Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett - I had lent this to a neighbor years ago, and when she returned it, there it was at the top of the pile right after I'd finished Pratchett's biography last month. This is one of the later Discworld books, and the longest. I wish it was a little tighter because there's themes in it I think other friends would enjoy, but it's a little too long to recommend to most people (my neighbor, however, seems to read like she breathes). I had forgotten about the character of Pepe, and rediscovering them was great. This one also contains one of my favorite extended Pratchett quotes (it's the one about otters).
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders - My neighbor lent me this when returning some other books I'd lent here, including the above. I'd never heard of it and probably not the kind of book I would have picked up on my own, but I ended up enjoying it well enough. Slight spoiler: They never tell you what "The Bardo" is, you're apparently supposed to just know this (insert Chris Flemming meme). It's a deft weaving of fiction and fact, told trough primary source quotes of the Lincoln era and a truly odd narrative structure. Takes a while to figure out what's going on, but that's intentional and a confusion shared by most of the characters. I particularly enjoyed when conflicting source quotes were presented in rapid succession as a way to recreate the hazy and unreliable nature of memory.
Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher - I got this for Christmas and pulled it out of that stack at random. It ended up being my favorite fantasy novel of the year so far. I immediately gave away my copy in excitement, forgetting I needed a picture for this post, which is largely what ended up delaying it a month. Not much I can say without spoiling anything, other than what the jacket blurb already does: "This isn't the kind of fairy tale where the princess marries a prince. It's the one where she kills him." The world-building is sharp and diegetic, and there's a satisfying number of twists based on clues laid out in bare sight of the reader earlier. I'm giving this copy away immediately, too.
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway - This came up in conversation after a D&D game, and I mentioned that I didn't think I'd ever read it. My friend latched on that and promptly ordered me a copy, because they're good that way. This is one of those books that reminds me how media illiterate I am despite reading all the time. It's smashing me over the head with allegories, and I just get the vaguest sense of "ah, the fish represents... something". Same with the sharks, and the basically everything. As a narrative there's something to be said for the dry, staccato prose, but in the end I felt like a high school sophomore who got a C- on their quarterly. I should read about reading more.
The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett - After finishing Pratchett's biography, I decided to go through my collection of Discworld novels and make sure I had them all. This is one I was surprised to be missing, and when it arrived in the order to fill in the gaps, I decided to give it a go, since it had been a while. It has a pretty bad reputation, and the common wisdom is "don't start Discworld with the first book", but honestly it was better than I was expecting. The world-building is probably what gets people thinking that, because it's much more heavy-handed than his later work, but there's plenty to enjoy here, and you can see how the seeds of weirdness and humor and humanity planted here grew into the larger series over the years.
Hollow Kingdom, by Kina Jane Buxton - Another gift by the same friend as Old Man Hemingway up above, in a decidedly different vein. A foul-mouthed, foul-named crow and his doofus hound dog companion set out to save the world, or at least the humans they care about, from a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes it seemed like it was trying to be an allegory for transness, but then would put that to the side entirely for chapters, so that just might be my reading comprehension failing again. The language could get a little thesaurus-poisoned, but I think that was the narrator crow putting on airs rather than the author grasping for ten-cent words. On the whole, it was a romp, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Gackling Moon, by Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp - Don't you love it when a forgotten Kickstarter project shows up on your doorstep? A nice hardbound copy of what started as a series of blog posts describing a distant fantastical land teetering on nonexistence, rife for adventure. It's accompanied by a set of inspired illustrations that depict cultural artifacts from the land, making it a kind of museum of an imagined place. I do wish they'd given it another run through an editor's hands - there's just a few too many typographic errors and "see page XX" left in an otherwise well-produced book. My favorite bits were the goblin empire and the antigoblin empire, but I also really enjoyed the lunatic phases of the titular moon.
The Pretty Good Jim's Journal Treasury, by Scott Dikkers - I don't know why I pulled this off the shelf. I've had it since I bought it off the bottom shelf of a used book and game store in college on a whim, and have read it who knows how many times since. The nigh-complete absence of humor is like slowly rolling down a set of winding stairs, and you occasionally hit a landing/joke, and are redirected down another flight. Nothing happens, and we're all the worse for it. A paragon of anti-humor.
The Marvelous Land of Oz, by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young (and L. Frank Baum) - A gift from the city's numerous little free libraries. I've read the novel a few times over the years, but did not know this comic adaptation existed. It punches up the puns and the absurdity of the source material a bit. The art is lush but, and this might be unkind, a little too Hot Topic. Also they copy and paste panels within a page rather frequently - maybe it wouldn't stand out if it was being read month-to-month, but in a collected volume it really does, even if it's done for laughs. A nice enough modern take, but I am sending it back to whence it came.
