THE WORSHIPFUL LUCIA

Fifth book in E.F. Benson’s wonderful Mapp and Lucia series. Lucia speculates in the stock market, runs for town council, thinks she’s discovered the ruins of a Roman villa in her garden, and marries (platonically) her adorable sidekick Georgie, all while ably foiling the machinations of her rival Miss Mapp.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

With this little novella, I’ve officially read all the Connie Willis available to me—sniff, sniff. Luckily, though slight, this tale of interplanetary explorers was clever, funny, and even romantic. I don’t normally go for hard-core space-travel sci-fi, but the setting here was just another chance for Willis to explore what she does best: bureaucracy, language, and screwball hijinks.

MISS PYM DISPOSES

Josephine Tey again. Loved again, maybe even more than Brat Farrar. Whereas the former plays on the English-country-house genre, this one is an English school novel, which I’m also a sucker for. It reminded me a bit of Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, but pared down and with a bit less neurosis; in this case, the setting is not Oxford, but a vigorous and wholesome women’s physical training college (a phenomenon I was not quite familiar with, but it seems to educate both gym teachers and physical therapists). As with Brat, although the story is plenty suspenseful, it’s not a traditional mystery but a character-driven drama, and I fell head over heels with both Miss Pym and the students. A perfect mix of cheer and chills.

SCOTT PILGRIM, VOLUMES 1 AND 2

I loved the movie, so of course I had to check out the source books by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Obviously there’s a lot more to the six-volume series than could be fit into a single film, but mostly what impressed me was how much the movie managed to capture, at least of the first two books, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. (Volume 1 especially had a number of sequences replicated nearly verbatim in the film.) I feel like I’m still learning how to be a graphic-novel reader (I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I’m old or just not very visual, but sometimes I have a hard time following what’s going on or telling which character is which), but this is a fun education.

MEET THE AUSTINS

In my read-all the-Madeleine-L’Engle-books project, I have now left the familiar shores of the Time Quartet and run up against the rocky shoals of the Austin books, which I was never able to get through as a child. I gave Meet the Austins at least two or three tries, but always found it mundane in comparison to the adventures of the brilliant, unconventional, magical Murrys. I still do, honestly: this is just a straightforward, ordinary, old-fashioned family story, remarkable mainly in its intelligent and sensitive writing that manages to be wholesome and spiritually inclined without getting very saccharine or preachy (though at times I did think the Austins seemed ever-so-slightly smug). I was able to appreciate it more as an adult, but I still don’t have the same passionate love for Vicky that I do for Meg. Hopefully that will change in the later books when more stuff starts happening.

BRAT FARRAR

I’d read two other Josephine Tey books years ago, The Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair, and enjoyed them in a casual way, but this one knocked my socks off. I picked it up after reading some rave mentions from trusted sources (“ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS EVER” tends to get my attention) and devoured it in just a few Metro rides. It’s right up my alley, not so much a mystery novel as a dark and suspenseful twist on the cozy-and-quirky-and-brilliant-family comedies of manners so blessedly plentiful in the early twentieth century, which are of course like catnip to me:

“Don’t eat out of the point of your spoon, Jane.”
“I can’t mobilize the strings out of the side.”
Jane looked across at the twin, negotiating the vermicelli with smug neatness.
“She has a stronger suck than I have.”
“Aunt Bee has a face like a very expensive cat,” Ruth said, eying her aunt sideways.
Aunt Bee privately thought that this was a very good description, but wished that Ruth would not be quaint.

TUCK EVERLASTING

I picked this Natalie Babbitt novel for book group, because I caught part of the movie on TV one afternoon (although as an adaptation it’s flawed, inaccurately superimposing a whole teen romance into the mix, I am a softie for Alexis Bledel and also John Hurt) and suddenly remembered what a huge impression the book made on me in fourth grade or so. I couldn’t recall much of the plot, just that it struck me as one of the most profound things I’d ever read. Upon rereading as an adult, I was surprised by how short and simple the story really is (it almost feels more like a fable than a novel), but I can still see why it blew my mind. Even though I’ve read and watched enough media that the concept of immortality being a curse and not a blessing now seems like an old-hat trope, this was probably one of the first really philosophical books I read and almost certainly the first to explicitly confront the concepts of time and death. Regrettably, I can’t recapture the experience of reading it with a young and impressionable mind, but I still enjoyed the meditative tone and beautiful writing. (“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.”)

ALL CLEAR

I can’t really be objective here. I can see some validity in the argument that an editor should have stepped in to pare down Connie Willis’s exhaustive detail; after all, the two-book set (this plus Blackout) totals more than 1,100 pages. But to me, that just means there’s more to love. So keep in mind that this is coming from someone who has infinite patience for just about anything Willis dishes out, but I think this is a tour-de-force epic on her best themes (and some of my favorites as well): the perils of time travel, the allure and elusiveness of history, the joys and frustrations of academics, the quiet heroism of everyday people, and World War II—specifically, the British home front experience, covered in nearly every facet from air raids to evacuees to ambulance drivers. The second volume delivers a satisfying, bittersweet payoff on everything painstakingly set up in the first.

BLACKOUT, PART 2

Although I’m sure I did it all the time as a kid, this is the first time in my recorded book history (1993–present) that I’ve read the same book twice in one year. I gobbled it up when it came out in March, but the finer points had evaporated from my mind by the time the continuation, All Clear, was released in October, so I figured I’d better do a reread if I wanted to catch everything—and there’s a lot to catch in Connie Willis’s complex story of three graduate-student historians from 2060 who, while doing their fieldwork in World War II thanks to time travel, become trapped in London during the Blitz and must try not to alter the course of events while fighting for survival and trying to find a way home. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around.