Wednesday is now advanced to the status of Honorary Associate Professor
What I Read
Finished Rainbow Bridge.
Read Aliette de Bodard, Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders (Domain of the Fallen 3.5) (2020) - might be me, a bit underwhelmed with this one.
Gwyneth Jones, The Grasshopper's Child (2014) - re-read, and think this was better read in a gulp, as I did the first time round (I think there was some matter of a long journey involved) rather than in bits around quotidien activities. (There are probably books that work better thus, and others that do work better in fits and starts?)
Started, but gave up, JA Jance, Man Overboard (2017), no 12 of the Ali Reynolds mysteries - I read 1-11 as quite a swathe as I recall, and then this came out, and I was a bit resistant to the notion of paying more than the price of a mass market paperback for the ebook, and the price never came down, which is quite often what happens? (Some authors may be buy at once at hardback prices, but some are not.) So I ponied up for a secondhand paperback and really, glad I didn't spend more, because this was a huge disappointment. A genre trope I really hate along with a narrative convention it often goes with that I also dislike, and the writing was not good enough to keep me going.
Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie (2019) - I think I snapped up the ebook on a promotion, and it was really good. Made me think about the virtues of 'the English novel': as being very much the 'loose baggy monster' decried by miserable old Henry James, and that far from being about manor houses in Gloucestershire, how much since its inception, it's been about telling the stories of the non-elite and the marginalised.
P. Djèlí Clark, A Dead Djinn in Cairo (2016): great worldbuilding, but I thought the plot was a bit slight? (A lot of set-up, but then it all seemed to be over and done?)
On the go
DJ Taylor, Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51 (2019). This was on my radar, and then last week I was asked a question within my area of expertise which bore upon this general circle, and I discovered that it was in ebook at a very eligible price. Codfish out for Cyril Connolly already, and I'm only about on chapter 1. (But I pretty much anticipated that.)
Up next
Really not sure. Don't think there's anything up and coming in the next week...
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