WHERE did June go?! How can it be gone already? Out here in the Western US, it probably melted. Record heat everywhere, and any minute now record fires too. sigh Ever feel like Mother Nature is slamming that reset button?
So whatcha’ all reading?
Twospot By Bill Pronzini and Colin Wilcox. Pronzini’s sections are good, not great, but Wilcox’s are awful: cliched writing, he’s trying to hard to be hard boiled, stereotypical tough guy cops, casual misogyny and the pacing is abyssmal. (Yes I know it was published 50 + years ago, it’s still bad) I will finish just to see if the conflict is as stupid as it appears…
The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian. Not one of her better books, honestly, the book is dragging it’s feet like a kid going to the dentist and the characters are lackluster and rather uninteresting.
On audio book:
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. A dystopian, western set in an authoritarian US. I am amused that Utah, my home, is an “insurrection” state. We have plenty of experience at fighting authoritarianism here.
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.
I read a bunch in June but I think I forgot to post about them at all, so Ima dump a bunch here:
Return of the King: at long last, I finished reading the series to my twelve-year-old (she was 11 when we started last summer). Tolkien at his best is among the best, and nobody can take that away from him. The climactic sequence on Mount Doom has like three astonishing-yet-inevitable plot twists in two pages. So good! And there’s a lot else good. But damn does the man love to lecture via character mouthpieces. The Curse of Chalion: so many folks here recommended it, and I picked it up, and it was really good. I have Paladin’s Soul upstairs as my next reading. The Loop: modern angsty-teen splatter horror. Not really my jam, although I respect that it has the courage of its convictions. A Master of Djinn: Would you like to read a murder mystery set in 1920s Cairo, with a lot of magic and djinni? Of course you would. This isn’t great literature, but it was pretty dang fun. The Galaxy and the Ground Within: Several strangers meet at a 24-hour truck stop in a community undergoing a traffic crisis and get to know one another. Oh yeah, and it’s on a barren planet and they can’t wait until they can take their spaceships off-planet. It’s Becky Chambers, and I know some folks are like Oh No We Don’t Like Her, but whatevs I think she’s amazing, and if you love her previous stuff you’ll love this, and if you don’t, pbththbthbth. Hummingbird Salamander: this is Jeff Vandermeer’s most straightforward novel in years. It’s still pretty weird and has a lot of nonlinear narrative, but it’s a basic “Suburbanite comes into possession of a weird artifact and it upends her life” story, thoughtful and well-constructed and moody. I liked it. Black Water Sister: but I really, really liked this one, and hope to see it during awards next year. A college grad at loose ends moves back to Malaysia with her traditional family, and there are ghosts and gods and crime and it’s just fantastic. Strongly recommended! The Blacktongue Thief: Like a lot of folks, I wasn’t real happy in November 2016. Life super-sucked. What got me out of my funk was reading a nasty, bloody, funny fantasy novel, A Crown for Cold Silver. Anyway, this book reminded me of that: it’s nasty, bloody, and funny. Terry Pratchett it ain’t, but if the author is a nac mac feegle it wouldn’t surprise me. Scariest goblins ever. A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians: a reasonably competent treatment of the concept: what if the late eighteenth century Caribbean revolutions and European politics had lots of magicians involved? It was fine just fine, but I didn’t like it as well as I expected to. Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick: Exactly what it sounds like. Remote Control: Nnedi Okorafor is an amazing author, and if you haven’t checked her out yet, this might be a good start. A girl in Ghana encounters a mysterious meteorite, and it ain’t good. A short, haunting novella.
This morning I finished a great thriller called The Secret She Keeps by Michael Robotham. I have in the past read his Joseph O’Loughlin series which is an exciting mystery thriller series from the perspective of a psychologist. The Secret She Keeps is a stand alone psychological thriller that carries the similar themes but his writing style alternates between two female lead characters. One who is the victim and one who is the perpetrator. You know which is which from the start but the fun in this book is going beneath the surface of these two women who appear to be on the outside so similar but in reality totally opposite yet on the inside so opposite but actually so much alike.
Just finished rereading a favorite of my teen years, The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. Lots of interesting (if somewhat sanitized and selective, in light of later revelations) behind-the-scenes stuff about the iconic Sixties sf show. The book ends early in the show’s third and last season, when its newly-assigned poor time slot on Friday night didn’t bode well, but Whitfield already had an inkling of the likely enduring appeal of the show.
I’m also enjoying The House of Silk by Anthony Horwitz. It’s a Sherlock Holmes novel, set in 1890 and liberally sprinkled with references to the Conan Doyle canon both subtle and obvious. Horwitz isn’t as talented as my favorite Holmesian writer, the late June Thomson, but he does a pretty good job. There’s a clever locked-room mystery as a subplot.
I have about a tenth of the audiobook to go in David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb , a 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winner about the last days of the USSR. It’s the summer of 1991, the half-assed Soviet military/KGB coup is quickly falling apart, Gorbachev is under house arrest and refusing to lift a finger to help his captors, and Yeltsin has climbed up on a tank outside the Russian legislature for his CMOA. It’s a generally interesting book, but earlier sometimes a bit of a slog.
Over the weekend I started reading aloud The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, the second in his terrific Old Man’s War military sf series, with my teenage son. Started with a commando raid on a secret alien research base that was up to no good. Fun stuff.
Finished The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. What a journey! Described as the world’s biggest shaggy-dog story, TS was published in nine volumes from 1759-67. One digression after the other – digression after digression after digression ad infinitum. The hero does not even get born until I think it’s Volume IV. The author may have intended to keep it up, as he did mention a possible 40 volumes if he lived long enough. He died the year after Volume IX came out. I love old novels like this, but they take some work. For TS, there are 137 pages of explanatory endnotes, which you ignore at your own peril. The book is very funny and very bawdy, but the endnotes are necessary to understand what an 18th-century reader would recognize immediately. As just two examples, back then “siege” was a slang term for “anus” and “attacking with armour” for “wearing a condom.” Since Tristram’s uncle is a career military man, there is ample opportunity for double entendres. And I learned that “slut” was actually a complimentary term for a lady back then, although it was still somewhat jarring to read statements like, “She was a pretty little slut,” written in all innocence. At one point, ten whole pages are missing covering an entire chapter – one page has one number, the next page is ten numbers later. I actually thought some glitch had occurred at the publisher’s, but then the author spent the whole next chapter explaining that he had personally ripped out those pages, because that chapter had been so good, it made the entire rest of the book look shabby by comparison, so it had to go. Later on, two whole consecutive chapters are blank pages, then several chapters later he finally explains that he had not been ready yet to relate the events of those chapters, but he was now, so then he told what was supposed to have gone into them. The book was wildly popular in Britain, and Sterne was feted throughout London. I recently read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin lived in London during this time. I kept imagining him reading this book and attending a dinner party or two with Sterne present.
I first became aware of this novel years ago when I watched Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and the always wonderful Rob Brydon. While the book is not everyone’s cup of tea, you should not miss this hilarious film. Ebert’s review is here. (“Cock and bull story” is Britspeak for “shaggy-dog story.”) The film is ostensibly a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Tristram Shandy the movie, but just as Tristram can’t seem to get himself born in the book, the movie can’t quit manage to get itself made. I’ve taken off work to address a few medical issues that are cropping up and so took the time finally to read this. Glad I did. Not a summer beach read but well worth the effort if this is your thing.
Next up, I’m going to decompress a little by returning to Elvis Cole, Joe Pike and LA noir with Taken, by Robert Crais.
Finished When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today, by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, which was interesting.
Now I’m reading The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, by Poul Anderson.
Finished The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories , by Poul Anderson, of which the title story was the best. It also has the interesting distinction of winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for, respectively, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story!
Now I’m reading Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare: From the Bounty to Safety–4,162 Miles across the Pacific in a Rowing Boat, by John Toohey.
I finished both of these. The House of Silk had a somewhat predictable ending but was definitely worth a read. Horwitz writes very much in the Conan Doyle style, and portrays the friendship between Holmes and Watson particularly well. Recommended for any Sherlock Holmes fan.
Lenin’s Tomb is an ambitious, very impressive history and I’d likewise recommend it. Remnick is methodical and rightly scathing in writing about the seven decades of murder, secrecy, corruption, brutality and oppression under Soviet rule, with occasional flashes of humor as it all came crashing down. My favorite line: “The collapse of the dream of Communist reform left the people stranded between the gulag and a McDonald’s. What could they do but order a Big Mac?”
Just started Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, given to me by a friend. It’s a long essay by a noted African American theologian of the Forties and Fifties who was a classmate of MLK’s at Morehouse College, and later his mentor.
Forgot to mention that Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness” features a hero whose name is Eric Sherrinford (which you may know was Doyle’s original first name for Holmes) and who consciously models his behavior on Holmes (although he doesn’t specify that name.)
Finished Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare: From the Bounty to Safety–4,162 Miles across the Pacific in a Rowing Boat , by John Toohey, which I recommend to anyone who’s interested in the topic.
Now I’m reading Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell.
Oh, and a rare Did Not Finish goes to How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse. It’s a science-fiction reimagining of Sleeping Beauty (get it? Rory like Aurora, Thorne like Wall o’?), but I barely made it through the too-cute-by-half first chapter. Afterwards I looked at a review which confirmed that it’s only about the Disney Sleeping Beauty, which obscurely irritates me. It looked to be one of those feminist books where all the men are villains or at best absent-minded idiots. It managed to get up my nose about six different ways during the first chapter, so I noped out of there.
Finished Taken, by Robert Crais. LA noir featuring Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Nita Morales hires Cole to find her missing daughter, believing a ransom demand is a ruse by her and her boyfriend. She’s wrong. They’ve been grabbed in the California desert by bajadores, border bandits who prey on coyotes bringing people up from Mexico, stealing the undocumented immigrants from them. Very good, as always.
Next up is another Crais, Suspect. A standalone, not part of the Cole/Pike series.
Finished In Dog We Trust by Neil Plakcy. It was a fun amateur sleuth cozy with a surprisingly serious undercurrent. Good fun.
I’m staring Reasonable Doubt by Gregory Ashe. In spite of the book starting on my birthday, the Somerset & Hazard books are emotional reads and I will be ready to dive into the stack of silly cozies I’ve been saving once I am done with it.
I finished The Library of the Dead, by T.L. Huchu. It was pretty good! I see it’s first of a series, so I will gladly pick up the next book when it’s available. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be young adult…the protagonist is a teen, and there’s no sex, but some of the language used raised my eyebrows. Anyway, girl ghost-talker solves mystery…good enough for me.
This morning, I started on Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone. You know that thing where you’re trying to get into a book and find out what it’s all about, but there’s something the protagonist can’t bear to face and they keep pushing it away so you can’t get to it? After forty pages of that, I decided I don’t care enough to go on. The book has a blurb on the cover from Stephen King, which usually means I won’t like it anyway.
Just began The Truelove, the next in Patrick O’Brian’s series of Napoleonic sea adventures. Capt. Aubrey finds an attractive young female stowaway after his ship, the frigate Surprise, leaves the British penal colony of Sydney, Australia, and then must decide what to do with her. Good stuff.
Lock Every Door by Riley Sager - A very well written fast paced and gripping story about a down on her luck woman named Jules who gets the opportunity of a lifetime to be paid big money as an apartment sitter for three months at the famous Bartholomew building. Home to the rich and isolated from the outside world of New York. Something which seems perfectly innocuous at first until…
