Regarding The First Day of Spring
Well, I guess I was wrong. Apparently the story was based on the real-life case of Mary Bell. Holy crap.
Just finished The Bone Ship’s Wake, the final book in the Tide Child trilogy, and it’s my favorite trilogy of the past five years or so. Nautical fantasy with excellent world-building, kickass action, and really compelling characters. I highly recommend all three books, with the proviso that they have a peculiar voice that might take awhile to get used to.
Holy crap indeed!
Just started The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave.
A mystery that looks promising.
Read the final book in Tao Wong’s Systerm Apocalypse series. It ended very satisfactorily; the only way it could end and stay true to the main character John.
Finished Electrified Sheep: Glass-eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and More Bizarre Experiments , by Alex Boese, which was okay. To me, the most interesting part was that people used to build dollhouse-sized villages and then zap them with a charge from a Leyden jar. It was a miniature version of a lightning strike. They were called thunder houses.
Now I’m reading a cozy mystery by Tim Cockey called Hearse of a Different Color.
D’oh! I posted the following in the February thread:
Finished A Time for Mercy, by John Grisham, his third novel featuring Clanton, Mississippi attorney Jake Brigance. Set in 1990, Brigance is tasked by a judge with defending a 16-year-old boy charged with the capital murder of a deputy sheriff. The boy, his sister and their mother are all trailer trash who were living with the murder victim, a violent alcoholic who terrorized all of them brutally. The boy, underdeveloped due to his hard life – he looks to all appearances like he’s 12 – mistakenly thinks the deputy finally killed his mother one night when she’s unconscious on the kitchen floor, figures he and his sister are next and takes the deputy’s own service revolver and shoots him point blank in the head while he’s passed out cold but showing signs of reviving. This being Mississippi, the general sentiment is stick him in the gas chamber right away. This is actually quite a good story … right up to the very end, when it all falls flat. I’m scratching my head thinking, “That’s the end?” It almost feels like he must be planning to continue it in another novel. Recommended only for Grisham fans.
Next up is The Beautiful and Damned, by F Scott Fitzgerald, his second novel, published exactly 100 years ago.
Last month somebody said that they had just finished Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women. I mentioned that I had read it myself (it’s in one of these threads), having borrowed it from my wife, Pepper Mill, who got it at a convention.
This is just to let you know that today we picked up the just-published sequel, Rediscovery Volume II (1953-1957). I got it for Pepper, who will be reading it first. I’m still working my way through The WorldCon Guest of Honor Speeches, and then the stack by my bedside.
On audio, I might have mentioned that I finished Stephen KIng’s Billy Summers and am now going through Clive Cussler’s Lost Empire. I picked it up at a used book store in hopes that I had not previously read it. I hadn’t. It’s the second of the Sam and Remi Fargo novels. As I was driving with Pepper today I told her how, if Cussler doesn’t have at least one moment in any book that causes you to say “Oh, Come ON!” then he hasn’t done his job. Then I recited a list of outrageous things from some of his other books, which got her laughing. I think she feels that she reads some far-out stuff, but it’s not as ludicrous as what I just told her.
Just finished rereading The Switch by Elmore Leonard. If you’ve read Rum Punch, the novel Jackie Brown was based on, The Switch is a prequel (?) that follows what Ordell Robbie and Louis Garra were up to before Rum Punch happens.
A fun book.
Started today on The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak. It’s about some teenage boys in the eighties, trying to steal a copy of Playboy from the local convenience store. As part of their plot, one of them befriends the owners daughter, then finds that she’s interested in writing computer code for video games, just as he is. Really liking it so far.
Next week, weather permitting, I need to take a car trip to deal with some family business. It’s an 8-hour drive each way. Suggestions for an audio book or two for the trip?
I’m a big fan of King, Grisham, Sandford, and Connelly. I’ve read just about all of their books, so something in a similar genre would certainly be considered. And being the skinflint that I am, something available on Libby would also be welcome.
Thanks in advance!
I just “read” Stephen King’s Billy Summers on audio. If you haven’t read it, it’s definitely worthwhile. I also recently read King’s Later
Read both of those recently myself! Thoroughly enjoyed them.
I gave up on The Golem and the Jinni. By page 144 the plot was still deep in exposition and introducing new characters. So I did something that foreshadowed the fate of this book on my reading pile: I looked up the reviews on Goodreads. Interspersed among all the glowing reviews of a book I obviously wasn’t reading were warnings that it took another hundred pages for the main characters to meet and then another two hundred for a disappointing ending. Life’s too short.
So I picked up The Tale of Genji instead. I was surprised to find out how freakin’ long this book is: 1200+ pages! Is this the year I read doorstops or something? Still, more things happened in the first five pages than in the first hundred of Golem & Jinni, so I’m sticking with it. Besides, I’m fascinated by the complicated and convoluted world of the tenth-century Japanese royal court.
OH, so it wasn’t just me that felt that The Golem and the Jinni had potential but ultimately fell flat. I liked the ending a lot but jeez the backstory took forever.
I liked The Golem and the Jinni, but I applaud your decision to set it aside if you weren’t enjoying the journey. I don’t think anyone should slog through a novel if they don’t like it.
Finished Hearse of a Different Color by Tim Cockey, which I enjoyed a lot. It’s more of a hard boiled mystery than I’d thought. Actually, it reminds me, style wise, of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels.
Now I’m reading Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays, by Yu Xiuhua.
Missed the edit window: Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm was translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
Thanks for the tip. Just put in a request at my library. If it is at all like Parker I’ll enjoy it.
Definitely not. I’ve found my 50-page rule has served me well over the years; I think I’m giving the author a fair shake, and if I’m not hooked by then, I know from hard experience it’s very unlikely I ever will be.