** Karen Tei Yamashita – Brazil-Maru
**** Patrick O’Brian – The Mauritius Command
*** Rafael Sabatini – Scaramouche
*** Robert E. Howard – Cormac Mac Art

I’ve read a little bit before about the large Japanese community in Brazil, and I was really looking forward to learning more about it from Yamashita’s book. Some of that aspect of the book was very interesting, but I ended up feeling like the story was specific to a particular community, a sort of utopian commune sort of group — which is fine, but I didn’t end up finding those specific people as interesting. The story didn’t stay interesting for me, and the characters didn’t really feel real.

More great O’Brian, I’ve given up on saying much beyond that about his books.

Scaramouche was a great adventure novel, very entertaining.

I’ve been meaning to reread some Howard, particularly the Conan books. I found this one used, but no Conan. It was okay; much of the problem was that some of what’s in the book was actually written by David Drake (who I’ve gotten tired of), and some of what’s left was unfinished (and the book doesn’t really make this clear). That said, I enjoyed the Howard bits and look forward to reading more.