Book resolutions

Sticking to my new-found seriousness in book choice, I read The Sea of Faith by Stephen O'Shea. It's about the first thousand years of Muslim--Christian interaction in the Mediterranean. It's interesting because of its broad view, but on the other hand quite a few of the episodes, e.g. the fall of Constantinople, are already pretty familiar. I was interested to learn about Muslim Spain, and also it had never struck me before quite how meteoric the spread of Islamic power was -- only about a hundred years after Muslim armies first emerged as a threat to Byzantine power in the east, they were fighting Charles Martel at Poitiers. The author occasionally says stupid things, but mostly he writes well. I also read Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, which is just utterly remarkable. He was an incredible author, not just because of how he wrote, but what he wrote about.

But one evening, when there was nothing on television and I didn't feel like working, I decided to relax by reading more low-brow books, and got through the first two volumes of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. (This is why I have no savings.) These books are actually very good. A bit like Suzanne Clarke in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Novik places a characteristic of fantasy, in this case dragons rather than magic, into real Napoleonic-era history. It works well, and at the end of the second book appears to be going off somewhere thought-provoking. The third is out in paperback soon so I'll get it then. All the writing at the moment which is really interesting is Sci-Fi or Fantasy-type stuff. That old genre, Secrets of the Past are Revealed, just doesn't cut it for me like it used to. What really happened at The House at Riverton (by Kate Morton)? What is the meaning of The Savage Garden (by Mark Mills)? What was The Thirteenth Tale (by Diane Setterfield)? I've lost the ability to care. From now it's Dostoyevsky or sci-fi for me, I think.