I’m glad I read Educated, but lost track of the number of times I found myself shouting back at the audiobook this or that variation on, “No. No! What are you thinking? You know about your family by now, and you know that’s a bad idea.”
I gave up on that book halfway through for the exact same reason.
Ha! I’ve read some reviews where people said how frustrated they were with her for how often she tried to come back home and fix things. I just finished Part 1, so she hasn’t even left home yet, let alone come back. But I’m hoping I’ll be less frustrated since I’ve been adequately forewarned. We shall see.
Finished Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family, by Madhushree Ghosh, which was interesting.
Started The Fell by Sarah Moss.
Finished The Hidden History of Lake Winnipesaukee. Now I’m reading Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in the Folger edition. I’d never read the play before (I saw that Julie Taymor, who did the Lion King stage play, made a movie version several years ago starring Anthony Hopkins, but I never saw it). The reason I wanted to read it is that a line from it is used as an epigraph in The Annotated Flatland, which I read last month (The author, Edwin A. Abbott, was a noted Shakespeare scholar), and I was intrigued.
This is one of the Bard’s earliest and bloodiest plays – gorier than Hamlet or Macbeth or even King Lear. It’s dripping with atrocities and bloodletting. It’s as if Shakespeare wrote an episode of Game of Thrones.
Finished Hide, and quite liked it! It was marketed as the author’s first adult novel, but I really couldn’t detect any way in which it differed from YA.
Just finished Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott, which is set in and around the post-Roman ruins of London in around 500 A.D. It’s very well researched and also manages to be almost Arthurian but not have him effect events at all - he’s mentioned as as a young warrior away in the west who might become important, or not!
Current book is The Half-Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley. She’s known as a fantasy/sf author but this reads like a straight historical novel so far (1/3 through it) and an afterword says that it’s firmly based on reality (apart from the 2 main chaacters!)
Set in 1963 a Soviet scientist is summoned from the Gulag and assigned to help study a radioactive area in a remore area of Russia. He’s told it’s a deliberate large scale experiment to assess how ecologies are affected by radiation but soon realises that’s only a cover story. The other main character is the KGB officer there in charge of security, who was on leave when the original incident happened
Gripping, and like none of her other books.
Finished The Fell by Sarah Moss, which was very well written.
Now I’m reading Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life, by Sutton Foster.
I finished Passersthrough by Peter Rock and am not quite sure what to think. It has an old man trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, a mystery of her disappearance when she was a child, the line between life and death, and a bit of the supernatural. But it doesn’t read like a mystery at all.
I saw one review that compared it to Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. It doesn’t have the body horror or science fiction aspects, but it does have the same unsettling feel and minimalistic description of characters and motivations. And like Annihilation, at the end you kind of know what happened while at the same time having no clue.
It’s a quick read, so no big commitment if you want to give a shot. If anyone reads it, please @ me - I’d appreciate other opinions.
Finished To Have and Have Not, by Ernest Hemingway. An honest man is forced by circumstances to run contraband on his boat between Cuba and the Florida Keys. The movie version was the first pairing of Bogie and Bacall – it’s where they met and started their relationship.
Next up is The Water-Method Man, bu John Irving. His second novel.
Started yesterday on The Change by Kirsten Miller, but didn’t get very far. I knew it was a book about some women developing supernatural powers and fighting back against men, but it was too much misandry for me.
Moving on today with Just Like Mother, which looks like a Stepford Wives sort of thing, only with kids.
Finished Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life, by Sutton Foster, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi.
I had to let go of Just Like Mother because I was dreading it instead of looking forward to it. There were a couple of icky sex scenes, and foreshadowing of child abuse to come. I mean, it is a horror novel, but some things are better implied than given too much detail. Plus, the main character keeps hanging around people who say insane things. Why?
Started this morning on A Black and Endless Sky. Prologue: Something evil is unearthed in the Mojave Desert. Chapter one: Brother and sister start on a road trip. I am pleased. 
Seems very well-written so far!
Girl in Ice Erica Ferencik
A mystery/thriller set on a remote research station in Greenland, with some supernatural stuff. I didn’t enjoy it that much. Too weird, especially at the end.
Finished The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi, which was a lot of fun. One of the best novels I’ve read this year.
Now I’m reading Downtown Shabby: One American’s Ultimate DIY Adventure Restoring His Family’s English Castle, by Hopwood DePree.
Finished Downtown Shabby: One American’s Ultimate DIY Adventure Restoring His Family’s English Castle, by Hopwood DePree, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Audacity of Sara Grayson, by Joani Elliott.
My teenage son and I enjoyed it, too. Not Scalzi’s best (I’d give Old Man’s War, Fuzzy Nation, The End of All Things or Redshirts the trophy), but a damn good read.
Recently finished:
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer, Doug Murray and Steven Sanders, a pretty good graphic novel about the 1944 naval battle off Samar.
Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon, about a near-future dystopic road trip by a schlub of a hitman/courier/fixer who’s contacted by his maybe-daughter and then finds himself on the run from his very dangerous employers. Very, very good stuff.
Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 ed. by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, a so-so collection of ST:TOS short stories.
Travels with George by Nathaniel Philbrick, in which the author retraces the routes of Washington’s trips around the early republic. Quite good.
Now underway:
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, one of my favorites of his, which I’m rereading with my son. It still holds up well.
Assignment in Eternity by Robert A. Heinlein, a 1953 short-story collection. I’m very unimpressed, but expect I’ll finish it.
The Face of the Third Reich: Portrait of the Nazi Leadership by Joachim E. Fest, with concise, well-crafted profiles of Hitler and his henchmen. Both interesting and chilling.
Finally, I’m taking an involuntary break (the library pulled back the audiobook) from Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony P. Tully, focusing on the Japanese side of things in the key WWII carrier battle.
Just downloaded and started The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth. It’s a drama about twin sisters, told from their points of view. I’m listening to the audiobook, which feature two different narrators for the two sisters.
Love That Story by Jonathan Van Ness.
Finished Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. It is an outstanding coming-of-age story of two brothers in 1980s Australia growing up through hardships of a broken family, drugs, violence, adversary, trauma, setbacks and an unvarnished insight into what adulthood really is like for so many people. Not the idealistic dreams most kids have but the quite literally brutal reality. All the while maintaining an innocence, desire, hopes and aspirations to go above and beyond what they witness and be who they want to be. I’m glad I picked this up since it is not really the kind of theme I often read.