I finally finished Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. I thought it was quite good. I particularly liked the more satirical parts (e.g. featuring Oblonsky or Levin’s bewildering election trip).
However, I found Anna to be easily the least interesting character in the book, so I sometimes got impatient during her parts. Also, I thought the denouement was a dud, where he discussed spiritualism and the war in Serbia at length.
Have you tackled War and Peace? Despite its reputation, I found it just as accessible as this novel.
I just finished City of Miracles, the last in a trilogy begun with City of Stairs and City of Blades. I enjoyed the first two, but thought the third one was significantly better; the ending was surprisingly affecting. These are great light fantasy reads–not comic fantasy, but not grimdark either.
I liked the first but would never consider it light. Probably a lot of that is just how gross I found it.
PSA:
Hi all, I’m going on vacation this week, driving across country, to visit a friend in Michigan. So if I forget the new month’s post and don’t get it up by the first, PM me! Doesn’t matter if I get multiple PMs just feel free to throw a fish at me…
Huh. I think I read it around the same time as The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which is IMO a much better book but holy shit is it ever dark. Both books feature as protagonist a woman whose primary skillset is accounting, and who comes from a culture that’s suffered under an oppressive conquering culture, so it was hard not to compare the two. In any case I don’t remember much gross about the first one.
It’s probably more fair to say it had some gross bits and some grotesquerie, which is an issue for me (as I am a delicate fucking flower).
I’ve started reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Because I’m not quite cynical enough yet. In which the local white population couldn’t outright steal the reservation land from the very rich Osage tribe in Oklahoma, so they married into the tribe and proceeded to kill them off so they could inherit the oil riches. Just the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t be reading if I wanted to maintain a good mood. 
Finished it. It was good but not great; things fall into place a bit too neatly by the end. I think I prefer Leonard’s modern-day crime stories to his Westerns.
Just started an audiobook of John Scalzi’s The God Engines, about a distant-future theocracy which uses captured alien slaves (called “gods,” although it’s not quite clear yet whether or not they’re actually divine) to power its starships. A very strange book so far.
A friend of mine read that and said it was terrific - although very depressing.
I finished the latest John Rain story, Zero Sum by Barry Eisler. The series continues to be well written, exciting and all round enjoyable. I do like John, even though he is an assasin…
Yes, I read and enjoyed it over ten years ago. The only part I didn’t find very interesting was Pierre’s dabbling in Freemasonry. I figured they would cut that out of the 2016 miniseries (which was pretty good) but no, they left it in.
The Keep turned out to be pretty good. I know there are more in the series, but I think this stood well enough alone and I don’t plan to follow any further.
Next I read a few chapters of Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero, which has a really great premise (homage to the Scooby Gang, Cthulu) but sadly it wasn’t working for me.
Now I’m on to The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins. Short fiction about prison life, written by a guy who is currently serving a life sentence. It’s pretty interesting but I don’t feel it will be a very memorable book overall. That’s cool.
Read Revere Beach, one of the “America in Pictures” books from Acadia Press. Interesting but a little frustrating.
I’m now reading Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, a book I’ve long heard of and wanted to read. It’s another of those alternative history novels in which the South wins the Civil War, but, as it came out in 1955, it is one of the first of thise niche, if not definitely the first. It’s much better than I thought it would be. Moore’s vision of a postwar North is pretty bleak, even decades later.
On audio, I’m reading Douglas Preston’s The Codex, which is about on par with his other outrageous adventure novels.
That’s totally how I think of you. Delicate as fuck.
Looking back, now I’m remembering more of the grotesquerie, and you’re right.
Anyway, just finished The Scarlet Sister. Totally original plot in a totally original setting: against the backdrop of a quasi-Western-Europe quasi-medieval setting (that really is on a planet settled by spacefarers), a child living in poverty is taken to a school of magic, where she discovers she may be The Chosen One, and anyway where she’s completely kickass at studies. How do authors keep coming up with such new ideas?
Snark aside, it was reasonably well-written and passed the time.
Oops. Red Sister, not The Scarlet Sister.
I’m glad my true delicacy is shining through this medium! 
I finished reading The Adventures of Gerard, one of two collections of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Etienne Gerard, Napoleon’s best (but not brightest) cavalry officer. They’re amusing and definitely easy reading. Plus they give me a reason to look up Napoleonic history on Wikipedia as a bonus!
Delicate as gosh darn lace! 
I’m in the middle of a 25 hour cross country drive, Hello Nebraska! Through most of Wyoming and into Nebraska, I listened to The Skeleton in the CLoset by M C Beaaton. THis is mythird or fourth reading of it. It passes the time nicely. TOmorrow will be Discworld, just haven’t decided which one yet.
I forgot to add that I finished Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley… War is much easier to read about when the victims are several hundred years in their graves 
I especially like the twist that it’s our timeline that is the alternative one, and that in the original timeline, Lee won at Gettysburg. It was only the presence of the time traveler, who was trying hard not to influence events, that inadvertently changed things. Very clever.