Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - August 2021 edition

Cafe Society
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So lucky me, my July ended with my computer crashing… On the upside my August will start with a brand spankin new computer!
So the Western US is still on fire, but here in Northern Utah we had our first rain in two months… aaaaaaaaand I hear you Australians laughing :laughing:

I recently finished: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The story of two fair skinned black girls who decide to leave their small town. The girls take very different paths in life, one becomes white and the other returns home. It was engaging, sad, funny in places and I liked it a lot.

I restarted Artificial Condition the second Murderbot story by Martha Wells. I had been listening in snippets and realized I really wasn’t certain what was going on.

I am also reading The Dark Tide by Josh Lanyon, her 5th Adrien English book. It’s very good, the mystery is interesting and she’s handling the relationship issues without wallowing in them.

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.

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Last month: Is summer over yet?

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The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth.

I think this is part of the backstory of a video game I know nothing about. But I have to say the writing is superior to that a typical video game novel. (It’s harder to enjoy such a novel if you aren’t familiar with the game.)

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Congrats on the new 'puter, @DZedNConfused!

I’ve finally gotten the opportunity to start on the book I won from Goodreads, The Night the Lights Went Out: a memoir of life after brain damage, by Drew Magary. I’m a big fan of Drew’s, so I’ve been looking forward to this, but it’s kind of a slog at the moment. He wrote the first couple of chapters, but now the story’s being told by his friends and family of what they experienced while he was in the coma. I would really rather skip all that and hear from him personally what happened afterward.

And then on Tuesday, the new one from Stephen King comes out! Also, I have many things from the library, some due right NOW, so… I really might have to take a day off work to catch up. I have priorities.

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THANKS @Dung_Beetle !

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Oops, I’ve not posted in awhile, so I have some backlog here.

I finished reading The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate to my third-grader. It’s the third or fourth time I’ve read it, and sadly it’ll probably be the last. On one level, it’s great, a middle-grade story of a girl living in Texas in 1899 and her relationship with her granddad the amateur naturalist. It has a great dry wit. But this read-through, the strong focus on the wealthy white kid, living on a plantation that once housed slaves (with her granddad implied to have been the enslaver) with Black people in the background as servants, and with none of that addressed in any way–it just didn’t sit right with me at all.

The Witness for the Dead, Katherine “Goblin Emperor” Addison’s latest book, was quite fun. Set in the same empire as her previous book but starring a bit player from the first, it’s a stand-alone story about a quiet man who can hear the voices of the dead, sort of. A murder mystery at heart, quiet and thoughtful. Also, the names are all like Zenzobar and Barzenzo and Zenbaro and Obarzen, and jobs like “cop” have made-up words for them, and come on, Katherine, don’t make this harder than it needs to be.

A few weeks ago I read the Empress of Salt and Fortune and loved it, so when I saw Nghi Vo had a new novella, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, I snagged it–and am glad I did. Set in a mythical east Asia, an historian and her guide are waylaid by weretigers, and they tell a story to save their lives. It’s really delightful, and a very short read. Highly recommended.

Paladin of Souls is the second Lois McMaster Bujold novel I’ve read, and thank you, folks who recommended her to me! Just like The Curse of Chalion, it was a tightly-constructed story whose magic absolutely served the characters and plot. I will definitely read more by her.

Afterland has echoes of Children of Men. A flu-like disease triggers an untreatable, fatal prostate cancer in nearly everyone with a prostate, and five years later there are almost no biological male humans left. The story follows the mom of one of the few surviving boys as she and he are chased cross-country. It had some interesting ideas, and it passed the time just fine, but honestly I never really cared about any of the characters, either to love the protagonists or hate the villains. It’d be a good beach read, but don’t hope for much more.

But my favorites are a pair that I didn’t even pick up at first, my wife saw one at the library and thought I’d like it: The Bone Ships and Call of the Bone Ships. They have a bit of Robin Hobb in them, inasmuch as they’re nautical fantasy with dragons, but I adored the main character and his relationship to his captain and his weird-ass birdman who can squawk up a storm. It took me a bit to get into the writing style, which is a bit florid; but once I caught the rhythm, it really, really worked for me. The third and final book comes out in September, and I’m stoked. Highly recommended.

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Just downloaded Defending Jacob, by William Landay. It was published in 2012, and it got some good reviews. Looking forward to reading it.

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Just finished the latest of Eric Ugland’s Good Guys series, Wild Wild Quest. It’s a fun fast read.

Next up is A. C. Cobble’s The Ranger’s Sorrow.

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Still on The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, by Dan Jones, as well as the graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale, by Art Spiegelman (“Volume I: My Father Bleeds History”). I had to set aside reading for a few days while I recovered from eye surgery.

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Finished Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, by Andreas Wagner. It’s hard for me to be fair to this book, because much of it was information that I had already read elsewhere, and what I didn’t know was took technical for me.

Now I’m reading Sidetracked, by Diana Harmon Asher.

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Finished a good thriller written by Ruth Ware titled The Turn of the Key. It’s not too long and quite a slow-burner but I like the style of writing where the protagonist is recounting the story after it already happened. For it is a last ditch attempt to prove she was wrongly jailed for murder. And in recounting the story in a letter to a lawyer, we as the reader, get to experience the story as it happened but with her recollections showing the traces of desperation, mistakes and regret the character now knows ultimately led her to where she is.

I’m now aiming to finish Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy for this month.

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Finished Sidetracked , by Diana Harmon Asher, a middle grade novel. Not bad.

Now I’m reading Vivid Tomorrows: On Science Fiction and Hollywood, by David Brin.

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Still re-reading Jules Verne’s The Floating Island – I like to read one Verne every summer. This time I’m reading it with the map the first edition included, so I can follow along.

as bedside reading, I’'m re-reading James Loewen’s Sundown Towns. A very important book, and it ties into research I’m doing.

On audio I finished Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and am now reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything

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I recently finished Riley Sager’s thriller Lock Every Door, about a troubled young woman with no money who accepts a too-good-to-be-true apartment-sitting gig in a venerable, posh but creepy Manhattan apartment building. The book had its moments but bogged down now and then, and was a bit too farfetched. I give the author credit, though: at one point towards the end I thought I knew exactly where he was going with it, and he faked me out. Good ending, too. Just about any New Yorker, or person who loves New York City, would enjoy it, I think.

After very intermittent reading over the past three years or so, I’ve also finished Inside Lincoln’s White House, ed. by Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger. It’s drawn from the journals of John Hay, one of Lincoln’s young aides, who was smart and snarky and highly observant. Very interesting although, at times, frustratingly cryptic (sometimes Hay only wrote down the punchlines of good jokes that he’d heard, or alluded to long conversations with the President and others that I would love to have learned more about).

Still digging John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades, the second in his Old Man’s War series, very good military sf about fighting hostile aliens out among the stars, trying to secure habitable worlds for humanity to colonize.

I’m also about three-quarters of the way through Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, a what-if fantasy about a suicidal young woman who gets the chance to experience alternative lives she might have lived. At one time or another she’s a rock superstar, a glaciologist, a dog-walker and a Cambridge philosophy professor, among other things. It’s pretty good, although sometimes she just seems willfully stupid in the various situations in which she finds herself, and I have to roll my eyes a bit.

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I felt the same way about Lock Every Door. I was with it right up until the end and then got a boatload of “Are you kidding me?” dropped on me at the last minute.

As for me, I recently finished The Hours which means that I had to check out Mrs Dalloway at my last library trip. This happened the first time I read TH years ago, but now I have the maturity to appreciate MD more than I did as a twenty-year-old.

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Finished The Night the Lights Went Out, and wrote a weakly appreciative review for Goodreads, but truthfully it was very dull. It’ll be bound for the Little Free Library one of these days.

Started today on Stephen King’s newest, Billy Summers. Ahhhh…like slipping into a warm bath.

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The Earth Beneath Their Feet: The British, the Americans, the Nazis and the Mountaineering Race to Conquer the Himalayas Scott Ellsworth

The struggle of American, British, and German mountaineers to conquer the high peaks of the Himalayas in the 1930s and 1950s.

Entertaining history, full of colorful characters and extraordinary exploits.

Hat tip to boycott who mentioned it in an earlier thread.

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Glad to hear you liked it!

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Finished Vivid Tomorrows: On Science Fiction and Hollywood , by David Brin. Excellent. My favorite essay was about 300.

Now I’m reading The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan’s Cherry Blossoms, by Naoko Abe.

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Finished Billy Summers. As always, I’m pleased to read whatever Stephen King writes. I was fortunate enough to be able to read this one almost all at once, but I think it would have held my interest regardless. There was a story within the story that was even better than the primary tale. However, there were a lot of things in this one that rubbed me the wrong way, and for that reason I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. If I may elaborate right now while it’s all bouncing around in my head:

  1. The title character is a Mary Sue, a good guy with a gun who is always a step ahead of the game. Successful with the ladies too.

  2. Intellectual snobbery. I know Mr. King, I mean Summers, is a smart guy. I was getting uncomfortable with how Summers was always dumbing himself down for everyone.

  3. Speaking of uncomfortable, there’s an icky scene that to me rivaled the problematic one in IT.

  4. I agree with Mr. King politically, but I cringed every time Trump was mentioned. It would have been better to just leave that stuff out.

  5. What was a nice Easter Egg for fans of The Shining was referenced until it didn’t shine no more.

Okay, think I’m done. I’m sorry for the nitpicking, Steve, thanks for writing it, and I promise to buy the next one. Love you!