Yuletide unofficial chat

What I’ve Read
My Happy Marriage Vol 1 & 2 – Akumi Agitogi
A manga in a slightly fantastical Taisho-era Japan setting. Our beautiful humble kind and gentle main character has been send to the garden by her family to eat worms -aka, she’s been displaced from her place of comfort to the role of a servant by an evil step mother and half sister. She is relieved to discover that the arranged marriage she was set to is, in fact, perfectly arranged-- the self-contained and stoic male lead is actually soft and squishy, adores her, and wants to take care of her. It’s very much an id-fic style indulgence, and I enjoyed it a good deal. It was a bit slow. I started it because I found the anime and was a bit curious, but on review, I think the anime might be a better go.

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert – Bob the Drag Queen – I really enjoyed this book and it was also a very strange book. It’s technically a fantasy, in that it involves an impossible conceit: Harriet Tubman (among other historical notables) returning to the modern world, and in Miss Tubman’s case, wanting to engage with the modern Black American through music and performance. But, it’s literally just a conceit – the main appeal of this book is a personal exploration of the Underground Railroad’s most famous members, in their own voices. The characters are personal and the meaning of freedom is both pragmatic and spiritual. They are all conversations with a modern viewpoint character, who is not actually Bob the Drag Queen. He’s a gay Black music producer who had some rough patches in his journey, but achieved enough success that Harriet Tubman asked to work with him.

I’m charmed by the book – it’s history as personal story, and I enjoyed the main character’s emotional roller coaster of awe, humiliation, and self respect. The book does not shy away from difficult self reflection, and I think the audiobook was pretty fantastic.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers – A Lord Peter Wimsey mystery from 1927 - Sayers is great, the characters are well sketched out, the mystery is plausibly tricky! I think the main heroine of the book is the newly introduced Miss Climpson – she channels her natural nosiness for justice and seems to have a wonderful time doing it. (There’s a wonderful passage where Lord Wimsey laments that the England’s greatest investigative resource - nosy older women - is being squandered and divided amongst the populace. He’d have a crack set of smart women ferreting out murderers as a public service, if he could just persuade the police to hire them!)

I’ve read Sayers out of order, so I do miss Harriet Vane, even if she wasn’t written into the book yet. I did find that this book, like Strong Poison and Have His Carcase, focus a good deal on the cleverness of the means of murder, and how medical knowledge shapes the understanding of the crime. However, I know about hemophilia and I about air bubbles in injections killing people, so I feel a bit cheated when the first thing I think of is meant to be a big revelation. However, these stories are so fun to read, and Sayers is so generous with the intelligence and dedication of her side characters, that I don’t mind going for the ride even if the destination is no surprise.

This one had a some real marks of 1927 on it, tho. Sayers has a certain respect for the cleverness of her murderers that makes you almost root for them, but this one leans hard into the stereotype of “doing gender wrong makes you dangerous.” The murderer, a tall commanding and “mannish” nurse who uses her medical knowledge to kill and her strong personality to isolate other victims by manipulation, reads as lesbian. (Hard to tell how much is deliberate with these things – patterns of thought reveal bigotry you didn’t know you harbored.) The point is driven home when she isolates a younger woman to be her particular friend, to move out to a remote farm and do all her housekeeping, and to eschew the company of any other person, but particularly men. It’s obviously a bad relationship whether they are lovers or not, but it’s structured so all the evils of it are attached to the characters’ deviation from their gender’s expected role in society. To a reader unfamiliar with gay tropes of the era, it might fly under the radar; but I’m not and it hit and I feel a bit queasy about that section of the book. Caveat lector.

My friend has a term called “the shot dog factor” – whatever you post on the internet, there’s always a chance that someone will come into your comments acting like you shot their dog. The risk is never zero. But you can shave off the worst likelihood with placating asides about what you really actually mean. Sayers, writing for herself, in a different century, has no fear of her dog getting shot. Sometimes I think that’s all the difference.

What I’m Reading
Whose Body -Dorothy Sayers – I appear to be in a mood. This is the first one and hinges on joint mysteries of a body found in bathtub and the disappearance of an upper crust Jewish financier. Since it’s also from the 1920s, it’s got some… choice language about Jewish people, tho the characters are all generally about as non-antisemetic as one could hope from upper crust English people in the 1920s.

Worn – Sofi Thanhauser. I feel bad, because I held out such hope for this audiobook, but the narrator is mournful throughout. Lots of the work of modern fabric creation is, in fact, worth of mourning – we depend on the exploiting the labor of underpaid people across the globe who deserve fair compensation; fabric creation depletes natural resources at a devastating clip – HOWEVER, not all of it needs to be talked about in sepulchral tones! I’ve heard Gregorian chant that was less of a downer. Slow going.

Lent by Jo Walton – continues beautifully and complexly and sadly. The book club enjoyed the first half and the Big Twist in the middle.

What I’ll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for book club 
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Monsters and Mainframes?
I feel due for a Pratchett.