I also just finished Never Flinch by Stephen King. Agree that it was just okay, although the climax of the book was riveting, as is the case in most King novels. Two really strange bad guys, whose paths cross when they target the same victim.
Sword of Kaigen - Just started this because my daughter loved it and she wanted me to read it this summer.
Any fans? NO SPOILERS!
I finished Roger Dixon’s Noah II, finally getting through a book I first saw ages ago. Guy builds a space ark to carry pe9ople and animals away from a dying Earth – a hoary old idea that’s been done to death plenty of times, right? Some good treatments, a lot of bad ones. This one is definitely unusual, because this one takes the story from Genesis as a model and follows it pretty closely in some places, and not at all in others.
His “Noah” is a guy named Preston who was raised in a Machines-Care-For-You-Utopia in which everyone has assigned roles, sort of Brave New World-ish, except our hero has a rebellious streak. Instead of staying in his safe community, he decides to go out and live outside the city. His girlfriend cokes with him. Even though he’s been reading up on things, and taken some books with him, the odds are that the two of them ought to be dead in a very short time. But they aren’t. They figure out how to adapt a home, plant and harvest crops, and go through childbirth without complications.
Abruptly the scene jumps thirty years into the future, and these two and their three sons (just like in Genesis! One of them’s even named Ham!) and other malcontents who have joined them have established a primitive community. This isn’t a promising group to build a starship. But there’s a magical visitor named Vicro, who only Preston ever sees. It’s not at all clear who or what Vicro is, but he’s not a fignment of Preston’s imagination, because he provides the high-techmaterials and tools that Preston’s Bronze-age community needs to construct starships. An apparently to gather together breeding poplations of anbmals. Amd people. Given the book’s heavy religious overtones, Vicro must be either God or an Angel. He provides the answer to Captain Kirk’s “What does God need with a space ship?”
So Preston’s people, who have already built fortified and palisaded dwellings, begin using high techy tools and materials to make polyhedral space-traveling ships which are capable of FTL travel usng some WArp-like tecnlogy.
While they;re doing this, a drought hits the cearth, and people remaning in the cities form warlord-lead armies that wamnt to take he starships and escape from Earth themselves. There are battles i which Preston’s people prevail against their dewsperate opponents, then they take off. The ships are guided by instructions that Vicro has set down on what is appartetlty magnetuc tape. The ships make episodic journeys by stages through the universe, kind of the way the Guardians of the Galaxy travel through a series of jumps. There’s rebellion among the ships when people see what appears to be an ideal world, only they’re not at the end o0f the tape. Fijnally, Preston and the remaining travelers get to their destination, and it turns out to be the Earth. The end.
This wasn’t worth waiting all thi time for.
Afte this I read Murder at the Beach, a collection of beach-them,ed mysteries, which wasn’y very satisfying. The cozy mysteries were TOO cozy. The best of the lot was an Elis Peters’ archaeological mystery, whose only reltionship with a beach is a lot of sand.
I moved on to A History of the World in 80 Lost Women by Katie Nelson and Olivia Meikle, a quirky little history of the world, emphasizing notable women. The book is very new, amnd one of its virtues is the up-to-the-minute set of historical discoveries. It covers a lot of unfamiliar ground with sly wit.
My son bailed on reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi with me, and at his suggestion we’ve instead turned to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which he’s read before but wants to read again. I haven’t read it before. So far, so good.
I’ll keep going with the Scalzi book, though. Not his best, but I like it.
Started on The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson. Starting out to be another good murder mystery by an author who writes good murder mysteries.
Bridge of Birds is indeed a wonderful book. I’m glad there are sequels, which I look forward to reading. Sandbows and Black LIghts: Reflections on Optics is also excellent, and I recommend it for anyone who, like me, enjoys reading popular science books.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Next up: How to Write One Song, by Jeff Tweedy, and It’s All or Nothing, Vale, by Andrea Beatriz Arango.
I’m glad you liked it! I’m probably due a reread soon.
Finished How to Write One Song, by Jeff Tweedy, meh, and It’s All or Nothing, Vale, by Andrea Beatriz Arango, which was okay.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Next up: Sister Wendy’s Book of Meditations, by Sister Wendy Beckett, and The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams.
Yesterday I read The Merry Spinster: tales of everyday horror, kind of a fractured fairytales book. The first story was good, but the others just passed the time.
I started today on The Devils, by Joe Abercrombie. It’s about a monk who is assigned to fight evil beings by leading other evil beings against them. At nearly fifty pages in, I haven’t decided whether to finish.
I finished reading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as an audiobook. I tried reading it in print many years ago, but never finished it. A very good book, well-written. Don’t know why it challenged me all those years ago. The book goes on for a surprising length after Crusoe leaves the island, for reasons not at all clear to me. There’s much more than is needed to tell us “what happened to the people afterwards”. Crusoe, sick of sea travel, makes a long trip through Spain and France and is attacked by wolves and bears. This seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the book, as if Defoe wanted to start another set of Crusoe adventures.
Not sure what to “read” on audio next.
I just finished The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb which has been on Mt. ToBeRead since it was published. I really liked it. It immersed me in the time period (mid-nineteenth century) with all of the new innovations. I don’t know how much I liked Vinnie, Mrs. Thumb, though. She was very much a stuck up snob and resistant to anyone telling her to get over herself. But she was interesting, so there’s that.
I kept thinking “Oh XYZ would write this so much better.” I spent my teens and 20s reading Tanith Lee, Ortberg got no where near filling those shoes.
Yeah, and not to bore everyone, but also T. Kingfisher. 
Absolutely!
Three new ones for me:
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. Years ago I started Artemis, and couldn’t get more than 70 pages in because the writing was so clunky and the voice so smug. I hated it. So when someone suggested Project Hail Mary for our book club, I sighed heavily and kept my mouth shut. And yeah, the first seventy pages or so were as bad as I feared.
But then, somewhere around that point, something happened in the book to change its tone and action, and it became something that I genuinely enjoyed. It’s still not great literature, won’t make any of my “best of” lists, but it’s a very solid hard SF novel with interesting ideas.
A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett. The first book was a murder mystery set in a fantasy empire with kaiju and plant-based genetic manipulation. Great fun! This sequel is more of the same: while it doesn’t really introduce that many new ideas, it’s a cool setting, with a decent murder mystery.
Swordscrossed, by Freya Marske. The previous two books I read by her were fantasies set in Edwardian England with secret societies and a big dose of queer porn sprinkled throughout. This one is set in a fantasy-world Regency England with no magic, complex politics, and maybe ten or twenty pages of hot and heavy man-on-man action. Well-written and fun stuff!
Finished Sister Wendy’s Book of Meditations, by Sister Wendy Beckett. I enjoyed her analysis of the works of art in the book. Also finished The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams, which was was okay.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Next up: Job: A Comedy of Justice, by Robert A. Heinlein.
Finished The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson. A decent murder mystery about two psychopathic women who kill, but for very different reasons.
Next up: A Talent for Murder, by the same author.
Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War’s Most Audacious Espionage Operation, by Steve Vogel – Operation GOLD: the Berlin tunnel, to tap into the Russian/East German phone lines
I hope you have better luck with it than I did. It was written towards the end of his life when he’d firmly gone off the rails.
Two minutes into this book, I realized I had already read it, and this was confirmed my Dope entry about it last December. Jeebus, I am showing my advancing age.
So I checked out another book from Libby: The Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins. I don’t think I’ve read this one, but I can’t be sure at this point.