No, he washed them off! It’s okay. 
Read Dave Barry’s Swamp Story, sort of a paean to the weirdness of Florida and its denizens. (Let’s just say it doesn’t make me want to visit.) It’s very, well, it’s very Dave Barry. At its best, the book is quite funny, but–as is often the case with his stuff–there’s an occasional much more “serious” scene, however brief, reminding us that the guy’s literary talents go beyond booger jokes. I enjoyed it.
Tried Heather Havrilesky’s book of essays What If This Were Enough?, recommended to me by a friend. I’m not familiar with Havrilesky’s other writings, maybe they’re quite good, but this one wasn’t up my alley. The main issue I had was that the author seemed to be trying to win some sort of cynicism contest. In her view, everything is a sign that the world is awful. It’s entirely possible that she’s correct and the world has already gone to hell in a handbasket, but the book didn’t seem to be bringing anything new to the table or even saying it in an interesting way. Back to the library it went.
I just spent a week vacationing on the coast, spending a lot of time doing nothing but reading. I’ve been lax in my reading habit for… several years now, tbh – grad school will do that to you – and it felt good to hold a book for longer than a few minutes.
First was Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea by Paul Begg. It covers the construction, fitting, and numerous voyages of the Mary Celeste, focusing of course on her ill-fated 1872 Atlantic crossing. It’s a historical monograph with numerous endnotes (I really prefer footnotes, but oh well), appendices, maps, and diagrams. It’s a good book for a beach vacation although not at all a “light” read.
Second was The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost. A travelogue, it chronicles 2 years the author spent on Tarawa, a filthy, overly crowded, and poverty-stricken island in Kiribati. It’s humorous but also depressingly sad. I started this book years ago but didn’t finish it; this time I did. He wrote a sequel detailing his subsequent life with his wife and newborn son in Fiji. I have that one but haven’t started it yet.
A student recommended I read Loki’s Wolves by K.L. Armstrong and M.A. Marr. It’s the stereotypical “average suburban boy suddenly finds out he has superpowers and must use them to save the world” drivel. I’m forcing myself to read it because it’ll give me something to talk to my students about, but it’s a seriously shitty story by crap authors. There’s a lot of good YA stuff out there – anything by Laurie Halse Anderson or Jerry Spinelli is worth reading – but this isn’t it. The author was clearly trying to capitalize on the Harry Potter popularity
I started that one, but found it more depressing than humorous. Maybe because I live in Florida.
That’s why I quit reading it too.
Could be! Barry includes a brief introductory note that you probably saw, to the effect of Florida “having plenty of problems” but “never being boring.” (Thanks, give me boring.) I can see that if you have to put up with that kind of stuff on a daily basis (making this novel seem more like a documentary than a work of fiction) it might be a tough slog. Easy for me–an outsider who has spent less than 24 hours in the entire state, and that at a business meeting/product launch–to perceive it otherwise!
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke. Part of my quest to read all of the Hugo award winners.
It’s a historical fantasy set in the early 1800s in England, where wizardry is still practiced. The essence of the plot is that two men (the title characters) are the only practicing wizards. They start off as allies and then become rivals. And a bunch of other stuff happens, because the book is 846 pages long. If all the footnotes were printed in the same font as the main text, it’d probably be 1000+ pages.
But I am enjoying reading it. It’s written in a deliberately old fashioned style, where, for example, ‘show’ is spelled ‘shew’. It’s got a fair amount of humor and the characters are interesting.
I got stuck at They’d Rather Be Right when I tried to read the Hugo novels some years back. I did read quite a few, though!
Wonder if the five second rule applies…
Finished Against Infinity, by Gregory Benford, which was okay.
Now I’m reading E. R. Nurses, edited by James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and Chris Mooney. It’s a collection of reminiscences by numerous E. R. nurses.
@Lancia, my favorite thing about finishing graduate school was getting to read for pleasure again.
I am currently reading (listening to) Ann Leckie’s Translation State. It’s set in the same universe as her Ancillary Justice series, 5 or 10 years after the events of that story. It’s told from three different perspectives. I can’t wait to see how it ends. As a bonus, the audiobook narrator is the actress who plays Lady Danbury on Bridgerton. She is excellent.
Waiting eagerly to get Translation State, the new Scalzi, and Allison Montclair’s The Lady from Burma.
@ Dendarii_Dame and others: Any word on whether another Penric and Desdemona is in the works?
I’m reading Philip Glass’s autobiography, Words Without Music.
I finally finished A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan. As I mentioned upthread, this is a book which consists of 13 short stories, all of which are disparate yet related. Three of the stories are good; the other ten are…not. The stories jump around in time and place, which made it hard to follow.
I would not recommend this book.
I haven’t read that one either (or heard of its author). I’d guess I’ve read about 2/3’s of them though.
I’ve only read Bujold’s SF, so I don’t know about any upcoming fantasy works.
Finished E.R. Nurses: True Stories from America’s Greatest Unsung Heroes, edited by James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and Chris Mooney. (Apologies for missing the subtitle before. My copy is LP and skipped it.) The book was powerful. Due to the subject matter, it was not an easy read.
Now I’m reading Something More Than Night by Kim Newman, set in an alternate 1930’s Los Angeles in which Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff team up to fight crime in a universe where monsters are real.
I can relate to the general premise of this. I gave up on a book this weekend that had disparate yet related chapters. A while back, someone in one of these threads mentioned The Grapes of Math by Alex Bellos. Each chapter related to a different numerical/mathematical concept, and some chapters were pretty fascinating but others did not hold my interest at all. Finally, early on in chapter 8 I gave up, because there was just too much boring stuff for the interesting stuff for me to find it worth my while anymore.
I also finished Burntown by Jennifer McMahon this weekend. She’s another author I’ve discovered in these monthly threads, and I like her writing enough that I’ve decided I want to read everything by her. This was book #4 for me, and not my favorite of hers but still enjoyable and worth the read.
Now I’ve gotten started on Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions by Todd Rose. I read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki earlier this year, and I think Rose’s book is a good companion piece to The Wisdom of Crowds Both books talk about copycatting, group-think, and how other people’s actions influence our own decisions. Wisdom comes from it from the perspective of the evolutionary benefits of this practice, where as Collective Illusions look more at its harmful effects. There’s a bit of both going on in modern culture (and probably all cultures, past, present, and future), and it’s good and kind of cool to be aware of how other people are affecting our actions and decisions.
Also started on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaeffer yesterday. It’s … I don’t know. Enjoyable, but I don’t think I’m properly appreciating it for what it is. It’s a book written in the form of letters that the characters write to one another, and while I can appreciate the story as a whole, I don’t really appreciate the format it’s written in, which is supposed to be part of its whole charm. The letter-writing is not just two people back and forth, it’s a bunch of people writing to one another, and the letters are pretty brief, so you change perspective and topic every 90 seconds or so, which makes it hard to settle back and relax into the story. You’d probably love this book if you suffer from ADHD, though.
Finished Broken Light and enjoyed it very much. In a way, it was a retelling of Carrie.
Started this morning on The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell. Spooky, I hope.
I finished reading Mistress Branican by Jules Verne. I like to read two or three Verne novels that I haven’t read before every summer, and this year I’ve got five teed up, of which this was the first. Verne wrote sixty to seventy works, most of them unknown to the general public, and it’s my intention to read them all. They’ve virtually all been translated to English at least once.
Branican is an unusual book. Its structure is in a series of revelations, so that the plot moves in leaps. It starts out with the titular heroine’s husband being made captain of a brand-new trading sailing ship, the Franklin. They live in San Diego, and have just had a baby, and Captain John Branican is off to the Far East for a six month’s trading voyage. It’s all drawn so prettily that you just know terrible things are about to happen to The Happy Family.
They do. In very short order John’s ship disappears and is presumed lost, Mistress Branican and her new baby fall overboard on another ship. She is rescued, but the baby drowns, and she goes insane as a result. And it turns out that her sister’s husband, who is set as caretaker, is revealed not to be the kindly relative he was thought to be, but a self-centered Ponzi scheme-making (even before there was a Ponzi), an incompetent gambler of an investor, who now controls her funds.
Eventually she recovers from her madness, and goes in search of her husband, who she fervently believes was not drowned. Several times they think they have come to the solution to his fate, but new evidence pops up again and again, leading her onward. Suffice it to say that, after a lot of suffering and slogging, there’s a happy ending.
In the way there are so many false endings followed by New Revelations, it reminds me of another Verne novel, the equally obscure Captain Antifer. I’d like to see a movie or TV series adaptation of that one. It’s the ultimate Verne treasure-hunting story. But it’s not a simple “follow a map to an “X””, or even an Edgar Allen Poe “Gold Bug”. The solution is far more complex. And every time you think you’re about to find the treasure, there’s another clue to follow. The ending is elaborate and ludicrously improbable, but it’s typical Verne.
Next up is Verne’s Survivors of the Challenger
I’ve also gotten a free copy of John Gould’s Tales from Rhapsody Home: Or What They Don’t Tell you about Senior Living by Maine writer John Gould, who went into a retirement home with his wife in their nineties. He was obviously not thrilled with what it turned out to be, and his recounting of his trials and tribulations, told with a positive spin barely covering the problems (can’t open the windows at night; food is terrible; complaint sessions by the inmates ignored) is well-written and hilarious. A short, quick read.
Besides the Verne books (which include Mathis Sandorf, Verne’s answer to The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, his continuation of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), I’ve got the most recent James Bond, Kim Sherwood’s Double or Nothing and Claire Heywood’s The Shadow of Perseus. The latter, a re-telling of the myth of Perseus and Medusa, styrips away all the magical stuff and appears to take the tack that Medusa was a member of a north African colony of religious ladies calling themselves “Gorgons”, something I’ve seen before. The book was recommended to me by my writing group, who knows about my own book on Medusa.
There’s another Bond book out, On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson, who wrote the "Young James Bond series. This is his first foray into the adult Bond. But I haven’t seen this one in any bookstore. If I want to read it, I’ll have to order it.
Based on a recommendation from the Libby app, I downloaded and started listening to Every City is Every Other City by John McFetridge. I admit that I was not familiar with the author, even though he’s written over 20 books. He’s a crime/mystery writer from Canada, and this book focuses on a part-time private eye from Toronto who reluctantly takes on a missing person case. I am enjoying it thus far.
Finished Something More Than Night by Kim Newman, which I enjoyed very much.
Now I’m reading This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together, by Jon Mooallem. It’s about the 1964 Alaska earthquake.
Ah, good. I’m a big fan of the book! Her The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories that overlap with it a bit, and her more recent novel Piranesi is quite different but also excellent.
Haven’t read the book, but there was a movie adaptation a few years back (including several Downton Abbey alums) which we enjoyed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP9eDmX0ow0
I see 007 is already acknowledging the new King!