Marion: I mostly read work in manuscript this week, but I did finish Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth. I’m shocked at how deeply and thoroughly the book disappointed me.

 

Bill: This week I read Animal Mineral Radical, a collection of essays by BK Loren; Washington Black, an excellent novel by Esi Edugyan; and Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell.

Terry: I finished Rachel Caine’s GREAT LIBRARY sequence with Sword and Pen, which was a fine finish to the quintet. I also finished Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End by Kevin Alexander, an excellent discussion of what’s happened with food in the United States over the last couple of decades. Finally, I finished The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer, which I felt was kind of flat, especially compared to Meyer’s other Holmes pastiches. I’ve been trying to stick to the many books I had bookmarks in at the end of 2019, but not entirely successfully: I’ve started Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, a very strange and original little novella.

Tim: This week, I continued with The Worm Ouroboros (lots of fun so far!) and also began rereading Frank Herbert‘s Dune in preparation for the film adaptation later this year. I’ve always been a Dune fan, and the audio version definitely adds something. I will say that I’d managed to forget Herbert’s knack for endlessly orbiting the point in dialogue scenes, but it’s a small quibble for such an overall amazing novel.

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  • Tim Scheidler

    TIM SCHEIDLER, who's been with us since June 2011, holds a Master's Degree in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Tim enjoys many authors, but particularly loves J.R.R. Tolkien, Robin Hobb, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke. When he’s not reading, Tim enjoys traveling, playing music, writing in any shape or form, and pretending he's an athlete.

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