Queen Witch by Martha Wells, second book of the Rising World.

I knew her from the Murderbot series (amazing) and lately decided to read most of her books. Demon King (book 1) was really enjoyable and the beginning of Queen Witch seems to keep up with it.

• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. So far so good, though I’m only 100 pages in. It’s been an interesting and valuable perspective into what it’s like living with a hoarder as a child and what Hollywood is like for a child. While the writing is nothing special, I admire McCurdy’s juxtaposition of levity and sadness.

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. This one’s a tough one. The stories in this collection discuss very tough topics through the perspective of your average alpha male. While it’s obviously a critique of that archetype, DFW does not go out of his way to paint them as fools and dirtbags. Instead, he does the opposite: carefully structured arguments for misogyny, some truly horrid rape scenes, detailed breakdowns of employable manipulation tactics, all presented to the reader raw. DFW does not criticize these men, he merely presents them, and I would be gravely concerned about the damage this could do to the reader’s thought process if his readers were not so fucking weird and discerning. The verbosity of his prose acts as a sort of filter, ensuring that for the most part these stories are only read by people that understand the books premise, that these men are HIDEOUS.

• History of Puerto Rico by Fernando Pico. The subtitle for this one is A Panorama of its people, and yet half way through I’m still forced to read about colonial conflicts and the actions of the elite. Demography and social sentiment are touched on, but it’s tricky because pretty much all of the sources on Puerto Rico’s pre-colonial history were destroyed and pretty much all of the sources on Puerto Rico’s colonial history are from the perspective of the colonizers. Definitely a dry read so far, and I’m sick of reading about imperial atrocities.

After my trip to the gulags, I hopped back in to The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan with the eleventh book, Knife of Dreams. It’s the last book he wrote before his death. I actually liked the previous - tenth - book, though it had very little plot. I think maybe two chapters in the whole book moved the story along, so practically you could skip the whole of it and not miss much. Luckily the one I’m currently reading actually starts moving things towards the climax. As ever, I am terribly conflicted with Jordan’s writing.

I also some time ago watched the movie The Death of Stalin and quite enjoyed it, so inspired by that I picked up the original comic book by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. It was a good comic book, though perhaps somewhat more sombre in tone than the film. I heartily recommend both though.