Good book! This one kept me up very late and I popped it open within 20 minutes of rising. (I often do this as there’s not much going on around here.)

Oh my- this shouldn’t have been such a surprise but …. I put this book on my Wish List as soon as it came out. And then I waited. And I guess I saw a few reviews which weren’t up to what I thought they should be if this book was going to be as good as Station Eleven, Mandel’s prior novel. And time went on. I took it off my Wish List at some point. Then I saw it as being “available” on the library audio shelves. Okay – I got it, tried it. (And it’s so good I want to read it again!)
https://www.marmaladeandmustardseed.com/bookguidesblog/the-glass-hotel
There is an excellent character list which may come in handy. (It did for me!).
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/emily-st-john-mandel-glass-hotel/605548/ Great but wait until you’ve finished the book. The actual review starts half way down the piece which also talks a lot about Station Eleven and our plague of 2020. This piece also mentions the David Mitchell link (which I caught before reading that others thought the same thing).
https://therumpus.net/2020/03/the-rumpus-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ An interview in which Mandell actually states that she based the structure on what Mitchell did in Cloud Atlas and how she really feels about Montreal. (She was quite hard on it in one of her books which I also read years ago.) There’s a lot of stuff in this interview about the meaning of having one character from one book lapse over into other novels. Very interesting – fascinating actually.
And from me to anyone in the All-nonfiction reading group there’s a bit of resonance in The Glass Hotel and Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener in that you know something but don’t know it – and that could be like the idea of our times maybe.
This is a series I don’t follow in order. I’m not really that much of a dog person and too much of Rosenfelt’s humor will do me no good. Once in awhile though … so I’m reading his Christmas books from the Andy Carpenter series. I don’t know if I’ll do another one this season or not – maybe. I know I’ll do another one at some point.
*******
Deck the Hounds
By David Rosenfelt/ 2018
Read by Grover Gardner 7h 19m Rating: B+ / legal mystery
*******
I read this in honor of Christmas and a very cheap offer from Audible – free with Audible Plus! And judging from the blurbs and sample, it sounded good. It’s an old book but it was brought back by Audible. I found it a bit disappointing in some ways but I stayed with it and enjoyed myself.
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
By Anna Wiener –
2020
Read by Suehyla El-Attar: 8h 45m
Rating: 8.5 / memoir