Okay I’m back, home today with a tiny case of I-over-did-it-this-weekend, but nothing a little water and a good book can’t cure! And honestly, who wants to go outside, it’s been 100+Farenheit or 37+Celsius outside, there are so many fires burning around us, you can barely see the big ole mountains less than two miles away… and my freezer has popsicles in it!
Sooo Whatcah all readin?
I am rereading Not a Mermaid by Madeleine Kirby for the I’ve-no-idea-how-many- times. I love her books, very cozy, somewhat supernatural, sexy cat shifter…
Camp by L. C. Rosen. A YA book about summer camp for gay kids and discovering who you are and whether love is worth making yourself into someone else. (The answer, of course, is no.)
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’ll repost this from this morning:
Started this morning on The Dissonance by Shaun Hamill, a novel about three people drawn back to their hometown, where they once practiced magic, in order to …well, I don’t know yet. I’m sure it’s something nice.
And add:
I’m also revisiting an old comfort read, Desperately Seeking Susan, the novelization of the movie. My daughter gave it to me as a birthday gift after my copy went missing. It’s very nicely written, and fun to hark back to the golden days of the eighties.
I finished They Never Learn by Layne Fargo, which Dung_Beetle had recommended in last month’s thread. It’s a crime novel about a feminist serial killer who only kills rapey, abusive and/or particularly annoying men. I particularly liked the setting, on the campus of a fictional Pennsylvania university, and the big plot twist which I didn’t see coming. The book has about as happy an ending as you could expect for a book like this.
Also recently finished USS Yorktown, CV-5 by Steve Wiper, about a notable aircraft carrier of WW2. Some rare photographs but not much in the way of text, and what it had was poorly edited.
I’m now listening to an audiobook of Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, a very good WW2 spy thriller about a lethal but not unprincipled German spy on the run across the UK. I’d read it years ago and it holds up very well.
I’m also reading hard copies of two books:
Warplane by Hal Sundt is about the design and building of the US Air Force ground-attack aircraft the A-10 Thunderbolt II (AKA the Warthog). It’s interesting but a bit dry so far; I’ve also caught several minor errors.
Rorschach by Tom King, Jorge Fornes and Dave Stewart is a graphic novel sequel to Watchmen, set during the 2020 campaign when President Robert Redford is running for reelection and there’s an assassination attempt against the Republican candidate. The mentally-disturbed vigilante Rorschach, long thought dead, seems to have been involved, and a private detective hired by the GOP campaign digs into the case deeper than the FBI appears willing to. It’s very good so far.
I read so many I procrastinate mentioning them, then I forget some.
I need to read a book called How to Stop Procrastinating.
I just finished Off The Record by Madeline Westerhout.
She was a secretary to Trump.
She fawns over him, how wonderful he was, how he cares about unimportant people, he reads a lot!
She was fired because some reporters bought her drinks and she made comments that got back to Trump and then she thought her life was Over and she cried a lot.
Now you don’t have to read it.
I finished Rorschach. It’s very good most of the way through, with an interesting plot and characters, and lots of in-jokes and Easter eggs about the original Watchmen, but then it goes off in a very weird and, I thought, implausible direction. The ending is disappointing and not really justified by what came before, I’d say. Still worth a read for any Watchmen fan, though.
Also finished an audiobook of Piece by Piece by Calvin Trillin, a 2007 collection of essays by the noted New Yorker humorist and read by him. Very few were laugh-out-loud funny, but I chuckled often. The bits on “deadline poetry” (including “If You Knew What Sununu,” about GWHB’s first White House chief of staff), teen slang, fruitcake and the vagaries of French grammar are particularly good.
I am reading The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire. It’s kind of a Star Wars version of Blood and Fire: an in universe history text of the setting. In this case the Empire (as it says on the tin).
Finished You Like It Darker, Stephen King’s latest volume of short stories. Very good. Every one of them a winner, but my favorite was actually the shortest one, “The Fifth Step.” Recommended.
Have started The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, by Erik Larson.
Four books since my last post. From best to worst:
The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands: I picked the book up because of Natasha Pulley’s recommendation: Railsea meets Annihilation. This description is pretty close to perfect, although I’d throw in a bit of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate for that nineteenth-century amateur naturalist vibe; and this book, too, was pretty much perfect. Beautifully written, compelling characters, a driven plot, dread and wonder twined together–and my new favorite fantasy map!
Running Close to the Wind: If one of the characters from Aardman’s Pirates! was marooned for being way too horny, and was then rescued by the crew on Our Flag Means Death, you could end up with this novel. I wasn’t expecting much, but also couldn’t stop giggling. Tremendous fun. My wife read it next, and her outbursts of laughter almost felt like reading the book a second time.
The Brides of High Hill: I’ve really enjoyed Nghi Vo’s novellas, and her Siren Queen is one of my favorite books of the last ten years. This one was worth reading, but it kind of felt like there was too much plot for its short length, with a twist that didn’t really work for me. But like her other books in this series, it’s got beautiful prose and a companiable protagonist, and was a pleasant way to pass the time.
To Cage a God: This was the only stinker in the bunch. It’s got an interesting-enough fantasy premise–a world in which the ruling class contain literal gods in their bodies, gods that are also dragons, and use these gods to oppress the masses–but everything else about the book actively annoyed me. The characters were straight out of central casting, the romances were obvious and without chemistry, and the politics were dull. I should’ve put it down.
I finished The Dissonance today, and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The plot moved along briskly and the chapters were quite short, so I could pick it up at any time, read three pages, and have something to ponder until the next time I got a chance. Quibbles: way too much detail in the sex scenes, minor plot holes, and I didn’t care for the ending. But for the most part it kept my mind happily occupied over the last week. I’m going to check out another book by this author.
The author describes his career exploring the world looking for unusual plants. The book is lavishly illustrated with his paintings and drawings of flowers, which are quite nice.
The text is okay. It doesn’t go into much depth and at times is just " We found this plant, and then we found another plant, …"
Finished The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone, which was interesting. My favorite part was when Rus described how, as a grad student, she and some classmates invented a robot to cut a birthday cake for their professor. Unfortunately, instead of the layer cake they had anticipated, it was an ice cream cake that was so hard, the robot arm with the knife was flung backward, then chopped forward very hard, until someone was able to hit the “off” switch. (The professor loved it, though.)
Now I’m reading The Man Who Solved Mysteries by William Brittain. It’s a collect of short stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.