I finished reading it with my daughter a week or two ago. What I’d forgotten was the excellent afterwork, in which the author talks about the real-world historical events and legends that he drew on for the novel. It’s a wonderful afterword, and I hope you enjoy it, and the rest of the book.
I’m currently reading You Like it Darker, by Stephen King, the first King I’ve read in more than a decade. It’s…okay?
When I was a teenager I noticed that Stephen King’s novels were populated by an inordinate number of novelists, and it was the first time I realized how far some authors take “write what you know.” This book is populated by an inordinate number of old White geezers. I guess he continues to write what he knows.
Some of the stories are the SNL-skit equivalent of horror short stories: he clearly had one cool idea and is stretching it out into an entire story. But there was one surprisingly moving moment at the end of the first story in the series that almost brought tears to my eyes; maybe I identified too much with it. And he is, as always, a very engaging writer who keeps things moving along at a brisk clip.
I’ll finish the collection, and probably wait another decade before reading another King book.
Being boring and conventional, I’m reading Moby Dick.
I’ll say it’s something like a Mt. Everest of literature for me, certainly an achievement and experience that’s worth the effort, but a lot of it just sucks. There are 2 entire chapters about historical sculptures, statues, and portraits of whales, and why they’re wrong. Melville has no qualms about going off on some multi-paragraph apostrophic rant directed at some 3rd-tier figure from Greek or Babylonian antiquity. He leaves no noun unadjected, he likes his similes lengthy and elaborate. Parts of the prose swell and gas like the floating carcass of a blasted whale, yet despite the stench you must rake the innards for the elusive lumps of ambergris known to lodge in this mass of text.
Anyway it’s OK once you get into it, but learn to recognize where Melville is launching into these monomaniacal flights of fancy, and feel free to just speed right by those. I’m pretty sure he was autistic and/or hopped up on whatever was the 19th-century version of meth.
I’m taking a break from H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire (AKA The Further Adventures of Odysseus), which seems to be bogging down after an exciting first couple of chapters. I’m reading Poul Anderson’s The Guardians of Time, which is interesting. I’m also reading a couple of books on animal behavior as background for a story I want to write.
I’ve also picked up Damn you, Entropy!: 1001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes, edited by Guy P. Harrison. The title, taken from Andrew Weir’s The Martian, ought to have tipped me off – an awful lot of his quotes are from very recent books (within the past five years), TV shows, and movies. There are some from older works (some of them a little obscure, even), and he quotes Voltaire’s Micromegas, but I’d have expected a lot more Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, etc. He quotes Liu Cixin and Ken Liu an awful lot, as well as a lot from the Star Trek franchise.
On audio, I took a break from Treasure Island to listen to Heinlein’s I Will FEar No Evil, which I’m not sure I have read since my initial reading in the early 1970s. It’s rare that I find Heinlein audio in libraries, so I had to pick this one up. I’ve picked up a trove of Robert E. Howard on audiodisc for after I finish Heinlein and Stevenson.
A classic from the Golden Age of Mystery. What seems to be a simple case = A man staying in a guest house of an English estate receives a mysterious visitor late one evening and the next morning he is found dead, shot at close range. - turns out to be anything but simple.
It was fun thinking about the mystery and reading along as the detectives unraveled what really happened.
Finished The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World, by Heather Pringle, which I recommend to those interested in that era, and The Night Dahlia, a fantasy mystery by R. S. Belcher, which I enjoyed for its language and humor.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes, edited by Gyles Brandreth.
Next up: Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner; and The Monsters of Rookhaven, a fantasy by Padraig Kenny.
I finished The Inquisitor’s Tale. A good yarn, though I kept wondering how much longer it would be allowed in a school library. Especially with all those naughty words.
I finished The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie by Carla Valentine yesterday and for the most part it was good. The author did a bit of fangirling but overall stuck to the topics. My only complaint - the repetition of a half dozen phrases - should have been caught by a halfway decent editor, but that wasn’t bad enough to ruin my enjoyment of the book.
The reason it is humorous and irreverent is that Schur is not an academic or author as such; he writes and directs TV sitcoms like Brooklyn 99, Parks And Recreation, and, crucially, The Good Place, an afterlife sitcom that frequently and directly references moral philosophy.
I’m not qualified to judge how accurate his representations of that field are, but I have read reviews by people who are, and they seem to agree that it is a more or less reasonable overview of the material you might expect in a low level Moral Philosophy 101 course.
It is entertaining and thoughtful, although sometimes he lays on the wisecracking humor so thick, it can seem like reading Dave Barry’s Guide To Moral Philosophy.
(It is not an official tie-in with The Good Place, although the show is referenced several times, and I’m told the cast members participate in the audiobook version.)
I’m all about kids reading it–but when I saw a fourth-grade teacher using it for a read-aloud, I strongly advised them to read ahead and think carefully about the plan. They decided on a different book.
I finished You Want it Darker, and while there were definitely some mediocre stories in there, taken as an old man’s retrospective, it’s got some very moving moments.
Finished Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which was interesting; and The Monsters of Rookhaven, a fantasy by Padraig Kenny, which was okay.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes, edited by Gyles Brandreth.
Now I’m reading Weird Inventions: Bizarre Gadgets You Can’t Live Without, by Edward Hopper, et al, and Paratime, by H. Beam Piper, which is a science fiction story collection about the Paratime Police.
Started this morning and read 80 pages of a 104-page novella called A Short Stay In Hell, by Steven Peck. So far, so freakin’ good. I’ll probably go hide out somewhere this afternoon and finish it up.
Done. I really liked it. I’ve always dug microcosm books, about different worlds with strange rules, and the people who struggle to escape or make sense of them. It’s kind of a bummer that it doesn’t really have an ending, but then you wouldn’t expect it to, would you?
Started this morning on The Garden by Nick Newman, a novel about two sisters who live on a walled estate, shielded from whatever remains of a damaged world.
Started this morning on Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, the story of a medieval knight and a girl who claims to see angels, journeying through a plague-ridden land on a quest.
Not to jinx anything, but it’s been a really good reading year so far!
Finished Weird Inventions: Bizarre Gadgets You Can’t Live Without, by Edward Hopper, et al. My favorite was a plastic wishbone, so families who fight over it at Thanksgiving can have extras. The inventor sued Sears when they sold something similar, and he won 1.7 million dollars. Also finished Paratime, by H. Beam Piper. My favorite story was “He Walked Around the Horses”, which multiple people said I would enjoy when I mentioned it in the “What’s the First Sentence” thread. The other stories (especially “Time Crime”) really didn’t age well, which is not uncommon in older works of fiction, but it’s especially noticeable here.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes, edited by Gyles Brandreth.
Next up: The Great Sweepstakes of 1877: A True Story of Southern Grit, Gilden Age Tycoons, and a Race That Galvanized the Nation, by Mark Shrager; and An Episode of Sparrows, by Rumer Godden.
Finished it. A bit dated now, but still worth a read.
I zipped through Some Writer!: The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet, a charming YA bio of the Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little author, including interesting details on his childhood, upbringing, literary inspirations and early work on The New Yorker. My favorite takeaway: it took him 17 takes to read aloud the scene of Charlotte’s death in creating an early audiobook, he was so choked up.
My current audiobook is Headhunters by Jo Nesbo, a dark comedy/crime thriller about an arrogant corporate headhunter who runs murderously afoul of his latest recruit. It was adapted as a crazy good 2011 Norwegian film, which I saw some years ago. The movie follows the book pretty closely, but I actually think I like the movie better.
