Finished reading My Real Children by Jo Walton. The book started very bluntly, but became much more nuanced well before the halfway point, and was heartbreaking at the end. Not a perfect book, but I very much enjoyed it.
Finished reading Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, one of those niche books I sometimes read about the history of role-playing games. This one focuses on TSR from before its inception to the ouster of Gary Gygax. It was mostly just sad: The two principal figures (Gygax and Dave Arneson) come across as bitter, insecure, and emotionally-stunted grudge-holders; the story is fascinating (with much more detail than I’d known before), but their animosity left me with a bad taste in my mouth long before the end of the book.
Finished rereading The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian, book 6 of the Aubrey/Maturin series. As foreshadowed in the previous book, the backdrop is the War of 1812. This one shines a spotlight on Maturin’s spycraft: It played an important role in the previous books, esp. H.M.S. Surprise, but Maturin is uncharacteristically the more active character for much of the novel.
Finished reading Where the Wild Coffee Grows by Jeff Koehler, about coffee and its origin in the Ethiopian highlands. Well-written and -structured, it covers (among other things) history, economics, biology, sociology, and climate change, but somehow isn’t too long. I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.
Finished rereading King of Sartar by Greg Stafford. It’s something of an anthropological study of Stafford’s RPG setting Glorantha, which inevitably reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. But while the vast majority of game designers aren’t Greg Stafford, it’s also true that Stafford wasn’t Le Guin. I enjoyed the book, but can only recommend it to a vanishingly-small slice of readers.