I finished Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker. It was… okay. Nothing to write home to Mother or Goodreads about, the ending was very rushed and I am left with more questions than the book’s run time. Something to listen to on a plane or a longish car trip when you really don’t want to think too hard.
Recently finished:
Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar, by Max Hastings
The Seventh Secret, by Irving Wallace
Gave up on:
The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone
Now reading:
The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas 1939-1945, by Max Hastings
Up Next:
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America’s Most Important Spy in World War II, by Lucas Delattre
I started, then almost immediately gave up on Luster by Raven Leilani. It’s about a self-destructive woman who thinks exclusively with her lower brain and then wonders why her life is falling apart. I got about two and a half chapters in before deciding that this is the kind of crap that life is too short to read.
Fortunately the other books I picked up at the library yesterday are much better. Voyage of the Damned by Francis White is a fun fantasy murder mystery and The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope is one of those doorstop-level Victorian novels that I love. Especially since it’s by Trollope who writes some of the best characters in the genre. The introduction kept comparing Dickens to Trollope since they were writing at the same time, but the difference that the editor didn’t realize is that Dickens wrote cariacatures while Trollope wrote people.
Started this morning on Those Across the River.
A young couple moves to an old house near the ruins of a plantation where horrific things were done by the husband’s not-so-distant ancestors. He hopes to write a book, the plantation hopes for revenge! A good premise, but this story hasn’t grabbed me as quickly as Mr. Buehlman’s other stuff. It was his first novel.
Yeah–I really like his writing, but this is not one of my favorites by him.
Finished In Too Deep by Lee Child and his brother, Andrew Child. I’ve read all the Reacher novels and this one is by far the worst. Like most of the books, the plot is contrived and not really believable, but this story is off the charts. Plus, I found it a bit boring and had a hard time putting all the pieces together. Not recommended.
Now I’m back to reading Never Lie by Frieda McFadden.
Reading The Electric State. The movie was terrible but what people were saying about the original source made me want to try it. The art reminds me of the work of Jakub Rozalski which inspired the board game Scythe.
More fiction for me the last few weeks: Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic trilogy of The Passage, The Twelve and The City of Mirrors.
Constructed somewhat similarly to The Stand, Cronin substitutes vampires for Randall Flagg and sometimes, as with Stephen King, I get a little annoyed at the injection of the supernatural. But also like King’s novel, it’s a rollicking adventure tale set in the entire wasteland of the North American continent, spanning a period of about a century.
I’m enjoying it.
Over halfway through, I’m ditching Those Across the River. It’s still not holding my interest, and I’m starting to get annoyed with the constant mention of how horny the main characters are for each other. That’s not what I came for.
I enjoyed those pretty well. His next novel, a standalone, The Ferryman, was super-disappointing to me, a predictable nonsensical misogynist mess. But his vampires were bloody and fun.
I just finished Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie’s short story collection. Leckie is one of my favorite science fiction authors, her Ancillary Justice series a real standout from the last decade. While none of her short stories blew me away in the way that her trilogy did, they were all solid stories, ranging from Twilight Zone weirdness to something that felt like Jane Austen trying her hand at comic weird fantasy. It was a lot of fun.
Finished Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman, by Mallory O’Meara, and Gilt, by Jamie Brenner, both of which would be good beach reads.
Next up: CalderScuplture, by Alexander S. C. Rower and The Sword of the Lictor, by Gene Wolfe. I’m also going to start an anthology about writing mysteries called Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club, edited by Martin Edwards, which will take me a number of months to read.
I picked up a couple of books for bedtime reading at a library sale:
Womder Woman: The War Years 1941-1945, edited by Roy Thomas. Interesting stuff. I’d never read the earliest Wonder Woman stories. I have to admit, they’re pretty crude. I knew that the artwork pre-1960 wasn’t great, but the artwork here is really bad. Still, there’s great creativity and they play the idea of the Amazons straight (Interestingly, I’ve been reading Adriene Mayor’s book Amazons, about the original Greek myths). Marston, who co-create her and wrote the scripts, was also the inventor and promoter of the Lie Detector (consider Wonder Woman’s magic lariat that forced you to tell the truth), so it’s interesting that at one point WW is almost given a Lie Detector test. Just finished this last night.
Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to Chemistry, co-authored with Craig Criddle. I’ve got a lot of Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon Guide to…” series, but I missed this 2005 entry. Lots of fun.
For regular reading I’m finishing up Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner’s Fleet of Worlds. Then it’s on to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which I’ve never read.
On audio, I’ve been listening to a bonanza of Robert E. Howard’s stories that I picked up used. Mostly Conan the Barbarian (which I’ve read in print a gazillion times), but also Solomo Kane, Kull, Breckenridge Elkins, and a collection of horror stories. The horror collection includes a number which I not only haven’t read, but hadn’t ever hear of before (and I’ve been reading and collecting Howard for years). The stories aren’t at all bad – I’d expect unfamiliar ones to be bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but they’re not – but they are often shockingly racist (which may be why some of these have’t been reprinted).
Finished CalderScuplture, by Alexander S. C. Rower. The photos of the artwork were stunning, but I thought the description of them just okay. The Sword of the Lictor, by Gene Wolfe, as usual, had excellent worldbuilding but the rest of it didn’t interest me much.
Still reading Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club, edited by Martin Edwards.
Next up: The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, a classic picture book which I somehow never got around to reading; and Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World, by Catherine E. McKinley.