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Bands of Mourning ended solidly, connecting with the first Mistborn trilogy while also opening out into Sanderson's larger Cosmere in a most satisfying manner.
I'd interrupted the second of Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, Claw of the Conciliator, to take advantage of the library loan, and now I'm back into it. These are the first books I've heard/read by the author, and certainly they're problematic--Wolfe, or if we're generous, his narrator, is obsessed with women as "the other." Many observations of the narrator/protagonist's relations with women are presented as profundities when they more closely resemble descriptions of a small, dark, odoriferous space that marks the extent of the protagonist's (and again, possibly the author's) horizons. It's also hard, if one is conversant with the effects of hallucinogens, not to see their influence writ plainly on the text. That said, the conceit of the excessively reliable narrator contrasted against the premise that it's a far-future manuscript largely "lost in translation" works well, and what we end up with is a fairly unique succession of fantastical fugues that bear revisiting even if they only just might add up to a story. There are echoes of Camus and Hesse here, both of whom also used protagonists who had trouble registering other people in general, and certainly women, as much more than stimuli.
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