BooksIWouldHaveToldMySisterAbout

I read the new Peter Swanson book yesterday, started in the morning, took a three hour nap, and then finished in the late afternoon. It’s his tenth book, titled A Talent For Murder.

It was a lovely day to spend reading. It rained all morning, and the apartment was dark and cozy. Stretch spent a lot of it on my chest, purring contentedly. Jenny came down to investigate now and then, reminding us that she’s here too. Sometimes they are on either side of me and I can pet them both, and that’s a real accomplishment honestly.

A Talent For Murder features Martha, a librarian who has a cat, came from Missouri and marries a stranger that she then suspects of being a serial killer.

Of course it’s not that straightforward. It never is.

Martha gets into contact with an old schoolfriend who just so happens to be Lily Kinter from The Kind Worth Killing and The Kind Worth Saving. Aka my favorite Peter Swanson character, though Henry Kimball is not too far behind. To be fair though, there’s not many of his characters that I don’t like. Even the murderers are interesting in their own terrible ways.

I reread Peter Swanson’s books every year. Not the same ones always. Sometimes I alternate.

The Girl With a Clock For A Heart (Published 2014) Read: 2016 & 2020

The Kind Worth Killing (2015) Read: 2016, 2018, 2020 & 2022

Her Every Fear (2017) Read: 2018 & 2020

All the Beautiful Lies (2018) Read: 2018, 2020 & 2021

Before She Knew Him (2019) Read: 2018, 2019, 2020 & 2021

Eight Perfect Murders (2020) Read: 2019 & 2021

Every Vow You Take (2021) Read: 2020 & 2023

Nine Lives (2022) Read: 2021 & 2023

The Kind Worth Saving (2023) Read: 2022 & 2023

A Talent for Murder (future book! to be published in 2024!) Read: 2023

Bonus: The Christmas Guest: Read earlier in 2023 and will probably read again this month.

I don’t believe these statistics are entirely correct because I’m almost certain I’ve read Her Every Fear more than twice. See also Eight Perfect Murders. On the other hand, I know very well I’ve only read Every Vow and Nine Lives twice, and both of their rereads were this year. They are probably the only two that don’t grab me as much as the others. I don’t feel like the cult in Every Vow is fleshed out enough…or maybe I just wanted more creepy horror! I like the premise of Nine Lives and yet it also frustrates me. The murders don’t seem fair, which is an odd thing to complain about a murder I know, but there you go.

I love each of the others in its own particular way.

I love Hen with her art and her obsessive nature. I always wish things ended differently somehow for Matthew, that he’d somehow get help, even though it’s far more realistic that he doesn’t.

Eight Perfect Murders always leaves me feeling melancholy. I tend to semi- Memento myself about the ending every time. How! How! Because I want it to be different, I suppose.

If you’ve ever seen a really beautiful girl, you just can’t really blame George for falling for Audrey, you just can’t. Similarly you might feel a little unnerved by Harry’s attraction to Alice, his stepmother, but you still get it.

Alice, pale, unsettling, beautiful Alice. And Joan, devious, menacing, intriguing…These two feel more like sisters than Joan and her actual sister honestly. Though obviously they would be a dangerous set of siblings. (Murder siblings…that’s what I would like to see Peter Swanson write next. Just throwing that out there to the universe. I’m a sucker for murder siblings.*)

There is almost always a character I would rather not get murdered, even if I feel they sometimes deserve it. (Looking at you, Corbin Dell.)

But Lily Kinter with her love of nature and animals, Monk’s House, and that buried well…Let’s just say I was very glad to have her back yet again in A Talent For Murder.

There is deep affection for books and reading, poetry and mysteries within all these pages. I find this deeply comforting in spite of all the murder. Also I’ve grown fond of Maine over the years and would like to visit someday.

There is nearly always a cat.

*maybe I should write murder siblings…

Discuss...

I am building a book fortress around me in my mind*. I just finished Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna (Unlikeable female characters!** Out in June 2024! Sorry you have to wait, people-who-don't-get-future books-delivered-to-your-email.) Yesterday I read Self-Portrait by Trina Schart Hyman, one of my favorite illustrators, who lived a really interesting life and honestly I would like a full length memoir. I've had the book in question sitting on my library book table for several months now, hoarding it as the book dragon I am. The only reason I haven't bought it on thriftbooks yet is that it's just expensive enough to make me think about it before I put it in my cart. One of these days though...

I wish you were here, filling our home with more books. These days the packages from thriftbooks and abe are always mine.

Someone else finally requested Self-Portrait though, and so I finally read it so I could return it for the next patron. Only I forgot to bring it to work with me today, so it's just sitting on my kitchen table, oops.

Before that I read The Hungry Dark, by Jen Williams, who you might recall is the author of A Dark and Secret Place (but NOT Mirrorland, even though I always think she is for a moment. That’s Carole Johnstone. You read The Blackhouse a few months before you died. I came across it on your goodreads the other day. Even in death, you're still ahead of me in books. Only fitting I suppose.) and Games for Dead Girls which I read a few days before that. I've now read all of Jen Williams' books, and have to wait impatiently for her next one.

I wish you were here to hear 'okay the mountain really was just actually HUNGRY.'

Previously I mentioned I was saving Bright & Deadly Things by Lexie Elliott. I'm glad I did. I read it when I came back from England, and it was exactly what I needed. The grief parts didn't so much hit close to home as open the front door, walk right in and make a cup of tea.

“There have been a few disapproving faces who clearly feel I've moved on too quickly, but thus far I've managed not to get exercised about that; I can only imagine they are lucky enough to have never lost anybody they're close to. Otherwise they would know that you never move on exactly: you take the person you've lost with you. And nobody else can ever tell you how you should grieve.”

Obviously, losing a spouse is different than a sibling, but you know. I will make new friends since losing you, I already have. But there is no replacing you. There will never be another sister like you. I know we said it all the time, I know we were aware of how lucky we were, and I’m fucking glad of it. I’m so glad we were sisters. I take you with me wherever I go, and so I am not just sitting alone on the couch with the cats, you are still there too. If I could, I would lean my head on your shoulder and say it again. I love you, Eames.

*I can just imagine someone casually pointing out that technically I could build a physical fortress of books too, and believe me, if I could, I would live in it and never leave.

**I mean, I enjoyed them obviously.

Discuss...

how is grief categorized who decides when and where and why things should be memorialized? where is the box for the mundane relentless little daily attacks

like when I realize that the laundry detergent bought last when you were alive is nearly gone, shampoos I bought for you to try, ibuprofen bottle finally empty, no one else is using up the wash clothes. i'm doing laundry just for me, and it's stupid. what I am going to do with all these towels?

how I am supposed to remember what spices we have in the kitchen, when I can't text you about them? who else thinks about Hilary McKay when saying 'cardamom' even though that's not right, Cause Caddie was named after cadmium, not a spice

all these library books, on the side table, taking up space like always, you never complained, who I am supposed to talk to about them now?

the frozen dinners we would split on hard nights, are simply there now, leaving me half to take to work the next day convenient, sure.

oh but I would give that convenience up, just to have you back in the world again.

let us split half a pizza and watch some tv together before we have to get up and face the world again

I could bear anything, when you were here.

Discuss...

New Scott Carson book on Edelweiss.

One of my favorite parts of the day, any day, was when we'd text each other that a new book by one of our authors had appeared on Netgalley or Edelweiss+. Sometimes the book has just been added so we couldn't request it yet, only stare at it hungrily until the request or download button had been added. Sometimes it was already available and that was pure magic. A book from the future just dropped into our laps.

The new Scott Carson is either called In a Town Like Yours or Lost Man's Lane, and again is either thriller or horror. I prefer In a Town Like Yours, and hopefully it'll be horror, though obviously I have nothing against thrillers. Where They Wait was so good though. Probably I should finally read The Chill.

I finished the new Simone St James the other day (Murder Road). V good, v murdery, but sad at the same time. Can you really be angry at ghosts who just want their stories resolved? Yes, it's terrible they're killing people, but grief makes people do strange things, even dead people. Also my brain keeps trying to sing it to the tune of Thunder Road.

Other new books I'm looking forward to are Safe and Sound (Laura McHugh), A Step Past Darkness (Vera Kurian), The Hitchcock Hotel (Stephanie Wrobel) and The Alone Time (Elle Marr.)

The spreadsheet of authors I keep track of has now reached 140. Only about seven of those are men. I should organize it a little better, condense the lists of books I've read into neat little lists, but I like to watch them spreading. Blue green for the books I've read. Fern green when I've been approved/acquired them. Gray when they've been newly added to Goodreads, Edelweiss, etc.

There are authors that have only one book that I check in on occasionally. Hoping they'll have something new. Is it better to have written one book and nothing else, or nothing at all? Is it worse?

I also read All Our Lies Are True (Lisa Manterfield) and it was...fine.

(Spoilers for All Our Lies Are True................................................................)

It took the main character a very long time to realize she was the one who'd accidentally killed her twin sister when they were kids and that her family had been keeping it from her AND medicating her ever since then. Anytime someone has a ritual of nighttime cocoa, or morning smoothies that they insist you drink, you know you're being drugged.

The strangest thing though was that it was set in England, written by an English author but it just didn't...feel like it. The author has apparently lived in California for some time. Either way it didn't satisfy the 'England book' want that is eternally there.

This problem is partly why I haven't gotten very far in Ruth Ware's latest either. (Zero Days). It doesn't feel like it's set in England, and I can't tell and it bugs me. But also the plot hasn't grabbed me like her other books.

Nothing new from Taylor Jenkins Reid this year. sighs sadly

Armistead Maupin on the other hand is releasing Mona of the Manor, the tenth installment in Tales of the City, and it does take place in England, so somebody is doing it right.

This has been Book Updates.

Discuss...

I miss making tea for you in the morning and bringing it to you while you were still half asleep. You'd look happily surprised every time, never expected it. It was such a little joy to get to be the one who brought you a cup of tea in the morning.

I miss sitting on the steps and porches of the various apartments we've lived in together while you needed to smoke and talk. Except for that one apartment where there was no porch, and the backyard was full of dog shit all the time. You had to lean out of the window in the back room if you wanted to smoke without going all the way downstairs, where there was a good chance of getting caught by the nice, but very chatty neighbors.

I miss you telling me about what book you read that day, what was good about it, what could have been better. In-between there were patron stories and things you wanted to get done at the library, and talks about the future.

We were always talking about the future; we were almost always grateful for the present. Time with you was never wasted, always precious, as nauseating as that sounds. We never had to do anything. I was happy sitting on your bed just talking while you organized stuff. I've sat on your bed in almost all of the bedrooms you've ever lived in and been there while you organized. I would sit on a bed anywhere you wanted to be.

I can't believe we'll never move again. We'll never finally manage to get a house somewhere, or buy a camper van and travel across the country, cats wildly outraged at the lack of space. I can't believe we'll never have a porch covered in plants and drink tea there in the morning. i can't believe all these mornings where i wake up and you're still not here.

None of this is new. This grief isn't new....it's the weight of losing you. This space inside me so empty and deadened and dull and yet full of memories. I understand all the sad bastard characters in stories now. How easy it was back then to wish they would get over it and move on with the plot. But they had a plot, they had plans.

I'm a broken record without you. All my plans are still perfectly fine plans, they just lack you. This emptiness is so heavy, so alone.I don't know how I have gotten through almost an entire year without you here in this universe.

Discuss...

two days ago...

I finished a book the other day. I knew I would find reviews on GR where people talked about how unlikable the characters were. Even though the title of the book was literally Bad Summer People*.

The thing is. I'm not reading for enjoyment or to make friends. I read to escape, to live more than one life. I always have, but now it is the tether keeping me somewhat grounded to the world. Or out of it. This metaphor isn't really going anywhere. I read because simultaneously it is the thing that keeps me going, and also the thing that connects me the most to you. I have never met anyone who loved, truly fucking loved, books as much as you do.

Yeah, present tense. What're you gonna do? Remind me my sister is dead? Shocker, I already know that. It's one of the reasons I read. Because as long as I'm reading there is a very small part of that forgets you are gone, and that you won't there when I set the book down.

And now I can read at work FOR work, which is great, so I'm letting in more things like YA books (quick reads) and nonfiction (hopefully? we'll see? I love to read nonfiction in theory) and just more stories, gathering them into my clutches like a little dragon sitting on a little book hoard.

I need to write my own stuff. I know that. I do. And part of me, some submerged languishing in a deep swamp, part still cares about doing that. But the swamp is really murky most days, and there is little point after all, because you won't be there to read anything I write.

I know there are people who can create art and stories throughout the most terrible times. I wish I were one of them. I wish I could write a book and everyone would say 'isn't it incredible she can do this even though her heart is devastated beyond belief? isn't it good she can can channel that grief into something more?'

I mean, yeah, that would be nice.

But I can't.

So there you go.

What're you gonna do about it, come back and haunt me?

I dare you.

(* It was good by the way. The people were people.)

Discuss...

I’m reading The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon, which has been “the new Jennifer McMahon book” in my head for a long time, but I just saw that she has a real new book up on netgalley, so I decided it was time to read this one. Also I just finished The Winter People which was suitably melancholy and creepy. All of JM’s books are a mix of that. A bit fairy tale, a bit swamp horror.

Ann knew this before I did, because they had already purchased half of JM’s books before I started reading them. I requested ones they didn’t have from the library and read those first, I think…and now I’m returning to the others on our bookshelves because the mood feels right.

Today I am wallowing in grief, letting myself sink into the depths of it. I was lying in bed this morning and thinking just how much I would give literally anything for the front door to open and Ann just be coming home from spending a night with one of their partners. It seems ridiculous that that can’t happen. The door stays closed. Ann doesn’t come home.

For the first time in my life I know the meaning, the weight of alone. I guess that isn’t bad for thirty six years.

I cried my way through a shower (griefstricken but hey, clean hair) and then I ran a bath and listened to High Violet and cried some more. The towel I was clutching against my body imprinted on my chest. The tears joined the bath water. I had a lemon la croix, cold and waiting. The apartment doesn’t run out of seltzer as quickly as it used to. Ann’s not here to drink it.

One of the things Ann and I were going to do before the pandemic started was drive to Ohio and see the National play the entirity of either High Violet or Boxer, and I can’t actually remember which one it was. Anyway, it was gonna be a great night.

We were also going to England that spring.

It’s like I don’t let myself remember this that often. It hurts too much. Why couldn’t we be in that version of 2020. Why isn’t Ann alive and we visit England and we listen to the National and it’s a better world and I want it.

Or there’s one where Ann and their husband at the time stayed in England longer than a year. They get a bigger flat and Ann writes all those stories that were just waiting to be told. And the distance is hard as it was that year, but we write letters back and forth and I visit every year and we walk in St James Park and visit our favorite statues. The air smells so right. Ann is happy, and I like that, even though it’s hard to be oceans apart.

There is a sister who hunts monsters in the Children on the Hill, and one of the monsters is her adopted sister. I’d take that version too. Track Ann across the US. I’d let the victims be sacrificed though, even though I know you’re supposed to rescue the dead or missing, you’re supposed to try to save them.

I would let A run free if I could. Give me a monster, give me a ghoul, give me fucking skeleton hand to hold in my palm. Just give me my sister back,

I don’t know if that’ll happen in the end of this one. I suppose I should finish it and find out. But this moment of before, where any ending is possible and it could be that one…let it be that one.

let your monster sister roam free, Violet. People die every day. What’s one more body? Who can say this wasn’t the time and the fate that had always been meant for them in the end? Monsters have to eat too.

The unfairness of this reality leave me breathless at times. Who decided this was the way it was supposed to be?

Discuss...

I’m reading a book you would like. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly. There’s a picture book with a mystery and a long hidden treasure and some bones, but beyond that the narrator lives on a houseboat with her semi-adopted daughter and that part is right up your alley. You always wanted to live on a houseboat somewhere (England, let’s be real) or on a barge. You wanted to live so many places, so many lives. You wanted to live. 

Even on the worst days you still wanted that. To experience things. A story, a sandwich. A new place. A caravan somewhere. Your current song on the radio. 

These may not seem like reasons to go on but they were.

How will we know what happened next, you’d say? You wanted to know what happens next. 

Maybe there’s a universe where we live on a boat together, dangling our bare feet into the water as the sunshine covers the deck. Too warm to drink tea just then, but later when the sun goes down and we’ve dried our feet and lit the lantern we’ll put the kettle on and talk about that stars that are just out of sight, other cats on our laps. 

Discuss...

This has been the longest year. Even now I don’t quite believe it’s going to end. I know there are things in 2023 to look forward to. I know there’re good things in the future. I know that everything has changed and forever will be changed.

My sister died in August.

No matter how much time passes, and we’re coming up on four months now, it still doesn’t feel real. I get up every morning, I feed my cats, I go to work, I chat with coworkers and patrons, I get through the day. I feed the cats again, I shower, I eat something. I watch some tv, some nights alone, some nights with friends. And I go to bed and dream briefly that Ann is still alive, and things are all right. And then I wake up.

…

And I read.

For the first two months I couldn’t really read at all. It was like the ability to lose myself in a fictional world, the one real escape where I’m not distracted by my phone, was simply gone. Lost. It seemed like it wasn’t physically possible. You’d think I’d have thrown myself into reading even more to get away from this reality. That’s what I’ve done steadily since before 2016. But not now. Not with this.

Yet, I knew Ann wouldn’t have thought that was the right thing. “I’m dead, and you’re not even reading? Really? Really?”

So I started again, a bit slowly at first. And then it all came back, the hunger for new stories and other worlds. Other experiences. Other minds.

I don’t remember getting my first library card. I remember learning to read and hating it, thinking ‘this will never be useful to me.’ And I remember the moment it clicked and everything fell into place. And I thought, ‘Oh. now I get it.’

Ann and I talked incessantly about books and stories. It was the daily thread of our conversation, everything came back to that. My sister is the only person I’ve ever met who read as much as they did, hungrily, voraciously, curiously. They would tell me about books they’d read and the premise wouldn’t appeal to me but the way Ann described it made me want to read it.

We always talked about starting a blog. We always meant to. Something where we’d do writeups and lists of our current reads and new books, and general reviews and just everything. And we never did.

So here I am with this blog. Partly spurred on by the trainwreck of Twitter these days, but also because I’m still reading. And I still want to talk to Ann about all the books.

So there there will be book reviews, and lists, and general ramblings. And talk of grief and missing because my sister was, and is, the most important person in my life and whatever form the future takes…that’s not going away.

Thanks for reading.

Discuss...