2020.Book4 - The True Queen (Cho)

Good enjoyable sequel.

Book3 - Knapsack Full of Dreams (Crowe)

Very good.

2020.Book2 - Women Talking (Toews)

Excellent stuff. Intentional society-building.

2020.Book1 - Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse)

More high-quality amusement.

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.

2018.Book52 - Equal Rites (Pratchett)

Good fun.

2018.Book51 - Belgravia (Fallows)

Fine. Plot-wise, the "bad guys" had so little power it wasn't interesting. Some editing problems.

2018.Book50 - Rejoice (Erikson)

A pile of hot garbage. So terrible. One-step-removed Mary Sue for Sawyer, and this reminded me of his shitty novels. A great concept, poorly done. Ugh.

2018.Book49 - Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro)

Pretty weak. Gene Wolfe lite.

2018.Book48 - Someone Like Me (Carey)

Carey's with Brooks Hansen now in the "wrote one good novel" club.

2018.Book47 - Asymmetry (Halliday)

All the parts are fine, but don't add up to much more.

2018.Book46 - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Ferrante)

More excellent drama. "We Spit on Hegel"!

2018.Book45 - The Story of a New Name (Ferrante)

Excellent. Wow. The ending.

2018.Book44 - To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

Excellent. Can see why it's a classic.

2018.Book43 - Gardens of the Moon (Erikson)

Pretty good re-read. Somehow not motivated to read the next one though.

2018.Book42 - Willful Child Wrath of Betty (Erikson)

Fun space comedy.

2018.Book41 - The Human Stain (Roth)

Very good, of its time

2018.Book40 - All the Birds in the Sky (Anders)

Pretty good. Some neat ideas.

2018.Book39 - Whitethorn Woods (Binchey)

Nice stories about (mostly) good people.

2018.Book38 - Beatrice & Virgil (Martel)

Just OK. Started out quite weak; got better in the last third.

2018.Book37 - The Calculating Stars (Kowal)

Just OK. Solid C

2018.Book36 - Commonwealth (Patchett)

Very good. The metafictional part seemed lame at first but better on reflection.

2018.Book35 - The Stone Angel (Laurence)

"My wilderness was pride, and the demon that led me there was fear". Very good.

2018.Book34 - Monday the Rabbi Took Off (Kemelman)

Getting a little less good

2018.Book33 - Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home (Kemelman)

Pretty good mystery

2018.Book32 - Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (Kemelman)

Pretty good mystery

2018.Book31 - Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (Kemelman)

Pretty good myster

2018.Book30 - The Kite Runner (Hosseini)

Pretty good but kind of cheesy.

2018.Book29 - Freeze Frame Revolution (Watts)

Really good SF.

2018.Book28 - Us Conductors (Michaels)

Pretty dull, then a little better in the last third. How did this win a prize?!

2018.Book27 - The Underground Railroad (Whitehead)

Very good. The gimmick was unnecessary.

2018.Book26 - No Coins, Please (Korman)

Classic humour. Liked it as much now as when I first read it.

2018.Book25 - The Agony and The Ecstasy (Stone)

Entertaining Michelangelo biography.

2018.Book24 - The Merry Spinster (Ortberg)

Fairly weak. A couple of funny parts.

2018.Book23 - Armed in Her Fashion (Heartfield)

This should have been so good. Medieval fantasy in a Bosch setting. Could have been quite horrifying, but author pulled her punches, I guess, or was going for something else.

2018.Book22 - My Discovery of England (Leacock)

Some funny parts; seeing London as compared to Peterborough. Definitely of its time in the sexist and classist senses.

2018.Book21 - Gnomon (Harkaway)

Very good. Got lost a bit.

2018.Book20 - Beartown (Backman)

Pretty terrible, but somehow I finished it.

2018.Book19 - Endangered Species (Wolfe)

Good short stories.

2018.Book18 - Love is the Law (Mamatas)

Great idea, pretty good execution.

2018.Book17 - We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (Irby)

Occasionally funny essays. Everybody's already told all so the impact is small. Like the pet clinic stuff.

2018.Book16 - The Devil in Silver (LaValle)

It's not often that I read a really terrible book. Just so bad. I loved "Ballad of Black Tom" so I thought this would be more of that; not at all.

2018.Book15 - Of This Earth (Wiebe)

Pretty interesting MB memoir

2018.Book14 - The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (Barron)

Very good Lovecraftian horror collection.

2018.Book13 - Gender Hurts (Jeffreys)

Very good. Lots to think about.

2018.Book12 - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Very strange, but very good.

2018.Book11 - Unsettling Canada (Manuel)

An unexpected alliance, a foreign power.

2018.Book10 - The River of Consciousness (Sacks)

Some interesting parts.

2018.Book9 - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Thien)

Wow, so boring. By the end I just didn't care at all.

2018.Book8 - The Thing Itself (Roberts)

Pretty cool attempt to ground horror SF in Kantian "ontology". Reminds me of Wilson (?) building Lovecraftian monsters in VR. But the idea at the end of this being some kind of apologetic? Very weak and I want to say typically British.

2018.Book7 - Blackout (Hepola)

Pretty good memoir

2018.Book6 - Exploring Diabetes with Owls (Sedaris)

Occasionally funny.

2018.Book5 - The Little Friend (Tartt)

Pretty good.