An Uncertain Place: a Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery, Vargas, tr. Reynolds. Yes. I continue to be fond of Vargas’s hero, Commissaire Adamsberg, and the writing and (perhaps especially) translation are lovely, but I fear the plots are becoming more involved than I need. Vargas is not nearly on the thin ice that Tepper is, though.

Dead Mann Walking: A Hessius Mann Novel, Petrucha. Yes. Petrucha has created a unique (to my knowledge) first-person narrator in Hessius Mann. I am looking forward to the next installment to see if he can maintain the level of interest, given Tana French’s rationale in giving each of her Dublin Murder Squad books a different protagonist: it’s hard to justify life-changing events happening to the same person over and over. Some aspects of DMW resonate with another recent work I also enjoyed; I think it rather validates Petrucha’s vision that a different group of talented writers went in a similar direction given a related premise. The only passage that pulled me out of the narrative was the improper (and strained) use of “to coin a phrase.”

Reaper Man: A Novel of Discworld®, Pratchett. Yes. Again, Pratchett provides reliable entertainment. This one introduces a particularly entertaining minor character, and Death can always be relied upon to add that certain something.

Goliath, Westerfeld. Yes. Follows Leviathan and Behemoth. If you’ve read them, you know whether you want to read this; if not, I recommend you start with them. I noted no mechanical difficulties, most likely because the story was holding me captive.

The Tears of Autumn, McCarry. Yes. I’m tempted to believe that every aspect of the theory presented in this 1974 political thriller is true, it hangs together so nicely. The writing is also very good.

Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!, Garant & Lennon. Non-Fiction. This is a ruthlessly practical guide to selling screenplays to Hollywood studios. It also provides appalling and entertaining insight into what is required of a writer in order to make a living doing that. If you are at all interested in the business of writing Hollywood studio movies, I encourage you to read this book. Even if you’re not, it’s probably worth a look.

Invisible Things, Davidson. Yes. Follows The Explosionist. Picks up near where its predecessor left off, and is another just fine YA novel. This one is more openly setting up for a follow-up book, which, if history is any guide, should be showing up in a year or so.

Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story, Rex. No. This came highly recommended, and has plenty of positive traits (two in particular: it’s mechanically sound, an incorrect “whomever” notwithstanding; and it has largely believable characterization), but it has two (to me) fatal flaws: it has way too much explanation, and it strikes me as far too interested in amassing geek credibility. These two characteristics combine particularly gratingly in the Rocky Horror scene, which walks us torturously through nearly every nuance of the viewing experience. Granted, plenty of plot and character advancement is occurring during the sequence, but I have to believe every bit of it could have been accomplished better without the artificial framework imposed by having it happen at a night out at a movie—especially when the author feels it necessary to explain so much of the night out.
This book would have been much better if Rex had worked harder on not telling us so much.

The Explosionist, Davidson. Yes. There were a number of features of this book that annoyed me: it’s nearly tiresome in the same ways that Jo Walton’s “Small Change” series was nearly tiresome (it is conceptually similar to Walton’s work, too); I discovered that I do not much care for the taint of outright fantasy in my historical speculative fiction; and there was this:

Dismissed, Sophie slipped upstairs just in time to avoid the inevitable awkward encounter with Miss Gillespie in the hall.

On the other hand, that sentence was the only time Davidson’s writing pulled me completely out of the story, and I found the characters believable enough, and some moments were quite well executed.

Fuzzy Sapiens (Note: link is to single-volume release of Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens (then titled The Other Human Race)), Piper. Yes. I read this as part of my ongoing quest to understand why the Fuzzy universe got rebooted, and in this sequel to Little Fuzzy, I am finally seeing why it might be desirable to leave large chunks of this canon behind. I wouldn’t presume to speculate that the things I would leave behind are the same ones that Scalzi will, but I will say that the constant and universal smoking is among the least jarring of things I would pretend never happened.