February is on the horizon and it’s a leap yar! One MORE day of reading for us!
So I have no idea what Punxsutawney Phil is going to declare next Friday, but spring has already hit Northern Utah with a vengeance. It was 53F/12C today, consequently I’m going to be cleaning up leaves that didn’t get raked before it snowed… before it -hopefully- snows again. Fortunately I have a few good audiobooks.
Currently I am reading:
On Kindle: An Allotment of Time by Ripley Hayes. Her first book was more of a cozy mystery and each book has gotten darker and more intense. . and I am here for it!
On Audio: P.S. I Spook You by S.E. Harmon. I read it a couple years ago but missed several key bits of info when listening in the car due to the audio pausing in the car but still running on my phone. I have since changed phones and cars which has fixed the problem … I hope.
So Whatcha all readin?
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.
Started listening to Persuader by Lee Child. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it before, but I want to refresh my memory before the next season of Reacher on Prime, which is based on this novel.
I finished Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code, which I thought was extremely good. The story is told through a series of audio recording transcripts featuring a (former) gangster named Steven Smith and known as “Little Smithy,” and focus primarily on a supposed code to be found in the works of noted (and disgraced) children’s author Edith Twyford. The book is about a good deal more than the Twyford code, though, in part because we learn quite a lot about the protagonist’s difficult and often sad life, in part because there are other codes floating around, and partly because the book is chock-full of twists and turns. Most of which I didn’t see coming. Not the easiest book in the world to read (in part because the transcription software isn’t always accurate, ahem), but very rewarding if you get through it.
I’ve read some of the works of children’s author Kate DiCamillo–my grandson and I are very fond of the Mercy Watson books and I think we would both like living on Deckawoo Drive–and thought I’d pick up DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie last time I was in the library. A middle grade novel/Newbery Honor Book in which a girl finds and adopts a dog, which she calls Winn-Dixie, and many strong connections and other good things result “because of Winn-Dixie.” Sweet, but I thought rather fluffy. Maybe if I were more of a dog person I’d have liked it better. Or, you know, maybe not.
Yesterday I finished Follow Me to Hell: McNelly’s Texas Rangers and the Rise of Frontier Justice by Tom Clavin, nonfiction about the Rangers generally and Leander McNelly, a legendary lawman of the 1870s, in particular. Plenty of interesting stuff about border ruffians, desperadoes, cattle rustlers and gunslingers, and the steely-eyed, sun-baked men who chased, arrested and often killed them, as well as the fraught situation along the U.S.-Mexican border even back then.
I’ve now started Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, with interviews with the cast and crew. Lots of fun, and very highly recommended for anyone who loves the movie, as I do.
For the moment I’m taking a break from Dream Town by Laura Meckler, about the struggle for racial equality and public education in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio.
I finished An Allotment of Time by Ripley Hayes, the lack of a conclusive solution is, while pretty realistic, terribly annoying to me “ties that mystery up in a bow” self. laughs
I started Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I’m enjoying it, however, this narrator is … monotone and not really good at doing different voices.
I am still slowly reading Radium Girls the first girl has died a thoroughly horrible death.
A week ago I finished Age of Assassins, by RJ Barker. It’s a mystery set in a bog-standard generic western-Europe medieval society, except with an overlay of Dark Sun magic from an old D&D setting. Nothing in it was especially surprising, but it was really good. RJ Barker’s later trilogy, the Bone Ships, is one of my favorites (pirates, dragons, body horror, tyranny–what could be better?), which is why I checked this one out, and I’m glad I did.
And I just finished The Dead Take the A Train, by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. I’ve read Kadrey’s Sandman Slim, and heard good things about Khaw’s Nothing but Blackened Teeth, so I was looking forward to it.
And? Eh. It’s profoundly gory and gross, all sorts of demon parasites with way too many teeth and eyeballs and a penchant for dismemberment, and I finished it up fast, but I don’t know I’ll be looking for its inevitable sequels.
Finished The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. Regarded as the foremost Founding Father by all the other Founding Fathers, Adams, cousin to John, remains relatively unknown today since he worked largely behind the scenes, preferring to stay in the background and play puppet master. He was reportedly the first to decide on the goal of independence, possibly as early as 1768. Adams believed Canada would probably have joined with us if independence had been declared immediately after Lexington and Concord in 1775. He was never called Sam, but he was for a time a brewer like his father before him. The book was okay. I expected it to be better. Shiff has a dull writing style that is even disjointed at times. I was glad to learn more about Adams but wish it had been from a more interesting writer. It’s a shame, because the author has written on other subjects I would like to read more about – Cleopatra, the Salem witch trials – but I won’t be seeking her out again anytime soon.
I haven’t read anywhere near all of Dickens’s works, but Bleak House is my favorite of those I’ve read. Hope you enjoy it.
I read The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz. I very much liked her novel The Plot, and I believe several others here did the same. I liked this one even better. It’s kind of a three-generation saga of a wealthy and somewhat messed-up NYC family, only there are actually only two generations. The oldest children, triplets, don’t want to have anything much to do with each other, a state of affairs which lasts until their much younger sister is almost ready for college, whereupon things change–subtly at first, then more rapidly.
The characterizations are deft and the writing excellent and often snarky, and the plot takes us through progressive education, Mormonism, Fox news, outsider artists, the college application process, the meaning of race in American society, and a variety of other themes.
The novel reminded me in an unexpected way of Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr series; at the ends of the Rhodenbarr novels every character gets what they deserve, for better or worse, and this book had a similar ending: the characters we mostly like get to live happily ever after (well, we hope), while the character we don’t like so much gets a certain…comeuppance. Recommended.
Now reading Brendan Slocumb’s second classical-music-themed suspense novel, Symphony of Secrets. We’ll see.
Siam_Sam, for a semi-comic portrayal of Sam Adams as a mooch and a rabble-rouser, check out Robert Lawson’s YA history book Mr. Revere and I, written as if by Paul Revere’s horse. Very good stuff.
Still reading Stephanie Schorow’s Cat Dreaming. It’s very good
My bedtime reading is Simon Winder’s James Bond: The Man who Saved Britain, a savage re-assessment of the character of Bond and his creator, and of both the novels and the films. I found my copy b ehind my bookcase, where it had fallen, and began re-reading it. Winder does a great job of placing the books and films in their time period and showing why they were so popular. He’s unsparing in his criticisms, and the book is a great read.
I disagree with a lot of his judgements about not only Bond, but many non-Bond things. He thinks only the first four Bond films are really worth anything, and denigrates On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and For Your Eyes Only as well as some of the later films that I think deserve some credit. (And the book appeared about the time the Daniel Craig series started, so he gives no thoughts on those films).
Still no audiobooks – my attempts to get my audio system running over the weekend have come to naught.
Started today on a children’s book from the seventies, The Court of the Stone Children, by Eleanor Cameron. This is exactly the sort of book I always gravitated to as a kid, so I’m sorry not to have run across it earlier, but delighted to have the joy of reading it now.
A mix of dystopian sci-fi and detective noir. The setup is that in the near future, humanity is divided into two groups - ordinary schmoes like you and me and Titans, a few ultrarich people who have received gene therapy that resets their body clock allowing them to live for centuries, and makes them unusually tall and large.
A Titan is murdered and an ordinary human has to find the killer.