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 Slow Horses by Mick Herron, first book in the series that’s the basis of the TV series I’ve been meaning to watch. Anyway, it was really good — clever, and deeply cynical in the way an espionage novel can be cynical (maybe not quite as much as Le Carré), which I do enjoy every so often.
A word of warning: This edition of the book was horribly copyedited, with search-and-replace typos, quotation marks instead of apostrophes, and missing and incorrectly-placed paragraph breaks. Mostly just eye-bleedingly obnoxious, but sometimes it actively hindered my understanding of the story.
Finished reading The Mills of the Gods by Tim Powers. Classic Powers (Phoenician gods + Paris + Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso), executed … well, acceptably. Not one of his great works (start with Last Call or Declare, not his later books), and a little heavy-handed on the Catholicism (were all of his books like this?), but includes a truly harrowing oil lamp–lit journey through the Paris catacombs.
Finally finished rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, reading her translation/rendering notes this afternoon. I don’t understand most of this, but most of what I understand resonates, and a lot of what I don’t makes me think.
Speaking of books, I’m slowly rereading Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching, and I just started rereading her masterwork, Always Coming Home.