Asking the Wrong Questions

The end of the year will soon be upon us, which means it's almost time to sum up the year's reading. Before I do that, though, here are some reviews of books I read in the second half of the year. Also book-related: over at Lawyers, Guns & Money , I wrote about the miniseries The Good Lord Bird , and since I was able to track down a copy of the James McBride novel on which it was based at a used bookstore shortly before the miniseries ended, I added some comments about the book as well. Short version: both are recommended, though mainly for the window they offer on the fascinating, contradictory figure of John Brown. Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu - In his afterword to this novel, Basu describes it as an "anti-dystopia". That's a bit of hard pill to swallow if you've just finished reading Chosen Spirits , which opens with its heroine, twenty-five-year-old Joey, frantically trying to keep her middle-aged parents from thoughtlessly handing out their data to ...

After a couple of lean years, 2016 is shaping up to be a great reading year.  If things continue at their current pace, I will have read more books in the first four months of the year than I did in all of 2015, and while there's a bit of cheating involved in that--my numbers this year have been padded by a lot of quick reads, such as comics or standalone novellas--it's also good to be back in the swing of reading regularly and even voraciously.  I've just returned from a two-week holiday during which I read a great deal (though of course I ended up buying more books than I read), and more importantly, reading a lot of satisfying, interesting work.  I don't know if I can keep up this pace for the rest of the year, now that my time is more encumbered, but this is certainly a good start. Nimona by Noelle Stevenson - It doesn't come as much of a surprise to learn that Stevenson's standalone comic is based on strips she originally published online, because the...