The Books of Lost Swords, Saberhagen. No. Prompted by recent reading, I re-read all eight of the Lost Swords books. I get the feeling Fred gave up about mid-way through (probably around the Sherlock Holmes hommage), and by the last couple wanted to kill the series so badly that he ignored the previous rules by which the Swords had operated. My disappointment with the tying up of loose ends in this series was similar to my disappointment with Ardneh’s Sword, though this one didn’t so much end up contradicting existing canon (Sword rules notwithstanding) as leaving me thinking "Really? That’s the best you can do with an abiding enigma?" Quite unsatisfying.

Self-Made Man, Vincent. No. This was a book-club obligation, a book I would not likely have read voluntarily (and I ended up reading only one of the sections). Between the author’s assumptions, generalizations, and overall unwillingness to maintain a coherent position, the only conclusion I can reach is that people are complicated and don’t communicate very well.

I Am the Messenger, Zusak. Yes. I have a couple issues with the book. First, it assumes (or perhaps implies) a characteristic of human nature that I am firmly convinced does not exist; second, the writer does a thing that I ordinarily disapprove of. He executes it competently, but it is not necessary to the story and I believe it does a disservice to the characters. Your assignment: compare and contrast IAtM and Zero Effect.

Walking in Circles before Lying Down, Markoe. Yes. I laughed more reading this book than I have laughed at a book in a long, long time. Ms Markoe is a gifted humorist.

Visionary in Residence, Sterling. No. This was quite a struggle for me to finish. I usually enjoy Sterling’s work, and I did enjoy the final two stories in this collection, but the rest, by and large, made me think that he was taking the title of the collection (which is also, I believe, his job title where he’s a visiting professor of design or some such) far too seriously. I really don’t care how smart you are, or how smart you think I am, just use the right words in the right order. Almost no one is good enough to show off and get it right.

The Psycho Ex Game, Markoe and Prieboy. Yes. Not flawless, but enjoyable. It was impossible for me not to speculate on which stories had been pulled completely from experience, and which had been given writers’ embellishments (or just plain invented). Further fueling that impulse is the fact that Recipe Cards have been posted by (or at least on behalf of) the authors. Also available: the song that started it all. I’ve been a fan of Ms Markoe’s work for more than twenty years, and while I don’t think this is the best book she’s been involved with creating, it does have a unique voyeuristic appeal.
(I’m getting "bandwidth exceeded" errors from the links to the book’s website; I’m hoping they’ll get more bandwidth at the beginning of the month (i.e., tomorrow))

the accidental, Smith. Yes. This is Ali Smith, not Zadie Smith of On Beauty, though this book, too, performed well (this one took first place) in the Tournament of Books. There is much I might have disliked about this book: the narrative style is flashy, there are not-infrequent somewhat extended passages where a narrative voice becomes fascinated with words, the structure does not lend itself to inattentive reading, those sorts of things. But the only features of the novel that bothered me were the typesetting (I never before realized how much easier to read a fully justified line of text is than ragged-right) and the title (for reasons I can’t possibly discover, I could not think of the title without starting to compose a song to the tune of “The Carioca” (“oh, have you read the accidental? It’s really very continental…” or “It’s only somewhat sentimental…”); ugh).
Update: To clarify somewhat, I’m a big fan of flashy narrative and am frequently myself fascinated with words to the point of distraction, but it’s been so long since I’ve read an author who could do those things in service of the story and the characters, rather than as an intrusive plea for attention, that I’ve taken to looking for simplicity. I suspect it may be easier for attention-seeking works to get published, so I have a notion that a simply written work that made it to my library shelves is more likely to be well crafted. Ali Smith’s verbal and structural games proved to be a delightful surprise.

On Beauty, Smith. No. I chose this due to its performance in the Tournament of Books. I started to hate it with the first sentence, but forced myself to give it more of a look. It finally defeated me ten pages in with its power of making me not give a rat’s ass about any of the characters. Oddly (since the author is from London), I found the idiomatic English overdone, as though she is writing for an American audience of hyper-Anglophiles. Even the American character speaks like a Brit—"How am I meant to react?"—though this is not consistent, as she later says "ass", which her husband re-figures to "arse". All in all, very distracting.

The First, Second, and Third Books of Swords, Saberhagen. If you like that sort of thing. I re-read these to see whether I missed anything cool in Ardneh’s Sword. The refresher did clear up the otherwise-inexplicable pointless character from AS, but, if anything, made the latter work even more of a disappointment in retrospect. There’s not even the slightest hint, in the fairly explicit exegesis presented in the Swords books, of the direction Saberhagen would, twenty-odd years on, decide to retrofit into the saga. I can construct a somewhat tortuous chain of reasoning by which the two ontogenies are not outright incompatible, but the author should be shooting for a very satisfying click as all the pieces fit together, not "Well, if you interpret what Draffut said this way, I suppose it still makes sense…."
On their own, the three original Swords books are just fine, as is the Empire of the East before them. I don’t have any immediate intent to re-read the eight Lost Swords books.

Ardneh’s Sword, Saberhagen. If you’ve read Empire of the East and the Books of Swords. This was just about exactly what you’d expect it to be. Saberhagen, bless him, does not misuse “whomever”. I was left wanting something more substantial; I’m re-reading at least the first three Books of Swords now, to see whether there was more to Ardneh’s Sword than I saw.
Update: here‘s what I found.