Started reading The Will of the Many by James Islington but set aside about a third of the way through. I’d bought a copy based solely on its cover and heft, but found myself disliking every character, none of whom seemed capable of uttering a simple true statement.

Blurt! — Sben
pile.org

Started reading The Will of the Many by James Islington but set aside about a third of the way through. I’d bought a copy based solely on its cover and heft, but found myself disliking every character, none of whom seemed capable of uttering a simple true statement.

Also

Finished reading The Dog of the South by Charles Portis. This was amazing; every character was such a weirdo, such a wild card, that I never knew what was going to happen next, and was just along for the ride. Portis treated each of them with respect, and the overall effect was maybe something like a less cruel, less political Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (meant in a good way).

— 10/22/2025 9:27pm ∞
Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett. Probably the best of the now-three books, and I kind of hope it’s the last, because this feels like a good endpoint for Wilde’s story.

— 10/7/2025 11:25am ∞
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.

— 9/26/2025 9:05pm ∞
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.

— 9/20/2025 7:19am ∞
The phrase “Butlerian Jihad” is being used around the house pretty regularly these days.

— 8/19/2025 8:16pm ∞