the accidental, Smith. Yes. This is Ali Smith, not Zadie Smith of On Beauty, though this book, too, performed well (this one took first place) in the Tournament of Books. There is much I might have disliked about this book: the narrative style is flashy, there are not-infrequent somewhat extended passages where a narrative voice becomes fascinated with words, the structure does not lend itself to inattentive reading, those sorts of things. But the only features of the novel that bothered me were the typesetting (I never before realized how much easier to read a fully justified line of text is than ragged-right) and the title (for reasons I can’t possibly discover, I could not think of the title without starting to compose a song to the tune of “The Carioca” (“oh, have you read the accidental? It’s really very continental…” or “It’s only somewhat sentimental…”); ugh).
Update: To clarify somewhat, I’m a big fan of flashy narrative and am frequently myself fascinated with words to the point of distraction, but it’s been so long since I’ve read an author who could do those things in service of the story and the characters, rather than as an intrusive plea for attention, that I’ve taken to looking for simplicity. I suspect it may be easier for attention-seeking works to get published, so I have a notion that a simply written work that made it to my library shelves is more likely to be well crafted. Ali Smith’s verbal and structural games proved to be a delightful surprise.

On Beauty, Smith. No. I chose this due to its performance in the Tournament of Books. I started to hate it with the first sentence, but forced myself to give it more of a look. It finally defeated me ten pages in with its power of making me not give a rat’s ass about any of the characters. Oddly (since the author is from London), I found the idiomatic English overdone, as though she is writing for an American audience of hyper-Anglophiles. Even the American character speaks like a Brit—"How am I meant to react?"—though this is not consistent, as she later says "ass", which her husband re-figures to "arse". All in all, very distracting.

The First, Second, and Third Books of Swords, Saberhagen. If you like that sort of thing. I re-read these to see whether I missed anything cool in Ardneh’s Sword. The refresher did clear up the otherwise-inexplicable pointless character from AS, but, if anything, made the latter work even more of a disappointment in retrospect. There’s not even the slightest hint, in the fairly explicit exegesis presented in the Swords books, of the direction Saberhagen would, twenty-odd years on, decide to retrofit into the saga. I can construct a somewhat tortuous chain of reasoning by which the two ontogenies are not outright incompatible, but the author should be shooting for a very satisfying click as all the pieces fit together, not "Well, if you interpret what Draffut said this way, I suppose it still makes sense…."
On their own, the three original Swords books are just fine, as is the Empire of the East before them. I don’t have any immediate intent to re-read the eight Lost Swords books.