in persuasion nation

Overall okay. A couple of the stories -- the first one, the title story, and one at the end called "commcomm" -- were really good. But a lot of them just gave me the same feeling I had reading Where'd You Go Bernadette: I got that I was being joked at, but the jokes felt too obvious or heavy-handed to be funny.

mottled dawn

A collection of short - in many cases very short - stories about partition by a Pakistani writer named Saadat Hassan Manto. Unrelentingly dark, full of irony. The style reminded me frequently of Roald Dahl, and I wonder how much of that is in the original and how much is just the translation. Glad to have finally read it.

a place of greater safety

Liked it, but took me a long time to get through. It's interesting to see the seeds of the Cromwell books in the way she builds the characters and the story, almost like watching footage of LeBron as a high school basketball player. The talent is there, he's bursting at the seams, but he's unfinished, unpolished somehow.

And by god, the French Revolution was a mess.

Also, the book cements for me that one of Mantel's lifelong themes is that of men whose ambition carries them to the top of the mountain and then casts them down. Cromwell is obviously like that, but so are Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre (and the dozens of others who got guillotined during the Terror). And so is O'Brien, the giant.

The Mirror and the Light can't come soon enough.