Happy New Year

 Well, been almost a year...

I'm going to try to get this going again. I want to at the very least keep track of my reading. My brain is getting old, and I've been known to buy a book I already have--or even buy a book when I already have two copies, in once case--and I read enough books that if I just use the blog as a book diary that somebody else reads once in awhile, that's OK.

So here's the first book of the year that I finished:

Jester's Fortune, Dewey Lambdin (Alan Lewrie series #8)

Not a great one to start the year off with, but it was a relaxing light read. Lambdin is clearly inspired by Patrick O'Brian, but like all the O'Brian imitators, he doesn't measure up, really. His prose is much weaker, his characters more flat, his humor less humorous, his grasp of the period's language less firm. (He really likes to use the adjective "shitten.") Yet I hold a little warm regard for the main character, who seems as if he were originally inspired by George MacDonald Frasier's cad Flashman, but Lambdin just wasn't able to keep Lewrie so terrible. By this novel, Lewrie has really grown up, and is starting to develop into a good leader with a real desire to be a better man.

I realized partway through that I'd accidentally skipped a book. It seems that #7, King's Commander, is not available on Kindle from Amazon Japan for some reason. Will I go to the trouble of tracking it down? Probably not. It says a lot about this series that I don't feel like I really missed anything.

Lambdin would also have done well to have followed O'Brian's lead on writing postscripts or forwards or other commentary on his own work: generally, just don't do it, but if you must, don't turn it into a blog post full of personal opinions about this and that. It doesn't really come across well. It's too bad, because there are some notes there about the historical events that inspired the story, and those are interesting. 

Currently reading: 

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (audio, read by the author): This is a reread for the Kuala Lumpur Speculative Fiction Book Club, and I'm half loving it--it really is so good!--and half not wanting to continue--it really is such a dark, sad, painful story! 
• A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher (print): I started this awhile ago, got busy, and have returned to it after finishing Jester's Fortune. It's...OK. I'm not the target audience, and I probably would have LOVED it as a pre-teen, but considering that its main theme is how bigotry and fear can be harnessed to take power, and I'm reading Beloved at the same time which deals with much the same thing in a MUCH more realistic and abject manner, it makes this book feel very trite. Not Kingfisher's fault, of course. I'm just kind of reading it to finish reading it, at this point.
• The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. This is the first novel of Newitz's that I've read, though I've read plenty of their nonfiction and a couple of short stories. When I was attending a panel they moderated at VICFA (the Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) a few months ago, I remembered that I needed to read more by them, and bought this one while listening to the discussion. I've barely started it, but it looks good so far.