I finished The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, and gave it five stars at Goodreads. I do love a good haunted house story!
Next up, Slayers of Old, by Jim C. Hines. It’s about an elderly magical trio who live together and run a bookshop, at least until they have to fight evil once again. Seems like a fun and fast read.
I’m now re-reading, with one of my sons, my all-time favorite sf espionage book, Tool of the Trade by Joe Haldeman. A Soviet sleeper agent at MIT in 1987 discovers a practical method of mind control and must go on the run from both the CIA and KGB, before eventually deciding to make a daring move to change world history forever. Very, very good stuff.
Finished Ancient Shores, by Jack McDevitt, which was okay; and Ice Age Bones: Mammoth, by Barbara Hehner, which is very outdated.
Next up: The Golden Ticket: A Life in the College Admissions Essays, by Irena Smith, and A Year Near Proxima Centauri, by Michael Martin.
Finished The Golden Ticket: A Life in the College Admissions Essays, by Irena Smith, which is okay, but mostly about her struggles with her neurodivergent children, not what the title suggests, and A Year Near Proxima Centauri, by Michael Martin, which is basically a cross between The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and A Year in Provence. It has some funny parts, though not on the level of Douglas Adams.
Next up: Untune the Sky: Poems of Music and the Dance, compiled by Helen Plotz; Money Money Money, by Ed McBain; and Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World, by Patricia Schultz.
The Genius of Birds - Jennifer Ackerman
A popular science look at the intelligence of birds, from talking parrots to migrating songbirds.
Reread from a few years ago, interesting and well-written book.
Finished Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. Stuart Kaminsky’s detective hero Toby Peters gets beaten up even more than Fredric Brown’s Bill Sweeney in The Screaming Mimi.
Now I’ve moved onto Angel of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs, the effective second half of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng. I haven’t been able to find a copy of the book on audio CD in any library, so I’m reduced to reading the book in print. Preston and Childs’ Pendergast books (as well as their other efforts, both together and independently) are one of my guilty pleasures, like the books based on Clive Cussler’s heroes that his collaborators are still churning out. As with Cussler, these books all have at least one moment when you have to stop and go “Oh, come ON!” because you can’t believe they actually wrote that whacko idea. In the case of Preston and Childs, it’s the increasingly outrageous nature of the universe Pendegast inhabits. When you consider that this started with The Relic, you have an idea of how far from reality this must have stretched by now. (Pendergast first appeared in that novel, but he was written out of the film they made from the book). The earliest books actually strove to try to find rational explanations for the zombies and other supernatural entities that inhabited the books, but by now we have a couple of characters who have lived a helluva lot longer than human beings typically live, some super-powered blood-sucking monsters, and time travel. And, of course, the EVIL Dr. Encoch Leng, who i can’t help visualizing as a taller Snidely Whiplash (or a broader Dudley Nightshade), with top hat and black cloak and a pronounced handlebar moustache that he twirls the ends of while gloating to the omnicompetant Aloysius Pendergast or his insane omnicompetant brother Diogenes or Pendergast’s omnicompetant Wednesday-like ward Constance. I feel sorry for NY Police detective Vincent D’Agosta, who deserves to be the hero of his own series, but keeps fallin g for Pendergast’s requests to help him out, and ends up being overshadowed and outclassed by the rest of the cast.
I’m a third of the way in. We’ll see how this turns out.
On audio, I received several books for Christmas, and am now listening to The Day of the Jackal, which I’ve read a zillion yimes.
I’ve also received several hard copy books for Christmas, most of which I’ve never heard of. Interesting reading ahead.
New thread: Well that’s a wrap on 2025…
Finished Untune the Sky: Poems of Music and the Dance, compiled by Helen Plotz, of which my favorite was “The Relic” by Robert Hillyer; and Money Money Money, by Ed McBain and Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World, by Patricia Schultz, both of which were okay.
See you in 2026!