Read The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, direct sequel to bonkers publishing-industry thriller The Plot and pretty much impossible to describe without ( spoilers for both books. ) Like the first one, this was entertainingly, compulsively readable in a no thoughts, head empty kind of way. Convoluted thriller aside, it's a send-up of the publishing industry and its trappings (book tours, author interviews, etc.) and cheekily meta/self-referential: early on, one character comments that sequels are never as good as the original, are they?; I didn't catch it until the note at the end explaining the joke, but all of the chapter titles are the titles of sequels to popular novels.

Finished The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi, which is not so much a puzzle-box narrative as the literary version of one of those comics where the characters reach between panels to interact with objects or whatever. (Obviously, better versions of the concept exist, but the first one that comes to mind was "luk a hat".) Across four different timelines, a disaffected Japanese college student makes different choices about his social life, but even as he always ends up bemoaning that surely the grass would've been greener if he'd made different choices, some things remain constant. ( ... )

Have started two memoirs from two women who had very different life experiences in the mid(-ish) 20th century: In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked by Jonna Mendez, a memoir of her Cold War-era career with the CIA, rising through the ranks from "contract wife" ("the agency had always counted on the accompanying spouse {of a CIA officer posted abroad} ... to fill low-level positions overseas on a contract basis") to Chief of Disguise; and I Leap Over the Wall by Monica Baldwin, a 1949 memoir by a former nun who entered the cloister in 1914 and left it in 1941, and therefore ends up reading like the memoirs of a time traveler. (The latter was originally recced by oursin, after I'd posted about more recent ex-nun memoir Cloistered, but osprey_archer beat me to actually reading it.)