What are you currently reading?
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. Yesterday I found four Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries at Half Price Books for $2 each, so I picked them up. I have been somewhat ambivalent about Whose Body?, which I’ve read twice, but I am really liking Unpleasantness. I will probably undertake to read the whole set.
What did you recently finish reading?
I’ve read eight books this month so far but discarded three, which seems a high number: City at the End of Time by Greg Bear, The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan, and Gunpowder Empire by Harry Turtledove, a young adult alternate history science fiction novel thinly disguising how much Turtledove knows about daily life in ancient Rome. When nothing–at all–had happened in the first quarter of the short novel except walking through town and observing cultural differences, I decided to put it down.
On the other hand, I recently finished Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, set in Shanghai in the early 1990s. Chief Inspector Chen Cao was an English major at a foreign language institute, but because one of his uncles was politically suspect, he got assigned to the police department instead of to a professorship. In this his first mystery, he questions whether his police work is as meaningful as his poetry, and then whether his poetry is as meaningful as his police work. An interesting character study and fascinating setting.
What do you think you’ll read next?
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, from the library, or the next Dorothy L. Sayers book. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson is still staring at me from the shelf, but after having just been burned by the hard sf of Greg Bear, I am not yet bold enough to give another new-to-me author a try.
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