GGK Reread Continues! The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

It took me a long time to get back to this book, which doesn't entirely surprise me given the themes involved. 

Kay's sixth novel, and his first that is significantly less high fiction and more historical fiction with the serial numbers filed off, is set in a world that draws heavily on the Iberian Peninsula in the time of El Cid and the reconquista. He is deeply interested in conflicts of faith and how people of different faiths and cultures either manage to bridge those divides or fail, and the consequences of those relationships can have for both individual lives and nation states and society as a whole.

The analogues for Christianity, Islam and Judaism are extremely clearly drawn, and there's a love triangle in the middle of this novel that in another author's hands could be extremely trite and obvious. But it's so beautifully developed and drawn out, and the tragedy of the end is the utter impossibility of a future that doesn't destroy something that will be mourned. I couldn't quite get through this book again in the fall of 2023, but I finally did this winter, and rediscovered all over again that I cannot read this book without crying, even 25 years after the first time I read it. 

Grade: A   

Book 10: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This book has been on my radar since it was published in 2019, but I only just now decided I was in the right headspace to read a book about all of the ways that global warming will destroy the fragile equilibrium that enables humans to survive on our planet. I don't know that I actually was in the right headspace for that, frankly, but one of the other interesting elements of reading this book now is that all of the science is at least 5 years out of date. And when it comes to climate science and, more importantly to the thesis of this book, climate projections of how warm it will get by when and even more crucially, what that will have done to various systems, none of the predictions contained in this book had the presumably desired impact of shocking me out of complacency. If anything the timeframes presented in the book feel almost naïve from here, to say nothing of the chapter on the impact a warmer planet has on the likelihood of future pandemics. I don't say any of this because I'm a climate doomer, or think there's nothing that can be done, or even that we're on exactly the same bad trajectory we were five years ago. I just think this book was actually not meant for me, at this time. Also, the book was written during the middle of the Trump presidency, and the despair present from that in the writing did remind me of how that felt to live under every day, and I would really like to not return to that. 

Grade: C

Book 9: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Hey, I finally read a good book in 2024! I've been meaning to read some of this author's short stories for years, and then my book club chose this collection for our first read of 2024 and I had a great reason to. These stories are all inspired by or in conversation with folk stories or fairy tales, but I enjoyed even the ones paired with stories I didn't previously know. It is such a pleasure to read short stories written by someone who knows exactly what they want to do with the form, and how to craft a complete story in that length that never feels like it's a prologue to a novel that may or may not be written in the future. The stories float along and her character voices are distinct and lovely. Some of the stories left me with a strong feeling of narrative resolution, while others were more of a vibe, and I enjoyed them all. Link has just released her first novel, and I'm looking forward to picking that up soon as well. 

Grade: A

Book 8: Murder on Mistletoe Lane by Clara McKenna

So, this is a sequel! Something I did not realize when I started reading it. It's a Christmas-season set murder mystery at the English manor of newlyweds in the early 20th century. This is apparently the fifth murder mystery that Stella and Lyndy have found themselves in the middle of, and because it's a sequel, the character setup is both perfunctory and spends a lot of time referencing events from previous books, and I found it more tedious than intriguing. I kept reading because I did actually want to find out the big reveals, and while they weren't disappointing exactly, they couldn't overcome the overall experience I had reading it. 

Grade: C 

Book 7: The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

A Christmas manor house murder mystery! The twist with this one is that it's a contemporary setting, and also that it's a game within a game, essentially - the now deceased matriarch of the Armitage family has required that her whole family gather at the family estate in order to play a series of games to determine who would inherit the house. The whole setup is contrived even for this genre, and the main failing of this book is that there are twelve poems of clues to decipher and solve, but they're not actually clues the reader can hope to solve. The whole mystery development ends up feeling inert as a result. 

Grade: C

Book 6: Hercule Poirot's Silent Night by Sophie Hannah

A classic kind of Poirot mystery, this time for Christmas! He and his trusty friend Catchpool are convinced by Catchpool's fairly unpleasant mother to come to a crumbling manor by the sea a few days before Christmas to help the family solve a murder to prevent a murder. Of course there are many secrets and revelations and red herrings along the way. I would have preferred slightly more Christmas in this story, but it's twisty in the Christie style, and I enjoyed reading it. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Catered All the Way by Annabeth Albert

I liked this one better than the other romance I read by this author this month! I can't say that I completely recommend it, but this is a pretty charming romance between a twenty-something gamer and his older brother's high school best friend who he's always had a crush on. The crush comes back home and helps out the siblings with their family business over the holidays (a subplot I truly could have done without), and sparks fly, etc. It was fine!

Grade: B