Finished Hostage, a one-off by Robert Crais. In a small town near Los Angeles, three losers decide to rob a convenience store on the spur of the moment. Things go south quickly, and while trying to flee they hole up in a wealthy home occupied by a father and his two kids. The town’s police chief just happens to be a former LA SWAT hostage negotiator who got burned out on that job. And bad news for the three losers, but the father in the house is mob-connected, and the mob wants something out of that house before the feds can stumble onto it. It was okay. Forgettable. Whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover obviously did not read the book, as it describes the father as “panicked” even though the small amount of time he’s not unconscious, he’s actually as cool as a cucumber.
Next up is another Crais and back to Elvis Cole/Joe Pike LA noir with Chasing Darkness.
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt Stephen Johnson
The remarkable history of Henry Every, an English sailor who seized control of the ship he was on, became a pirate, and attacked and plundered an enormous boat belonging to the Mughal Emperor.
Well-written and interesting book. Recommended
Piranesi Susannah Clarke
The titular character, Piranesi, lives happily in an infinitely-sized building decorated with statues, each one unique. He knows one other person in the building, his friend the Other, whom he meets twice a week. But then he begins to find evidence that things are not as they seem…
A strange book, to be sure, but I quite enjoyed it.
All right, I dropped off posting in these threads for a while towards the end of last year, but I’m going to try to start up again.
I started reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the very end of 2020. It’s slow-going, because the text is just – I don’t know, it’s like reading philosophy. Philosophy just doesn’t flow through your mind the same way a good fiction story does. There are enough interesting ideas in the book for me to keep reading, but I think it’s one of those books I’m reading more because it’s educational than because it’s fun.
I’ve finished three fiction books so far this year, which I’ve been reading alongside Antifragile:
The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney, about a girl who moves into a strange flat with a lot of rules, then discovers the girl before her was murdered in the flat and starts investigating the murder. It’s a well-written thriller, with enough reveals throughout the story to keep you satisfied, but enough mystery to keep you curious.
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova, about the medical condition left-neglect in the brain. The parts about the neurological condition were interesting to read, but the actual story about the main character wasn’t as engaging.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. A fantastic book about a 15-year old girl’s experience being pursued by her 40-something year old English teacher, and the aftermath.
The Gameshouse: Claire North is one of an underappreciated fantasy authors, brilliant at taking a conceit and exploring it fully. This novel presupposes a mysterious, moving gambling den, where the elite gamble everything from years of their life to their very memories on world-spanning games. It’s chilly, thought-provoking, exciting stuff.
The Once and Future Witches: I really liked the last thing I read by Alix Harrow (the Ten Thousand Doors of January), so I was excited for this one. Eh–it’s fine just fine. An alternate universe 19th century set in New Salem, after witches took over the original Salem, Massachusetts and were burned out by the Inquisition. It’s pretty good, but a bit too steeped in 21st-century feminist philosophy to work well as an historical novel. If you’re not comfortable with deeply leftist politics, you’re gonna have issues with this one.
Hench: This one has much of the same politics of the previous book, but it worked a lot better for me. It shares a lot in common with Amazon’s “The Boys” show, in its hyper-jaundiced view of superheroes, but doesn’t leave me needing a shower like that show does. The protagonist temps for supervillains. It’s brutal and funny and really well done.
Hmm, I wasn’t crazy about Ten Thousand Doors, but I heard a rave review for The Once and Future Witches, so I put it in my hold list. I think I can be leftist enough.
Finished A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II , by Simon Parkin. It was very good, and I learned a lot about the Battle of the North Atlantic.
Now I’m reading The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, by Lyndsay Faye.
You might also like Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, which covers similar ground and is very entertaining (with just a hint of pathos for a supervillain whose elaborate plots always come up just a bit short).
The leftism didn’t turn me off (I see jaws everywhere not dropping in shock). But the thoroughly 21st-century mindset of the book was kind of jarring to me. I know a lot of folks disagree, either that it’s jarring, or that it’s 21st-century, and I’m not even sure how to define that more specifically; but it didn’t “feel” to me like 19th-century characters.
It’s a Booker Prize winner from 2019 and I found it to be a fabulous read. It is about the a black, lesbian community in the U.K. but it is really simply about community and family. When I finished it earlier this week, I just wanted to cheer (and not because it is about the black, lesbian community). I’m going to look for more by this author
Finished The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes , by Lyndsay Faye, which I enjoyed. The best story, in my opinion, was “The Adventure of the Honest Wife”.
Now I’m reading Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish.
Finished Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais. Elvis Cole, Joe Pike and LA noir. In this installment, fires are raging toward Laurel Canyon, and the authorities make a gruesome discovery: The apparent suicide of a man who had in his possession a photo album with pictures of female murder victims. Three years earlier, Elvis Cole, working for the guy’s lawyer, proved conclusively that he was not a murderer. Was he wrong? The best in the series that I’ve read so far.
Have started A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben MacIntyre.
I realize that this thread had about six hours left, but what the heck.
I spent the weekend devouring Alex Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction The book is, at heart, a biography of John W. Capbell, Jr. and of Astounding Science Fiction under his editorship. But it includes huge slices of the biographies of Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard as well. By doing that it shows how they all interacted in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I’d read Asimov’s autobiographical works, Patterson’s two-volume bio of Heinlein, and several biographies of Hubbard, most notably Russell Miller’s Bare Faced Messiah (which I bought the moment I saw it, correctly figuring that the Scientologists would litigate it into oblivion as soon as they could), but Nevala-lee managed to find more material that hadn’t been in those books, or which Asimov or Patterson wouldn’t be likely to tell. And one of my complaints about Hubbard’s biographers has been that they didn’t know a damned thing about science fiction and fantasy, and concentrated on the wrong things. Nevala-Lee has published science fiction and non-genre works, and has researched the hell out of this. He knows whereof he speaks. .
One of the things I’d noticed before, but which reading this brought back to mind 00 Trump reminds me powerfully of L Ron Hubbard. both were narcissistic self-centered overweight guys with odd hair who were easy and compulsive liars. They refused to back down when challenged, were incredibly vindictive, and mistreat their closest associates, throwing them under the bus if it profits them.
I really enjoyed this one - I knew a lot about Heinlein’s and Asimov’s lives, but I learned a lot about Campbell and Hubbard (I hadn’t realized how much of Dianetics was Campbell, for one thing).
