Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - July 2024 edition

Cafe Society
21

I enjoyed this book, too.

Finished By Any Other Fame, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. My favorite alternative history story in it is “The Defiant Disaster” by Kate Daniel, in which Amelia Earhart did not die prematurely and Chuck Yeager did.

Now I’m reading First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human, by Jeremy DeSilva.

22

Just started Toxic Prey by John Sanford. His latest Lucas and Lettie Davenport thriller. Excellent thus far, as usual.

23

Finished The Art of Rhetoric, by Aristotle. It was okay but not something I would ordinarily seek out. I was given a copy by a friend who, in what he himself terms “a senior moment” (he’s almost as old as I am), bought a copy, then forgot he bought it, then bought another copy, finding himself with two. Knowing I am fond of the classics, he gave me one. But this is really just a manual for the well-skilled fourth-century-BC orator, and it reads like a manual. It does give a glimpse into the Greek thinking of the time, and the endnotes had a lot of historical background info, but still it’s not something I would recommend unless you’re really, really into something like this.

Next up, I’ve started You Like It Darker, Stephen King’s newest short-story collection.

24

Started this morning on a children’s book from 1972, The Ghost Next Door. It’s the sort of thing I would have pounced on as a child, but I haven’t read it before.

25

Finished First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human, by Jeremy DeSilva, which was very interesting.

Now I’m reading The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, by Rowenna Miller.

26

Started this morning on Swiped, by L.M. Chilton. One review calls it “Bridget Jones meets Scream” which is too much credit but at least gives you the gist. It ought to get me through the next couple of days.

27

Finished it, and liked it very much. Engaging characters, an engrossing murder mystery with religious and political overtones, and some very interesting alternative-history worldbuilding (including the establishment of the Federal District of Sitka for European Jewish refugees in the early days of WWII, Israel’s defeat and dissolution in 1948, a long and futile U.S.-Cuban War, the collapse of the Third Russian Republic, Mrs. Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink wool pillbox hat, Manchuria with its own space program, etc.).

I listened to the audiobook, read by Peter Riegert (Animal House, The Sopranos), and he’s excellent - great accents and characterization.

Sounded intriguing, so I’ve started it. Thanks for the tip! The college-freshman character is just a bit too annoyingly insecure and self-doubting, but I’ll keep reading.

28

I’ve been travelling and have spent the last 9 days on a farm, which means a lot of reading.

The Stars Now Unclaimed, Drew Williams, 2018. Slightly above-average space opera from a first-time writer. Recommended if you like the genre and do not expect a lot of character development.

Octavia Gone, Jack McDevitt, 2019. I like the “Alex Benedict” series, partly because they are supposedly set like 10,000 years in the future yet the society is structured like it’s 1989. Anyway, this one was kinda boring and not very memorable. If pressed, I would call it a Space Opera… that’s where the Alex Benedict series lies… but this one was neither very Spacey or Opera-ey. Not recommended unless you’re a McDevitt fan.

The Big Short, Michael Lewis, 2010. I’ve read a lot of books on the 2008 financial crisis, but never got around to this one. Pretty engaging, but it has the same problem that Lewis’s Liar’s Poker has – you’re supposed to be horrified at everything, but instead you just want to get on the action. Recommended.

Mr. Texas, Lawrence Wright, 2023. Very engaging novel about a novice politician from Texas. Not too sure how believable it is – this guy rose from a nobody to Speaker of the House in about a years’ time – but as the adage goes, if you write it well enough, it’s believable. Recommended. (I’m an easy grader, team.)

What To Listen For in Mozart, Robert Harris, 1991. Y’all ever read a book and realize, about 20 pages in, that you’ve read it before? Yeah, that happened here, but it doesn’t matter as I’m glad to rediscover this primer for my favorite composer (yeah, I’m pretty base. Deal with it.) Definitely recommended if you like Mozart or want to understand the structure of many a classical music piece.

You Like It Darker, Stephen King, 2024. None of the stories were very “dark”, but they’re all of a good-to-high quality, so very recommendable, especially for King fans. My favorite was “Slide In Road” where one of the characters goes through a moment of paralysis which all men fear.

Summer of ‘49, David Halberstam, 1989. Halberstam is a fantastic writer and he brings his gifts to the 1949 pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Recommended if you like Halberstam, baseball, or tales of How They Lived Back Then.

The Leader In You, Dale Carnegie, 1993. I mean, it’s credited to Dale Carnegie and has his writings at the beginning of every chapter, but since the man died in 1955, this one is ghost-written by someone at his Institute. Regardless, not a bad book – Carnegie was kind of a Cognitive Behavior Therapy guy before there was CBT – and it has some very good recommendations on how to lead people.

Liked the last one so much that I bought three of his books for 35 cents off Google Books and am working my way through them now.

OK, that’s my July vacation reading list. We’ll be leaving Ukraine in a few days, headed off to Vienna, and I’m not going to be doing much reading other than during the train rides.

29

Started this morning on I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones. Jones got a lot of attention for his novel The Only Good Indians. I tried to read it, but there’s a bad animal death in it right away, so I stopped. Now I’m giving him a second chance, but I’m up to page 58 already and not very interested. Trying to decide if I’d rather re-read something I own.

30

Finished Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe…went in totally blind, just seeing the cover on social media and seeing that it was listed as one of Amazon’s Top 20 Books of 2024 so far.

It was fantastic. I breezed through it, laughing out loud (something that rarely happens to me when I’m reading) the whole way. It was so relatable, well-written and enjoyable. I loved the perspective, the writing-style (it switches between first-person and third-person in a very unique and disorienting way), and I loved the overarching premise that life is what you make of it, that we shouldn’t be ashamed of who we are and what we do, as long as we try our best to be good humans.

I very much appreciated it and consider it to be one of the very few 5/5 reads I have enjoyed this year. I have read 68 books so far this year and have had maybe two or three 5 star reads (this one included)…so I am definitely in the market for some slam-dunk 5-star books - suggestions welcome!

31

Jeez, it’s got a waitlist a mile long at my library. But what the heck, I’ll get it one day.

32

Finished The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, by Rowenna Miller, which I enjoyed.

Now I’m reading Existence Is Elsewhen, a science fiction story collection by John Gribbin and Rhys Hughes, et al.

33

An eclectic mix now. I’m simultaneously reading:

Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy, It’s subtitled A History of the World in Eight Plagues . It looks at the considerable impact on human history that plagues have had, using a lot of very new data. It appears to be his contention that a lot of events similar to the devastation that afflicted American Indians (North and South) when they met the disease-ridden Europeans, and they had no immunities to the disease has, in fact, played out multiple times in human history. It might have been responsible for Cro-Magnons wiping out not only the neanderthals, but also the Denisovans and other human varieties. It’s responsible for Neolithic extinctions when farmer and shepherd types (who lived with animals, those reservoirs of diseases capable pf leaping to people) moved in next to hunter-gatherer types. And so on. It’s a pretty interesting and compelling hypothesis.

I’ve started re-reading the Richard Burton translation of the Thousand and One Nights , which I’ve read and re-read parts of, but never did get all the way through. I now have two copies of the first edition of Burton.

The twentieth volume of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius, which I picked up at NASFIC last weekend (where they were GoH’s)

Leslie Lehr’s A Boob’s Life: How America’s Obsession Shaped Me… and You. I got this at a used book store and picked it up for the title. A lot of the book isn’t so much about boobs themselves as it is about sexism and its detrimental effect on even the most talented of women. A worthy topic on its own, but putting “boobs” in the title is a better sell. And a huge amount of it relates to boobs, in any case.

34

Ditched. I’m going for an old comfort read this week, Charles Portis’ True Grit.

35

I’m pretty behind on posting my books, so I’m gonna do a mass post.

First, my contender for Book of the Year (for me, anyway): Cahokia Jazz. It’s alternate history, with the Native American-dominated state of Cahokia right smack in the middle of the United States. It’s a 1920s murder mystery, and it’s noir as fuck, and just gorgeously written. All your noir stereotypes are there (femme fatales, corrupt cops, incompetent mayors, seedy businessmen), but they’re so much more developed than noir characters usually are. The world is simultaneously fascinating and not plot-dumped; unless you read the author’s note, it’s not really clear what set off the alternate history (which is just fine). I absolutely recommend this book!

Now for the other eight books I’ve read since last posting, none of which came close to Cahokia, but some of which were just fine:

  • Witch King: I actually read this one for a book club, where we wanted to visit the various award nominees for 2024. Had I not read it for a book club, I wouldn’t have thought so much about how to discuss it, and then I wouldn’t have thought so much about issues such as character arcs and plot structure and sociopolitical worldbuilding. I would have focused instead of the excellent action sequences and general badassery of the protagonist. But I did start thinking about it, and I realized that the book is hollow. There’s a great deal of political setup, but none of the factions have a coherent ideology. The Hierophants are a cypher–which is fine for eldritch extraplanar invaders, but nonsense for a group that regularly strikes political deals. The Immortals have no real position beyond snootiness. The Saredi are little more than a Noble Savage stereotype. And the Rising World is barely hinted at. The characters are fun, but lack any real depth or complexity, much less character arcs. I ended up feeling like the book was trying to do what Ann Leckie, Adrien Tchaikovsky, China Mieville, and others do, but fell short in every important area. Its saving grace is that it was a fun read. If you can turn your brain off and not worry about substance, you’ll much likelier to enjoy the ride.
  • My Best Friend’s Exorcism: I had fun with this. It’s what the label says, if The Exorcist were about Linda Blair and her BFF getting through it together.
  • My Heart is a Chainsaw. @Dung_Beetle, I know you ditched a couple of Stephen Graham Jones books. If you give him one more chance, I’d recommend Mongrels, not this book; but if you like Mongrels, this’d be a good second one. The protagonist is a teenage girl fan of slasher flicks who really wants a slasher killer to come to her town and start slashing. What starts off as a Holden Caulfield for our times develops into a pretty interesting character. Jones grounds his work in Native American cultures, and his incorporation of folklore is really well-done IMO.
  • Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. You got yer Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you got yer Brazil, you got yer Sorry to Bother You; mix em up, and you might have this book. A secret government project sends workers into the sleeping minds of the employees of large corporations, where they vacuum up nightmares and disturbing dreams in order to make the employees more productive. It’s a slow, quiet book, with the saddest of sad sack protagonists, and normally I can’t abide a sad sack protagonist, but somehow it worked in this one, and the book has stuck with me.
  • Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon: It’s another Hugo nominee, and I hope it doesn’t win (my current choice would be Translation State, although I still need to read The Saint of Bright Doors). As a super-power story based heavily on Nigerian mythology, it’s a great adventure story. As anything more, nah. The characters were all pretty stock, the stakes were simultaneously super-high and not compelling, the thematic elements were weak. Fun and forgettable.
  • Chaos Terminal: Mur Lafferty continues her wryly comic space-station murder series with a second book, and I won’t read the third. Big yawner for me.
  • The Best of Lupin: After loving the Netflix show, I wanted to check out the novels. On the plus side, Lupin’s tricks are brilliant and delightful. On the minus side, Lupin is an insufferable Mary Sue. Not nearly enough goes wrong in his life to create any real tension, and he’s a walking breathing stereotype of the snotty Frenchman. I’m not sad I read it, but the pleasure of the tricks had to be separated from the annoyance with the protagonist.
  • Watch Your Back! If you have you ever read a Dortmunder novel, you know exactly what you’re getting into. If you haven’t–well, you’re in for a treat. Dortmunder, like Lupin, is a gentleman thief who preys on wealthy assholes. Unlike Lupin, he works with a well-defined team, and they’re all weirdos and oddballs, and shit is constantly going wrong for them, and the joy of the book is less in watching intricate plans unfold beautifully and more in watching them fall apart spectacularly. Dortmunder novels are hilarious (although they’re all pretty similar, so I’ll probably wait a few years before reading another).
36

I’ll have a look at it. It seems to be that time of year when I have a ton of books on hold, but none available. Then in early September, wham! They all come at once.

37

And he may not be your cuppa. He’s definitely in the brutal horror genre. When I read The Only Good Indian, I was reading it before bed, and I was getting ready to stop for the night when I hit a scene of such grisly violence that I said, “I need to read another chapter to cool down.” So I read further, and hit a scene that made the first one look like a cakewalk, at which point I was like “goddammit” and just quit for the night with that horror in my head.

But he’s a very fine writer, and his horror is thematically rich, so I put up with it.

38

While you and I tend to line up in reviewing books, I’m hoping this is a YMMV situation. I have Witch King on my Kindle unread. I really love the Murderbot books so fingers crossed here.

39

That may be. I’ve only read one Murderbot, and it left me cold, and I know a lot of people like Martha Wells a lot. But I definitely think that if you want well-defined political factions in fantasy, those other authors (and Seth Dickinson, and Robert Jackson Bennett, and NK Jemisin…) do it better. Maybe I was just looking for the wrong thing in the book.

40

Another vote against both Murderbot (which didn’t catch my interest, I may try again some day) and Witch King which I really really disliked, I DNF at about the 60% mark.
Murderbot seemed like it could eventually be good, I abandoned it very early because it wasn’t catching my attention and I had other books that were tempting me.
Witch King… just not my kind of fantasy book, at all.