A Jungle of Tales

  This book has been getting renewed interest lately due to the fantastic mini-series adaptation that came out in 2019 1 , and rightly so. Simultaneously a Cold War satire and a parody of the supernatural apocalypse movies that came out during that period, it is both hilarious and thought-provoking. Premise:             The demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale have been around since The Beginning 2 as agents of their respective sides, but neither has ever been particularly good at the black-and-white thinking their bosses favor. They even formed The Arrangement, according to which they avoid interfering with each other's activities and even swap jobs when it is convenient. Over the millennia they have become rather fond of the earth, and each other. So when Crowley is handed a basket containing the Antichrist, his immediate thought is to call Aziraphale and try to stop the end of the world from happening. Crowley propos...

  What if Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan lived in the twelfth century? What, you say she might have been burned as a witch? Well, that is certainly a risk to the heroine of this tale, Doctor Vesuvia 1 Aurelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar - Aurelia for short. But not one that is going to stop her from pursuing justice!       She ends up in Cambridgeshire when the head of the medical school in Salerno 2 receives a request from King Henry II for a 'master of the art of death' to help investigate some murders and absentmindedly dispatches Aurelia and a small team...without reflecting that a sharp-tongued female doctor, her Muslim eunuch bodyguard Mansur, and Jewish fixer/investigator companion Simon might be a tad conspicuous in rural England. The local Christian populations have blamed a series of gruesome child murders on their Jewish neighbors, who have had to take refuge in a castle - where, of course, they can't do the money-making stuff th...

  I quite like Latin American magical realism novels. So when I heard that this genre not only had a tradition in other regions, but that there was a Soviet magical realism story involving the devil and his cigar-smoking cat running amok in Stalin's Russia, I knew I had to check it out. Premise:        The book starts out with an editor of an anti-religious literary magazine critiquing an author's most recent poem, which is critical of Jesus. The editor points out that this isn't the point - the point is that Christ never existed. To which a strange foreigner pipes up to say that this is complete nonsense, and he should know: he was there. By the time we get a flashback of Pilate meeting a pleasantly eccentric but probably-non-divine Yeshua, and see Satan (AKA Woland) and his cohorts starting to cause apparently random havoc among Moscow's modern-day artistic and literary scene, I started hearing 'Sympathy for the devil' playing in my head 1 - and it stayed ...

This book tells the story of a genetically-engineered apocalypse that befalls the human world as we know it, and a new Edenic world that rises from its ashes, from the point of view of "Snowman" the last remaining old human (so far as he knows, anyway). Things I liked:   The story unfolds almost like a mystery, making it quite a page-turner. How did this apocalypse happen? Who are these new humans, these "children of Crake" or "Crakers" that Snowman talks about, and why does he feel so alienated from them? The descriptions of the pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse worlds are also really vivid, with lots of description of the plants, the animals, the smells, the hazards. It is a very immersive story. Things I didn't like:   Snowman is an unreliable narrator, which is fine. But I would have expected that, since he knew both the title characters, we would find out more about them. And the lack of development of the female title character in particular ...

      The circus arrives without warning...It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds or crimsons to be seen...When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sky, the sign appears...Le Cirque de R ê ves (The Circus of Dreams).      The name of the titular circus in this tale is appropriate, as the whole book has a magical, dreamlike quality. The story probably counts as "magical realism" since it takes place in our world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and only a few characters have magical abilities, but as a reader you spend so much time in the spaces influenced by the magical characters that it can feel like a separate fantasy world.    The circus is the venue for a competition between Marco and Celia, two young magicians. They are pitted against one another by their mentors, who have differing philosophies of magic. Celia's father fav...

  I've written previously about my 'problematic fave', HP Lovecraft . So imagine my delight to discover in 'Annihilation' a Lovecraftian story told from the perspective a xenophile rather than a xenophobe. The narrator is 'the biologist', an unnamed female ecologist who approaches the mysteriously altered landscape of "Area X" with an attitude one could describe as: "This is creepy, but not horrifying. So the universe is full of forces and entities that don't care about humanity? What else is new? I want to know more about this place." Area X is clearly dangerous; All previous expeditions have come to grief in various ways. But it is also lush and full of life, lacking any human pollutants. The life they find is seriously weird at times - some of the animals have oddly human characteristics, for instance - but the biologist has always felt more at home with nature than with people, so she deals with that with more e...