Late January/Early February Reading
Feb. 6th, 2018 07:38 amFrost in May, by Antonia White.
The slice-of-life boarding school story is one of my favorite subgenres of literary fiction, and in this one-step-away-from-memoir novel, White gives me the equal of Tobias Wolff's complex, anxiety-ridden Old School, my previous undisputed favorite. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of overlap, and they would make great paired reading.
Nanda Grey is very young when she's sent away to convent school by her newly converted and very devout father. Nanda shares the intensity of his faith, but that isn't all that matters at Lippington, which is just as full of class distinctions as any other boarding school. Sometimes that revolves around the class symbols recognized by the outside world--Nanda quickly learns to disguise her middle-class status through vagueness and obfuscation--but sometimes it's about whether or not the girls come from the old Catholic families of Europe. Nanda's friend Leonie may grow cheerfully heretical or smuggle in copies of Candide, but ultimately the nuns have more faith in her faith--as she puts it, "Catholicism's not a religion, it's a nationality"--and don't constantly test her virtue the way they do Nanda's. That testing, and the concentrated, everything-is-full-of-significance atmosphere of Lippington, gives the novel a peculiar intensity, both beautiful and terrifying, even when it's just a naturalistic discussion of the ins-and-outs of Nanda's schooldays.( Read more... )
Watching the English, by Kate Fox.
A weighty pop anthropology book that wryly looks at England from an insider-outsider perspective, explaining things like the etiquette of queues and a cultural fondness for DIY. This was interesting, but I was a poor reader of it because I should properly have not read so much of it all at once--there's an unavoidable repetition that grates when you're gulping it down--and I'm chagrined at having done it wrong. What I found most valuable here was the concept of "negative politeness," which crystallized some of my own anxiety around social interaction. Effectively, Fox says that "positive politeness," which most Americans practice, involves assuming people want social interaction--they want to be asked what's wrong, chatted with on the train, etc.--and that it's rude to not do it; "negative politeness," which is what most English people practice, assumes people largely want to be left alone. It's the "don't make direct eye contact with people on the subway" rule, the "pretend you don't notice that person is teary-eyed because you don't want to embarrass them" rule. I think my own tendency is to negative politeness, because I have a low opinion of my own social skills and don't want to make things worse, but then I get into a trap because I'm aware the cultural default in America is positive politeness, so I practice it--because I genuinely do care and want to express that--while worrying that I'm either doing it wrong or that the person really did want to be left alone.
In a quintessentially American way, I have now made this book about another country all about me personally. Hurrah for narcissism.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt.
This won an Alex Award--given out to adult novels that could still be read with avid interest by teens--and the qualities that led to its well-deserved victory are both strengths and weaknesses.
This is about June, fourteen years old in the... late 1980s? The vagueness of the time period was something I struggled with here, because AZT isn't yet out and public stigma surrounding AIDS is still strong and incredibly paranoid, but at the same time, it's well-known that June's uncle was gay and this doesn't explicitly affect much about how people talk about him, which feels a little unrealistic for the time period, especially among teenagers. That felt to me like the author pulling the strings a little, writing about HIV-panic because that was her topic but not wanting to touch too much on cultural homophobia beyond that because it is, obviously, off-putting, and that felt like a dishonest ploy for likability.
Anyway, my objects to a kind of cultural whitewashing aside--this is about June, fourteen years old and dealing with the loss of her beloved uncle Finn, who was her godfather and in many ways the most important person in her world. Finn died of AIDS-related illnesses and, in the aftermath of his death, his boyfriend, Toby, whom June has never met, surfaces and tries to get to know her. She's warned away from him--her family is blistering about him, insisting that he "killed" Finn--but gradually falls into a meaningful relationship with him, half-friendly and half-familial. The process of doing so unearths a lot of family secrets about the sometimes troubled relationship between Finn and June's mother, complicates June's relationship with her overachieving and spiraling-out-of-control older sister, and leads to the slow and beautiful mutilation of Finn's last painting, a piece called Tell the Wolves I'm Home.( Read more... )
Conclave, by Robert Harris.
And now for something completely different! This is a--thriller? suspense novel? something with lots of tension--about the conclave electing the next pope. Points for going for that one, Robert Harris, and for settling for implausibilities as your complications rather than outright pulpy shenanigans, while still generating a lot of suspense and playing for high stakes. I liked this a lot but, in all fairness, I love 1) stories set in hermetically sealed environments and heavily rule-bound cultures, 2) political gamesmanship, and 3) theology. There's less of the last than you might expect given the subject matter, but Harris handles all of it well, being sincere about his characters' faith and worldviews and taking those seriously but not depending on the reader being in agreement, and honestly portraying controversies.
This is mostly just fun--fun that takes its own premise seriously but not grimly. Harris sets up the prominent contenders and then begins introducing fairly believable complications that throw the outcome into greater uncertainty, and does this all through the perspective of an endearing cardinal and administrator trying earnestly to do the right thing, an unusual but vivid version of the thriller archetype of an unprepared Everyman thrust into sudden, earth-shattering importance.
Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham.
World War I spy game short stories about a sophisticated, dryly witty writer named Ashenden who is recruited into British Intelligence and travel around Europe doing small acts of espionage and persuasion. Amusing, readable, and well-paced competence and travel porn with the bonus thrill of knowing Maugham is drawing from his own experience, but Maugham... doesn't like women and certain ethnicities very much, and it shows in ways that irritated me enough for it to be a detriment to the whole collection.
A Guilty Thing Surprised, by Ruth Rendell.
Minor Rendell but still with worthwhile emotional richness and a great deal of cleverness. Excellent title.
Faking It to Making It, by Ally Blake.
I've liked pretty much all of the Harlequin Kiss books I've read--I'm thankful my e-library has pretty much all of them--and this is no exception. It doesn't have the staying power of my personal favorite (Waking Up Married) but it's pleasurable, witty fluff.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, The Best School Year Ever, and The Best Halloween Ever, by Barbara Robinson.
I've read the first two of these multiple times--funny, practical, and kind, they're great comfort reads--but didn't even know the third of them existed. Having now read it, I don't mourn its absence from my childhood, because while it's still fun, it's much slighter than the other two. But Robinson's focus on the strange beauty and profundity added to the world by the constant troublemakers, the Herdmans, is ever-present and lovely, especially as they rarely stop being funny.
Odds Against, by Dick Francis.
Recommended by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija as a great starting place for Francis, and it really is. This is the kind of novel where I'm genuinely tempted to feel like they don't make them like this anymore--novels with a little bit of something for everyone, a fast-moving and carefully-crafted plot, a lot of insider professional detail, emotion and glorious hurt/comfort, and a matter-of-fact focus on one man slowly rejoining the world around him and being awesome. I found it massively endearing and highly readable, and I'm currently reading my next Francis, Flying Finish.
Odds Against is about Sid, a former jockey whose horrific hand injury led to him sleepwalking for two years through a replacement job as a consultant with a PI firm that does a lot of racetrack-related work. He was abruptly awoken from this stasis by being shot in the stomach, and as the novel opens, is just starting to re-engage with the world, particularly as his adorable father-in-law invites him to convalesce at his manor and there springs upon him an intriguing problem. (And a lot of great h/c scenes. Their relationship was one of my favorite parts of the novel.) Sid doggedly sets to work investigating whether or not a down-at-the-heels track is being sabotaged as part of a land grab scheme, and Francis is attentive both to the details of that and to the details of Sid getting back into the swing of being alive: the people he has to convince of his capability, the feeling of being in a world he can no longer participate in in the same way, the adjustment to injury, etc. Just all-around good fun that I know I'll be reading again.
Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey.
Mostly via Audible, although I started on Kindle. The Audible reader is superb.
I feel like I'm the last one to the party on this series, but I enjoyed this Game of Thrones-in-space-but-with-less-nihilism very much, first for the worldbuilding and then, more gradually, for the characters. It's a little shapeless, but still fun and buzzworthy.
The Answers, by Catherine Lacey.
A high-concept novel that flops because it can't decide what level of realism it wants and also seems half-asleep. I wanted so badly to like this but was really disappointed. It's partly a victim of its own ambitions--it tries to do way too much, satirizing celebrity culture and relationships and pop psychology while also trying to be a moving look at the way we lose contact with the people we love and how pain and separateness make us outsiders, and also trying sfnal projection, and it would be incredible if it could pull all of that off, but it can't, so it isn't.
Second Chance Cinderella, by Carla Capshaw.
Historical inspie romance. I started reading these, despite being only vaguely the target audience, because I'd heard that they were notable for often having more varied settings and more varied character types than a lot of historical romance. I had great luck with the first few I read, finding great writing and character development with believably integrated religion and without much "preachiness," but Second Chance Cinderella, after a promising start, broke that streak.
Sam and Rose were childhood sweethearts--raised together in an orphanage, they were in love their whole lives and planned to marry up until Sam had the opportunity to go to London as a clerk, when they both decide he should go to set up his future and then return for her. He returns for her, but hears she's married and assumes she stopped caring about him the moment he left. She, on the other hand, married a kind, dying man because she was pregnant with Sam's baby, and believes Sam never came back for her. Classic Big Misunderstanding, but I'm forgiving of that because Capshaw sets up a good premise for a reunion--nine years later, Sam is a successful and wealthy London stockbroker and Rose, who had fewer opportunities, is a kitchen maid. I was looking forward to the class complications of two people having started in the same place but then diverged far from that, and won over by the virtual absence of any shaming of Rose for her unwed pregnancy and by Rose's staunch ethics--she pointedly says that it's dishonorable for Sam to come onto her while she's in his employment because he's taking advantage, a sadly still-controversial issue, and when he tries to humiliate her by having her serve supper (a job usually reserved for footmen), she calls him out for behaving badly by doing so at the cost of his almost-fiancee's first night as his hostess going badly.
And then the inspirational themes became less and less integrated into the characterization and plot and more and more shoehorned, there's a needless kidnapping, and the almost-fiancee turns out to be unreservedly awful. It's a waste of a good set-up and a lot of early empathy and subtlety.
In the Sheikh's Marriage Bed, by Sarah Morgan.
My first-ever Harlequin Presents. I decided I should read one of those for wider genre exposure, and I've liked another Morgan, so this seemed like a fair spot to start. It's a strong testament to Morgan that I found this quite enjoyable even though most of what makes it, to the best of my knowledge, a Presents did absolutely nothing for me and was sometimes an active deterrent.
Forceful hero who believes all women are inherently faithless and manipulative and who has "punishing kisses"? Check, and meh with an additional bit of eye-rolling. Sexual Adonis hero and virginal heroine? Check, and I just... don't care about that. Heavily-exoticized setting and hero with seemingly no attempt made at creating a believable Middle Eastern character or culture and with lots of jokes about harems and a whole setup dependent on the white, Western heroine being menaced by brigands in a marketplace? So much check, and the most off-putting part of the book for me. It showed up in nearly everything, down to the fact that the hero didn't seem to distinguish between the city he lived in and the country he was a price of because who wants to bother learning more than one faux-Arabic name? I don't know what I expected from the title--not realism, definitely--but even with a generous curve for a kind of indulgent fantasy, this still grated.
(It probably goes without saying that Islam is Sir Not Appearing in This Film. Presumably there are English-speaking Muslim readers who would like inspies of their own, but they're obviously not getting them from Harlequin.)
But despite all that, this oddly worked for me. It helps that Morgan is funny, which meant the hero and heroine had a good rapport when he could take a break from being cold-eyed and dangerous and she could take a break from swooning. It made them seem more human and believable. And the sexual tension was actually very well done, hot and convincing, which I think is a hard thing to pull off. I was really impressed by how Morgan wrote their physical awareness of each other. And somehow the cheekiness made the over-the-top soapy misunderstandings more palatable, because it seemed to suggest that they were inexplicable directives the hero and heroine were bewilderingly complying with but that they were generally much more grounded, sensible people who would be fine after the novel ended.
This made me think that everyone probably has their own internal scale for over-the-top, and that different emotions and presentations of emotion register as believable, worthwhile exaggerations, understandable, not at all recognizable as human behavior, etc., to different people, because I definitely have my own fictional actions I find understandable and sympathetic that I know other people don't have the same reaction to. Which means that I try to be a generous reader, especially when it comes to books that engage deeply with emotions.
Plus
Some novels that are hereby classified as top secret for reasons of professionalism, including an ARC I'm exceptionally grateful to have acquired but am legally bound to review elsewhere before I review it anywhere else, and some delightfully fun novels with a style I want to try to internalize.
The slice-of-life boarding school story is one of my favorite subgenres of literary fiction, and in this one-step-away-from-memoir novel, White gives me the equal of Tobias Wolff's complex, anxiety-ridden Old School, my previous undisputed favorite. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of overlap, and they would make great paired reading.
Nanda Grey is very young when she's sent away to convent school by her newly converted and very devout father. Nanda shares the intensity of his faith, but that isn't all that matters at Lippington, which is just as full of class distinctions as any other boarding school. Sometimes that revolves around the class symbols recognized by the outside world--Nanda quickly learns to disguise her middle-class status through vagueness and obfuscation--but sometimes it's about whether or not the girls come from the old Catholic families of Europe. Nanda's friend Leonie may grow cheerfully heretical or smuggle in copies of Candide, but ultimately the nuns have more faith in her faith--as she puts it, "Catholicism's not a religion, it's a nationality"--and don't constantly test her virtue the way they do Nanda's. That testing, and the concentrated, everything-is-full-of-significance atmosphere of Lippington, gives the novel a peculiar intensity, both beautiful and terrifying, even when it's just a naturalistic discussion of the ins-and-outs of Nanda's schooldays.( Read more... )
Watching the English, by Kate Fox.
A weighty pop anthropology book that wryly looks at England from an insider-outsider perspective, explaining things like the etiquette of queues and a cultural fondness for DIY. This was interesting, but I was a poor reader of it because I should properly have not read so much of it all at once--there's an unavoidable repetition that grates when you're gulping it down--and I'm chagrined at having done it wrong. What I found most valuable here was the concept of "negative politeness," which crystallized some of my own anxiety around social interaction. Effectively, Fox says that "positive politeness," which most Americans practice, involves assuming people want social interaction--they want to be asked what's wrong, chatted with on the train, etc.--and that it's rude to not do it; "negative politeness," which is what most English people practice, assumes people largely want to be left alone. It's the "don't make direct eye contact with people on the subway" rule, the "pretend you don't notice that person is teary-eyed because you don't want to embarrass them" rule. I think my own tendency is to negative politeness, because I have a low opinion of my own social skills and don't want to make things worse, but then I get into a trap because I'm aware the cultural default in America is positive politeness, so I practice it--because I genuinely do care and want to express that--while worrying that I'm either doing it wrong or that the person really did want to be left alone.
In a quintessentially American way, I have now made this book about another country all about me personally. Hurrah for narcissism.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt.
This won an Alex Award--given out to adult novels that could still be read with avid interest by teens--and the qualities that led to its well-deserved victory are both strengths and weaknesses.
This is about June, fourteen years old in the... late 1980s? The vagueness of the time period was something I struggled with here, because AZT isn't yet out and public stigma surrounding AIDS is still strong and incredibly paranoid, but at the same time, it's well-known that June's uncle was gay and this doesn't explicitly affect much about how people talk about him, which feels a little unrealistic for the time period, especially among teenagers. That felt to me like the author pulling the strings a little, writing about HIV-panic because that was her topic but not wanting to touch too much on cultural homophobia beyond that because it is, obviously, off-putting, and that felt like a dishonest ploy for likability.
Anyway, my objects to a kind of cultural whitewashing aside--this is about June, fourteen years old and dealing with the loss of her beloved uncle Finn, who was her godfather and in many ways the most important person in her world. Finn died of AIDS-related illnesses and, in the aftermath of his death, his boyfriend, Toby, whom June has never met, surfaces and tries to get to know her. She's warned away from him--her family is blistering about him, insisting that he "killed" Finn--but gradually falls into a meaningful relationship with him, half-friendly and half-familial. The process of doing so unearths a lot of family secrets about the sometimes troubled relationship between Finn and June's mother, complicates June's relationship with her overachieving and spiraling-out-of-control older sister, and leads to the slow and beautiful mutilation of Finn's last painting, a piece called Tell the Wolves I'm Home.( Read more... )
Conclave, by Robert Harris.
And now for something completely different! This is a--thriller? suspense novel? something with lots of tension--about the conclave electing the next pope. Points for going for that one, Robert Harris, and for settling for implausibilities as your complications rather than outright pulpy shenanigans, while still generating a lot of suspense and playing for high stakes. I liked this a lot but, in all fairness, I love 1) stories set in hermetically sealed environments and heavily rule-bound cultures, 2) political gamesmanship, and 3) theology. There's less of the last than you might expect given the subject matter, but Harris handles all of it well, being sincere about his characters' faith and worldviews and taking those seriously but not depending on the reader being in agreement, and honestly portraying controversies.
This is mostly just fun--fun that takes its own premise seriously but not grimly. Harris sets up the prominent contenders and then begins introducing fairly believable complications that throw the outcome into greater uncertainty, and does this all through the perspective of an endearing cardinal and administrator trying earnestly to do the right thing, an unusual but vivid version of the thriller archetype of an unprepared Everyman thrust into sudden, earth-shattering importance.
Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham.
World War I spy game short stories about a sophisticated, dryly witty writer named Ashenden who is recruited into British Intelligence and travel around Europe doing small acts of espionage and persuasion. Amusing, readable, and well-paced competence and travel porn with the bonus thrill of knowing Maugham is drawing from his own experience, but Maugham... doesn't like women and certain ethnicities very much, and it shows in ways that irritated me enough for it to be a detriment to the whole collection.
A Guilty Thing Surprised, by Ruth Rendell.
Minor Rendell but still with worthwhile emotional richness and a great deal of cleverness. Excellent title.
Faking It to Making It, by Ally Blake.
I've liked pretty much all of the Harlequin Kiss books I've read--I'm thankful my e-library has pretty much all of them--and this is no exception. It doesn't have the staying power of my personal favorite (Waking Up Married) but it's pleasurable, witty fluff.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, The Best School Year Ever, and The Best Halloween Ever, by Barbara Robinson.
I've read the first two of these multiple times--funny, practical, and kind, they're great comfort reads--but didn't even know the third of them existed. Having now read it, I don't mourn its absence from my childhood, because while it's still fun, it's much slighter than the other two. But Robinson's focus on the strange beauty and profundity added to the world by the constant troublemakers, the Herdmans, is ever-present and lovely, especially as they rarely stop being funny.
Odds Against, by Dick Francis.
Recommended by
rachelmanija as a great starting place for Francis, and it really is. This is the kind of novel where I'm genuinely tempted to feel like they don't make them like this anymore--novels with a little bit of something for everyone, a fast-moving and carefully-crafted plot, a lot of insider professional detail, emotion and glorious hurt/comfort, and a matter-of-fact focus on one man slowly rejoining the world around him and being awesome. I found it massively endearing and highly readable, and I'm currently reading my next Francis, Flying Finish.Odds Against is about Sid, a former jockey whose horrific hand injury led to him sleepwalking for two years through a replacement job as a consultant with a PI firm that does a lot of racetrack-related work. He was abruptly awoken from this stasis by being shot in the stomach, and as the novel opens, is just starting to re-engage with the world, particularly as his adorable father-in-law invites him to convalesce at his manor and there springs upon him an intriguing problem. (And a lot of great h/c scenes. Their relationship was one of my favorite parts of the novel.) Sid doggedly sets to work investigating whether or not a down-at-the-heels track is being sabotaged as part of a land grab scheme, and Francis is attentive both to the details of that and to the details of Sid getting back into the swing of being alive: the people he has to convince of his capability, the feeling of being in a world he can no longer participate in in the same way, the adjustment to injury, etc. Just all-around good fun that I know I'll be reading again.
Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey.
Mostly via Audible, although I started on Kindle. The Audible reader is superb.
I feel like I'm the last one to the party on this series, but I enjoyed this Game of Thrones-in-space-but-with-less-nihilism very much, first for the worldbuilding and then, more gradually, for the characters. It's a little shapeless, but still fun and buzzworthy.
The Answers, by Catherine Lacey.
A high-concept novel that flops because it can't decide what level of realism it wants and also seems half-asleep. I wanted so badly to like this but was really disappointed. It's partly a victim of its own ambitions--it tries to do way too much, satirizing celebrity culture and relationships and pop psychology while also trying to be a moving look at the way we lose contact with the people we love and how pain and separateness make us outsiders, and also trying sfnal projection, and it would be incredible if it could pull all of that off, but it can't, so it isn't.
Second Chance Cinderella, by Carla Capshaw.
Historical inspie romance. I started reading these, despite being only vaguely the target audience, because I'd heard that they were notable for often having more varied settings and more varied character types than a lot of historical romance. I had great luck with the first few I read, finding great writing and character development with believably integrated religion and without much "preachiness," but Second Chance Cinderella, after a promising start, broke that streak.
Sam and Rose were childhood sweethearts--raised together in an orphanage, they were in love their whole lives and planned to marry up until Sam had the opportunity to go to London as a clerk, when they both decide he should go to set up his future and then return for her. He returns for her, but hears she's married and assumes she stopped caring about him the moment he left. She, on the other hand, married a kind, dying man because she was pregnant with Sam's baby, and believes Sam never came back for her. Classic Big Misunderstanding, but I'm forgiving of that because Capshaw sets up a good premise for a reunion--nine years later, Sam is a successful and wealthy London stockbroker and Rose, who had fewer opportunities, is a kitchen maid. I was looking forward to the class complications of two people having started in the same place but then diverged far from that, and won over by the virtual absence of any shaming of Rose for her unwed pregnancy and by Rose's staunch ethics--she pointedly says that it's dishonorable for Sam to come onto her while she's in his employment because he's taking advantage, a sadly still-controversial issue, and when he tries to humiliate her by having her serve supper (a job usually reserved for footmen), she calls him out for behaving badly by doing so at the cost of his almost-fiancee's first night as his hostess going badly.
And then the inspirational themes became less and less integrated into the characterization and plot and more and more shoehorned, there's a needless kidnapping, and the almost-fiancee turns out to be unreservedly awful. It's a waste of a good set-up and a lot of early empathy and subtlety.
In the Sheikh's Marriage Bed, by Sarah Morgan.
My first-ever Harlequin Presents. I decided I should read one of those for wider genre exposure, and I've liked another Morgan, so this seemed like a fair spot to start. It's a strong testament to Morgan that I found this quite enjoyable even though most of what makes it, to the best of my knowledge, a Presents did absolutely nothing for me and was sometimes an active deterrent.
Forceful hero who believes all women are inherently faithless and manipulative and who has "punishing kisses"? Check, and meh with an additional bit of eye-rolling. Sexual Adonis hero and virginal heroine? Check, and I just... don't care about that. Heavily-exoticized setting and hero with seemingly no attempt made at creating a believable Middle Eastern character or culture and with lots of jokes about harems and a whole setup dependent on the white, Western heroine being menaced by brigands in a marketplace? So much check, and the most off-putting part of the book for me. It showed up in nearly everything, down to the fact that the hero didn't seem to distinguish between the city he lived in and the country he was a price of because who wants to bother learning more than one faux-Arabic name? I don't know what I expected from the title--not realism, definitely--but even with a generous curve for a kind of indulgent fantasy, this still grated.
(It probably goes without saying that Islam is Sir Not Appearing in This Film. Presumably there are English-speaking Muslim readers who would like inspies of their own, but they're obviously not getting them from Harlequin.)
But despite all that, this oddly worked for me. It helps that Morgan is funny, which meant the hero and heroine had a good rapport when he could take a break from being cold-eyed and dangerous and she could take a break from swooning. It made them seem more human and believable. And the sexual tension was actually very well done, hot and convincing, which I think is a hard thing to pull off. I was really impressed by how Morgan wrote their physical awareness of each other. And somehow the cheekiness made the over-the-top soapy misunderstandings more palatable, because it seemed to suggest that they were inexplicable directives the hero and heroine were bewilderingly complying with but that they were generally much more grounded, sensible people who would be fine after the novel ended.
This made me think that everyone probably has their own internal scale for over-the-top, and that different emotions and presentations of emotion register as believable, worthwhile exaggerations, understandable, not at all recognizable as human behavior, etc., to different people, because I definitely have my own fictional actions I find understandable and sympathetic that I know other people don't have the same reaction to. Which means that I try to be a generous reader, especially when it comes to books that engage deeply with emotions.
Plus
Some novels that are hereby classified as top secret for reasons of professionalism, including an ARC I'm exceptionally grateful to have acquired but am legally bound to review elsewhere before I review it anywhere else, and some delightfully fun novels with a style I want to try to internalize.