2019.Book48 - Uncle Fred in the Spring Time (Wodehouse)

Excellent. Funniest book I've ever read. Complicated plot, delightful prose.

2019.Book47 - Starwater Strains (Wolfe)

Fairly enjoyable. Wolfe has an occasional reactionary-grandpa vibe I hadn't noticed before. Spoils some of the stories.

2019.Book46 - The Floating Opera (Barth)

Very good. Barth is great.

2019.Book45 - Final Fridays (Barth)

Not my thing. Kind of dull.

2019.Book44 - Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit (Wodehouse)

High quality throughout. Uncle Fred was a revelation.

2019.Book43 - Finding Father (Loewen)

Pretty good.

2019.Book42 - The Sot-Weed Factor (Barth)

Excellent. Huge, entertaining, hilarious, ridiculous.

2019.Book41 - Lent (Walton)

Started out as kind of a boring story of a horrible man, then took a huge turn. Pretty good.

2019.Book40 - Two of Swords Vol 1 (Parker)

Fragmented and a little disappointing. Maybe it'll come together better if I read all three volumes?

2019.Book39 - How to be an Antiracist (Kendi)

Very good perspective.

2019.Book38 - The Lives of John Lennon (Goldman)

Pretty good book. Felt a bit padded. This story is that Lennon didn't have an artistic drive to get him through the perils of success.

2019.Book37 - The Raven Tower (Leckie)

Excellent. Wow, this is super-cool.

2019.Book36 - Lost in the Funhouse (Barth)

meta

2019.Book35 - Medicine Walk (Wagamese)

Pretty good.

2019.Book34 - Starlight (Wagamese)

Enjoyable. The promise is false.

2019.Book33 - American Pastoral (Roth)

Excellebnt. Peace and violence. Reason and force.

2019.Book32 - Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

Audio: I can see why this is a classic. Excellent stuff.

2019.Book31 - Ossian's Ride (Hoyle)

Competently done, but it seemed to just drop everything in at the end. Maybe I missed the clues?

2019.Book30 - The End of the Road (Barth)

Wow, this is great! A bit bogged down near the end, but so good.

2019.Book29 - The Grand Dark (Kadrey)

Just OK. I liked the German environment. Makes me sympathetic to the "representation matters" idea.

2019.Book28 - Sorceror to the Crown (Cho)

Excellent. Interesting world, Likeable characters.

2019.Book27 - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (Parker)

Excellent. Very enjoyable. Engineering and infrastructure

2019.Book26 - Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel)

Fairy tale. OK.

2019.Book25 - Beauty of Humanity Movement (Gibbs)

Good characters.

2019.Book24 - Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart)

Pretty good kids' book

2019.Book23 - Kill All Normies (Nagle)

Pretty good. Strong both-sides-ism, though. Makes the "bullies wouldn't pick on you if you weren't so weird" mistake.

2019.Book22 - Provenance (Leckie)

Good solid SF. Ingray was a good character.

2019.Book21 - 98% Funky Stuff (Parker)

Really interesting auto-bio of the saxophonist

2019.Book20 - The Hod King (Bancroft)

Pretty good, but this series is just going on too long.

2019.Book19 - Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Hadden)

I'm tempted to need the protagonist to have some redeeming qualities to offset his damage. And the author offers intelligence, but unconvincingly. He could go farther with primes: they're the only ints you need to remove. He gets the night sky reason wrong: it's not the stars' velocity that hides them, it's that most stars formed too far away for their light to have reached us yet. So the protagonist is unusually flawed, without compensation. Maybe that's the real bleak message.

2019.Book18 - Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Sloan)

Good plot, but full of cringe. Wrong on tech, wrong on museums, wrong on people. Ack.

2019.Book17 - Revenant Gun (Lee)

Very good ending to the series. Quite a bit of humour.

2019.Book16 - Arm of the Sphinx (Bancroft)

Good sequel. I like the characters.

2019.Book15 - Senlin Ascends (Bancroft)

Starts off kind of slow, but turns into Scott Lynch-esque adventure.

2019.Book14 - The Circle (Eggers)

Pretty good. A little dated. I think it's trying to be nice at first, exposing the seamy underside later, but it all seems kind of wicked from the start.

2019.Book13 - Go Tell it on the Mountain (Baldwin)

Not sure about this one; pretty good but not what I expected from Baldwin.

2019.Book12 - Goethe (Safranski)

Mostly kind of dull, with a couple of good parts. "Let he who has never felt something not argue about the meaning of sentences" and Faust/Mephisto as modernity.

2019.Book11 - State Tectonics (Older)

Excellent end to the trilogy

2019.Book10 - Artemis (Weir)

B. The most plot-related welding in any book I've read. Most welding period.

2019.Book9 - The Quiche of Death (Beaton)

Reasonably good cozy mystery.

2019.Book8 - Null States (Older)

More good near-future SF.

2019.Book7 - A Room with a View (Forster)

Excellent. Wow!

2019.Book6 - The Mystery of the Blue Train (Christie)

OK mystery.

2019.Book5 - Live Magnetic Air (Popoff)

Surprised a book about a band would make me like them less. Probably because of lyricist drama. Helped me realize my relative valuation of music and lyrics (about 9:1)

2019.Book4 - Infomocracy (Older)

Very good. Entertaining and interesting.

2019.Book3 - Secondhand Time (Alexievich)

I can see why this won a Nobel Prize. Spectacular, harrowing, intense.

2019.Book2 - Autumn (Smith)

Arty.

2019.Book1 - The Story of the Lost Child (Ferrante)

More excellence. So good.