Reading Roundup #90: New Year, New (to Me) Stories

Happy belated new year! I didn’t have anything to post in a roundup last week because I was too busy to read for a while — and because I’d just embarked on three loooong books. Which I still haven’t finished (and likely won’t for a few weeks, if not months). But I did manage to squeeze in a few shorter books thanks to audiobook magic, so I can share those!

Knot of Shadows (Penric and Desdemona #11) by Lois McMaster Bujold: At this point in the series, we’ve seen Penric and Desdemona through some pretty harrowing experiences, but in many ways, this was the most challenging for me as a reader. A major theme of the story is despair and the distance of the gods from mortal problems — something I think many of us struggle with, whatever our personal relationship to religion may be. The internal theology of this world is endlessly fascinating, and once again, I’m impressed by Lois McMaster Bujold’s ability to write tragedy and explore unanswerable questions with delicacy and even awe. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. My thanks to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Partners in Crime (Tommy & Tuppence #2) by Agatha Christie: It’s been a while since I read the first Tommy and Tuppence book, The Secret Adversary, and I loved being back with these two and their shenanigans. Unlike the first, Partners in Crime is really a book of short stories, with a light overarching plot. Some mysteries are twistier than others, but they’re all fun and sure to delight fans of the characters.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain: It’s not a long book, but it took me months to finish this, mostly because the pace plods terribly. That said, I was fully invested by the end. Twain’s love of Joan is evident, and it’s impossible not to feel for her, especially while reading about her final days. Joan is a figure I’ve always known about vaguely, but this was the first time I really got the full story. And even if I wasn’t blown away by the book as a whole, I was certainly blown away by Joan, her story, and by this labor of love from Mark Twain.

And that’s all I have for this week before I go back to my lengthy tomes: The Count of Monte Cristo, Middlemarch, and The Fellowship of the Ring (which is not really a tome, except when you count the rest of the trilogy!). What are you reading?

–b