2021.Book2 - Mexico Set (Deighton)

 Pretty good spy stuff. Can an author write a depressed character and not know it?

2021.Book1 - Twelve Who Ruled (Palmer)

 Very interesting how much the first republic was the image of what all governments look like now.

2020.Book38 - Berlin Game (Deighton)

 Pretty good, but such an unlikable protagonist. Not sure if that's just the distance between then and now or intentional, or maybe a portrait of depression?

2020.Book37 - This was Supposed to be Fun (Martis)

Fairly shallow memoir (of legitimately traumatic events) coupled with some basic race-and-society run-through

2020.Book36 - Spy Hook (Deighton)

 Pretty good. Middle of a series though, so I'll start at the beginning.

2020.Book35 - Middle C (Gass)

 Excellent. Live free of blame by lying. Also modern composers!

2020.Book34 - My Lady Ludlow (Gaskell)

 Good characters.

2020.Book33 - A Jazz Odyssey (Peterson)

 Very interesting life story. Includes a lot of commentary on music and musicians, which is great.

2020.Book32 - The Atrocity Archive (Stross)

 Pretty good. A little too ostentatiously nerdy.

2020.Book31 - The Rhesus Chart (Stross)

 Fun stuff.

2020.Book30 - Give, Take

 Nice

2020.Book29 - The Bell Jar (Plath)

 Sad, then hopeful.

2020.Book28 - The Mirror and the Light (Mantel)

 Excellent. A great novel.

2020.Book27 - Caste (Wilkerson)

 Excellent. Race is the skin, caste is the bones.

2020.Book26 - The Angel of the Crows (Addison)

 Very good. Not the non-stop fun times of Goblin Emperor; Doyle has more problems.

2020.Book25 - The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Robin)

 Very interesting. Tragic view.

2020.Book24 - Being and Place Among the Tlingit (Thornton)

 Pretty interesting.

2020.Book23 - Order of the Pure Moon ... (Cho)

Pretty good. Cho will have my eternal respect for that "smoke curling from her jaws" in Sorceror to the Crown.

2020.Book22 - Wolf Hall (Mantel)

Excellent historical novel.

2020.Book21 - The Red Threads of Fortune (Yang)

OK. Takes the epic out of epic fantasy. Gender world-building unconvincing (we didn't have it, so we invented it?), grammar is awkward, but that's not a deal-breaker.

2020.Book20 - The Skin We're In (Cole)

Excellent review of 2017.

2020.Book19 - LETTERS (Barth)

Like wading through waist-deep water. The exertion is pleasurable if you don't need to get anywhere.

2020.Book18 - The Last Emperox (Scalzi)

Good. Entertaining. Felt like floating along the top.

2020.Book17 - Listen, Liberal (Frank)

Excellent but, sadly, obsolete.

2020.Book16 - Nomad (Gibbons, Partridge)

Fairly amusing.

2020.Book15 - Giles Goat-Boy (Barth)

Disappointing. Racism doesn't age well, and neither do the jokes (except the Beists "go limp!"). Felt like a slog after about the first third.

2020.Book14 - Agency (Gibson)

Excellent near-past thriller. Gibson has such good style, love it.

2020.Book13 - Vets Might Fly (Herriott)

Funny veterinary memoir

2020.Book12 - This is Going to Hurt (Kay)

Funny medical memoir

2020.Book11 - Pride and Prejudice (Austen)

Very good classic.

2020.Book10 - Milkman (Burns)

Excellent. Very funny

2020.Book9 - Odyssey (Homer)

Pretty good classical.

2020.Book8 - Cartesian Sonata (Gass)

This was hard to get into, but after some effort, big payoff. Also, first Penner in literature.

2020.Book7 - Immigrants in Prairie Cities (Loewen, Friesen)

Pretty interesting. General info on Canadian prairie immigration.

2020.Book6 - This is How You Lose the TIme War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone)

Pretty good SF love story.

2020.Book5 - The Iliad (Homer)

Non-stop violence and speeches

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