My Summer Holiday Reading Stack
This is what I packed for the holiday in Milan and Corsica this year. Not that I ever thought I would it read it ALL …
Robin Sloan, “The Writer & the Witch” – On top sits the smallest and by far the most beautiful object of the pile: Robin Sloan’s short story The Writer & the Witch, printed, folded, stapled and trimmed by Sloan himself in his Penumbra Print Shop. Italian paper with a gritty tooth, endpapers made from radish leaves by the Awagami Factory — you can see the speckled green sheet peeking out in the photo. Sloan claims the paper smells amazing. It does.
The story is a modern fairy tale: a young writer in a hurry, an old woman by a bridge, a curse that turns out to be something else entirely. I read it in one sitting, because of course I did — it’s about 4,000 words. I liked it a lot.
“Korsika” – The obligatory travel guide for our destination. So we know which road is technically a road.
Alastair Reynolds, “Eversion” (German: “Das Schiff der flüsternden Träume”) – My perfect hard-SF summer novel, and I flew through it.
The premise is wonderful: a ship’s doctor on a 19th-century sailing expedition to a mysterious structure in a Norwegian fjord. Then the same crew, the same doctor, the same structure — aboard a steam ship before Patagonia. Then again, elsewhere, elsewhen. Each iteration ends in catastrophe. For a long stretch you have no idea what you are reading, and Reynolds is entirely comfortable letting you sit with that.
It resolves. And it resolves well — into an explanation that is, three years after the book first appeared in English in 2022, considerably more thinkable than it must have been at the time. I won’t say more. Absolutely recommended.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, “Children of Time” (German: “Die Kinder der Zeit”) – Just started. The first pages are already very good. Report to follow.
Manuel Garand, “Murdoku” – The pool-and-beach puzzle book. You solve murder cases by deducing where each character was standing on a room-plan grid. It borrows the constraint logic of Sudoku but is far less abstract and considerably less complex. It is about people, not numbers. You can try it at murdoku.com.