October Books 18) The Full Cupboard of Life

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18) The Full Cupboard of Life, by Alexander McCall Smith
More laid-back Botswana tales, with lots of incident and little plot – indeed, the only actual bit of detection for the detective agency peters out half-way through, as if the author had lost interest in it.

One thought on “October Books 18) The Full Cupboard of Life”

  1. Certainly Hominids is worse than Blackout/All Clear, and so is They’d Rather Be Right. (A commenter on Abigail’s blog supported the latter on the grounds, my interpretation! — that well it isn’t as bad as everybody has been saying over 55 years — maybe so, but it’s still very bad.) I’m pretty sure that when Hominids won I posted something to the effect that at last They’d Rather Be Right had competition for Worst Novel Hugo.

    The Gods Themselves didn’t deserve its Hugo but it’s not that bad. Neuromancer probably also didn’t deserve its Hugo but it’s quite good.

    The Dervish House was robbed, but it would have been just as bad if Feed had won. So what can you do?

    I will say that I thought all the short fiction awards were wrong — the Chiang is one of his weaker stories, though Chiang being Chiang, it’s still good. Just not as good as the Hand, Swirsky, or Landis. Abigail is spot on about “The Emperor of Mars” — Kelly should have won in this category, but it was really a pretty weak year for novelettes. And I enjoyed Kowal’s story, but “The Things” was far better — though the nomination list could have been a lot stronger.

    —
    Rich Horton

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