BOTM: C.T. Powers, In the memory of the forest (1997)
F. Butler - Gallie, Touching cloth (2023)
J. Cocker, Good pop, bad pop (2022)
J. Duindam, Dynasties: a global history of power 1300-1800 (2015)
P.J. Farmer, The alley god (1970)
C. Jarman, River Kings (2021)
L. Kennedy, Trespasses (2022)
A. Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)
R.A. Salvatore, The crystal shard (1988)
T. Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
This was not a great month. Many of them were mediocre to poor, though I did find Duindam's survey of dynastic power interesting, if slightly slow going sometimes. At least part of that is around expectations. There is some pompous reviewing of Salvatore's debut novel, the one that launched a thousand sequels. It's obviously far from the best written novel, but it does its job just fine. The mythos holds together, the setting is compelling, the characters have little nuance, but they occupy their place in the plot very well, and it gallops long, and lots of things sound really cool. Thoroughly enjoyable. Adam Rutherford's book, which has much better prose, drove me into an absolute fury with its underlying smugness and lack of precision and honesty. Far from a recommendation.
Powers does all the right things well. It's billed as centring on a murder. It isn't in any way (though there is a murder at the start). It's actually a fascinating novel about a landscape we all know little about, even - as the book is at pains to say - many of the people who live there. We're really bad at the complexity of Eastern European history, and this is a very welcome look at how communities thought and didn't think about their vanished Jewish populations. It's well done, deep and expansively written, and nowhere near as dry as I'm making it sound. It's a resounding success as a novel
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