Just finished Diavola, by Jennifer Thorne. A novel about a haunted Italian villa, it started off well, but then went on much too long and too far off the rails.
Finished it. Meh. Don’t see why it won a Pulitzer; it’s not nearly as good as Tea Obreht’s remarkable novel Inland, the best book I’ve read so far this year.
Having recently watched the terrific 1946 Bogie and Bacall detective movie The Big Sleep, I’m now reading Raymond Chandler’s original 1939 novel. Pretty good so far; I’ve only noticed a few relatively minor differences between the two.
Last month I read all eleven Flavia Albia novels, by Lindsey Davis, and started rereading the twenty Marcus Didius Falco books that precede them. (Albia is Falco’s adopted daughter.) Just finished the eighth book, and will resume rereading after I finish Voices of Rome, a collection of four short stories that star minor characters from the Falco and Albia books.
Finished The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene, which was well done.
Next up: Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells.
I finished the book last night and read your review this morning–and yep, that’s exactly my takeaway. I basically enjoyed the plot of the book, but the flashbacks made it nearly unreadable, simultaneously WAY too much review of the previous trilogy, and too scattered through the first half of the book to be useful.
It’s far and away the most disappointed I’ve been in a VE Schwab novel. Usually she’s a firm resident of my “good fun but not great literature” shelf, alongside John Scalzi and Rebecca Roanhorse and a bunch of other folks. But the flashbacks, the goddamn flashbacks. Edit two hundred pages out of this book, insert a two-page “What you need to know” preface or appendix, and the novel’s like ten times better.
Oh well.
Finished listening to Three Inch Teeth by C.J. Box. A better read than the last few by this author in the series. Almost believable, unlike the several preceding novels.
I picked up Inland by Tea Obreht, largely on the recommendation of @Elendil_s_Heir in last month’s thread. A sort-of Western involving the US Camel Corps of the later 1800s on the one hand and the travails of an Arizona homesteading woman on the other. The first story involves Lurie, an immigrant from southeastern Europe (referred to on a Wanted poster as “a hirsute Levantine”) who steals, kills, and eventually wanders all around the West with his camel companion, Burke. Lurie has an affinity for the dead and their wants, and his story takes place over an entire lifetime. The second, interlaced with the first, focuses on Nora and takes place in one day (though with lots of flashbacks); Nora’s husband has vanished, as have her two older sons, and she is trying to keep the rest of the family running on essentially no water while wading through personal guilt and political issues. Oh, and she has conversations with her dead daughter while outwardly disparaging the supernatural.
I liked it. One of those books where I was kind of sad that it ended. The sense of place is extremely strong–I kept feeling thirsty during the Nora scenes–and the background of the Camel Corps is fun; I knew something about it before reading this book, but now I know more. The characters are well drawn, particularly Nora, and their connections seem realistic. The inevitable connection between the two stories works well. I did find the story unbalanced, in that I found myself much more interested in the Nora parts than in the Lurie-and-Burke parts. Also, Obreht likes adjectives, loves adjectives in fact, so much that I found it to be a distraction. Obviously, YMMV.
But overall, an excellent (there’s an adjective for ya!) novel.
Finished The Confession, by John Grisham. Three days before a black man is to be executed in Texas for the kidnap, rape and murder of a white high-school cheerleader, a man with a lengthy arrest record for sex crimes walks into a Lutheran minister’s office in Kansas and confesses to the crime and says the body is actually buried in Missouri, where he killed her after taking her there. The death-row inmate was a football player at the cheerleader’s school, and while the body was never found, small-town detectives bullied a confession out of him, which he later recanted. Can the minister and the real perp – or is he? – make it to Texas in time to stop the execution? Very good. it came out in 2010, and I was pretty sure I had not read it before but began having doubts as some parts started feeling familiar. I finally decided I had not read it before but that Grisham may have repeated certain plot devices in some other books.
Have started reading another Grisham, The Boys from Biloxi, his latest.
Glad you liked it, UtU! Still the best novel I’ve read this year. My book club will be reading it for our May 31 meeting, on my recommendation.
Finished Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, which was powerful.
Now I’m reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.
I finished *Onmyoji and Tengu Eyes Vol. 1: The Spirit Hunters of Tomoe * Yoshiko Utamine. The book is a light novel from Japan. I think this is the first thing this author had ever written and it was originally published online. The book is not well written, whether that is the fault of the writer or the translator, I do not know, but the early sections are very amateurish in style. The last two sections are more polished and far more readable. The pacing is all over the place, the story line episodic and there’s very little actual action. I was firmly with Ryouji when he yelled, after all the build up to the conflict, “IS THAT ALL?” Really…
That said, the characters are well drawn, interesting and I’m looking forward to more of Misato’s co-workers. The world building was excellent particularly the atmosphere of dread, the build up to the conflict with the inugami was well executed, even though the overall event fell incredibly flat.
Alexandria: The City that Changed the World Islam Issa
A comprehensive history of Egypt’s second city, from Alexander the Great to the Arab Spring.
Enjoyable book, full of interesting history
Finished it; good stuff. I can see why it’s still such a classic hardboiled-detective novel. The conclusion is much different from the movie’s, BTW.
I’m now engrossed by Redeployment, Phil Klay’s 2014 collection of short stories about US Marines serving in Iraq during the worst days of the insurgency. Very powerful stuff. Klay, a Marine public affairs officer deployed there, is quite a talented writer.
Finished Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, which is very good. I’m planning on reading more books in this series.
Now I’m reading Bizarre London: Discover the Capital’s Secrets & Surprises, by David Long.
Finished Bizarre London: Discover the Capital’s Secrets & Surprises, by David Long, which was interesting.
Now I’m reading Zorro: The Daring Escapades, edited by Audrey Parente and Daryl McCullough.
My book club is reading The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. LeGuin. I read it -back in the early 80s- so this is partly new and partly remembered bits.
Also reading on Kindle Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles. SHe is venturing into whoodunnits and so far the magic is holding.
I read None of This Is True by a writer named Lisa Jewell. Two women discover that they are “birthday twins”–born the same day and in the same hospital. When Josie Fair discovers that Alix Summer, her “twin,” is an interviewer and podcaster with an emphasis on highlighting successful women, she begs to be interviewed as an example of a perfectly ordinary woman. Alix agrees, and the two form a connection. Josie turns out to be not quite so ordinary as all that, and pushes her way into Alix’s life in a way that Alix doesn’t know how to handle. The title refers to the way in which both women tell lies to themselves and to each other, though to be fair (ha!) most of the lies are on one side. As the plot thickens other people start dying, and determining the truth becomes of the utmost importance.
It was all right. It’s reasonably well written and the plotting and pacing is pretty good. The problem for me was the characters, who never really come together in a way that makes sense–their motivations are murky throughout the book. That’s particularly true of the two men, Josie’s husband Walter and Alix’s husband Nathan, whose characterizations I thought left a good deal to be desired. As one example, at the end of the novel we’re given a reason (childhood trauma) for some of Nathan’s issues, and it’s too little, too late. Not bad, but could’ve been better.
I’m now well into Eric Flint’s 1632. I’d never gotten around to reading it, and wanted to start with the first one. I stumbled across a copy of it at Boskone. Much better than I’d anticipated. Apparently Flint either wrote or co-wrote some 33 sequels (!!), and died about two years ago.
On audio I’ve just finished re-reading Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel. I read this quite a long time ago – about a half a century ago – and I’m not sure if I re-read it since then. Certainly I remember quite a bit of it, but there are bits I hadn’t. The audiobook is read by William Dufris, who does a good job of giving different speech patterns to the various characters, although is bothers me that his Dr. Fastolfe sounds a lot like science/science fiction writer Jeff Hecht.
Some things bothered me even when I first read it (and when it was a mere twenty years old) – the culture on Earth seemed to be only a few decades removed, at most, from when it was written. Of course, any writer trying to depict the future labors under that kind of handicap, but Lije Baley’s society is too closely linked to post-WWII culture to be believable as one supposed to be a thousand years in the future. They still sing songs to the tune of “Mademoiselle from Armentires”, for cryin’ out loud. They still refer to “atomic piles”, terminology dying out when it was written.
Of course, there’s a lot Asimov couldn’t have poredicted. There’s a lack of digital electronics that afflicts a lot of tSF from the 1940s and 1950s. It seems weird for him to refer to Human-Robot culture as “C/Fe”, when not long afterwards they would be referring to robot intelligence as a Silicon-based thing, so it would be “C/Si”. He seems too enamored of the wonders of non-stick fluorocarbon polymers for our modern society, aware of the problems of PFAS. They still use photographic plates instead of digital imaging.
And there’s that odd obsession with moving sidewalk strips as a major means of transportation, even between cities. Heinlein used it, too (“The Roads must Roll”) Even fifty years ago that struck me as an inefficient means of moving people and things around – you have to perpetually use a huge amount of energy to keep those strips moving at high speed, even if there’s not much on them.
Some things ring true. The commissioner’s archaic use of glass eyeglasses I can believe. Until they finally closed the American Optical factory in Massachusetts in 2005, they were still churning out one product in bulk using the same technology they had for decade – “Glass Executives” – glass eyeglasses in black frames. It was a little weird for Asimov to still be writing about glass contact lenses – even if he didn’t foresee modern hydrophilic plastic lenses, you’d think he’d have realized that plastic contacts would take over.
There’s more characterization than I recalled, and it hangs together pretty well. Although parts of the book can still makes me cringe, on the whole it still stands up.
Next up – Jack de Brul’s The Sea Wolves, continuing the adventures of Clive Cussler’s Isaac Bell. As I’ve said, Cussler’s one of my guilty pleasures.
Are you sure it’s a thousand years in the future? I’ve always thought it was more like 200, 300 years.
I recall that it was more like 2000 years, although it’s been a while since I read it. Either way, @CalMeacham’s observation about the stasis of culture in the book is correct. But sci-fi is often that way.