Finished reading Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel. I enjoyed it, though I was quite tired of some of the characters by the end of the book. The story had a couple coincidental meetings that were even less plausible than some in Station Eleven — we’ll see if this is a recurring motif in her work.
Finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a pre-COVID “most people in the world die of a plague” novel. The story starts during a performance of King Lear at the start of the plague, and then follows two people — the actor playing Lear, through the before-times to that point, and a young girl also in the production, through the after-times in a traveling company performing Shakespeare plays. I read Last One at the Party about a year ago, and think this one is so much better it’s almost unfair to compare them. If you can stomach the premise, read this.
Finished rereading The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, book 16 of the Aubrey/Maturin series, and the fourth and final book of their circumnavigation. Neither Aubrey nor Maturin has great success in this book; oddly, this felt satisfying enough that even a deus ex machina ending wasn’t a disappointment.
Finished reading The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison, a followup to last year’s Witness for the Dead. I enjoyed this as much as the previous. Addison draws her fundamentally-decent but painfully-introverted protagonist with compassion, through grim events of murders, child pornography (handled as tastefully as possible), and a malevolent spirit.
Finished rereading the collected Sandman by Neil Gaiman et al., volumes 1 (Preludes & Nocturnes) through 10 (The Wake).
This still basically holds up, which I was a little concerned about. (There’s more reference to rape than I remembered, but at least it doesn’t involve protagonists, and justice of a sort is generally done.) Some of stuff that was profound when I was in my 20s feels a little trite, but overall it still seems to achieve what it’s aiming for.