Buried Deep and Other Stories (⭐⭐⭐⭐ but for the ones I read)
Did I get this only to re-visit the world of Temeraire? You bet! I felt, I think like many people, that Novik got a bit fed up of her Dragon + Napoleonic Wars world by the end, with the whimsy and joy taken over by staid descriptions of military marches and food depots. This was a way to return to the original joy, especially since one of the retellings was of Pride and Prejudice (!!!!!) which we have well established is my weakest of spots.
Other stories…I’ve already read the original Spinning Silver short story in another fairy tale anthology, otherwise it would have definitely been the highlight of the (physical) book. Instead, I checked out the audiobook of this alongside to hear the narration by Lisa Flanagan, whose narration of Spinning Silver I absolutely adore (me, who doesn’t really do audiobooks). While most of it is the same at the outset, I’ll do just about anything to be back in that world. Ice dragons, anyone?
The main point of this book should/was the inclusion of the sneak peak for Novik’s next book. Perhaps it’s because it had to compete with two properties that I love, but I can’t say I recall it super well…but I’m looking forward to reading it when it comes out!
Our Evenings (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
I’ll be honest I’d never heard of Alan Hollinghurst before this book started popping up on those bougie “books to look out for” lists everywhere, but the blurb had all the right words for someone like to be interested. British life? Boarding school? Dramatic reminiscing about a life through British society bits that I remember? I love me a push and pull when a person of lower SES or lower awareness of the culture of the rich and famous is invited into that world, given a small sliver of purchase, and then wrestles with it as they live their life. If we were being honest, it might be (is) because I see it in myself, who attended a private day school and then was a scholarship/financial aid recipient at a very expensive private boarding school who has definitely been shaped by what I experienced. But that’s another conversation!
I went to an author reading of this book, with Hollinghurst and a British Malaysian author Tash Aw—ethnicity relevant because here, for what is the first time, Hollinghurst wrote a half British half Burmese main character and the way in which he talked about it at the event was so…British. This main idea was that Hollinghurst, a very white British man, wanted to ‘explore’ what British society looks like through the eyes of someone mixed race, and all I could think was how this would lead to him being utterly savaged by BookTok in the States. Is it a nuanced portrayal of someone half-Burmese? Well, usefully Hollinghurst has Dave Win be the son of a father he’s never met, so his feelings of race-specific alienation are limited to a few comments on his skin tone. But I appreciated the way he spoke about it, and the conviction with which he went after the goal of making his books more inclusive of the British experience.
Anne of Green Gables (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
This was another of those books I felt positively compelled to read, and, in a very Anne-like fashion, and could not stop myself from doing so even though I had other things to do! It was kicked off by an innocuous question in a letter from a friend–“do you identify more with Diana or Anne?”–which made me go, “duh, Anne??” before realizing that one of the pleasures of Adulthood is realizing that Diana is not merely the dimpled plump cheeked sidekick to Anne but a lovely girl in and of herself who symbolizes loyalty and contentment.
But yes, that aside, Anne all the way.
I think about this book constantly. I was given it as a gift–twice!–back in elementary school, a copy I still own, and I loved it to pieces. The story of a girl, brighter and more vivacious than the rest by virtue of her imagination and creativity who takes whatever care she’s given (at the beginning, precious little) and spins it into a community who loves her and would go bat for her against all the outsiders? No wonder she rings true, even if her latter days (seven children! heavens) start to veer away from what we think of as liberated feminism rah rah. Anne had dreams, huge dreams, and she ran after all of them without stopping and skinned her knees a handful of times in the process. No part of this book fails to reduce me to a quivering pile of emotion, after all these years.
Anne of the Island (⭐⭐⭐⭐
)
Has any college story been more delightful than Redmond College? I thank Montgomery for giving me a vision of a college experience that isn’t all drunken parties and hook ups, and also isn’t all about amazing intellectual discoveries. At the end of the day it’s about gumption, and as Aunt Jimsie says, you either have it or you don’t. Which might imply college is useless, as the nosy busybodies of PEI might say, but Anne comes out of it with a renewed sense of self and fully energized for the world ahead. She grows into the woman she becomes at Redmond, on the backs of the years she’s spent nurtured by PEI.
One would be remiss, of course, to ignore that this book is also the shining example of How to Be a Man. Be Gilbert, everyone, Gilbert is the way to be. He wooes Anne but then expresses what he wants in a clear and coherent manner. He is sufficiently sad when she turns him down but never gets cruel or lashes out (or, Captain Wentworth, go off to war and silently pine). He stays casual friends, goes on with his life, and silently pines but in way that does not infringe on Anne’s autonomy! And then, of course, when she realizes her mistake he is waiting and remains the best. He tries to become her friend! Even though his heart is pining. Okay, maybe the pining is part of the allure, but also you get this sense that he adores Anne and will find their life together to be an adventure. And that, my friends, is why Gilbert Blythe is the best of men.
Anne of Ingleside (⭐⭐⭐)
I honestly skip over most of this book and go straight for the end. I can’t help it–I don’t really care much for the lives of Anne’s kids (although I have a soft spot for Rilla because of Rilla of Ingleside) or her domesticity vibes. I fully support them, and seeing Anne have the full home and family that she was denied as an orphan is truly heart-warming. That she continues to get into scrapes is a good way of reminding us all that we never stop being kids, (or that we shouldn’t). But while I think I’ve read the next book that’s pretty much entirely about her kids, I never could get into it very much.
The end of this book, however, gets at something we don’t often see in a romantic arc: the time after the HEA, after the honeymoon phase, the solid middle age bits where there are too many demands on your time and not enough energy to please everyone. Anne is the mother of seven, Gilbert appears to be the only competent doctor for miles around, and people keep having babies (well, pot kettle). Christine Gilbert nee Stuart–Gilbert’s second paramour at Redmond after Anne turned him down–has invited them to a dinner, and Gilbert seems more enthusiastic about this than anything else that Anne’s been trying to get him engaged with (one kid’s got a rash! all the kids are being too loud! he’s forgotten their anniversary!). And so we see Anne do something that seems the least Anne-ish: she lets herself wallow, and give in to her darkest thoughts: Gilbert never loved her, which even she can’t really convince herself of. Or…their marriage has gotten stale, which she can’t help but see evidence of.
Of course this is Anne, so this is not how this story ends, but it’s a lovely look into a couple we’ve given our hearts to and how they’ve grown over the years 🙂
The Husbands (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Another book from IRL Book Group! I loved how this book made no qualms about its premise, and it’s right there in the blurb. Lauren comes home to a husband. Every time the husband goes up to the attic and disappears from view, a little light bulb goes fizz and a new one comes down and in doing so resets her entire life. As in, new photos, new memories, new everything, but also a new husband who thinks this is his whole life.
With a few caveats to logic (I maintain that there’s no way to be dropped into a world where you have no memories and be able to catch up. Think about how discombobulated you are as an experienced hire at a new job where everyone is trying to help you understand how things work, but now imagine that you’re dropped into a world where everyone assumes you remember everything???) (okay maybe better analogy is like, coming back to a job after parental leave?) (whatever) the switcheroo plot is presented as fact and we’re more interested in what it does to Lauren. She basically is living life with Tinder on Steroids. She doesn’t like her life? Swipe left, which is to say ask husband to go upstairs and grab lights or a fan or a bottle or what have you and start over. There’s nothing keeping her tied to any one life, and at some point she has to actively decide to pick a life…knowing that she has an out.
Things go a bit haywire when a husband injures his back and can’t make it back up the stairs, but given the entire premise it’s not entirely unreasonable how she chooses to solve it. The ending has the right amount of finality and ?? given the entire set up as well. One of the more novel and interesting books I’ve read for sure–takes the Groundhog Day phenomenon to a different place than you’ve seen it before.
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
A gift from the lovely Eunice!
An interlude as to how I met Eunice, and the radical optimism of assuming, NYT doom and gloom articles aside, that you can make friends as an adult (even an adult over 30!) and find kindred spirits (Eunice, in fact, asked me the Anne-and-Diana question that prompted the re-read of Anne of Green Gables +2, 2024 edition). My sink drain was backed up right when I was starting to list my home to sell, which meant that I needed to talk to all of my upstairs neighbors so that it could be fixed. It took a bit to get in touch with the person above me, but when I went hat in hand asking for a pretty intrusive favor (hi, you’ve never met me, can you give me your key so I can go into your home middle of the day and run your sink?) we started talking–I shared I was going on a spontaneous trip to a clothing optional hot spring to camp overnight with someone I’d just met a month before, and sort of uncertain? and then suddenly was talking about how I was really excited to no longer be a banker and try a job with fewer hours, and hearing about what it was like to be a new academic in a new city?
But the real push was when Eunice reach out and asked if I wanted to come over for dinner, which is a radical move that they’re always going on about in the aforementioned adult friendship solution articles. It takes courage and energy to put yourself out there (even, if I may give myself some credit, though I am someone who puts out incredibly strong GREEN FLAG FRIEND vibes), and in doing so the die was cast.
Okay that all aside, this book is pretty dope. Not to say there aren’t already tons of books about female friendship–there absolutely are, because toxic masculinity etc etc–but it’s quite cool to read about the inner machinations of a friendship that at one point was literally performative in the sense that they were recording a podcast about being Best Friends while holding a lot of resentment apiece. It’s also refreshing to hear the concept of race and being the “only person of color” in a friendship/friend group–I won’t equate being the only Black person to being the only Indian person in a group, but I understand the feeling and can empathize. It’s also not a tidy book, because both women are in the solid middle part of their lives! I’m curious to read their next book and see what comes of their friendship in the decades to come (if she can do it so can we).