Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 18, 2026

This is slightly cheating: I'm writing this the morning of Friday, July 10, and the three books below all arrived earlier this week. But I already have a post about new books going up this Sunday, so this one gets bumped back a week. No one cares about the exact timing anyway.

I was on vacation this week - still am, as of the moment I'm typing this - and wanted some things to read. (Because three big bookcases full of stuff clearly wasn't enough, as often is true.) I ordered some things from that retailer we all wish we didn't use as much as we do, and three of the four books I bought came quickly. (One more is still in transit from somewhere more distant; I imagine I'll post about that when it finally arrives.)

Anyway, this is what arrived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week - in three separate packages on three separate days for maximum environmental impact, I guess.

For a reading project: The Moving Target, the first of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. I've already read this, and written a post about it, so what else can I say here? Hmmm. I have a suspicion that this book was printed print-on-demand, if that's interesting. It's the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition from 1998, but the copyright page doesn't have a listing of what printing it is. Also, the covers curl somewhat more than usual while reading, the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy, and there's a bunch of blank pages at the end. All of that, in my mind, adds up to POD - but there's no bar code at the end of the book block, so I can't be sure. If it is POD, it's very close to a "real" offset-printed book, which is nice.

Because I like to try to read longer books when I have a few days free to dive into them: Witch King, the beginning of a fantasy trilogy from Martha Wells. (I almost said "new" trilogy, but this is from 2023, is already in paperback, and I think the sequel is out or nearly out.) I'm not quite a quarter of the way into this one, and looking at my days of vacation left, I might not manage to finish it off before Monday's return to work. So far, it's a meaty, complex book with two timelines, but, given its trilogy-starter status, I'm trying not to expect an actual ending here. If I do get one, that can be a pleasant surprise.

And, more or less as an alternate choice if I decided I didn't want to read Witch King next, I also got Jack Vance's 1982 novel Suldrun's Garden. I've been working my way through Vance novel-series over the past couple of years, and I think I've gotten to all of the classic Vance that has been collected into omnibuses. So now this fantasy trilogy is probably next, and then I'll have to figure out where to go from there. I did read this, I think, but it was a long, long time ago - probably in the mid to late '80s, having gotten them from the SFBC a decade or so before I went to work there.