Spring in the Rocky Mountains… and finally breathable air! (Northern Utah is so nasty in the winter, keep your inhaler close) My daffodils are blooming and with today’s rain everything should be green again.
So Whatcha all readin?
In print: Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie, the 6th Duncan Kincaid & Gemma Jones book. So far it’s pretty good.
Kindle: The Stroke of Midnight by Parker St. John. This is a side story to her Cabrini Law Clinic series, which I love a lot.
Audio: Good Behaviour by Molly Keane. This was written early in the last century but not published until 1981, it’s very stiff upper lip British; I suspect if you’re a Evelyn Waugh fan, you’d like it. I don’t dislike it, I’m just not wowed by it.
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 put this in the March thread this morning, but I’ll put it here too.
Yesterday I finished Best Horror of the Year, volume 13. Out of 25 stories, I really liked only two of them “It Doesn’t Feel Right” (Michael Marshall Smith) and “A Treat For Your Last Day” (Simon Bestwick). However, a high percentage of the remaining stories were decent, and only a few were dreck.
Today, I’m going back to novels with Simone St. James’ The Book of Cold Cases . It’s about a true-crime blogger interviewing an acquitted murderess who lives in a possibly haunted house. (And since this is Simone St. James, yes, the house is actually haunted. Good.)
The Doctor, as portrayed by Jon Pertwee in the early 1970s, along with Jo Grant and the team from UNIT, investigate some mysterious events at oil platforms in the North Sea. Is there a connection to the Master, currently imprisoned nearby?
Not a novelization of a show, but very consistent with the pace and feel of the old TV series. Good escapist fun.
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick, set a few hundred years in the future about a scheme to terraform Pluto. Her style reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson a bit.
I’m about 1/3rd of the way through and enjoying it a lot.
Finished Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Return of the Pharaoh and wasn’t very satisfied. I liked The Seven per Cent Solution and The West End Horror, but didn’t care for his later The Canary Trainer. I haven’t read The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, and now I’m not sure I want to.
I’m a big fan of Holmes pastiches, although I recognize that most of them aren’t even close to capturing Arthur Conan Doyle’s style, and most don’t even try. (A rare exception was the collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, written by Doyle’s son, Adrian, and classic mystery writer John Dickson Carr. Half the stories are by Carr alone, and I suspect her wrote 90% of the others. Those stories felt as if the elder Doyle really did write them.) I could overlook Meyer’s quasi-Doyle writing, but the characters seem to stray farther from the originals here, and there are too many anachronistic and non-Holmesian phrases and thoughts. And the mystery wasn’t that good.
Now I’m reading L. Sprague de Camp’s autobiography Time and Changes, and enjoying it more. I didn’t even realize that de Camp had written an autobiography until two months ago. It’s got a great cover painting by Frank Kelly Freas, who did all those pulp sf/fantasy covers for magazines de Camp’s work appeared in (not to mention some great stuff for Mad). The book was published in 1995, five years before de Camp’s death (and ten years before Freas’). The book won the Hugo for best non-fiction in 1997, which shows I oughta pay more attention.
On audio, I’m finishing up Stephen King’s If it Bleeds
I finished The Book of Cold Cases, and am happy to report that Simone St. James is back on her ghost story game!
Today I read about half of Cosmogramma, short sci-fi stories by Courttia Newland. It’s okay, but I’m not going to bother finishing.
CalMeacham, if I haven’t already recommended her, allow me to put in a plug for June Thomson’s pastiches. If you’d never read the best five Conan Doyle stories and just about any five of hers, with author names removed, I’d defy you to guess who wrote what. Start with The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes, a terrific collection, and go from there.
I’m now coming to the end of The Hundred Days by Patrick O’Brian, the next in his celebrated series of Napoleonic naval adventures. Capt. John “Lucky Jack” Aubrey is hoping for orders from a not-especially-friendly superior to intercept and capture a French treasure ship, while his particular friend and ship’s surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin has just returned from an informative bit of espionage in Algiers. Excellent, as are all of O’Brian’s books IMHO.
About halfway done with the 1936 Newbery Honor winner, All Sail Set by Armstrong Sperry, a YA novel about a young man who helps design and then sails from New York to China as an apprentice sailor aboard the famous clipper ship Flying Cloud . A straightforward adventure story with beautiful woodcut illustrations (reminiscent of Rockwell Kent) by the author.
Still enjoying John Scalzi’s sf novel Zoe’s Tale, about a human colony hiding from hostile aliens.
I’ve been hopping around in Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, a very interesting history book by Mark Mazower, looking up things in the index that interest me. Mazower shows just how ill-conceived, haphazard and pointless (often self-defeatingly evil, even when it didn’t “need” to be) the Third Reich’s governance could be.
I finished Good Behaviour by Molly Keane. It was… very early 20th century comedy of manners. I would have loved it as a 20 year old. I don’t regret reading it, it was an odd experience and a decent distraction. If you like Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L Sayer, Oscar Wilde, you will quite likely like this one.
My library pulled back my audiobook of O’Brian’s The Hundred Days because someone else wanted it, dammit, so I’m taking an involuntary break from that book (with less than an hour to go).
In the meantime, I’ve begun an audiobook of Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. So far it’s meh, but I’ll keep going for now.
Finished The Clutter Corpse by Simon Brett, about a professional declutterer (who actually functions more like a social worker IMO) who stumbles upon not one but two dead bodies in the course of her work. A real potato chip book, not sorry I read it. There’s apparently a sequel (the book jacket describes this as “the first of a brilliant new mystery series”) which I may see if I can find, two potato chips being better than one. Or something.
Just finished A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine. Absolutely read the first book (A Memory Called Empire) first–but if space opera with a brilliantly-realized empire based loosely on Byzantium and the Aztec Empire, coupled with meditations on selfhood, assassination attempts, and hot lesbian romance appeals, it’s a series worth checking out. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in awhile.
That said, I want to discuss what may be a ginormous plot hole. Don’t open the spoiler if you might read the book at some point:
So, the aliens in their giant wheel ships are all of a single harmonious mind, right?
And this is the first alien contact they’ve had with a species of individuals, such that it rocks their freakin’ world to realize that individuals can be people, right?
Then why is their military tech so advanced?
It seems really unlikely they fight wars amongst themselves, given their harmonious mind. And it seems unlikely they’ve fought wars against another spacefaring species, given how astonished they are at the idea of sentient individuals. Who are they fighting with, then, that they’ve developed battleship technology?
This by no means ruins the book for me, but I hope someone has an answer.
Finished Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics , by Heather Lende, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading The Last Cuentista by Donna Barbra Higuera, this year’s Newbery Prize winner. It has the distinction of the highest number of people killed in what’s called “Death by Newbery”–billions when Earth is destroyed by a comet. (I didn’t spoiler it because that information is at the beginning of the novel and on the inside front cover.)
I finished Beneath the Stairs. The ghost story parts were well done and interesting, but the romance subplot featuring the living characters was really getting on my nerves by the end. The author made sure to let us know how things were going to work out for them, when what I actually wanted to know was how things were going to work out supernaturally. I think the book would have been improved by cutting out the whole living-folks relationship (and the unnecessary sex scenes, ugh). However, overall the book was decent, and I would give the author another chance.
I just started The Spy In Moscow Station- there’s a lot of technical information and descriptions of the various ways the Russians were using microwaves to gather information. I thought it would be dull but the author keeps it brisk enough to be interesting even if you’re not technically inclined.
Still on The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance , by Ron Chernow. Will take awhile. Big, and I have limited reading time.
