Permanent Objects

A collection of miscellany

Archives for August 2025

52 IN 52, Book #37: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

This was another audiobook listen for me as I was on my road trip this summer. I’d heard of Piranesi before, but had sort of avoided it, mostly because I have a problem where the more hyped up something is the more worried I get that I won’t enjoy it–but when I saw that the audiobook narrator is Chiwetel Ejiofor, I knew I had to give it a try. And I’m so glad I did! I thought this book was absolutely gorgeously written–the prose is so lush and the worldbuilding so rich and complex, and Susanna Clarke does a really masterful job of creating intrigue without being heavy-handed about the mystery of it all.

In a true masterwork of avoidance, I actually knew nothing about Piranesi before I started the audiobook, which meant that the things being revealed were indeed revelatory for me. It took quite a number of chapters before I began to realize that there were hints being dropped, and even more chapters after that before I started to piece the hints together into a coherent picture. I enjoyed being able to kind of play detective as a listener, even while Piranesi himself as a character still wasn’t picking up on what was going on.

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52 IN 52, Book #36: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I ended up listening to this audiobook during a road trip, having chosen it almost wholly on vibes, but I’m pleased to say that I really enjoyed it! In my review of The Darkness Outside Us I mentioned that I like books with premises that make me wonder how the hell the author managed to come up with such an idea, and this is definitely one of those.

The core premise of the book is more or less a boarding school for wayward children who slipped away from their parents and found doorways that led them to other worlds. Our protagonist is Nancy, who went through a doorway that took her to the land of the dead; having recently returned to the human world, she’s struggling to adapt to human life and no longer feels connected to a human identity. Her parents have sent her to a boarding school run by a woman who herself was once such a wayward child and therefore knows best how to handle them, although she doesn’t present herself as such to the children’s concerned parents.

Soon after Nancy’s arrival at the school, other students begin to be murdered in various gruesome ways, and it’s up to Nancy and her ragtag band of friends to figure out what’s happening and why.

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52 IN 52, Book #35: The Door on the Sea by Caskey Russell

This was a very enjoyable read for me! I absolutely loved seeing a high fantasy epic adventure plotline reimagined through an Indigenous lens, and I found myself really rooting for and mourning these characters as they went through their trials and tribulations.

I also really enjoyed that this book is so clearly influenced by Indigenous oral storytelling traditions. The little asides from the narrator to the reader were a nice touch, and I appreciated that they were so often phrased as if the narrator expects the reader to be part of the tradition while also giving enough information to clue you in if you aren’t. (For example: “As you know if you are of the sea…”)

I will confess I struggled a little with the Tlingit language that’s interspersed throughout, but that’s primarily because I’m not very familiar with the language; once I was able to get into the flow of reading, it was easy to remember which words meant what, even if I still wouldn’t feel confident pronouncing them aloud, and they really did a lot to add flavor to the story overall.

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