My book club read Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music awhile back, and I remember it as being very divisive. Some of us hated it; I thought it had an interesting premise but was just OK, not great, as a book.
I’m now almost halfway through The Passage by Justin Cronin, about a near-future secret research project on Death Row inmates that leads to… well, very bad things, I’ll just say. It starts out as a biomedical/government paranoia thriller but there’s been a substantial time-jump forward, and now it’s a completely different book. Not sure yet if it’s a better book, but it’s certainly different.
Just started reading with my son When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, a sf comedy novel about the Moon actually turning into cheese, and what happens next.
I keep meaning to get back to Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain; someday I will. It’s OK, sometimes pretty good, but it’s hardly a page-turner.
I don’t know how old your son is but there’s an , um, adult chapter in the middle. No sex but some kinky shenanigans. One of the best laughs of the book in my opinion,
Just gave up on Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline about halfway through. I was just barely putting up with the rock-bashing-me-over-the-head-with-the-message already, but when the Deus Ex Machina crashed the Secret Time-Travelling Women meeting with Important Information that they needed to keep the plot moving I decided that this book is too silly to exist.
Also, someone needs to tell the author that everyone has read The Devil in the White City already so there’s no need for her to show off. that she’s read it as well.
I think you got further than I did. My book club loved but I just couldn’t get past the Deus Ex Machina overload the character that they all loved died, so no remembered who she was but then someone went back in time and saved her so now they could all love her again. I shouted “OH COME ON!!” at my phone and just pure drek of it all.
It probably doesn’t help that I was reading it right after I finished the vastly superior A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum. It’s also about women’s rights but seen through the lens of three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn. It was hard to get through sometimes because there is a lot of spousal abuse but it managed to be hopeful and–this is important–not preachy.
I stepped away for a few minutes today to re-read Life of Chuck, a short story from Stephen King’s If It Bleeds collection. It’s about to be released as a movie, and I wanted to refresh my memory.
Now that I’ve done so, I’m honestly puzzled as to how they could stretch this sixty-something page story into a film, especially as very little happens.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Finished The Heirloomist: 100 Treasures and the Stories They Tell, by Shana Novak, which had some interesting stories, of which my favorite was a photo of a helmet worn by a firefighter, Jack Burton, when he caught a toddler who fell from a burning building. As he bent over to put the baby down, a baby fell onto his back. That child survived, too. A newspaper called him “The Human Safety Net”.
Next up: My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew, by Abigail Pogrebin, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick.
Started today on The Witchstone by Henry Neff. It’s an amusing story about a demon dealing with the bureaucracy of Hell and the difficulties of managing humans; I always enjoy this type of thing.
Okay–I wrote this before a major plot advancement that fundamentally changed my take on the book.
The protagonist meets an alien and strikes up a deeply touching friendship.
Up to that point, the book had felt very much like We Are Legion/We Are Bob, which I cordially disliked. But from here on, there was much more emotional depth to the book. Not Dostoyevsky by any stretch, but the protagonist felt much more human.
If someone doesn’t like science fiction, this ain’t the book to change their mind. It’s not great literature. But it’s a solid, fun read, and the final scene actually got me a little emotional.
I finished Anima Rising. If you’ve read any Christopher Moore, you know what to expect – it’s quirky, obscene, and funny. As the subtitle says, it’s Gustave Klimt and Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud meeting the Bride of Frankenstein (who the good Doctor put back together, after tearing her apart). She’s virtually immortal and amoral, and casually talks about murdering people, which Freud and Jung take with savoir faire. There’s also a surprising amount of Inuit mythology thrown in.
It’s not quite as engaging as his earlier books, most of which contained at least one line of description or dialogue that you wanted to read out of context to someone just to het their reaction. But worth a read.
(Self-plug: I wrote my own Bride of Frankenstein story, A Light so Brilliant and Wondrous, several years ago – in this case the survival of the Bride was ca consequence of one small change I made to the story of Frankenstein. You can read it here for free:
I also read Luke Skywalker Can’t Read by Ryan Britt and God, No! by Penn Jillette. Interesting essays on Science Fiction/Fantasy and on Theology/Religion.
I’m on travel, so I picked up a copy of Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Excellent as always.
I’m halfway through Roger Dixon’s Noah II, a book that came out in 1970, and which had a tag on the cover – “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!”. Well, it’s now 55 years later, and the motion picture hasn’t happened yet. In the edition printed five years later the “motion picture” claim is gone, but it’s said to be the first book in a series “The Quest”, which hasn’t happened either. I’m a little curious what happened. Dixon wrote two other books, although the Science Fiction Encyclopedia says three. Dixon died in 1983 at the age of 53, so it looks like we won’t get any answers from him. The book starts out competently enough, but it suddenly jumps thirty years into the future, and hops around a lot. I’m not entirely happy with it, but we’ll see if it gets any better. The damned thing was published five times (six if you count the e-book), but it doesn’t really seem worth it yet.
The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground Menno Shilthuizen
A look at the various types of citizen science and environmental activism being done in cities around the world, including posting to platforms such as Inaturalist.
A.J. Jacobs wrote the preface to My Jewish Year… Pogrebin discussed her planned book with him before she wrote it, and they decided the two books wouldn’t be too similar. The Year of Living Biblically... is now on my TBR list.
Finished My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew, by Abigail Pogrebin, which I thought was fascinating, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, which was okay.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Next up: Sandbows and Black LIghts: Reflections on Optics, by Stephen R. Wilk, and Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart.
Bridge of Birds is one of my favorite books. I reread it fairly regularly.
I’m sad that Barry Hughart got so much sh*t from his publishing company that he quit writing after the third book.
I finished A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh McDonnell. That was… crazy and wild in all the right ways. And I’m going to grab the next book in the series.
I finished The Witchstone, and gave it the rare five stars at Goodreads. As always, I’m posting a disclaimer because I don’t really care for the star rating system! This is not among the best books ever written, I’m merely saying that I had a good time with it, it was a nice story and did exactly what it said on the tin. I would try this author again.
i’m nearly through this series. just a fun read. seeing the world through the eyes and noses of the various animals. the series is written from the point of view of athos a malamute, and pearl a neva masquerade. other animals are brought in as athos and pearl investigate the murders.
