Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Hi did you miss these?

Just finished: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I ended up enjoying the shit out of this. Murder mystery/political palace intrigue set in a world where eldritch abominations threaten to break through the seawall and destroy entire cities every wet season, and magic is done through bioengineering. The brilliant Sherlock Holmes analogue is a mysterious and terrifying elderly woman and the Watson analogue is a dyslexic disaster bisexual kid who's been altered so that he remembers everything he experiences. It's very fun.

Currently reading: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. Look at me I'm reading CanLit! It's about the Winnipeg General Strike, though, so it's not off-brand for me. In the first section, William, a failure of a farm boy, goes off to the Great War against his family's wishes. It's immaculately researched; you get every detail of small town Alberta and the culture shock of moving to the big city of...1914 Calgary. William's father is a coal miner who describes in passionate terms the solidarity that comes from joining a union, but doesn't want his son to go down into the mines himself, so Williams seeks it first in the church, and then amongst his unit. I've gotten to the bit where he's finally being shipped out for France. Quite good so far.

Comments

[sovay]

William's father is a coal miner who describes in passionate terms the solidarity that comes from joining a union, but doesn't want his son to go down into the mines himself, so Williams seeks it first in the church, and then amongst his unit.

Huh. As a slant on a WWI novel, that is compelling to me and I look forward to hearing how it plays out

[sabotabby]

Oh, I know the author and the publisher (Black Rose). Even though the beginning is a straight-up WWI novel, it's inevitably not going to be a straight-up WWI novel.

[selki]

I liked *The Tainted Cup*! I have the sequel's audiobook on hold (*A Drop of Corruption*) and am trying to decide whether to wait the 10 weeks to get it and then longer to listen to it, before listening to the Narrated podcast May discussion on it.

[sabotabby]

Ooh, there's a sequel already?

[rachelmanija]

Yes! It's great!

[selki]

I figured out that your description of *Bread and Stone* reminded me in a way of the description of Willa Cather's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Ours which I've been wondering for a while if I should read (I've read My Antonia and O Pioneers). I wonder if the second half is as pro-war as the critics thought at the time. Now I've made it so far as to bookmark One of Ours in Hoopla. My library system doesn't have Bread and Stone, though.

[sabotabby]

Having now gotten quite into Bread and Stone, it's definitely not pro-war (I wouldn't have guessed that it was). The point of it is that the character is naïve and searching for purpose, and when he comes back from the war he's completely abandoned by his country, his mom dies from the influenza pandemic despite being one of the few people who masks, and he's drawn into the labour movement by one of his army buddies.