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Well, I'm Back
It's been almost exactly two years, which for me can be pretty much summed up with 1.) Pandemic; 2.) I graduated; 3.) I got a job! It was terrible!; 3.) I quit and got another job! It's less terrible!; and 4.) I drifted out of DW and fandom in general for what--to me--feels like a very long time. I've missed it.
I still don't feel like I have the bandwidth to write fic or get as involved in fandoms as I used to be, but I'm hoping to at least get back to tracking my reading, hopefully in a way that's a bit more organized and substantial. But for the sake of getting the ball rolling again, here are a few quick and dirty highlights from the past month or so:
Billy Summers by Stephen King
I don't think this is one of King's best books, but it is one of his very, very good books. Billy Summers is a one last job story and a hitman with a heart of gold story, but primarily it's a story about the power of stories and storytelling, the goodness of ordinary people, and the intensely loyal relationships that spring out of chance meetings and a powerful, unmet need for love and connection. So, very standard Stephen King (including some wonky stuff at the end--he tries to turn the book's central relationship romantic for, as far as I can tell, no good reason whatsoever), but it mostly works well, and I adored it.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Reread. A Sherlock Holmes continuation/retelling/self-insert fanfic with some MAJOR flaws, also incredibly immersive and very moving. It's in the 'Watson is an idiot' school of retellings, though if I'm remembering correctly that gets better in later books. Or maybe Watson quits showing up in later books. Anyway, this is an old favorite, even if certain parts of it are painful to reread. I'll probably continue with the rest of the series.
The Cass Neary series 1-3 by Elizabeth Hand
My current obsession. Most of the characters whom I tend to think of as antiheroes are actually just heroes with an iffy past or an attitude problem. At least compared to Cass Neary. Cass is a genuine antihero.
She's a photographer who published one book of photos, Dead Girls, in her early twenties before being raped and never really getting over that trauma; at the start of the series she hasn't shot a photo in years and is prone to terrible relationships and random acts of spite, like swiping a stranger's car keys (not because she needs a car--she just hides the keys in a dead, dried-out sea urchin). Cass get tangled up in murder mysteries because she's pathologically self-destructive and can't stay away from people who are damaged in the same ways that she is.
But she's also a sharp observer with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photography and music and film, self-awareness, a sense of humor ("Looks like Sauron's fallen on hard times."), and a good eye. Cass is passionate about photography and photographers, about art and the people who create art. It's almost her only redeeming quality and definitely the one that keeps her head a bearable place to be in.
Of the first three books (Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light), Available Dark might be my favorite; it's set in an especially dreary Iceland, features black metal and a couple of folk-horror-tinged ritual murders, and ends with another ritual that's both extremely disturbing and weirdly, transcendently beautiful. But the whole series is addictive. I'm a little more than halfway through the fourth and so far last, The Book of Lamps and Banners, and bracing for withdrawal.
(In my head, the True-Detective-style credits sequence for the prestige TV adaptation these books deserve is set to "White Foxes" by Susanne Sundfør.)
I still don't feel like I have the bandwidth to write fic or get as involved in fandoms as I used to be, but I'm hoping to at least get back to tracking my reading, hopefully in a way that's a bit more organized and substantial. But for the sake of getting the ball rolling again, here are a few quick and dirty highlights from the past month or so:
Billy Summers by Stephen King
I don't think this is one of King's best books, but it is one of his very, very good books. Billy Summers is a one last job story and a hitman with a heart of gold story, but primarily it's a story about the power of stories and storytelling, the goodness of ordinary people, and the intensely loyal relationships that spring out of chance meetings and a powerful, unmet need for love and connection. So, very standard Stephen King (including some wonky stuff at the end--he tries to turn the book's central relationship romantic for, as far as I can tell, no good reason whatsoever), but it mostly works well, and I adored it.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Reread. A Sherlock Holmes continuation/retelling/
The Cass Neary series 1-3 by Elizabeth Hand
My current obsession. Most of the characters whom I tend to think of as antiheroes are actually just heroes with an iffy past or an attitude problem. At least compared to Cass Neary. Cass is a genuine antihero.
She's a photographer who published one book of photos, Dead Girls, in her early twenties before being raped and never really getting over that trauma; at the start of the series she hasn't shot a photo in years and is prone to terrible relationships and random acts of spite, like swiping a stranger's car keys (not because she needs a car--she just hides the keys in a dead, dried-out sea urchin). Cass get tangled up in murder mysteries because she's pathologically self-destructive and can't stay away from people who are damaged in the same ways that she is.
But she's also a sharp observer with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photography and music and film, self-awareness, a sense of humor ("Looks like Sauron's fallen on hard times."), and a good eye. Cass is passionate about photography and photographers, about art and the people who create art. It's almost her only redeeming quality and definitely the one that keeps her head a bearable place to be in.
Of the first three books (Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light), Available Dark might be my favorite; it's set in an especially dreary Iceland, features black metal and a couple of folk-horror-tinged ritual murders, and ends with another ritual that's both extremely disturbing and weirdly, transcendently beautiful. But the whole series is addictive. I'm a little more than halfway through the fourth and so far last, The Book of Lamps and Banners, and bracing for withdrawal.
(In my head, the True-Detective-style credits sequence for the prestige TV adaptation these books deserve is set to "White Foxes" by Susanne Sundfør.)
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I've been hearing good things about Billy Summers and look forward to reading it.
I read the first three Cass Neary books and I also enjoy how Cass is often terrible and almost always destructive or self-destructive or both, and yet I like her even though I wouldn't want her anywhere near me in real life. My favorite was Hard Light, mostly because the background and premise fascinated me so much. That too had a moment of transcendent beauty.
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Billy Summers is peak late-stage Stephen King, in my opinion--when you get to it, I think you'll enjoy it.
Oh my gosh, the moment in Hard Light where they discover the...I'm completely blanking on what it's actually called, but the ancient camera/sunprint in the cave was wonderful. I think the fact that Cass really appreciates beauty does a lot for making her a character you want to spend time with (in the pages of a book--I also wouldn't want her anywhere near me in real life, especially since so many people she meets end up dead). The connection to that other artist across time was just really well done.
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Yes, that's what I meant in Hard Light. So beautiful. I think it's a camera obscura.
I also loved the bit in the Iceland book where she gets called a Valkyrie, and seems to be led by a raven.
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There's a nice callback to Cass being a Valkyrie in The Book of Lamps and Banners, too. I just finished that one today and will try to write up my thoughts at some point, but it's partly set in Sweden, so there's more cool mythology references and another very touristy but bleak landscape.
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100% agreed about The Beekeeper's Apprentice. It's got several significant flaws and various things that really don't hold up and I want to argue loudly with King's conception of Watson... and yet it's still an old favorite and compulsively readable when I'm in the right mood for this particular variety of competence porn flavored with nostalgia. And sometimes, I am.
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"Competence porn flavored with nostalgia" is exactly right! I think I first read the book when I was around the same age Mary is in the opening chapters, so I imprinted on it hard and didn't pick up on some of its wonkier parts at the time. But that's part of what makes it precious to me, and it's still one of my biggest favorites in the "smart people doing smart things smartly" category of books.
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Beekeeper's Apprentice, oh man that takes me back. We had the audiobook through Audible when I was younger, looks like Jenny Sterling's narration, and I remember listening to it a whole bunch of times. I don't know that I ever got into the sequels but I think I must have listened to this one...four or five times? I hope you're enjoying the reread!
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BK was one of my absolute favorites in high school, so I was super happy/relieved that it still mostly holds together--still a favorite, even if I have a few more nits to pick with it now.
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I'm glad to hear it still (mostly) holds together—looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the sequels, too!!
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The butler's poisoning his boss in order to send super-secret codes to the Germans. And their first meeting is so very good--that's one of the parts that's always stuck in my memory, too.
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Oh so that's what the butler was doing! I'd totally forgotten—I think I thought he'd actually murdered someone, presumably just off the idea that "the butler did it."
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I'm so, so excited to have somebody to reread and discuss with! My copy of the second book just came in from Thriftbooks, so I'll try to get to it soon. And if at any point you decide to post your thoughts, I'd love to read them. :)
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I've just hit the part where they're on the run, at Mycroft's—I do remember enough to know who's behind this, and when I got to the reason she was staying later at the dorms I went 😬 It's funny, though, I remember this all happening in the last 30% of the book, maybe, not so much the last 50%; I suppose memory plays tricks on us. She's just disguised herself as Dr Watson—I suppose I'll have to see what's next!
(Though this also means I've gotten through the part which has certain reasons it doesn't age well. There's certainly some good stuff in the kidnapped child plotline, but—their disguises would be bad enough, the subsequent faking of child abuse with those disguises to get arrested, and Holmes' easy dismissal of the police violence his identity undergoes—I had not remembered all of these details, and wow. There's still parts I like in this arc—Mary rescuing Jessie, their conversation after she's rescued—but /wow/.)
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I know right?? Knowing the culprit makes certain passages so much more sinister! And it's still a pretty good solution to the mystery, I think, even though I come to these books more for the characters than the mysteries.
I'm so excited that you're still reading this and enjoying it! Btw, I just finished the second book in the series, and I'll try to write up my thoughts at some point soon--it's also very immersive, and I actually liked it quite a bit more this time around than I did as a teenager.
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1994, apparently! Which to be fair is...28 years ago, apparently??? Man it does not feel that long ago.
And yes!! There's this part too:
My maths tutor was away, illness of some kind, and I was secretly grateful not to have that pressure. The woman who tutored Greek was also away, vanished into maternity over the Christmas holidays.
And of course you have the Greek tutor's absence to camouflage the significance of the maths', but it's right there. I'd forgotten how much she'd mattered to Mary, too, though that too is foreshadowed—I think it's a very satisfying solution but more as it relates to Mary's character and the arc of the story than the mystery exactly; which, as you say, are the reasons one comes to the book in the first place.
Today I finished the first book and then read all of the second—which I think I must have read before after all; I'd forgotten so much of it but I recognized Mary's question about Holmes' fairies, at the end. Heh. Reading it did bring back some memory if my first time through, and I think I appreciated it more this time as well. And now I've started the third—hopefully I can actually write my thoughts about these up sometime soon!
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So happy that we're both reading the books together! It makes the experience even more fun.