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The Book of the Most Precious Substance.jpg

The Pajiba February 2022 Book Recommendations Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | February 28, 2022 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | February 28, 2022 |

The Book of the Most Precious Substance.jpg

A lot of my top reads of the month are about books in some way or focus on the literary mould and ways it can be reshaped. That wasn’t deliberate but it feels fitting given how much of my time I spend obsessing over the written word in its various forms. I’ve also been leaning heavily on novellas as my brain short circuits thanks to, you know, the planet doing what it does. Make sure to share your own book recommendations from the past month in the comments below.

Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom



I have long been fascinated with the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin. It’s a deeply grotesque yet undeniably fascinating topic, one mired in mystery and intense speculation. For Megan Rosenbloom, it’s her life’s work, and her book Dark Archives reveals her research into studying and authenticating these strange items. Rosenbloom details the scientific process behind confirming whether many of these rumored skin books are real or just impressive fakes. The meat of the book — sorry — is the historical and cultural context that helped to shape this most stomach-churning of hobbies. Rosenbloom offers key information on how anthropodermic bibliopegy overlaps with areas of gender, class, and race, as well as the ethical quandaries her studies pose. You cannot invoke objectivity when you hold someone’s skin in your hands and the chances are the person involved did not consent to this post-mortem practice. I greatly appreciated how Dark Archives demystified this history while remaining deeply aware of its bleak human cost.

Girls Before Earls by Anna Bennett



Taking a swift change in direction from the previous book, here’s my romance recommendation for February! Miss Hazel Lively is finally living her dream after opening a school for girls in the picturesque seaside town of Bellehaven. There, she hopes to allow less fortunate students to enroll, funded by the parents of richer kids. She just needs to build up her reputation among the societal elite first. Step forward Gabriel Beckett, Earl of Bladenton, and his feisty niece. She’s been expelled from two London boarding schools and is doing her damnedest to scare off his potential fiancée. Blade asks Hazel to take her on and will make sure she becomes the most talked-about schoolmistress in England. Hazel agrees, but only if Blade agrees to visit his niece (and maybe her) every week. This book was just a total delight, the ideal balance of fizz and heft that I want from a historical romance. The protagonists are witty, lovable, and their tropey interactions hit just the right beats.

The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams



There’s a literary phenomenon known as the mountweazel: a fictitious entry in a dictionary or reference book, typically added as a safeguard against copyright infringement. In The Liar’s Dictionary, words are added to a new encyclopedic project by a bored Victorian lexicographer named Winceforth whose own life inspires a need for a new vocabulary. Several decades later, a bored intern named Mallory is being tasked with uncovering all of these fake words for an unfinished dictionary that was obsolete long before her time. It seems so pathetically low stakes, so why the hell is someone making threatening phone calls to her and claiming there’s a bomb in the building?

Williams cuts between Mallory and Winceworth in alphabetical chapters named after various mountweazels, as their dual stories reveal the ways that language impacts both of their lives. Having faked a lisp since childhood, Winceworth is forced to maintain the illusion — and deal with the societal mockery — while he yearns for a woman he cannot have. Mallory has a girlfriend but isn’t technically out as gay, which leads her to ponder what it means to truly be oneself and if the words matter as much as the intent. Williams takes great pleasure in exploring the hilarious, aggravating, and mystifying qualities of the words we speak every day. That makes the book sound weightier than it is but this is really a very fun book that doesn’t sacrifice readability for stylistic experimentation.

They by Kay Dick



They are coming. They roam across Britain, targeting those who are different, smarter, proud pursuers of ideas and creativity. Books start disappearing from shelves, even those in people’s own homes. Artists are threatened. Those who paint risk losing their hands. Those who compose are made deaf. The age of the philistine is nigh.

Faber has done an incredible job in recent years by re-releasing forgotten modern classics for new generations. Last year, they brought us the delightful and spiky Mrs. Caliban, a romantic satire wherein a bored housewife fell for a genetically mutated six-foot-tall sexy frog-man (so of course I loved it.) They was discovered in a charity shop, an overlooked dystopian folk horror that feels horribly prescient. At less than a hundred pages, it’s a short sharp shock of a novella, one with a foreboding mood that felt like Ari Aster would have been eager to take notes. Some aspects feel very much of their time (the philistines force everyone to have TVs in their homes, which is a bad thing in context but feels very quaint in the age of prestige TV) while others sadly aren’t. As we currently live through the smearing of critical race theory and a fresh wave of censorship in schools, it doesn’t seem that plausible that proudly violent anti-intellectualism would become a major political force. It kind of already has.

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran



Lily Albrecht is a former author who now works as a rare book dealer to make ends meet after her husband was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She is offered a chance to claim the payday of a lifetime when a friend asks her to track down a book that may not exist. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th century manual on sex magic, rumored to be one of the most powerful books on the occult ever written. Those who follow its erotic instructions are promised power beyond their wildest means. For Lily, it’s a chance to get some much-needed cash and escape her own troubled life for a few weeks. Of course, things soon go awry.

Sara Gran wrote one of my favorite books of 2021, Come Closer, a horror novel about a woman being slowly possessed by a demon. That book hinted at some serious Clive Barker inspirations in her work and that carries over into The Book of the Most Precious Substance, although here, things are much more melancholy in tone. Part mystery, part erotica, part character study, there are layers to this story that tease out that concept beyond its titillating potential. Gran has a lot of fun with the eccentricities of the rare book world and its populace of book nerds, ultra-rich weirdos, and sex magic connoisseurs. Lily’s love for her husband, who is a shell of his former self thanks to the cruelest of conditions, is undeniable. So is her exhaustion and fury at how the world has abandoned her in her hour of need. The book becomes an addiction of sorts, with the vague promise that it can bring something new to her monotonous life. She doesn’t believe in the magic, not at first, but she does believe in the ludicrous lengths that the most desperate people will go to for satisfaction. Books are supposed to be a constant so what happens when they offer a change in such a major way?

I loved this one. Gran’s easily become one of my favorite writers working today and this book is an early contender for the best new reads of 2022.