Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett, followup to Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries. I guess I didn’t mention that the first book was a romance novel in addition to all the other stuff it had going on. This book continues right along the same path, and was equally charming.
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 Dead Lions by Mick Herron, the followup to Slow Horses. This had the same things going for it as the previous, including (which I didn’t mention) something of a sense of humor.
Bonus: This edition of this book only had a handful of typos, one inexplicable but most inconsequential.
Finished reading Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo, trans. Charlotte Whittle. This was a fascinating trip back to the birth of writing and, more importantly, of various forms of books, how they were copied, stored, sold, and valued, and a million short digressions, each of which Vallejo tied neatly back into the narrative. As usual, non-fiction meant slow reading, but it was quite good, and also has a lovely and witty index.
This book sung in a neat harmony with Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, which looked back at the same authors and books from the other end of the timeline.
The phrase “Butlerian Jihad” is being used around the house pretty regularly these days.