2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.

2026 read #14: The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt.

The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt

132 pages

Published 2023

Read from February 28 to March 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve woefully neglected poetry in my recent reads. The last single author collection I read was May Chong’s Seed, Star, Song last summer. I also want to devote more time reading authors I “know” (in whatever capacity) through social media connections.

This collection begins with the powerful statement of “The Hero With An African Face,” and from there upfromsumdirt’s poems balance adroitly at the intersection of Black embodiment and futures, mythology and exploitation, the narratives stolen away and the narratives constructed anew. Ben Sisko of Deep Space Nine obeys obeahs; Dorothy’s not in Kush anymore.

“The Three Sulas” is a particularly staggering work, a tale of three diasporic witches raising the narrator from the dead. Equally brilliant: a nine page, double columned epic titled “The Underground Rubaiyat.”

upfromsumdirt particularly excels at long form poetry. Sprawling, multi-movement celebrations of embodiment and sexuality leap between the stars. A sequence of thirty-eight poems outlines the legendarium of a character named Fayre Gabbro. I only wish I could sustain poetry at that level. I suppose it would help if I truly knew what I had to say.

2025 read #66: Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley.

Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

319 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 13 to September 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Another installment of the British Library Tales of the Weird anthology series, this one naturally centers stories set in London. Dearnley’s introduction is especially interesting, evoking the danger and weirdness of befogged London, a shifting terrain of social anxieties amid tumultuous change. Her story introductions also provide vital context to the authors and the topics they addressed.

—

“The Telegram” by Violet Hunt (1911). This story was a bit of a speed bump right at the start of the anthology. I went into it expecting a specific vibe from these Tales of the Weird collections, which this literary character study of a woman who just wants to enjoy her own life and flirt with men without settling for any of them did not meet. It’s a good story, a fascinating document from a leading writer of the New Woman era, and its eventual ghostly turn plays well with the story’s examination of women’s autonomy. But I had to get into the right headspace for it, and the story itself sure takes its time. B-

“In the Séance Room” by Lettice Galbraith (1893). Sociopathic men and patriarchy are the horrors of this piece, which portrays both with a frankness all too rare even today. More so now than ever, I understand the fantasy of supernatural justice depicted here. Heavy-handed and melodramatic as fiction of this era often was, it still works. Kinda. C+

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen (1941). Wartime retelling of the namesake ballad, brief but atmospheric. C+

“The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” by Rhoda Broughton (1868). Suspiciously cheap apartments in Mayfair lead to supernatural death. Mildly entertaining, ends rather abruptly. C+

“War,” an extract from London in My Time by Thomas Burke (1934). Fascinating essay on London’s attitudes during the Great War. It’s an eccentric choice for an anthology of London Weird, with the surreality of zeppelin raids and dimmed streetlights supplying the weird, but it’s not entirely misplaced.

“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf (1927). Another creative non-fiction piece, a sensorium of walking and daydreaming through interwar streets, rather reminiscent of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem. Dreamlike and mostly enjoyable. Like Mirrlees, however, Woolf can’t resist throwing in some riff on marginalized populations, here making a spectacle of the disabled segment of society for several paragraphs. 

“Pugilist vs. Poet,” an extract from A Long Way from Home by Claude McKay (1937). My first exposure to McKay’s writing, a too-brief extract on his experiences in London in 1919. Scintillating. I want more!

“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). I read and reviewed this story in the British Library’s Weird Woods anthology. There I wrote: “Machen’s primary interest here appears to be the art of reproducing rambly conversations between older men. All of which is a roundabout path to not much in particular. Only the last page hints at the story this could have been, had Machen been inclined to tell it instead of what we got.”

“The Lodger” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1911). An early novelette treatment of what, a couple years later, this author would turn into the very first novel about Jack the Ripper. Working-class protagonist Mrs. Bunting, onetime foundling and former maid, wants to avoid the obvious conclusions after her lucrative new lodger proves suspicious. The story is less of a murder mystery and more of a complex psychological study in how financial insecurity leads to complicity. B

“My Girl and the City” by Sam Selvon (1957). An absolutely stunning mood piece about the fluctuating city. Again, not sure why it’s in a Tales of the Weird collection, but it’s lovely. A

“The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” by Edith Nesbit (1893?). Quite brief but well-written mood piece of suburban unease. B-?

“The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” by Charlotte Riddell (1882). A disinherited young gentleman, kicked out by his father that morning, shelters for the night in the antique grandeur of a Vauxhall house lately turned into a rental. The hauntings of the house pervade his dreams, and he decides to stay and find the late miser’s treasure. Interesting mainly as a document of how useless the upper classes are without working folk to take care of them. C+

“The Chippendale Mirror” by E. F. Benson (1915). A more conventional eerie tale, in which a secondhand mirror discloses glimpses of the murder it witnessed. Perfectly adequate. C

“Spring-Heeled Jack” by Anonymous (1884). Straightforward write-up of the titular urban legend, detailing alleged exploits then fifty years in the past.

—

And that’s it for London Fog! A major departure from other Tales of the Weird volumes, which all tended to feature tales of the, well, weird. Not much eeriness to speak of, but a good collection all the same, if you ignore its title and the vibe of the rest of the series.

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.

2023 read #141: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Illustrated by Laurence Hausman (1890 edition)

51 pages

Published 1862

Read November 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I found this narrative poem tucked in at the end of a hefty collection of Victorian fantasy titled Beyond the Looking Glass (1973). I’d never heard of it before. My partner R, however, tells me that Goblin Market was the inspiration for Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, which they enjoyed.

The 1973 introduction sums it up, in questionable '70s fashion, as "probably the most extreme and most beautifully elaborated example of repressed eroticism in children's literature." There's nothing explicit in here, of course, but it isn't subtle, either:

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She sucked until her lips were sore;

Then flung the empty rinds away

But gathered up one kernal-stone,

And knew not was it night or day

I'm skeptical that Market was actually intended for children. Much the way that contemporary fantasy by feminine writers (especially feminine writers of the global majority) is cordoned off into YA, my hunch is that any fantastical writing from a woman would have been packed off for the nursery by Victorian publishers. It seems, instead, that this narrative of frugivorous temptation was inspired by Rossetti's own experiences with erotic entanglement, and by her sister's support through the heartbreak. She wrote a "children's" poem, I think, because that was the market open to her.

I haven't much read much poetry from before the current century; rhyming couplets often feel too trite or precious. But Rossetti's language is unexpectedly hypnotic, breathing strange and perilous rhythms of sound throughout her tale.

Also mesmerizing: Laurence Hausman's art nouveau woodcuts that illustrate this edition. Fantastic stuff.

2023 read #138: I Never Liked You Anyway by Jordan Kurella.

I Never Liked You Anyway, or: The Tale of Eurydice & Orpheus as Told by One God and One Musician by Jordan Kurella

165 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 25 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Small press releases are wildly uneven. My most frequent complaint is that many indie books could use more polish, whether that means an editorial once-over for prose that doesn’t flow, or a substantial restructuring to let the narrative breathe. Which is why it’s particularly delightful to read an indie fantasy novel written with this much verve and style.

I Never Liked You Anyway is, as you might have guessed, a postmodern interpretation of the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. We meet them as thoroughly modern college students, orbiting each other in the music department, but their contemporary vibe is augmented by gods and fate and ghosts. Hades can’t get enough of the hot dogs Persephone brings down for him. Orpheus is the most popular student in the department because he carries the favor of Apollo. Eurydice is young and starstruck and gets manipulated by the budding wunderkind, kept under his thumb, her music co-opted. And then she is killed, and her real journey begins, because even the Afterlife is a college of sorts.

Kurella’s prose skill goes far beyond many mainstream fantasists I could name, and his adaptation of Greek mythology is as inventive and fluent as any retelling I’ve read from an author outside of Greece. (Contemporary Greek authors, of course, are doing astounding things with their own myths and folklore.) The story is vibrant and angry and propulsive. Even if you’re skeptical of small press offerings, this one is a must-read.

2023 read #90: Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell by Stephanie Parent.

Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell by Stephanie Parent

99 pages

Published 2022

Read September 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

I hit a bit of a reading skid there. I was trying to do more with my kid before summer ended, and then some awful things happened at one of my favorite periodicals (which I’ll touch on in a later review). So I haven’t had the time or the heart to read much at all these last two weeks.

This is a lovely collection of poems that explores both the darkness and the magic of fairy tales. In “shades of darkness and blood,” Parent explores the cunning and secrecy required to survive as a woman in patriarchal society: the looming violence from wolves and men, the narrative of inferiority and expectation of submission, the steady suffocation of her own desires. Even the most dutiful and demure girl might lust for a taste of blood.

Eroticism and bloodshed pulse through many of the poems, wild and strange cruelties charged with birdsong. Cages and the branches of the wildwood are mirrors of each other; both can promise a form of escape. Love is a curse that binds its children to toil, to brambles, to emptiness. Parents make a wish in hopes for a child; the child is left to bear the curse of its consequence.

Some particular favorites:

“Into the Forest”

“Red Hood in the Woods”

“Clawed Creatures”

“Little Cages”

“Poissonnier”

“Part Two: Little Houses”

“Little Bones”

“The House on Chicken Legs”

“Thorns and Wings”

“Skin and Salt”

“Blessed Curse”

“Epilogue: Disenchanted”

2023 read #78: Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi.

Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi

47 pages

Published 2022

Read July 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A jagged, devastating, gorgeous collection on queerness, trauma, identity, finding the sacred in oneself. I think this is best read after Emezi’s Freshwater; many of Everything’s themes build from that book’s examination of godhood and self-destruction.

Many of these poems explore birth, rebirth, and holiness, godhood and cool river water. Others dig deep into abuse, the violence of those we should have been able to trust, rejection, bigotry. Mortality, shrinking, inwardness all recur; bodies are scarred, broken up, oiled or awash in seawater or fucked in grave dirt. The soul is refashioned, built from scraps of hauntings and butchery and the clothing abandoned by those who hurt us. Heartbreak and sexual violence are no mortal thing, but a shattering of the godhead. “salvation” promises us “even nightmares / can be maps…”

A pervasive motif is what-if: what if we had been able to live our own sacred-in-themselves lives, what if we’d had support, what if we could have avoided the traumas of our pasts. What if love could heal instead of destroying. What if we could just exist, or not exist.

It’s impossible to pick any particular favorites — but here’s a running list of mine anyway:

“what if my mother met mary”

“disclosure”

“what if jesus was my big brother”

“july 28”

“confession”

“‘but why did you feel you had to kill yourself, baby love?’”

“self-portrait as a cannibal”

“what if magdalene seduced me”

“ashawo”

“when the hurricane comes the men protect their brothers”

“i was born in a great length of river”

“self-portrait as an angel”

“mourning”

“self-portrait as an abuser”

“content warning: everything”

2023 read #38: Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair by Marisca Pichette.

Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair by Marisca Pichette

119 pages

Published 2023

Read April 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

Another entry in what is quickly becoming my favorite micro-genre: collections of folkloric fantastic poetry rich with hints of macabre in its deep dark wood.

Miracles and acts of consumption bridge the fictive gap between humanity and the rest of nature. Fairy tales and the wreckage of the Anthropocene collide, entangle in broken remnants, climb in tendrils across each other. We celebrate the forest that grew from the city. We metamorphose from heartbroken beings into rivers; we carve our hearts from trees; trees metamorphose into folkloric beings and into heartbroken people, back into ourselves. Hair and hyphae are inseparable, indistinguishable. Cobweb brides wear veils of moss; bones “too heavy to float” build up reefs. Chalk and childhood intertwine, each scoring meaning upon the other in the pastel rituals of summertime.

in chalk you drew a line

between the Wilderness

and our childhood 

spent in gardens we thought 

were wild, walls we imagined 

(from “Kitchen Garden”)

Informal list of favorites:

“the size of your fist”

“Her ribs are apple wood”

“Kitchen Garden”

“In the Unlocking Room”

“They grow between foundation stones”

“What do you remember about the earth?”

“Maid Stone”

“While Alice sleeps in Wonderland”

“Paper boats”

“Iron, Glass, Slipper”

“Mothers become stepmothers in fairy tales”

“For this meal we thank her”

“The Art of Betraying Others for Food”

“the glaciers made her deep”

“vigil”

2023 read #26: The Dodo Heart Museum by Kelly Weber.

The Dodo Heart Museum: A Fabulist Shadow Box by Kelly Weber

35 pages

Published 2021

Read March 12

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes I think I’m a pretty good writer. I’ve been published a handful of really cool places. My stories and poems have gotten modest praise, a handful of Pushcart nominations, and even earned me a few hundred bucks over the years. Every now and then I waver, though, and feel that my writing lacks substance, misses the depth of ideas and language I truly wish I could explore.

This slender chapbook made me feel completely outclassed as a writer. It feels part oldschool zine, full of collages and drawings and found images, and part document from an unraveling reality. The book opens with instructions on how to tear it apart and reassemble it into a new whole ordered by the wind. What seems at first to be the fictional review of a fantastic poetry collection distorts and fractures into a poem itself; the writer of this fabulous collection swallows her parents backstage. A dictionary defines the verb form of goldenrod and adjective sense of jar. Women grow the teeth of musk deer and permit snow to inhabit their throat. Girls follow creatures into the forest in the dark. Language is full of perils here; folk tales are spun through keyholes. Fragments, a hoard of small secret words, repeat themselves in new orders and disorders: glass and sugar, pearl and blue.

Any one of these prose poems and strange hints of fabulism could be quoted at length and speak Weber’s brilliance better than any line I could write here: “Now she stands beneath the branches, breathing. Now the small white branches are like the shape of her lungs full of air.”

2023 read #16: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
235 pages
Published 2018
Read from February 4 to February 5
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I first tried to read this book way back in March 2019. That was a different world, four years ago. A different place in my life, a ring of time now long gone. I had just packed up my life to begin a new one in Ohio, promising my kid that his new step-parent and I would prepare a new home for him in a new state, that this would all be for the best, my then-partner and I relying on our years of daydreams to scaffold our tender new future, our unfamiliar try at family. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Freshwater back then. I read maybe a quarter of it on my phone, tucked away in a corner of a library waiting for the mud to harden outside while my then-partner took classes; it made my head swim with its baffling, blood-mantled beauty. I put it away and forgot about it while I went through the motions of that new life, one fated from the start to shrivel into nothing but another change, another loss, another disappointment. I’ve learned a lot about myself since then, and the world itself has passed away and been born into a harder, more jagged and fragile shape.

Freshwater made sense to me this time.

How to describe what it is? It is an autobiography as a fable, a religious documentation of the self and and its multiples and madness, a metaphysical Bildungsroman. It is a poem pulled and stretched wide while still soft. It is a catalog of anguish and horror spun with transcendent words. It is grief on top of grief, adrift. And then, finally, acceptance.

2023 read #3: The Saint of Witches by Avra Margariti.

The Saint of Witches by Avra Margariti

92 pages

Published 2022

Read from January 3 to January 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

Avra is one of the rising stars of SFF, particularly in the realm of speculative poetry. This collection is their full-length debut, a mix of original and previously published horror, fantasy, and gothic poetry, with murmurs of deep space and the abyssal sea.

The poems here are queerly sumptuous and vengeful, rotting right off the bone. Ossified hearts, gravediggers, bloated bodies, and putrid apples float by in morbid delectation. Children take delight in destroying the hidden laboratories that had shaped them. Vampires and angels alike sink their teeth into skin. Past lives and future incarnations flutter and rage. Crones, monsters, and demons escape pyres and out from under beds, flay flesh and mix paint from bones, repaying cruelty for cruelty in age-old arithmetic. It’s a swirling cauldron of ideas and imagery that left me breathless.

Some particular standouts for me:

"Witches of Fur and Teeth"

"In the Ever-Night"

"When They Come Back"

"Behold, a Rabbit-Footed Boy"

"Cherry Wine"

"The Birds and the Beasts"

"Lady Vitriol"

"Sugar and Spice"

"The Thing About Stars"

"Darkroom Liaisons"

"Until You Reach Me"

"Blessed Is the Final Girl"

"Mazzeratura or, The Penalty of the Sack"

"The Saint of Witches"

But really, almost all the poems here are all-time bangers.

If I could sum up the mood of this book in two lines, it would be from the close of "Mazzeratura or, The Penalty of the Sack":

They want us to drown, the girl says,

but we float.

2022 read #49: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

109 pages

Published 2019

Read from December 24 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R and I are putting together our own holiday traditions here in our third December living together. Christmas Eve books to swap and read? Yes please!

This is a lovely little novella about the Green Man, the ancient wood, and the shy breath of human connection. It's been in my "cheap treats to buy for myself when I can" list for most of the year, and R just happened to obtain it for our nascent holiday tradition. As with almost every novella I've read this year, it probably could have been longer; more time to linger with the characters in the deep heart of the wood would have been welcome. It's a gorgeous little book all the same, sweet and hinting at deeper wilds in its heart.

2022 read #47: Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson.

Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson

191 pages

Published 2019

Read from October 25 to October 28

Rating: 4 out of 5

An exquisitely realized sapphic retelling of the folktale of the Snow Queen, brittle with winter chill and thrumming with heart-deep warmth. The sense of place is perhaps less precisely realized than in The Bear and the Nightingale, but Gibson makes up for that with the aching realness of her central characters' loss, fear, and desire.

I can't tell if this book was self-published or went through an extremely tiny press. Either way, it's one of the finest self-pubbed or small-press novels I've read so far. It has its share of typos and typesetting errors, especially in the later chapters, but that comes with the territory; I note that more for my own reference than anything, something to be mindful of when I go forward with my own self-publishing adventures.

2020 read #2: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
323 pages
Published 2017
Read from January 20 to January 24
Rating: 4 out of 5

I can’t seem to resist comparing this book to Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child. Both are novels centered on girls growing up with an uncanny connection to the northern wildwood; both are based on Russian folktales; both make a central character out of the taiga landscape itself. Unlike The Snow Child, which squanders its magic and mystery with mundane explanations in order to preserve its literary fiction credentials, The Bear and the Nightingale is explicitly fantasist in conception and outlook, its magic and mystery rooted in the narrative rather than used as cheap set dressings to discard when no longer needed—and is altogether better for it.

It took a while for Nightingale to click into place for me. Most of that has to do with the attention problems that have hindered my reading pace for the last few years; the novel was lovely and evocative from the first page. What I expected from this book, however, was not the story Arden had set out to tell. Nightingale is largely a domestic drama about a feudal landowning family in northern Rus'. The fantastic elements emerge gradually, little touches here and there, enriching the story without commandeering it until the second half or so. A central theme is the lack of choice facing women in this feudal society—growing up, girls know they're destined to be married off, either literally to some man as a "mare for his pleasure," or figuratively to the church as an inmate in a convent. This would have been a fascinating thread had Arden done more with it. As it is, only our hero Vasilisa (or Vasya) seems aware of the unfairness of this arrangement, and only her stepmother Anna is shown to suffer from it. Once Vasya makes the choice to, well, make sure she always has a choice in her life, the shackles of centuries of misogynistic tradition vanish and she finds herself free. If only things were ever that simple.

The best part of Nightingale was its rich, immersive depiction of the seasonal round of the Land of Forests. Cramped, famished winters lead to springs of eager growth and languid summers of lingering twilight. The magic of Arden's Rus' is in the land itself. The imagery of the Winter-King's domain scarcely matches the pure beauty of the forests around Vasya's village. At times, the more fantastical imagery of the feud between the Winter-King and his brother Medved feels like an intrusion from a less beautiful, less interesting book, though thankfully those moments don't last for long. The climax veers from rousing to corny to heartbreaking, ultimately a fairly satisfying cap on a lovely story.

Without spoiling too much, however, I can say that the coda—in which our hero Vasya, gifted with a mighty supernatural steed and ready to ride to all the corners of the world now that she's free of the expectations of late medieval womanhood—feels like a tacky sequel hook from a forgettable YA fantasy.

2019 read #14: Circe by Madeline Miller.

Circe by Madeline Miller
394 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 21 to September 23
Rating: 4 out of 5

Women, throughout the history of the written word, have been relegated to roles as helpmeets, trophies, obstacles, cheerleaders, and convenient plot devices. The few famous literary characters who were women tended to appear as chapters in the narratives of men. The mythological figure of Circe exists almost entirely as an appendage to Odysseus: initially a powerful and dangerous foil for him to overcome, subsequently conquered by his supreme manhood and serving a domestic role for him and his crew. In texts where her existence doesn't revolve around Odysseus, Circe is depicted (more or less literally) as a maneater, a manifestation of female libido and power who transforms her male "victims" into swine.

It's satisfying to read a modern novel based on Circe's legends that, for a good chunk of its length, refuses to center Odysseus as the upright pillar of her story. Miller's treatment explores age-old topics like godhood and mortality and the capricious cruelty of the divine, centering Circe herself as a belittled outcast in a divine household where nymphs are treated merely as bargaining chips and as playthings. She is the focus of her own story—an obvious choice rendered significant by the overwhelming numbers of male storytellers (and readers) who would be baffled by it to this day.

I grew up with the safely sanitized versions of the classical Mediterranean myths we all absorbed. Odysseus was my favorite as a child. A hero who used his brains far more than his brawn sailed directly into my nerdy, shrimpy little heart. I put myself in his sandals when I read a bowdlerized and abridged version of The Odyssey, right up until the end, when I also identified with Telemachus and viewed Odysseus as the esteemable and good father figure I lacked. The chapters in Miller's novel when Odysseus arrives on Aiaia, the romance he shares with the wary and cynical witch Circe has become, felt nice, cozy, fulfilling. All of which made Miller's subsequent deconstruction of that little domestic interlude all the more powerful and eye-opening.

2019 read #3: The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson.

The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson
196 pages
Published 1977
Read from January 20 to January 31
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Cultural appropriation is a complicated topic. Writers of privilege should not use the culture, experiences, or heritage of less-privileged groups in order to enrich themselves—that's straightforward enough, as an ideal. But no culture exists in isolation, and a white writer rejecting cultural interchange in order to write some Western European fantasy about a kingdom that has only ever known blue-eyed blonds is going in exactly the wrong direction. The better ideal would be to enjoy cultural exchange only on terms set by the less-privileged group. (A further suggestion, that white and male authors should just shut up and let other folks have the floor for a while, is hard to refute on philosophical grounds, other than a vague sense that silencing an entire group based on their demographics is probably not the best idea in the long run, and is probably something to be avoided.)

On its surface, The Ice Is Coming appears to be an example of cultural appropriation done with every intent of treating those it steals from respectfully. It is told largely from the perspective of Australian Aborigines, or the People; the monsters, heroes, songs, and cultures that enter the story are treated seriously. Especially considering when it was published, Ice seems to be a remarkably forward-thinking novel. When you read deeper, of course, cracks begin to appear. Not a single member of the People is thanked, credited, or acknowledged in the author's note; no indication is given of how Wrightson obtained her information, or who (if anyone) told her it would be okay. Wirrun, the main character, is repeatedly described as "heavy-browed"—exactly the sort of thing that Eurocentric eyes might dwell on, rather than a distinguishing feature a young man of the People might himself fixate upon. Monsters and spirits from a broad geographical transect of eastern Australia are thrown into the narrative as if on a zoo tour, a selection of curiosities to spice up Wirrun's journey before its ultimate confrontation. A random white "Inlander" shows up to help in the climax, much like Martin Freeman's character in Black Panther.

And all the while I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Is a white person really the one to be writing this tale?"

Come to think of it, I don't know of a single Aborigine author. Not one. (Wrightson certainly doesn't list any for her readers to check out.) I need to Google and educate myself; it's a pretty glaring area of ignorance.

As a work of fiction, Ice falls closer to the 1970s exotic thriller than to the fantasy examples Wrightson cites in her author's note. It has more in common with Jaws or this one thriller I read that had to do with these people stranded in a cave because of an avalanche (I forget the title) than with Earthsea or Middle-earth. Wirrun makes major plot decisions based on newspapers; there are random asides to show how local store owners and tourists are handling the encroaching return of the Ice Age. The reveal of the Eldest Nargun at the end was a nice bit of storytelling magic, but otherwise, Ice is an odd document, ahead of its time in some ways but wholly of its era in terms of narrative conventions.

2019 read #1: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5

When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.

My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.

Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.

Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.

2018 read #14: From the Forest by Sara Maitland.

From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5

Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.

Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.

The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.

Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.