Finished reading Translation State by Ann Leckie. I’ve loved her other Imperial Radch books, and enjoyed this one, but felt like it could have used a more vigorous edit: One character kept shifting between “disturbingly alien” and “distressed teen”, and there was a plot contrivance that bothered even me (normally fairly blasé about that kind of thing). That aside, there was lots to like, including the aforementioned disturbing aliens and Leckie’s usual explorations of personhood and empire.
Leckie fans should read this; newcomers should start at the start, Ancillary Justice.
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.