I’m curious to see if your reaction matches mine (link goes to spoilery review).
Finished Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The trials and tribulations of a group people all connected by a decades-long legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed many real-life precedents for this fictional case. One I’ve heard of was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was tied up in court for 62 years. !!! The novel helped spark a judicial reform movement that culminated in real legal reforms in the 1870s. A very good book.
I am now reading The Confession, by John Grisham.
I like Dickens in general, but I really enjoyed Bleak House. I’ll probably have to reread it at some point.
I always enjoy the level of snark and sheer pissiness your reviews hold. This was no different.
Thank you, kind person. I’m glad some good comes out of these crap books.
Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, an unauthorized bio by Michael Shelden, is pretty interesting. I knew a bit about Greene’s work for MI6, the British Secret Service, during WWII, but not the details. I also hadn’t known that he did occasional work for MI6 as late as the 1980s. Shelden draws some interesting parallels between the plot of The Third Man, one of my favorite Cold War movies, which Greene wrote, and Greene’s work with Kim Philby, a friend and MI6 colleague eventually revealed to be a Soviet mole (Greene was, after an internal investigation, cleared of suspicion).
I finished Heinlein’s Time for the Stars and enjoyed it all over again. I also noticed an ambiguous bit of dialogue in one of the final scenes which could be interpreted to mean the protagonist’s voyage among the stars was either (a) good clean fun, or (b) a tragic waste of time, blood and treasure. Don’t know why I never picked up on that before. Clever of Heinlein.
Now thinking through what my next audiobook will be.
Finished Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading Murder Before Evensong, by the Reverend Richard Coles.
I finished Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue last night. I enjoyed, in spite of the lack of quotation marks, but I felt the “love” story was pretty shoehorned in and the ending rushed. She did a great job on the characters and making them feel real.
Don’t know if this is the right place to ask this question, but I’ll go for it anyway.
Is anybody else having issues with the Libby app today? Both the website and the app are insisting on verifying my library cards, then it says that they can’t contact the library server because of high demand. It started for me about six hours ago and hasn’t yet been rectified.
Anybody else seeing this behavior today?
Not today, but I did have to verify my library card a few weeks- maybe a month- ago. Since I no longer have a physical card, it took me a couple days to locate the text document with my info on it.
Just checked and mine seems to be working.
Murder Before Evensong, by the Reverend Richard Coles, which I enjoyed. It’s a solid example of a British cozy mystery.
Now I’m reading The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro.
Three-Inch Teeth by C.J. Box. The latest in a series about Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, who always manages to find himself in the middle of a complex murder investigation, when he’s only trying to do his job and feed his family.
Operation Chastise: The RAF’s Most Brilliant Attack of World War II Max Hastings
The history behind the Dam Busters. Early in World War 2, the British determined to attack dams in the industrial areas of Nazi Germany. An engineer came up with the seemingly absurd idea of dropping a round bomb from a plane low over the water, where it would skip along like a stone until coming to rest at the base of the dam and then detonating. Surprisingly enough, this actually worked. Although a technical success, the impact of the attack on the larger war effort was modest. And the resulting flood killed more than a thousand people, mostly civilians and prisoners.
Fascinating, well-written history
I’m finishing up How to Suffer Outside by Diana Helmuth on the theory and practice and joys of backpacking , and The Joy of pi by David Blatner (which would a great little book o pi, had he not subscribed the the Cosmopolitan practice of writing everything in needlessly tiny script on a bad color choice for the background.
Yesterday, while waiting for the eclipse in St. Johnsbury Vermont I picked up the most amazing book, which I hadn’t heard of before:
Doers it Fart? The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence by Dani Rabaiotti and Nick Caruso, a book which answers your burning desire to answer this question, which some surprising results. The answer it most “yesy”, but
Parrots? No
Potuguese Man of War No
Termites Yes
Dinosaurs? Not any more
There’s apparently a sequel. You NEED to get this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Does-Fart-Definitive-Animal-Flatulence/dp/0316484156
Heh. Definitely headed for the Pulitzer shortlist.
I haven’t had any problems with Libby other than recently maxing out the number of audiobooks I can have on hold. Never had that happen to me before!
On the other hand, over the weekend Libby returned Hernan Diaz’s Depression-era novel Trust to me sooner than predicted, which is nice. I’ve now resumed listening to the book, and have less than two hours to go.
Libby seems to be behaving for me since its weekend tantrum. Although I totally fat fingered the PIN on one of my cards and now need to visit my local library to have it reset.
I just finished The Haunting of Velkwood, by Gwendolyn Kiste. It’s about a haunted neighborhood, kind of like if you could go back to the Poltergeist house after the movie ended and things were still happening there. Really good and weird, I’ll have to check out this author’s other books.
Just finished Maynard’s House by the late great Herman Raucher. A Vietnam vet moves into a haunted house in the Maine woods. Beautifully written and even funny. I didn’t give it five stars because it ended with some ambiguity and I really wanted answers!
Just finished The Bad Ones, by Melissa Albert. A YA novel about a children’s game and its connection to the disappearance of various townspeople.
Finished The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro, which was interesting. Recommended for anyone interested in Shakespeare or British history.
Now I’m reading The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene. In the introduction, he says he wrote it in the 1940’s as a story treatment for an MGM movie. Then he and everyone else forgot about it until somebody found it in a drawer at the studio in 1983.