Naomi Novik, Empire of Ivory
Book four of Temeraire. More of the same. Perfect! (This series cannot be described any better than EW's blurb, "This book is for anyone who's read one of Patrick O'Brian's nineteenth-century-set naval adventures and mused, You know what would make this better? Dragons.")

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

Just as his first book, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was utterly accomplished, so does his second book, a decade later, feel like a worthy mid-career work of an absolute master. Chandra dials back the multi-layered storytelling to merely overflowing, and gives us a fairly straight story of organized crime and police in Mumbai. Spoiler: just one little bit of a taste: pages 838 to 876 contain a rich and convincing complete life story, with a background of classism and racism in a town in rural India, of a character who was nameless during his brief appearance in the main story many hundreds of pages before. This little novellette was so good it would have been worth reading 837 pages of junk just to set it up. This was easily one of the best books I read this year.

Cecelia Dart-Thornton, The Lady of the Sorrows.
I have fond memories of reading "The Ill-Made Mute", by Cecilia Dart-Thornton, so I picked up its sequel. Apparently those memories are quite vague, because the only parts of the recap that rang a bell were that the protagonist had been mute and disfigured but got fixed by the end of the book. Within a few pages I was reading this:

It was difficult to sit still inside the house of the carlin, within walls, and to know that Thorn walked in Caermelor, in the Court of the King-Emperor. Now the renewed damsel was impatient to be off to the gates of the Royal City. At the least, she might join the ranks of Thorn's admirers, bringing a little self-respect with her. She might exist near him, simultaneously discharging the mission she had taken upon herself at Gilvaris Tarv: to reveal to the King-Emperor the existence of the great treasure and—it was to be hoped—to set into motion a chain of events that would lead to the downfall of those who had slain Sianadh, Liam, and the other brave men of their expedition.

And it made every bit as little sense to me as it must to you. I was reading gems like this:

The long tables, loaded with dinner service, made the High seem by comparison austere. Myriad white beeswax candles in branched candelabra reflected in fanciful epergnes of crystal or silvered basketwork, golden salvers lifted on pedestals and filled with sweetmeats or condiments, sets of silver spice-casters elaborately gadrooned, their fretted lids decorated with intricately pierced patterns, crystal cruets of herbal vinegars and oils, porcelain mustard pots with a blue underglaze motif of starfish, oval dish supports with heating-lamps underneath, mirrored plateaux and low clusters of realistic flowers and leaves made from silk.

Maybe I've been buried too deep in academic papers, but when I see prose like that I expect to see footnotes and a bibliography. By the time I hit this on page 32:

Thorn!
But no. Of course not—it was just that she had not been expected to see a tall figure wearing the subdued Dainnan uniform here in the palace suites, where braided liveries stalked alongside jeweled splendors. This man with brown hair tumbling to his shoulders was not Thorn, although he came close to him in height, and if she had not first seen Thorn, she would have thought the Commander exceedingly comely. He was older, thicker in girth, more solidly built, his arms scarred, his thighs knotted with sinew. At the temples his hair was threaded with silver. Proud of demeanor he was, and stern of brow, but dashing in the extreme.
The warrior leader's hazel eyes, which had widened slightly at the sight of the visitor, now narrowed. Somewhere in remote regions of the palace, something loose banged peevishly in the rising wind.

I think that was probably when I gave up any hope, and it was probably about 30 pages too late. Sadly, I spent many minutes that afternoon waiting for a night bus (d'oh) with only that book for company, and was driven by desperation to read as far as page 70 or so. I guess the silver lining is that, with a better book, I might have waited the full three hours until the night bus service started.