Mailbox Monday #20

Happy Monday! It is going to be absolutely sweltering here today and tomorrow. Northern Europe is not made for 37 degree weather, it just isn't. It might not feel like a high temperature to people form different climates, but none of our houses etc. are set up to mitigate this kind of heat. While it will suck for me I'll probably be fine, since I've kept the next two days clear of appointments so I can keep an eye on myself and my cat. But this is going to be really rough on the elderly and those who underestimate it. So fingers crossed it all turns out ok! But enough about that, let's get into books!

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists. It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran (Faber and Faber, 11/3/2022)

A book with all of life’s answers, if only you can find it...

Rare book dealer Lily Albrecht has just been given a tip-off about The Book of the Most Precious Substance, a 17th century manual rumoured to be the most powerful occult book ever written, if it really exists at all.

With some of the wealthiest people in the world willing to pay Lily a fortune to track it down, she embarks on a journey from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris.

If she finds it, Lily stands to gain more than just money. This could erase the greatest tragedy of her life. But will Lily’s quest help her find some answers, or will she lose everything in search of a ghost?

I love books about books, books about secret books, and books with magic books. So obviously The Book of the Most Precious Substance was an immediate yes for me. But then I'm also super curious about the question whether there is anything in my life I'd willingly erase.

The Guest Lecturer by Martin Riker (Grove Atlantic, 1/24/2023)

In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.

Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a hero’s quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.

With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime. 

As a young academic, this book is going to hit me where it hurts, I think! I'm also very much someone whose mind wanders at night, who starts on a work thing and then an hour later is contemplating something random about The Lord of the Rings before contemplating climate change another hour later. So yes, The Guest Lecturer is probably exactly for me.

My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig (Grove Atlantic, 2/7/2023)

Tessa is a successful white woman writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more—but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship.

While Tessa’s husband Milton enjoys Charlie’s company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie’s mixed-race Asian wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa’s martini-fueled declaration that Wah is “an insult to womankind.” As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether.

An exercise in empathy, an exploration of betrayal, and a charged story of the thrill of a shared connection—and the perils of feminine rivalry—My Nemesis is a brilliantly dramatic and captivating story from a hugely talented writer whose portrayals are always gracefully phrased and keenly observed.

This book sounds absolutely fascinating! It will probably be quite a tough read, since I know I've still got some internalised misogyny to deal with myself and Tessa does as well. So this will be one of those books through which I'll learn something about myself, which is both great and difficult.

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott (Knopf Doubleday, 9/13/2022)

The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist—have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive a mysterious inheritance, the siblings are reunited—only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs. 

Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas’ ancestral home in Russia—but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine’s blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family’s traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide—erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future.  

An enchanted adventure illuminated by Jewish myth and adorned with lyrical prose as tantalizing and sweet as briar berries, Thistlefoot is an immersive modern fantasy saga by a bold new talent.

Yesss a fairytale read for early autumn! This comes out a day after my birthday, so this is going to be an early birthday read for me. Just a little treat, something lovely and maybe a little scary to bring us into winter. Also, love the cover!

That's it for me today! Which one grabs your attention the most? And what's new in your mailbox?