Finished rereading Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was Le Guin’s last novel (and one of my favorites, along with Always Coming Home and (in third place) perhaps Tehanu). It’s clearly the work of an older Le Guin, comfortable writing not just as a woman (which only happened some time into her career) but as an older woman. The ending has brought me to tears both times I’ve read it.
Finished reading The City & the City by China Miéville. This was one where I enjoyed having my misapprehension corrected partway into the book; it’s a murder mystery set in a pair of overlapping/intertwined cities, with none of the overt supernatural of the other Miéville books I’ve read.
This makes me realize that some of the plot (including some characters’ actions), especially at the start of the book, felt like RPG sessions. The characters themselves are well-conceived and -drawn, but most of them seemed pretty blasé about the supernatural.
Really, Lovecraft Country just makes me want to run a Harlem Unbound game of Call of Cthulhu.
Finished reading Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, described as a novel but really a set of closely-connected short stories. As reviewers have said, the racism is far more scary than the horror, though the second half of the book does bring nice bits of the Lovecraftian “sure, magic is evil, but maaayyybe just this once?”.