2024.Book49 - Exordia (Dickinson)

 Mind-blowingly good. Ending kind of disappointing, but so much excellent stuff in this.

2024.Book48 - The Great When (Moore)

 Very nice stuff. Funny, weird. Great that it's kind of real.

2024.Book47 - Game of Mirrors (Camilleri)

 Another good one. The contrast between horrible murder and comedy is jarring.

2024.Book46 - The Rosie Project (Simsion)

 Very entertaining.

2024.Book45 - Minding Frankie (Binchy)

 Fine, kind of low level.

2024.Book44 - The Quincunx (Palliser)

 Pretty good; too long and complicated.

2024.Book43 - Health and Safety (Witt)

 Very good. But once again, the least interesting of the three gets the most attention.

2024.Book42 - The Message (Coates)

 Nothing to disagree with. Except the fallacy of projecting haunting into the world instead of recognizing self-haunting.

2024.Book41 - Fugitive Pieces (Michaels)

 Fairly poetic. Trying to give a lifetime of love in a moment.

2024.Book40 - Walk Backwards and Weep (Lanegan)

Why did you write a book about the most boring part of sex, drugs, and rock and roll?

2024.Book39 - Us Conductors (Michaels)

 Surprised this won awards, it's pretty weak. Got more interesting when it switched to "Kolyma Tales".

2024.Book38 - The Topeka School (Lerner)

 Pretty good memoir-esque family story. Language, violence.

2024.Book37 - Counterweight (Djuna)

 Dense, good buildup, not much payoff.

2024.Book36 - Starter Villain (Scalzi)

 Enjoyable, fun. Angry dolphins.

2024.Book35 - The Cunning Man (Davies)

Enjoyable characters, no intense plot.

2024.Book34 - Sophie's World

 Interesting history, mediocre frame tape

2024.Book33 - The Unaccountability Machine (Davies)

 High-level

2024.Book32 - House on Vesper Sands (O'Donnell)

 Pretty good. More straightforward than "Maker of Swans", with entertaining characters.

2024.Book31 - Angelica's Smile (Camilleri)

 Another entertaining story with the Vigata police

2024.Book 30 - The Comforts of Madness (Sayer)

 Waiting for an explanation that never comes, seems appropriate

2024.Book 29 - After E

 Pretty good, really depends on community though

2024.Book28 - The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)

 Pretty good, strange ending.

2024.Book27 - The Russia House (LeCarre)

 Solid spy novel.

2024.Book26 - After Claude (Owens)

Fairly funny, weird ending.

2024.Book25 - Roland in Moonlight (Hart)

 Baffling and intriguing, insightful and wrong. Excellent book.

What is the purpose of materialism? What am I protecting myself from?

Aristotelian causes

Seeing with rods and cones (and brain?) or spirit? Smelling?

Atman is brahma

2024.Book24 - Treasure Hunt (Camilleri)

 Good as usual, but jarring contrast between comedy and horror.

2024.Book23 - North Woods (Mason)

 Very good history of a place. Good level of mysticism.

2024.Book 22 - The Golden Enclaves (Novik)

 Very good finale. Lots going on, emotional "stay"

2024.Book21 - Heavy Weather (Wodehouse)

 Excellent humour. Wodehouse is consistently great.

2024.Book20 - The DaVinci Code (Brown)

Good from a thriller perspective, but historically and religiously preposterous

2024.Book19 - All the Sinners Bleed (Cosby)

 Pretty good. Interesting characters, OK writing. Hard to keep track of everybody.

2024.Book18 - The Dance of the Seagull (Camilleri)

 Great how Camilleri works in such psychological weirdness into straight-ahead mysteries.

2025.Book17 - The Age of Doubt (Camilleri)

 Pretty consistent entry in a good series.

2025.Book16 - The Last Graduate (Novik)

 Very enjoyable, emotional.

2025.Book15 - Light in August (Faulkner)

 Pretty good, gothic melodrama.

2025.Book14 - The Potter's Field (Camilleri)

 another great montalbano story

2024.Book13 - A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

 Pretty good. I liked the metaphor of aristocrats summoning the devil.

2024.Book12 - A Deadly Education (Novik)

 Very enjoyable wizard high school.

2024.Book11 Ball Four (Bouton)

 Pretty entertaining baseball stories. Probably better without appendices

2024.Book 10 Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons)

Very enjoyable

2024.Book9 -The Beast Must Die (Blake)

 Pretty enjoyable, interesting structure. Would have been better if the diary was all fake

2024.Book8 - The Red House Mystery (Milne)

 Enjoyable mystery. Self-consciously Holmes/Watson dynamic is fun.

2024.Book7 - The Portrait of Dorian Gray (Wilde)

Very good. Wilde will always beat his more sincere adversaries (Chesterton, Lewis) because he can say things just for effect. I imagine this drove them crazy. One good one though "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

2024.Book6 - Hag-Seed (Atwood)

Good at the concept and plot level, cringeworthy at the sentence and word level. 

There is no Oxfam in Toronto, although obviously there are Winners locations everywhere. Whose miss was that?

2024.Book5 - Hitch in Time (Hitchens)

 Fine, but I don't have the context to get a lot of the references.

2024.Book4 - Red Team Blues (Doctorow)

 Pretty good. I always wonder if infelicities of prose are intentional ("Guilt by association is not a crime.'). And for a forensic accountant, the protagonist doesn't do much accounting - just social media scraping (first contracted out, then directly). Didn't get the Baron von Rijsstafel pun.

2024.Book3 - Home Cooking (Colvin)

 Fairly entertaining.

2024.Book2 - The History of Tom Jones (Fielding)

 Wow, extremely good. Entertaining and very funny.

2024.Book1 - The Olympian Affair (Butcher)

An excellent sequel to Aeronaut's Windlass. Fun adventure.

2023.Book47 - The Aeronaut's Windlass (Butcher)

 Re-read in preparation for the sequel. Still very good, appealing characters in peril.