Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - February 2021 edition

Cafe Society
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Finished A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben MacIntyre. Very good. Much has been written about Kim Philby, but this book focuses more on the personal friendships he betrayed. Particularly his best friend and fellow spy Nicholas Elliott. Man, imagine your best bud of 30 years finally turns out to have been reporting everything you’ve ever told him to the Soviet Union. Elliott was even Philby’s staunchest supporter in the early 1950s, when the first storm of allegations merged. Philby’s friend James Angleton of the CIA never got over it, ending his days a neurotic wreck. Lots of interesting tidbits, such as one of Philby’s close friends in Beirut was the American CIA agent Miles Copeland Jr. Copeland lived with his wife and children in a large hilltop house, which the locals bluntly called the “CIA house,” and his son Stewart later became the drummer in the band the Police. The lady who finally remembered Philby trying to recruit her as a Soviet spy 30 years before and informed the authorities, after which much of the puzzle fell into place, was Flora Solomon, whose son Peter Benenson founded Amnesty International. (It had been suggested that she turned him in as eventual revenge for being jilted by him all those years ago, but she steadfastly denied it.) She introduced Philby to his first wife, who met a tragically alcoholic end. I remember Andy Rooney once saying he thought any spy who got caught ought to be sent to bed without his supper and not allowed to play with the other spies for two weeks. I could understand that sentiment better if not for the hundreds of lives people like Philby ultimately cost. A very good book. Recommended. Apparently the author writes a lot on espionage issues.

Have started Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, by George Eliot.

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Started this morning on The Survivors by Jane Harper. She writes reliably decent mysteries, so I expect a good time.

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I read that Philby book a couple of months ago. I agree with your remarks on it. Highly recommend another book by the same author called The Spy and The Traitor which covers a KGB agent working for MI6 and the thriller turns it took which once you finish the book feels a wilder ride than any Hollywood fictional spy film could ever take.

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I won “The Dry” from Goodreads… I will read it after the Nameess Detective book I’m currently reading.

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Congratulations! The Dry is one of the better ones, I thought.
(I like Pronzini too, but I stick to the spooky stuff).

46

Finished A Shark Out of Water by Emma Lathen, which I enjoyed.

Now I’m reading The Incomplete Book of Running, by Peter Sagal.

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I read his book Double Cross on World War 2 British espionage and counterespionage. It was quite good.

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Just finished The Incomplete Book of Running , by Peter Sagal. It’s a quick read, and a lot of fun, despite its occasionally serious subject matter. (Sagal was about 100 yards away from the bombs at the Boston Marathon.)

Now I’m reading Network Effect, by Martha Wells, in the Murderbot series.

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Finished it. Once he’s out of film school and actually working on movies (including a remarkably disgusting but hilarious nine days filming low-budget porn, then a stint as the Coen Brothers’ cinematographer before becoming a director himself), the book really picks up steam. Lots of funny stories, lots of Hollywood name-dropping - and oddly, it’s even a bit touching now and then. Recommended for anyone interested in the movie biz.

Now I’ve started The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, my book club’s latest selection, a novel about a young woman with a tiny no-pets apartment in NYC who’s asked to take care of her late friend’s enormous Great Dane. Not really my cup of tea, but readable; I think I’ll keep going.

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I teach reading and literacy in a boarding school for teens, so I’ve been on a YA kick lately – I used the pandemic to catch up on some books that I thought might be good for my students.

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli is one of those ubiquitous books that I think everybody under the age of 40 had to read in middle school. I read it then, and had mostly forgotten the plot. It’s actually more endearing than I remember it being, for which I’m grateful.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becki Albetalli was recommended to my by one of my students. It chronicles a closeted gay teen as he develops a crush on a unknown classmate – he only knows him through an anonymous online social media site. A pretty good book but it kind of whitewashes some of the more brutal behavior teenage bullies engage in.

Dear Martin by Nic Stone. A black teenage boy living in Atlanta deals with prejudice and racial profiling by both his peers and the local police, and he copes by writing letters to Martin Luther King, Jr. For young adults – hell, for everyone – this is a powerful book and I’m still mulling over how to use it in my curriculum.

For my truly low-level readers I picked up a classroom set of Whirlpool by Laurel Croza. This is actually one of my favorite collection of children’s stories I’ve yet found. The stories are short and easily accessible but deal with some (for kids) heavy issues like teen pregnancy, death, abandonment, domestic abuse, and the like. I think it’ll be a boon for my dyslexic kids.

For myself, I haven’t read much lately. I was reading The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My wife gave it to me for Xmas after I dropped some not-so-subtle hints, but I find reading it is giving me quite a bit of anxiety. I know a lot of people in my life who have had, and have died, from cancer and reading the book is harder than I anticipated. I’ll make my way through it eventually but it’s not at the top of my list right now.

What I would like to find is a good historical monograph detailing the mutiny of the HMAV Bounty. The well-know trilogy that Nordoff and Hall wrote in the 30’s has become the go-to source of information on the mutiny despite the fact the trilogy was essentially fiction, using the real mutiny as a backdrop. Bligh wrote a book about it, but a majority of his book details his subsequent lifeboat journey. I’d like to find a monograph that details Bligh and Christian and analyzes the lead-up to and the mutiny itself.

So anyway, that’s next on my list, if I can find one.

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Any useful sources here that you didn’t already know about, Lancia?: Mutiny on the Bounty - Wikipedia

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Finshed Network Effect , by Martha Wells, in the Murderbot series. Excellent as always.

Now I’m reading Minding Miss Manners in an Era of Fake Etiquette, by Judith Martin.

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Just finished The New Map by Daniel Yergin. I started back in november , got side tracked and picked it up again during the power blackouts we just had in Texas, it seemed appropriate.
Not great, most of the energy items I was aware of and if you pay reasonable attention to international affairs the sections on Russia, china middle east , cars and the environment really were nothing gnee or eye opening.
It really felt like it had been compiled from a bunch of economist articles and each chapter felt it had been written independently of the others so a lot of repeating of details almost verbatim.

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Read Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson last month after reading a glowing review. Like the Mars series I thought the ideas were brilliant, the science well thought through, and yet the writing did not compel me and I can remember little of the book a few weeks later

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I finished The Third Encounter by Sara Woods today. It is the 4th in her Antony Maitland series; these were written in the 60s and 70s so are to some extent a bit dated. Must of us probably don’t think about how computers are literally everywhere these days until we’re reading about people having to search up a phone booth to make a call or waiting days/weeks to get info from another country.
I read some of this series back in the late 70s or early 80s and wanted to revisit them. I had not remember how little action is in them, they are very dialogue heavy, much like classic Agatha Christie.

And keeping with the nostalgia kick, I am a quarter of the way into Undercurrents by Bill Pronzini, this is the 3rd Nameless Detective book.

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Oh, and I am also reading Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. This is my book club’s pick for this month and I am enjoying it a lot. The audiobook narrator is doing a great job with bringing the women to life.

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Thanks for letting me know Miss Manners has a book out I had not read. I stayed up half the night reading and laughing.

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I finished The Survivors by Jane Harper. It was a good enough way to pass the time.

Starting today on Michael Koryta’s latest thriller, Never Far Away. It’s about a mother who fakes her death to escape the vengeance of a crime boss. Years later, when the children’s father dies in an accident, she’s able to reclaim her kids…only they believe she’s their long-lost aunt.

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I hadn’t know about it either until last week. (I miss going to the library to skim the new book shelves!) I think she’s very funny, too.

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Finished Minding Miss Manners in an Era of Fake Etiquette , by Judith Martin. I enjoyed it a lot. (My favorite answer, to a question about whether a mother-to-be should write thank you notes after a baby shower: “Yes, unless the baby is going to do it. Or the father-to-be, which may be even less likely.”)

I have always liked Martin’s referring to herself in the third person. “Miss Manners thinks that…” Does anyone know of any other authors who do this? Maybe in fiction?

Back on topic: Now I’m reading a Middle Grade novel called The Next Great Paulie Fink, by Ali Benjamin.