Finished Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Witling, by Vernor Vinge.
I am about a quarter through Replay and enjoying it quite a bit.
The Trillion Dollar Conspiracy by Jim Marrs.
Finished Plum Island by Nelson DeMille. A decent whodunit, although the protagonist figured out the murderer well before the end of the book, and then spent an inordinate amount of time (I thought) chasing him down.
Now I just started Women Talking by Miriam Toews. The movie version was released a couple of months ago. The book is based on a true story of a very conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia where the women and girls were regularly raped after being subjected to an animal anesthetic. The attackers, as it turned out, were men from the colony.
As both sides of my family have roots in the Mennonite church, I am definitely interested in this story.
Just started Nightmare on the Scottie by Stephen Orsini. It is a fairly short non-fiction book that details the King Crab “goldrush” in the 60s and the need to build new ships in Alabama. It is the story of transporting one of those ships from Mobile, AL to Seattle, WA via the Panama Canal with a fall-down drunk captain at the helm. It’s an absolute page-turner and I expect to finish it within another 1-2 days.
I finished rereading Walter Mosley’s books on my kindle. Started rereading Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes (short story collection)
Oh good, glad to hear it.
Started today on Murder Your Employer: the McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes (yes, that Rupert Holmes)! It’s just okay so far, but has a lovely cover and illustrations, and of course is fun to flaunt at work.
Okay, I gotta read that one!
Ken Grimwood’s Replay is great - I’ve read it twice. Clever and engrossing, with some moments where I actually said “YES!” out loud when I got to them. Hope you keep enjoying it, Mahaloth.
My current audiobook is The Passenger, nonfiction by Chaney Kwak. He’s a travel writer who survived a 2019 disaster aboard an ocean liner on which he was sailing, and of course wrote about it afterwards. There’s a bit too much navel-gazing about his stereotypical South Korean parents and his neglectful German boyfriend, but it’s a quick read and I’m enjoying it, all in all.
Still reading A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O’Brian by Dean King, with essays by John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes. As I noted before, his choice of emphasis is sometimes inexplicable - he writes two pages about a single naval battle featured in only one of the 21 books in the series, but then just a short paragraph about HMS Surprise, the British frigate which is the setting of most of the books.
Still making slow progress through Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a distant-future sf novel about a terraforming project gone badly, and dangerously, awry.
I’m also reading The Unexpected George Washington by Harlow Giles Unger, about the first President’s private life. I’m a big GW fan but Unger is too gushy even for my taste. Not sure I’ll finish it.
I’m listening to Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. It’s a first contact story and I’m about halfway through. I haven’t quite decided if I like it or not just yet. It’s a little tenser than I prefer listening to on my early morning walks, but I’m looking forward to finding out what happens.
He just went back in time for the second time, which I assumed was going to happen. This is the earliest version of this “live it over again” story I’ve read. Predating Groundhog Day by a few years.
I love that on his first trip back, he made tons of money, which is probably what I would have done. I also love that the second time, he is making money, but not the billions he made the first time. It’s an interesting choice.
I just finished The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honore Fannone, and I really enjoyed it. The plot goes back and forth between a the lives of a family in (relatively) recent times and those of their ancestors, working from the 1600’s to the 2000’s.
I read Women Talking some time ago, and it was so devastating that I can’t bring myself to see the movie, even though it looks like it would be very good.
Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman - A history of the events in the days between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. No surprising revelations but this goes into a lot more detail than most general histories devote to this topic.
One problem with the book is that it can’t really answer its central question. Germany declared war because Hitler decided to and he didn’t have to answer to anyone else. But that means there will never been a conclusive answer as to why Hitler made that decision. We have some evidence from what he told other people but the things he said often didn’t fully express what he was thinking.
Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. A collection of essays on movies. This book reveals how central movies are to Tarantino’s life. In one of the opening chapters, for example, he talks about seeing Bullitt in a theater and his reactions to it. This wouldn’t be unusual except he mentions at one point that he was six years old at the time. That said, Tarantino does have a lot of interesting insights into movies.
A question: have you read any of Grimwood’s other books and, if so, are they worth seeking out?
No, only that one.
That sounds like a worse horror story than anything Stephen King and Rob Zombie combined could come up with!
Replay is excellent – I’ve read it several times.
Just started Winds of Wrath, the fifteenth (and final) book in the Destroyermen AH series by Taylor Anderson.
Next will be The Janus File, the third book in a time-travel/AH series by David Weber and Jacob Holo.
(Weber needs to quit wasting time on other stuff and finish the third Hell’s Gate book!)
Finished The Witling, by Vernor Vinge, which is a very good SF novel. Vinge has some very interesting ideas about how certain psychic powers could work if they existed, especially with regard to teleportation.
Now I’m reading A Man Called Peter by Catherine Marshall, a biography of her husband.
Finished it. Meh. Dunno why it got such great reviews.