2026 #33 The Guest Lecture (Riker)

 

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Given that I assume Martin Riker is not a middle-aged perimenopausal female academic, I'm not quite sure how he so perfectly nailed my insomniac anxieties, but wow! I'm going to guess that the premise--the middle-of-the-night mental meanderings of a recently-denied-tenure economics professor--isn't going to appeal to everyone, but the book is fascinating. "Meanderings" isn't quite accurate either. Abigail starts out with the best of intentions to practice using "loci" as she directs her imagination to move through each room of her house as she consults John Maynard Keynes (the topic of her talk the next day) on each part of the talk she is to deliver. These conversations with the imaginary Keynes are absolutely delightful. Even with such a wise and thoughtful companion, however, Abigail's life-worries start to creep in, disrupting her focus and derailing her ability to compartmentalize (literally, in terms of the "loci" practice).

What was not expected and ended up feeling rather eerie given its top-tier relevance to my own profession, was an abundance of references to contemporary music! And not just the usual headliners either (John Cage, etc), but Susie Ibarra, Pamela Z, Mary Jane Leach...and many more. I can't remember how I learned about this book, but now I'm thinking one of my music colleagues must have recommended it. I even wrote down some names new to me! Riker's name-dropping is partially to fill out Evelyn, one of the characters we meet as Abigail's insomniac journey expands backward into her past, but it still came as a total surprise in a book I figured would be fairly economics-centric.

A side effect of all of this is that my long-sleeping interests in International Relations (when I briefly toyed with the idea of double majoring in college) were awakened, at least inasmuch as Riker (through Abigail) illuminates Keynes as both "creative improvisational human" and "institutional symbol of unchecked government expenditure that history has made him." (22%) At one point, Abigail beautifully captures the joy of reading Keynes's essays:

"...but I read them despite wrongness, despite datedness, for the voice of the person writing. His voice, his astuteness and humor, his crabbiness, the life in his voice, his way of seeing and thinking about the world that was not just in the ideas or claims or arguments but in the way the voice thought, the way the thought turned..." (58% Chapter 9)

Take THAT ChatGPT summaries! Be still my historian's primary-source-loving heart.

Part III is when Abigail's mind really lets loose--not so much as a hamster spinning on a wheel, but more like a rat running through a maze. She knows she needs to find the exit, but she takes the most circuitous route possible in getting there. While I enjoyed some of it, at times it started to feel a bit tedious.

I cannot say that I've read any book like this, and if you tried to summarize the "plot" for me, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. It seems quirky, but then you realize it really isn't (unless you are some rare soul who has never laid awake at night with your anxieties keeping you company). Mileage will definitely vary with this one, but for me, it was one of the best reading experiences I've had this year.



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2026 #32 Blessed Water (Sister Holiday #2) - Douaihy

 

Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.75 stars
While I'm still invested in the series, Blessed Water didn't quite work for me as well as its predecessor Scorched Grace. With the first book, I noted that everything seemed to accelerate at the end for the sake of resolution, and that was also the case here. But the main issue I had is that the elements of the story seemed to be uneven in how they popped up. Sister Holiday's brother makes a weird appearance, which is welcome if he's going to stick around, but seemed quite extraneous to the mystery. We don't really get any more reveals about her shady past, although "Nina" comes through a bit more.
There are some subtle clues that I got only after reflecting on the story, so I enjoyed that. Sister Holiday's foul mouth is fine, but her penchant for violent thoughts, particularly against Detective Grogan and the purposeless Alex, got a bit tiresome (just overdone, I would say). Her relationship with Riveaux develops nicely, and holds a lot of promise.
You don't need to have read the first one (there are plenty of references to it), but I'd recommend it before launching into this one. A good installment, and I look forward to seeing where this goes.

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2026 Reading Goals 32/60

2026 #31 Artificial Condition - Murderbot Diaries #2 (Wells)

 

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to the Graphic Audio version, and unlike others, I didn't care for it. The underscoring felt very gratuitous, although some of the foley and fight sequences reminded me of old radio shows (in a charming way).

Murderbot seeks out the mysteries of its past and finds a friend-bot ("ART"). I liked the premise, and the human characters are more dimensional. We also finally get to meet a "Comfort Unit" (aka sexbot). Definitely a bit more culture-building in this one, so I'm in. There's a lot of techno-speak, which I found tiresome in certain places and probably would have skipped over pages had I been reading it in hard copy.

While I did not enjoy the reading as much, I thought the story overall was more interesting and we certainly get a better sense of all that Murderbot is negotiating as it tries to hone its own identity and autonomy. 3. 75 stars


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2026 Reading Goals 31/60

#192030 Challenge: 2018

2026 #30 An Experiment in Criticism (Lewis)

 

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself," C.S. Lewis offers after 140 pages of the most wonderfully vexing postulations regarding that which is "literary" and "unliterary." This is definitely a "MBF" -- a "must-be-finished" book. I've read too many reviews that seem to have bristled at the beginning and either stopped reading closely or just stopped reading altogether. To be sure, Lewis's tone befits his Oxford professorship, but there are so many moments when his tongue is planted firmly (but elegantly) in his cheek, and his provocations are intended to prove perhaps his largest point: literature is to be received, not used.

"Using", he says, is "inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brights, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it." (88). Lewis advocates deep reading, a "resting" in the literature, rather than using it as an opportunity for "castle-building" as he calls it. A good book coexists in a rather symbiotic relationship with good reading. The work should work on us, rather than the other way around. He writes, "In good reading there ought to be 'no problem of belief' meaning we should be able to receive that with which we do not agree, thereby possibly entertaining a time and space otherwise when we might agree.

I think he loses people with his attempts to parse "literary" from "unliterary" in the first few chapters. But he offers nuance: "Let us be quite clear that the unliterary are unliterary not because they enjoy stories in these ways, but because they enjoy them in no other." (38) Here he refers to a desire for excitement and an arousal of certain emotions, which he is not condemning, as I understand it, but offering that it is only part of literary engagement.

Lewis has one moment that I felt was truly classist: he decides that grocers and gardeners will have read few books, but perhaps have seen more films (76). It is an unfortunate moment in a book that otherwise seems to have a fair amount of equanimity, versus a critique (in the negative sense). "The literary," he notes, "sometimes 'use' poetry instead of receiving it. They differ from the unliterary because they know very well what they are doing and are prepared to defend it." (100). But he also, supporting his "good reader" theory, offers that there are really, at the end of the day, no so-called "guilty pleasures": "If ... we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." (108)

If you are a reader (whatever that means to you), it is worth spending some time with what Lewis had to say. It has made me re-evaluate why I have a numeric reading goal every year. I know part of that is there is SO MUCH I wish to read and I am extrinsically motivated when my time is not always my own. But Lewis has given me a lot to think about in terms of the reading experience. If he irks you at the beginning, read more slowly. Underline. Receive what he is actually saying. You may come away from it still irritated and thinking he's a pretentious prig, but you might find some value there too.

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2026 Reading Goals 30/60

#192030 Challenge: 1961

TYPTBR 15/18

#2026 #29 All Systems Red - Murderbot Diaries #1 (Wells)

 

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I absolutely see why this popped up in my algorithms after I finished (and LOVED) Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. I'd heard good things about this series outside of that, so I figured I'd give it a try here at the end of when I actually have a life before school begins. I won't judge it against PHM, especially since it is a novella. Both do share a similar sense of humor.

It is entertaining! I was disappointed in the ending only because I was enjoying what developed between the bot and the crew. The short length was a bit of a let down in that regard. It is a very interesting negotiation of non-human sentience, and I applaud that. Kevin R. Free's reading was quite excellent, and Dr. Mensah became my favorite character. I definitely enjoyed it enough that I've already started no. 2 Artificial Condition, but the only one available via Libby was the Graphic Audio production and I'm already not excited about the abundance of underscoring...

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2026 Reading Goals 29/60

#192030 Challenge: 2017

2026 #28 Small Things Like These (Keegan)

 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The writing here is beautiful. Keegan manages to do so much with just a few words. There's little in the way of hyberbole or superlatives, but there is a clean rhythm that is almost poetic and draws you in. It is a touching story, but also relatable in how most of us face moral quandaries at one point or another. Bill Furlong is just a coal merchant delivering fuel to a Magdalene convent laundry in Ireland during the 1980s. But over just a few pages (it is a novella), we start to walk with him. We feel what he feels, and we see what he sees. You can almost feel the knotted tension forming in the pit of his stomach as he grapples with what he's witnessed at the convent. This is a very good book about the "small things" that can be opportunities to test or own moral courage.

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Challenges 

2026 Reading Goals 28/60

2026 #27 The Queen of the Valley (Hughes)

 

The Queen of the Valley by Lorena Hughes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars (3.5)

I picked this book somewhat at random for the Read Around the World Challenge. This historical backdrop is the 1925 earthquake in Cali, Colombia, so starting it just two days after the awful earthquake in Colombia on August 10th this year felt rather eerie. The book is engaging with a reasonably interesting story/mystery, but I wonder if I would have connected better if I had read the first book, The Spanish Daughter, which introduces the character Puri (short for Purificación). Reading this one without the first didn't thwart enjoyment, but the (minimal) references to the first book would have been more meaningful. How Puri winds up "as a nun" might have been more believable, as well.

The other major context for the story is a cholera outbreak, and Hughes deftly handles descriptions in the cholera ward without sensationalizing the misery. The female characters are particularly strong, and Lucas is nicely complex. Martin is known mostly through the lens of those in his orbit, and I wish that Farid had his own chapters too. There's a web of entanglements that at times was hard to keep track of (Angélica, in particular, felt a bit happenstance and underdeveloped), but keeping the main narrative focused on just three characters (Lucas, Puri, Camila) helped. The circumstances of the disappearance of a certain character also felt a bit patched together near the end.

Overall, a solid read and good piece of historical fiction.

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Challenges 

2026 Reading Goals 27/60

Read Around the World: Ecuador (4/14 for South America)