Finished Witchcraft For Wayward Girls, which was okay. It made me cry a few times, for subject matter and current events reasons, as it’s about pregnant teenagers.
The Swallows by Lisa Lutz – A high school where girls are being objectified by boys, but instead of speaking up and complaining, the girls decide to get even. And they get vicious.
Never Lie by Freida McFadden – This thriller is the king of “I didn’t see that ending coming”!
Finished You’ve Got Eight Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World, by Paul Hellman which is a quick, worthwhile read, and The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe. It’s supposed to be a masterpiece, and its worldbuilding is excellent, but its plot felt disjointed and I didn’t find some of the characters’ actions plausible. It’s the first of a four-part series, which I’m planning on finishing this year. I hope I like the other books more.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.
Next up: How to Read Medieval Art, by Wendy A. Stein, and Constant Hearses and Other Revolutionary Mysteries, by Edward D. Hoch.
Finished it. Quite readable but concise - I actually wouldn’t have minded if it were twice as long. Focuses on the British/Commonwealth monarchy, but with interesting looks at the Thai, Spanish, Japanese and various Western European and Arab crowns. Recommended for anyone with an interest in royalty, political science or history.
Just started At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, a horror manga by Gou Tanabe, about a doomed 1931 exploratory and scientific expedition to Antarctica. All of the characters look not quite American while also being not quite Japanese, but I’m digging it.
The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi Bruce Upholt
A history of humanity’s relationship with America’s greatest river, which runs almost the length of the country from North to South. Ever since European arrived, we’ve been meddling with the river in various ways, with levees, dams and dredging. The author’s assessment is that the cost of these projects has greatly exceeded the benefits, and maybe it would be better to allow the river to return to a more natural state.
See also the “Atchafalaya” section of John McPhee’s book Control of Nature (a book well worth reading for its analysis of the Los Angeles earthquake-flood-mudslide cycle, “Los Angeles against the Mountains”). There’s an enormous amount of ,money and effort poured into trying to keep the river at bay.
thanks for the recommendation of the McPhee book. I’ll definitely check it out.
The Atchafalaya is discussed the The Great River as well. It is a “distributary” (a word I learned from this book) of the Mississippi that branches off from it just before it enters Louisiana. The worry is that the course of the Mississippi could shift, diverting most its water into the Atchafalya and leaving Baton Rouge and New Orleans high and dry. There are various sets of dams to prevent this and they’ve worked. So far.
Finished Testimony by Scott Turow. Pretty good legal read about an investigation into a supposed civilian massacre which occurred many years earlier in the Bosnian War.
This morning I started The Woman in the Library, a murder mystery by Sulari Gentill. 3 chapters in, and I’m hooked.
Finished it. It bogs down a bit more in the final quarter of the book than I recalled, but it’s still well worth a read (including lots of interesting stuff about the river, and about the steamboat trade).
Next up: Twenty-Six Seconds by Alexandra Zapruder, nonfiction about how her grandfather’s fateful afternoon in Dealey Plaza changed both their family and American history itself.
Finished How to Read Medieval Art, by Wendy A. Stein, which was quite interesting and featured stunning photos of a variety of art. It reminded me of taking art history courses in college, which I enjoyed. Also finished Constant Hearses and Other Revolutionary Mysteries, by Edward D. Hoch, of which the best was “The Orchard of Caged Birds”.
Next up: What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, by Gary Smith, and Fireheart Tiger, a fantasy novella by Aliette de Bodard.
Still reading The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.
Finished The Swallows by Lisa Lutz. This book had so many characters and the point-of-view changed with every chapter, until I was starting to get confused. However, the story kept me hooked and ate up my spare thoughts in the wee hours of the night, which is a major benefit. Four stars.
I got about halfway through Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn and gave up. I can see why it was nominated on the Goodreads Choice Awards last year because it has LGBT characters and it’s very clearly about modern times, but that’s exactly why I tossed it. It’s too close to modern times, especially in the last couple of weeks, and the characters felt like the author was playing buzzword bingo. “Okay, I have a lesbian character, now what if I made a Black lesbian character? Do I have a transgender character yet? No, let’s toss one in there. What about genderqueer? Is there one of those yet? No? Okay, let me shoehorn her in somewhere.”
Maybe if these characters had anything other than the most surface motivation for anything they did and grew and changed through the course of the story I might have been able to tolerate them. But such things are not done in Buzzword Bingo.
Also the science in this science fiction is extremely iffy. In one scene the Atlantic Ocean is described as full of trash, but in another scene two characters go swimming in it and don’t seem to be bothered with the trash which may or may not be in it, I think the author forgot. And another character is chosen to bear the CEO’s child so the egg is just implanted in her with exactly zero prep. I have never gone through IVF but I know people who have and I remember the extremely long preparation process that they went through before anyone ever thought of implanting an egg.
Finished Lethal Prey by John Sandford. Another well-written and entertaining Davenport/Flowers novel by a favorite author. But…with a wholly unsatisfying ending, the first that I can remember by Sandford. I suspect this is leading to a sequel, but that’s not very common for this author.
with charging stations 