The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels. Nonfiction about the 1830s in France. After the Bourbons had been kicked off the throne for the second time, the duchesse de Berry, widowed mother of the theoretically legitimate king (who was only 11), attempted to lead a civil war ( Read more... )

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths. A murder mystery set in modern-day Norfolk, England. Ruth is single, overweight, nearing forty, and lives alone with her two cats - all of which is extremely horrifying to her religious parents, though Ruth herself couldn't give a fuck. She's also a professor of forensic archaeology, and is called in by the ( Read more... )

I did a post like this last year, but thought a new year was a good time for an update. Though there's certainly a lot of overlap! So here are my Top Ten Favorite Podcasts of 2020 - or, at least, the podcasts I listened to the most often, which oddly doesn't always translate to 'favorite'.

10. The Dollop: Two male comedians tell one another weird ( Read more... )

2020 was not a great year for reading, as many people have been pointing out for months now. For me, I managed to finish a fair number of books, but am horrifyingly behind in writing them up.

I had a couple of different themes to my reading this year. On my trip to India (late Feb-early March), I focused on books set in or written by people from ( Read more... )

The Case of the Reincarnated Client - Tarquin Hall.The fifth book in the Vish Puri series, murder mysteries set in Delhi. This one, though set in 2016, mostly concerns a murder that took place in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Puri's own father was a police detective at the time, and ( Read more... )

The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre. An absolutely fantastic fantasy novel set in the court of Louis XIV. Marie-Josephe is a naive, relatively poor, convent-educated young woman working as lady-in-waiting to the king's niece. Her brother, Yves, is a Jesuit and natural philosopher, particularly interested in dissecting and studying a 'sea ( Read more... )

The Elementals by Michael McDowell. A horror novel set in 1970s rural Alabama. Family matriarch Marian Savage has died, and her relatives gather for a period that's half mourning and half summer vacation. They consist of her son Dauphin and his wife Leigh; her other son, single father Luker, and his 13-year-old NYC-raised daughter India; her best ( Read more... )

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated from Swedish by Alex Fleming. A horror novel set in modern-day Sweden. In 1959 an entire village of 900 people vanished - leaving behind no bodies, no footprints, and no trace of where they'd gone. The only clues were one newborn baby, abandoned in the local schoolhouse, and one corpse, that of a woman ( Read more... )

Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg. A vampire novel set in modern-day small town North Carolina. Sophie and Natalie are lifelong best friends, both single mothers to infants, both doing nothing much with their lives: in their early twenties, working at Waffle House and living in a trailer park. Until one night they cross paths with a vampire named ( Read more... )

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. A horror novel set in modern-day smalltown America, though I can best sum it up with an equation: House of Leaves + Algernon Blackwood's The Willows + a little dash of Annihilation = this book.

Kara, a thirty-something graphic designer in the midst of an overtly friendly but low-key depressing divorce and with few ( Read more... )