Belatedly, what I read last month but didn't get around to reporting before closing the January thread:
I duly finished Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees but I'm still conflicted over it. I enjoyed the writing and some of the fantasy ideas, but I wasn't taken with whatever message was meant to be behind the fairy fruit -- art, fantasy itself, drug use?? The Duke is a serial rapist and both he and his fairy accomplices drive people to suicide and others to murder, yet it appears we're meant to side with them against the bourgeois and unimaginative merchants who rule the city.
Another Christmas present I raced through was Felix the Railway Cat by Kate Moore, a “biography” of a cat who is taken on as a tiny kitten at Huddersfield station as a rodent control operative. Light weight with some amusing anecdotes, but not enough photos of our Felix herself.
The charity bookshop of our local National Trust stately home had a display of books by cosy murder mystery writer M.C. Beaton following her death, and I picked up a couple. The obituary I read of her said she was upset not to be honoured by fellow crime writers in the UK, and I noted that both books were published in the US long before here, and having read them, I understand why. Death of a Nag was the better of the two, a Hamish Macbeth story ostensibly set in 1995 when it was published but seemed more late 1970s in setting and tone, with Hamish taking a holiday in a Scottish B&B that’s cheap and terrible, where one of the patrons of the B&B is murdered by being thwacked on the head with driftwood. Hamish himself wasn't badly drawn, but the other characters were caricatures, and the plot hackneyed with no resemblance to actual police procedure or anything else of the 90s -- it read as if written by someone who had once lived in the UK, but had long since emigrated and now had no idea what went on. An aspect that was even worse with the second novel, Haunted House featuring Agatha Raisin, which was published and presumably set in 2003 but which read more like 1953, in which there are murders in a small village where a Tudor cottage holds clues to the Civil War. Characters ciphers, mostly unlikeable, plot hackneyed, writing poor.
To soothe my spirits after hearing what BBC America is planning to do with Sam Vimes and his team, I turned to Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, my favourite Discworld novel. Sam is catapulted back 30 years together with the maniac murderer, Carcer, and takes on the mantle of John Keel, the copper who taught him everything he knew. A brilliant, witty read with lots to say about rulers, rules and the ruled.
Also excellent, The Empyreus Proof by our own HareBrain, which I should have finished in December but which ended up hanging over until the new year to finish the last 100 pages or so. Exciting and heart-breaking moments, if not quite as pacy and dramatic as TGP.
And the last of January's haul, Windhaven by GRRM Martin and Lisa Tuttle, written in 1981. Maris wants to be a flyer, but she isn’t born into one of the families who inherit the exalted position and fly as messengers, the only speedy and reliable method of communication between the scattered islands of the planet as the seas are dangerous. The book started life as two novellas, to which a third was added to create a novel so we get three separate stories about Maris and her flying career, when she's in her late teens, her 30s and then 50s, with a prologue of her as a child (by far the best part of the book as far as I was concerned) and an epilogue on her death bed, with the intervening years largely ignored or glossed over. Although the two later stories flow from her initial disruption of the heredity-based transmission of the valuable wings, to me it didn't really hang together well as a novel. Nonetheless, still well worth a read.
