I’ve been observing the half-year recently by posting a list of the books I’ve read since January 1. Not as many as in the last few years. Also, it looks like fewer books that I would categorize as YA. Perhaps subjectively.
- Love & Other Crimes, Sara Paretsky
- Bring on the Girls!, P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton
- In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan
- The Eighth Detective, Alex Pavesi
- There's Something about Sweetie, Sandhya Menon
- The Absolute Book, Elizabeth Knox
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Dark Tide, Alicia Jasinska
- A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, Ramachandra Guha
- City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, Eleanor Fitzsimons
- Daisy Jones & the Six , Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
- The A.I. Who Loved Me , Alyssa Cole
- A Gentleman in Moscow , Amor Towles
- Cathedral, Ben Hopkins
- The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers
- Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline
- The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner
- The Assassins of Thassalon, Lois McMaster Bujold
- On Juneteenth , Annette Gordon-Reed
- The Unraveling, Benjamin Rosenbaum
- Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells
- The King of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner
My favorites? I am very much enjoying the Megan Whalen Turner series—somehow I had thought I had read the first three, at least, and embarked on re-reading the series leading up to the recently published series capper. It turns out that I only read the first one. I have no idea why I stopped, presumably because the second one wasn’t in at whatever library I was using at the time. The other sequels and series books for the year were mostly disappointments, though. Well, I don’t know that RP2 was a disappointment, technically, as I thought it was going to be terrible in exactly the way that it turned out to be terrible.
I read In Other Lands (which I was afraid was going to be snarky-Hogwarts but which turned out to be extremely snarky and clever and queer Hogwarts, so that’s all right) twice, once for myself and then aloud to my Best Reader, and while I still really liked it a lot, I found that the flaws really came out in the aloud-reading. On the other hand, I totally enjoyed picking accents for all the characters (I don’t chose Southern California accents for a prominent group, which are totally fun to do, so that’s all right, too).
As for The Unraveling, y’all know that if I personally know an author, I won’t review their book properly on this Tohu Bohu; the only ethical thing is to talk about the work purely in terms of whether it will make the person sufficiently rich and famous for some of the benefit to splash onto Your Humble Blogger. Benjamin Rosenbaum has occasionally read this Tohu Bohu, and we have interacted on-line, which is not personal acquaintance really, but I think is enough that I don’t want to review the work here. Plus, everybody else has been reviewing it! It’s one of the talked-about specfic works of the summer! Ch-ching! ish.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.