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I easily topped my reading goal, but with a little over a month to go I don't think I'm going to reach the number of books I read last year, 78. I'm only at 55 so far.

The story alternates between the war and 1947, just before Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Prince Philip. Three women work at Bletchley Park breaking Axis codes during the war, and hate each other bitterly by 1947. One of them is in an asylum by that point, and thinks she was put there by a Bletchley Park traitor. We see how they came together, how they fell apart, and wonder whether they'll come together by the end. While the plot isn't a masterpiece, it is good enough to not be in the way of what are extremely rich characters and amazing historical detail.

The experience of listening to an audiobook is definitely not the same as reading. I'll happily count it as reading, but with a good narrator, the story is a bit more immersive.

I'm 3 chapters from the end. We're about to get to the big inflection point. And I had to pause this, because I don't know that I'm ready to handle it if the bad guy gets the upper hand and wins. This never happens to me with words on paper.

(And I know the good guys are gonna win here. This is not the kind of book that's going to build up all the characters and then end all of them on a sour note. But still, I have to pause.)

I was traveling when this was announced, but David Szalay's Flesh is now added to the Booker Prize list.

After Kit’s mother dies, her need for connection leads her to make friends with Bella, a young newcomer in town.

The writing is excellent, and Kit is written with great tenderness. She feels like a real little girl in a real world. As her story meanders back and forth, the blanks get filled in, and the reader gets sucker punched more than once. I’ll be reading more Verble.

Just announced as winner of the World Fantasy Award best novel category (and added to the list on SFBA.club).

Tracing language's past through archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, reconstructing the unlikely-seeming breadth of similarities and ecological-driven differences and additions over millennia. A well-crafted and word-loving history.

For a while I thought I was accidentally rereading the author's other prison-on-another-planet book (Cage of Souls) which I just didn't get into and gave up halfway through, but maybe I should have stuck with it, because I also found this one slow-going and uninterestingly written for the first half but then it really got going and I thought the writing was almost poetry in the final chapters. My new theory is he's a different writer once the extraterrestrial biology gets going and the boring human-on-human preliminaries are out of the way.

I realize this guy is a sci-fi legend, and a I read a bunch of his stuff as a kid (I think The Dueling Machine doesn't get enough credit inspiring a bunch of movies I saw later), but as with beer, my taste for prose has refined over the years, and this book reads like early Bond, telling the spunky female jet pilot to get her little butt out of there, and I had to stop at "oriental inscrutability." I guess that counted for DEI at the time to just have a female and Asian character, and I actually flipped back to the copyright page expecting it to be sometime in the 50s but actually it was published in 1988. So the eighties weren't that great. I give the eighties two and a half stars.

@technicat@bookwyrm.social This is a great cookbook.