I hadn't read Les Miserables in a long time, and I really enjoyed rereading it. There's so much more to learn about a lot of the characters (a bit of Fantine's courtship with the man who abandoned her, Marius's turn toward revolution, a page and a half digression on cannon design during the assault on the barricade). Plus, this description of Javert:

He, Javert personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil. He was surrounded and supported by infinite depths of authority, reason, precedent, legal conscience, the vengeance of the law, all the stars in the firmament; he protected order, he hurled forth the thunder of the law, he avenged society, he lent aid to the absolute; he stood erect in a halo of glory; there was in his victory a reminder of defiance and of combat; standing haughty resplendent he displayed in full glory the superhuman beastliness of a ferocious archangel; the fearful shadow of the deed which he was accomplishing, making visible in his clenched fist the uncertain flashes of the social sword; happy and indignant, he had set his heel on crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, and hell, he was radiant, exterminating, smiling; there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous St. Michael.

I just powered through the first five books of the Temeraire series; if you like proper British gentlemen, the Napoleonic wars, civil rights struggles, and also dragons, they are pretty great.

Part of the back of my mind thinks of Temeraire as a budding FAI; incredibly powerful, and with a fairly different set of preferences from most of society, and ends up making some big changes as a result. He doesn't undergo self-enhancement and spiral out of control but there's a very strong Sense That More is Possible, and the struggle to do the right thing as the Only Sane Man is basically the whole plot.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is perhaps the Great Latin American Novel of our generation. It's a sprawling unity of five distinct sub-novels, each revolving around different characters but with some intersections between them. One part, for example, follows the lives of several European literary theorists devoted to the study of a reclusive German writer invented by Bolaño, while a different part, coming much later, is a biography of that writer. Despite the fact that the plots of these sub-novels weave through many places and times - Europe, the US, Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia - they are all connected in one way or another to a fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa, lying close to the border with the US, itself modelled closely on the real Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. Santa Teresa, as Ciudad Juarez in real life, has seen something like an epidemic of feminine rapes/murders over the last 20 years, which may or may not have been the work of unknown serial killer(s). Much of 2666 is devoted to painstaking description of many of these murders, their victims, and the ineptitude and corruption of local police. Those parts are not easy reading, but neither are they suffering porn.

This is a brilliant book, wide-ranging, psychologically precise, often funny, at times painful to read. If you're mainly reading for hedons, you would probably not like it. My mind has been enriched through reading it, and I highly recommend it.

In descending order (reviews on Goodreads):

• Brin, Existence
• Kipling's Kim
• Musa Pedestris