Finished The Promise, by Robert Crais. Elvis Cole-Joe Pike LA noir. Cole is hired to find a grieving mother, and his search takes him to a seemingly ordinary house in LA’s Echo Park neighborhood. Except the house and the people hiding inside are not ordinary. At the same time, LAPD K-9 Patrol officer Scott James and his German shepherd Maggie, from Crais’ novel Suspect, are tracking a fugitive to the same house. Very good, as usual.
And that brings me up in the Cole-Pike timeline to The Wanted, which was the first Crais book I read, it having been given to me by my now-deceased neighbor. That leaves only one more Crais book I have not read, the Cole-Pike novel A Dangerous Man. And I do have a copy here waiting to be read.
But I am saving it. Next up will be a little history, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, by Dan Jones.
I liked When Worlds Collide, and I HATED After Worlds Collide. It’s anticlimactic (as it practically has to be. After you’ve destroyed the Earth, where is there to go but down?) and it has one of those things I really dislike in stories – “The Bad Guys have so completely infiltrated our defenses that there’s no point in taking precautions” T.H. White pulled that in his novel Darkness at Pemberley, and in both cases I immediately lost all sympathy with the main characters. If you’re not going to root for your own survival, then why should I?
Almst finished with Poul Anderson’s The Van Rijn Method and also with my bedside reading, All the Countries the Americans have Invaded and The Jefferson Bible. Next up is Jules Verne’s The Floating Island (I read a different translation a decade or so ago, Propellor Island) and, for bedside, James Loewen’s Sundown Towns, a really eye-opening book.
On audio, I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which I’ve wanted to read for quite a while.
That brings to mind C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, the third novel in his trilogy Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.
The good guys mostly sit around in armchairs front of the fire, in Oxford common rooms, drinking tea and discussing theology and philosophy. They decide to let God take care of things – and the bad guys are duly destroyed by an earthquake.
I read the series once, many years ago, and I’ve never had a desire to read it again.
In addition to that, I have finally, finally, taken up the graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale, by Art Spiegelman. Starting with “Volume I: My Father Bleeds History.” I bought both volumes tears ago in Bangkok but never got around to reading them. Then I packed them up, brought them to Hawaii and promptly forgot about them until I found them again over the weekend. Holocaust history with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis cats.
I agree, not as good as The Martian, but better than Artemis, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary was a fun read. It’s basically an apocalyptical event / first contact mash-up hard Sci-Fi novel.
Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast Cynthia Saltzmann
In 1563, Paolo Veronese painted an enormous and magnificent depiction of the Wedding at Cana, and it was installed in a Venice monastery. Flash forward to 1797, and a young Napolean has just conquered Italy. Following a long European tradition, he orders the removal of art treasures from Italy to France, including the Veronese.
Flash forward to 2021, and the French haven’t given it back.
Oh man. I stopped posting in here regularly, so I have tons of books to post about in here.
Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea by Catherine Goldhammer - A nonfiction story about a woman who gets through a divorce by throwing all her energy into rehabbing her new home and raising chickens. It reads more like a series of journal entries than a book, but as long as you know that going in and keep your expectations reasonable, it’s pretty good.
The Last of the Moon Girls by Barbara Davis. A woman’s grandmother dies, and the community believes that the grandmother had murdered two children even though she was never formally accused or stood trial. The grand-daughter comes back into town and stirs shit up in an attempt to clear her grandmother’s name. A very disappointing read, since the author gets you invested in the mystery, and then abandons the mystery mid-way through to focus on some lackluster romance before getting back to the good stuff at the very end.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen. A nonfiction account of the teenage activism that was sparked in the wake of the Parkland school shooting. It’s by the same author who wrote Columbine, and I recommend both of his books. The author handles the topic of mass violence very gracefully.
Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire, which I think I first heard about in one of these threads. It’s a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost, and aside from that premise, it lacks much of a coherent plot and reads like a series of short stories. It was good enough to finish, but I think the book would have benefitted from a more cohesive plot and a consistent set of characters.
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West. An engaging collection of essays from a fat woman who loves to talk about her fatness, and who is unapologetically liberal and not always inclined to attribute good motives to those who think differently from her. Like I said, it’s very engaging, so as long as you can stand someone highly opinionated I’d recommend it.
Pines by Blake Crouch. This was so, so disappointing. It’s a book where a man wakes up after a car accident in a strange town, can’t get in touch with anyone from back home and can’t escape the town. And something about the town just seems off. The author keeps throwing in more and more strange details that got me incredibly curious about the mystery, and then halfway through the book, the author just abandons the mystery and makes the book this ongoing chase scene, where the main character is alternately running from the town’s inhabitants, hiding from them, or fighting with them. (I mean, if that’s your thing, then you’ll love this book – but it’s not my thing.) I ended up skipping about 30% of the book and going straight to the ending, so I could see the resolution of the mystery. To be fair, the resolution was good, and the first half of the book was good.
Wonder by R.J. Palacio. About a 5th-grade boy with facial disfigurement who attends school for the first time after being homeschooled his whole life. The entire book is written from a child’s perspective (not always the boy’s – it shows some of his classmates perspectives, his sister’s perspective, and some of his sister’s classmates). I would have preferred for the book to have a more adult perspective (like maybe a grown man looking back on his childhood), but I enjoyed the book anyways.
How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price. A great, great book split into two parts. The first part presents research showing how smartphones affect our mental states: our ability to focus, for example, or how narcissistic we are. The second book then has steps you can follow to cultivate a healthier relationship with your phone. You’re not actually “breaking up” with your phone so much as making sure that the ways you’re using it are beneficial to your mental health.
I wonder if the people complaining about my attachment to my phone are the same ones who laughed at me in middle school for always having my nose in a book…
Finished Sourcery , by Terry Pratchett. I agree that it’s not one of his best, but I enjoyed it a lot. It was a delight after slogging through After Worlds Collide.
Now I’m reading Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, by Andreas Wagner.
The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus Bordewich.
I read Bordewich’s Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America a couple of weeks ago and now I’m circling back to read this earlier book on a similar topic. Obviously, I like Bordewich’s work.
An amusing anecdote from the book: James Madison had worked with George Washington in the past so Washington asked him to write his inaugural address when he was elected President. Madison had also been elected - to the House of Representatives. When the House decided to send Washington an official letter of thanks for delivering his inaugural address, they delegated Madison to write the letter. When Washington received this letter, he wanted to officially respond back to the House - and he asked Madison to compose the letter. So Madison wrote the letter responding to the letter that he wrote responding to the speech that he wrote.
