#pheobe atwood taylor

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Books of the Month: Jan 2025

I've been having a good time lately with poking around, finding books/series that look interesting, and not stressing too much about reading fast enough, or the right genres, or anything like that. (This is always my goal, and I think I'm usually somewhat meeting it, but the past month and a bit have been particularly good on the reading front!)

Sort of relatedly, I've decided that I'm adjusting my own brief going forward when it comes to choosing Books of the Month. So instead of saying I'm posting the books I recommend the most, I'm going to post the books that I thought about the most during the month - that took the most brainspace. (In a positive way. Maybe someday I'll do some dishonorable mentions.) Some overlap with the books I liked best/books I recommend, etc., but mostly if I thought about a book a lot, I want to write about it too! :)

So the books that occupied my brain the most in January are:

Deep Secret (Diana Wynne Jones): I reread this at the beginning of January so some of my thoughts are gone again, but I did enjoy this book maybe more than I have in the past, when I was younger. I love the loving parody (or maybe - realistic depiction) of what a fan conference is like. As usual, all DWJ's characters are flawed and prickly and you like them anyway. The character Maree actually had surprisingly little narration; I thought there was more. But her character comes through so strongly!

Too Many Cooks (Rex Stout): This is #5 in the Nero Wolfe series apparently; it's the first Nero Wolfe book I've read. I thought about it because it's a book from the 1930s and a murder takes place in a resort in West Virginia, and there's a whole host of Black kitchen/hospitality workers who are potential witnesses. So I was ready to sigh through a dismissal of them as individual people, and was pleasantly surprised that in fact, they do turn out to be individual characters, and Wolfe has a little speech where he acknowledges that Black men don't always get included in the social contract against murder. It's still a book written in the 1930s instead of 2025 and it's certainly not perfect on the racism (or sexism) fronts, but progressive for its time!

The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players (Pheobe Atwood Taylor): Speaking of books of their time...I picked up this particular book at a used book store and liked it enough to search for others in the series. Golden Age (written in the 1930s-50s or so), with a detective known (to the characters in the books) as the "Cape Cod Sherlock." His name is Asey Mayo. Having read a couple now, I can say that they're fine and fun as mysteries. What I like even more is that they are very situated in their time and place, so they give little snapshots of what it must have actually been like to live in rural Cape Cod during [the depression/WWII/the 1950s, etc.]. Asey does seem to be one of those detectives who manages to keep his age at about 60ish through three decades of detecting, but the setting changes with time.

Father's Arcane Daughter (E.L. Konigsburg): The copy I bought of this is actually called My Father's Daughter, but I personally kind of like the first title better. This was a book I read as a kid, and I may like it even more now. Narrated by a young man (now adult, as we see in interludes) from a rich, upper class family; his younger sister has some physical disabilities (hard of hearing, definitely clumsy; we don't learn any specific diagnoses) and his much older half-sister was kidnapped before he was born and presumed dead...until she shows up at his family's door, and sort of slowly turns everything on its head. Made me think because it's quite a short book but there's no one easy moral, just some ideas and suggestions.

In the Bleak Midwinter (Julia Spencer-Fleming): This is the first book in a murder mystery series (not cozy, despite small town setting) that is my current low-level obsession. I am having to request the books through inter-library loan, so I'm forced to read slow-ish, which is probably good for me. What to say? Once I get obsessed enough with a series it's hard to tell if it's objectively good but at least after the first book or two I thought "yeah I think these are just well-written!" and then after books 3 and 4 I still think so but I'm now very invested in the characters, so who knows. Look, I expect a book from this series will be on my list for Feb too, so I'll leave it at that for now, but feel free to ask if you want some (subjective) reasons I have been really enjoying them!