I re-ordered all this so it appears in the order I actually finished them, rather than the order I started.
LHC #246: "Tristimania" by Jay Griffiths. Intense. I might have added this to my list because she does the Camino de Santiago. I think I expected something more personal. With more of a thread of action. For huge sections, it was nothing but picking who in mythology represents hypomania the best. Though it might have given me a title for Vinterlys so I guess it's worth it. I might have preferred it if the poetry had been at the start rather than the end; it felt already explained by the time I got to it.
LHC #244: "Ant Architecture" by Walter Tschinkel. Very funny book! Full of bad ideas! I totally enjoyed the descriptions of experiments done on/with the ants. What a brilliant mind. I care relatively little about ants but this book was fascinating.
LHC #243: "Sex workers, psychics and numbers runners" by Lashawn Harris. A little more academic than I was ready for. I found Chapter 2 pretty hard to read, but Chapter 3 was good. I might not have been the target audience of this, and the author isn't a representative of the sort of historian I'm accustomed to, perhaps.
LHC #245: "If on a winter's night a traveller" by Italo Calvino. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, mostly because a friend mocked me for having not read it (about eight years ago, I'd guess). Reminded me a little bit of Vita Nostra from last month. Reading the synopsis, I didn't think it was going to work for me, but it did. The part where the computer keeps writing crap books rang pretty true. Prescient, for 1979! There were some very funny moments, but also sections that seemed like a slog.
"The Dragon Republic" by R.F. Kuang. I don't know why I didn't put this on my holds list back when I finished "The Poppy War" back in 2020. Kind of trashy, very fun, quick read. I won't wait so long to read book 3.