LHC #104: "Gingerbread" by Helen Oyoyemi. I actually remember wanting to read this when I put it on the list. I made gingerbread in its honor, and the boy asked if he could take some for his girlfriend, but it contained eggs and she's allergic, so I had to make another one... This book was worth every minute.
LHC #105: "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis. I got it out because it was the highest item on the list that didn't have a wait. Apparently it's book 2 of a series. I wish that had been clear on the synopsis on the library website? It's part of the description on Overdrive, but not on the main TPL site. And it was on my list because it was the only thing they had in hard copy by Connie Willis, which seems wrong somehow. I just looked, and the situation is better now.
Anyway, I think my dad would have loved Connie Willis. The science fictional time travel blended with the Wodehouse-style humor and energy would totally have been his jam. Mine too, apparently. There's an underpinning of grand design that doesn't come off as deus ex machina which really worked.
I will seek out her other books.
"Thick as Thieves" by Megan Whalen Turner. I think I've bought this book twice, and finally read it now because I bought the next one to give away for Christmas. I was a little anxious to start, because for me Gen is about as stressful as Jant, but it was fine. I loved reading it and wondering what the point was, because with these books there's always a point. Oh, and wondering when she was going to admit who the Attolian was.
I read it in basically one sitting. It's a good thing I started it fairly early, or I would have been up past my bedtime.
"Return of the Thief" by Megan Whalen Turner. I had a deadline of Dec 25 for this since it's a gift, and Dec 31 for the library book, so I started this next.
I love the thing she does where she shows the same scene in various books from different points of view. It sets the overlapping times (I'm trying to do a little of this with my three POVs in WWS) and gives really interesting impressions. This book seemed really Narnian to me -- high king and then the other three, two girls and a boy; the dancing at the end. Like Narnia only darker and more consistent in the writing, and with more interesting religion.
LHC #105: "The Conference of the Birds" by Farid al-Din Attar, translated by Sholeh Wolpe. I need to be better about crediting the translator on stuff I read, where applicable. It's a huge part of the experience.
A lot of the translator's footnotes explained bible story stuff, which I hadn't really thought of as being applicable to other than Judeo-Christian stuff. This was really fun, the tone was very accessible, kind of like a self-help book, complete with case studies and everything.
LHC #106: "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" by Shahriar Mandanipour, translated by Sarah Khalili. Second book by him I've read. He thanks his translator in the dedication, which seemed weird at the start, but then I realized, this book wasn't really intended for an Iranian audience. It was never published there, and the target audience is me. I quite enjoyed it.