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Tried to buy On Stranger Tides by the same author, but neither library nor bookstore had it available. Picked up this short story collection instead. Mostly horror/dark fantasy. Pretty good.

I wasn't expecting The Fall of Ile-Rien to be a trilogy. I had anticipated at least a couple more books, so when things looked like they might resolve when I was two-thirds of the way through this, I braced myself for a really annoying cliffhanger. But no. It all resolved. A good adventure book. I need to go back and re-read Death of the Necromancer, though. I feel like the atmosphere of that book was a little lost in all of the world-hopping that was going on in this series.

Essays on travel. Seemed appropriate reading for traveling. The author is actually unexpectedly supportive of not traveling. Some insights, but not great overall.

Amusing.

I've been meaning to read this since seeing it mentioned as an inspiration in To Say Nothing of the Dog. Happened to run across a Wikipedia entry that mentioned it and grabbed it from the library. It's amusing. Full of clever anecdotes and observations.

This turned out to be a collection of Eco's humorous columns from a literary magazine from the late 60s and early 70s. I would probably have gotten more out of it if I were more familiar with the works and events that Eco satirizes. Several of them were quite clever.

This keeps coming up on AskMeFi best-of-SF lists. And with good reason. Excellent. Very cleverly constructed.

Covers the history of piracy and contrasts it with how pirates were depicted in fiction. A wealth of interesting material, but the organization was strange. For example: the chapter on the types of ships that pirates tended to use segues into a general discussion of the depiction of pirates in movies by mentioning that they used larger ships because they were more impressive looking and easier to film on. Why aren't those separate chapters?

Great. Excellent characters. Good worldbuilding.

Japan's history chopped up into bite-sized pieces. An interesting approach to getting familiar with the subject.

I grabbed this book from Quincy probably almost a decade ago. It was one of the texts of a Russian history class he was taking. It's been on my shelf since. I'm not sure why it suddenly looked appealing, but I started it. It's very dry. I'm sure the historical detail is fascinating to scholars in the field. Less so to me. Now that I've started something else, I'll probably never finish this.

Fun. A very personal view of a strangely-interrelated set of historical facts. Charmingly written.

Tedious. I was hoping for a more coherent book, but this is a collection of lists and personal anecdotes.

Charming collection of short essays about books and the author's family's relationship to them.