Month 54: Letdown

Month 54 of 260 (20.77 percent)
Size of list: 92,140 pages (18.47 percent above start)
Pages read: 27,870 (30.25 percent)
H-list: 7,770/23,922 (32.48 percent)
N-list: 10,101/37,308 (27.07 percent)
O-list: 9,999/30,910 (32.35 percent)
Reading: The Path of Daggers
Finished: The Triumph of Injustice, Ancillary Mercy

I've been updating this blog late. I'm fairly confident in the numbers, because I keep my spreadsheets updated at least weekly, but I'm a little iffy on the correspondence between what I've finished and those numbers. Nonetheless, what I finished this month was all on the O-list, and the O, we recall, stands for Other: books that neither won a Hugo nor were included on the official D&D inspirational reading list. 

The Triumph of Injustice is not only nonfiction, it's not really a story -- it's a policy book about taxation. The authors, Saez and Zucman, work with Piketty but are based at Berkeley, which is a huge plus. Nonetheless, this book lacked the pizzaz of Piketty translated by Goldhammer. It's a weird thing to say about an economic treatise, but there it is. It's hard to judge how convincing it is, since I'm inclined to agree with them already, at least on the problem.

Ancillary Mercy was a profound disappointment as the third installment of the trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. The first volume set up this massive galactic showdown between Anaander Miaanai and herself, and the last volume with a very localized resolution. What's going to happen to the Empire? On the Imperial Scale? Who wins? How? This book is good on its own merits, but it doesn't exist on that basis. I wanted resolution of what was set up in volume one, and volume three isn't it, and there's no volume four. Sigh.