Grendel by John Gardner gives a valuable new perspective we don't often hear--the point of view of the monster.

You are probably familiar with Beowulf. We've all read it, parts of it or seen a movie or tv show based on it. We know the basic story even when we HAVEN'T read or seen it. It is like Sherlock Holmes (to use a more recent fictional example). You know who he is even if you've never read a word of the source material.

Gardner's book is completely  the views of Grendel. In the old epics monsters were rarely given a point of view. Here he is, sometimes, eloquent (when he isn't disemboweling people or biting off their heads).  More important Gardner 's prose is mesmerizing and intricate. One character speaks with modern idiom but there is a reason for this--a reason I will let you figure out for yourself.  There are ruminations on the meaning of life, the lack of meaning, the mundane nature of evil  and the nature of time itself. This is truly the sort of book you keep thinking about after you are done. You may even pop back and re-read passages you just finished. But keep in mind here this book never "bogs down" or becomes tiresome. You want to know what is on the next page and then the one after that.

It is a short book, under 180 pages in the edition I read (pictured). You can easily finish it in a day or so, even when you backtrack here and there. John Gardner tragically died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 49 and he also wrote a number of academic books on writing as well as children's books. This book inspired me to buy a number of the academic books on writing.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron is the third of the "Slough House" books. It is a tough thing, without recounting plot, to discuss a series. These books follow the lives and drudgery of a group of discredited spies. As noted in my discussion of the previous two books they are civil servants that is is inconvenient to fire. And yes, ultimately spies for MI5 are civil servants.

So the denizens of Slough House are sent to basically count paper clips until they quit. But action seems to keep finding them and they often prove they are, at least slightly, less incompetent than it appears on the surface. Sure there are degenerate gamblers, coke heads and alcoholics (recovering and otherwise) in the group but when push comes to shove they (sometimes) answer the call.

The books seem to get better as they go on and that is high praise because the first two in the series are the sort of book you cannot put down. Sometimes you start to put them down and think; "ok, ONE more chapter." This third book is also pretty self contained. If you haven't read the first two you will still follow it but there is no reason to not start at the beginning and get to it. 

Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth are the first books from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series that were written as novels. The three previous books were written as magazine serials. They are essentially a collection of connected short stories or, perhaps novelas. They often leap from character to character with head spinning rapidity while also leaping forward through time. Nonetheless they tell a compelling story that often takes on the tone you usually find in a mystery. I often joke that the plot points come to conclusions that call to mind Columbo or even (less charitably) Scooby Doo. There is a fairly short segment where a protagonist

Characters often have much time to be developed but the story is the thing that keeps you reading. Some characters get more "page time" and you get a feel for a personality but it is really about the story and the world (well, the GALAXY) that Asimov has created. As I noted before his galaxy became a template for many writers who followed.

These two books, while maintaining some of the episodic nature of the earlier ones, are much more cohesive. Some characters wind up developing more personality than you find in the earlier installments. This is especially true because these two books are basically sequels to one another. They could, effectively, be one book since the first chapter of Foundation and Earth immediately follows  the last of Foundation's Edge.

Despite the large gap in time between Second Foundation and Foundation's Edge, the style stays more or less the same. The early books often had people doing things you'd associate with the 1950s (everyone smokes) and even reading newspapers. While people were still reading papers in the 80s the Science Fiction conventions had moves past.

You will read flippant accounts of Asimov saying he did this for a big check from his publisher. Maybe he did but he still wrote some wonderful books.