Finished reading The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel, the final book of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. This was a huge book, and reading it felt a little bit like work, but it was absolutely worth it by the end: We know how the story must play out, even if we haven’t read the history, but it remains compelling to the last page.
Just a couple years slow, I finally had the upsight that Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz is structured like a jazz tune: The overall history of the music is the melody, and the occasional biographies of important figures are the solos.
Finished reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, followup to Wolf Hall. I very much enjoyed this. It feels like the political parts of A Song of Ice and Fire, but with a wry sense of humor, and without the fantasy elements (obviously) and glorified cruelty that became increasingly central to that series. (Or, rather, probably vice versa: That series clearly drew some of its inspiration from these historical events.)
Amusingly, the stylistic tic of Wolf Hall was transformed into a different tic which eliminated almost all pronoun ambiguity. It felt forced at the beginning, but it gradually won me over.
Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. This was a charming story about two academics — the titular Wilde, junior and diligent and quite possibly neurodivergent, and a tenured professor, lazy and charming and (Wilde suspects) prone to falsifying his research. Seasoned with little bits of horror, but still quite fun and cozy.
Finished reading The Language of Power by Rosemary Kirstein. This is clearly not the end of the series, though it ends on an adequately-satisfying note, but it’s the most-recently published. (Kirstein is apparently continuing to write.) Less Le Guin–esque than the others, but still reminiscent. I’ve enjoyed all these books.