June, we are now six months into 2026… and honestly it feels like six decades. On the other hand, my goal to read one T.Kingfisher book a month is cooking along nicely and I have the next three months lined up and waiting. With the world being so stressful right now, I’m going to be reading- or rereading- a lot of my favorite authors this year. .. with chocolate. Comfort, ya know?
So Whacha all Readin?
Audio: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Cat Bohannon. It seems to be a polarizing book on Goodreads, you either love it or hate it. I’m loving it.
Print: The Museum of Desire by Johnathan Kellerman. Look, I don’t care how formulaic the books may be, I enjoy the time spent with Alex & Milo, and right now I need that sense of friends hanging out.
Still plugging away at Blitz by Daniel O’Malley.
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 gave up on A Resistance of Witches about a third of the way through. It started feeling like the author was working off a checklist of character tropes and everyone started getting intensely stupid about the Evil Magic Book of Evil. (I originally typed “witchers” instead of witches. A resistance of witchers would be a much better book.)
I finished up my Anthony Trollope Author Quest about a month ago and now I’m working on Wilkie Collins. First up: The Dead Secret, a book about a confessional letter written by a dying woman that was hidden by her faithful servant. It was really good. Now I’m rereading The Woman in White. (Note for @DZedNConfused, once I’m done with Collins my next Author Quest will be T. Kingfisher. Probably in a year or so, those Victorians wrote loooooooooong books.)
Finally decided to read Weber’s “Honor Harrington” series. Our library has all but seven books; four of those are from the five-book YA series in which treecats are first discovered, two are short-story collections, and only one (Field of Dishonor) is part of the main series. Unfortunately, I’m now reading The Short Victorious War, and the next book is the missing novel.
I also discovered a newish Nancy Drew series I’d never heard of – the Nancy Drew Diaries – and I’ve started reading them, too.
Right now, though, I’m taking a break from both series and am about halfway through Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann – the book that The Sheep Detectives is based on. Unlike the movie, the book is not for kids. It seems George’s murder was somehow connected with drug smuggling. The sheep, though, are the main characters, and the humans are mainly seen from the sheep’s perspective.
I’m now reading The Many Loves of Dobie Gilis by Max Shulman. I’ve known about this book, and others by Shulman, for ages, but never read any of them, partly because they’ve pretty much vanished from bookstores (even used book stores) and libraries. I stumbled across this one at a used book store and decided to pick it up. Of course, I grew up on the TV show, but I couldn’t tell you the plots of any of the episodes. I knew it mainly as the launching pad for Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld and the pre-Gilliagan Bob Denver as TV beatnik Maynard G. Krebs. And the prototypes for the Scooby-Doo gang. Dwayne Hickman showed up in a couple of movies afterwards (Mr. Magoo’s 1001 Arabian Nights, Cat Ballou) and some abortive TV series, but this was arguably the high point in his career.
The book is interesting so far , especially in showing how humor has changed through the years. The chapters in this were originally individual short stories published in a variety of magazines. The cover painting is by a guy who would later become more famous doing cartoons for Playboy, and whose women don’t appear to have noses.
It’s probably a basd sign that my favorite part so far is the dedication:
To Ferdinand de Lesseps
without whom I never could have dug the Suez Canal
On audio, I’m listening to a bunch of audiobooks I’ve put on a USB drive in MP3 format. Right now I’m listening to the Pengiin audio edition of Tales from the Arabian Nights, specifically the story of Aladdino. It’s telling that Aladdin is the go-to Arabian Nights story, not only here, but in the Avenel Press edition, excerpted from Burton’s translation (and Burton’s original edition makes it clear that this is NOT part of the original Arabian nights – it’s in one of the volumes of the “Supplemental nights”), in the Hallmark TV adaption of the Arabian NIghts, and in a great many other places. Yet, as I’ve pointed out before, the story isn’t in any of the original manuscripts of the 1001 nights. It was apparently made up out of Arabian Nights tropes (and some autobiographical material) by Hanna Dayib, who provided the first outlines of the stories
Still reading Doctor Who: Time Lord Fairy Tales, by Justin Richards.
Finished Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney. Enjoyed it quite a bit, and may read some of the books Romney recommends. However, I was concerned that Romney, a rare book dealer, keeps talking about all the gorgeous green books she has. Some green books printed in the Victorian era (true, later than most of the editions of the books she’s discussing) contained arsenic. Since she’s encouraging readers to collect antique books in general, I think she should mention this danger. (Presumably she knows?) Also finished All the Blues in the Sky, by Renee Watson, which is this year’s Newbery Award winner. Meh. Also, I’m concerned for some of the kids who’ll read this book, especially since it’s about grief. (That part isn’t a spoiler.) The main character’s best friend is struck and killed by a car. The heroine feels better when she’s taught about Bessie Coleman. This pioneer African- and Native- American pilot “soared through the skies” and was a “magician of the air”. The book’s author doesn’t mention that Coleman fell out of her airplane at a young age and was killed. (Presumably she knows?) Anyway, lots of kids, especially those in mourning, will be told to read this book and might research Coleman.
Next up: For Duck’s Sake, by Donna Andrews, and The Ballad of Beta 2, by Samuel R. Delany.
Finished The Running Man, by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman. Published in 1982, the story is set in the future, 2025. A poor but intelligent man desperately needs money for his sick baby and so becomes a contestant on The Running Man, a TV game show in which he is hunted mercilessly. If he can last 30 days, he’s home free and wins $1 billion, otherwise he’s killed spectacularly once the hunters catch up with him. There have been no winners so far, and the longest any contestant has gone is eight days. He’ll need luck as well as intelligence. Very good if forgettable.
It seems the reason King wrote some early books as Richard Bachman was because publishers at the time thought it unseemly for an author to put out more than one book a year. They thought the reading public would accuse them of packing the market with any one particular “brand.” But King felt he had more than a book a year in him and persuaded his publisher to let him use the Bachman name. For a cover photo he used one of a friend of his agent and made up a whole bio for him.
Next up is On the Road with Charles Kuralt, by Charles Kuralt. I may have read this a long time ago, not sure. But I was at a friend’s house in northeastern Thailand for a couple days, and he gave me some books. This was one of them.
Didn’t particularly care for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Max Shulman’s Dobie character varies too much from sory to story – he’s obviously a tand-in for Shulman, and has whatever characteristics are needed to highlight the character of the lady in each story, even if this makes Dobie a poor student in one story and a nerd in another. Shulman recognizes this and tries to wriggle out in a foreword, but it’s pretty latant.
What’s more annoying is how freakin’ old the stories feel. The book is really an anthology published in the early 1950s, which means the individual stories saw print in the 1940s, and I suspect felt old an out of date eve then. Dobie takes his dates to concerts featuring Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. One of his classmates longs for a raccoon coat. No wonder that when they turned this into a TV series (Shulman was himself involved) they threw in a beatnik to try to make it feel current and relevant.
On to Double for Death, a Rex Stout mystery featuring Tecumseh Fox, rather than Nero Wolfe.
Finished listening to Out Of Nowhere by Sandra Brown. A decent murder novel focused on two survivors of a mass shooting who are drawn to each other as a result of the tragedy. But when the shooter re-appears, the mystery deepens.
This is my first read by thsi author. I will look for more of her work.
I finished John Grisham’s novel The Whistler, which was very slow getting started but which, after a somewhat unexpected murder, then moved along at a good clip. Two State of Florida investigators are drawn into a case involving a Native American casino, organized crime and an allegedly crooked local judge. It’s not Grisham’s best (that’s still The Runaway Jury for me), and there’s a lengthy epilogue which kinda breaks the “show, don’t tell” rule, but overall I enjoyed it.
Now I’m about two-thirds through an audiobook of Robert Harris’s Precipice, about the real-life affair between British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and the aristocratic Venetia Stanley around the time of the outbreak of World War I. It’s quite engaging as both a historical novel and a kinda-skeevy romance (he was married to someone else, and she was much younger than him; he was also extraordinarily reckless in sharing military and diplomatic secrets and documents with her).
Still occasionally returning to Dan Chaon’s supernatural-circus novel One of Us, and Ali Hazelwood’s Mate, about love, secrets and power in a werewolf-dominated Pacific Northwest.
When King was exposed as Bachman, he joked that the latter had died of “cancer of the pseudonym.”
Understandable! It was kind of dense, especially since it’s been so long since the last one came out.
I just finished The Gate of the Feral Gods, fourth in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. I still love the characters, but this one was kind of a slog. It was impossible for me to visualize the setting, and toward the end, I didn’t even know who was doing what and why. It’s a testament to Mr. Dinniman that I was still sufficiently entertained! And then, the epilogue was worth an additional star all by itself. Looking forward to the next installment.
Damn! I just noticed that my tracking over at Goodreads is not accurate. I think what’s happening is that if I add a book using my phone (and their crappy app), it’s just listed as read, and doesn’t go on the shelf I asked it to.
Thank goodness I had these threads, so I could go back and fix things!
I hate that app with every fiber of my being, but it’s the only way I can get a new book posted on the Home page to update as I read.
On a brighter note, I finished the 35th Alex Delaware book The Museum of Desire by Jonathan Kellerman. It was MUCH better than the prior book even if I felt the motive was largely unexplored and kind of abstract..
I started Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. It’s a signed copy that a fellow Doper sent me when he saw Scalzi talk recently. I’m not far but the narrative already feels comfortable, like catching up with an old friend.
Started Blood Moon by Sandra Brown. An investigative reporter discovers a possible link to a series of homicides, and tries to enlist the aid of a detective who worked the last case.
Started today on The Fountain, by Casey Scieszka (daughter of Jon). It’s a novel about a woman who appears to be young and is unable to die. When she returns to the small town where she lived with her family hundreds of years ago, she is reunited with her brother, who shares the same trait. Together, they are searching for the source of their immortality, but for very different reasons. This is well-written, and I’m enjoying it so far.
Finished Doctor Who: Time Lord Fairy Tales, by Justin Richards. This is a slipcovered set of 16 SF stories based (mostly) on fairy tales. The best is “The Three Little Sontarans”. Also finished For Duck’s Sake, by Donna Andrews, which was okay, and The Ballad of Beta 2, by Samuel R. Delany, which was quite good.
Next up: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C. S. Lewis; and Little Book of Tiffany and Co.: The Story of the Iconic Brand, by Tamara Sturtz-Filby.
I’m not far but the narrative already feels comfortable, like catching up with an old friend.