Then and Now #40 (12/6/23 - 18/6/23)

Happy Sunday and welcome to the new year!  The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week

Happy Sunday to y´all! I hope you've all had a good week. Mine's been pretty busy with work, prepping my seminars, catching up on the feedback I needed to give to students for their presentations, and doing my office hours. We're also electing a new Dean at our faculty, so I needed to attend a meeting for that. But it's been good busy. I've had loads of days where I still have 80% of my phone battery left by 7pm, which I use as a silly indicator to see how productive I've been. More battery = less phone time, so I think I've been pretty productive this week xD 

I also joined a Bollywood dance class at the start of the semester and we're doing a performance in July, so we are doing extra practices now. It's super fun, especially cause we're currently doing a routine to my favourite Bollywood song, Kajra re. I'm not half as elegant as is required, but I am having loads of fun! I also decided on another harebrained enterprise, which is potentially starting a book podcast, as if I don't have enough things to do and am not already struggling staying on top of this blog... But I'm enjoying the creativity process, so even if it goes nowhere, I'm having fun. Maybe if I get an episode up, I'll share it here cause I'd love some feedback from book connoisseurs! Also, if it does get going and anyone would like to join me on there to talk about a book, hit me up! 

Posted last week:

• Review: Mountains Made of Glass by Scarlett St. Clair
• Review: Marionette by Antonia Rachel Ward
• Review: Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America by Audrey Claire Farley
• I absolutely loved this book, even if it covers a difficult topic. Farley has done so much research and yet has also written a very readable book.

Recommendation

This is the song we're currently dancing to, it is so much fun! It just has a great beat and is so propulsive, if that makes any sense? I'm always grinning like an idiot whenever we're practicing the choreography xD Enjoy Kajra re!

Mailbox Monday

Only the first book is one that actually came in on NetGalley this week, the other two I got a week or two ago and wanted to share as well.

The Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami, trans. by Ted Goossen (9/19/23; Stone Bridge Press)

From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty—in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don’t apply.

Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea. 

I just loved the mysterious cover, and then I read the blurb and was absolutely sold. A shape-shifter? A fox spirit? A woman desperate to return to the sea?! Sign me up!

With Regrets: A Novel by Lee Kelly (9/5/23; Crooked Lane Books)

Seven courses, seven guests, twenty-four hours that will obliterate everything.

When recent NYC-transplant Liz Brinkley and her husband are invited to an exclusive soiree by their neighbor, “lifestyle guru” Britta Harris-Che, Liz’s immediate thought is hell no. Britta is insufferable, and Liz is wary to leave her young children with a barely-teenage babysitter. And yet she RSVPs anyway, trying to extend an olive branch to her withdrawing husband, who seems desperate to get in with the cliquey elite.

They’ve barely made it through their first round of champagne when a “red alert” comes through their phones, and every channel on the television tells the same story: strange atmospheric masses, reported to look like “glimmering clouds,” have been spreading through major U.S. cities and killing anyone they touch. Authorities have just one clear directive: Find shelter. Immediately. 

 A collective panic seizes the dinner party; all the guests have children at home. In the mad dash to their cars, they see it: a shimmering net floating over the town. The street is littered with wrecked cars and dead bodies. Leaving now is not an option. Instead, the group launches into survival mode, grabbing supplies to take shelter in the hosts’ wine cellar. But everyone has very different opinions about the best plan from there.

Liz becomes increasingly willing to do anything it takes to get back to her children. As the glimmering clouds continue to kill anyone who steps outside, the tensions and suspicions among the party guests near a boiling point. But she begins to realize that there may be others in that cellar even more desperate than she is.

A mysterious dinner, a catastrophe, and relationships on the brink? Yes, this sounds like my kind of book! I love everything that it has going on, so hopefully Lee Kelly also brings it all together into a cohesive whole! Also, isn't the cover with the obliterated and obscured faces fascinating?

Small Change: The Complete Trilogy; Farthing, Ha'penny, Half a Crown by Jo Walton (9/5/2023; Tor Publishing)

Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain’s upper classes never faltered, while British ships ferried “undesirables” across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east.

In three brilliant novels set between the late 1940s and the early 1960s of this alternate world, Jo Walton explores how a free society can become an unfree one, how easily traditional powers-that-be can accommodate themselves to tyranny, and what a difference a few courageous men and women can make. Alternately charming, heartstopping, and astonishingly deft, this trilogy is a work of total relevance to our modern age.

I read a short story collection by Jo Walton not too long ago and really enjoyed it, so when I saw this on NetGalley I was super intrigued. I'd never heard of the trilogy before, but it sounds like a fascinating exploration of freedom and power.

So that's it for me this week! What are you reading? And how you doin'?