Welcome to July or as I like to call it “I am getting no sleep this month” month! Utah has TWO count 'em TWO fireworks holidays. My poor pets are a wreck by the time August rolls around… Should be better now that the kids across the street have reached the “uncool to hang with your parents on the holiday” age
So whatcha all readin?
In print: When the Tides Held the Moon by Vanessa Vida Kelley. M/M romance at the turn of the 20th century between a Puerto Rican immigrant and a merman..
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. Not sure where this is going but I enjoyed Station Eleven so we’ll see.
Audio:
The Element of Fire by Martha Wells Amazon Prime had it for free in June so why not? Not very far into it but I’m hoping she does some wordbuilding soon.
Kindle:
The Rookery by Emily Organ. Victorian murder mystery, I’m hoping she does a better job with the lead character than in the last book. I’ve read a later book and enjoyed it so expectations are good.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I am currently reading Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek by Nana Visitor.
It’s terrific, a great addition to the Trek corpus. It honors Trek’s ambitions and where it was successful while being clear-eyed about its faults and limitations over the years.
Structurally, it bounces back and forth between an objective journalistic viewpoint — interviews with and essays about the women of Trek — and Visitor’s own personal memoir. This latter is incredibly well written, occasionally piercingly confessional. If you aren’t aware of the traumas she endured in her career, you’re in for some achingly painful but necessary reading.
Definitely recommended. Good physical presentation, too, with quality paper and lots of photographs.
If I have any criticism, it’s that the Original Series is a little shortchanged. It’s understandable — a lot of the women simply aren’t around any more to be interviewed, and reference material is limited because nobody was recording their lives in this way back then. Also, it was before Visitor’s time, so perhaps she felt it would be irresponsible to speculate beyond her own experience. But whatever the reason, the balance is definitely tipped toward more modern Trek.
I’ve still been enjoying it, though. If you’ve looked at it and considered it, take this as my recommendation.
I finished The Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins. A pretty good psychological thriller, but it was extremely confusing to read, because the first-person narratives by the three woman protagonists followed different timelines throughout the book. So First Woman was describing events in July, but the next chapter had Second Woman telling us what was happening in June. It came together at the end, but I had to pay close attention to the chapter headings, which contained the dates.
Next up: Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry. He’s a prolific author who’s been publishing for over 40 years, but this will be my first read of his work.
A sci-fi classic from the 1980s. The setup is a bit convoluted, and unfolds slowly. In the late 20th century a group of scientists invent a force field projector and use it to take over the world. A group of rebels held by one of the inventors of the device fights back.
I just finished King’s latest book, “Never Flinch”. It’s the latest in the Holly Gibney series and I give it a solid “meh”. I think King needs to hang up his spurs.
I’m going to reread “Into Thin Air”, which is an excellent account of an Everest climb gone wrong. I read it, but can’t remember it, so it’ll be mostly new to me.
I finished The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson. Pretty good, avoiding the usual cliches, but he gets too mystical and uses too many coincidences (unless that’s just the mysticism) – how many other time travelers can you expect to meet on a trip into the past?
Now I’m on to How to Forage for Mushrooms without dying by Frank Hyman. I picked this up at a “5 Below” store (everything inside $5 or less), believe it or not. I was drawn in by his disdain for books that said things like “even experts can’t tell these poisonous mushrooms from safe ones” (which explains the titlle). The book is pretty good, and written with some humor:
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Finished The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth, which is worth reading if that subject interests you and if not, not; and If You Shoot the Breeze, Are You Murdering the Weather?: 100 Musings on Art and Science, by Alan Dean Foster, which ranks somewhere between “Meh” and “Okay”.
Next up: Icerigger, by Alan Dean Foster and We’ve Decided to Go in a Different Direction, by Tess Sanchez.
Now reading:
*Legend", by David Lynn Golemon – interesting storyline, but an amazing number of errors: typos, grammar and just plain mistakes (an aircraft carrier 100 miles east of Peru, with a second carrier 100 miles east of the first one; a lieutenant commander who keeps addressing a master chief petty officer as “Chief”; a man who is an army spec 4 on one page, and a marine lance corporal eighteen pages later; another man who is a spec 5…).
Next up: Legacy – another book in the same series, which I hope will be better written/edited.
There are sequels, but I haven’t read any of them.
Only one that I’m aware of (and that shows up on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database) – To Sail the Century Sea, which came out 15 years after the original. (And the sequel was only published the one time, at that)
@Cervaise does she go into why Rick Berman (may his name be cursed) insisted on the stupid catsuits?
My current reading pile:
Recently tossed off: A Sweet Sting of Salt, Rose Sutherland: I was told there was a selkie story in here somewhere. I got halfway through and I’m tired of the main character mooning over the (possible) selkie woman and being an idiot. Also, the dialogue is not appropriate for early-nineteenth century Nova Scotia says the person who’s read A LOT of L.M. Montgomery. Side question: when did lesbian romances become sapphic romances? Is lesbian a bad word now?
Still on the pile: The Duke’s Children, Anthony Trollope: The last of the Palliser series. The Duchess dies and now the Duke, who’s been a distant father for the last twenty years, has to deal with his three children ranging from late teens to mid-twenties. His daughter is in love with a man who is both Conservative (the Duke is a Liberal) and not rich. His oldest son is a member of Parliament, but he’s a Conservative as well. His younger son is really bad with money and running with the wrong crowd. If the Duke hadn’t gone gray before his wife died, he will be by the end of the book.
The Italian, Ann Radcliffe: Classic Gothic romance from the late eighteenth century. I’m only a few chapters in so it’s mostly atmosphere right now. The sinister monk has been introduced so it should pick up soon.
The Saint of Lost Things, Christopher Castellani: The Delaware book for my Literary Tour of the United States quest on my blog. This was the second choice because the first one I picked vanished from the face of the earth as soon as I put it on hold at the library. It’s about an Italian family in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1950s. Good so far but I’m going to have to reach in the pages and slap the crap out of Antonio (the husband) if he doesn’t get over himself tout suite.
The Witches of Wenshar, Barbara Hambly: Second in the Sun Wolf and Starhawk trilogy. Sun Wolf goes down to the desert kingdoms to learn magic. It’s been a while since I read it so I’ve forgotten most of it. I know there’s a demon in it somewhere.
The Cat Who Played Brahms, Lilian Jackson Braun: I need a cozy mystery right now. This is the turning point in the Cat Who series where Qwilleran moves out of the big city to the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Pioneer Day, celebrated on July 24. There’s a big parade down Main Street in SLC, with LOTS of floats. When I lived there families staked out an area along Main Street to sit in. I don’t mean just folding chairs and the like – they’d bring in rugs and upholstered seats and sofas, and tap into the city’s electricity. Utahns are SERIOUS about Family entertainment.
One year I was there they had Bob Eubanks (the guy who hosted The Newlywed Game on TV) as the announcer, and it was pretty clear that he had no idea what he’d gotten himself into.
And at night there’s a big fireworks display – bigger than the one for the Fourth of July.
Oh, yeah – the reason for the holiday. It celebrates when the LDS party under Brigham Young first entered the Salt Lake valley, and Young said his immortal phrase " This is the Place". I can’t help but think that they saw this as an almost biblical moment – they’d been forced into a pilgrimage, like the Israelites coming out of Egypt, crossed the desert, and ended up in a fertile land with a Salt Sea.
(Then they got a plague of locusts. And a miraculous intervention. But that’s another story.)
