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.

2023.Book46 - Siddhartha (Hesse)

 Enjoyable, possibly deep.

2023.Book45 - The Track of Sand (Camilleri)

Another excellent Montalbano mystery. Ramping up the comedy, psychology, and twists.

2023.Book44 - Dissolution (Sansom)

 Pretty good mystery. Thomas Cromwell as villain.

2023.Book43 - A Spectre, Haunting (Mieville)

 Good stuff. Knowledgeable, not hypnotized

2023.Book42 - Death at La Fenice (Leon)

 Average mystery. Precedes, but pales in comparison with, Montalbano.

2023.Book41 - Ghosts (Wharton)

 Good short stories. Not chilling, but enjoyable. Last one (Perrier) was kind of Poe-esque creepy.

2022.Book40 - August Heat (Camilleri)

 Good as usual. Character cliff-hanger. And we never found out exactly what happened to Rolf?

2022.Book39 - Ex-Wife (Parrott)

 Enjoyable, pretty modern for a book that's 100 years old.

2022.Book38 - The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (McBride)

 Very good. Entertaining.

2022.Book37 - Sun House (Duncan)

On the one hand, really terrible Mary Sue vs the Straw Men. With anachronism. And token struggles.

On the other hand I don't want to be cynical; I wish some of this was possibly true.

2022.Book36 - The Patience of the Spider (Camilleri)

 Good kidnapping story; consistent comedy.

2022.Book35 - Rounding the Mark (Camilleri)

 Consistent quality.

2022.Book34 - The Smell of Night (Camilleri)

 Another good one; weird at the end.

2023.Book 33 - what's bred in the bone

 classic Canadian. Should have been longer!

2023.Book32 - Excursion to Tindari (Camilleri)

 More humour, also quite grim.

2023.Book31 - Never Love a Stranger (Robbins)

 Kind of old-fashioned, toying with the lurid but staying pretty basic.

2023.Book30 - Tears of the Giraffe (McCall Smith)

 Pretty good. Series is kind of samey, which could be called consistency.

2023.Book29 - At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft)

 Pretty good. Classic. Dangerous explorations.

2023.Book28 - The Voice of the Violin (Camilleri)

 Good stuff. Fairly funny too.

2023.Book27 - The Snack Thief (Camilleri)

 Another good one. Interesting how the TV version was different/simpler.

2023.Book26 - The Terra-Cotta Dog (Camilleri)

 Another very good mystery. Enjoyable.

2023.Book25 - The Shape of Water (Camilleri)

 Enjoyable mystery (Sicilian)

2023.Book24 - Come, Thou Tortoise (Grant)

 OK, silly humour.

2023.Book23 - The Art of Eating (Fisher)

 Excellent collection of food writing.

2023.Book22 - The Maias (de Queirós)

 Very good 19c novel. Some pretty funny parts, melodrama, etc.

2023.Book21 - Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley)

 Pretty good LA noir.

2023.Book20 - Travels with Charley (Steinbeck)

 OK. Kind of an "old man yells at cloud" vibe. The storm scene was breathtaking though, and the "cheerleader"/"witches' sabbath" episode was shocking.

2023.Book19 - Breath (Nestor)

 Pretty interesting and motivating.

2023.Book18 - Lies of Locke Lamora (Lynch)

 Still excellent. I'm surprised how little of the plot I remembered. Kind of a weird combination of grimdark and swashbuckling.

2023.Book17 - In the Wake (Sharpe)

     Surprisingly light-weight for such a serious topic. Misconstrual as method, pun-based philosophy.

2023.Book16 - How to Raise an Elephant (McCall Smith)

 nice and warm hearted, not much plot

2023.Book15 - Drive your plow over the bones of the dead (Tokarczuk)

 Excellent Polish story. Righteous woman

2023.Book14 - The Books of Jacob (Tokarczuk)

 Epic about a Jewish sect in 18th-century Poland. Well done but not interesting. Long.

2023.Book13 - Catching Fire (Hahn)

Pretty interesting account of translating a book.

2023.Book12 - Fair Play (Jansson)

 Artists work and live

2023.Book11 - On Browsing (Guriel)

 Pretty interesting Toronto memoir.

2023.Book10 - Our Share of Night (Enriquez)

 Wow, really good. Freaky cult, old money, monsters.

2023.Book9 - Really Good Actually (Heisey)

 OK. Trying for lurid, hits pointless.

2023.Book8 many loves dobie gillis (shulman) -

 funny entertaining

2023.Book7 - Thus Was Adonis Murdered (Caudwell)

 Delightful. I didn't remember most of it.

2023.Book6 - Happy-Go-Lucky (Sedaris)

 Usual high-quality amusement.

2023.Book5 - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

 Pretty good, kind and empathetic

2023.Book4 - Idiot Girl (Notaro)

 Pretty funny, memoir.

2023.Book3 - Stella Maris (McCarthy)

 Also pretty good. The blind universe/black fire image was unsettling. Insufficient ridicule of mathematical platonism.

2023.Book2 - The Passenger (McCarthy)

 Western's conversations with his associates are entertaining - at least the associates are. ("Hot weather came, and I had to let her go.", "Once they start sweeping the floors and washing the plates with soap, it's all over.")

The math and physics were interesting but didn't really go anywhere. Mentioned, not used.

2023.Book1 - Throw Me to the Wolves (McGuinness)

 enjoyable.

2022.Book42 - Midlife (Setiya)

Pretty bad. High-level, just the uselessness of (modern?) analytic philosophy. Where it isn't wrong, it's shallow. (IMO hypothetical humans are fungible)

2022.Book41 - The Thousandfold Thought (Bakker)

 Excellent. Got a lot more of the secondary plots this time - what happened to Conphas, Moenghus.

2022.Book40 - The Warrior-Prophet (Bakker)

 Very good. Quite brutal

2022.Book39 - Only a Joke Can Save Us (McGowan)

 Pretty interesting. Lack vs excess. Tries to cram everything into that framework, and it doesn't all fit.

2022.Book38 - Nigger (Gregory)

 Excellent story of suffering and (partial) triumph.

2022.Book37 - Do I Stay (McLaren)

Thumb on the scale - best imagination and effort is put into the "yes" side. Another way to look at it is he's recruiting for a new project.

2022.Book36 - The Darkness that Comes Before (Bakker)

 Good on re-read. I enjoyed the crusades part more this time. I think in earlier reads I just wanted to get to the aliens/Dunyain stuff.

2022.Book35 - Fingersmith (Waters)

 Excellent. The plot twist about a quarter of the way in was devastating. A little bogged down in the middle, excellent ending.

2022.Book34 - What is Theology? (Kotsko)

 Pretty interesting stuff.

2022.Book33 - Maker of Swans (O'Donnell)

 Excellent. So gothic.

2022.Book32 - Auntie Mame (Dennis)

 Pretty entertaining. Some good laughs.

2022.Book31 - The Executioner's Song (Mailer)

 An unlikable murderer and everything that comes after. Surprised to learn it was "true crime".

2022.Book30 - Factotum (Bukowski)

 Lurid, sometimes funny. Goes to the End of the Road.

2022.Book29 - The Mars Room (Kushner)

Excellent. Lurid and empathetic

2022.Book28 - The Misanthrope (Moliere)

 Kind of not that great, maybe better live?

2022.Book27 - A Time for Mercy (Grisham)

 Solid entertainment

2022.Book26 - The Beast (Martinez)

 Very good description of migrants through Mexico

2022.Book25 - Deacon King Kong (McBride)

 Excellent. Very entertaining.

2022.Book24 - Real Tigers (Herron)

 Very good. Lots of action.

2022.Book23 - The Sentence (Erdrich)

 Not very good, maybe for political reasons? Ghost arc was unoriginal -- too "Get Out". Book store characters fairly interchangeable, maybe because they were based on life?

There's so much room for an interesting investigation of identity formation - especially voluntary, conscious identity choice. And the political implications of partially-voluntary ethnic identities! Discourse privileges the involuntary status.

The current-events plots were inessential, as was the goofy loup-garou thing.

2022.Book22 - Wives and Daughters (Gaskell)

 Good entertainment. Feminine hobbledehoyhood!

2022.Book21 - Elite Capture (Táíwò)

 Pretty good. Quite simple. Pitched as "why oppressive companies have DEI", but it's more about progressive-aligned organizations.

2022.Book20 - Election (Perrotta)

 Not great, but better than the movie.

2022.Book19 - Material Girls (Stock)

 Good stuff, but I'm not hopeful. Extremism will win over moderation; allies can't stop.

2022.Book18 - Lonely Boy (Jones)

 Pretty interesting. One work of art and the right publicity can last a lifetime.

2022.Book17 - The Song of the Lark (Cather)

 Excellent. Loved it. Great novel about art.

2022.Book16 - The Music Lesson (Wooten)

 Some very good stuff, mixed in with a kind of ridiculous frame story.

2022.Book15 - Dead Lions (Harron)

 Pretty enjoyable follow-up. Kind of funny how Webb keeps getting beaten up.

2022.Book14 - Slow Horses (Harron)

 Pretty good, entertaining stuff.

2022.Book13 - The Professor's House (Cather)

 Excellent. Trying to understand the place of the Western in the middle. Comparison of the abandoned civilization with the professor?

2022.Book12 - Making of biblical womanhood (Barr)

 Very good. Continually shocking that complementarianism is a thing

2022.Book11 - All Our Wrong Todays (Mastai)

 Some parts are excellent, a little uneven