Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - February 2025 edition

Cafe Society
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Month two of 2025 and week two of Hell in the USA. Ya know, if I had an old couch, I’d consider shelling out the money to FedEx it to the White House… everyone needs a work wife. However, I shall just make an effort to keep reading books with LGBTQIA characters and keep replacing the flags on my porch (I think the Halloween ghouls that are still up are keeping everything safe right now)

So whatcha all readin?!

On Kindle: The Best Corpse for the Job by Charlie Cochrane. It’s a cozy mystery, murder in a small English village; I’ve had some nasty job interviews but murder seems a little harsh!

Audiobook: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin So far just weird and f***ed up enough to have caught my attention; it’s my book club’s choice for the month.

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.

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Last Month:Who invented January?

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Yay, my favorite thread! Thank you, @DZedNConfused.

I’m currently reading Never Lie by Freida McFadden. Two newlyweds are trapped in a house where the previous owner died under mysterious circumstances, and they may not be alone. It seems to me like I’m able to put together a lot of the puzzle pieces to this mystery already, but I think that’s just to give me a false sense of security before the twist. I never do figure these things out, but it gives me something to think about besides political news. :fearful:

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You are Welcome!

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I’m currently 2/3rds of the way through The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister.
It’s folk horror set in deepest West Virginia. It’ geting quite dark as ancient secrets are revealed and familial bonds are tested.

I really enjoyed her first book, Desert Creatures but that was set in a post apocalyptic desert, not a rotting mansion in a backwoods bog!

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I’m about a third of the way through Twenty-Six Seconds by Alexandra Zapruder, nonfiction about how her grandfather’s fateful afternoon in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963 changed both their family and American history itself. It’s really good.

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Finished What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, by Gary Smith, which was a good introduction to probability in daily life, and which I would’ve liked more if I hadn’t already seen the material covered in other books (The Mismeasure of Man, for example) and magazines (mostly The Skeptical Inquirer). Fireheart Tiger, a fantasy novella by Aliette de Bodard, is quite good.

Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.

Next up: Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land, by N. Scott Momaday, and Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan.

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I just completed Herman Wouk’s two-part epic about World War II, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.

It was incredible and I’m in absolute awe of Wouk’s research and depth of knowledge. I knew Wouk mainly from The Caine Mutiny and was delighted to find he lived to 103 and only passed away in 2019.

WoW and WandR are long, long books which follow a number of characters through the war. In doing so Wouk brings us through many of the important combat theatres, political decisions and of course the Holocaust. These books make it personal and I cared about all the main characters. I know a fair bit about World War II, but these books taught me a lot and I often stopped to read straight historical accounts.

For example, I had never heard of the Theresienstadt Ghetto and the sickening beautification project the Germans undertook prior a Red Cross inspection. Several of Wouk’s characters experience it. There was also a lot of detail about the Battles of Midway and Leyte Gulf, which one could read about for a lifetime.

I won’t give any spoilers except to say I was wondering for weeks how it would end, and I found it satisfying. What a piece of work. I can’t imagine undertaking such a huge project. I briefly tried to watch the TV series from the 80s, starring Robert Mitchum, but it didn’t match what I saw in my head and I stopped.

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I read those years ago and had the same reaction you did. I was completely blown away at the attention to historical detail. Great stories.

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So… the Allies win?

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Unless you’re Philip K Dick…

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I said no spoilers!
:slight_smile:

I’ll add this about Herman Wouk’s insights on World War II - I was frequently struck by an eerie similarity to what we’re seeing in the world now. I wrote down a few quotes:

“… but nobody made the Germans follow Hitler. He wasn’t a legitimate ruler. He was a man with a mouth, and they liked what he said. They got behind him, and they let loose a firestorm that’s sucking all the decent instincts out of human society.”

“Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”

"…He asks me to picture the Ku Klux Klan seizing power in the United States. That is what has happened to Germany, he says. The Nazi Party is an enormous German Ku Klux Klan. He points to the dramatic use of fire rituals at night, the anti-Semitism, the bizarre uniforms, the bellicose know-nothing hatred of liberal ideas and of foreigners and so forth. I rejoined that the Klan is not a major party capable of governing the nation. The he cited the Klan of Reconstruction days, a respectable widespread movement which many of the leading Southerners joined; also the role of the modern Klan in the Democratic politics of the twenties.

Extremism, he says, is the universal tuberculosis of modern society: a world infection of resentment and hatred generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old values. In the stable nations the tubercles are sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless lunatic movements. In times of social disorder, depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break forth and infect the nation. The is has happened in Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United States."

“Why the Germans committed themselves to him remains a historical puzzle. They knew what they were getting. He had spelled it all out in advance, in Mein Kampf. He and his National Socialist cohorts were from the start a gang of recognizable and very dangerous thugs, but the Germans by and large adored and believed in these monsters right up to the rude Stalingrad awakening, and even long afterward.”

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They didn’t care if bad things happened to them, as long as WORSE things happened to the people they hated…

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Today I started on Before the Coffee Gets Cold: A Heartwarming Novel of Time Travel, Magical Realism and the Power of Healing, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. First of a series about a coffee shop where the patrons are able to travel back in time under very stringent rules, one of them being that they must return before their coffee gets cold.
Oh dear. This is not what I was looking for. The premise is interesting, but I generally keep my heart at a certain temperature and do not appreciate attempts to warm it. However, it’s a small book and I’ve read half of it so may as well finish.

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I finished reading Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre and Mysterious , edited by R. Rasmussen. I’d read many of the entries, but there were enough that were new to me to make it worthwhile

I went on to H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire, which takes up the story of Odysseus after the events of The Odyssey. It starts out depressingly with him finding his home and most of Ithaca abandoned – definitely not the Odysseus of Tennyson’s poem.

I’m also reading Janet L. Jones’ Horse Brain - Human Brain about Horse psychology. It’s background for a story I want to write.

On audio, I finished Andy Borowitz’ Profiles in Ignorance (which I’d already read as an e-book) and Graham Brown’s continuation of Clive Cussler’s “Numa Files” series Desolation Code. Cussler’s books, even by proxy like this, are one of my guilty pleasures. This one has so many improbabilities heaped into it – an Elon Musk-like supervillain, a self-aware supercomputer AI hooked into the brains of unwilling subjects, mass human cloning, genetic development of a weaponized voracious rapidly-reproducing organism, and an anti-fertility virus – that it’s like a distillation of the Essence of Cussler. All we’re missing is what I like to call “weapons porn”, where they bring out an old or speculative new piece of interesting military hardware.

Now I’m reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a book I’ve never read (having seen so many adaptations of it), but which I should have before now. I discovered years ago that I really like Stevenson’s wring, after I first read Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde, then several of his supernatural short stories and “Kidnapped”. I’ll get around to his other stuff one of these days.

I might pick up something at the library, though. And I’ve ordered some used books on CD over the internet.

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Finished Before the Coffee Gets Cold…what’s that thing the kids say: “Thanks, I hate it”?

Started on Clever Little Thing by Helena Echlin. It’s about a mother who believes her child is taking on the characteristics of her babysitter who recently died.

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Oh my god, it’s SO GOOD! Long John Silver is possibly my favorite villain in all fiction.

Years ago, I was in a course for K-6 educators on teaching literature. Each of us was assigned a week to read a children’s book (or section thereof) to the class. Most folks chose things like Where the Wild Things Are, or The Giving Tree, or other classics from their childhood.

I chose Treasure Island, and read Chapter XIV – “The First Blow”.. I practiced beforehand and read it pacing back and forth in front of the class, bloody murder and everything.

I will never forget the faces of those college kids on hearing this chapter.

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The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Edward Achorn

A history of professional base ball (as it was spelled back then) focusing on the American Association league. The Association differed from the more established National League by having games on Sunday and selling alcohol at games, both of which were controversial back then. A key figure was Chris Van der Ahe, a German immigrant who owned the St Louis Browns (who later became the Cardinals). Van der Ahe didn’t understand the game well, but he owned a bar and knew how to sell beer.

The book is well written with entertaining descriptions of colorful characters and the games, as well as interesting history of the first African-Americans to play in the pro leagues.

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Let’s see, the books with an actual bookmark in them include
“Reaper Man”, Terry Pratchett (part of my ongoing project to read all the PTerry ‘Discworld’ novels in order of publication)

‘The Better Angel’ by Roy Morris, Jr.
‘The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman’, edited by Ezra Greenspan, both part of my ongoing project to research Walt Whitman and find traces of him here in NYC.

Still banging away at “America’s Constitution” by Akhil Reed Amar and “Becoming a US Citizen” by Ilona Bray, in a futile attempt to make sense of US politics and history. (@The_wind_of_my_soul - thank you so much for your recommendations from last month! I’ve only just got around to ordering some of those from the library.)

I just finished “The Reckoning” by Rennie Airth. I haven’t read any of his work in years, and in fact, I had already read this one (as I figured out in about five pages!), but I like his style and his plotting enough that I kept going. Fortunately, it had been long enough ago that I’d read it that the surprises were, well, if not quite intact, at least appreciated. I’ve got “The Death of Kings”, the next book in the John Madden series, on order from the library.

And I’ve got three books in Spanish on the go - “Poemas de la Vega” by Federico García Lorca, “Poesía de amor” by Pablo Neruda, and “Short Stories in Spanish” by Olly Richards. I’m doing section 3, unit fifteen on Duolingo, and my current score in Spanish is 25, which is 'aligned with the high A1 level of CEFR. In real life, this means I can chat a little, if someone is patient and ready to help. I’m also working my way through Barbara Bregstein’s “Complete Spanish Step by Step”, and trying to find a conversation class or group that I can hang out with.

If anyone has any recommendations for books in Spanish for a beginner, please let me know. When my next books come in at the library, I’m planning to ask the librarian to show me the YA section in Spanish, in the hope of being able to find some fiction or non-fiction appropriate to my level.

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My kid’s favorite Discworld, they still quote bits to me, even though they read it 10 years ago.