Friends

Work has been a madhouse this week, so Wednesday Reading Meme is alas a day late.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Emi Yagi’s When the Museum Is Closed (translated by Yuki Tejima), a short novel about a woman who is hired to chat in Latin with a bored Venus statue, and inevitably ends up falling in love with her. High hopes for this one, but did not end up liking it as much as I hoped. ( ”Spoilers” )

However, I approached E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia leerily, and I ended up really enjoying it! The omnibus at the library includes the cover blurb that Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are “the most enchantingly malicious works written by the hand of man,” which put me off, but I can only assume that either the books change radically in character over the course of the series, or Mr. Gilbert Seldes and I have very different standards for what malice looks like.

Queen Lucia is a social comedy about English village life, like a slightly more biting Miss Marjoribanks or Miss Read. The characters can be petty, at times even spiteful, and Benson is certainly poking a bit of fun at Lucia’s cultural pretensions (she likes to pretend she can speak Italian, for instance) - but despite their foibles they’re basically decent people, who can imagine no higher level of cruelty than snubbing someone’s garden party. The human species would be greatly improved if that was the worst thing we ever did.

Finally, I read Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, a chronicle of the bungling incompetence with which the US Army approached the Spanish-American War in 1898. Fortunately for them, the Spanish bungled even harder. A striking number of military conflicts seem to be decided on this scale of “which side displays slightly less shambling incompetence?”

What I’m Reading Now

Stephen Brusette’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Like many small children, I loved dinosaurs, so I thought it would be fun to catch up on the latest developments in the field. So far we’re in the earlier Triassic, which is marked mostly by non-dinosaurs species, like the salamanders the size of cars.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m just about to wrap up the last 2026 Caldecott book, and then I’d like to turn my attention to the 2026 Newberies.