I'm typing this on Friday, which means I may yet get mail today or tomorrow and have to revise this post. Such are the dangers of being a blogger.
The list below, at the moment, is all things I unwrapped this Wednesday, on the usual hegemonic festive winter holiday of my people. Several of them I bought for myself - as I've said before, it's the one way to be sure you get what you want - and I'm not going to tell you which ones.
Acceptance is the third of the original Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer from a decade ago - he has a new book in the same world that just came out a few months ago. The first two are Annihilation and Authority, and I'm reading them slowly enough, I'm sorry to say, that I got Acceptance in a completely different cover design than the first two, which physically pains me. I'm sure I'll live. And I'm going to try to read this relatively quickly; I'm vaguely trying to catch up on VanderMeer, even though he's pretty prolific.
My Brother's Keeper is a newish novel (from 2023) by Tim Powers, and sees him return to
Stress of Her Regard territory with the untold secret history of the Brontë sisters. I'm a long-time fan of Powers, though I have to admit I did look a bit askance when he moved to Baen a few years back and had a three-book series about the same characters (I've read the first one,
Alternate Routes). But writers gotta eat, and want to write stuff and get it out into the world, and sometimes you dance with whoever's willing to dance. So I guess I'll keep reading Powers books unless he starts going overly Baen and includes rants about the Trilateral Commission or something.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the new novel from Haruki Murakami, who I've been reading since
Wild Sheep Chase -
almost everything he's had translated into English at this point. (There's a short book about music I haven't gotten to yet, and the bug-crusher
1Q84 sitting on my shelf and mocking me.)
The City is shorter than
1Q84 - most books are - so I might tackle this one first. What's it about? Probably the same quirky things as any Murakami novel - which is to say, anything. I'll figure that out when I read it.
High Tide at Midnight is the sixth book in the
Trese series, about a supernatural detective in the Philippines. I'm really happy to see that this attempt to bring the series to the US market seems to be working better than the first try did, years back - I saw the first two books way back in my SFBC days, and then there was a long drought before I saw more, even though new material was being published in the Philippines at least intermittently over those years. (There was an animated TV series a year or three back, which probably helped the books' profile - TV, even in these latter days, hits a vastly larger audience than any book.) Anyway: great series, great atmosphere, great art, really interesting supernatural world.
And last is
Schtick Figures, the new book from Drew Friedman from this year. It collects over a hundred and fifty of his portraits - looks like comedians are the largest group, but with lots of random others as well. My sense is that this is the "odds & sods" collection, with all the Friedman work that didn't get into his more tightly-themed books. (US Presidents! Old Jewish Comedians! Comics pros! Great Mailmen! Well, maybe not that last one.)
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