Finished Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, by Noah Charney, which was okay. That said, I don’t think it was necessary to use the phrase “herstory, not history” at least a half-dozen times.
Now I’m reading Spaced Out, by Stuart Gibbs.
Spice, I enjoyed Harari’s Sapiens very much, too. A terrific book on anthropology for beginners and laypeople, written at the gallop.
And yes, 50 pages is indeed my rule, Ulf. Seems fair to the author, and keeps me from wasting time with books that are almost certainly never going to work for me.
@Ulf_the_Unwashed, maybe No One Can Know because no one can finish the book. 
I haven’t finished many of the books I started lately, but finally broke the curse with Little Darlings by Melanie Golding. Her writing style’s got some class, so I went ahead and requested another of her books as well.
Started yesterday on a book by another fairly dependable author, Simone St. James’ Murder Road.
Finished Spaced Out, by Stuart Gibbs, which I enjoyed and would’ve liked even more if I’d been between 8-12 years old, its intended audience. It’s a solid hard SF mystery. Note that it’s a sequel to Space Case and has major spoilers for that book.
Now I’m reading Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist, by Ron Joseph.
Finished a quick grimdark novella called In The Shadow of Their Dying…it was…wild. I enjoyed it and wanted to keep reading till the end, but it was also so gorey and gruesome that there were multiple times I squeezed my eyes shut and kind of had to choke down a vomit-inducing sensation…
Worth a read, though, if you’re into the genre. Not a spoiler, but this story has a few chapters told from the point of view of a demon creature and they were especially intriguing.
Italian Ways Tim Parks
A travelogue through Italy, mostly on trains. On the one hand, the author seems to really like rail travel, and wants us to like it too. On the other hand, he describes lots of unpleasantries that happen to him on trains - late arrivals, weird bureaucracy, rude passengers and train officials, etc
Still an enjoyable read all in all
Today was not a good day for the books in my CBR (Currently Bein’ Read) pile. My give-a-damn busted about 130 pages into both Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok and Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt. The first one started out as a good mystery but then it got bogged down by Family Drama. The second one was bogged down from page two.
Fortunately I also have the third volume of the Shattered Sea trilogy, Half a War on the CBR pile and it’s still good. Joe Abercrombie hasn’t disappointed me yet.
Finished Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist, by Ron Joseph, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading Growing Up Weightless, by John M. Ford.
I’m halfway through Colin Alexander’s Starman’s Saga, a hard SF novel about the first interstellar expedition, told from the point of view of “Leif the Lucky”, an odd man out in the expedition. It’s apparently the first of a series of novels about the guy. It appears to be self-published, but it is really very good . I’m halfway through it now. (I bought it at the Small Press table that was selling my books, too at Boskone).
On the side I’m reading How to Suffer Outside by Diana Helmuth “A Beginner’s Guide to Hiking and Backpacking”. I’ve done lots of hiking and backpacking, but it’s been years, and I wanted to read the latest thoughts on things. There is, for instance, and entire chapter on “Poop (yes, it deserves its own chapter)”, on which proper practice has evidently evolved. Things have evidently changed even since Kathleen Meyers’ 1989 book How to Shit in the Woods. There’s a lot more to the book than this, of course, and it’s a good refresher (and guide to what’s new).
My bedside reading is still The Annotated The Lost Worlf, which I’m halfway through.
On audio, I just finished Stephen King’s Holly, which was pretty good. I wasn’t sure until the end if this was going to be a supernatural entry into the “Mr. Mercedes” canon or not.
So now I’m listening to Michael Farquhar’s Behind the Palace Doors: Five Centuries of Sex, Adventure, Vice, Treachery and Folly from Royal Britain. It’s hard to believe a book could live up to that glorious title, and it doesn’t. What promised to be a juicy insider tell-all about scandal and misbehavior of Britain’s Royal families turns out to be a rather prosaic recounting of the history of the British monarchy from Henry VII onwards. And I do mean the monarchy – Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth are barely mentioned. I know about the Tudors from an endless stream of plays, movies, and mini-series*, but I’m rusty of the Stewarts and afterwards, so it’s worth listening to.
- I wrote my own play about Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen – Iana Non Regina. It’s probably not all that great, but it’s more historically accurate than the movie Lady Janed, for all its star power.
That sounds pretty good! We haven’t done any hiking in a few years, but there’s a place in Colorado we mean to get back to someday. We always joke that based on what we’ve learned about packing light, we won’t be bringing any food.
i am reading “oh jerusalem”. wow! what a book. it gives all sides of how the middle east is the very knotty area we all know.
very informative for the issues of gaza, west bank, and israel.
Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen.
It is really intriguing so far. I’m only halfway through it, but it basically goes through the 8 different Vice Presidents of the USA who were swept into the Presidency through the death or other assassination of their predecessor. I just got to President McKinley’s assassination - which I somehow had no idea about - and Teddy Roosevelt’s assumption of the office of the president. His “rough ride” from Buffalo via multiple horses in order to get to a place where he could be sworn in was fascinating.
Finished Growing Up Weightless, by John M. Ford, which had excellent worldbuilding and language use, but whose plot was somewhat weak.
Now I’m reading The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure Our Lives, Behavior, and Well-Being, by Lily Bernheimer.
Gangster of Capitalism; Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz.
I’ve been wanting to read a good history of Smedley Butler and the Businessmen’s Plot. But this isn’t it.
To be fair, this is a biography of Butler’s entire career and I’ve only got as far into it as his military career. So maybe when I reach the relevant chapters, I’ll find the history of the plot to be what I’m looking for.
But I’ve already encountered the major fault in the book; the author insists on inserting himself into a biography of somebody who lived a century ago. At least a quarter of the book is what I consider to be unnecessary passages about the author traveling around the world doing research.
And worse, most of these passages are the author’s attempts to make this book relevant to current readers by trying to trace a path from American imperialism to Donald Trump. Which doesn’t really work; God knows Trump has his faults but he’s never been much of an imperialist.
I have actually ZERO idea about any of this topic, or this person, or this plot…but I looked it up and it seems super interesting! Do you have any suggestions on something else that covers this type of stuff ?
I finished the audiobook Behind Palace Doors. It was a good intro to British Monarchs I was unfamiliar with, and to the amazing story of Catherine Matilda, daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales (the son of George II who died before he could become king), who married her cousin, the ineffectual King Christian VII of Norway and Denmark. She had a very open affair with the court physician Johann Friedrick Struensee, who effectually became the king and dictated policy, introducing a series of unbelievably liberal reforms:
Unfortunately, he wasn’t Danish and didn’t speak the language, and he was far too liberal for the entrenched powers-that-be, who forcibly removed, jailed, and tortured him and exiled the queen. The renaissance lasted a mere year, and Struensee was executed in a particularly grisly way, and the Queen died shortly thereafter.
Aside from this, and a few other royal tidbits, though, not remarkable.
I’ve moved on to John Mortimer’s Rumpole Misbehaves. read by Bill Wallis. The roile of Rumpole is inextricably linked to actor Leo McKern, who I believe has been the only one to portray Horace Rumpole on TV. He’s also the one who has performed Rumpole most often on audio. I hhave audiobooks from three different companies in which McKern reads them in his characteristic voice and style, and it’s as much a part of the story as Mortimer’s writing. I’ve heard Rumpole audiobooks read by others before – character actor Michael Hordern (the father in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, among many other films) and another, lass familiar actor whose name I cannot recall – but they fall very far short of McKern’s interpretation. Sadly, so does Bill Wallis’ . He may grow on me yet, but so far he’s not yet in Hardern’s class.
Started today on Not Dead Enough by Tyffany Neiheiser, a YA novel about a girl with mixed feelings about the death of her abusive boyfriend. Also, is he haunting her?
I’ve been there! Well-maintained, and worth a visit: Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site - Wikipedia
The first in Edmund Morris’s terrific TR bio trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, also has a good account of the incident.
I recently finished:
Bride by Ali Hazelwood, a Romeo-and-Juliet-ish novel about a political, alliance-building marriage between a werewolf man and a vampire woman, set in the present day and told from her perspective. Silly but readable, funny at times, and with some explicit sex.
Nine Nasty Words by John McWhorter, in which the noted linguist discusses the N-word, the c-word and several others - acknowledging, of course, George Carlin’s famous rant - and exploring how the words developed and entered the vocabulary, and how they’re used, or not, today. His most interesting theory, for me: the most shocking forms of profanity in the English language were originally about our relationship with God (such as “Hell,” “damn,” “for Christ’s sake,” etc.), then were about our bodies (so “ass,” “pussy,” “cock” and the like were the worst, at the time), but are now about groups (taboo terms about racial, ethnic and religious groups).
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, in which the bad-boy chef discusses his childhood, education, misadventures and rise to culinary stardom. Lots of great behind-the-scenes tales of drunkenness, cooking, debauchery, the Mafia, drug use, the perfect French meal and whatnot at the great restaurants of Manhattan and beyond, as well as a very good chapter on his extended visit to, and appreciation of the culture and food of, Japan.
For now I’ve returned to Dream Town by Laura Meckler, nonfiction about the desegregation of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and ongoing efforts to address the achievement gap among students of color.
I’ve also begun rereading one of my all-time favorite Heinlein juvenile novels, Time for the Stars, about using twins to telepathically communicate between Earth and trans-relativistic starships.
Finished a doorstop fantasy, Sword Catcher.
Nothing in this novel surprised me. It’s right in the middle of modern fantasy. The prose and plotting are competent enough that I finished reading it, but there’s nothing in here that I’ll remember in a week.
The main book on the subject seems to be The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R. by Jules Archer, which was first published in 1973. I have not read this book.
The problem I have with it is its context seems questionable. Archer wrote a lot of books and seemed to have been a “pop” historian, which makes me suspect his research may have been shallow, and he seems to have had a liberal slant to his works. And the current publisher also publishes works about various conspiracy theories. So I suspect this plot may be a case of adding one plus one and coming up with twelve.
Nor does it help that Butler was a central figure in this plot. Butler had been a decorated marine who had participated and led various military expeditions into third world countries. But after he retired he denounced these expeditions, saying they had only been launched to serve business interests. (Smedley said he had been a “gangster for capitalism” which is the source of the book’s title.) So it seems strange that a cabal of businessmen, looking for a front man in a plot of overthrow the American government, would have chosen Butler who had openly spoken out against business interests interfering in government. It seems more plausible to me that Butler might have seen signs of a conspiracy that didn’t really exist.
So, as I said, I’ve wanted to read a good history of the event and try to make sense of what really happened.