Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 5, 2024

This is the second of three posts listing a big box of books I got from the remainder dealer HamiltonBook a couple of weeks ago. It has the fiction that is not SFF, which mostly means mainstream. There is one mystery novel, from a writer I have a shelf of and may need to read a great big batch straight through at some point. As before (and like the third post coming next week), these are all things I paid money for, which is at least a mild recommendation.

Shrines of Gaiety is a novel by Kate Atkinson, from 2022, and I think I'm going to read everything she's written until I hit something that makes me stop. (I've hit three of her "Jackson Brodie" novels so far, most recently When Will There Be Good News?, and found them all brilliant.) This one is a standalone, set in high society of 1926 London, and that's about all I know about it - and about all I want to know before diving in.

Snow is a 2020 John Banville novel set in 1957 Dublin and about a murder investigation by a policeman. I've read a bunch of Banville's books, though not as many recently - and I have his first book as Benjamin Black, which are more specifically genre mysteries, also set in 1950s Dublin, on the shelf. For this one, I want to keep reading Banville, and I wonder what makes this one a "Banville" book, while others on similar themes are published under his pseudonym. I doubt I'll have the time or energy to read this back-to-back with Christine Falls, but that would be fun to do.

Make Russia Great Again is a humorous novel by Christopher Buckley from 2020, which I probably will need to let a few years lapse until I'm interested in reading it. It is about You-Know-Who; Buckley has done a bunch of political satires in his day - Thank You For Smoking is way above the rest, but the others are all at least amusing and fun to read. I think the last book of his I read was They Eat Puppies, Don't They? a decade ago.

City Walls is a mystery novel by Loren D. Estleman, in the series about Detroit-based PI Amos Walker, from 2023. Looking at my shelves, I have eight of them that I haven't read, plus now this one, and three more just before this one that I missed. Estleman, I think, writes at the usual mystery book-a-year pace in this series, so I'm a little over a decade behind. But I caught up on a dozen books in this series once already, so I know I could do it again, if I feel like it. And, who knows? maybe I will feel like it soon.

Lessons is a 2022 Ian McEwan novel - well, the only one that year, but you know what I mean. I've been reading McEwan since the late '80s, and haven't given up yet. (I am a few books behind at this point, but that happens.) This seems to be one of his "several important moments over the course of a long life" books, about what may be a piano prodigy about his age.