Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Books are Back, Baby! I’ve always been a reader. I honestly cannot think of a time when I wasn’t reading something. My current book tracking app (more on that in a moment) says my reading streak is 9 days. Bitch, my streak is 51 years (by my rules, if you miss a day because you’re unconscious in the hospital because your gall bladder popped like a hotdog in the microwave, it doesn’t count).
Finished reading: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon 📚
I enjoyed this book very much, and if you asked me to write a book report on it, I would fail spectacularly.
The prose was gorgeous - I loved every word. It was immersive, evocative, and rhythmic. The protagonist is stoned for most, if not all, of the book, and it read that way. Although this was my first Pynchon novel, I have read all the greats when it comes to hard boiled detective fiction: Chandler, Hammett, Ellroy, and despite the fundamental grooviness, this book somehow sits squarely with the rest of them.
Our PI gets engaged and then sort of drifts through the story, which honestly, Philip Marlowe does plenty of, you know? This novel was like Ellroy’s L.A. Noir reimagined by Hunter Thompson. There is organized crime, croooked cops, setups and double-crosses, everything a good detective story needs, but it’s all swirled up with hazy, languid language that very successfully conjures LA’s hippie phase.
I was enjoying the story anyway, but I was all in when we found a morgue drawer filled with frozen chocolate bananas for our dirty LA detective. I genuinely laughed at that; ditto when Doc being represented by a maritime attorney paid off at the end.
I didn’t do myself any favors by reading this book in fits and starts before bed and on plane rides. If I tackle another Pynchon - and I plan to - I’ll approach it with a little more structure. Chapter by chapter, in the morningtime, taking it slow.
As a very unimportant aside, I work in an insurance-adjacent job, and found it interesting that “inherent vice” is a real insurance term.
All in all - great read, and I’m anxious to try something else by this author, although I think I’ll pick something off my physical to-read pile first.
#bookstodon
Finished reading: Men Without Women Stories by Haruki Murakami 📚
I love Murakami, and most of these stories were really good, but “Kino” is an all time great. It really struck me and has stayed with me in a significant way. Feels very Japanese in the way a Studio Ghibli film does - there’s a gentle simplicity to it, with an undercurrent of loneliness.
The last time a short story landed this way for me was Salinger’s “The Laughing Man,” which I suddenly really want to re-read.
Finished reading: Blood and Bone by Ian C. Esslemont 📚
I am honestly not sure how I felt about this book at all. Parts of it, I absolutely loved. Some really great characterization, fun banter, cool set pieces. The lore was fascinating, and some passages were genuinely chilling. It was set in a part of the #malazan world we hadn’t seen before, and I really appreciated a lot of the detail.
That said, the ending was so confusing I had to read chapter summaries in the wiki and consult Reddit to understand what the fuck actually happened. I’d say part of that was my fault for reading late at night while dealing with insomnia, but there are a lot of Reddit posts that suggest maybe it wasn’t just me.
I will cop to making a bad decision in treating these novels as interstitial to the Malazan Book of the Fallen. They’re their own series, and I should have been reading them that way, so part of my befuddlement is my own doing.
On to Assail!
Finished reading: Orb Sceptre Throne by Ian C. Esslemont 📚
I really enjoyed this one. Loved the deeper look at the Seguleh and the Moranth. I found the climax to be a bit of a mess, though, and was disappointed. It was wacky when it shouldn’t have been, and while I love a good all-storylines-converge ending, it felt forced and coincidental. Still, one of my favorite Malazan novels so far. I’m moving directly on to the next in the series, since there are so many characters and locations to keep straight.
On a side note, I got some bookshop.org gift cards for Christmas, and it turns out, those can only be redeemed for physical books, so I ended up with the last 3 books in the Novels of the Malazan Empire in paperback, which is fine except (a) I have everything else as ebooks, and (b) shelf space is at a premium these days. But man, these books are gorgeous and I kind of want to backfill the rest now. Which means some other books are going to have to go, and that is never fun.