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I really wanted to like Another Country. I had read a brilliant essay by Baldwin and thought I'd like to read more, and while the most sensible thing might have been to read one of his non-fiction books, I'm more a fiction reader so I started with this.

It's interesting and literary but it's also slow and seems to lose energy as it goes along. It does a number of interesting things, such as changing focus to show you into the mind of a character you've only seen from the outside, but I didn't care deeply about any of those characters.

Another Country has a fairly strong, very desperate beginning, but when its most tortured character exits it leaves a hole Baldwin doesn't seem inclined to fill, and the more muted unhappiness of its cast left me enervated.

At the point I stopped, the only real reason to keep reading would be to see if one eventually sees the world from the one major character who, two-thirds in, has only been seen from the third person. She's the most intriguing character for most of the book. But I can't work up enthusiasm to keep going.

Guess I'll try something non-fiction after all.

I need to begin by saying I'm not that big on graphics novels. I rarely read them, and I'm not asking that anyone take this review as useful. I just like to have a record of what I thought of things so I'm reviewing it for myself.

This is apparently considered one of the best of the series, and I thought it was just awful, a semi-comprehensible stew of Nazis and supernatural beings that seemed nonsensical even by the often loose standards of graphic novels. After a few chapters I just felt thoroughly annoyed, after which I skimmed forward a bit but couldn't see any reason to read more.

While reading something like Watchmen makes me appreciate what graphic novels can be and makes me think maybe I should read more of them, this juvenile gibberish makes me think I should stick with (I'm going to say it) real books.

The art is fine, I guess. As I say, I'm not that into graphic novels, and one reason is, I suppose, because I rarely find the art that interesting. It's standard stuff, good for what it is.

Every Cormoran Strike book has a distinct personality. Cuckoo's Calling was about methodical procedure, Silkworm was a classic whodunit, Career of Evil was "personal peril/serial killer". Lethal White, for much of the first half, is entirely focused on the slowly-heating non-romance of the principals; there's barely any detecting for the early chapters.

Since the previous book ended in a way that suggested this "will they/won't they" thing was heading in the "they won't" direction, much of Lethal White involves resetting that situation. Galbraith clearly isn't in a hurry to come to a resolution, but she doesn't seem inclined to keep that suspense unending.

When the book finally gets to the detecting, it's an interesting, rather involved case of blackmail and politics with a variety of fairly interesting characters. Although I wouldn't say I was as drawn by the mystery in as I was for the first two.

Still, a nice return to form after that annoying serial-killer thing.

The Glass Castle is an entertaining and somewhat disturbing memoir about really bad parenting. What's interesting is that while the parents are objectively terrible, Walls portrays her childhood as a rather heroic and engaging adventure. It's not that she doesn't acknowledge that parents that barely feed their children are bad parents, but the book still shows the ways in which she had freedom and learned remarkable self reliance. I was far more coddled as a child, and I'd say I am far more fearful as an adult. (May or may not indicate causality.)

Should the kids all have been taken away by social workers? Probably. And yet, they seem to have turned out pretty well, at least according to the book.

Anyway, if you ever complain about your childhood this is a handy reality check. If it's worse than Walls' was, you've definitely got the right to complain!

Very entertaining and well written.

Devil in the White City follows two historical stories; that of the creation of a world's fair and of a serial killer active at the same time.

The world's fair story is utterly fascinating, unspooled in a suspenseful manner and well contextualized within the times.

The serial killer story is interesting as serial killer stories go. It's not a genre I'm a fan of, but the novel doesn't descend to the level of torture porn as some books do and the author has a nice sense for detail.

The problem with the book is these two stories don't connect in any real way. A weak argument is made that the chaos of the world's fair made it easier for the killer to proceed, but that's about it. I agree with another reviewer here that it feels like two short books stuck together to make a longer one.

It's hard to say if this is a failure of writing or premise. A good author can tie anything to anything, and having committed to this premise, it's surprising that this author - who writes very well - couldn't create a context within which this pairing made sense.

The book is often fascinating, full of interesting facts, and well worth reading, but the lack of cohesion and the way the book winds down into nothingness keeps it from being fully satisfying.

In the little bit of this book I read, Coates said a number of thoughtful, insightful things. And that's great. But I hate the way he writes this so much. I've read articles by him before that I liked, but the dense and flowery writing of Between the World and Me is like reading a 16th-century pamphlet on a nobleman's struggle with gout.

Often he seems to just be playing with language for the fun of it. His constant use of the word "body" in sentences that would commonly use words like "safety" or "life" seems to have become popular, but to me it is distancing; with Coates, the definition of "body" feels indistinct, becoming whatever he wants it to be in that particular sentence.

According to my Kindle the book can be read in two hours, and I'm sure the guy has a lot of interesting things to say, but I find the style so aggravating, so floaty, so indirect in its directness, that I found reading it close to intolerable.

1Q84 begins as an intriguing and fanciful story about a woman whose impromptu decision leads her to a world that is not quite her own; a world with strange, supernatural features around the edges.

I like the central story, but that story is told in a way that is often off-putting, full of tedious repetition and digression.

How repetitive is this book? There are multiple times where we watch a character go through a particular series of events, followed promptly by a section just as long in which that characters thinks about those events and there are redescribed in as much detail as was given the first time. In these repeats, we do not generally learn new information or see how characters reinterpret and expand on events; we just get the same story told a second time.

The book also loves extraneous detail. Characters often tedious muse about the past or the present or about trivial occurrences. I found myself skimming quite a bit of the book, although while most times these digressions never connected with the story, sometimes they actually did, which meant you could never skim in perfect safety.

The characters are fairly likable although I didn't end the book caring more than a little about any of them. In part, this is because I couldn't quite believe in them. This is particularly true of the women; according to the author, most women spend a huge amount of time thinking about their breasts and other women's breasts, and I'm just not convinced that's true.

Still, 1Q84 creates a nice amount of intrigue and mystery. Unfortunately, the author gets lazy about it. After building up the mystery for the half the book, many of the central puzzles are explained by a supernatural character who just says, okay, here's what's going on. While it was a relief to get an explanation, an info dump from an all-knowing prophet seemed like a cheap payoff.

The author also drags his heels mightily on getting to the end of the book, as you constantly feel things are about to reach a turning point they never seem to get to.

My overall impression is the author thought it would be neat to write a really, really long novel but didn't actually have much to say. I would much have preferred to read a Reader's Digest version of this that cut it down by about 70%. I think you could do that without losing a single important thing.

I didn't hate it, it has its moments, it did keep me curious, but I can't heartily recommend it, even if I wouldn't go as far as warning people away.

What I love about Jon Ronson is his ability to see the insanity and sanity of both sides. Yes, believing lizard people are ruling the world is insane, yet the idea that there are elites with little accountability and an outsized role in world politics is quite reasonable. Sure, the government may not be a grand conspiracy of Jews trying to destroy civilization, but that doesn't mean it won't fall into a deadly disaster through gross incompetence.

In Ronson's world, there are people on all sides who are trying to use logic yet not always coming reasonable conclusions. Among the right-wing loonies he includes a left-wing group whose insistence that every government-conspiracy group is anti-semitic means they can't accept that yes, there is a group that isn't being euphemistic when they talk about those evil alien lizards. Ronson shows all easily pretty much anyone can fall into paranoia and conspiracy thinking.

Ronson has the clear vision of someone who is more interested in observing than judging. It allows him to calmly portray a KKK leader trying to clad the organization in a cloak of positivity, but to also show the moments the mask falls and the monster peaks out.

Consistently entertaining, amusing, and thought-provoking, like everything from Ronson.

The Time Machine Did It is really, really, really funny. I decided to read it after someone posted the first page as "the funniest first page of any book."

It is extremely silly, with a dope of a detective explaining a case he barely understands, generally stumbling on important clues several times before he notices them. A typical bit is the detective handing someone a card and saying, "I had cards printed up saying I'm a private eye, so I guess until someone prints up some cards saying I'm not, I am." I find that hilariously weird.

The book is wonderful, but perhaps best read in small doses, as it reads a little like a standup comedy routine. It's got a tremendous number of hilarious jokes, but there is a sameness to the delivery that can be wearying if you read too much at one setting. And the story isn't particularly clever or engaging; this is a book you read entirely because it's laugh out loud funny all the time.

This is the first Swartzwelder book I've read, but definitely won't be the last.