Having made a sort of peace with the state of the
world (or, at the very least, having developed better coping mechanisms for
dealing with the Ongoing Shitshow), I was able to read something that approached
a decent number of books this year.
Wednesday 22 November 2017
Monday 20 November 2017
Agents of Empire
Noel Malcom, 2015
(November 2017)
A fascinating book. Takes as its premise the
interconnected stores of a family of minor Albanian nobility, and follows them
through their various trials and tribulations in Venice, the Balkans, and
Istanbul in the late 1500s. Slightly ponderous writing, but not overbearingly
so, and every so often contains gems such as this: "…the chronicler Ureche
would have nothing good to say about Aron. His main passions, allegedly, were
'pillage, debauchery, gambling and bagpipe-players.'" Thorough, enlightening,
and on occasion surprisingly funny.
Friday 17 November 2017
Never Let Me Go
(November 2017)
Gyah. What a singularly frustrating book.
What, to be more specific, a singularly frustrating narrator.
Friday 10 November 2017
Within the Sanctuary of Wings
(October 2017)
And so the Lady Trent books reach a
suitably rousing conclusion. Suitable in that while great affairs of state and
nation are settled with no little help from our protagonist, for most of the
book not very much seems to happen at all. It’s Shangri-La with scurvy, in a
nutshell.
Wednesday 8 November 2017
The Remains of the Day
(October 2017)
Reread this for a thing. I wasn’t going to
write too much about it here, as this isn’t the thing (yet), but I find that I have
thoughts that are not so directly connected to the thing and so here we are.
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