I’m reading The Garden of Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu. It’s a collection of very strange and seemingly unrelated short stories, interspersed with chapters about a traveler in a Mediterranean city who ends up taking part in a human chess game. The publisher’s description says, “With many strata to mine, The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness, the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.” If you like Kafka, or Italo Calvino, this might be up your alley. Me, I’m not too sure yet.

I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. It’s told from the point of view of Tookie, an ex con who works at a bookstore in Minnesota owned by an author named Louise. Tookie is now married to the tribal cop who arrested her, she has a fraught relationship with her step daughter and with the ghost of a former bookstore customer who died while reading a book that is now in Tookie’s possession that she thinks may be cursed. It takes place in 2020, and COVID-19 has just struck. I love Louise Erdrich, and this is much more engaging than the Karasu.

For SF, I recommend anything by Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first of her Wayfarers series.