2025.Book19 - Terms of Endearment (McMurtry)

 Good fun, entertaining. Sad ending.

2025.Book18 - My Dining Hell (Rayner)

 Very good. It's true; bad experiences are funnier than good ones.

2025.Book17 - A Pyramid of Mud (Camilleri)

 Excellent. Leaning on humour a bit more, I think.

2025.Book16 - Orbital (Harvey)

 Very good, poetic, scientific. Not quite as beautifully written as I expected, but what's being communicated was.

2025.Book15 - Nest of Vipers (Camilleri)

 Solid mystery, good to jump back often.

2025.Book14 - Good Material (Alderton)

 Low quality Hornby-core. One funny part ("I can't look at the sea any more!")

2025.Book13 - Days of Shattered Faith (Tchaikovsky)

 Another excellent installment. Good characters. End of the trilogy?

2025.Book12 - The Bright Sword (Grossman)

 Excellent psychologically-modern Arthurian epic. Adventure, comedy, tragedy.

2025.Book11 - The House of Open Wounds (Tchaikovsky)

 Excellent follow-up. Much more fun - the stakes are still high and things are still awful, but the good guys win more often.

2025.Book10 - Streets of Laredo (McMurtry)

 More good western epic. Some horror elements, kind of slid in sideways. Sequel problem of "oh yeah this other thing happened in the first book I didn't tell you about - Mox Mox". McMurtry's not scared to kill his characters off-page.

2025.Book9 - Black Powder War (Novik)

 Another good one in the series.

2025.Book8 - Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)

 Really good western epic.

2025.Book7 - City of Last Chances (Tchaikovsky)

 Very good. Drama and action in an occupied city in a complicated world.

2025.Book6 - The Invisible Library (Cogman)

 Pretty good; a bit amateurish in characterization and internal monologue but maybe the rest of the series is better.

2025.Book5 - The Nickel Boys (Whitehead)

 Really good. A mostly sad story.

2025.Book4 - The Case of the Philosophers' Ring

 Kind of goofy; Holmes meets Cambridge philosphers

2025.Book3 - Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (McGhee)

 Pretty good; trying to be all metaphoric and relevant, but not really successfully. And what's with the drive-by DFW reference?

2025.Book2 - The Jade Throne (Novik)

 Good sequel: lots of violence.

2025.Book1 - His Majesty's Dragon (Novik)

 Fun, master & commander with dragons.

2024.Book50 - A Beam of Light (Camilleri)

 Another good one.

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.

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.