potentialities

What I've been reading

I read The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil, which has a highly compelling title. Said beard is the irruption of chaos into a world of disturbingly perfect monotony, along the lines of Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time. There are all kinds of weirdly perfect details in the artwork that make it oddly compelling.

I read Shirley, thus finishing all of Charlotte Brontë's completed novels. I found it pretty spiky and offputting, especially at first, although one advantage of the way it is plotted, almost aggressively lacking in unity, is that if at any point you are not enjoying the sort of book it is you just have to keep reading and it will inevitable hare off in some direction that you may like better, although this will inevitably pass in its turn.

I read Stolen Magic, the sequel to A Tale of Two Castles, and I was really quite disappointed in it. Elodie and her new employer, basically Sherlock Holmes in dragon form, end up embroiled in a mystery back on the boring island which Elodie had just escaped from to seek her fortune. There's a bunch of stuff about brunkles and bees which is muddled and dull, and also I don't remember anything about either of them even being hinted at in the first book.

I read A School for Brides, the sequel to Patrice Kindl's last book, Keeping the Castle. This is the first time she's written a sequel to anything, actually—usually each of her books is completely different and they come out exactly four years apart, except for the ten-year gap between Lost in the Labyrinth and Keeping the Castle when I began to despair. This book continues in a similar comic pseudo-Regency vein, although the number of eligible ladies having been significantly increased, the amount of pages devoted to each of them has correspondingly decreased, but I did still find them all quite delightful.