Just finished The Woods All Black…my gracious. Ron DeSantis would hate this.
Two books recently.
The Book that Broke the World is a sequel to The Book that Wouldn’t Burn. I really enjoyed the first book, given its mystery, its nonlinear setting, and its wonderful protagonist (one of them, anyway).
This one didn’t really do it for me. I was already used to the nonlinear setting, so it wasn’t novel so much as it was a chore, trying to keep track of the multiple timelines. The new characters never did make much sense to me–the vengeance plot driving much of the book’s action felt really forced. And too much of the book consisted of chase sequences.
But it was a freaking masterpiece compared to Edenville.
I save one-star reviews on Goodreads for books that are so bad I can’t finish them. But man, is this book testing that policy. The author has absolutely no sense of how to build tension, relying instead on gross-out effects (if I never read the phrase “eye jizz” again it’ll be too soon). The humor fell flat, the characters were flatter, and none of the action sequences packed any sort of punch. I mean, I’m glad it worked for other people, but for me this ended up being more of a hate-read.
In addition to the other books I’ve been reading, I’ve added
The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Sir Richard F. Burton. I’ve read parts of this before, but have not yet read the whole thing, and in order. I’ve recently acquired a second copy of the first printing, so I figured it was time. I’ve also been reading a lot about the Arabian nights, most notably The Annotated Arabian Nights and Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: A Companion
I also picked up a copy of How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Arman Mattelart. I’d stumbled across this Marxist view of Disney comics several years ago and dismissed it, because it seemed absurd to see the work of the underpaid and underappreciated Carl Barks as insidious propaganda for monopolistic capitalist entities. But the recent banning of two of Don Rosa’s Uncle Scrooge stories has made me want to take a second look (Rosa is a acolyte of Barks’)
This is a relatively recent edition, published in 2018 (the first edition came out in 1971) , which refers to Donald Trump and other current events. The new front material also actually praises the work of Barks and hails him as a genius not shackled to the Disney philosophy. I suspect they may have put that in because a lot of people felt the way I did. We’ll see how the rest of the book fares.
Finished Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Best book I’ve read so far this year. Strongly recommended, especially if you’re interested in works of popular science.
Next up: Pulling the Wings Off Angels, by K. J. Parker (a fantasy) and Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, by Randall Munroe.
I finished How to Read Donald Duck. As I expected, if you leave out the newer intrioductions there isn’t any recognition of Carl Barks. The book appears to be based on Chilean editions of the comics, which (if the originals were from the US) translated and heavily edited. There’s no way the original edition of the comic, for instance, had blackbirds named “Marx” and “Hegel”, as the translated comic has. And I suspect a lot of the other text has been altered, as well. The Chilean government was heavily into propaganda, and its heavy hand shows in the examples they give in the book. What they’re criticizing isn’t so much the American comics as it ids the beefed-up propaganda of the edition published in Chile.
Not that there isn’t stuff to criticize in the US editions (their notes show that they did get hold of some US comics, in addition to the Chilean editions), but it doesn’t help that their evaluation of the Uncle Scrooge story “The 24 Carat Moon” is hopelessly wide of the mark, and their attempt to shoehorn it into their model of exploitation of the natives doesn’t really work. Muchkale isn’t a native, but another “exploiter” himself, and he sure as hell knows what he’s trading.
Carl Barks, writing to Don Rosa, offhandedly called “How to read Donald Duck” a piece of “communist propaganda”. He wasn’t impressed.
On audio, I finished re-re-(many times) - reading Strasnger in a Strange Land and am now listening to King Arthur by James Knowles. I’d never heard of him before, but he was a contemporary of Alfred Lord Tennyson, and dedicated his prose version to Tennyson.
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers. A novel set in New England and the Maritimes. 4-year-old Ruthie, a Mi’kmaq girl, wanders away from her family and is kidnapped by a white couple who fake an adoption. Many years later Ruthie, now known as Norma, finds out the truth and meets her family of origin. That’s about it. I’m not giving anything away due to the (to me anyway) curious decision by the author to start the book with the reunion, so there is very little suspense (is Norma really Ruthie? Will she see her family again?). The book also has a lot of glurgy “homespun wisdom”: “I think that we all do bad things, but that don’t always make us bad people.” I have the feeling the author may have a great novel in her, but I didn’t think this one was it.
On another note: Trail of the Lost by Andrea Lankford, about the long and complex search(es) for three missing hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail. Lots of hiking, lots of searching, lots of information on searches, the role of social media, charlatans, and people who both help and hinder thru-hikers. I learned a lot! The author is a skeptic when it comes to psychics, but one of the families got a psychic involved. It didn’t work, but the most maddening part of the book is the psychic concluding that one young man wasn’t found because his mother didn’t fully WANT him to be found, so she needed to work on that before any progress could be made. Talk about blaming the victim! I recommend this one, though, and it’s heartwarming to see total strangers getting involved in these searches.
Started Glitz by Elmore Leonard. My first Elmore Leonard crime novel. The man is known in the writing world for excellent dialogue.
The story sucked me in immediately.
But it’s extremely sexist. Fifty pages in and so far the only female character is a twenty year old sex worker dating the 41-year-old protagonist and the book blurb says she gets murdered, so… Sometimes I have to switch off being a feminist just to enjoy good writing. I can do this for some things and not others.
Also on the agenda: A Most Wanted Man, John Lacarre, another author I’ve been meaning to get around to. Notable for the fact that he was an actual spy who later wrote espionage thrillers based on his experience. Hard to beat it for authenticity.
This is what I’ve been doing since I discovered the library. Taking a few more reading risks.
Finished Pulling the Wings Off Angels, by K. J. Parker (a fantasy) and Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, by Randall Munroe, both of which I enjoyed. The former is very Discworld-ish.
Now I’m reading An Elephant for Aristotle, by L. Sprague de Camp.
Great book. De Camp, known as a science fiction/fantasy writer and science popularizer tried to branch out into writing historical fiction. He only wrote a handful of them, but they’re worth reading.
Besides An Elephant for Aristotle, he wrote
The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
The Bronze God of Rhodes (about the construction of the Colossus of Rhodes. It bears comparison to Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth
The Arrows of Hercules
The Golden Wind
I’ve read The Bronze God of Rhodes, which I liked, but I enjoyed An Elephant for Aristotle, which I just finished, much more.
Now I’m reading The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish, by Emily Voigt.
Started this morning on a YA novel, Unpregnant, by Jenni Hendriks and Ted Kaplan. It’s about a seventeen year old girl who travels out of state for an abortion (I found it on a banned book list). So far it’s an implausible and annoyingly light wacky-girls-on-a-road-trip story, but as the topic is so interesting to me I do still want to see how it all plays out.
Finished Unpregnant, and gosh, that was terrible. It’s really just a story about two girls becoming best friends again. Oh, and they have to make a long trip together. 
Finished The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish, by Emily Voigt, which was quite interesting.
Now I’m reading Sherlock Mars by Jackie Kingon, a cozy SF mystery.
Started today on a sure thing: Playing With Myself, an autobiographical book by Randy Rainbow. Some really impressive blurbs by the likes of people like Patty Lupone and Carol Burnett. Wow, Randy was friends with Josh Gad as a kid! Oh, and spoiler alert, Randy is gay.
NO!
I would never have guessed that! 
The cutest ones always are. 
Finished Sherlock Mars by Jackie Kingon, a cozy SF mystery. Not recommended.
Now I’m reading Angel of the Overpass, by Seanan McGuire.
I finished The Bitch by Pilar Quintana last night and I am STILL MAD. Do NOT read this book if you have any positive feelings for dogs. I was irritated with it to begin with because it was misery porn but in the last bit the main character straight up strangled her dog. Fuck this book with a rusty dildo. I think I have the winner for the worst of the year on my blog.
I haven’t even read it, now I’m mad too!
I’m working up quite the rant for Goodreads. People must be warned!