Finished reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, and its accompanying novella “Ajax Penumbra 1969”. This was fun; it felt like a light Neal Stephenson novel, in length and intensity and depth, and earnest where Stephenson tends ironic.
Finished reading Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie, a collection of short stories. A handful are set, at least notionally, in her Imperial Radch setting, several are in the setting of The Raven Tower, and several others are their own things. I enjoyed all of them to greater or lesser degrees; The Raven Tower in particular seems perfect for short stories.
Finished rereading The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. I love this fantasy novel, about gods and bargains and thoughtfulness, and its casual queerness is the cherry on top.
Finished reading The Design of Books by Debbie Berne. This is a casual overview of the process of, as it says on the cover, designing books, from cover to page layout to interacting with authors and editors. Very interesting, though of course not especially relevant to my life.
Finished reading The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. A promising setup (what if people could step through an endless series of parallel Earths?) was let down by merely adequate writing and a very abrupt out-of-nowhere ending (that wasn’t really an ending at all but a setup for the next book). Glad I read this book; not sure if I’ll read the next.