Well 2021 is one quarter of the way gone. This month has just flown by! How’s the weather in your parts? The Rocky Mountains region, here in the US, has had it all… often on the same day. Northern Utah had frost and snow on the first day of Spring. Apparently, Mother Nature tripped over her cat and landed face down in the punch bowl, it’s all been chaos since!
So Whatcha all Readin?
My book club is reading City of Bohane by Kevin Barry. The blurb lead me to think it was going to be some kind of fantasy but so far it’s just street gangs and nearly incomprehensive accents… I am not likely to even get to Elendil’s 50 page mark before DNFing it…
The Gilded Cage by K. J. Charles in my current Kindle read. Victorian mystery and jewel thief shenanigans
Error of the Moon by Sara Woods is the third Anthony Maitland book.
I won The Sumage Solution by G. L. Carriger on audiobook when the author had a giveaway on her newsletter. So for the mumblety mumbleth time I am reading that one as well
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I’m continuing my YA kick and am reading Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson. I recently read her books Speak and Twisted and will read The Impossible Knife of Memory next. It’s been a long time since I’ve discovered a new author that I’ve enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed her works.
I recently finished The Rosie Project, as recommended by Elendil’s Heir. It was sweet and funny. Since then I’ve been picking up books and putting them down again. Hopefully I’ll have something more to contribute soon!
Doctrine and Covenants
Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home
Ender’s Game
The Fold
The first is because that’s what my wife and I are studying this year. The second because I enjoy the Rabbi Small series. The third is the novel the Year 9 students in the book club chose for this semester. And the final one is the book a friend gave me to read after he finished it.
I am starting off today in a state of disgruntlement.
I found this book, The Lion’s Paw, in the local Little Free Library. It’s a children’s book from 1946, and when I looked it up on Goodreads, it had all these reviews from people saying it was their beloved childhood book that they had been searching for, and it really held up on re-read. So that sounded pretty righteous, but this morning when I started on it, I found that my copy has pairs of unprinted pages scattered throughout. I think the universe just doesn’t want me to read anything this week.
While I’m still working through Clive Leatherdale’s heavily annotated Dracula Unearthed, my copy of Wiliam Seabrook’s Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory just came through interlibrary loan, and I’ve got to go through it and get what I nee from it before it has to go back.
If you’re not familiar with Wood, he was easily one of the most bizarre and idiosyncratic physicists the US has produced. A wizard in optics – he invented the gradient-index lens with his oddly-named Wood Lens, came up with a practical ultraviolet-transmitting filter (and applied it light sources, thereby becoming the true inventor of the Black Light), photographed sound waves, built the first liquid mirror and used it in an astronomical telescope, exposed pseudoscience on many occasions (most notably exposing “N-rays”), and literally wrote the book on Physical Optics (1905, and frequently reprinted to this day). He also wrote two books of humorous poetry, co-authored a science fiction novel, supposedly invented the “chinface” illusion (although I haven’t been able to verify this yet – Chinface - Wikipedia ), and, on at least one occasion, ostentatiously spat into a puddle while surreptitiously dropping sodium into it, causing a minor explosion.
Wood made Richard Feynmann look normal and restrained, by comparison.
@DZedNConfused : Funny, Amazon says the hardcover version isn’t out until October! I was planning to get my library to buy it but I don’t know they’d want a paperback.
I’ll wait awhile until you tell me how wonderful it is and then I’ll probably just buy it for Kindle.
Having really enjoyed the recent Netflix miniseries based on it, I’m still reading Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit, about a troubled Kentucky orphan girl and chess prodigy who rises to become an international sensation in the Sixties. I’m about three-quarters of the way through it, and it’s really good.
I’m also reading John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It’s not wowing me, but it’s okay, and I’ll keep going.
At the recommendation of another member I have picked up a copy of Fatherland by Robert Harris. An alternate history book in a timeline where the Nazis won the war.
I have also started a travelling adventure book by a British author named Levison Wood. The book is called Eastern Horizons: Hitchhiking the Silk Road about his time as a 22 year old going on a journey from home in England to India through the plains of Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s very well written and I’m glad I picked this up. It’s one of the few occasions were the design cover drew me in because I don’t think I’ve ever read this kind of travel genre before.
Finished the first; I recommend it (and you don’t have to be a chess junkie to enjoy it). The miniseries was largely true to it, but with some notable differences.
On the homestretch of the le Carre. No change in my opinion.
Next up: The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O’Brian, the next in his terrific series of Napoleonic naval adventures.
Finished Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, by George Eliot. Excellent. An early-19th-century soap opera-ish tale set in the small English town of Middlemarch. Mostly late 1820s and early 1830s, but at the end it shows what eventually becomes of many of the main characters. I have a fondness for 19th-century novels. Probably I would have enjoyed living in that century but would not have lasted long, for sure dying of appendicitis or some other ailment that modern science cured me of early on in my 20th-century life.
Next up is more 19th-century goodness: Emma, my first Jane Austen.
