It finally stopped snowing! For high desert, we have an explosion of green everywhere, my daffodils are finally daring to show themselves. Still, here it is May and the mountains are still mostly white. Water for swimming pools this summer!
So whatcha y’all readin?
I just finished (about 20 minutes ago) The Moon Spinners by Mary Stewart. It was a nice read, slower than I had remembered. The romance seemed rather forced but eh, it didn’t ruin the story. Nice to see a heroine, in the 1960s, doing the rescuing instead of needing to be rescued. (She did need rescuing at the end, but it was the result of attempting to get out of a predicament.)
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Falun Gong by Richard Sugg.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
Finished Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, his last novel. Despite being a member of the lower class, young Jude has ambitions of entering university and maybe even the clergy. But his life grows more and more sordid as he is tricked into an early, loveless marriage by a faked pregnancy and then, after his wife leaves him, falls in love with his cousin, and they live together as man and wife in spirit if not in name. Things do not end well. Published in 1895, this was scandalous stuff, and he was roundly denounced on both sides of the Atlantic. Book reviews carried such titles as “Jude the Obscene,” and the novel was routinely labelled a mass of filth from beginning to end. Hardy was accused of attacking the institutions of marriage, church and higher education when he was in fact arguing for reforms to correct the types of social and legal injustices that acted to keep basically-good people down. The criticism was so harsh that he vowed never to write another novel and turned to poetry instead, and he kept his promise for his remaining 33 years. In truth, the book is quite tame by 2014 standards, maybe even by 1960 standards, kind of a Victorian soap opera. I enjoyed it, but it is possibly the most depressing book I have ever read. Not recommended for the suicidal.
On the recommendation of somebody in last month’s thread–@Shoeless, perhaps?–I read Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, about four women in the process of retiring from the assassin biz. Fun! The only thing was that the assassins Mary Alice, Nat, and Helen kind of blended together–they were pretty interchangeable and I thought the author could have done a better job with their characterization. Oh well, I enjoyed it.
I also read–possibly on the recommendation of someone here, possibly not–The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly. Two very deeply dysfunctional families with secrets all the way down; the main character is Nell, and her father wrote a bestselling treasure hunt/picture book some years earlier that sparked a bunch of crazies and messed up Nell’s life pretty seriously. There are a lot of flashbacks, but the main action is in the present, with Nell an adult and finally learning about some of these secrets. The book is long, and it took a long time for me to get into it–thought about moving on to something different more than once, lots of characters, lots of time periods–but I stuck with it and I’m glad I did. The book really takes off about halfway through and stays that way. Creepy as all get out, but extremely well done. (I especially liked the dedication, something like “To my parents, with thanks for being nothing like Nell’s”)
Have begun reading John Irving’s Cider House Rules, which though it does take place in New England has nothing in it so far about bears, Vienna, wrestling coaches, or prep schools. (I think the last Irving novel I read was Hotel New Hampshire, when it came out; you can probably tell. I am told he expanded his themes since then. Probably a good thing.) It’s certainly grabbed me so far.
Ha! Mea culpa, mega mea culpa. Should’ve double checked. Wonder how I confused the two of you? Oh well, I obviously have in mind that @Shoeless is a poster to be trusted and listened to, and now I clearly need to add @Railer13 to that mental list!
Ah! Mystery solved (sort of). I was scratching my head wondering what the two of you had in common–@Railer13 and @Shoeless aren’t very similar names, and your avatars don’t look at all alike–but somewhere in there I must’ve picked up that you are both Kansans. Along with, I believe, @Baker.
Funny the things you remember–or don’t. This dope will try to keep you straight going forward.
I ended last month on a high note, with T. Kingfisher’s Summer in Orcus, a YA novel best read after one has finished the Chronicles of Narnia. It was just lovely.
I’ll keep the TK buzz going now with A House With Good Bones.
I finished The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth last night. It’s a great non-fiction book, profiling many of the homeless people of New York who have set up shelter underground. The stories are sometimes shocking, sometimes tragic, sometimes intriguing, sometimes all three. Overall, the book gave a voice to an under-represented community with stories that should be shared.
I am about halfway done with A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. It started out promising, as a humorous, light-hearted novel featuring a cranky old man. But after the first few chapters, it changed tone and turned into more of a coming-of-age novel featuring a young orphan who has lost all his belongings. I’m feeling kind of disappointed right now, because I was in the mood for more of the breezy read that the first few chapters made me think it would be.
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough. It’s a history of domestic terrorist groups in the seventies. Very well-written. The author makes a valid point about how this part of our history seems to have been forgotten, even by people like me who were alive during this period.
I finally finished Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. I enjoyed it, even though it took me about a month to listen to the audiobook! I believe whoever most recently posted about it didn’t love the ending, but I am a complete sucker for an ending that describes the main characters’ futures. The book is told from multiple perspectives and I found some of them more compelling than others. I was completely out of patience with Ramsey by the end.
I’m still working my way through The Wide Sargasso Sea.
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas: A Weighty Tome indeed but very exciting and fast-paced. I expect nothing less from Dumas unless he’s writing about Napoleon.
Dune, Frank Herbert: When I opened up my old copy of Dune, pages fell out. I guess I read it to death. So I got a new set of the original six books. Now they all match.
The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper: Another exciting book, but I’m definitely going to have a new appreciation for Mark Twain’s essay on Cooper after this.
Burn Me Deadly, Alex Bledsoe: If you’re looking for a fun sword-swinging fantasy series with a wisecracking hero I can’t recommend the Eddie Lacross series highly enough.
Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle: I did not expect to learn German from English lit, but here we are.
Terry Jones’ Barbarians, Terry Jones & Alan Ereira: I can’t remember if I ever saw the TV series this book is a companion to, but I’m definitely going to look it up to (re)watch after I finish this.
Chernevog, C.J. Cherryh: Surprise find at the used book store. I didn’t expect to uncover this so soon after finding Rusalka.
