Much sympathy to those who are ailing in various ways: @EineReiseDurchDieZeit, @Owlbookend and @NotWavingButReading 💐
@VikingNorthUtsire this comment is quite late (sorry!), but I loved your review of Dream Hotel, which was also a bold for me. Like you I read it more as a human story than as sci fi; the dream parts were not as interesting to me as the rest. I thought it was a powerful indictment of all the people who are being arbitrarily detained (and/or deported) in the US at the moment, and of the ways that profit-making companies (like Serco in the UK and so on) exploit prisoners and asylum seekers. It was very similar to The Handmaid's Tale in that the dystopia depicted is more like actual historical reality than like fiction.
I also agree entirely with your review of Wild Dark Shore; I thought it was going to be a bold for me, because it was just so good, and then the last section went all crazy thriller. WTF!
@Piggywaspushed, another very late comment about your review of The Correspondent: you said, I do wonder if Americans actually have a different English usage that I can always spot and hear? I'm sure that's true. As someone who grew up in the US, American novels just hit me in a different way from other novels written in English (not always a better way, but a different way!). When I read Elizabeth Strout for example, I can 'hear' Americans from my past speaking, and I'm sure that's part of why I find her books so moving. I think this is happening partly on a conscious level, partly on an unconscious one.
I also failed to contribute to the whole discussion initiated by @MamaNewtNewt about reading authors who are repellent in some way in real life; it was a fascinating discussion.
Like others, I thought of Alice Munro straight away. I loved her short stories but I have no desire to read her any longer after the revelations about child abuse. I just feel quite viscerally put off (to borrow the term you used about Laurie Lee, @Terpsichore).
I thought We Need to Talk about Kevin raised some interesting issues (for instance, how the mother recognised dark elements of herself in her sociopathic child), but on the whole, it seemed to me an unsubtle book. Then I read some of Shriver's political statements and decided I was done with her. She was pro-Brexit and also vociferously anti-immigrant. These issues are ones that I personally care deeply about. Her anti-immigration stance seemed utterly hypocritical to me, because she herself immigrated from the US to the UK... but I guess that was OK, because she was the Right Kind of immigrant, with the right socio-economic class and the right language and the right skin colour. Last I heard, she decided that Britain's culture has been ruined by immigrants, so she's moved to Portugal instead. Good riddance, Lionel. I hadn't realised that she's also sceptical of people being diagnosed with neurodivergence, but I'm heartily unsurprised. The woman is a misanthrope. End rant.
I was also thinking of some famous French writers, like Celine, who were fascists. Perhaps that's not a reason not to read them, but I would say you have to take the fascist views into account when interpreting their work. Hannah Arendt famously read Mein Kampf in order to dissect and critique it.
Perhaps most troubling to me currently is the fact that a lot of 20th c. French intellectuals I admire, including Foucault and Beauvoir and Sartre, signed petitions trying to decriminalise sex with minors. Very disturbing. I'm not going to boycott their works because of this, but I think it's important to be aware of this huge blind spot on their parts.
I don't want to be dismissive or glib, but I'm reasonably sure that future generations will look back at us and see enormous blind spots in our thinking as well.