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Fair warning: Review contains discussion/mention of sexual assault, as does the book. I've spoilered anything that I think might ruin part of the book, but I don't consider mentioning something that happens in the first chapter to be a spoiler, so YMMV.

At first, I was going to say that I thought Akimitsu Takagi was a worse author than Seishi Yokomizo, but I realized that's not fair; I don't think he's any less talented, just different - and that's not a bad thing. "The Noh Mask Murder" is a 1949 locked room mystery novel set (as so many of them are) in a seaside mansion in Japan immediately after WW2. It plays fair - the clues are there for you to solve much of it - and at 200-odd pages, it is exactly the right length for the story.

To start with the bad: like so many of these mysteries, the women are insane, and when a woman is insane in one of these stories, you can bet sex abuse/rape or incest are not too far behind. For the time this was an acceptable plot device, but to modern audiences, even ignoring the ick factor, it often feels lazy and like a substitute for giving women characters deeper motivations. In addition, many of the characters feel very stock, and unlike Yokomizo, there's no real attempt to let us get to know the non-detective characters for the most part. There are other stock characters too, including "noble child dying of an incurable disease" and secret lovechild (these authors all love secret lovechildren.)

That said, the author does subvert expectations in a few places too: the main POV character has an interesting sort of frenemy-esque relationship with the other detective, and their bickering and mixture of bickering and affection with disdain felt very real to me, and at times led to some genuinely funny internal monologuing. Most of us, I think, have known someone where we clearly get something out of spending time with them - we feel sad when they leave - but in the heat of the moment wonder what we ever did see in them. I was also surprised to find that the mentions of WW2 and wartime Japan (especially considering this was written in the 1940s) were surprisingly critical - one character remarks on how the war-crime tribunals which Japan is included in are proof that mankind and justice can better themselves, and another comments that Japan bears fault for being taken in by fascists and madmen within the country. Even by modern standards that is a fairly shocking thing to read in a Japanese text, given Japan's general unwillingness to this day to fully "deal with" their part in the War. The plot also incorporated a brief but surprisingly compassionate discussion about the misuse of asylums and the rights of the mentally ill, and the misuse of wartime education alongside the importance of atoning for past mistakes to avoid repeating them. I appreciated these digressions on ethics inside the larger story.

The ending's not half bad either, playing some bits true to form but throwing in a genuine surprise or two.

At 130-odd pages, you can't go wrong. It's less a single story than a set of vignettes, but they're fun. The setting's religious but the book's not preachy, and Cadfael is a fundamentally decent fellow who cares for justice rather than the law.

A friend of mine derided this as slop, and while it's certainly popular fiction, I was very pleasantly surprised. It's not the funniest or the best-written thing you'll read, but the pacing is masterful, and the two primary protagonists are likeable. It also doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation the characters are in, but rather engages with it without crossing over into melodrama. On the whole, this is a decent weekend read. I'm definitely going to pick up the next book in the series, even if I'm not rushing out right. this. second - a distinction I imagine many fellow readers will identify with, I think.

A tight 240-odd pages, Rendezvous with Rama really was a joy to read. There's a tiny bit of humour, a bit of politics, but mostly it's just a bunch of people exploring an object that is at once theoretically familiar and utterly alien.

I read an older translation and the quality was a bit variable, but it is hard to translate these poems faithfully anyway. It did pique my interest enough (as some of them were great) to mean I've added seeking out an annotated translation to my reading “to-do” list.

Great book, though if you're looking for typical supernatural horror you're sort of barking up the wrong tree - the horror is thoroughly grounded in reality, while the supernatural element just sort of helps it along. I imagine women of a certain age might find this a hard read, but it does a great job of weaving the fundamental injustices women faced at the time (and sadly still do today) into the narrative.

...also, was anyone else irrationally annoyed by the term ‘bippies'?

Useful little book that covers all manner of distinctions, gotchas, and malapropisms. Fun to leaf through, it explains a lot of finer points of usage in an accessible manner with copious examples.

A great end to a great trilogy. Perhaps a bit less grimdark on the whole than the earlier books, the highest praise I can give it is that I was not angry nor did I feel cheated that the big climactic battle was in the last 10 pages of the book.

As another reviewer noted, I had hoped this to be a history of the Syndicate, a complex and highly successful, very secretive organization behind the series mentioned in the title. Unfortunately, it mostly just discusses a number of series as a historical and literary phenomenon. Not a bad read by any means, but anyone looking for a history of the Stratemeyer Syndicate will need to keep looking. I should note I did not read the entire book, but rather focused on some chapters. Fans of the Merrie Melody “The Dover Boys” will find the chapter on The Rover Boys interesting.

Another entry in the House Murders series from Pushkin for fans to read, and overall it's a good one. There is an interesting and multi-layered framing story that was interesting enough, and the entire thing is tightly written and keeps moving at a cracking pace. As is often the case with these books, the setting is also very well fleshed out - and of course like all honkaku mysteries, it is an honest mystery; the hints are there for the reader to work with.

Worth a read. Disturbing, provocative, and very sad. I was worried it would be yet another 70s neo-primitivist type book, but it avoids that in a fashion. After a massive ecological collapse and a terrible war brings down civilization, a rich extended family of farmers and scientists works to develop cloning technology to try and outlast the mass sterility caused by the collapse. They succeed, but the clones develop along a new and horrible route, and the society they birth sounds almost idyllic until the book begins discussing the price of unity. A scavenging trip causes a number of the clones to go through a radical change in personality, and from there the story develops along fascinating lines. It's a brisk read and well worth it, even if you're not a fan of older sci fi.

What an interesting read - in a grim dystopian overpopulated earth, people dream of health insurance without which life is nasty, brutish, and short, and which can only be afforded by the richest of the rich. Chapters alternate between the protagonist's past at a space station where people have an opportunity to explore alien worlds aboard ships we cannot reproduce, left behind by an alien race about whom we know almost nothing, and the ‘present' where the rich protagonist spars, screams, and sobs in consultations with a computerized psychiatrist built from scavenged technology. I expected the focus to be on the exploration, but it is instead focused on the people and their psychology, as some very broken folks live their lives. The ending twist was abrupt but very good, and I was pleasantly surprised by the author's skillful inclusion of LGBT people in a work from the early 1970s in a way that was organic, interesting, and not performative - people that happened to be queer, not people whose whole identity was being queer. The protagonist is in many ways a shitty human being, but he owns it and is clearly at some level trying to be better, which was also a pleasant surprise.

Worth a read.

With this volume, the Spatterjay trilogy comes to an end. A good end to a good series, though it's over all too fast. We get to see a more interesting side of the Prador, too. Some will probably find bits of it a bit twee, but on the whole it wraps things up while leaving plenty of avenues for future books to explore. As ever, Asher does well at making his universe feel lived in, even when playing with some classic sci-fi tropes.

Two short stories; one of them is a Kosuke Kindaichi story with very little KK and the other is an epistolary in which KK figures only in a framing post-script. They're alright. That's really all that can be said about them; I find Kindaichi stories usually have interesting characters, and these are both too short to allow for much character development at all, and that missing element is very conspicuous by its absence. The first story at least has an interesting twist; if you're a completionist and in to the series the book is worth picking up, but if you're looking to get into the series I'd suggest starting with Gokumon Island, the Devil's Flute, the Village of Eight Graves, or any of the others.

I just finished “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants” by Erik Piepenberg, a svelte 200-page book that is equal parts nostalgic paean to a bygone era and discussion of a historical trend which asks “does it survive into the present?” It's not a bad book by any means; Erik is a gay Gen Xer who lived through the tail end of the time of the gay village, so it's a world he participated in at least in part. He's also a journalist and so he writes reasonably well, and manages to largely successfully walk the fine line between historian and participant. One thing of note when I read a gay book about gay things is watching how the (gay) author handles “the gay” – obviously while it's a lot more than a sexuality, a big part of homosexuality for most homosexuals is sexual. Since outsiders often reduce gay people to the sex act, gay authors often fall victim to one of two extremes: either they defiantly focus on the prurient, or they shrink away from it entirely and produce a sanitized work.

At its worst, the latter feels like capitulation and the former performative, so I was quite happy that Erik largely avoids either trap. It is important to note that gay restaurants do have a lot to do with sex; with homosexual conduct outlawed in most of the west until a decade or two ago, many LGBT people couldn't hope for much more than a community, a life in the closet or at the periphery, and some sex. After all, if you can't cohabitate with another man past your 20s let alone marry, your options are limited. Restaurants and bar-restaurants were places to socialize, to look for a liaison, to commiserate with friends after a night on the town, to mourn losses, and so they are intimately tied into the homosexual experience, especially when gay people could not take for granted safety to be themselves. This is a lot of what Erik touches on, and he does a good job of conveying that.

In terms of the good: It's well-written, it's fairly engaging, mixing social trends with vignettes and recollections old and new, as well as with interviews and things he's pulled out of research archives. It also doesn't overstay its welcome. He also does a nice job of including lesbian and transgender narratives and stories in the work, while also discussing the difference between “lesbian/gay” (as it would've largely been considered then) with “queer” (as it would be called now) in a way that feels inclusive without leaving the realm of the historical, and is thoughtful where it isn't inclusive. There's also an extensive bibliography for those of you who might want to track down primary sources.

In terms of the not-so-good: Some of the vignettes drag a little bit, while others are over before they start. Also, I would imagine it's obvious to any queer folks reading this, but many elements of the work cover depressing topics, from the role of restaurants as social spaces during the AIDS crisis to examinations of the decline of the gay village for reasons social and economic, and perhaps most depressingly of all to the fact that the book was published in 2025, a time when any queer person with a brain cell to spare is justifiably concerned for their safety given the second flowering of fascist authoritarianism. Also, for any other non-Americans reading this, and if the title doesn't make it obvious: the book is about America's gay restaurants, and its focus is exclusive, though the author does take pains to go beyond West Hollywood, San Francisco, and NYC.

On the whole, a decent read.

A fun sequel - familiar, but different enough to not feel like it was a retread.

An enjoyable dark fantasy that felt sort of like the setting was Vietnam with witches and wizards. Definitely grim though - the Black Company are not good people, and even the good guys commit their share of atrocities; it might not be for some folks, especially living as we do in interesting times.

A lot of fun; Asher wove together a whole bunch of threads marvelously well. It's like a grittier Culture - the Culture by way of Alastair Reynolds, if you will.

A quick, tight little soft military sci-fi adventure.

Sean Carroll writes well, with clear enthusiasm, and argues interestingly for his position while also covering a complex topic in a way that's a bit more than popsci but still doesn't assume deep expertise. The chapters stand alone enough that one can flit around the book easily enough if one doesn't wish to cover the entire piece. Worth a look if you're at all curious about the history around figuring out how we get from a single fertilized egg to 206 bones and untold nerves, capillaries, and other structures, and how much of that architecture we have in common with fruit flies, mice, fungi, or chimps.

An enjoyable entry in the series, though nothing remarkable.

Enjoyable, though not the easiest read as the timescales we're dealing with engender a sort of existential horror, or at least they did for me.

An enjoyable set of vignettes about how subtle interplay between factors can yield interesting results, interwoven with a discussion on unintended and intended incentives. Definitely a popular work (not that there's anything wrong with that), but the notes section is expansive and he does discuss more academic sources if that matters to you.

What a fun short story; I see now why Howard has his fans.

An enjoyable read, though with some very, very dark subject matter. Yokomizo's approach to writing women could probably warrant an essay in and of itself, though I am not one to attempt it. Suffice it to say that while I appreciate that he tends to realize many of his woman characters as clever and shrewd – often moreso than the men – there's a weird sort of infantilization that goes on that can be really off-putting to a modern reader, and that's without even speaking of the disgust/horror with which he addresses women's sexuality. None of this prevents the book from being an enjoyable/interesting read, but it is definitely noticeable. The setting, as always, is quite interesting: a Japan still being rebuilt and still in tatters.