Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Shelby Foote, William Faulkner…?
I just started THE BOYS a memoir by Ron and Clint Howard. Really good so far.
Finished Sewer, Gas, & Electric.
Now I’m reading Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, by Mark Bergen.
Started Come On, Man! The truth about Joe Biden’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad presidency by Joe Concha. Can’t stop reading it, its gripping.
Finished The Spite House, although the story utterly fell apart. The secrets were implausible, the motivations were weak, and even two chapters of exposition at the end couldn’t make any of it make sense.
Next I started on Haunted by the Past by Simon Green, another haunted house story. I hadn’t realized it, but it’s part of a series about two detectives. Fifty pages in, I’m getting a strong Nancy Drew vibe, so…ditched.
Still reading A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O’Brian by Dean King, with essays by John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes. His choice of emphasis is sometimes inexplicable - he writes two pages about a single naval battle featured in only one of the 21 books in the series, but just a short paragraph about HMS Surprise, the British frigate which is the setting of most of the books.
I finished Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a very long, very weird, sometimes unnerving novel about a house that’s much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I don’t quite know what to say about it. It’s sort of horror, sort of adventure, sort of social commentary. It definitely would not be for everyone.
Still making slow progress through Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a distant-future sf novel about a terraforming project gone badly, and dangerously, awry.
The library yanked back my audiobook copy of Ian Kershaw’s The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945, and then did the same with Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry, my book club’s pick, a feminist fantasy focusing on a spunky, brainy, beautiful chemist trying to overcome sexism in the Fifties. Don’t know when I’ll get 'em back again!
Zipped through The Orville: Season 1.5: New Beginnings by David A. Goodman, David Cabeza and Michael Atiyeh, a graphic novel with two new Orville stories, about a rescue mission and a border incident. I liked it.
Next up: The Unexpected George Washington by Harlow Giles Unger, about the first President’s private life.
I’m currently reading Blitz, the third book in the Rook trilogy. I wasn’t too impressed with it in the beginning – it’s a long book and could have used with some tighter editing – but now I’m, oh, maybe 300 pages in and very much absorbed in the story.
Also reading The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again by Catherine Price, the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. So far, I’m disappointed. How to Break Up With Your Phone was a fantastic book that really transformed my life, but this follow-up just seems like an inferior regurgitation of some of the ideas in her last book, with an excess of distracting footnotes. But I’m only maybe 60 pages in, so I’m holding out hope that this one’ll turn around.
Recently finished:
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The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang. An absorbing collection of essays written by a woman who suffers from schizoaffective disorder. Seeing the practice of being put under an involuntary psychiatric hold from the perspective of a mentally ill patient really opened up my eyes to what it’s like to lose your sense of bodily autonomy, and how that can contribute to a worsening of psychiatric symptoms.
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The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth. A deep-dive into the complicated relationship between a woman and her mother-in-law, told from the perspective of both the woman and the mother-in-law. Interesting, though not particularly memorable.
Finished Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley. This was the eleventh and final book in the Easy Rawlins series, which led to me rereading the first ten. I read eight on the beaches while in St Martin and read the last two at home.
Reading them in order helped me to understand why Mosley wanted to end the series.
Thanks for the correction! Not sure where Hilary came from. I really enjoyed Sea of Tranquility. I haven’t read her other work, but I will check it out.
@The_wind_of_my_soul, I had the same impression of Blitz. In the end, I enjoyed it, and really wanted an epilogue about the characters from WWII.
I recently listened to Shades of Milk and Honey as an audiobook. It’s intended to be a Austen-style novel with a little magic thrown in. It was OK, but I’m not in a hurry to read the rest of the series.
Finished Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, by Mark Bergen. It’s well-written, and I recommend it for anyone interested in the subject.
Now I’m starting Flynn’s World, by Gregory McDonald.
The CrossRoads of Civilization: A History of Vienna Angus Robertson
A thorough history of the Austrian capital, from its start as a Roman frontier settlement called Vindobona to the 21st century.
Well-written and interesting book