It’s very good, I agree.
It, and its sequel, were both pretty great.
There’s a similar book that I’ll recommend until I’m blue in the face: The Traitor Baru Cormorant. There are a lot of thematic similarities between the two, except that City of Stairs is a lot more lighthearted, and Baru Cormorant is a lot more ethically ambiguous.
I’ve not had great luck in the past couple weeks with my reading: All the Birds In the Sky, The Hike, Updraft were fun enough, but none of them were worth recommending.
I just finished a children’s book last night that was way more hardcore and interesting than any of them: The Madman of Piney Woods, by Christopher Paul Curtis. It’s set in like 1901 or something, with children who are reasonably well-adjusted but are still dealing with elders who are scarred from slavery and from the Irish Potato Famine. At first I thought it’d be a good read-aloud for my seven-year-old; but when a character describes the Typhoid quarantine ships coming into Canada, I was like, shit no.
I haven’t read Baru Cormorant yet, or the sequel to the Bennett. I hate grotesque things, so the Bennett was rocky for me at times. But in the end I thought it was very good.
I’m perpetually in the middle of Dune, which I admire every time I pick it up, but which somehow doesn’t entice me to pick it up very often.
Instead I’m reading Beverley Nichols’ books about his house and garden. I flew through Down the Garden Path in about four days, now I’m halfway through A Thatched Roof. I love these books. Imagine Bertie Wooster bought himself a toy cottage in the country and invited you down to it, and the two of you sat by the fire sipping sherry while he told you about having it done up. That’s what these books are.
Now past the halfway mark with Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, and it’s getting a little better. I’ll definitely finish it.
Finished Ian Toll’s Six Frigates this weekend, and was very impressed. Anyone who enjoyed the Patrick O’Brian books would like it (Toll even quotes, with approval, O’Brian’s account of the USS Constitution-HMS Java battle, accurate but for placing Jack Aubrey in the middle of it).
Also just finished One Hundred Days, and really liked it. Adm. Woodward discusses the difficulties of protecting his fleet, juggling limited resources, trying to guess what the Argentines would do next, and dealing with casualties, logistics problems, bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, unreliable missile systems, etc. A great high-level book of modern war at sea.
Currently reading The Strange Invaders (1934) by Alun Llewellyn when I’m travelling. It’s set in a devastated Russia, long after a civilisation ending war. A failing feudal community are beset by growing troubles as the annual trade caravan is late. Slow but interesting.
And at home I’ve started The Golden Hill by Francis Spufford. A young man with a huge bankdraft (which will take time to clear) arrives in New York in 1746. Soon robbed of most of his other funds, he must maintain face among the close-knit New York society until the bank draft clears or he’ll be believed a con artist of some sort and the draft won’t be honoured.
Styled after early novels, it almost makes me want to re-read The Sotweed Factor by John Barth (except I gave my copy to charity earlier this year!)
I loved that book! It’s a companion to another title by the same author, Elijah of Buxton.
I finished Come Twilight last night: another solid entry in the Long Beach Homicide series. 
And perfect timing, because the three new Hogwarts e-books were released yesterday! Now I just have to decide which to start tonight:[ul]
[li]Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies[/li][li]Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists[/li][li]Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide[/li][/ul]Decisions, decisions…
The best part about reading on a Kindle is that no one can tell by its cover what I’m reading. So I can feel free to read whatever trashy thing I wanted to. Then my boss at work was thinking about getting a Kindle Oasis too and wanted to check out mine.
“Sure,” I said handing it over to her before realizing what book I’m in the middle of.
“Why are you reading about Trump?”
“Uh…I wanted to see how bad it was.” It was the truth but it was one of those truths that still felt like a dirty lie.
*In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome *by Ann Coulter is as dirty as it gets. I’m at page 147 of 221 pages and it’s like those challenges where you see how long one can hold their arms out before just giving up. I am definitely not part of the core audience that would gravitate towards this book. In fact, this is the first (and probably the last) of her books I’ll ever read.
Objectively, it’s the literary equivalent of a shit shotgun. She might hit the target, but she will get everything else full of it in the effort. There are some parts that I find myself agreeing with. That causes me concern that there’s some sort of Stockholm effect happening only to have it quickly dispelled by the next paragraph. The crux so far seems to be that everything is bad and only Trump has the “common sense” to call everything bad and that’s what makes Trump awesome. Except when she builds that house of sand, she ignores the tide of vomit coming towards her.
Looks like she might already be having second thoughts: Coulter Goes to War with Trump And It Is Glorious - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Phew! I’m finally going to let go of The Big Book of Science Fiction after having read about 98% of it. I enjoyed most of it but the library wants it back, and I really want to read something different now. Fairly good, but my favorite story was George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings, which I had already read. Nothing else knocked my socks off.
This morning I started with great joy to read Michael Koryta’s newest, Rise the Dark.
Still plugging through Alexander Hamilton. It sucks, because I know the ending, but it’s still an interesting look at the founding fathers (outside of YAY WE WON!, I didn’t pay much attention to US History in high school). If I could stop getting distracted by other things, I’d like to think I would be done.
I read Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day by Jonathan Howard this morning. It was funny, captivating and a great introduction to the character and his world.
Try “The Way of Cross and Dragon” and “The Stone City” for two more great GRRM sf short stories.
As a followup, I suggest Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, about the Framers (including Hamilton) in their relationships with each other, as friends, allies, frenemies and foes. Won the Pulitzer, and deserved it.
I wound up not starting any of the new Hogwarts e-books; instead, I decided to read the next book in the Joe Dillard series (In Good Faith). I have a serious weakness for law enforcement/legal dramas, and I felt like staying in that genre. I just read the first book in the series two books ago: it wasn’t particularly clever, but entertaining and engaging enough that when I finished it I went ahead and downloaded the next book.
I’m only a couple of chapters in, but this story already seems to have a slightly better/more complicated setup than the first one. The main character has switched from a 20-year defense career to a position in the D.A.'s office, and the perspective change could be interesting (on top of the grisly case he gets assigned to). I’ve already noticed one editing mistake, though: the chapter titles are dates, and the “August 29” chapter starts by talking about the September heat. :smack:
I read Exeunt Demon King the second prequel short story to the Johannes Cabal series. It wasn’t quite as good as the first but still a good read… and a side of Cabal I had not anticipated 
Finished “All Clear” by Connie Willis; the second book in the “Blackout”/“All Clear” set. I normally like Connie Willis, but this one was just too long and the pay-off was just too obvious for the sheer amount of story involved. One gets the feeling that Willis did a lot of research on the period (the Blitz) and wanted to include ALL of it in the story. Far too much of the book(s) involves the characters just muddling about in frustration, figuratively bumping into dead ends in the maze. A lot of the dead ends are social, and eventually you wish the characters would just start snarling “Get the hell out of my way!”, rather than being so damned polite. Anyway, the muddled, piled on frustration technique works a lot better in her comedies than it does in drama, especially when it just goes on and on for half the book.
Also read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and was less charmed than I expected to be. The central conceit, which is that the author collects old photographs and weaves them into a story, doesn’t work as well as it could. At least, I didn’t find the pictures particularly compelling and don’t think they added much to the story. One consequence of using found pictures is that you have this weird dichotomy among the “peculiar” children. Half of them have powerful X-Men like abilities and the other half draw the short straw and are effectively circus freaks. I don’t know if I could live happily for decades in a time loop with people who can turn invisible or fly if my special ability was … having a mouth in the back of the head or being full of bees. Yay? Also, the pictures also don’t really match the description of the characters in the book.
The central conflict seems tacked on – any whimsical fantasy in this genre needs a super evil cabal to fight against, so naturally there are evil monsters which our protagonist is uniquely suited to fight against. This is his only obvious “peculiarity”, which has to really suck, because his one ability is being able to defend people who are a lot cooler than he is.
Pretty much my opinion as well… and I was waaaaaaaaay creeped out by Grandpa’s former girlfriend latching on to the kid.
My goodreads review captures my opinion of those maddening books well: "Too long and with situations that seem really easy to fix if the characters weren’t so busy being a bunch of dillweeds.
“At the same time, it was engrossing and I cared what happened to the dillweeds. I have no explanation.”
I finished Dark Places by Gillian Flynn - not nearly as good as her masterful Gone Girl, but it has its moments and is worth a read.
Just started an audiobook of James Ellroy’s Perfidia, about the LAPD at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. I’ve already recognized several characters from L.A. Confidential, which makes for some interesting cross-connections.
I’ve also been browsing through Rogues, a collection of short stories edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. So far it’s a bit uneven.