Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

 This is a beautiful novel, very much aimed at and very much hitting a distinctly postmodern kaleidoscopic target, with prose that occasionally literally took my breath away. The stated goal of looking at five lives (fictional lives, fictionally lost in a real event, fictionally given alternative lives) at the same handful of moments between 1944 and the novel's end in 2009 does make it really had to pull a single story out, though there are occasional interconnections if you pay attention, but it leaves room for Spufford to say things about London and England and Western culture and plausibly humanity overall; he makes glorious use of the space he gives himself. All the POV characters are deeply human, flawed on multiple levels, believable, plausible, different in their experiences and triumphs and regrets.

Railhead by Philip Reeve

 

This is a weird novel, a sort of very-far-future SF that somehow manages to have a strong whiff of Cyberpunk to it--corporate overlords, virtual hacking spaces, AIs, the works--though the primary feature of the setting is that humanity has reached the stars by finding a more or less literal railroad (the vehicles at least seem to run on actual rails) through magic-tech gates to the stars. Uh, apparently most of the trains have something like AIs in them. They all have names, and they have different personalities. The story is basically a Cyberpunk story, young thief ends up doing a job for someone who's probably not entirely to be trusted (though he does turn out to be telling more of the truth than the corporate overlords or the AIs, who are more or less the same things; this is probably not a huge surprise). It's reasonably well-written on the prose level, and most of the characters and their motivations are clear. Given this guy's best-known work is a four-book series, I wouldn't be shocked if there were other novels planned to follow on this; I think it ends just fine, and if there are other novels, I won't need to read them. Not the worst use of my evening, not deathless.

Gone Too Long by Lori Roy

 

This novel seemed to have lots to say about the inherent core depravity of the KKK and its members, but the story was simultaneously kinda muddled and more than a little obvious: I worked out the two or three big twists well before they were revealed, which ... might have been in the intended range, considering how clearly those things were telegraphed. Of course, "obvious" isn't just about plot details, and the intended message, here was pretty flipping obvious. The characters were kinda muddled and blurry around the edges, sometimes closer to the core--there are some characters who are doing things for reasons that aren't ever clear, without any apparently longer-term thinking about eventual inevitable repercussions. The prose was mostly stolid, without a lot of sparkle (some of that might have been that one of the primary POV characters is kinda uneducated). Even the ending was murky: There's clearly supposed to be something obvious happening next, but there are two options, and I don't think Ms. Roy was trying for a "The Lady or the Tiger?" kinda ending. Maybe I just wasn't in the fight headspace tonight, but this really didn't work for me all that well. Things happen.

Red Traitor by Owen Matthews

 

So it turns out that *Black Dawn* is the first book of a trilogy. This is the second. Like the first two, It's a a spy thriller mostly, with much less of Mystery about it, and a lot of Soviet Russian internal politics, which means authoritarian as hell, and survival is more or less the same as winning. There are some good characters, here: The main, Alexander Vasin, is clearly a detective at his core, not a spy or counterspy; his boss Orlov is pretty despicable (as are all the Politburo types); most of the people in the novel can fairly be described as "morally murky." The tension spins out really well, conveying just how close the Cuban Missile Crisis came to spiraling out of control to a nuclear exchange (and even though the USSR didn't have anything like the intercontinental reach it wanted the world to believe it did, there's nothing about "nuclear exchange* that is a good outcome). A really good book, and I'm looking forward to the third book in the trilogy, which is at this moment at the bottom of my checked-out to-read stack.

An Honest Man by Michael Koryta

 

This is an excellent novel, a cluttered story with clear characters; through the middle section it's more interested in unveiling a couple of the characters than in unveiling the plot/s they're dedicated to unraveling, but that's OK: They both have secrets they're skittering around the edges of, and telling the reader those secrets makes them--especially the main POV character--much more reliable, even as like tight-third-person narrators. Other than those characters being somewhat veiled, especially at first, and some other characters being intentionally murky as to their morality and/or trustworthiness, everyone's motivations are pretty clear, here. Koryta seems to have a thing for the physical edges of the US, between the North Atlantic and Montana; the metaphors there seem pretty obvious to me and they might even be intentional.

The Less Dead by Denise Mina

 

This is not a very good novel. The characters are unpleasant and mostly uninteresting, the story is jumbled without being complicated or complex; the primary saving grace is the occasional extraordinarily well-turned phrase. It's pretty clear the author has things to say, but she's not really able to get out of her own way here--that's a pity, because I think I agree with much of what she's trying to say.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

 

There was a wet fizzle at the coffee shop this afternoon, a novel that was clearly not working for me, so I bailed after like sixty pages. This, though: This was emphatically not a fizzle of any kind. Ms. Makkai writes with wit and passion here, telling interconnected stories of the slow-motion catastrophe that was AIDS among the gay subculture in the 1980s and about a woman whose brother had died in that catastrophe trying to resurrect or reconstruct or resomethingorother her relationship with her daughter. So much of the novel just rings with loss--the grief here isn't just for the dying, it's for the living and the innocence and hope they lost so much as the friends and lovers--that the little glimmers in the last few chapters feel like a goddamned sunrise, some sort of moment to be grasped and clung to because there are always people who can't stand that there are people who love and are happy in different ways than theirs. A beautiful, heartrending, eventually optimistic (ish) novel.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

 

While the book seems on its face to be powerfully absurd (and in many ways it is just that) it's also a remarkably serious novel, with more stuff to say than Scalzi's last couple of novels--I mean, it's just as breezy, bordering on flippant, and the wit and humor are just as present; but there are things going on, on the levels of theme and deeper in the subtext, that remind me of *Redshirts* (a novel that has more going on than a lot of people give it credit for). There's a nice little arc that's all about looking death in the face and deciding who you want to be, which is like a little shiv in the ribs; and there's commentary on billionaires and their often inhuman priorities; and there are some nifty takes on politics and media and astronauts and how science might react to the (apparently) impossible, and the book wraps with what might be snark on how what history records isn't often much like the history people live through. While there are a lot of POVs in the book, it's remarkably coherent. Glad my local library of choice had it, happy to get it back so someone else can read it.

Hard as Nails by Dan Simmons

 

After a kinda substantial planning fail around dinner, I needed a quick read, and this fit the bill. It had been a while since I'd read anything wherein Simmons constrained himself to something like reality, I remembered liking what I'd read of his Kurtz novels (literary Easter egg and all) and this is about as good as I remember those being. Grim and bloody and violent, noirish and twisted, with some amusingly turned phrases and some clearly drawn characters--Kurtz himself among them, of course, but he's not alone. I gather Simmons' politics have ... drifted the past few years, but I saw no evidence of any of that here.

The Double Game by Dan Fesperman

 

This is really a muddled mess of a novel, especially through the middle when the author is deploying misdirection as hard and as often as he can--in this case, just about to the point of turning the story into an unreadable stain. I did finish the thing, but the going isn't really worth the go; all the muddle and mess just wreaks hell with the pacing and the suspension of disbelief, and goes a long way to demonstrating that maybe the Cold War Spy Novel is best treated as a historical artifact, if not just left in the past.

Invisible by Andrew Grant

Grabbed this because it looked as though it might play in the realm of pursuit novels, and that's not wildly wrong--though the person doing the pursuing here is the main character. It's mostly a novel about a hypercompetent person with a specific set of skills being a hypercompetent badass. A little interlude near the end when things are explicated for the final couple of scenes. Interesting and sometimes amusing, but the main is so hypercompetent, especially compared to most of the thug-types he runs up against, that there's really not a lot of tension; part of that's the borderline-flat affect of the prose, which ends up on the far side of, say, Thomas Perry's kinda idiosyncratic prosaicness. Pretty decent, maybe I'll look for more by the author.
 

Red Letter Days by Sarah-Jane Stratford

 This is a pretty good novel, mostly historical with a dash of falling-in-love stuff in it. Kinda grim, being about the whole Red Scare thing, not much in the way of large-scale happy endings available, but some smaller-scale, personal ones--that'll have to do. Neatly written, lots of characters but mostly clear; the author herself is something of an expat in London and her experience coming to grips with the whole "two countries separated by a common language" thing is clearly reflected in the novel.

King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby

 

So after last night's minor dud, I figured I needed some fireworks. Holy fucking shit, y'all. A brutally honest book, tracking a morally flexible character's failure to be a hero on the slide to becoming a villain, or maybe a monster. Bad shit happens to fucking everyone, there is no respite for the weary or hope for the good--at least the latter because there ain't much good. The book has many themes--racism is less overt, here, because just about everyone's Black, except for the occasional Latin--but probably the main one is how money poisons everything, especially relationships and very especially relationships we think are or want to be based on love. Strong stuff, as one might expect from Cosby.

Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan

 

This was a kinda weird and distinctly disappointing little novel. It felt very much like a YA novel, but I'm not sure how much fo that was becuase it's also a Christian novel--the publisher is an explicitly Christian one, I've probably seen that before and I probably persist in not remembering that. Oops and oh well. Anyway, there are some decent turns of phrase here, and some decent characterization--the POV is particularly nicely done; the problem is the way the story tries to have it all the ways between divine (or at least angelic) intervention, delusional mental illness, and rational explanations. It feels like a vague rugpull, even when you see it coming like 200 pages ahead (it's not at all subtle, really). At least it was a quick read.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

 Grabbed this out of a Little Free Library a while a go, started it in a coffee shop this morning, finished it this evening. It's a gripping as hell read, grim and gruesome in parts (there are real reasons climbers call 25,000+ feet "the death zone") and there's some ancillary stuff about people wanting to discredit Krakauer for whatever reasons--some of those reasons are probably because the business of guiding people up Everest doesn't come off looking all that great here, even in some alternate timeline where the expeditions don't bottleneck at the summit right as a squall is moving in, and the people leading those businesses especially don't come off looking super great, and those people were some of the people who died in May of 1996, and they had people they left behind who didn't like that their loved ones came off not looking super great. Very high mountains are deadly, and there's no way to completely negate the statistics. I get the feeling looking at timeframes that this is the book that made Krakauer's reputation, and that's pretty well deserved. Very worth reading, if you can deal with the subject matter.

The Collapsing Empire; The Consuming Fire; The Last Emperox by Jon Scalzi

 Spent the last few evenings reading this trilogy. Scalzi being Scalzi, of course, but writing something at least passable as Space Opera. Bold move to make so extensive and interesting a setting and then destroy it--well, technically, wrap the series with the ending of it being inevitable, but with there being something like long-term hope for the people living in it. Also after bringing all the amoral vortices of greed in the novel to something like justice. The voice is definitely recent Scalzi, though there's probably more depth and substance here than in novels like *Kaiju Preservation Society* or *Starter Villain*. The characters are just spot-on (and if the sense I get that Kiva Lagos is everyone's favorite is correct, that's earned) and the various threads move and dodge and weave nicely. It's probably easier to read what's effectively a 1,000-page novel when it's broken up into installments like this. Back in the dim and distant past, I read the first book, figure out there was no way it some of the pending plot elements were going to resolve in the book, and did some poking around and found out it was a planned trilogy, then started buying the books so I could read the completed trilogy at my leisure. Uh, I don't have a good reason that took me five years after it was completed. That's on me--this was a very good three-night read.

Hidden River by Adrian McKinty

 

This wasn't all that great a novel, at least it wasn't a very readable one--the voice was mostly disjointed and scattershot (though there were occasional flashes of acidic wit) and the POV character (and his close buds) came across as pretty hapless and flailing for most of it. It did eventually get somewhere worth getting to, mostly. The "big reveal" was one I saw well ahead, which could reflect on McKinty or it could reflect on me, dunno and don't care; at least it was only twenty or maybe fifty pages ahead, not like most of the fricking novel. Things did clear up immensely the last quarter of the novel or so, that's arguably not enough.