Letters from the Age of Reason by Nora Hague

I’m not sure how this book ended up in our house.  I think Stacey got it as a gift several years ago.  It’s been sitting on the To Be Read shelf for longer than I can remember (though, since it was written in 2002, that’s our earlier limit).

I picked it up a year or two ago, I think for lack of anything better to read on hand.  I’ve been picking it up on and off since then.

This is another historical fiction from the era of slavery (set just before and during the Civil War), and like The Unknown World, it’s not my typical fare.  But it’s a well written first novel, and like Jane Austen’s first novel, it is composed entirely of letters.  The book tackles the oddity of relationships between slaves, owners, and those with uncomfortably mixed ancestry.

I like to look up authors I’m unfamiliar with, but Nora Hague hasn’t got much info out there.  A few reviews of this book, no wikipedia page, and a Facebook page with the french edition of this book as the profile picture.  Her author note at the back of the book says she’s working on her second novel… it must be a long one.

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville

Curt Holman loaned me this book, a favorite of his daughter’s.

My only experience with China Mieville thus far has been Perdido Street Station, which is a quirky but engrossing book. Mieville seems like the writer that the term “speculative fiction” was coined for, as one hesitates to call it fantasy or science fiction.

Un Lun Dun is a surprising and creative book intended for kids, but entertaining for adults.

Jumping between what I’ll call an Un-World and this world, it has a down the rabbit hole feel, but more grounded than the Alice surrealism. The world of unLondon thrives on the cast-offs of the real London, where animated garbage and eccentric creatures abound. A crisis that threatens unLondon and London alike can seemingly only be thwarted by a prophesied young girl, but Mieville is not so pedestrian to allow that to play out as you would expect.

The vivid description of the action and oddball characters is crying out for a movie adaptation.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Stacey gave me this one Christmas or birthday; It was an NPR recommendation. It is one of those books that sit on the To Be Read shelf, looking somewhat appealing, but always overshadowed by a flashier title next to it.

But I made a decision to attack those piles of attractive-but-somehow-second-choice books on my shelf, and this was the second one from that list (The Time Traveler being the first).

It’s a very good book, if a book about the institution of slavery can be said to be “good”. It delves into the lesser known quirks of the time, such as free blacks living amongst slaves, and, in fact, owning slaves. If a paper is all that stands between a black man and slavery, what happens when the paper is eaten?

As interesting (and unsettling) as the topic was, the real shining point was the storytelling technique. There was a smooth jumping back and forth in time, often pausing in the middle of a paragraph in the “present” and telling the full fate of a character in a sentence or two. It reminded me of “Run, Lola, Run”, when we would often see a series of snapshots showing the fate of someone Lola bumped into.

The characters are complex and nuanced, and there are a lot of them, all deftly painted.

It’s not my typical sort of book, but I’m glad I read it, possibly because of that.