I finished The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett last week. A very good book with a host of strong female characters.
Finished Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, Monday. I do really love Murderbot and I hope to see ART make an appearance once again.
Finished The Dispatcher by John Scalzi. This was my first Scalzi book and … I liked it but it took awhile to hook me. The end however, was well paced and the characters interesting. I will read the next book soon
Finished The Amazing Mrs Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman today. Sort of cozy thriller, I described the series today “Like potato chips, not a meal but satisfying and enjoyable nevertheless.” I read all of these in my early 20s and I’m glad they are just as enjoyable 35 years later.
When I was teaching primary school, I had kids annotate their reading logs with tags indicating the relative difficulty of each book. The only one I remember was P.C., which stood for, you guessed it, Potato Chip. A book that didn’t challenge the reader and was reasonably far below his or her reading level, but was nevertheless fun and worth reading. A good descriptor, I always thought!
Just finished The Absolute Book. Very ambitious, and I’m not convinced it lived up to its ambitions. The mood was bleak throughout, and the novel was carefully, almost puzzle-box plotted. The protagonist never really moved me, and I’m still not clear what her purpose was in the story. A couple of scenes were really intense and well-crafted, and the mythology is great–but it never really came together for me.
I started Matt Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, an homage to 1920s pulp starring the real-life Black American who may have been the first human to reach the North Pole. It looked like a ton of fun–but the writing is so terrible that I couldn’t make it more than half a dozen pages. If you can groove on super-pulpy writing, like Dan Brown quality, this sure looks like a goofy fun book. I couldn’t hack it.
I’m a big Scalzi fan, and that’s not his typical book, but I liked it. Bizarre premise but he just runs with it. If you wanna read more Scalzi, I highly recommend Old Man’s War (kickass military sf, with humanity fighting aliens for habitable worlds), Redshirts (a very funny and, by the end, oddly touching meta take on Star Trek) and The Collapsing Empire (first of a trilogy about a distant-future human interstellar empire coping with looming disaster).
I finished reading Verne’s The Floating Island. This was a different translation than the one I read earlier. Propeller Island was part of the ARCO/Fitzroy series edited by I.O. Evans. Verne enthusiasts and scholar HATE those editions. They abridge things and cut out entire chapters. Their chief virtue is that they reprinted a lot of Verne that had gone out of print. The Ace paperback editions were all based on these, so they suffer from the same drawback. The one I just finished reading was the old Sampson Low translation. When I hold the books up back to back the Low translation is more than twice as thick as the ARCO one. If you flip open and compare passages, you can see how ARCO criminally pare down descriptions and cut entire paragraphs. (Why? Did they have an aggressive wordcount they wanted to meet?) After reading the fuller Low translation, the ARCO one is like eating watery soup.
BUT – the Low translation cuts out passages insulting to Britain and America. Which is pretty significant, since the book is a satire of American Upper Class behavior. Interestingly, the ARCO version restored these (although, for the most part, what they have appears to come from the Low translation. Which means they actually added new translations to the old thing at the same time they were pruning the descriptions). One solution is to read the translations side by side. A better solution is to read the 2015 translation The Self-Propelled Island by Marie-Thérèse Noiset and published by Bison Books. (But even here we do not achieve perfection – Ms. Noiset, for no good reason, switches the tense throughout from present tense to past tense.). But it’s time to move onto something new.
Now I’m reading A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not” Ripley by Neal Thompson. The book was a gift to my mother, who finished it and gave it back.
Finished it. The ending was a bit predictable and pat, but I’m glad I read it. Ken Grimwood’s Replay covers a lot of the same ground and much better, I’d say.
Next up: audiobooks of Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, a contemporary mystery, and The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, a historic naval adventure.
I’ve started Case Histories, a detective novel by Kate Atkinson. I’d really liked her historical fantasy novel Life After Life. This one is slow getting off the ground, but I’ll stick with it for now.
I just finished Defending Jacob by William Landay. It’s a legal thriller and an excellent read. The narrator is the DA for city near Boston whose 14-year-old son is accused of murdering a classmate. Very surprising plot twist at the end.
I really enjoyed Case Histories (it was the first novel of hers I read; my son gave it to me, thinking it would be up my alley) but I agree it took a while to get going. There are several sequels involving Jackson Brodie, who gets to be a more complex (and rather luckless) character in each succeeding book.
I’m currently reading another of Atkinson’s, A God in Ruins, which is…not a detective novel but rather more of a biography-slash-saga. I’m liking it a lot. It helps that there are a couple of major “points of contact” between me and the main character (no, I was not a bomber pilot during World War II).
I’ll have to look into Life After Life.
I’m also reading Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which is okay. I think the book is trying to be too many things at once: the story of the Los Angeles central library fire back in the eighties and how it was investigated, plus a history of the library, plus being about how libraries change and adapt to new needs and generations and how they serve the communities, and also being basically a day-in-the-life-of-a-library kind of thing… It’s sort of too much and feels very disconnected at times, but at its best it’s definitely interesting. The day-in-the-life is the part that grabs me the most, I think. The historical stuff is probably the least appealing, though some of the early directors were certainly characters. A book that could have benefited from tighter editing, all in all.
