Asking the Wrong Questions

Summer is usually a dead reading time for me, the heat and dust making it difficult to concentrate on anything but the least challenging fare.  But this summer--which has anyway featured some interesting developments --has turned out to be very exciting on the reading front as well.  I didn't love all of these books--in fact one of them is easily my least favorite read in quite some time--but all of them broadened my horizons and took me places I wasn't expecting.  Here's to many more summers (and seasons) like this one. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro - I'm having trouble explaining to myself why I picked up The Buried Giant .  After all, the only other Ishiguro novel I've read, Never Let Me Go , left me feeling disappointed, frustrated, and genuinely puzzled at the love and admiration that so many other readers (including genre readers) had for it.  The only justification I have for giving Ishiguro another look is that it had been ten years since Never ...

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...