Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor, and Media into the Twenty-First Century by Marina Warner

This book investigates representations of the spirit and the supernatural, starting early but really hitting its stride around the early eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. It considers representations of the self and a spiritual presence in material (wax, cloud, photographs, film) and immaterial (ether, air, ectoplasm) forms. The book casts a wide-ranging net to gather its evidence--we see examples drawn from art, literature, material culture, and many other places. Generally it argues that despite our increasing understanding of the processes in the world and our increasing secularization, we still need, perhaps more than ever, representations of spirit. I thought the last chapter, on zombies, was particularly effective. The book had a refreshing tone--it treats moments of spiritualism (like knocking, expulsion of ectoplasm, etc.) as moments to be studied for their interpretative value, not as phenomena to be definitively proven or disproven.

Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

In this book everything in the Mortal and Caster worlds is falling to pieces since Lena claimed both Light and Dark. The style of the writing in these books still vaguely annoys me, and I'm not finding the Caster mythology/logic entirely convincing. Still, this book seemed to hold it together a little better than the previous two.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

This book tells the sprawling story of a family with secrets by means of extreme compression. It takes five moments in the history of the related characters and through these five extended scenes shows a lot more about the personal histories and secrets entangled in those moments. At times the book was a bit too glib--even though the characters are faced with ambiguity, the reader knows enough more about what happened and what the characters were like to draw her own conclusions, which works against the book's carefully constructed demonstration that our history remains partially inaccessible and unknowable, even as we're living it. It was definitely interesting to see the characters' assessments of each other and their relationships changing as time passed. Unfortunately Paul Bryant, the biographer trying to figure out the real story (or dig up the dirt and hidden secrets) of the Valance family, whose scion Cecil was an up-and-coming poet until he died in the trenches in World War I, was extremely annoying to me, which colored my enjoyment of the second half of the book. Overall, it does present a world you can get lost in and a plausible and entertaining story.

The Night Eternal by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

As this book opens, things look bleak for humankind: the Master has leashed a nuclear apocalypse that covers the world in polluted darkness for all but a few hours a day, humans have turned on each other, vampires round up humans to live in camps, and there's even dissent among the resistance. This book changes up the relationship dynamics within the group and gives a full background of the vampires (although they turn out to be as mythologically/religiously/magically grounded as anything, in an interesting twist for a series that started out portraying vampirism as a disease to be studied scientifically). Overall a fitting conclusion to the series.

Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

This book collects short fiction in a variety of forms. Some of the stories are as short as a sentence (a favorite in this category is "Collaboration with Fly": "I put the word on the page, but he added the apostrophe"), and others are longer meditations. There's a fair amount of engagement with grammar, words, and the meaning of language, in addition to the literary tradition and canon. Two of my favorites from this genre are "Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho" (a brilliant meditation what we can and may get out of reading Beckett) and "Walk" (an encounter at a conference between a translator of Proust [presumably a version of Davis herself, since the story quotes her Swann's Way] and an unappreciative critic). Finally, there are the almost-scientific accounts of characters in various aspects of their lives (Mrs. D.'s attempt to find a suitable maid, a study of the long lives of Vi and Helen (with addenda about Hope), the letters a fourth grade class writes to Stephen who's in the hospital, and the changes that a baby brings, for example). Many of the more-sustained stories (and even some of the shorter ones) think a lot about family--how we relate to each other, what we owe each other, and how we change each other. While some of the stories are more effective than others, all in all they provoke thought--especially about family and language.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

In this book Roy's luminous language tells the story of tragedy coming to an Indian family with the visit of their cousin, Sophie Mol. While we know from the very first pages that the stories of the twins Rahel and Estha, their mother Ammu, and their cousin Sophie Mol cannot come to a conventionally happy ending, the book works against convention in its structure, its language, and its plot. If not happy through and through, or entirely hopeful, it does offer a visionary path towards a better life--both through a trans-human ecology and through a commitment to storytelling as a way of reordering and giving meaning to a harsh life. Although the boundaries some of the characters cross in this book may be hard for readers to swallow, the book affirms boundary-crossing as an important activity, and reminds us that these boundaries are only human constructions that get in the way of our full potential. Booker award winner, 1997

The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston by Maurie McInnis

This book looks at material culture in antebellum Charleston to understand the complex political and social system in place there at that time. McInnis reads the architecture, art (ranging from public sculpture to privately-owned paintings), and furniture and decoration of the buildings in the city to show both the elite's reliance on and attempts to control enslaved peoples and the enslaved people's resistance (mostly in the form of carving out space for a private life). This book supplements its readings of material artifacts with both primary written accounts and secondary, scholarly accounts. Overall it is an intriguing book that paints a compelling portrait of antebellum Charleston without romanticizing its history.