2022.Book4 - The Word is Murder (Horowitz)

If anyone can make metafiction too self-absorbed, it's the British.

2022.Book3 - Fight Night (Toews)

 Pretty good. Works hard for not much payoff. Entertaining.

2022.Book2 - The Talented Mr. Varg (McCall Smith)

 Not very good. Loose plot, unimportant characters.

2022.Book1 - The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe (McCall Smith)

 Just OK.

2021.Book 49 - Conversations with Friends

 Not sure what it was going to be about. Kind of Neapolitan

2021.Book48 - The Institute (King)

 Good stuff. You know what you're getting with Stephen King.

2021.Book47 - Agent Running in the Field (LeCarre)

 Very good. Excellent twist, ending kind of unresolved.

2021.Book46 - Side Effects (Allen)

 We had to steal to eat. Then we had to steal to tip.

2021.Book45 - Greenlights (McConaghey)

 pretty good

2021.Book44 - Rivendell Readers (Petersen)

 Pretty interesting, learned a lot.

2021.Book43 - The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (LeCarre)

 Very good. Complex and bleak.

2021.Book42 - Dead Astronauts (Vandermeer)

 Phenomenology of genetic engineering? Inside the apocalypse?

2021.Book41 - Kingdom and Empire (Tempelmeyer)

 Pretty good.

2021.Book40 - Nobody Will Tell You This But Me (Kalb)

 A nice life.

2021.Book39 - Piranesi (Clarke)

 Not what I expected, but very good.  Seems pretty straightforward, are there hidden depths?

2021.Book38 - Red Dragon (Harris)

 Good stuff.

2021.Book37 - All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr)

 Pretty enjoyable.

2021.Book36 - Reading while Black (McCaulley)

 Can you read the bible through an emancipatory lens? Of course you can. Unconvincing R7 exegesis, and the "you're saying the slaveowners were right" is a ludicrous straw man.

2021.Book35 - On Awkwardness (Kotsko)

 Surprisingly good.

2021.Book34 - Racial Contract (Mills)

 Good stuff. Seems pretty standard for today High-level thesis (proposing racial contract as better explanation than social contract) is, as Mills says, a category error. But that's just the "woah dude" hook - the actual content is accurate.

Is Europe's racism in America a betrayal of Enlightenment ideals or their inevitable actualization? I think the former.