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This feels like a book that needs two distinct reviews.

First, Emily Wilson's translation, which is wonderful. Just as Heaney moved Beowulf from "worthy work" to a fun read, Wilson's made The Odyssey eminently readable, while keeping it a formally structured long poem and apparently sticking scrupulously to the pacing of the original Greek. I had started reading other translations of this work but never actually finished them, so I'm delighted that this one now exists. And the maps, introduction, footnotes and dramatis personae all helped me follow a work that's heavy on reference and allusion.

But I have to say I didn't get on very well with the content. Some of it is delightful, from learning that Greeks have appreciated wine, olive oil and the sea for longer than much of the world's had written records, to all the descriptions that weren't about Odysseus himself. But there's a degree of repetitiveness to the language that grated--Wilson's introduction explains why it was so in a work written to be performed but it still took away from my experience of reading this as written text--a few too many passages that consist of just listing characters from other Greek myths to the point that they felt like the Torah's "begats", and by the end I found the character of Odysseus dislikable enough to not care about his fortunes.

I'm still glad to have read this. I didn't get anywhere near the exposure to Greek mythology that US schools seem to give, so much of the story was either new to me or connected dots that I'd picked up scattershot from English literature referencing them. And I have to say that I'm re-reading the Torah this year, which seems to be of approximately the same age, and found The Odyssey so much more sophisticated and compelling as a work of literature. But I can't exactly say that I like this story.

Meh.

Actually that's not quite fair. I wish I'd read this when it first came out, because it would have saved me several years in getting a sense of what the nebulous-sounding global social justice movements that spawned things like the Seattle WTO protests were about. But reading it in 2018 I found myself too often reacting with either "how did you not see that [e.g.] Chavez was a problem?", or "yes, that's nice in itself, but we're so manifestly losing this battle". There are some useful rays of light in it, and Solnit's a great writer, but on balance I think this book left me feeling more hopeless and depressed.

A lovely exploration of a utopia that Le Guin managed to make seem both appealing and plausible without shrinking from the sacrifices that it entailed.

At times the weird temporal structure of the book confused me, though it does make sense given the principal character's work. And there are moments when the utopians' political talk starts to feel like author lecturing reader - though really only moments, this isn't one of those books that bludgeons you with its rhetoric. It is one of those that I've spent as long thinking about after finishing as I had spent reading it, because there's more substance and subtletly to its politics and sociological observation than you might expect after I've thrown the "utopia" label at it.

Oof. This collection pulls no punches. And is great as a result. Beautiful when it can be, ugly when it has to be, but consistently penetrating.

I appreciated this window into a lifestyle I sometimes fantasize about but don't really think is for me. It's a very wide-ranging collection of essays, in a nice steady voice.

A beautiful book about migration, and how that might look in the face of one big change in how the world works. Like so many migration stories, it starts with an intensely sad premise, and even though the book is not an unrelenting wallow in that, the sadness is never exactly absent.

It's written in a very distinctive style, full of long sentences that at times can be achingly beautiful, and at times feel like a useful device for conveying the complexity of the characters' entangled lives, but at other times also become rather grating, as though the author's forgotten that breaking a paragraph up into sentences is an option available to him, or just become too reliant on this device because when it does work it works so well, and I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because long run-on sentences are a common flaw in my own writing, but by the end of the book it was definitely taking something away from what was otherwise a wonderful read.

A lot of fun, and with a beautiful sense of pace and timing, though at times the lessons feel a bit clunky. This book's made me very keen to read some of Okorafor's non-YA work.

An unavoidably difficult, frustrating book, given the subject matter. I appreciated Imarisha's honesty, including about the number of the things she doesn't have satisfying answers to because no-one does.

VanderMeer's use of negative space is stunning. I spent the first couple of chapters frustrated with omissions but it quickly became clear that they were both deliberate and masterful. I'm not quite sure what this book is, but I know I loved it.

I think I see why this is such an important book to many of my friends, but I didn't get on well with it. Part of the problem is definitely that I'm reading it as an adult and it's clearly intended for a significantly younger audience than the YA novels I've enjoyed over the past few years. But there's other stuff too.

The Meg-Calvin relationship developed without ever developing - like it was just inevitable that these two would have a super gender role normative relationship so there was no need to bother with exposition of it - and felt like it undermined her agency. The weirdly formal tone of most of the dialogue. The simplicity of "evil" in the book, which when its content was explored at all just felt like red scare propaganda, as if 1962 America didn't have its conformist, deindividuated suburbia. The occasional bursts of god-talk in a story that religion doesn't seem to fit into. The way the beloved father figure keeps resorting to authoritarian responses to children who know things he doesn't.

Maybe this just hasn't aged well? Or maybe it's just not a book for me.

Lovely collection of poems from a time that Britain calls the dark ages because so few written records survived from the other end of Eurasia. Wang Wei was particularly good at capturing small details of scenes - the way a canoe's paddle moves through the water, or subtle changes in a town with the seasons - but he must also have taken great joy in people because another rich seam in this collection is poems of farewell, greeting, and missing people in between.

This was one of the most disturbing, uncomfortable books I have ever read, because it goes so deep into dehumanisation by those who wield power. And yet I finished it in a week because the key characters and the strange world Butler set up were so compelling.

This book approaches a particularly interesting time in Russian history in a new-to-me way: by compiling poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction) from the first two years of the Revolution. It's a well compiled selection that covers a very broad range of reactions, and humanises the events of the time in a way that purely historical accounts can't. Also gave me a lot of authors to add to my wishlist....

Interesting stories, skilfully retold and accompanied with beautiful drawings. The existence of this book is both a happy and a sad thing: putting an oral tradition into writing both to share it with the world and to protect it in case things continue to get worse for the storytellers. There are some elegiac moments in the book which are quite powerful.