Finished Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English, by Ben Yagoda, which is okay, and Death Without Company, a Walt Longmire mystery by Craig Johnson, which is the best book I’ve read this year so far. Alternately horrifying and hilarious, with great action scenes and characters I really care about.
Next up: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Mainspring, by Jay Lake.
Started today on James, by Percival Everett, a re-telling of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of runaway slave Jim. It’s entertaining so far.
I read that a few months back and enjoyed it, all in all. I then read Twain’s original and wrote a short essay about how well the stories fit together… or didn’t. PM me if you’d like to see it when you’re done.
James was brilliant …sharp, funny poignant.
Of course I’d like to see that essay, @Elendil_s_Heir ! It’s been quite a while since I read the original, though I skimmed the Wikipedia entry before I started.
@MacDoc, I agree, but I sure hope Tom Sawyer gets his comeuppance as well.
Finished The Watchmaker’s Daughter by C. J. Archer. Enjoyed the book a hella lot, had to force myself to stop reading last night because I needed to be up early today. Looking forward to the next book in the series.
Glad to. Just PM me when you’re done, to avoid spoilers.
Finished the audiobook of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, very entertainingly read by the author himself. Highly recommended for anyone who loved, or loves, the children’s classic. Included was a 20-minute afterword read by George Plimpton about White’s life, career and literary inspirations.
Next up: The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller, nonfiction about an all-deaf champion high school football team in California; the book was recommended to me by a friend.
Finished Collision of Lies by Tom Threadgill. Pretty good read, although the plot and especially the climax became more than a bit fanciful. All in all, however, an enjoyable mystery novel.
Next up: Never Lie by Freida McFadden
Started this morning on I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman.
Finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy which I appreciated for its brilliant use of language; and Mainspring, by Jay Lake, which I appreciated for its outstanding worldbuilding.
Next up: The First State of Being, by Erin Entrada Kelly (this year’s Newbery Award winner) and When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance, by Riley Black.
Been cruising detective series from various countries/cultures and currently on
“Virdee” is a British crime thriller series following Detective Harry Virdee, a police officer disowned by his Sikh family after marrying a Muslim woman, who finds himself entangled in a moral dilemma when a young dealer is murdered, potentially needing help from his brother-in-law, a drug kingpin
4 books in the series, pretty brutal - Author: A.A. Dhand
There is also a TV series in 2025/
Bouncing around with a series in North Iceland in areas we visited in winter to fly over a volcano
Auth Ragnar Jonasson Nightblind (Dark Iceland) one of four in the series
and also a series with a young ( 19 yr old ) girl detective set in the 20s in India.
Murder Under a Red Moon Auth: Harini Nagendra
If you realllllly want to move outside your culture
Auth: Leonie Norrington A Piece of Red Cloth
All relatively fast reads tho looking up words takes time. The last one might stretch your view of the not too distant past in a little known part of the world.
Almost like scifi/fantasy in a past but real age.
Started on T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones and loving it. She really captures the creepiness of mid-central/eastern North Carolina. I lived out there for a while, it is a weird place indeed.
I think this was the first horror I’d read by her (she also writes kidlit under the name Ursula Vernon, which I think is her real name)–and yeah, having grown up in that area, she nails it.
Last week I finished The Sympathizer. Holy hell. It’s way outside of my normal reading, a realistic fiction piece set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. The writing is beautiful, the narrator’s sense of humor could dissolve pennies, the story is gripping. And there are three or four scenes of such brutal violence and horror that I could barely read them. The scenes aren’t gratuitous, but they’re very, very brutal.
I definitely recommend the book if you’re willing to go through that kind of awfulness; but if you’ve got triggers that make books unfun, they’re likely to be in here.
This week I zipped through The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides, a very good history of Capt. James Cook’s third and final voyage of exploration throughout the Pacific. Interesting bits on imperialism, exploration, celestial navigation, Navy life, London high society, scurvy, STDs, native cultures and religions, bartering, etc.
Still enjoying The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller, nonfiction about an all-deaf champion high school football team in California, even though I’m not a football guy. There’s also a lot about deaf culture and society’s changing response to it.
I’ve returned to Mark Twain’s fictionalized memoir Life on the Mississippi. Almost 30 pages in and it hasn’t really grabbed me yet, but I’ll keep going.
Finished Black Coffee by Charles Osbourne, the novelization of the play by Agatha Christie. I really wish I had read the play first because there was a lot of stuff Dame Agatha obviously did not write. But I did like the -literally-in-front-of-your-face conclusion to one of the mysteries. Hastings continues to be a douchebag…
Familial Haunts by Madeline Kirby, it’s supposed to be the first in a series about murder and magic in a small Texan town, but she seems to have disappeared, I hope her health issues didn’t take a nose dive. The book was well written, cozy but not overly twee and, as usual, I loved the characters.
Started Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker today. Slightly less than a quarter in and I’m enjoying it, the main character has my attention.
Recently finished:
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, by David Chaffetz
Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan , by Lt Col Scott Mann (Ret.)
Now reading:
"Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar*, by Max Hastings
The Seventh Secret, by Irving Wallace
Up next:
The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone
Seven Days in May, by Flether Knebel and Charles W Bailey
Spent a good chunk of February reading mysteries – the eleven Maggie Hope books, by Susan Elia MacNeal, and the six Mitford murders stories, by Jessica Fellowes. Most of them were pretty good, though MacNeal could have done a better job of researching before writing the last few books in the series.
Love Triangle Matt Parker
The author, a science and math* presenter, explores the various applications of triangles and trigonometry in the modern world, as well a fair number of other geometric concepts. It’s definitely written for the general reader - there aren’t any proofs or complicated derivations. A lot of it is fairly interesting and there is a fair amount of humor (The author has a youtube channel called “StandupMaths”).
A few minor things take away from the book. It’s a little too cute at times. The pages are numbers using the sine of the page number in degrees, for example. Also, the diagrams are printed in a horrible grayscale that is hard to make any sense of.
All in all, pretty good
after 2 john nance books, 16 souls and headwind, i read a memoir that the inquirer had as a highlight article.
lost found kept.
the author (deb.) starts with having to go to her mother’s house to leave a note because her phone was cut off. horrified by the condition of the house, deb calls her sister and starts the process to have power of attorney to be able to pay her mother’s bills. that is when they find out that the water has been cut off for 2 years.
mother is moved to the sister’s house while looking for assisted living placement. deb and her husband deal with the horrour with in the house. the memoir goes back and forth between deb’s life and clearing her mother’s house.
on the 18th i will be back in panem, reading the latest book on haymitch’s 50th hunger games. sunrise on the reaping.
Finished The First State of Being, by Erin Entrada Kelly (this year’s Newbery Award winner). Meh. Also finished When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance, by Riley Black. It’s a good introduction to the subject of evolution, but I’ve read most of the material (except for the most recent discoveries, since this book was published in 2025) before. It’s also annoying when the author writes that a plant or animal “of course couldn’t have known” that it was about to change the world in some way because of its mutation or how it feeds, etc. The author does so in almost every chapter.
Next up: Between a Flock and a Hard Place, by Donna Andrews (a Meg Langslow mystery) and Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, by Gail Crowther.
Finished reading The World’s Desire by H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, She) and Harold Lamb. Odysseus sets out on his last adventure, meeting Helen of Troy in Egypt. Some great moments, but it lags in places.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi – others have reported on this. A fun little read.
The Book of Limericks – a circa 1995 collection that references Barong Gould’s and Legman’s. Quite a few I haven’t read before. Includes Edward Lear’s, with the illustrations.
Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner – haven’t quite finished it yet. There are two more in the series. Very good. Niven’s finally fleshing out Puppeteer culture. I realize I’m late to the party – this book is almost two decades old.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, of course. The Norton Critical edition with lots of extra material. I hadn’t realized that there was so much stuff that didn’t make it into the standard edition until last month, when I stumbled across some of the material in an issue of the American “Perry Rhodan” series, of all places.
It’s interesting to me the books we thought we knew, where they exist in multiple editions or were cobbled together by others. Mark Twain didn’t issue a copy of The Mysterious Stranger during his lifetime. It was his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, who combined parts of two of the three versions he wrote to create the “standard” edition. Paine is also responsible for the editions of Twain’s “autobiography” that appeared before 2010, using bits and pieces Twain had written. The real Train autobiography came out a century after his death, in three volumes. Based on what I’ve seen in used book stores, most people never got past the first volume, but I read all three.
Similarly, Robert E, Howard never finished his Burroughs-esque interplanetary novel Almuric. It was finished by another hand, but whose is by no means clear. Some credit his editor, Otis Adelbert Kline (who himself wrote Burroughs-esque stories about Mars), although there are other nominees.