troisoiseaux

Read We Hexed the Moon by Mollyhall Seeley, in which a group of teenage girls accidentally cause the moon to disappear and then have to do some grave-robbing and human sacrifice to get it back. I enjoyed this a lot! Written with a bit of a noticeable Tumblr accent— not in an offputting way, imo; the author is ofgeography, so she comes by it organically— and very girlhood is cannibalism, but even more than the horror-fantasy/magical realism aspect, I enjoyed the slow, layer-by-layer reveal of all the hairline fractures in the foundation of the girls' codependent friend group, just ready to crack apart and take everyone down with it even before they have to grapple with a whole trolley problem of murder and self-sacrifice vs. the fate of the world. I'd say there's an overlapping target audience with Jennifer's Body, Thoroughbreds, Yellowjackets, and (at least in spirit) The Locked Tomb.

Read Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell, a retelling of the myth of Hercules told through the alternating narrative POVs of a furious, foul-mouthed Hera (opening line: "Good news, Heaven," announces my dipshit husband. "I've made a new king of the mortals") and an endearingly himbo-ish Heracles (opening line: "Dear Auntie Hera, Thank you for the snake friends"). As you might know, I am a snob about Greek mythology retellings, although "snob" doesn't always feel like the right word, because I am down for retellings that get silly with it— I just want them to do something creative and interesting with the source material??— and I enjoyed this one. Overall, it's got a cozy-fantasy feel— Wiswell's take on the twelve labors of Heracles reads like a D&D campaign where the players insist on befriending the monsters instead of, or at least after, fighting them; he calls the Nemean lion "Purrseus"— but is bittersweet enough to keep things interesting.

Re-read Matilda by Roald Dahl for the first time since I was a child, on a pub trivia question-induced whim. Interesting to note what I did and didn't remember— apparently the school shenanigans had left more of an impression than Matilda's pranks on her awful, neglectful parents, but this time, oh my god, her parents are awful— and I was surprised to realize that Miss Honey is only 23???? As the meme goes, she should have been at the club.

Also re-read what turned out to be only the first half of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (i.e., Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood; I've put book 2— The Story of a Return— on hold, so stay tuned), a graphic novel memoir about growing up in early 1980s Iran. Satrapi's black-and-white art appears simple but so evocative: I found myself marveling over one page, where young Marji and her classmates are drawn just as circles for faces and eyes and dashes for noses, against identical black headscarves, but there's enough subtle variation in those sparse lines that they're all distinct characters and you can tell which one is Marji.

Read The Other Man by Farhad J. Dadyburjor, a m/m romance novel set in contemporary Mumbai (specifically, in 2018, on the cusp of the Supreme Court of India's ruling decriminalizing homosexuality): the closeted heir of a major company falls for an American tourist just as he finally resigns himself to marrying to satisfy his family's expectations. Romance novels are not really my cup of tea, but this was a serviceable enough mini paper cup of Lipton, as it were.

Started The Family Man by James Lasdun, true crime nonfiction about the now-infamous Murdaugh family of South Carolina, encompassing two murders, one accidental death of very obvious culpability, and two deaths under suspicious circumstances, not to mention the shameless financial crime. ( ... )

Have also continued reading both Crimson Angel by Barbara Hambly and Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand— I'm onto the "entrees" now, longer stand-alone stories— but, as you can see, I keep picking up new books instead of focusing on the ones I have in progress. (...don't even ask about War & Peace...)

Finished the Damon Runyon collection Guys and Dolls and Other Writings! To be honest, I mostly skimmed through his Early/Other Fiction, which lacked a certain something (like... good writing...), but at least his much better Broadway Stories made up like 70% of the collection, and his 1920s-30s trial reporting— including coverage of Al Capone's 1931 trial for tax evasion and the 1933 Senate investigation of J.P. Morgan Jr., also for tax evasion, presented back-to-back— was also interesting; it, along with some of his Occasional Prose, offered a bit of insight into his Broadway Stories: the "Mindy's restaurant" that often appears in his stories is presumably a nod to the "Lindy's restaurant" mentioned in the context of the 1929 murder of gangster Arnold Rothstein... who, per a short Wikipedia rabbit hole, appears as "the Brain" in several of Runyon's short stories— and has also been pointed to as his inspiration for Nathan Detroit?— and also shows up in The Great Gatsby as Meyer Wolfsheim. The more you know! My one nit to pick with this collection was that it presented the stories without date/context, but it turns out all of this information was included in an "annotations" section at the end, so complaint retracted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finished Famesick by Lena Dunham, which I really.... enjoyed does not feel like the right word, because it is basically a memoir of getting chewed up and spit out by the fame machine at the same time as she was suffering from chronic health issues and struggling with substance abuse and she apparently just has godawful taste in and/or luck with men, but it is an engaging and - despite the heavy content - frequently funny read. Prominently features various celebrities who I'd say I was abstractly aware of as famous people who exist, but I found that this didn't necessarily change my opinion of, say, Jack Antonoff or Adam Driver— like, not in the sense that I don't credit Dunham's narrative, it's just that my brain did not really connect my indignation over Dunham's increasingly selfish/useless boyfriend to that guy from that band, or the coworker who sounds like a walking red flag (but, even in her own memoir a decade later, she seems more enamored with than put off by??) with that guy from that movie, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Mostly, I think, because I didn't really have preexisting opinions about any of said famous people; I enjoy the music of both fun. and Bleachers, but 100% could not pick Antonoff out of a lineup of white guys in hipster glasses.)

Read Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, technically a 1950 fictionalization of WWII's Operation Mincemeat— a deception operation to convince the Nazis that the Allies planned to invade Sardinia, not Sicily, by way of "secret" plans planted via dead British officer washing ashore in Spain; in recent years, the subject of a book, a movie, and a musical— although only the last ~20 pages (of 155) have anything to do with/map onto the story of Operation Mincemeat (which was still classified in 1950, although Cooper apparently learned of it from Churchill as dinner gossip and Ewen Montagu published his own account only a few years later). Instead, it is mostly the pretty bleak life story of one Captain William "Willie" Maryngton (barely filing the serial numbers off of Mincemeat's faked Major William Martin here), a born and bred soldier with the misfortune of being too young for WWI and too old to be shipped to the front in WWII, who finally achieves his life's goal of seeing "action" only after he dies of pneumonia and is used in a deception operation to convince the Nazis that etc. etc. Can't really put my finger on the tone, beyond bleak— the dialogue frequently has the gung-ho feel of a propaganda film, but I feel like there's kind of a cynical edge, overall? The most interesting character in this is actually Willie's foster brother Horatio "Horry" Osborne, the son of a military family who pursues his dream of becoming an actor instead, but— after a lifetime of insisting that the Army wasn't "going to get [him] in their clutches"— immediately joins up when WWII breaks out, motivated by his "profound hatred of injustice and cruelty," and is almost as quickly killed in battle. (RIP Horry.)

It's interesting to compare what we know now about the IRL Operation Mincemeat to Cooper's fictional Operation Heartbreak: in the novel, Maryngton's death provides the operation with a ready-made cover story, vs. the real-life work that went into carefully constructing an identity, down to the pocket litter. (Although someone does still write a love letter to send off with him: in this case, the secretary who does so is the aforementioned Horry Osborne's younger sister! Who Willie has been in love with for years! And had in fact recently turned down his proposal!) Also interestingly, the afterword on the IRL Operation Mincemeat, written circa 2004, dismisses Glyndwr Michael— the "real" Major Martin, an unhoused man from Wales who died (whether intentionally or accidentally) from poison— as a possible identity for the body used, positing that "a postmortem might have discovered [his real cause of death] and the risk would have been too great." Happy to pass this along to anyone who'd like to read it, btw, otherwise it's going to local little free library.

I left for my trip to Ice-/Ire-/England with two books* and am coming home with nine— in my defense, two of the seven acquired** were a. one pocket-sized novella (The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark, from Books Upstairs in Dublin) and b. one even smaller copy of a short story (Mr. Salary by Sally Rooney, from a random used book stall in Bath), which were also the only two I've actually finished on the trip:

- The Driver's Seat is difficult to discuss without spoilers, although you learn in the first sentence of chapter three that the protagonist, Lise, will be found the next morning, brutally murdered, and I guessed the twist(?) fairly quickly: ( ... ) I really liked the narrative approach, with its lurking sense of doom from the mixed present and future POV— Lise's ongoing actions are followed by asides on how the person she's just interacted with will explain it to the police later— and the ominous pattern that emerges when you notice how the false background Lise spins for each person is based on the conversion she had with the previous person.

- Mr. Salary is a sparse, aimless short story in which a young woman returns to Dublin from grad school in Boston to visit a. her dying estranged father and b. the older man she's had a years-long, codependent, nonsexual but not exactly platonic relationship with. Technically beat the "every Sally Rooney book is just people talking about sex and Marxism" allegations by virtue of being people talking about sex and death instead, but I feel like I caught shades of Rooney's Intermezzo (2024). (Maybe a bit of Conversations With Friends? Which was published in the same year, 2017.)

* The Truelove by Patrick O'Brian and North Sun by Ethan Rutherford, both of which I did start, but......

** Other books acquired were The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin by Aoife Moore, from Hodges Figgis in Dublin; Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper (1950 fictionalization of Operation Mincemeat), Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya (1930 novella advertised as one of the few surviving contemporaneous accounts of Stalin's Great Purge), and A Writer's Diary (the diaries of Virginia Woolf, 1918-1941) from Persephone Books in Bath; and what appears to be an inscribed/autographed copy(?!) of Naomi Mitchison's memoir You May Well Ask from second-hand bookstore Skoob in London. (It was just tucked away on the shelf and only £6, but it does match her handwriting/signature according to a quick Google search.... WILD.) We did also visit Gay's The Word in London but I restrained myself to postcards and pins.

In War and Peace, Natasha and Andrei have fallen in love and gotten engaged at great speed, although on the promise to Andrei's father that they won't get married for a year, and will keep their engagement secret for that year, which will cause absolutely no problems whatsoever. :) :) :) Natasha's first ball is one of the scenes I'd remembered fondly from my first read-through, ~10 years ago— Tolstoy is just so good at evoking the feeling of experiencing feelings (here, the deadly seriousness of preparing for, and giddy excitement of attending, Baby's First Big Grown-Up Social Event) and, between Natasha and Kitty in Anna Katerina, I feel like he's surprisingly good at writing teenage girls? On the other hand, I had not recalled the twin plot threads of Andrei and Pierre both trying to engage with reform via committee: in Andrei's case, advocating for military reform, through which efforts he quickly becomes besties with but just as quickly disillusioned with (I'm sensing a pattern/foreshadowing here) an upstart statesman; in Pierre's, getting really invested in the mission and mysteries of the Freemasons and trying to convince his fellow Freemasons, who view it more as a social networking club, to take it equally seriously.

I've started reading Madly, Deeply, the edited and published collection of Alan Rickman's diaries, 1993-2015; so far, his 1993 entries have been a blur of names and references that I mostly don't recognize— main plot threads of 1993 are a failed bid to acquire a theater(?) and shambles on the set of the movie Mesmer— but it is delightful whenever someone I do recognize pops up (so far, Fiona Shaw— who he refers to as "Fifi"— and Ian McKellen). I'm also delighted by his frequent mini-reviews of random movies: "Jurassic Park— what the hell is the plot? Great dinosaurs." and "Sleepless in Seattle— halfway through I think 'I was in this movie'" (followed by editor's note: "He wasn't").

Since my last update in War and Peace (yesterday), I'm back to The Great Comet of 1812 territory with the scene that's the source for "No One Else"— interestingly, it's Natasha's song in the musical but Andrei's experience in the book, after seeing Natasha for the first time while visiting the Rostovs on business and feeling the first stirrings that life might be worth actually living again, post-Austerlitz and post-Lise: First time I heard your voice / Moonlight burst into the room vs.

As soon as he opened the shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and very still. . . .

His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were also awake. He heard female voices overhead.

"Just once more," said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrei recognized at once.

(On the other hand, the lyric I feel like putting my arms around my knees / and squeezing tight as possible / And flying away is an almost verbatim quote from Natasha, and the differences might only be in translation.)

I also forgot to mention that I've turned back to China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories that mostly take either a frog-in-boiling-water approach—you'll start out reading about a couple on vacation, or a therapist who's kind of unhealthily overinvested in one of her patients but in a normal way, and then halfway through it slips into folk horror, or a world where therapists are also assassins ("Sometimes the externalized trauma-vectors in dysfunctional interpersonal codependent psychodynamics are powerful enough that more robust therapeutic intervention is necessary"); I very nearly laughed out loud on the metro at the latter twist— or a peeling-the-onion one, where it starts out in a world that is overtly not our own and the parameters reveal themselves, slowly, as you keep reading. ( ... ) I'm a little over halfway through, although I did end up skipping one story after very quickly realizing that it was not a flavor of horror I had the stomach to read.

Read Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park, which starts with the murder of a North Korean spy in an alley in Oxford, England, and then spends the first half of the book as a slower, more understated read than one would expect from that opening: split between three characters living very different, but entangled, lives in Oxford— a North Korean spy (the protégé of the murdered spy) posing as a Japanese-French grad student, a Korean-American CIA agent posing as a bartender from Seoul to keep tabs on the North Korean spy cell, and a South Korean restaurant owner with a tragic backstory— it's mostly an exploration of identity (what does it mean to be Korean?) until it does in fact loop back around to being a spy thriller, and then several things I was kind of ???/ambivalent about from a narrative standpoint clicked into place. ( SPOILERS )

Read Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a graphic novel in translation from Arabic, set in a world where wishes are real, and regulated, commodities, but most people can only afford sketchy third-class wishes; in Cairo, Egypt, a small neighborhood kiosk with three genuine, first-class wishes for sale changes three lives - a recent widow barely scraping by; a wealthy student struggling with depression; and the kiosk's owner - for better or worse. Clever world-building, with interludes between the three volumes/chapters(?) in the form of world-building infographics and an eye to the way inequality could/would still exist in a world where, theoretically, anyone could wish themselves rich, to solve world hunger or for world peace, etc. (The short answer is who has access to wishes as a resource, on both an individual level and, e.g., which countries have the raw resources vs. the corporate headquarters, a la the history of extractive colonialism.)

Read Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, a contemporary Japanese novel about a budding friendship between two socially isolated thirty-year-old women - an office worker and a homemaker blogger - that quickly grows toxic; picked this up at osprey_archer's recommendation. From the description, it seems like the plot should be "Misery, but about a parasocial relationship with a social media personality," and might have been more satisfying if it was, but actually I found it most interesting when the two women's storylines ran in parallel, exploring themes of, like... to what extent is any given interaction with someone else a matter of performing the version of yourself that they expect...? And, like, the extent to which other people can have such different worldviews - not even in a political or religious sense, but just, a way of approaching things - that when trying to interact they both just end up baffled. (Speaking of which, I did find the recurring, and perhaps overall, theme of Gendered Expectations in Friendships utterly baffling myself— I think it is to some extent reflective of a cultural difference, but I have definitely encountered the American version of this online in terms of, like, she's a girl's girl! or POV your boyfriend's pick-me girl friend and it always makes me feel like a space alien.) ANYWAY. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler, which is to say I found this deeply off-putting but couldn't put it down. ( ... )

It is officially LIBRARY USED BOOK SALE SEASON; I acquired a box set of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series from the one I went to last weekend, so I guess I will finally get around to reading that. As 2025 was the Year of Twelfth Night, 2026 really is shaking out to be the Year of As You Like It, because I also stumbled across and acquired a copy of Rosalind: Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine by Angela Thirlwell, a self-described "biography" of the character through interviews with actors, directors, etc.