silly? It was so jarring. If you want a story that's fully grounded, take the Definite Explicitly Real gods out - if you want a book that has these elements, why not have Achilles be invulnerable? And finally, I didn't like that a lot of the dialogue was very modern and colloquial. This did come across as a stylistic choice, but it's not one that I appreciated, it just took me out of the narrative. Why are these Ancient Greek soldiers singing modern rugby songs? You couldn't come up with something that had the same vibe, but wasn't that weirdly anachronistic? It'd be one thing if the story had that slightly less grounded tone - I'm thinking specifically of the Headley translation of Beowulf - but the story seemed to want to present itself as being realistic while also having gods and divinely sourced plagues, historical but with modern dialogue…it seemed as though the story itself wasn't sure of what it wanted to be, and that held it back and muddied the waters of what it was trying to say a lot. You tried? But not hard enough.

Next, a spot of heresy.

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105. The Wonderfvll Discoverie of Witches in the Covntie of Lancaster

Owned?: No, library Page count: 188 My summary: In 1612, a group of people, mostly poor women, from Pendle in Lancashire were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged. The star witness was Jennet Device, daughter and sister to some of the accused witnesses, who claimed that she had seen them partaking in all kinds of devilry for their dark masters. Extraordinarily in a time before court shorthand, an account of the trial was published for later consumption - and this is that tale. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Well, it was sort of inevitable that I'd read this eventually. The USA has the Salem witch trials; England has the Pendle witches. And they're local to me! Well, sort of. In the same county, at least. The Pendle witch trials were of course a miscarriage of justice - the people executed at the trial's conclusion had likely done no more wrong than being poor and Catholic at a time when Catholicism was considered suspect at best and outright dangerous at worst. Jennet Device, the nine year old girl who was the main witness to the 'witchcraft', had likely been coached on what to say. It's noteworthy that much of what the Pendle witches allegedly did follows King James I's text on witchcraft, Daemonologie - there's a theory that the publication of the trials, at least, was an attempt to curry favour with local judges and the King. This book is interesting to me for the descriptions of what witches were meant to have done - making clay images of people they hated to cause them magical harm, cavorting with spirits and familiars, and the like. But while that aspect of it is fun, at least to me, it's worth remembering the real people who were killed for, essentially, their poverty.

17th century text isn't the easiest to read at the best of times, but I muddled through. Lots of 'v' instead of 'u' and vice versa, and some archaic spelling. Mostly, I was interested to learn that the phrase 'fell out' as relates to people having an argument is apparently as old as this - in my head, that's way more of a new one. But that's neither here nor there. It's also a repetitive read; James and Jennet Device's testimonies of the Good Friday gathering at Mallkin Tower where the witches are meant to have plotted violence against the jailer holding Alizon and Demdike are repeated time and again, and vary very little in wording. Which makes sense, honestly, this is a summary of evidence being given against prisoners, not a story meant to entertain. But the formatting of it is still interesting. What the text doesn't mention is also sometimes glaring - sure, a lot of the 'witches' confessed to all sorts of crimes, but how free and willing were those confessions? Even if they weren't tortured, I can imagine that their confessions were not exactly the product of them going 'eh, it's a fair cop'. It's an interesting account of a horrible little chapter in history, in short, and I'm glad I got around to it.

Next, the silence of the girls.

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104. The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez

Owned?: No, library Page count: 317 My summary: The Girl was a runaway. Escaping slavery, escaping pain, escaping the life she once had, she ran away and was found by a white lady named Gilda, who seemed to find a kinship in the Girl. Years later, Gilda was gone, and the Girl had taken her name and her gift - vampirism, a type of immortality, sustained by blood and giving its gift of longevity. As Gilda watches the centuries turn, who will she become? My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

Here's something of a modern classic. The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez is a work of speculative fiction, an example of vampire fiction that eschews many of the trappings that I would associate with vampire fiction, a story of Black people and Black lives from 1850 to 2050 first published in 1991. I…have to admit that I struggled with this book at first. I think I was expecting a more conventional vampire story, at least by the conventions that I have grown up with, and so the fact that this book uses vampirism more as a way to explore changing times and historical eras was something I struggled to acclimate to at first. I also think that the book falls down a little for the fact that it's sort of meandering - not a lot happens, and the huge time skips between eras are sometimes disorienting, forcing the reader to move on to a new setting just as they've been acclimated to the old one. Halfway through the book, I was just ready to put it down and not pick it up again. (In fairness, I was about three hours into a rather uncomfortable four hour train journey at the time, so that might not entirely be the book's fault.) But I stuck it out, and I'm actually glad that I did, because now I'm on the other side I do have a further appreciation for this book and what it's trying to do. It just took me a while to get into the groove, so to speak.

Gilda is our protagonist, first introduced to us as a nameless runaway slave in 1850 who winds up at a brothel which a vampire, the first Gilda, owns. Vampirism here isn't the evil that other books depict it as. It comes with telepathy, additional strength, and eternal life and youth, though vampires choosing to 'take the final death' is a culturally normal thing to do. Vampires need to drink blood, but do not need to kill the person they drink from, and Gilda's cohort of vampires use their telepathy to give the person they drink from a gift as they do - a little mental nudge towards making better decisions, or a nice memory. Vampires are weakened by the sun, but this effect can be counteracted with soil from their birthplace, worn in their clothes. Gilda is inducted into vampirism by the older Gilda and Bird, a Lakota woman who is the older Gilda's lover. Gilda herself is interesting - she's not introduced as a Strong Female Character, she's a girl who has survived awful situations and has found a strength within herself. Her family were enslaved on a Mississippi plantation, and she ran away rather than getting sold away, killing a bounty hunter that came after her before the older Gilda picked her up. Over time, we see her strength manifest in the friends she makes and the bonds she forms while on the road. The Mississippi dirt she carries with her serves as a metaphor; she carries her past, the memory of her Fulani mother, everything that was done to her in her old life, but she still moves forward and forges a new life for herself. Just because this was done to her, doesn't mean she is defined by it.

And Gilda is surrounded by her Black community through the ages. She moves from a philanthropic woman in the 1890s to a hair salon looking out for a s-x worker in the 1950s to a musician in a jazz club in the 1990s, surrounding herself at all times with other Black people, particularly Black women. Gilda finds a few female lovers through the years, though how that manifests depends on the social mores of the era she is in. It never feels particularly separatist, though, it's just that Gomez is using Gilda to explore Black culture from 1850 to the then-present day (and beyond, though I'll talk about that in a bit) and in particular how one might navigate these spaces as a darker-skinned Black lesbian, and one who has the memories of her time on a plantation and the (for her) very recent terror of the Middle Passage. It's noteworthy that some of the white vampires in Gilda's community are travellers who visit countries worldwide, but Gilda stays in America and is terrified of travelling across the ocean, largely because of passed-down memories of the Middle Passage. Gilda is treated as an equal by the vampires, but she still has to navigate the world as a Black woman, albeit a Black woman with far more power than mortals. It's her choice how she uses that power, whether she shapes it or lets it shape her. She is slow to find affection, but searches for it no less. She carries trauma, but she is strong. There's a power in that, and a power in her. She's a fascinating window into Black American culture in the 20th century.

I think the book sort of lost me when it went into the future. The last two chapters are set in 2020 (futuristic on the book's publication in 1991) and 2050. To her credit, Gomez paints a very credible 2020, to the point where I initially thought that the book was published a lot later and this was a more factual 2020 - it was just the consistent use of the phrase 'video phones' that tipped me off and had me check. However, the story suddenly veering into talking about the climate crisis felt kind of jarring to me? That wasn't what the book was initially about, and the sci-fi dystopian vibe of the 2050 chapter felt like it lost some of the realistic groundedness that was a hallmark of the earlier chapters. It just felt like the last chapter swerved into an entirely different genre whatsoever, when the story felt reasonably finished by the 2020 chapter. It was jarring, and I thought a bit of a tonal misstep to what is otherwise a really interesting book.

Next, the silence of the girls.

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103. The Walls Have Ears, by Helen Fry

Owned?: No, library Page count: 274 My summary: During World War Two, a unique intelligence operation was ongoing. Captured German officers, prisoners of war, were taken to London and interrogated by the British army. So far, so normal. But what the German officers didn't know was that they were being spied upon. Hidden microphones in the ceiling and fireplace, an army of secret listeners behind the walls, ready to record their idle chatter…the Germans gave their secrets, and British Intelligence acted. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

I'm not always interested in World War Two history. The fact that most of the history books in my local library cover various aspects of WWII means I'm often pretty sick of it - seems like you can't learn about any kind of history apart from WWII and maybe the Tudors in this country. Still, there are some aspects of WWII that interest me, and the cover of this sparked my interest when I walked past it. It's about a large-scale spying operation on German prisoners of war, where they were placed in cells with hidden microphones and listeners fluent in various German dialects (many of them German Jewish refugees who had fled their native country after the Nazis rose to power) were stationed to eavesdrop around the clock just in case the prisoners revealed anything that could be useful to the war effort. It seems that the details of this operation have only recently been declassified, and thus this book serves as an informative overview of the operation and exactly what it entailed. And it's a good look at how the war progressed, what the spies learned, and the then-state-of-the-art technology used to listen into the Germans as they discussed the war effort in what they thought was privacy. If you're interested in the subject, this will make a good read. I'm just…interested in the implications of what the book doesn't say.

See, one of the reasons I'm kind of leery about reading about WWII is that English books on the subject can veer into the propagandistic. Aren't we great, we Won The War and beat those evil Nazis and didn't do any war crimes ourself in the process. We kept a stiff upper lip and played by the rules, don't you know? This book feels carefully neutral in tone, not wanting to give value judgements apart from obvious 'war crimes and mass murder are bad'. Is spying on prisoners of war ethical? Is presenting them with fake aristocrats who will pamper them in the hopes that they'll let something slip ethical? Is planting fake prisoners among them ethical? I don't have a good answer for that - obviously stopping the Nazis is a goal I can get behind - but I wonder how the same actions would be framed if the Germans were doing them to us. More disturbing, though, is the evidence they collected of Nazi war crimes. From this book's account, it seems that British military intelligence were aware of the mass-murder of Jewish people from at least 1942. And yet, also from this book's account, they just sat on that information. The book makes mention of collecting evidence for eventual war crimes trials, but I don't think that this evidence was actually used at Nuremberg. Surely we could have done something? Bombed the railway lines used to take people to the camps, blown up the camps themselves, anything to stop the slaughter. It just seems like we knew, and we did nothing about it, for three years. That leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Surely, surely there was some way to use this information, something we could have done. And it disturbs me that this seemed not to have happened.

Next, a girl who was once an escaped slave walks the night for hundreds of years.

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102. Travellers in the Golden Realm, by Lubaaba Al-Azami

Owned?: No, library Page count: 256 My summary: Mughal India, a militarily and economically powerful institution in the 17th century, was a valuable prize for English traders. Spices, cottons, tea, and other goods were highly prized in Europe, and India was the only place to find them. But for India, England was a tiny upstart country barely worth any time, a flea turned to a nuisance. This is the story of India in the 17th century, and how England fared on her shores. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

More research, more India! Much like the last one I talked about, this is a look at the early days of England's interactions with India, where the Mughal Emperors received ambassadors from England with various amounts of warmth, and granted England some trade concessions that led to the spread of the East India Company throughout India. This is, as I said before, a part of Anglo-Indian history that isn't really talked about - the focus is always on the British Empire in India, the Raj, when England most decidedly had a foothold in the country and was making major decisions for her. This early history, of incessant arguing with Mughal Emperors and small concessions here and there, is not a history that England wishes to remember much. But that's why it's still important to remember. Because it happened, because it contextualises all that came after, and because it's interesting. So - Mughal India and England. What else was going on there?

The other book I discussed was entirely about Thomas Roe, England's first ambassador to India, and while Roe makes an appearance here, the book is more broadly concerned with 17th century Indian relations with England, and as such had a wider scope, if far less detail. And it really highlighted my own ignorance about the subject, I'll say that much! I didn't know about the EIC's history of human trafficking in India - it's obvious that there was some, now I think about it for more than five seconds, but I hadn't connected that dot previously. The writing style of the book is informative without ever becoming dull, and is very readable, even with note-taking I was getting through huge chunks at a time. Overall, a good look at the subject!

Next, a true account of spying on Nazi prisoners in the Second World War

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101. I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Owned?: No, library Page count: 188 My summary: Thirty nine women in a cage below the world. Thirty nine women, and one child. The girl is alone among her fellows, with no memory of the world before or anything outside of the cage, the bunker, the guards who march around their lonely cell. When a siren comes and the guards vanish, the girl is quick to grab the keys and release the forty prisoners. But a life in a cell is a strange introduction to the world, and the girl and her fellow women are unprepared for what lies outside… My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

This book has changed something inside me. I'd never heard of it until a few weeks ago, when it came up in conversation with a colleague and she recommended it. Written in 1995 in French by a Belgian author who fled the Nazis as a girl, this book is a sort-of sci-fi tale of an apocalyptic…something. Something happened. Nobody remembers what happened, but something happened, and now the world of these forty women is limited to the cage in which they are held and the three guards circling it. If you want an explanation, you are missing the point. This is not a story about explanations, about action, about anything other than the survival of this group of women, brought together by some other power, survivors by accident of fate, who forge the best life they can in a world they do not and cannot understand. I'm doing it a disservice here, because the experience of reading this book is something I could not have quite prepared for and cannot quite describe. It's disquieting rather than scary, curious rather than mysterious, inviting questions rather than providing answers. I am going to attempt to organise my thoughts here, but really, if you want to know what it's like, go and read it. If you want to see me rambling…well, look no further, I suppose.

The one thing that struck me when I read this book is how old-fashioned it seemed. I suppose that could be credited to the age of the author (sixty six on the book's publication in 1995) but when I read it, I was greatly surprised that it wasn't written in the 1950s, because that was the impression I got from the cultural biases of the story. The women know how to sew and cook, they are mentioned as having had jobs but their attitudes are somewhat archaic, they wear dresses at all times and speak with an old-fashioned affect. And yet, it's not as stereotypical as all that. These women are survivors, after all - they also trek long distances, teach themselves how to build homes and support each other through the deprivations of their new life. They're hardy women. This is described as a feminist work, and yeah, it's entirely focused on women. The only living men are the briefly-appearing guards - every other man is dead. But the text didn't stoop to moralising about gender roles or anything like that; rather, it let the actions of the characters stand on their own. In other words, it's feminist because it is about interesting women, rather than being deliberately written to have a Message, and I appreciate that about it. Despite their situation, and despite the attitude that it's useless, the women do manage to pass their knowledge onto the narrator - practical information on cooking and sewing and building and reading and maths, but also the more ephemeral knowledge of community, of tradition, of the value of humanity, and even though the narrator sees herself as apart from them she does appreciate all that they gave to her.

This book is also described as post-apocalyptic, although the image that phrase most likely conjures for you is far from the tone this book creates. There is an element of struggle for survival, though the survivors find bunkers and cages similar to the ones in which they were incarcerated easily, and each has bountiful food stores and supplies. They do not really struggle with food or shelter; there are no other humans or animals or hazards of the environment other than some mild rain or cold. There are very few inter-community issues or arguments. The women are simply abandoned in a place that is likely not Earth, with no knowledge of how or why or what happened, and they just have to…live with it. They spend at least two decades just living out there, existing alongside each other in relative comfort, until they begin dying one by one. Age, then disease, and in a few cases just inertia take them, until our narrator, the youngest, is left. What these women battle is inertia, and the knowledge that they are never going to know what happened to them or why. The result is a story much quieter and more contemplative than the average post-apocalypse. We're not even sure there was an apocalypse, just that as far as the narrative is concerned our narrator is the only human alive in her vicinity. Coming to terms with that is part of the story.

Speaking of our narrator, she's a strange person to be in the head of. Unnamed by virtue of being imprisoned at a young age, losing much of her memory, and never knowing what her name was, she is a being of this new world of cages and bunkers and barren landscapes. She alone does not remember what it was to live a normal life on Earth, and does not understand many of the concepts that the other women discuss. When they leave the bunker, that is her first time not only seeing the sky and trees and grass, but her first time ascending a staircase. She's a strange young woman, introspective and withdrawn, but intensely curious about the world. She wants to know everything, even if it's things that aren't going to be immediately useful to her survival. While her fellow women are content with making their village and settling down, the narrator wants to constantly be on the move. But, importantly, she doesn't judge or demean the other women for wanting to remain. She's very dutiful - she stays with them when they need it, and moves on when they are gone. She's a strong voice and a singular character, even if you can never quite get a read on what she's about. I loved her, and I feel a strange sense of mourning now the book is over and she's gone. And yet, satisfaction. The book answers no questions, but it concludes in a way that makes sense for it, and for that, I am glad. What a weird story. I cannot recommend it enough.

Next, more adventures in Mughal India.

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100. The Vanishing Hitchhiker, by Jan Harold Brunvand

Owned?: No, library Page count: 202 My summary: We all know the stories. Teens at the local makeout spot are interrupted by news of a crazed killer on the loose. Alligators prowl in the sewers beneath New York. Cars pick up ghostly hitchhikers who vanish as soon as they reach their destination. These are the urban legends of American folklore - their provenance, their meaning, and how they spread so far. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I have always had an interest in urban legends. Creepypastas, strange tales, horror stories that you know aren't true but hear from a relative of a friend of a friend who swears down it happened to someone they know. This book is a curiosity - published in the 1980s, it documents some of the legends that were passed around through word of mouth at the time, something that's fascinating to me. I know intellectually that we were hardly cut off from each other before the internet exploded into popular use, but I've grown up online, I've never really been conscious of a time before I could instantly connect to people in all corners of the world and pass on stories like these. Of course, it's the 1980s, not the 1780s - things like the telephone and fax machines obviously existed and allowed the spread of stories within communities, as well as international travel being easier and more affordable. Still, it's a neat time capsule of a time before the internet made the urban legend so much more widespread, and at the same time more widely mocked and debunked. After all, who hasn't seen Man Hook Hand Car Door or THEN WHO WAS PHONE?, satirical retellings of urban legends that appear in slightly straighter versions in this volume.

It's interesting to me how these tales appear, and the societal anxieties they reflect. Obviously stories like 'The Hook' play on fears of criminals and of the mentally ill, with a lovely dollop of ableism even above that with the hook hand aspect. It's also something of a morality tale about the dangers of teenage sexuality - don't go off to a lover's lane and make out, kids, or this could happen to you! (A somewhat archaic manifestation of that fear, these days; kids going to make out in a car on a lover's lane is a very 1950s or 1960s image, modern day kids would just be drinking vodka in the park or something.) This book aims to peel back the folktale and expose those fears somewhat. It's a slim volume, so there isn't much depth to each of the tales, which is fair, because stories like these are inherently short and wear their themes close to the surface. Spider nests in a girl's hair that bite her or eat through her skull is a warning against vanity and teenage fashion trends. Stolen corpses play on taboos around death. Snakes in an imported rug is a manifestation of xenophobia. A stoned babysitter putting a baby in the oven is fearmongering around drugs and youth culture. What amazes me is how long-lasting some of these stories are - I grew up hearing variants of these here in England, and encountered more when I discovered the internet. This is a really interesting book, and I'm very glad I stumbled across it!

Next, a girl who grew up in a bunker explores her world.

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99. Run Away With Me, by Brian Selznick

Owned?: No, library Page count: 278 My summary: Rome, 1986. A teenage boy who spends his life following his mother as she takes various preservation jobs is in Rome for the summer, at a loose end. While wandering the city, he happens across a strange, curly-haired boy - about his age, with a bottomless knowledge of Rome's secrets and a guarded history. He says he'll call the boy Danny, asks for Danny to name him; Angelo, for the angel statues around Rome. Angelo tells Danny a winding tale, of men who lose their hearts in Rome's shadowed corners, and Danny is enraptured…but he knows his time in Rome has an expiry date, and it is fast approaching. My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Well, this was delightful. I love a Brian Selznick book, even if in practice I've only read three - this, The Marvels, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which you might recognise from having been turned into the film Hugo in 2011. His style of combining text with these gorgeous, dark, moody illustrations is always beautiful, and his mystical and almost fairytale narratives are absolutely sublime. Selznick is also gay, and wrote about gay men in The Marvels and in this, a love story between two boys in Rome in the 1980s. I've been to Rome exactly once and know little about it other than what you learn about Ancient Rome in primary school, so that aspect of the narrative is one I know little about. A shame, really, because Rome is a major character in this book. When I got to the afterword and saw that Selznick was inspired by living in Rome with his husband for a few months in 2020, I wasn't surprised, because that is exactly the experience this book reflects - a brief residency in an ancient city full of mysteries and history. It's a gorgeous book, and I really recommend it.

Danny is our narrator. His real name isn't Danny, but that's what Angelo dubs him, and when we learn his actual name late in the story it feels wrong somehow. Angelo is a boy from Rome with a lot of secrets. It turns out he has a serious respiratory condition that had him hospitalised when he was younger, and lives with a large family in a small space, so he doesn't host Danny there. The story kind of baits you into assuming that Angelo is some kind of ancient personification of Rome itself, that he's a mystical sprite summoned from the statues and the streets and the city, but the answer is a lot more mundane, he's just a kid who is fascinated with history and knows a lot about Rome. It's this ambiguous magic to the world that I love in Selznick's books, the hint that something mystical is happening, some twist of fate - but the resolution being such that it doesn't feel disappointing. There is something magical about Angelo, even if he is just a regular kid. Perhaps it's just Danny's love for him. But even that is something delicious in itself, the awkward but intense first love of two boys who find each other and need to keep themselves secret, a summer romance that both will remember for the rest of their lives, even if they never see each other again.

The boys build up an at first seemingly unrelated scattershot of stories - an elephant in Rome, a pair of brothers who collect and restore books, a sculptor and apprentice, a Jewish refugee who was an extra in a film during the War - that grow to entwine and mesh with each other to reveal a more cohesive whole. Since this story is one of exploration of these ideas and themes, not a lot technically happens within the narrative; Angelo and Danny hang out, their relationship deepens, they talk about stories and mysteries, they hide from Danny's mother. At the end, Danny leaves. But even though, strictly, not a lot happens, so much occurs within that time in terms of their relationship. Angelo and Danny are young and closeted at a time when being gay is very, very stigmatised. Their relationship is fumbling, but it's cute. And more, they learn about other men who liked men through history, and the ways they kept their relationships. It's a good conceit, and it makes for a compelling narrative.

And, of course, it wouldn't be a Selznick book without these beautiful illustrations. They bookend the story, first taking us through the empty Roman streets from Danny's perspective, then at the end showing Danny and Angelo amid the rose petals, turning into the different men of the story, morphing through time and space in a reflection of the love they have for each other, and the love these men have had for each other. It's all greyscale, moody, atmospheric work and it's utterly gorgeous, totally sets the scene and sinks you into the world in an instant. I love it, I love this book, and I really appreciate what it's doing here.

Next, a litany of American folklore.

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98. all the young men, by Ruth Coker Burks

Owned?: No, library Page count: 347 My summary: A hospital bed in Arkansas, 1984. A young man named Jimmy is dying of a virus with no known cure - AIDS, the notorious killer of gay men, about which little is known. The nurses won't go near him. His room is cordoned off. He has nobody - until the door opens to admit a curious young woman. Ruth, visiting a friend nearby, wants to help. At first, she calls Jimmy's mother, but she refuses to see a son who is an 'unrepentant sinner'. But when Ruth goes to give Jimmy the bad news, he's far enough gone that he calls her mama. Ruth is holding his hand hours later when he dies. And so begins one woman's quest to help young men with AIDS, at a time when most won't even go near an AIDS patient. Ruth Coker Burks cared and advocated for many men in her community - and now, she is telling her story. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I had wanted to read this for a while. I'd heard about it through the grapevine, the testimony of a woman who helped AIDS patients in the American South in the 1980s and 90s, when many people turned away from those who had AIDS and treated them like scum. I'm assuming anyone who reads this post will at least know the basics of the AIDS crisis and how patients were treated - nurses refusing to go near them, doctors refusing to treat them, families who abandoned them, men left to die alone and afraid. So when a copy showed up at my library, how could I refuse? It is, however, worth noting that there is some controversy around Burks. She raised $75k on GoFundMe for a memorial to the men she buried that, as yet, has not materialised, and is said to have cut off people helping her to make said memorial after the money came in. There is also a dispute around how many men she buried, and over the ownership of the cemetery she is meant to have buried them in. Others also have issue with her portrayal of the community of Hot Springs, Arkansas as being predominantly homophobic, with her as one of the few people willing to help gay men. The GoFundMe thing is sketchy, I'm not gonna lie; the numbers thing I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt over. She has not provided a list of the names of the men she buried, but the reason she gives is that they didn't want to be outed, which I think is fair enough. As to the latter, it is possible for two different people to have wildly different experiences of the same place, though granted Burks could be exaggerating the homophobia at least somewhat for the purpose of self-aggrandisement. I don't know, is my honest takeaway here. I'm willing to give her something of the benefit of the doubt, but take any claims here with a pinch of salt, at least.

There's no doubt that this is a highly emotive memoir. Burks talks about the hopelessness and the pain of the gay community during the AIDS crisis in great detail. In particular, she focuses on her relationship with Billy, a drag queen she met at a gay bar in Hot Springs who became her friend, and who passed away due to AIDS complications in the 1990s. The way that she talks about Billy, it's clear that there was a lot of love and respect there, and she seems to have greatly helped him and his partner when things took a turn. Otherwise, there are few names mentioned through the book - as I said, Burks seems to not want to posthumously out any of the men she helped. The ostracism experienced by gay men at the time is paralleled with her ostracism as a single mother, something it was harder to be in a highly Christian area at the time. The memoir does have a kind of defensive tone to it, repeatedly bringing up that Burks was the only one helping gay men at the time, the only one who dared to go into their hospital rooms, et cetera, which feels a little hypocritical when she decries a woman going into a church giving an AIDS work sob story then passing around a collection plate. Especially given the GoFundMe thing. I don't know. It's a very well-written and emotive book, I think that Burks ultimately did some good work caring for the gay men in her community who had AIDS, and I did enjoy reading this book. I would have given it a 5/5, were it not for the lingering doubts about Burks,

Next, not straying too far away - two boys find each other in Rome.

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97. Courting India, by Nandini Das

Owned?: No, library Page count: 364 My summary: The history of England and India is tied up with the British Raj; with Queen Victoria, the 'Empress of India', and British occupation of India. It's hard to remember that, in the early 17th century, England was barely a footnote in Indian history, with one ambassador vying for trade deals against a culture he did not understand. This is the story of Thomas Roe, England's first Indian ambassador, and the bonds he made halfway around the world. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Another research book! Are you getting sick of these already? I've got six left from the library, and then I get to start delving into the massive pile of books I actually own, which get to be a bit more niche. Just gotta slog through India. Now, if you've been following my research for a while, you may wonder what India has to do with the novel I am planning to write, which will be set in 1711 Europe and feature a crew of pirates, the main character being a Spanish pirate whose mother was Taíno. (Indigenous Puerto Rican.) Sort of the opposite side of the world. Well, one of the other characters is Indian, and I figure that if I'm gonna make points in this narrative about European colonisation, I should probably look into some of the other places that Europe was busy colonising at this point in history; and since one character's from India, I figure her life will have been impacted at least somewhat by English colonisation. Thing is, while I do know some things about the English in India, most of my knowledge comes from the British Raj, which Wikipedia reliably informs me was 1858-1947 - Victorian, not my late-Stuart setting. So, long story short, time to hit the books!

This is the story of England's first ambassador to India, and the struggles he had to get even the smallest foot in the door of trade in India, ultimately not achieving that much and returning home frustrated by the intricacies of Mughal India. It's an interesting, if somewhat dry at times, read. As it turns out, there's a fair amount of sources for this period - not just English sources like Roe's journals and the accounts of other Englishmen in India, but the Emperor Jahangir's own memoir as well. The events of Roe's visit are chronicled in minute detail from a reasonably neutral point of view, although sometimes the narration does point out how Roe was ill-equipped to deal with the Indian court, from the gifts sent by the East India Company being subpar or damaged in transit to his own stubbornness and refusal to bow to Mughal court etiquette, as well as things like the language barrier. William Hawkins, another Englishman in India, learned the language and had an Indian wife - this was seen as being unpatriotic and unchristian, unlike Roe's stubborn refusal to acclimate to Indian life. It's an interesting read for anyone who cares about the subject, and really works to highlight just how some of the narratives that England tells about itself are, at best, exaggerated. Far from a major player on the world stage, at this point in the early seventeenth century we were shadowed in comparison to the far richer and far more expansive Mughal Empire. It'd take some time for us to become the imperialist monsters of later in the century.

Next, the story of a woman helping patients through the AIDS crisis.

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96. The Quick and the Dead, by Emma Hinds

Owned?: No, library Page count: 354 My summary: 1597. Kit and Mariner are thieves - scum and lowlifes, working for the Grave Eorl of Southwark, a thief extraordinaire called Twentyman. They make an odd pair; the girl who dresses as a boy sailor and dreams of the sea, and the boy who cannot feel pain. But a chance encounter in a graveyard leads to Kit's abduction by alchemists, and a whole new world open to them. Magic has its joys - and its dangers. Soon, Kit and Mariner will find that alchemy is just as hazardous as theft… My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

This was another random pick-up from work - a book about Tudor thieves, promising queer storytelling and magic. Of course it piqued my interest. While the Tudor period is outside of my general sphere, I do love me some historical fantasy, and this has enough ingredients in it to be up my street. At first, when I'd gotten about 50 pages in, I thought I disliked it. There was just something about the stream-of-consciousness prose, something about the world, I just wasn't gelling with it. But, as my rating will show, it did win me over by the end, and that's fair enough. I can't say that I wholeheartedly loved it, and I'm going to criticise it a fair bit under the cut, but just know that I did have an appreciation for what this book was trying to do, and overall I think it's good.

So first off, our characters. Both Kit and Mariner are queer - Kit has a preference for men, Mariner is only interested in women. And both have other things that make them outcasts. Mariner is mixed-race and visibly darker than the average Londoner, which gets her some pushback from others. Kit is intersex; I don't know enough about different intersex conditions to say if his condition is something that is common? That he has both a small penis and a vaginal opening felt like a stereotypical depiction of an intersex condition, but it's a possible condition, and there were other ways it manifested. Kit doesn't grow hair easily, he's smaller and less broad than other men, and has a boyish look to him despite being in his early twenties. I think it's an interesting depiction of what it might have meant to be intersex in the Tudor period, but it is hampered by the fact that this is first revealed to the audience when Kit is forcibly stripped and inspected by his captor, which is a horrifying and uncomfortable scene even for me, a perisex individual - it could be legitimately triggering to an actual intersex person. I think there's a solid attempt here to show Kit in a neutral light and be a faithful depiction of an intersex character, I just question if we needed that scene in that amount of detail.

Also, as regards other representation - that Kit and Mariner are queer in their sexuality and express it isn't anachronistic by any means, particularly given that they're lower-class and wouldn't have an expectation to marry and have heirs in the same way, but the side character Captain Larkin, an openly female sailor, did give me pause for how casually she just seems to exist in defiance of Tudor gender norms, and how she seems to be unchallenged. (Also also, I've got no better place for this gripe than here - the author fell into my pet peeve of people not understanding how hangings worked in these periods. The 'long drop' method with the trapdoor was a Victorian invention, folks! Before that, you're standing on a cart which is pulled away, or something like that - I know, not the most consequential anachronism, but it annoys me.)

The prose style is strange - third person, present tense, with prose that occasionally borders on the purple in its descriptions and lyrical quality, but it's very stream of consciousness and that makes the action sequences a little hard to follow at times. I know I was getting lost or missing vital sections because it was all going by so fast. Honestly, I think this was a large part of why I didn't get on with the book initially. But once I'd acclimatised to it a bit more, I was finding it more readable - the prose was just a turn-off for me at first.

On the other hand, I have to profess an interest in the alchemy this book depicts. I don't know much about this sort of High Magic of the period - cunning men and women are more in my interest than court alchemists - and it seems that the author did a fair amount of research into how alchemy was meant to have worked and theories of alchemists. The waters are muddied a little by the fantasy elements - obviously in real life turning lead to gold isn't a thing that 16th century alchemists could do, but Kit is able to do so when his powers are unlocked - but on the whole it seems a pretty good depiction of alchemists and how they thought the world worked at the time. Kudos!

Next, England's first ambassador to India.

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95. Haunted Mansion comics

Owned?: No, library Page count: Unknown My summary: When hinges creak in doorless chambers, and strange and frightening sounds echo through the hall…that is the time when ghosts are present, and what tales they have to tell. From the pets that haunt the cemetery to the coachman who delivers spirits to the swinging wake to the mournful bride in the attic, the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion are ready to tell their tales to the world. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

Ah, the hyperfixation fairy has definitely come to visit me. Yep, it's more theme park stuff, and specifically the Haunted Mansion. The Haunted Mansion was my first love when it came to theme park attractions, and though I've never actually ridden it in real life (damn that pesky Atlantic Ocean) I love it to pieces and consider it to be one of the finest examples of the art form currently operating. When I was a teenager, I was likewise obsessed, and that was when I discovered these comics. Published by SLG in the mid 00s, these are a collection of stories from the Haunted Mansion, based on the setting or on the ghosts you can find within. The longest story ties together the Ghost Host, named William Gracey in this iteration, the attic bride, and the Hatbox Ghost in a sort of origin story for the Mansion itself. There are small inconsistencies between some of the stories that I'm going to take as a clue that they're not necessarily meant to be part of the same continuity, but there are some rules that are consistent; Madame Leota doesn't know she's a ghost, inside ghosts can't go outside and vice versa, Gracey is the Ghost Host, etc.

Overall, they're pretty good little stories. These days, I like them more as interpretations of HM characters rather than the definitive stories of those characters, because there's a lot of fanlore and headcanon going on here that isn't definitely what the creators intended. In particular, the Ghost Host being called Gracey, being a sea captain, being the bride's husband, and being the master of the house is all an amalgam of various pieces of lore that have appeared over the years, but aren't strictly 'canon'. There's a few cute nods for nerds, such as the architects of the Mansion in one story being Mr Davis and Mr Coates, an obvious reference to Claude Coats and Marc Davis. In all, I think the stories are better read as standalones than all together necessarily, but to be fair this is a collection of about five comic issues, so that's to be expected. And it's a handsome book! It's a good collection for any Haunted Mansion fan to pick up, but hardly required reading by any measure.

Next, to Tudor England, for thieves and liars and alchemist's fire…

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93 and 94. Marc Davies in his Own Words, by Peter Docter and Christopher Merritt

Owned?: No, library Page count: 739 collectively My summary: Marc Davis was one of Walt Disney's Nine Old Men - animators hired by Disney in the studio's early days who made their mark in the field of animation. Davis was then moved into Imagineering, and was the designer of many now-iconic characters and attractions in the park. Now, for the first time, some of Marc Davis' concept sketches and art for the parks are being published in this volume, alongside his own words and thoughts about the attractions on which he worked. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Oops, I've tripped and fallen back into a Disney parks fixation. Look, Disney the company is an evil media monopoly and a lot of what they do is absolutely reprehensible. I am just fascinated by theme parks as a medium - as an art form, how they tell stories and evoke moods and create characters, how they use physical space to create illusions, how they plunge the guest into an immersive world. But a large part of my fascination with Disney products comes not from the faceless company nor from Walt Disney himself, but from the artists and creators who have worked under the company, legitimately talented people making creative works that stand the test of time. And Marc Davis was very much one of those people. Davis was a character animator; when he was transferred to the parks, he used his skills to create scenes and presentations that could be 'read' in a single glance, gags that started being funny in 0.5 seconds, vibrant ideas that leapt off the page and into the parks. He was working for the parks from 1955-1978, working on many of the iconic attractions of the day like the Jungle Cruise, Tiki Room, Carousel of Progress, Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and America Sings, among others. And this is a collection of his work from those attractions, and from those times. I was very excited to see this when it was initially published in 2020, and now I'm finally sitting down and reading it all the way through!

And it's delivered. The art on display here is beautiful, from full-colour designs to rougher concept sketches, and beyond, with maquettes, models, and actual show figures being shown as well. The focus is on Davis' work, but other imagineers get a good look-in - I appreciated how many women were showcased, beyond just Marc's wife and talented costume designer Alice Davis to Mary Blair, Leota Toombs, Harriet Burns and the like. It wasn't just Davis' words either, with narration from other imagineers past and present filling in the gaps, leading to a much better-rounded view of the timeline than I was expecting. The only real thing I have to criticise is that it's very Disney-approved - no criticism of the big man allowed here, nor really of the company. The worst we get is faceless execs who were shooting down Davis' vision. Granted, this is more tolerable here than in most sources, because by all accounts Marc Davis had a high view of Disney as a person (he did work under him for years, after all) and this book's thesis is to tell Davis' story in his own words - if those words were uncritical of Disney, then that's the story that needs to be told. Other than that, gorgeous art, and a fascinating look into the minutiae of how these theme park attractions were being designed. If you're into this kind of stuff, I would heartily recommend it!

Next, more Disney, with tales from the Haunted Mansion.

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92. Hanged in Lancashire, by Martin Baggoley

Owned?: No, library Page count: 173 My summary: Every county has its history. Miscreants and ne'er-do-wells, the kind of people who find themselves on the wrong side of the law - and pay the ultimate price. The Lancaster Assizes saw many people pass through, and some were delivered to that final punishment. This is a cross-section of those people, snippets of their lives from the crime…to the punishment. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Much like the last book we talked about here, this is a niche book of morbid local history - it's just that this time the focus is on people who were hanged in Lancashire (obviously…) rather than just general crimes and horrible things happening within the county lines. Each chapter is a different case, pulled from as much actual primary evidence as the author can find - there's engravings from newspapers and photographs for the later cases, for example. Loosely, the cases progress through time, from the first people who were hanged for a crime within Lancashire to the last, but other than that there's not much of a structure - not that a book like this really needs much structure, granted. It speaks for itself, says what it says, gives us the information, and then gets out. Simple as.

Still, I find things to note here. Though the prose was at times quite dry, I did appreciate the detail put into each account, as well as the conservation of detail - the author didn't waffle, or go off on tangents, instead just delivering the facts as far as they can be gleaned and then moving on to something else. There were some fascinating stories among them; one particular, of 'sodomites' who were hanged for their crime, was interesting to me, though there were also a few intriguing cases of miscarriages of justice or strange and enigmatic crimes. A lot of murder, naturally. Also a lot of cases from the Victorian era, also naturally. We love some Victorian crime. But yeah, not much else to say about this one - it was exactly what it said on the tin, no more, no less.

Next, something completely different - the story of an imagineer.

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91. A Grim Almanac of Lancashire, by Jack Nadin

Owned?: No, library Page count: 192 My summary: Have you ever wondered what horrible things happened on this day in the past? This grim almanac looks to answer that question - particularly about Lancashire's local history. Witches and giants and murder and malice abound in the pages of this chronicle of Lancastrian history. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

The local history section in my library has some little nuggets of gold, sometimes. Most of our local history books are the kind of things I don't at all find interesting - histories of various local towns and villages, books of pictures from the past, memoirs of people whose claim at having interesting lives starts and ends with growing up in the 30s, that sort of thing. But every so often I come across something that really piques my interest, as this did. It's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin - a collection of morbid news reports from Lancashire's past. Well, mostly the 1800s. There are a couple of earlier accounts, and some later, but a majority of the stories are from the 1800s. What can I say, people love Victorian crime. The entries for each day are just brief snippets into what occurred, summarising a case or quoting a newspaper source telling the reader what happened on which day, then moving on to the next. The result was, perhaps, not meant to be read cover-to-cover, but it was still an engaging enough read for that.

I was, as anyone would be, kinda looking out for mentions of my town, but the things that happened were mostly from other parts of Lancashire, which was something of a shame. (And yet, no mention of the unsolved murder that did happen in my town? Weird.) Still, the book delivered on its promise - it was exactly what it said it was, and is therefore not all that easy to talk about. It's gimmicky, sure, but it was meant to be, and thus saying that it's gimmicky is barely a criticism. There were also some real gems among the tales of murders and fires and fatal accidents; a story I liked was of a dog who was found alive in a well weeks after being thrown in it, and went on to live a happy life afterwards. But yeah, overall this book delivers on its promise, and is a good enough little collection for what it is. Interesting enough!

Next, more morbid local history!