I finally have a minute to sit down! And here we are knee deep in 2021, somehow I thought the 20s would be more exciting than this… but at least we still have books! So what are y’all readin?
I am reading:
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal with my books club and surprisingly loving the book a lot. (I’m “reading” the audiobook and the woman narrating is phenomenal.)
on my Kindle, I was going to start The Dry by Jane Harper but K.J. Charles dropped her latest Regency farce/romance *The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting" so…
I just finished Undercurrents the third Nameless Detective book by Bill Pronzini. Parts of it were pretty dated - it feels wrong to not have a single computer or cell phone anywhere in the story - which is to be expected since it was written in 1973. I feel Pronzini had finally hit his groove for this series. Nameless was much less detached and indifferent to the mystery this time and the overall pacing of the book was much better.
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 don’t want any more excitement unless it’s between the covers!
Of a book, I mean.
Finished Michael Koryta’s Never Far Away, and really liked it. There’s a movie coming out soon of his book Those Who Wish Me Dead (another good one), and Never Far Away has a link to some of those characters. Those Blackwell boys scare the crap out of me!
Currently reading The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold. Survivors struggle post-apocalypse, yay.
And now I see Stephen King’s newest, Later, is on its way from Amazon…
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. It’s an analysis of seven Russian short stories intended for writers. It’s my first time reading Chekhov, and I have to say I enjoy his stuff. There’s also a delightful story by Gogol about a man misplacing his nose. I read a lot of writing craft books, but rarely those with a literary bent. It’s interesting.
Finished The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert Heinlein.
Thought it was a bit of a drag for the first half. When I start books I try as best as I can to get through it on a daily basis but this one had very long meandering dialogues to begin with that took me an age to take in. Second half of the story picked up and was a lot more interesting.
Now starting The Seventh Secret by Irving Wallace. This is a fictional story about a father-daughter duo trying to put together the final part of their biography of Adolf Hitler. That being what really happened in those last days at that bunker 40 years earlier.
I’m enjoying Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, a 1976 sf novel that I read years ago but remember very little of. It’s about the visit of a Titan colonial tycoon’s cloned son to humanity’s homeworld in time for the U.S. quincentennial in 2276; interesting chapter now on life aboard an interplanetary passenger liner.
Gave up on The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which Tride mentioned earlier and which my niece, who’s well-read on contemporary sf, recommended. It’s a pretty grim portrait of near-future global climate change and I just wasn’t digging it.
More lighthearted by far is The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Set in Australia, it’s about a Dr. Sheldon Cooperesque scientist’s dispassionate, systematic attempt to find a suitable wife (including a 32-page questionnaire). I’m almost halfway done and it’s a hoot.
I also read the kids’ book The Kitchen Knight, a retelling of the Sir Gareth tale from Arthurian legend by Margaret Hodges, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Looks great but the story’s meh, including an abrupt and ambiguous ending.
Magpie Murders Anthony Horowitz. In the 1950s, a quiet English village is the scene of two mysterious deaths and noted detective Atticus Pund is called in to investigate. It turns out that many in the village have dark secrets, and are not very nice people at all. But is one a killer?
At some point the plot develops into a sort of book-within-a-book, and so there are two mysteries in one.
Although the book lacks the psychological intensity of, say, the Wallander books, I enjoyed it. Although the unusual structure makes it quite long (> 400 pages).
I tried to read Isle of Palms by Dorothea Benton Frank, but got bored with it midway through and didn’t finish. Then I picked up The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, and again got bored and threw in the towel. I began to fear that reading was just losing its appeal to me, because neither of these books had obvious flaws and both were generally well-received and popular. I just found my mind wandering as I was reading the books, and when I wasn’t reading them I didn’t feel any sort of pull to go back and finish them. I didn’t care about the story or the characters very much.
Thankfully, my next choice was Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s an interesting cross between fact and fiction: in the book, Hilary decides not to marry Bill, and the book explores how history might have played out differently if she had not married him. But a good chunk of the book focuses on their romantic relationship prior to “breaking up” (in the fictional version of events), and I’ve been Googling some of the things that happen in the first part of the book and a lot of them are historically accurate. But of course, the book also describes intimate moments and conversations, so even if Bill really did change his summer plans to spend the summer with Hilary, you know that the author didn’t know exactly what their conversations were like. Anyways, the book very much holds my interest, and while I’m only halfway through it, I’m pretty confident that I do still love reading and just had the misfortune to pick two books in a row that weren’t a good fit for me prior to this one.
I am also reading Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker. This book has sold very well, and I can see why: the author does a good job of turning solid research into something easy to understand and interesting to read.
Ooh this title has me hooked. I’ve added it to my to-read list!
Weird, I remember reading a short story by Kelly Link about a man who wore fake noses, and would pick out ones with, like, flowers painted on them or something. It seemed like a pretty unique thing to shove into a short story, but I guess not.
Finished The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine , by Thomas Morris. It’s hilarious, horrifying, and often both. I strongly recommend it…for those with strong stomachs.
Now I’m reading a science fiction novel, Light, by M. John Harrison.
I finished Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal this morning. I really enjoyed it, it was interesting, funny and exciting. It was a nice peek into the insular Sikh community the insular society of elderly women.
Robert McKee is a giant in writing craft. He makes thousands off of his seminars. This is one of the seminal works All Writers Must Read, and it’s… fine. I’ll admit there aren’t many surprises because a lot of it was repackaged into Story Grid, and I studied Story Grid for about two years. I might be way more impressed if these were new concepts.
I’m rereading Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie. I love history but I don’t often re-read books. But this one is an exception.
I’ve also started Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton. I’ve been putting it off because I don’t like starting on a series and having to wait for the publication of follow-up volumes. But the third books in the series was recently released and I had an opportunity to pick up a used copy of the second book so I’ve jumped in.
Having heard it praised many times, LN, Massie’s Dreadnought has been on my to-read list for years, but I’ve just never gotten around to it.
Just zipped through Crossing on Time by David Macaulay. Written and illustrated with his customary wit and skill, it’s about the evolution of steamships up to their apotheosis, the swift, sleek SS United States, launched in 1951 and all too soon made unprofitable - if not obsolete - by jet travel. A highlight of the book is a meticulous four-page fold-out cutaway view of the liner. Very good stuff.
Now past the halfway mark in reading Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, a very enjoyable retelling of Arthurian legend (although the great king too often comes across as a bit of both a prig and a boob).
Yesterday I finished The Electric Kingdom. It was well-written, and that kept me going, although much of the book was only mildly interesting and at times confusing. Then…the characters reached their destination, and the book became a far more interesting mindfuck. So I’m torn…it was kind of a slog, until it wasn’t. And I don’t know that the ending was redeeming enough to make up for the journey to get there, but I did spend some time thinking about it afterward. One important thing you may wish to know if you’re thinking about reading this one: the dog does not die.
Today I started on Stephen King’s latest contribution to the Hard Case Crime series, Later. Am I happy today? Yes. Yes.
There’s a link here to read a sample if you want: About Later
