*** David Foster Wallace – Fate, Time, and Language: an Essay on Free Will. I did not read all of this. It took me back to a time in my life when I was more interested in working out the logical puzzles necessitated by thinking deeply about philosophy or linguistics. Wallace had a good argument and did a good job making it clear, and that was enough for me. I didn’t need to read all the tedious working out of the details.
** Lee Doty – Out of the Black. This book was okay while I was reading it, except for the forced and very unconvincing banter. And then the kind of wtf ending. And the kind of hard-to-follow timeline back-and-forth (like, if you’re going to do the split timelines thing, make them palpably distinct, not like two days apart). I liked the attempt at doing hard-boiled mystery and what he tried to do with magic and technology. But then it just kind of turned to mush in my mind, and then I made the mistake of looking at the Amazon reviews, where the author replies to every single negative review in a way that is just not good.
** Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It’s Douglas Adams, and it’s fun to read, but the whole thing just doesn’t hang together enough. It feels to me like, with the Gently books, Adams just didn’t define enough what was and wasn’t possible in that universe, and so he feels free to just make up anything and the result is kind of aimless. Entertaining but ultimately empty and sort of pointless.
** Douglas Adams – The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. See above.
** Beth McMullen – Original Sin. This book was okay. I’m interested to see if she continues the series and gets better with the character, but this one wasn’t that compelling.
*** Roald Dahl – FFantastic Mr Fox. Roald Dahl is pretty much always good, and this was no exception. Of course, there’s not that much to it.
** Kurt Vonnegut – Cats Cradle. I expected more from this rereading it for the first time in 20+ years, but meh. There really isn’t much there. Sure, ice-9 is a fun concept but otherwise, snuh.
** Terry Jones – Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic. Terry Jones doing a passable imitation of Douglas Adams. Pretty forgettable, and it’s fairly obvious that it’s a novelization of a game; it was hard not to be aware of how the plot points were determined by game dynamics rather than, you know, interesting storytelling.