Sounds good. I found this Stephen King blurb on Amazon, “Looking for a suspense novel that will keep you up until way past midnight? Look no further than Lock Every Door, by Riley Sager,” and have now reserved the audiobook from my local library. Thanks for the tip!
Started today on The Last Human by Zack Jordan, about a girl living among aliens, trying to hide her true identity, and discover if she is really the last of our species. Pretty good so far.
And holy crap, I won a Goodreads giveaway! It’s a non-fiction book by an author whose fiction and essays I’ve always enjoyed. It’s called The Night the Lights Went Out by Drew Magary, and it’s about his recovery from a nearly life-ending injury. I’m really excited to read it.
Finished Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell. Meh.
Now I’m reading To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography of Lorraine Hansberry.
Finished To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography of Lorraine Hansberry.
It was excellent.
Next: The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart, by Emily Nunn.
I’m coming to this thread a bit late, but it’s great to find another fan of Tristram Shandy!
Can I suggest that you may enjoy James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson?
It’s non-fiction, but it’s written warts-and-all, and it’s highly entertaining. If you’re already comfortable with 18th century writing, you’ll find it easy going.
Boswell was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, by the way. When Benjamin Franklin first arrived in London, he made of point of calling on Boswell (who was already a well-known public figure on his own merits, long before he wrote the Life), and later invited Boswell to join a club he started in London.
The first part of the book, dealing with Johnson’s early years in not as interesting as the later parts. It really takes off from the point where Boswell himself met Johnson, perhaps a quarter of the way into the book. You could skip the early part, start with Boswell’s meeting with Johnson, and go back to the beginning later, if you like. The good part starts on 16th May 1763, or a little before.
In fact, it’s the kind of book you can open at random and dip into anywhere, and find something interesting and entertaining.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve heard of that but not read it. But I would definitely read it from beginning to end, that’s just how I’m geared.
Meanwhile, I’ve finished Suspect, by Robert Crais. LAPD cop James Scott suffers from PTSD after he is shot on duty and his partner killed. Nine months later, he signs on with the K-9 Platoon and partners with Maggie, a German shepherd who is also suffering from PTSD after being wounded in Afghanistan. Together, they hunt for the perps of the shooting. A one-off, not part of the Elvis Cole-Joe Pike series. Very good, a quick read.
Next up is Operation Garbo: The Personal Story of the Most Successful Spy of World War II, by Juan Pujol Garcia and Nigel West. I’ve been meaning to read it for a while now, as Juan Pujol Garcia, the successful spy in the subtitle, is a personal hero. He is exactly who I would like to be if I were in WWII.
I do all of my reading at night, in bed before I fall asleep. In May/June I got into the habit of falling asleep to streaming video on my iPad, so it took forever to finish John Colapinto’s nonfiction This Is The Voice. I recommend it, though: it was well-written, and contained information not only about the physiological voice but about speech development, language, singing, etc.
I am currently ~65% of the way through Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel The Other Black Girl, which I discovered by searching Amazon for something new to read. The description was interesting enough:
“Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust. Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW. It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.”
However, last night I decided that I’m not going to bother finishing it. It’s just not written very well, and Nella comes off like an immature drama queen who causes most of her own problems. The chapters skip around three different storylines in at least two different timelines, and I’m just not sure why I should care about any of them. What I read last night sealed the deal, though: one of the alternate storyline characters started referring to Other Black Girls (with the caps, and abbreviated afterwards as “OBGs”), some kind of supernatural beings who can infect “regular” black women and somehow take away the essence of their blackness…I think? Meh.
I’ve been watching old episodes of the UK fine arts competition show Portrait Artist of the Year, and the first season’s grand prize was a commission to paint author Hilary Mantel. I’d never heard of her, so I looked her up on Amazon. It seems that most of her work is historical fiction or near-fiction, which is not my thing, but I discovered a 2006 novel called Beyond Black that sounds promising:
“Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever.”
I downloaded a sample to my Kindle, and I plan to start it tonight.
Yeah, that does sound interesting. I’ll add it to Mount To-Be-Read.
And, because of your intriguing review, I just went to my librariy’s ebook app Libby and borrowed it 
Hope you like it.
Doh! That should have read LAPD cop Scott James. Darn these people with all first names.
I’ve read all three of Weir’s science fiction novels. I feel that The Martian was driven by the situation. Artemis was driven by the characters. And Operation Hail Mary was driven by gimmicks.
I just read You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe. I bought it on a whim but I ended up enjoying it much more than I expected. It’s a good mix of serious scholarship lightened by some irreverence towards the subject and other biographies of the subject.
Poul Anderson was one of those writers who got a bee in his bonnet about some other writer’s character and kept circling back to him. In Anderson’s case it was Sherlock Holmes. You not only have the character in Queen of Air and Darkness, but you have Syalock in “The Martian Crown Jewels” (Syalock is a Martian so taken with Holmes that he wears a “tirstoker” cap and lives on The Street of Those who Prepare Nourishment in Ovens). In “The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound” (co-authored, like all the Hoka stories, with Gordon R. Dickson) you get a bunch of aliens (who resemble teddy bears) re-creating Victorian London, with one of them being Sherlock Holmes.
Philip Jose Farmer was similarly obsessed with Tarzan of the Apes.
I’m about a third of the way through Poul Anderson’s The Van Rijn Method, which I thought would be simply a collection of stories about Anderson’s character Nicholas van Rijn and his Polesotechnic League of traders (obviously based on the Hanseatic League), but it took me until the fourth story before the character was even mentioned. It appears that the collection was made by combining Anderson’s book The Earth Book of Stormgate (itself a collection of earlier stories, some re-written, put together with framing material and published in 1978) with some later Van Rijn stories. Trying to understand it is like doing an archaeological dig on the literary history. It’s wort it, though. Van Rijn is a malaproptic hoot.
My bedside reading is still working my way through All the Countries the Americans have Invaded (which is segmented country by country, so it’s perfect for bite-sized morsels that you can read as many as you want before turning out the light). I’m also re-reading my facsimile edition of The Jefferson Bible (More properly, as Jefferson titled it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth)
On audio I just finished up Tom Clancy and Peter Telep’s Against All Enemies It’s good, but Clancy’s new hero, Max Moore, seems to be a magnet for trouble, with a lot of his companions dying brutal deaths. And his enemies are particularly nasty. When I picked it up, I thought at first that it was another of the plethora of post-Clancy novels. But this was one of his last novels, featuring a new hero who wasn’=t Jack Ryan, and which was apparently supposed to be the start of a new series. But the sequel, Search and Destroy, never appeared.
Now I’ve started Steohen King’s Elevation. Right off the bat I was put on the alert, because King named his hero Scott Carey. King seems to now give you clues to show that he’s being inspired by other fictional works (he’s long been “adopting” other people’s stories – I could give you a list – but now at least he lets you know about it. Like when he titled a story that feels a lot like the movie They Live “The Ten O’Clock People”. They Live was based on Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning”).
If you haven’t caught on, googled “Scott Carey Richard Matheson”. King even mentions insecticide and gives his Scott Carey a cat. It’s not developing exactly as I thought it might, but you can see the relationship.
I don’t need to, but I was thinking about the story this morning. (“So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite.”) It was sparked by something I had dreamed. And now here you are bringing it up again. Not a mind-blowing coincidence, but interesting.
Huh. Learn something new every day. (Although I did know about Farmer’s obsession with Tarzan.)
GreenWyvern and Siam_Sam, you may know that Sherlock Holmes affectionately referred to Dr. Watson now and then as “my Boswell.”
I saw this subtitled Spanish documentary, Garbo: The Spy, awhile back and enjoyed it: Garbo: The Spy (2009) - IMDb. Two of my favorite fun facts about Garbo were that (a) he was the only person in WWII to be decorated by both King George VI and Adolf Hitler, and (b) by early 1945, the Germans were shoving so much money at him to support his vast (and imaginary) spy network that they were covering most of MI6’s wartime budget.
Little_Nemo, I mostly liked Coe’s You Never Forget Your First, too. A good companion piece is Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.
Finished The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart , by Emily Nunn, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Rambling, by Jimmy Cajoleas.
I saw that. It’s how I first learned of Garbo. Ebert has a good review here. Another fun fact: When Garbo decided one of his imaginary spies needed to die, the Nazis paid his “widow” a pension!
Excerpt from Ebert’s review:
His masterwork was to inform them that the Allies would fake a landing at Normandy to lure the German army there, and then unleash Patton’s surprise attack at Calais. They believed him. The fiction worked so well that the Nazis never were up to strength at Normandy, and the fabled Panzer division, while en route there, was diverted to Calais instead.
By this point, the Allies were working closely with Garcia. Three hours before the D-Day attack was timed to begin, Eisenhower personally authorized Garcia to tip off the Nazis, reckoning they wouldn’t have time for troop movements. In a stroke of luck, when Garcia’s message arrived, the Nazi communications center was unstaffed, and so when they discovered his timely warning hours later, he looked even more reliable.
Incredibly, weeks after the invasion, he continued to convince them the real target was elsewhere. When they asked why the attack at Calais never came, he explained: “They had such unexpected success at Normandy, they decided to cancel it.” The Nazis continued to believe Garcia to the end, and he became the only man decorated by both sides in World War II.