How funny - for me on this read-through project, it’s ‘Moving Pictures’ which has really stood out for me.
Four more books for me:
The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown. Now a major motion picture! I read this with my third graders–and although I didn’t much like it on my first two reads in the past, this time I really appreciated it, in large part because of the excellent book-club discussions these kids had about it. It’s a simple, mostly gentle character study of a being rising from programming to self-awareness and from order to wildness.
The Inquisitor’s Tale: or, Three Magical Children and their Holy Dog. Another kidlit book, another reread, and an absolute banger. Most kidlit books don’t feature a scene where a monk tears the leg off of his donkey and beats bandits to death before reattaching the leg to a beast none the worse for wear. Between that and the horrific Jewish pogrom that occupies the book, and the myriad other weird-as-shit scenes, it’s unlike any other kid’s book I’ve read. If you have any tolerance for reading children’s books, I highly recommend this one.
Asunder, by Kerstin Hall. A Deathspeaker (sold her soul to an otherworldly being for the ability to speak with the dead) stumbles on a world-shaking plot and has to flee before she’s caught, along with her phantom boyfriend. I mean, sure? It just felt like a lot of other books that I’ve read. Ann Leckie blurbed it, and I freaking love Ann Leckie, but it was nowhere near as weird or glorious as that led me to expect. Solid modern fantasy but nothing special.
Embassytown by China Mieville. Now HERE’S a fuckin NOVEL! It’s a reread for me, for a book club, and I was thoroughly delighted by it on the second reading. A planetary romance (not in the smoochy sense), a world on the edge of known space occupied by an alien species whose language is inherited, absolutely tied to thought, and impossible for the aliens to lie in. It’s a novel about linguistics, and colonization, and politics, and relationships, and Mieville’s signature phenomenally weird shit. I went looking for reviews of it, and the first one I stumbled across was a glowing review written by the Grand Dame of science fiction herself. So, so good!
Finished Vol. 2 of Gou Tanabe’s manga of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Pretty good, although it was sometimes hard to understand exactly what’s going on in the darker drawings.
I’ve been on kind of a Big Muddy kick, having read in recent months Percival Everett’s James, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream. Now I’ve started Twain’s (somewhat fictionalized) 1883 memoir Life on the Mississippi. I’ll be particularly interested to read about him learning to become a steamboat pilot before the Civil War.
One of my favorites. I discovered it in a Bamberger’s book department (back when such things existed) and devoured it whole. There are a few dull stretches, but that’s made up for by some truly excellent pasages, my favorite being his comparison of the pilot losing his sense of beauty, and comparing this to a doctor.
Twain wasn’t quite as young as he suggests in the book, and his mentor, Horace Bixby, was only nine years older than Twain (and outlived him). Bixby was not happy with his depiction in Twain’s book, and didn’t like the fame it brought to him (Bixby, that is). He especially didn’t like that Twain portrayed him as a cursing man. Don’t let any of this dissuade you – the book is a hoot.
Life on the Mississippi is one of the best books I read last year. So far it’s my favorite Twain book.
Finished Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land, by N. Scott Momaday, which was a brilliant set of essays. and Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan, which was okay.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.
Next up: Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth, by Lenore Newman and Evan D. G. Fraser, and
Not Quite a Ghost, by Anne Ursu.
Finished Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth, by Lenore Newman and Evan D. G. Fraser, which was very interesting, and Not Quite a Ghost, by Anne Ursu, which is one of the best novels I’ve read so far this year. It’s a kid’s book I found in a couple of blogs talking about potential Newbery medalists, and though it wasn’t a winner or runner up, it’s still excellent. It’s inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.
Next up: The Secret Life of Hidden Places: Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds That Made Them, by Stefan Bachmann and April Genevieve Tucholke; and The Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolfe.
Finished The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill. It started out with a bang and I thought it was gonna be a great whodunit. But the plot got bogged down in the last half of the book and I was ready for it to end. Plus I figured out who did it with a couple of chapters to go.
Next up: We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz.
Thanks, CalMeacham. I will definitely continue with Twain.
Just finished Twenty-Six Seconds by Alexandra Zapruder, about how her grandfather’s fateful afternoon in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963 changed both their family and American history itself. It explores the film’s pop culture impact, conspiracy theories, copyright and government taking issues. It’s excellent - very interesting and engaging, and the best nonfiction I’ve read in quite awhile. Anyone interested in the Kennedy assassination should read it.
Just started Baghdad Without a Map by Tony Horwitz, about his travels as a young reporter through the Middle East in 1991. It’s not nearly as good as I remember Confederates in the Attic as being, but I’ll stick with it for now.
Finished Clever Little Thing, by Helena Echlin, a book about a mother whose child undergoes a drastic personality change after the death of her babysitter. I think the best thing about the book is that for most of it, the reader doesn’t know the cause of the issue or even who to believe, so it really held my interest. Five stars.
Started today on Havoc, by Christopher Bollen. It’s kind of a Bad Seed story told from the perspective of an elderly lady who’s not such a wholesome seed herself, and very nicely written too. I’m quite enjoying it so far, and hope it turns out well because I see the author’s written several other books.
Finished I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin.
A millennial says, “You know what this world needs? A retelling of the movie Highway 61, set in modern times, in the style of Donald Westlake, except for the sections where characters go on shallowly-researched monologues about their views of the modern world.”
His Boomer editor says, “Okay, but what is this ‘Reddit’ and ‘post’ and ‘username’ mumbo jumbo? You gotta explain every reference post-1990 in tedious detail!”
So we get this novel.
I mean, it was fun, and I read it fast, but there were no surprises, and no real giggles. And no moments at all where the character philosophies were anything beyond flags of “people to avoid at parties.”
Although I did look up Guinea Worms. Cool! Next, look up malaria cases.
I read that one also, and liked it less than any of his other books.
I think I’m on a downward spiral with him. I’ve liked each of his books less than the last, and I it’s due partly to his being a one-trick pony: he writes in this over-the-top obnoxious cartoonish tawdry style that’s funny, but that gets old after awhile.
Had I realized the book was by him, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, and honestly I feel a little embarrassed that I didn’t take one look at the title and realize it was him.
This article was linked in another thread the other day, and I thought, well at least he has that to his credit. I can’t remember specifically now, but Black Box of Doom had some things going on in it that felt kind of skeevy and anti-feminist.
Oh, absolutely. The main character was an outright incel, and the second character was a feminist, and huge sections of the book are arguments between the two. The author, based on other stuff, pretty clearly ain’t pro-incel; but to his credit he does his best to write from within the head of this incel asshole, to give him the best arguments for his case, not the worst. Which means that the reader gets treated to a whole bunch of pages of incel rhetoric. Like, Gandalf-explains-the-history-of-a-river-length monologues, except the river is Harvey Weinstein.
It’s just that I hated both of the characters–him because he’s an incel asshole, and the secondary character because she’s super smug about all her views, and like Rah Rah progress, and is just insufferable.
Finished The Secret Life of Hidden Places: Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds That Made Them, by Stefan Bachmann and April Genevieve Tucholke, which was excellent; and The Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolfe, which, like the first book, had excellent worldbuilding.
Next up: The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World, by Heather Pringle, and The Night Dahlia, a fantasy mystery by R. S. Belcher.
Just zipped through O Captain, My Captain by Robert Burleigh, illustr. by Sterling Hundley, a kids’ book about Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. Interesting text and graphics. Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals in Washington, and saw Lincoln’s carriage pass by now and then, but they never met, as far as anyone knows.
Just finished Triumph and Illusion, the fifth and final volume of Jonathon Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War.
The five volumes have not been a quick read - in keeping with the length of the war(s) they are each 600-700 pages - but the detail is what makes it. This is broadly a narrative history with occasional thematic digressions that give a good overview. Some of this is traditional military history, with maps and formations etc., but there is a huge amount of political, economic and social history in there too.
I was particularly intrigued to see how Sumption would handle Joan of Arc, because his treatment of various important women in previous volumes had been somewhere between abrupt and dismissive. In fact he treats her with respect and sympathy, doing a reasonably good job of dissecting the competing legends to give an idea of the - let’s face it, utterly remarkable - teenage girl behind them.
The narrative of this final novel is kind of depressing, not in a “boo, my side lost” kind of way but because of the overwhelming mood of a grim inevitability dragged out way past sense by stubborn, greedy and stupid people who probably did know that England was destined to lose its lands in France, but couldn’t see their way to just calling it quits, and thus dragged the war out senselessly for an extra couple of decades. There are I think some interesting parallels with later colonialism that somebody clever really ought to look at.
This is in many ways a sensible correction to much popular English understanding of The Hundred Years War, which tends to dwell on victories in battles such as Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt etc. without really acknowledging the fundamental point which is that when all is said and done England lost.
And as a break from that, I’ve picked up Damon Runyon’s short stories which are magnificent.
(Although because they were written in the 30s/40s and include reference to both black people and Jewish people, it is occasionally a bit like walking along a beautiful golden beach and seeing a dog turd. You can skip over it but it detracts a bit from the otherwise beautiful landscape.)
I finished Havoc, which was pretty entertaining though it left a couple of loose threads.
I realized I haven’t actually read any kid lit in a while, so my next two will be The Inquisitor’s Tale, and Not Quite a Ghost, both mentioned upthread. I got a good start on The Inquisitor’s Tale this morning and am enjoying both the story and the illustrations.