Monstrous Regiment

Monstrous Regiment
by Terry Pratchett
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780385603409
Series: Discworld #31
Pages: 352
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Doubleday

'Trousers. That's the secret...Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: idiots! Get yourself some trousers!'

Women belong in the kitchen - everyone knows that. Not in jobs, pubs or indeed trousers, and certainly not on the front line.

Polly Perks has to become a boy in a hurry if she wants to find her brother in the army. Cutting off her hair and wearing the trousers is easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape takes more time. And there's a war on. There's always a war on.

Polly and her fellow raw recruits are suddenly in the thick of it. All they have on their side is the most artful sergeant in the army and a vampire with a lust for coffee. Well ...they have the Secret. And it's time to make a stand.

Monstrous Regiment has the distinction of being the first Pratchett book I just fell into. No fighting with the narrative, no initial struggle to follow what was going on. It all just worked from the start.

In spite of this, something … wasn’t missing so much as, I suppose, this was a different kind of story than I was expecting, based on my one Sam Vimes book so far. This was much more satiric than my first City Watch, and really, much more blatant a satire than any of the Discworld books I’ve read so far.

Between this book and Carpe Jugulum I learned something about myself: I love good satire about the ‘smaller’ things in life, like politics, academia, and social mores, but I struggle to embrace satire about the ‘big’ things like religion and world politics. I think there are some things that are too big or too complex, to be effectively satirised, no matter that they make themselves such easy targets with their outsized human fallacies. Of course I’m not an advocate for war, nor am I an advocate for religion-for-profit, or religion-for-power, but I don’t believe that all, or even most, governments eagerly search out reasons to go to war, nor most followers or seekers of faith and guidance are less than sincere – though I’ve met more than a few of the latter in my life.

Now that I’ve said that, though, I want to give all the credit to Pratchett for what I felt was his attempt to be brutally, objectively, honest about his satire in Monstrous Regiment. A cynical reader might start reading this book and think ah, here’s the sop to feminism just about every bestselling male author writes anymore. A cynical reader would be wrong — which delights this cynical reader to no end. Truely, this is a book about how women can do anything men can do – and do it better. Pratchett’s just honest enough to point out that isn’t always something to be proud of, and he does it in the most extraordinary way.

His bitterness towards organised religion is as apparent, and almost as scathing, here as it was in Carpe Jugulum, but there’s also what feels like a newfound acknowledgment of the power of faith. Towards the end, it feels as though the author is wrestling with himself through his characters about the importance of belief in something greater than oneself.

This internal debate felt apparent to me not just in matters of faith, but in matters of politics and government. Polly’s realisation that she must play an ongoing, active part in her country’s fate, that lasting change doesn’t just happen because people want it to, that it’s a process that is forever going forward and backwards, feels like it’s a truth that’s only starting to be considered, rather than a wisdom being imparted to readers.

Then again, what do I know? Maybe I was just seeing zebras instead of horses, and disappointed by the lack of ginger root and oxen. What matters is that it’s a damn good story, and a more obviously philosophical one than any other discworld book I’ve read so far.

Heroes

Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures
by Stephen Fry
Rating: ★★★★★
Publication Date: November 1, 2018
Pages: 462
Genre: Mythology
Publisher: Penguin / Michael Joseph

Well, with the lockdowns, it took me not quite 6 months to finish this on audio (I can only listen in the car), but I finally did it. It was, of course, worth every minute, and I’d recommend the audio version to anybody who even wants to like Greek mythology. Especially those who want to like it, but always struggled with the names, and the who begat whoms, and the who married whoms. Fry unapologetically tells the listener to ignore all of that – there won’t be a test at the end – and just enjoy the stories. His narration makes this all the easier, as he’s absolutely brilliant at it, even if the Greeks are speaking with Scottish, English and at one point what I think was a distinctly cockney accent. In fact, the hint of Monty Python in some of the stories made them all the more enjoyable for me, because they made me chuckle.

I’ve never been all that interested in the Trojan War, but I’m sorely tempted to check out his version with the next book in this ‘series’.

Darjeeling: A History of the World’s Greatest Tea

Darjeeling: A History of the World's Greatest Tea
by Jeff Koehler
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781408845929
Publication Date: January 1, 2015
Pages: 291
Genre: History, Non-fiction, Plants / Agriculture
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Set against the backdrop of the looming Himalayas and drenching monsoons, this is the story of how Darjeeling developed its tea industry under Imperial British rule and eventually came to produce the world's finest leaves. But today the industry is battling dropping production ,a violent struggle for independent statehood, labour unrest and the devastating effect of climate change. It's the story, too, of the measures being taken to counter these challenges and save India's most exclusive and iconic brew that are nothing short of radical.

A fascinating portrait of the region and a story rich in intrigue and empire, full of adventurers and romance, it illuminates the historic, arcane and changing world of this celebrated tea.

Winner of the 2016 IACP Award: Literary Food Writing

Finished this last night and it was a solid 4 star read for me. It might have been 4.5 save for a dull chapter or two on the colonial history between India and Great Britain. Lots of names, dates, and skirmishes, with back-and-forths between time periods that just made my eyes glaze over. But at 19 chapters, the book had plenty of chapters to make it up to me, and it mostly did.

Written in a ‘feature article’ style, the author frames the book and its chapters within the tea-picking seasons, called flushes. Spring flush, second flush, monsoon flush and autumn flush, tying the trajectory Darjeeling tea finds itself into the advancement of the seasons. These ‘preludes’ to the chapters are written in a flowery, evocative style that mostly works, although at times seems to try a tiny bit too hard.

In general terms the book set out what it meant to do: educate me about tea. As someone whose circulatory system is, at any given time, roughly 75% tea, I was shockingly ignorant about my life’s blood, so the book was destined to succeed. I knew nothing about CTC vs. orthodox teas (CTC is the mechanical process of cut, tear, curl, while orthodox tea is still almost entirely hand processes) and while I’d heard of Darjeeling tea, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it’s considered the world’s best tea, or that the vast majority of it is certified organic. The importance when it’s picked has on its taste is also going to make it easier for me to find my go-to black teas; I’m pretty sure I’m a solid spring-flush kind of girl.

But what the author really succeeded in, was convincing me of the inherent romance surrounding the growing of teas in spite of all the challenges and barriers: the climate changes, labor issues and a fraught political climate in West Bengal. He touches on all of them in some depth, describing the ways owners are tackling the first two issues and trying to survive the fall out of the third, but still, it’s almost impossible not to imagine these tea gardens as romantic.

If nothing else, the book succeeded as a marketing tool: midway through I found myself online ordering 100g of a tea called “Gold Darjeeling” described by the Tao of Tea as a Light Black Tea, with a smooth, buttery, honey texture. Full-bodied brew with pleasant rose, muscatel grape-like aroma. I’m off two minds about my hopes for this tea: of course I want to like it, but given that you can only buy it by the gram, not so much that it ruins me for all the other black teas out there. Although, as long as I drink iced tea, I doubt I’m in any real danger of becoming the tea snob.

The Haunting of America – DNF @ pg. 105

The Haunting of America
by Joel Martin, William J. Birnes
Rating: ★★
Publication Date: September 15, 2009
Pages: 400
Genre: History, Non-fiction
Publisher: Forge

In the tradition of their Haunting of the Presidents, national bestselling authors Joel Martin and William J. Birnes write The Haunting of America: From The Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini, the only book to tell the story of how paranormal events influenced and sometimes even drove political events. In a narrative retelling of American history that begins with the Salem Witch Trials of the seventeenth century, Martin and Birnes unearth the roots of America's fascination with the ghosts, goblins, and demons that possess our imaginations and nightmares. The authors examine the political history of the United States through the lens of the paranormal and investigate the spiritual events that inspired public policy: channelers and meduims who have advised presidents, UFOs that frightened the nation's military into launching nuclear bomber squadrons toward the Soviet Union, out-of-body experiencers deployed to gather sensitive intelligence on other countries, and even spirits summoned to communicate with living politicians.

The Haunting of America is a thrilling exploration of the often unexpected influences of the paranormal on science, medicine, law, government, the military, psychology, theology, death and dying, spirituality, and pop culture.

How do you ruin a book with a name like that? Wrap a textbook in it.

It might not actually be a bad book if one is looking for an anthropological view of superstition and paranormal belief and their effect on the American political system, but I was just looking for some fun and slightly spooky stories about haunting in America. You know, what it says on the tin.

Ah well, another one off the TBR; progress is progress.

Locked Room Mysteries Omnibus

The Locked-Room Mysteries
by Otto Penzler
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780307743961
Publication Date: October 28, 2014
Pages: 941
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard

In this definitive collection, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler selects a multifarious mix from across the entire history of the locked room story, which should form the cornerstone of any crime reader's library.

Virtually all of the great writers of detective fiction have produced masterpieces in this genre, including Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr, Dashiell Hammett, Ngaio Marsh and Stephen King.

The purest kind of detective story involves a crime solved by observation and deduction, rather than luck, coincidence or confession. The supreme form of detection involves the explanation of an impossible crime, whether the sort of vanishing act that would make Houdini proud, a murder that leaves no visible trace, or the most unlikely villain imaginable.

My last square on my bingo card this year that needed to be read for was Locked Room Mystery. I had several books that qualified, but none that appealed, so it was time to pull out my trusty omnibus, Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler. I chose two previously unread stories: one I was sure to like, featuring The Saint, and one completely unknown to me but considered to be a locked room classic up there with The Hollow Man.

The Man Who Liked Toys by Leslie Charteris: four-stars

I liked this one about as much as I expected to – maybe a little less. And I probably should have given it 3.5 stars instead of 4 because at its core it’s more a snapshot of a story than an actual story. But the method of murder is ingenious. I have to say though, The Saint isn’t nearly as dashing on paper as he is when he looks like Val Kilmer.

The Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany: five-stars

Well, I can see why this is one of the most re-printed locked room stories. It has a Poe-esque quality to it, as it starts out a very normal, even vanilla, narration by someone who considers himself a Watson, and rapidly escalates towards the end into a mini-horror story. I saw where it was going but now quite, and the ending … ends perfectly. Any more would have diluted the effect completely, even with the superbly done writing.

I read these for 2021 Halloween Bingo, specifically for the Locked Room Mystery square.

The Big Over Easy Re-read (Nursery Crimes, #1)

The Big Over Easy
by Jasper Fforde
Rating: ★★★★★
Series: Nursery Crimes #1
Publication Date: January 1, 2005
Pages: 398
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

My original review pretty much sums up my general feelings about this book. I still think it’s the most highly quotable book I’ve read, I still think the satire is spot-on, both of the media and murder mysteries and I still think Prometheus adds just that little something of surprise depth to the narrative, if only briefly.

Re-reading it, it’s held up perfectly. Fforde’s amazing at writing these intricate plots and clever dialog, but it’s all the small details that continue to leave me gobsmacked. The excepts at the opening of each chapter, the small jokes and wordplays scattered in the text, and the “ads” at the back of the book all are unnecessary to the plot, but make the book all the richer for their inclusion.

Though I gave it, and stand by doing so, 5 stars, the heinous plot revealed in the mystery is gross in that way that British humor excels at. Gross and sublimely silly. Which makes the story better, in spite of the “UGH, yuck!” moments towards the end.

I read this for Halloween Bingo 2021’s Noir square. It’s not a traditional fit, but there’s a clear argument that along with satirising mysteries and the press, there’s a very noir-satire vibe in the story,

Paper & Blood (Ink & Sigil, #2)

Paper & Blood
by Kevin Hearne
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780356515243
Series: Ink & Sigil #2
Publication Date: August 12, 2021
Pages: 336
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Orbit

Well, this was fun. The follow up to the first book, Ink & Sigil, takes place in Melbourne, Australia, my current residence of record. Specifically, in the Dandenong Ranges, one of my favorite places here, as it’s primarily rain forest.

This is not a mystery in any sense, but more a quest. Al and Buck arrive in Melbourne to assist the apprentice sigil agent there with finding her master, who felt a disturbance in the wards, went to investigate, and never returned. On their way to her last known location, they pick up a hitchhiker, Al’s receptionist, who should be in Scotland but isn’t, Gladys-who-has-seen-some-shite, and meet up with Connor, a/k/a Atticus, the Iron Druid. Once they get to the trail, they pick up a few more adventurers, some old friends and some new.

This is the rag-tag band that goes out to save the missing sigil agents, if they can be saved, and battle the ever stranger beasts, unimagined chimeras, that spring up in their path. The only unanswered questions are how the entity arrived and why, but those are answered 2/3rds of the way through rather matter-of-factly, so there’s really no buildup of suspense – just a few minor skirmishes, a perilous passage, and finally the epic battle royale and showdown with those responsible.

Quests have never been my jam, so there was an element of unmet expectation for me. By dint of my reading tastes, I unconsciously kept waiting for a climax or big reveal. But other than that, which the setting more than made up for, I enjoyed the story. The characters felt less over-the-top for me this time around and the humor slightly less adolescent-male, though the hobgoblin, Buck, made up for the quantity with some stunning quality here and there. I could wish that were toned down a bit more.

I happened to read the Acknowledgments that are at the end, first, and noted that Hearne had every intention of visiting Australia to do the research for this book until the Pandemic we all know and love (to hate) reared its ugly head. He was forced to get the details second hand and I have to say, having been to all the places he’s mentioned, he and his sources, did a bang up job of getting it right. The only two tiny details I caught, and only because they vexed me when I arrived here 14 years ago, was in the scene at the Healesville Hotel. The first is that, unless things have changed, there is no table service at the bar. The vast majority of casual dining/drinking establishments here don’t have table service. You order at the counter and then pay at the counter before you leave. The second is that Ya-ping ordered an iced tea. I’d kill to be able to order iced tea here – the flavoured stuff is becoming popular here now in a niche way, but they still think iced black tea is a sacrilege. Both of these things are entirely inconsequential, and I mention them only for the opportunity to vent about them.

I suspect I’m not strictly the target demographic for this series, but I enjoy it anyway and I’m looking forward to the third book, where, hopefully, Gladys-who-has-seen-some-shite will once again play a role. I like her.

I read this for Halloween Bingo and it is the perfect book for In the Dark, Dark Woods as you can see in the above pictures I took in the Dandenong Ranges. It would also work for Cryptozoologist, as the story is littered with chimeras that include a dragon-turtle-spider and a cassowary-cobra to name but two.

Bayou Moon (The Edge, #2)

Bayou Moon
by Ilona Andrews
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780441019458
Series: Novel of the Edge #2
Publication Date: September 28, 2010
Pages: 480
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Ace

I’d been told ages ago that The Edge series got better as it went along. And this second entry was certainly different from the first.

We start off with just one of the characters that played a part in On the Edge, the werewolf, William. He’s approached by the Weird’s version of the CIA to retrieve something from another clan in another part of the Edge, in the Louisiana territory, where shifters are killed on principle.

Cerise’s family is old and used to part of the aristocracy of the Weird, but was banished generations ago. They live in a constant state of feud with another old family, and her parents have been kidnapped in the feud’s latest volley. But there’s another hand running this latest skirmish and it’s after the knowledge Cerise’s grandparents took with them to their graves. Or maybe not.

This book has a much more sci-fi feel than any of Andrews’ other books save for the Innkeeper series, which came along later. It’s not science fiction in the strict sense, because what’s done by the antagonist of the story is done entirely with magic, but the scientific processes are applied to these magical ‘experiments’. The results are cryptozoological creatures that are a horrifying mix of plant, animal and human. I’m not, generally, a fan of this kind of thing, and it was the part of the book I liked the least.

The characters overcame this though. There was just something about Cerise’s huge family that was endearing; all of them vastly different from each other and as a whole a lot of fun to read about.

The final battle was … unsatisfactory. The thing they overlooked seemed too big a thing to overlook, especially for William who fought this antagonist twice before. And the ending was too fairy tale for my tastes, coming within sight of being twee.

It’s sort of a weird book for me, because I was enjoying it as I read it, but after finishing remembered as many of the bits that I didn’t like as I did the bits I did. But overall, a good read.

I read this for Halloween Bingo 2021 and it definitely fits the Cryptozoology square, with its characters that are human/plant/animal hybrids. It would also work for Mad Scientists and Evil Geniuses, as well as Terror in a Dark Town, and Shifter.

Carpe Jugulum (Discworld series)

Carpe Jugulum
by Terry Pratchett
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780857524157
Series: Discworld #23
Publication Date: November 22, 2016
Pages: 412
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

It’s done; I’ve read the whole thing. Which really isn’t saying much because at only a little over 400 pages it’s not like it’s a door stop. But, and I say this as one who thoroughly enjoys Pratchett, reading the discworld books is hard work for me. I love the characters, and I laugh out loud at the jokes, and I welcome the footnotes, but something about Pratchett’s narrative style doesn’t flow effortlessly for me, and because of that I’m always looking at them and thinking up excuses to put off reading them.

This was the case with Carpe Jugulum although once Granny Weatherwax finally got involved, the story started moving along enough for me to ignore the effort.

On the surface, the story is a hilarious one that follows the efforts of Count Magpye and his family to overcome the stereotypes of being vampires, or vampyres, as they prefer. It’s a cautionary tale of what can happen when the wrong mix of intelligence and self-help books come together.

Underneath that are some pretty dark musings, in my opinion. How much of my opinion is coloured by the knowledge of Pratchett’s early onset Alzheimer’s I’m unable to say, but must be mentioned; there are also shades, I’m sure, of my own current and likely permanent cynicism about humanity.

The book starts off with Granny in a dark place; she’s feeling invisible and forgotten by her friends and her community, and an accident with a cow left her forced to make a difficult choice for someone else. I’m not sure if we’re meant to believe that’s why she takes herself off to the gnarly moors or if I missed the moment when her true purpose was foreshadowed. Either way, Granny puts her affairs in order and leaves without a word to anyone, in the throes of a dark depression.

Meanwhile, in an effort to be modern and embrace a modern tolerance for all beings, King Verence invites the vampires into the castle to celebrate the naming of his newborn daughter. Tolerance taken too far is a touchy topic these days, when everybody is supposed to embrace inclusiveness in all forms but naïveté and inclusiveness aren’t a good mix and it wasn’t hard to draw a line from Pratchett’s vampires being invited in to today’s ‘open-mindedness’ that leads to widely accepted conspiracy theories and general apathy about all the ways the world is currently going to hell.

Then there’s the theological battle that takes place throughout the book. This felt very auto-biographical to me, as if Pratchett used Oats and the witches to vent his spleen – a very bitter spleen from the feel of things. So while I was laughing at the numerous moments of hilarity and sly humour, there was a stain over it of … sadness, I guess. The idea that this genius of storytelling was at his core quite possibly an unhappy man. And I don’t say that because I claim that without faith in a higher being it’s impossible to be happy, but because to spend so much time elucidating the reasons why such faith is misplaced doesn’t seem like something a person at peace with his personal philosophy, and fundamentally happy, would spend his time doing. I don’t agree with him about the higher being, but I do agree with him (and Oats and Granny) that one can find the sacred everywhere.

The ending is both simplicity itself and a perfect reflection of the one-way thought processes of humanity. Not to mention that justice and mercy don’t always come wrapped in bows and happiness.

I read this book, which had been on my TBR for years anyway, on the advice of Themis Athena as a good book for the Splatter square on my 2021 Halloween Bingo card.

On the Edge (Novel of the Edge, #1)

On the Edge
by Ilona Andrews
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780441017805
Series: Novel of the Edge #1
Publication Date: September 29, 2009
Pages: 336
Genre: Fiction, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Ace

Well, it just goes to show you: people change and you should never say never. I read this book back in 2016 and my review from that reading was … unfavourable, ending with my declaration that I’d never read the book again.

Shows you what I know. I not only read it again, I liked it better than I did the first time. It’s still a little too PNR for me, but I found it easier to get into the story, the setting and the characters. Maybe because I’d already read it and had a vague recollection of not liking the romantic interest, I found him less unbearable than I expected to, and the non-consent issues didn’t feel as egregious this time around, only typically arrogant.

I can’t really say why, except maybe I’ve read more Ilona Andrews’ since, or my mood was more receptive to the story. Who knows? But I went from rating this 3 stars and never reading it again, to rating it 4 stars and buying a copy of it for my shelves. Along with the other 3 book in the series.

I’ve been intending to read this since I ordered it back in July, but its arrival during Halloween Bingo was fortuitous; it’s a great fit for the Relics and Curiosities square. The story line centers on a powerful artefact from a previous civilisation that eats magic and spits out something very akin to a demon hound.