09 | September | 2020 | Notes from Coode Street

Ten minutes with… is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they’re reading right now and what’s getting them through these difficult times.

Widely respected historical novelist (and very occasional SF or fantasy writer) Cecelia Holland talks with Gary about the smoky conditions in northern California, the joys of doing research, her own new novel about Mongol invasions in the Middle East, and the small comforts of reading favourite poets like W.H. Auden, Richard Howard, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Books mentioned include:

Heart of the World by Cecelia Holland
The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson
Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

Today Jonathan fires up Skype to talk to Chaz Brenchley about the strange challenges of these times, the comfort to be found reading crime and mystery novels, living and working a short walk from SETI and NASA in Silicon Valley, combining girls school novels and steampunk (and the accompanying Mrs Bailey’s Recipes for Medium), taking control of his own publishing, his new short story collection and more.

Crater School

Chaz has been working on a series of English girls’ boarding-school stories set on Mars. You can sample the Charter School on his website and read more on his Patreon.