Finished reading The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker. A couple quibbles aside, I loved this book, set in Manhattan c. 1900. It felt like a puzzle where all the characters ended up fitting together just so (and I think the quibbles are where I didn’t feel like the fit was quite satisfactory … but they were minor characters). Recommended.
Finished reading The History of Jazz (3rd ed.) by Ted Gioia. This was kind of the flip side of A History of the World in Six Glasses: I wish it hadn’t been quite so long, but I was fascinated by every part of it, and wouldn’t cut much if anything. I now have a lot of listening to do.
Finished reading Steeple, volume 1, and rereading volume 2, by John Allison. I read volume 2 serialized online (it’s ongoing), and it and the first are great ridiculous fun.
Finished reading The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe (as the second half of the Shadow & Claw compilation). Not quite as compelling as Shadow, but it felt like the protagonist was a little more active (even if he was somewhat unpredictable). Will move on to the next two books soon.
Finished rereading Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian, book 5 of the Aubrey/Maturin series. This one was grim, nearly unrelentingly so: plague, storms, and mutinies, with a bare glimmer of hope at the end of the story. Compelling reading.
Finished reading The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe (as the first half of the Shadow & Claw compilation). (Technically this was a reread, but I recalled so little that I may as well treat it as my first time.) Really quite good, though it’s not my favorite novel by any stretch. Looking forward to the next book in the series.
Finished rereading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis. A hard-boiled detective thriller set in imperial Rome, the book was quite good … except for first part, which painted the main character with such unpleasantness and misogyny that it was something of a slog. The “but with a heart of gold” was there, of course, but I wish the author hadn’t felt the need to play into that trope quite so hard. I’m considering reading more (of course it’s a series), but I don’t know if the next book resets the character back to his initial state; if so, I’d probably rather just read something else.
Finished reading A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage. In many ways, I wanted this to be deeper — any of the chapters could comfortably have been twice as long — though I’m not sure I wanted to read a book that was twice as long. The sins of brevity were largely atoned for by the appendix (“how can I taste something like the early forms of these beverages?”) and thorough bibliography (for further reading).
Finished rereading Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was Le Guin’s last novel (and one of my favorites, along with Always Coming Home and (in third place) perhaps Tehanu). It’s clearly the work of an older Le Guin, comfortable writing not just as a woman (which only happened some time into her career) but as an older woman. The ending has brought me to tears both times I’ve read it.
Finished reading The City & the City by China Miéville. This was one where I enjoyed having my misapprehension corrected partway into the book; it’s a murder mystery set in a pair of overlapping/intertwined cities, with none of the overt supernatural of the other Miéville books I’ve read.
This makes me realize that some of the plot (including some characters’ actions), especially at the start of the book, felt like RPG sessions. The characters themselves are well-conceived and -drawn, but most of them seemed pretty blasé about the supernatural.
Really, Lovecraft Country just makes me want to run a Harlem Unbound game of Call of Cthulhu.
Finished reading Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, described as a novel but really a set of closely-connected short stories. As reviewers have said, the racism is far more scary than the horror, though the second half of the book does bring nice bits of the Lovecraftian “sure, magic is evil, but maaayyybe just this once?”.
Finished reading This Is How You Lose the Time War, a novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Well, wasn’t this a delightful read. If you like letters, time travel, and/or love, you’ll be delighted too.
Finished reading TARDIS Eruditorum, Volume 7: The Sylvester McCoy Years by Elizabeth Sandifer, part of a series of critical surveys of Doctor Who. Though a fan of the show, I’ve never seen a single episode of this era, much less read any of the novels, so I expected to skip my way through this volume. But Sandifer always had something interesting to say, and I found myself reading cover to cover.