The department notes, without judgement, that the institution is reviving old habits with regard to acquiring texts more quickly than it reads them.

Zindell’s The Remembrancer’s Tale: the Requiem for Homo Sapiens sequence had a profound and formative effect on the institution, despite its being discovered almost a decade after its initial publication. (Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, its concerns make it seem prescient of the present in many ways, particularly with regard to questions of epistemology and truth, and the seductive power of information technologies.) Capping-off works delivered many decades after the original do not have a great track record, and so this accession comes freighted with the understanding that the encounter may prove bitter-sweet, as well as the enduring hope that it does not.

Harkaway’s Titanium Noir: the institution has not been a completist when it comes to Harkaway, but has enjoyed the majority of his works that it has encountered. This one looks uncharacteristically slim, but the plot summary on the back cover suggests that there is already a Harkawayean template, or at least a collection of favoured tropes, that transcends the momentary constraints of the genre of any given title. This actually enhances the appeal: the institution has lately become very interested in the accretive nature of bodies of work with regard to style and tropes.

Bonus borrowings!

The institution is still woefully inadequate in the local language, despite nearly four years in situ, and thus directed the department to acquire some reading material which might actually encourage sustained engagement with Swedish text (in a manner that, say, local newspapers have heretofore failed to deliver). Hence the arrival of some of Mankell’s Wallander novels in their original language; these are set in Skåne, so there should be some added value in seeing the stories play out in locations with which the institution is at least passing familiar.