2024 read #142: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

232 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reading this book immediately after Magic: A History wasn't serendipity; I had Cunning Folk checked out from the library and waiting. It provides some of the depth I had longed for when reading Magic. As a history, Cunning Folk offers a Peter Ackroyd-like sampler of primary-source anecdotes from aristocrat and commoner alike, spanning from the Medieval through the Early Modern period. It isn’t memorably well-written or especially eye-opening, but it’s solid enough.

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2024 read #140: A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper.

A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper

239 pages

Published 1981

Read from November 9 to November 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Eight long years ago — maybe three or four subjective lifetimes ago — I was reading the first book in this series, The Road to Corlay, on a fateful Tuesday in November.

I already owned A Dream of Kinship, but in half-conscious superstition, I avoided reading it afterward, packing it up in moving boxes as I spent the following eight years bouncing from New York to Ohio to North Carolina and back to New York. Now that the worst has happened again, and Trumpenfascism has thrown open the door to Christian Nationalism, I figured: Fuck it. Might as well go ahead and read the book I’d irrationally been avoiding this whole time.

In a future of melted ice caps, sea level rise, a militant church, and a return to feudal polities, the Kinsmen are a standard-issue love-and-brotherhood movement founded by a standard-issue white guy messiah in The Road to Corlay. Kinship picks up a few months after the death of Thomas the piper, with the church and its secular enforcers moving in to destroy the heretical Kinsmen, even as a child is born and grows up into another white guy messiah in his own right.

Sci-fi authors of this era couldn’t get enough of the idea that a very special white boy would convince the world that cosmic love held the universe together. The setting’s gender norms are straight out of the 1950s. Women characters who start out as fighters either die or live long enough to become madonnas. The faith of the Kinsmen is little more than hippy-ish Christianity, spiced with some far-out clairvoyance. Such powers are hereditary — meaning the messiah, whether the author consciously thought it through or not, has a stink of eugenics around him.

There’s also a through-line that the church’s officials are attracted to boys, which isn’t presented in the sense of “men in power like to abuse power,” but more in the gross old “haha, priests are gay” line of bullshit. 

Cowper’s prose was the highlight of The Road to Corlay, but even that was a disappointment here. Much of Kinship is couched as a historical review looking back on the events of the novel from the perspective of the religion they promulgated. That can be a fun narrative device, but it’s applied inconsistently here, and, in my opinion, not done well.

I don’t think I’ll bother to persevere into The Tapestry of Time. Well, probably not. Maybe four years from now, if I’m still around.

2024 read #139: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

191 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 1 was the very first book I started reading after my partner R and I moved into our house, back in April. We had moved to New York in part to position ourselves for a potential return to Trumpenfascism, planning either for blue-state protections or for proximity to Canada, should that prove necessary. But as we settled here, and the Harris campaign became the can’t-possibly-miss-it choice for America’s future, those anxieties quieted. I dared to imagine a life of humble satisfaction and community joy instead of mere survival. Dungeon remained a fixture through all of that summer into fall, as I finished the first season of the anime and spaced out the manga.

I finished Dungeon in a different world, a darker and meaner and shallower world. This week, I sped through the last few volumes to wring out what comfort I could. I’ll miss it, going forward.

Volume 14 serves as a loving coda to the characters, quickly but thoroughly tying up loose ends and giving each of the central cast a lovely moment of farewell. Kui’s storytelling continues strong even in this victory lap, doling out just the right amount of closure for the characters and their story. After the unrelenting gallop of the final climax, I’m so happy Kui gave us this last little time with characters I’ll never forget.

2024 read #138: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

175 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Continuing Kui’s unparalleled run with another incredible installment. Stunning art, gorgeous layouts, satisfying storytelling, thematic continuity, payoffs rooted in all the patient character work she put into this series — truly, what more could you want from the penultimate volume of this story? Absolutely wonderful.

2024 read #137: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

239 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read from November 8 to November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

What began as a fun adventure with a clever hook — eating the monsters on our way through a dungeon! — has broadened and deepened into an exploration of desires, consent, grief, and what it means to be alive. Kui’s art and storytelling continue to be astonishingly dynamic, twists and developments conveyed in amazing compositions. At the heart of everything are the characters we’ve gotten attached to, even the secondary and tertiary characters from various factions, all of them drawn together in an extended climax that never feels overwhelming. And as always, the loving central emphasis on food, on cooking, on feeding one another as an act of care.

An excellent installment of a superlative manga. When I began it, I never imagined our world would be what it is here near the end, never expected the comfort I would find in these monstrous times. I’ll be so sad to reach Dungeon’s end.

2024 read #136: E.T. the Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle.*

E.T. the Extraterrestrial in His Adventure on Earth by William Kotzwinkle*

247 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 7 to November 8

Rating: 1-ish out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This was not the world I expected to be living in when I reread this book.

E.T. was a staple of my youth. Not the movie — this novelization. I found it in a thrift store when I was like 11 or 12, and while it never approached Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds on my list of compulsively-reread novels, I read it quite a few times. I read it so often, in fact, that as an adult, I didn’t realize I had never seen the movie until my partner R and I watched it last year.

I found it again last month in a used bookstore, and thought it might be a nice winter season comfort read. I imagined a cozy winter in our little house, secure in the knowledge of incremental social and economic progress under the coming Harris administration. Instead, here we are, right back in the raging shit river of the Trumpenfascist timeline. Instead of gentle winter blues, I’m fucking devastated, crying over everything, scared for the future. I’m so very tired.

But we keep going, because we cannot stop.

Anyway. This book.

I was surprised to learn that E.T. was novelized by William Kotzwinkle. I haven’t read anything else of his, though when I briefly contemplated reading all the World Fantasy Award-winning novels, a few years ago, his name stuck in my head as the author of 1977 winner Doctor Rat. The writing definitely feels like a literary fantasy prose-smith (or at least the 1980s idea of a literary fantasy prose-smith) signing up to cash a check. 

A bit of personal trivia: This book was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, which is portrayed in all its Satanic Panic glory as a gateway to teen hooliganism, drugs, and depravity. Divorced suburban mom Mary frets: "Have I raised my babies to be Dungeon Masters?" I don't think it was intended to be as absurd as it reads today. Though maybe it was a satire on Reaganite family values pearl-clutching, for all I know. 

The book is grotesquely Eighties in other ways. The movie, wisely, leaves out the subplot of E.T.'s attraction to Mary. An actual line from the book: “How ironic it was that the willow-creature, the lovely Mary, pined for her vanished husband while in a closet, close at hand, dwelt one of the finest minds in the cosmos.” The straights should never be allowed to write anything monster-fuckery.

The film is also free of Kotzwinkle's Eighties-man-writing-a-woman flourishes. Every other sentence from her POV may as well be: “I’m horny and I’m desperate and I’d fuck the first man who looked at me, and also I’m a terrible mother who can’t stick to a diet.” There are a lot of jokes about roving perverts for a novelization of a kids' movie.

It’s like what America proved to be on Tuesday: a lot worse than I remembered.