Bite sized reading

I’m a member of the Dreamwidth community Bite Sized Reading but have never posted there, partly because when the “tell us what you read” posts come up, I can’t remember what I read.

I’m going to try keeping a list of things read here, so I can easily copy it over there as appropriate.

• A series of LiveJournal posts examining Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books
• Several chapters of The Lord of the Rings, in parallel with the tor.com LOTR re-read from several years ago
• Newspapers from the 1960s and 1980s, for my local history research

• The 11 July 2016 edition of the Morning Advertiser, while sitting in a pub

• Several articles in the latest London Reconnections magazine.

• Gareth Davies describing how “A paper with a proud 147-year history [was] reduced to being a thrown together collection of clickbait written for the web”.

• Gareth’s follow-up article on SubScribe

• Invisible: Britain’s Migrant Sex Workers by Hsiao-Hung Pai
• Several chapters of The Comfortable Courtesan (not an intended juxtaposition, but rather I’ve given up on The Lord of the Rings and this was next on the fiction list)
• The side of an actual cereal packet, while waiting for a four-year-old to finish eating breakfast

• Hop on Pop by Dr Seuss
• Are You a Boy or are You a Girl? by Sarah Savage and Fox Fisher
• Poppleton in Fall by Cynthia Rylant and Mark Teague (this prompted much discussion of why lions won’t make plain pancakes)
• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
• The 5 August 2016 edition of the Croydon Advertiser

• Hydrogen Sleets by Michael Warren Lucas
• Sticky Supersaturation, also by Michael Warren Lucas (a re-read of this short story after the above read of his new novel)

• Various stories in the August 2016 edition of Clarkesworld magazine
• Several stories in A Treasury of Sayers Stories by Dorothy L Sayers

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman, along with the tor.com re-read
• Cheap: The High Cost Of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

• Middlemarch by George Eliot (an English classic which I’ve somehow failed to read until now! I liked it and will no doubt re-read at some point, though I found some of the sentences impossible to parse)
• Drifting House by Krys Lee (short stories, which I didn't actually realise until I got to the end of the first “chapter” then wondered why the abrupt shift to a completely different context)
• The Skies Discrowned by Tim Powers (I found the style and story of this a bit confusing until I realised it’s a very early one!)
• REAMDE by Neal Stephenson (a fairly random re-read prompted by my Kindle deciding this was suddenly “new” again, which reminded me that it exists and is a pretty good read; though the “and they all lived heterosexually ever after” ending does rather drive home the fact that I’m not the intended audience)

• The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North. I enjoyed her first one (under this name), The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, so thought I’d try more. This had an interesting and well-developed premise but felt just a little too long.
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I got food poisoning and couldn't do anything useful for two days, so I spent them re-reading this. I’ll probably re-read it again at some point.

• Not One Shrine: Two Food Writers Devour Tokyo by Becky Selengut and Matthew Amster-Burton.
• Gifts, Voices, and Powers, by Ursula Le Guin.

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang. This won the Man Booker prize, so I suppose it must be a good book, but all I really got out of it was a reminder that namul are delicious.
• Everfair by Nisi Shawl. Didn’t finish this — I got about a third of the way through but it all felt far too rushed for me.

• Callaloo and Other Lesbian Love Tales by LaShonda K Barnett. Short stories and vignettes. She has a novel out now too but I can’t seem to find a Kindle edition.
• Between Two Thorns, Any Other Name, All Is Fair, and A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman. The first four books in a series (the final one is yet to be published). I wished these had been better copyedited, but I still enjoyed them.

• “Road To Wingo”, “Graf”, “Ezekiel Saw The Wheel”, and “533” by LaShonda K Barnett. The last of these also introduced me to Carmen McRae, who is excellent.
• Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh. The first two of these were re-reads, the third was my first time. I love these books — all the different Englishes, the descriptions of food, and the way the characters are drawn so distinctively. This also introduced me to something excellent I’d not been aware of before, namely akuri (the version in the book just used eggs, spring onions, green chillies, and fresh coriander, which is what I used when I made it).

• Beyond This Place by A J Cronin. My first Cronin was The Citadel, which although depressing ended well, so then I read The Stars Look Down, which was depressing enough that I avoided him for a couple of years. This was less depressing! And also not overly preachy - the author does like to make Important Social Points in his writing, but it works with the story rather than being bolted on.
• One Of Us by Michael Marshall Smith. This was OK; a somewhat uneven blend of satire, noir, and cod philosophy. I made it to the end but am unlikely to re-read.

• Neuromancer by William Gibson. I wanted to see how well this had aged, given that it’s a futuristic novel published over 30 years ago. The answer is: pretty well!

• Aberfan — 50 years on, in the survivors’ own words. This happened 9 years before I was born, 9 miles from where I grew up. I learned about it in a school not dissimilar from the one that was buried by the tip. This piece was very hard to read, but I’m glad I did.

• The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson. Of this year’s reading, this is certainly my favourite novella, and possibly my favourite book.

• The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Didn't finish — I tried the first four stories and couldn't get into any of them, and none of the rest looked particularly appealing aside from the fact that one was by Aliette de Bodard, so I read that one and then gave up.
• The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. This is a very condensed retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of one of the main female characters. I haven’t read the original, and TBH am unlikely to, but I enjoyed much of this version and would give other retellings a go if someone recommended them.
• “The Closest Thing to Animals” by Sofia Samatar. It was OK. I found out at the end that the author also wrote A Stranger in Olondria, which according to my Kindle I have read at least some of, but I have no memory of this, and online reviews aren’t helpful in jogging my memory. I’m going to give it another go to try to work out why I can't remember anything about it.

• A Very English Scandal by John Preston. It was OK, but felt a bit lumpy in places, as if the author really really wanted to shoehorn in certain anecdotes however irrelevant they were. I also found it somewhat grating that there wasn’t a single use of the word “bisexual” in the entire book (even though more than one of the main characters had relationships with both men and women) and somewhat horrifying that the author never used the word “rape” for something that by his description clearly was.

• The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It was OK, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as her Palace of Illusions. It got a bit too romance-novel towards the end, which felt incongruous with the rest of the book.

• The Stepsister Scheme by Jim Hines. This is the story of what happened after the end of Cinderella. I found it a bit hard to understand what was going on at times, and there were too many action scenes for my taste. I can see people who like action-adventure really enjoying this, though.

• The Lipstick Pastor by Tomi Makanjuola. This was quite rambly and could have done with quite a lot more editing. There were quite a few places where it wasn't clear who was speaking, and the viewpoint jumped around quite a lot too. Often the words were... not quite the right ones, e.g. the first page describes walls being painted with "orthopaedic paint". I wish it had been better edited, because it could have been a much better book if it had.

• A Stranger In Olondria by Sofia Samatar. As noted a few weeks ago, I have this on my Kindle in a folder which suggests I've read it, but I can’t remember anything about it. Tried it again, gave up 11% of the way through. It just feels like very generic fantasy with nothing particularly compelling about it and a viewpoint character with next to no personality.

• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. A re-read of this collection of short stories, partly prompted by the release of a film, Arrival, based on one of them, and partly because after a small streak of bad luck in choosing reading matter, I wanted something I knew I’d like. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Chiang that I didn’t enjoy on at least some level, and I wish he was more prolific.

• Glow by Ned Beauman. I met the author at a non-book-related thing, and he seemed like a nice enough chap with a good appreciation of copyeditors (we asked each other what we do for a living; he writes, I copyedit), so I downloaded samples of all three novels he’s written so far. I couldn’t get into either of the others (Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident), but this one was pretty fun — and, yes, well edited. It’s just on the right side of several lines: not quite too many similes, not quite too much explanation, and not quite too many in-jokes.

• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. A re-read — possibly the third time I’ve read it, I think? It suffered from me reading it immediately after Glow; the latter has a very smooth prose style which made this one feel somewhat clunky. I love the imagination and ideas in it though, and no doubt I’ll re-read it again.

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.
  • The first was a re-read, prompted by the second in the series now being out. I enjoyed the first one, as I did the first time I read it. Same-sex relationships just normal and happening and not being either remarked on or a plot point! Descriptions of delicious-sounding alien-but-very-plausible food! (I did a websearch to see if anyone had come up with a recipe for smoky buns — sadly not, since they sound amazing.)
  • The second was... OK. A lot of it was written from the perspective of a 10-year-old, and that has to be done really really well if it’s going to work for me. This didn’t, quite. There was also a pretty jaw-dropping exchange which went basically: “Person A: [speciesist remark] / Person B: That’s a bit speciesist. / Person A: It’s OK, we’re in the Human carriage! / [all laugh]” (and these were characters who we’re supposed to like) (the “Human carriage” part is iffy in itself — the idea is that the carriages on a train are segregated because different species have different physical needs for their seats, but [a] what are you supposed to do if you’re travelling with someone of a different species — just split up? what if the other person is a child?, [b] part of the explanation is that one species travels on little carts instead of walking but hello we already have a solution for making public transport accessible both to people who travel in their own seating and people who need it to be provided and [c] just a couple of chapters later there’s a tattoo parlour with a seat that’s explicitly described as adapting itself to different species).
  • Actually very little of this second one works for me. The conflicts feel forced, and most of the explanations of how things work seem implausible. Lovelace is essentially a perpetual-motion machine. The non-human species apparently have one culture and one language each. Consent is a key virtue of the galactic cultures, yet when one character is on a dancefloor and fondled unexpectedly by a stranger who approaches them from behind, their being freaked out by this is treated as something shameful that needs to be concealed by pretending that the freakout was caused by them having taken drugs. I am disappoint! Because I did like the first one.

• Stone Harbour by Liza Daly. Interactive fiction, well-written, not too deep, but immersive and interesting. There were some typos but as the source code is on github I could send pull requests to fix them.
• Magical Makeover by S Woodson. Interactive fiction again, this one subverting the “makeover/dress-up game” trope. Short but worth re-reading as there are multiple paths.

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. A re-read of this fairly short novel by one of my favourite authors. I can’t remember what prompted me to read it again — it’d been years since I read it last. I think this is the first time I recognised George and Lenny’s relationship as an abusive one.
• What Lot’s Wife Saw by Ioanna Bourazopoulou. This had a clever premise, but the execution got a bit tedious towards the end.
• Laughing All The Way To The Mosque by Zarqa Nawaz. Normally I can’t remember who recommended a book to me, since I don’t keep note of this and it can take a while for something to bubble its way to the top of the to-read pile. I remember this one though! It was spiralsheep, with whose writeup I’m pretty much entirely in agreement.
• On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss. I think I’d been expecting this to be informative rather than reflective, so I wasn’t quite in the right frame of mind for it. It doesn’t so much build an argument as meander around various loosely-related trains of thought.

• Under The Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta. It took me a couple of tries to get into this, for some reason — the first chapter just wasn’t going in, no matter how hard I tried to focus, but I’m glad I perservered.
• Horrible Words: A Guide To The Misuse Of English by Rebecca Gowers. This was pretty interesting, though I found the framing story (“this is a guide to annoying pedants”) a bit irritating. Having said that, it is right there in the title, so I shouldn’t complain.
• Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex And Nigerian Tastebuds by Yemisi Aribisala. A collection of essays on Nigerian food and other subjects that food brings to the author’s mind. It’s a very personal collection, and at some points reveals more about the author than she perhaps intended (apparently she doesn’t realise that not all non-heterosexuals are gay men), but due to its nature as a compilation it’s easy enough to skip to the next essay if one of them isn’t working for you. The food parts are great, though.
• Things Fall Apart and Arrow Of God by Chinua Achebe. The first was a re-read, the second new to me. Both reads were partly inspired by having recently read two other very different Nigerian books, as noted above. There’s a really interesting comment by Ainehi Edoro in a discussion with the author of Longthroat Memoirs, which I didn’t see until after reading all of this, but with which I totally agree: “I like using Things Fall Apart as the classic example of a novel that we credit with so much representational value but that almost completely excludes the question of food. There are the usual references to people cooking and eating mounds of pounded yam and roasted cricket but nothing memorable, nothing like Pip in Dicken’s Great Expectation going and on about godawful bread his sister forced him and her husband to eat.”
• An Accident Of Stars by Foz Meadows. I loved how bisexuality and polyamory were just part of the world, nothing special, and I liked the differing viewpoints throughout the book. I did feel the ending was a bit rushed and implausible, but I’ll definitely read the next one in the series once it’s out.

• Hild by Nicola Griffith. I think it was ceb who recommended this. It’s quite long and has a lot of characters with similar-looking names, so I struggled a bit with keeping track of who was who. Also, it felt rather as though the novel started slightly after the beginning of the actual story, which I know is always going to be an issue with novels based on Actual Historical Events, but I’d have liked to have had a bit more context about Edwin and Hild’s father and why Hild was living where she was living at the start of the book. I’ll re-read it at some point, though, and hopefully manage to follow it better next time. (I loved the descriptions of day-to-day domestic life, and wished there had been more of that.)

• Mr Campion and Others by Margery Allingham. This was a recommendation from sunflowerinrain after I asked for suggestions to get into the Albert Campion books. It’s a collection of short stories, which wasn’t exactly what I was after as reading matter, but it worked very well as an introduction. I have a couple of the novels on my to-read pile now.
• Galactic Empires edited by Neil Clarke. More short stories, but this time SF. This was... OK? The Ann Leckie and Greg Egan stories were both very much to my taste, and so of course I’d read them before. It was good to have a prompt to re-read them, though (for, I think, the third or fourth time in the case of Egan). The stories by John Barnes and Paul Berger were both new to me, and I enjoyed them though would be unlikely to re-read. The Neal Asher one was very Neal Asher, the Yoon Ha Lee one was very Yoon Ha Lee, and the Kristine Kathryn Rusch one was very Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Robert Silverberg story was an excuse to make beautiful descriptions of alien landscapes (i.e. very Robert Silverberg). The one by Robert Charles Wilson started off so creepy (as in male-gaze creepy, not haunted-house creepy) that I didn’t read it. Steve Rasnik Tem’s was interesting enough for me to want to seek out more by the same author, though this particular story wasn’t one I’d read again. I liked the one by Naomi Novik, and Ruth Nestvold’s was interesting though I’d have liked to have had more acknowledgement that gender doesn’t have to be binary.

• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, recommended by nanila. I liked it a lot and have already bought the next few in the series.
• Volume 9 of The Comfortable Courtesan by Madame C- C-. I love this series and can’t wait for Volume 10.
• The Red Abbey Chronicles: Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff. I’m really surprised I liked this, because it’s Young Adult (YA) and I normally find YA annoyingly over-simplified. (I hadn’t actually realised it was YA when I bought it.) This was not over-simplified! It was a bit too short for my taste, though. I’ll probably give the next one in the series a go once it’s out in English.

• Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch. Second in a series, still enjoying them.
• Night Song of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas. Memoirs set in Glasgow. I read this because I was on holiday in Glasgow and wanting to read something local. It did that thing of reporting verbatim conversations that the author wasn’t actually there for, which I find a bit annoying, but overall I enjoyed it, and when I go back to Glasgow next year I'll try one of the author’s novels.
• Lanark by Alasdair Gray. Another Glasgow-based novel, but this one very different! It’s a sort of combination of coming-of-age story and surrealism. It’s also huge, and took me several days to finish, so I actually finished it back in London. I’m glad I read it, but I probably wouldn’t read it again. The structure is interesting, but the central character is not.
• Efuru by Flora Nwapa. A classic of Nigerian literature that I hadn’t got around to before. I really enjoyed this and will read it again, even though the formatting in the ebook edition isn’t great — the words are run together in many places, and the linebreaks and quotation marks in the dialogue aren’t always accurate — so in places it’s hard to understand who’s speaking. I’ll probably pick up a paper copy some time.

• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. This was... OK, I suppose? I’m probably not the intended audience for this, since having read Donald A Mackenzie’s Teutonic Myth and Legend several times as a child (including making my own family tree of all the gods), I was already very familiar with these stories, and this retelling generally didn’t add very much.

• Cargo of Eagles by Margery Allingham. I quite enjoyed her short stories in Mr Campion and Others, but really wasn’t all that keen on this one. It took me several tries to get started, and then I found myself alternately bored by the storyline and annoyed by the way the main characters treated women. I gave up about 15% of the way through.
• The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla. I’ve been making this one last, reading one or two essays at a time, but have sadly finally reached the end. Thoroughly recommended.
• Whispers Under Ground and Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch. Third and fourth in the series, still enjoying them.

• No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe. Still working my way through the Nigerian classics. This is sort-of part of a trilogy, and all three novels have depressing endings in very different ways. I’ll likely re-read all three though.
• Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch. Fifth in the series, still liking it.
• Tempest In The Tea Room and Too Many Coins by Libi Astaire. These were OK. I liked that they were set in a Jewish context, but I did feel that the clue to the resolution of the mystery in Tempest In The Tea Room was made really really explicit over and over and over again, to the point where I wondered if it was going to be a red herring. I also found the conversational language very stilted. I probably won’t read more in the series, unless someone makes me a very enthusiastic recommendation.
• Brother’s Ruin by Emma Newman. I enjoyed this one, though I did feel it might have been better as a novel rather than a novella — it seemed to stop fairly abruptly, and since there’s clearly going to be more in the series, why not give us a bit more of the story?

• Savant by Nik Abnett. I really wanted to like this one, but there are not enough SF trappings in the world to make me enjoy a book about an inept-at-life mathematical genius and the selfless woman who teaches him how to love.

• The Corporation Wars trilogy by Ken MacLeod — well-written but not really my thing. I slogged my way to the end of the first book, made a start on the second, then decided life's too short.
• Various things with a polar theme: White Fang by Jack London, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson, and South! by Ernest Shackleton. I also re-read “Scott and Scurvy” at Idle Words (there’s a bunch more stuff there about Antarctica too).

• Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes. Got about a third of the way through but wasn’t finding it particularly interesting, so stopped.
• Players by Paul McAuley. As above, except I only made it a quarter of the way through this one.
• In Order To Live by Yeonmi Park. This was OK, I suppose, but I wouldn’t see any need to read it again. It’s the memoir of a North Korean refugee who ended up in South Korea after some time in China, which could have been interesting but it was quite blandly written, pretty much just a recitation of “this happened, then this happened, then this happened”.

• Volume 10 of The Comfortable Courtesan.
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. This was OK. I mean, I love the idea of books being set in London, and even though it was written by a non-Londoner I still only found two parts where I was like “huh, that doesn’t really match reality”, but I wasn’t massively keen on the way the central mystery was revealed. I’ve already queued up another by the same author, though, since I did think it was promising.

• Dichronauts by Greg Egan. One of my favourite authors, but I found this one fell a bit flat for me. I love the fundamental idea of the book, and will likely re-read it in order to get my head round it a bit more, but I wanted more exploration of both the story at hand and of other ways the weird physics of the universe would impact people’s lives.

• Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal. I liked this better than her Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, partly because it had lots of mentions of delicious food. There was a similar holding-back of a central mystery, and again it didn’t really work for me (I think I just don’t really get on with that sort of structuring device). Also, there was annoying and pointless fatphobia which the book would have been much better without.
• Black Dog by Neil Gaiman. This was OK. I wouldn’t bother reading it again, even though it’s set in the American Gods universe (and I love American Gods, and have read it four times and listened to the audiobook twice). I just got to the end and it all felt a bit... pointless.

• Volume 11 of The Comfortable Courtesan.
• AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, edited by Ivor W Hartmann.

• Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. Didn’t enjoy this as much as Three Men in a Boat — there was too much boring stuff in between the funny bits.
• The Bees by Laline Paull. A re-read because her new one (The Ice) coming out reminded me that this one exists. v.g., will probably re-read again.

• The Ice by Laline Paull. Major disappointment! I loved The Bees, but this one I just found to be a boring story of rich people doing rich-people things. My Kindle tells me I got 16% of the way through before giving up.

• Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville. I read this bit-by-bit over the past several months and have now reached the end. I found it a mixed bag. I’ve enjoyed several of his novels and wanted to try out his short stories too. Some of these I liked a lot, while others I felt I wasn’t quite clever enough to grasp the point of. The title story is also the first story, and didn’t work at all for me, so it took me ages to actually get any further (in retrospect I should have just skipped it). One of the stories was way too far towards horror for me — I’ve successfully blanked it from my mind now, but this does mean I’m unlikely to re-read this collection because I don’t want to risk that one getting inside my head again. Which is a massive shame!
• The Interior Life by Dorothy J Heydt. Not bad — a very interesting premise, and the earlier parts were good, but it had A Great Big Climactic Battle, and I find those very boring, so I ended up skipping bits, which is not how I want to remember a novel.
• The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke. Space elevators in Sri Lanka, though sadly as a product of colonialism rather than Sri Lankan science.
• The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean. Popular science book about DNA and related things. I found it annoyingly perky, and in places colloquial to the point of incomprehensibility. It uses “he” as a generic pronoun, and erases Rosalind Franklin entirely. Kindle says I made it 16% of the way through, which I see is exactly as far as I got through the last book I didn’t finish.
• Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, edited by Hope Nicholson. Recommend, will read again, am hoping for a second volume.
• Binti and Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. First and second in a series of novellas; the first was a re-read in preparation for my first read of the second. I liked the first one but found the second a bit disappointing. I also found it really weird that Binti’s university-level maths study appeared to be all about numbers. (I didn’t get on with the author’s novel Who Fears Death either; I found myself skipping great swathes of it from about two-thirds of the way through).

• Count Zero by William Gibson. Like when I re-read Neuromancer a few months ago, I was curious to see how well this would have aged. Again, the answer is: pretty well!

• The Proper Place and The Day of Small Things by O Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan). If it wasn’t for the occasional random racism, classism, and sexism, these would have been really good relaxing reads.
• Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Really good. I was going to take my time over this, but couldn’t put it down.
• An Accident of Stars and A Tyranny of Queens by Foz Meadows. A “more realistic” take on the real-world implications of portal fantasy. The first was a re-read in preparation for the second (its sequel). Pretty good all the way through, though I did find in the second one I sometimes had to backtrack a bit because I’d misinterpreted which character was the current viewpoint character (it switches around a lot).
• Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire. Another interesting take on the portal fantasy theme. The next one in the series is out this month and I may well get it.
• Summer in Orcus by T Kingfisher. Yet another portal fantasy. I swear this wasn’t on purpose — I just remembered that I like this author and went to see if they had anything out that I’d not already read. I still like this author.
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I’d never read this before, and felt it was time to remedy this.

• Round About A Pound A Week by Maud Pember Reeves. Published just over a century ago and still relevant today.

• Between Two Thorns, Any Other Name, All Is Fair, A Little Knowledge, and All Good Things by Emma Newman. The first four of these were re-reads in preparation for the fifth, which is the conclusion of the Split Worlds series. I enjoyed all of these, though am not likely to re-read them in the future. The writing style didn’t really grab me in the way I wanted it to — it has that feel of being a really really detailed plot summary rather than an immersive experience (a criticism I have previously also levelled at the Harry Potter novels, so if you’re fine with those you should be fine with these).
• Trans Like Me by C N Lester. I didn’t find this as engrossing as I’d expected to — my attention kept wandering, I think partly because I felt the writing style was a little too impersonal to fit well with the first-person viewpoint. I was also surprised to discover a plethora of footnotes at the end of the book, since all the in-text citations are missing from my copy (Kindle version bought from Amazon). I think all cis people should read it, though!

• Confessions of a Barrister by Russell Winnock. This was OK, but the author isn’t as witty as he thinks he is, and the romance sub-plot was cringeworthy. Also, his portrayal of the situation of false rape accusations is annoyingly biased (and, according to evidence, wrong).

• The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard. I decided about halfway through this that I wasn’t enjoying it, but persisted to the end in the hope of closure. Sadly it turns out that this is just the first in a series, so no payoff for me.
• Something Coming Through by Paul McAuley. A similar experience to the above, really, though I did at least make it further through the book before wondering if it was worth continuing.
• How to Live on Other Planets: a Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, edited by Joanne Merriam. Short story collection looking at the immigrant experience from an SF point of view.
• The Last Place you Look by Kristen Lepionka. A murder mystery with more dead women than ideal, but the reason I like it anyway is that the main character is a bisexual woman whose bisexuality isn’t made into a plot point. I don’t know if this is the first in a series, but I kind of hope it is.

• The Red Abbey Chronicles: Naondel by Maria Turtschaninoff, translated by Annie Prime. As previously mentioned, I don’t normally like Young Adult, which apparently this is, but I liked the first in this series, and I like this one too. It’s not exactly an easy read — some of the characters are really terrible people — but I’m keen to read the next one.
• My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal. This is really good. I have some experience of a couple of its major themes, and it brought up some difficult memories for me, but it was very much worth reading.

• Volume 12 of The Comfortable Courtesan. This is the end of the main story :( :( :( (though there is at least one related novella still to read).

• The Windfall by Diksha Basu. Some light holiday reading, not bad at all, might re-read on a future holiday. I liked the multiple interconnected storylines.
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. A generational novel covering so many generations I found myself losing track of who was who towards the end. A good read, though a difficult one in places.
• Fearsome Journeys edited by Jonathan Strahan. A good, varied collection of fantasy short stories.
• Wetware: Cyberpunk Erotica edited by Violet Blue. Not bad; might read again.
• Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt by John Grindrod. Really really good.

• Wireless: The Essential Charles Stross. I got this for the novella included in it, “Palimpsest”. I did enjoy that one, but the others were all a bit meh, and in places a bit creepy (as in icky, not as in scary).
• Evening Is The Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan. Got 10% of the way through, wasn’t digging it, stopped.
• The Case Of The Late Pig by Margery Allingham. Aside from the casual fatphobia, a good short read!
• The September 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Some good stories, some not my thing.
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman. A re-read after many years. I enjoyed it the first time I read it, but it feels a bit too close to the "evil stepmother" trope for me now.
• Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair. Decent enough light reading, will read more.
• Taken By The Hand by O Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan). As previously reported, there are issues of occasional racism, classism, and sexism in this author’s books, but I still enjoyed reading this one. I think the main thing I enjoy about them is that they take the mother-daughter relationship seriously.

• Landscape In Sunlight and Seaview House, both by Elizabeth Fair. As previously reported, I found the first of her novels to be “Decent enough light reading”, and felt the same about Landscape In Sunlight. On the other hand, Seaview House was heavily concerned with “will X marry Y or Z”, which I found tedious.
• The Best Of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, both by Karen Lord; the former a re-read in preparation for reading the latter, which is its sequel. I find the first of these is a much smoother read than the second, which is clogged up with lots of infodumping and not-clearly-separated points of view.
• Half A King by Joe Abercrombie, which I downloaded a sample of after recommendation from fred_mouse. Couldn't get into it, though, so decided against buying the full book.
• Letters To A Young Muslim by Omar Saif Ghobash. A bit repetitive, and some of it felt very naive to me, but overall an interesting read.
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. A re-read, and along with it I read the tor.com re-read posts. I’ve read this several times before, but this was my first time reading it after having watched the recent TV adaptation, and it reinforced my opinion that the adaptation was a really good one.