The trouble* with reading the Tor.com blog is that I keep reading reviews of really interesting-sounding books. I'm getting better at putting them on my wish list and not buying them straight away, but Kate Heartfield's novella Alice Payne Arrives just sounded too interesting to resist; somewhere between "lesbian highwayman" and "time travel shenanigans" I found myself clicking the "Buy it now" button.

I have to say, I wasn't disappointed. Alice Payne Arrives weaves together the stories of the eponymous Alice, an impoverished mixed-race gentlewoman living in Hampshire in 1788 and moonlighting as the notorious highwayman the Holy Ghost, and Prudence Zuniga, a soldier fighting a complicated war over the course of human history made possible only by the invention of time travel, where the opposing sides try to nudge the course of the past to produce a present more to their liking (with very little success, as without their intervention the First World War would never have happened, and the less said about 2016 the better...). It's clever, engaging and tremendous fun from start to finish, and my only complaint is that I wish it had been longer. I've already pre-ordered the sequel, which is due out in March.

*for values of trouble relating to my bank balance, at least

The tenth published volume of the Comfortable Courtesan series, An Honourable Estate mainly focuses on Clorinda's continued work to improve the situation of the family of the Earl of N-. She may have persuaded him to adopt a less miserly approach to domestic expenses, but there is still the question of his eldest daughter's marriage to resolve. Meanwhile, the bad poet Mr W- Y- has gone missing and the sinister Mr R- O- is making enquiries into his whereabouts.

The series continues to be an absolute delight - perfect cosy comfort reading, where even the occasional moments of Mild Peril are quickly and happily resolved, but still with a more serious eye to the very real inequalities of early nineteenth-century society. I'm sorry that there are only two more volumes to come after this, although I'm pleased to see that the author also plans to publish The Ironmaster's Tale in the new year and hope that some of the "next generation" material that has been appearing on the blog since the main series finished may also make its way into print one day...

I always think that pre-ordered Kindle books feel like surprise presents from Past Me to Present Me, and I was particularly pleased to have something I knew was going to be fun and entertaining, in the shape of Ben Aaronovitch's seventh Peter Grant novel, Lies Sleeping, to look forward to through the last few days of what felt like a Very Long Week last week.

It didn't disappoint; there were lots of humorous reflections on policing, magic and the relationship between the two, enjoyable character moments, digressions into the history of London and geeky references and in-jokes, all narrated in Peter Grant's distinctive voice, and I enjoyed it a lot. I also continue to love Aaronovitch's multi-ethnic cast of characters and really noticed in this one the way Grant's narrative always identifies white characters as white, refusing to accept the unmarked status of privileged groups in British society.

I did feel, though, that it was possibly a bit short on plot, and what there was suffered from some pacing issues, with an odd lull about three-quarters of the way through and then a rush to wrap things up (including one major ongoing plot being tied up in a somewhat anticlimactic way). I think this is largely because, like a lot of series, the longer this one goes on the more it becomes less a series of separate stories and more of a roman-fleuve, with much more of a focus on the interactions and development of the regular characters than on the plot, but I would have liked a bit more actual crime-solving. Also, I thought it could have done with better copy-editing as there seemed to be a lot of the kind of errors that creep in when a text is being rewritten and revised electronically (though this is not the only book I've had this problem with recently - are publishers cutting back on proof-readers?).

Mostly, though, I just thought it was fun, and definitely over too soon.

I had to have two goes at Becky Chambers' first novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but ended up quite enjoying it without being wowed by it; I thought it was a pleasantly upbeat space opera which felt very much like a fairly lightweight SF TV series in book form. I did think though, that in some ways it felt like the SF equivalent of the kind of historical novel where the characters all feel like modern people dressed up in historical costumes, with all the issues it explored seeming to be very directly equivalent to contemporary social issues (then again, that is a fairly common issue with the kind of TV series it reminded me of).

Given this ambivalence, I didn't rush to buy the follow-up, A Closed and Common Orbit, but ended up ordering a copy last year when I was stocking up on comforting and fluffy reads on the grounds that while it might not be brilliant, I might want a fluffy SF comfort read sometime. However, I found that I liked this one a lot less than the first book. The feeling that I was reading about 21st century people and problems dressed up in SF clothes, rather than SF which was offering a new perspective on contemporary problem, was even stronger this time round as the novel ticked off a list of issues including neurodivergence, genderfluidity and child labour. I also felt that neither of the two central characters really had much more depth than the much larger cast of characters of the first novel; there seemed to be a lot of description of their day-to-day lives in the place of character development. I also wasn't very keen on the novel's resolution; I felt that Chambers actually sets up some major structural societal problems in the future she depicts, and then instead of tackling them presents an individual happy ending as being all that's needed, and I am currently quite over the idea that individual actions are the answer to society-level problems.

Ultimately, although it's not terrible, for everything this book does, I can think of other books which do the same thing, but better. If I wanted to read about a ship's AI adapting to life in a human body, I could read Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. If I wanted to read about concepts of personhood as applied to AIs, I could read Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas. And if I wanted SF fluff, Bujold would probably have been a better bet.

The publication of Robin Stevens' latest Wells and Wong mystery last week reminded me that the previous one, A Spoonful of Murder, had been sitting on my kindle since it was published in February, and given that I was in the mood for a fun, fairly light read anyway I thought I ought to try to catch up.

A Spoonful of Murder begins with Hazel being summoned home to Hong Kong following her grandfather's death. Dasiy comes with her, but when the girls arrive they find that her grandfather's death isn't the only change there has been in Hazel's family, and soon they find themselves investigating a crime which touches Hazel as closely as the case in Arsenic for Tea touched Daisy. I really loved how much this book shows the ways the two girls have grown and changed during the course of the series; Hazel in particular really comes into her own here, in a setting where she is at home and Daisy is the foreigner and forced by language considerations and other people's assumptions to let Hazel take the lead a lot of the time. It also continues the series' deftly subtle examination of race and gender issues (and class also comes into play in this one). I enjoyed it very much and am looking forward to reading the new one soon (hopefully before the next one comes out this time, though there's something to be said for always having one book of a series I'm enjoying in reserve rather than being all caught up and having to wait until a future release date for more...)

The fourth and last of Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas (but at least the sadness of that 'last' is mitigated by the recent news that there will be a Murderbot novel in 2020), Exit Strategy sees Murderbot returning from its investigative travels to rescue its original clients from All Systems Red. Despite being only novella-length, it squeezes in a lot of action, but underneath the hacking and shooting and hair's breadth escapes only to find that the danger isn't quite over yet the novella's real theme is Murderbot's development as an independent individual. Throughout the series, we've seen it learning to pass among humans and interacting with people who perceive it as another person; reunited with its original clients, it finds itself interacting with people who know it's a SecUnit but still think of it as a person, and (very unwillingly) finds itself having to confront the question of what it wants to do and be. Although there's quite a lot of considerably-more-than-mild peril and Wells' future is full of Evil Megacorps which are even more Evil and Mega than today's corporations, there are also found families and utopian refugee colonies and kindness and caring and it felt like the perfect SF comfort read, and Murderbot's voice is still delightfully snarky and wonderfully funny.

I first read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed when I was in my early teens, though I can't remember exactly when; my copy is a 1987 reprinting, but I think I remember reading it on the bus back from swimming lessons at the Aldershot pool which were a PE option in the spring term of my fourth year of secondary school, which would have been early 1989 (although that might have been a re-read). Whatever the exact date was, it made a deep and lasting impression on me; the utopian-anarchist ideology of Odonianism, harnessing community and mutual aid for survival in a harsh environment, helped to shape my own political beliefs, and the novel also depicts a fluidity of attraction that I think was actually more fundamental than the possibly more obvious The Left Hand of Darkness in showing me that monosexuality wasn't actually the only option.

It may be 30 years since I first read it, and approaching half a century since the book was first published, but re-reading it now some of the social commentary (and the mention of dead, polluted Earth, still littered with the indestructible plastic waste of previous generations) felt more relevant to the world of 2018 than it did to me in the late 80s. Some of the language has dated; there's a lot of generic "he" where I think "they" would be used in a book published now, and "mankind" instead of "humanity", but I can forgive Le Guin that when it's in a context of a novel that tries to depict a society without gender roles, and then to set it against a patriarchy so extreme women are all but invisible. It's a slow, thoughtful, philosophical book, with lots of digressions from the plot to explain the structure of Anarresti society and the ideas of Odonianism which underpin it. In less skillful hands, this might seem clunky but Le Guin's writing is as beautiful as always and the philosopy and plot complement each other perfectly.

Things which particularly struck me on this re-read: the description of the academic communities Shevek is part of, which suggest that academia is basically the same everywhere in the universe, never mind the ideology of the wider society it inhabits. The link Le Guin between creating and disrupting, furthering the revolution which has to keep moving to avoid becoming another system to revolt against. Cetian temporal physics, described by a character as a hybrid of maths, physics and philosophy but which I'd never realised before is basically the scientific proof of the truth of Four Quartets. Now I'm older, I find the philosophy of the novel, and the idea of suffering as the true constant in life and the source of all community, much easier to understand than I did as a teenager. (We are watching The Good Place at the moment and the two resonate interestingly together.) And I love the characters, especially Shevek, Takver and Bedap, as much as I always did, so re-reading felt like revisiting very old friends.

I hadn't heard of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain until I read Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks, which devotes a chapter to it (much of which is reprised in the introduction to the edition of The Living Mountain I bought, or perhaps vice versa), a couple of years ago, but when I wandered into the delightful Highland Bookshop in Fort William after a week of walking through the Highlands and saw a copy on one of the display tables I couldn't resist picking it up.

The Living Mountain isn't a long book - barely 100 pages - and I read most of it on the train home yesterday. Each of its twelve chapters examines a different aspect of the Cairngorms, close to Shepherd's home on Deeside, an area she loved and spent long days walking in; she looks at the structures of the mountains, the effects of light and wind and water and weather, and the lives, plant and animal and human, that are intertwined with the mountains' existence, and gradually builds up a vivid picture of the totality of the mountain world. It's beautifully written; Shepherd's prose is lyrical and as clear as the mountain streams she writes about, and each word feels deliberately and perfectly placed to evoke the mountain landscape. It's also full of Shepherd's love of her native mountains, and, more than almost anything else I've ever read, she absolutely gets the joy of walking in the mountains, something that far too many books about walking somehow utterly fail to convey.

In the third of Martha Well's Murderbot novellas, Murderbot is headed outside the Corporate Rim to investigate an abandoned terraforming project run by the GreyCris Corporation in hopes of finding some evidence to support the legal case being brought against them by Murderbot's former clients at PreservationAux. Of course, Murderbot's luck being what it is, it also finds another crew of humans it can't help but take responsibility for, and a peppy pet robot who really wants everyone to be friends.

This was as delightful as the others in the series; Murderbot's snarky, grumpy narrative is hugely enjoyable and their complicated relationship with the humans they interact with - part irritated and introverted and wanting to be left alone to watch TV, part painfully conscious of their difference and isolation and keeping everyone at arm's length to avoid rejection - is deeply relatable to this human at least. I'm looking forward to the next instalment, which is due in a few weeks, and am excited by the recent announcement that there will also be a full-length Muderbot novel next year.

I read Lindsey Davis's The Silver Pigs years ago, because someone had recommended the Falco novels, and I quite liked the mix of hardboiled private eye and Ancient Rome, but not quite enough to shell out full price for new copies of the rest of the series, given just how many there were. Instead, I thought I'd just look out for second-hand copies, but the next one I found was the eleventh in the series and it rapidly became obvious that this was a series which really needed to be read in order if I was to have any hope of keeping track of the character development, and as I never seemed to find any of the earlier books I more or less gave up on the series.

A month or so ago, though, I was browsing in the Oxfam bookshop at lunchtime and found that they had almost a full set on offer, including pretty much everything up to book 10. So, obviously, I bought them all (a bargain at only £26 for 13 books), and then I thought that perhaps I'd better re-read The Silver Pigs before starting on the rest. At this point I discovered that the copy of The Silver Pigs I had definitely owned once upon a time was no longer anywhere to be found (I can only think that I had given up on ever find the next one and may have selected it when trying to find things I could bear to take to a book swap), so I had to order another one before I could re-read it.

My impression on re-reading was much the same as my first impression; it's a fun read which combines a pacy mystery plot (twisty and complicated enough that despite having read the book before I couldn't remember whodunnit) with a very thoroughly researched historical setting, snappy dialogue and likeable characters. Falco is an entertaining, self-aware narrator and his friends, family and associates are also engagingly drawn. I'm looking forward to working my way through the rest of the series.