L. Bracket, Shadow over Mars (1944)
N. Blake [C. Day-Lewis], Thou shell of death (1936)
F. Leiber, Conjure Wife (1943)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Secret lives and other stories (1975)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the cross (1980. English version 1982)
M. Pye, Antwerp (2021)
R.A. Salvatore, Streams of silver (1989)*
R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling's Gem (1990)*
T. Spector, Spoon-fed (2020)
This is what happens when you slightly let yourself succumb to temptation. I wouldn't say that any of the five genre novels I read were terrible, but only Conjure Wife could be said to be of real value. I enjoyed them all though, even if Salvatore's middle Icewind Dale novel has laboured plotting. It shares that defect with almost all the rest of my reading. I'm really liking Ngũgĩ, and his books are very well written, but Devil on the cross could do with digesting its Marxism (the short stories are better).
R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling's Gem (1990)*
T. Spector, Spoon-fed (2020)
This is what happens when you slightly let yourself succumb to temptation. I wouldn't say that any of the five genre novels I read were terrible, but only Conjure Wife could be said to be of real value. I enjoyed them all though, even if Salvatore's middle Icewind Dale novel has laboured plotting. It shares that defect with almost all the rest of my reading. I'm really liking Ngũgĩ, and his books are very well written, but Devil on the cross could do with digesting its Marxism (the short stories are better).
Even Alexievich's book, though I do think it is the best of the lot, and I think is essentially the one she won the Nobel for, suffers from uncertain narrative flow. Some of its passages are also just a little too long for me. These are niggles though, it is a masterpiece (again) and is a real testament to the historian's ear for source material allied to the ability to edit it to allow those voices to become something bigger. If it doesn't have the precision and pace of The unwomanly face of war, that's an impossibly high bar, and it's still enormously moving, humanising and powerful.
