A friend to whom I had raved about 📖 Cahokia Jazz raved back about Civilisations. Well no, he didn’t rave, because he didn’t want to offer any spoilers. All he said was that it was a great counterfactual. When I asked for at least a bit of an outline, he added only, “well, when the Inca fleet turn...

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See, this is what happens when you procrastinate.

I've been putting off reviewing Cahokia Jazz, which I finished a couple of months ago, because I wanted to tie it in to knowing a teeny bit about Cahokia from The Dawn of Everything and my subsequent discovery of Red Plenty, also by Francis S...

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I’m at a bit of a loss what to make of Jonathan Lethem’s latest. It’s definitely very clever. Maybe it does also capture growing up in Brooklyn during the earliest days of regeneration and eventual escape. Or not. I certainly enjoyed it one little chapter at a time. Overall, though, it just did not add up to anything notable, for me.

Perhaps you had to be there.

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If I were a character in this terrific novel, I would remember exactly who had recommended it to me, under what circumstances, and everything else about them. Alas, I am not, nor do I really wish I were, but as a story it has that kind of appeal, of making me think, what would I have done. The plot covers a dozen or so years, from Bulgaria in the early 1930s to America in 1946, and it concerns a group of NKVD recruits whose allegiance to one another is stronger than their allegiance to the NKVD. Or is it?

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Looking back, I cannot remember which particular recommendation engine thought I might like to read this. I asked a couple, telling them how much I had enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. After I had ploughed through a couple of things for work and John Le Carré’s Sing...

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