I finished Supreme Justice by Phillip Margolin. Next up is Capitol Murder by the same author.
I started How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him to Villiany: Miracle 1 by A. J Sherwood. It’s a m/m satire on sword and sorcery tropes, so far I’m laughing. Nothing deep, but a fun potato chip book. Not sure if the schtick will hold up over several volumes, but I’m game to find out.
Cherry and her friends definitely eat ravioli at the restaurant in my edition (I checked) although her friend Ann does say, “Wait till you eat Mama’s pasta.”
Finished The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, by Michio Kaku, which actually made physics interesting for me.
Now I’m reading Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Conundrum, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Finished Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Conundrum, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Meh.
Up next: H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.
Both are excellent choices! I should reread them.
I just finished Lost Man’s Lane, and I’m crying a little bit. It was so freaking good. If I hadn’t known who the author was, I’d have guessed Joe Hill. The characters rang so true, and there was a confidence in the telling of the impossible story that made me go along with it. Like a good King novel, without his recognizable quirks. Loved it.
A Meditation on Murder Robert Thorogood
An original story with the characters and settings from the television series Death in Paradise . There is a murder in the prologue and the small police force of the fictional Caribbean island of Ste Marie investigate.
Reading the book is a lot like watching the show. Fun, but don’t think about it too hard.
Started this morning on a non-fiction book, The Witching Year, by Diana Helmuth. It’s about a woman who decides to follow the precepts of witchcraft for a year as an experiment. The problem is that she’s finding witchcraft to be completely vague and made up by, well, everyone who plays at it. It’s making the book a little boring so far, but I hope it picks up.
Favorite quote so far:
I heard about one group that was a pretty loose collection of Wicca Boomers who did a lot of improvising. One time they sacrificed a Chocolate Moose.
And when someone used the phrase “Let us ever remember and Never Forget…” the reply from everyone was “An elephant’s faithful, one hundred per cent.”
Yeah–I dipped in and out of a coven called The Lunatic Fringe, back in the nineties. The God and Goddess were, at various times
- Apollo and Aphrodite
- Erzulie and Baron Samedi
- Peter Pan and Wendy
- Elvis and Priscilla
It was…eclectic.
Oh! As for what I’ve been reading:
- The Final Girl Support Group, about the women who were the sole survivors of slasher-movie-style mass murders. It moved along at a good clip, but ultimately didn’t do a lot for me.
- The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, by the same author, was a lot better IMO. If you’ve seen Teenage Bounty Hunters, and can imagine the moms in that series and what they’d do if they encountered vampires, you’ve got this book. Lots of fun.
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: read these to my 11yo. SO WEIRD! I’ve read them many times, but this is the first time in about a decade, and I’d forgotten a bit of just how bizarrely silly they are. Definitely worth the reread.
- Convergence Problems: a short story collection that I can best describe as a bunch of Afro-futurist Twilight Zone episodes. If that’s your jam–and it’s mine!–it’s very good.
Finished H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. I enjoyed them both, especially the latter.
Now I’m reading Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels & Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved, by Kenneth Catania.
Your mileage and mine wildly varied. I skipped to the end, read the last 20 pages and called it a day.
Finished Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels & Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved, by Kenneth Catania, which was very interesting. I enjoyed it a lot.
Now I’m reading Ten Low, by Stark Holborn, which is SF.
Fair enough! The juxtaposition of suburban Southern housewife culture with super-creepy vampire horror kept me interested, but I totally get how it won’t work for everyone.
I just finished The Scourge Between Stars, which is basically “Alien on a Generation Ship.” Meh. Characters acted in illogical ways, aliens acted in illogical ways, the descriptions of the aliens were lacking, there was an extra alien species that didn’t need to be there, and the ending was very Deus Ex Machina. On the other hand, it was something like 130 pages long, so I finished it fast. Don’t plan to look for other books by that author.
I LOVE the Alice books and always have. Not all books that worked for me when I was young still work for me all these decades later, but these absolutely do. I imagine you’re familiar with, or have read, Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice; but if you haven’t, I recommend it highly. Very informative and by far the best of the The Annotated _____ books I’ve read.
I read two middling novels: Killer Diller by Clyde Edgerton and Vanishing Edge by Claire Kells.
The first is a bit reminiscent of Dave Barry in some places and Garrison Keillor in others; it’s about people associated with a Christian college in North Carolina, but it’s really about hypocrisy. The takeaway is “A lot of conservative Christians are jerks,” and you’ll get no particular argument from me about that, but the novel was just okay.
The second deals with murder in Sequoia National Park, solved by a team of one (1) female law enforcement agent and one (1) male park ranger. The descriptions of the park are good, and the mystery isn’t bad, but I thought the characters left something to be desired. Especially the man, Hux, who seems to be practically perfect in every way. I am reminded of the crack that some reviewer of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone series made when Muller introduced a new love interest for McCone: something like “Muller got him for 30% off at a sale of used Harlequin romance heroes.” Yeah, that.
Now reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Not sure exactly where it’s going, but it’s early days yet.
Gardner released three different iterations of this book. After the original, he updated it with More Annotated Alice, which features illustrations by Peter Newell instead of the familiar ones by Tenniel. He then released a further updated one, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition in 1999, with the Tenniel illustrations back.
In 2015 the same folks released The Annotated Alice: the 150th Anniversary Edition with additional annotations by Mark Burstein (Gardner had died) and a lot more illustrations. I’ve got copies of all but the last of these.
Finished Ten Low, by Stark Holborn, which was okay. I would’ve liked it better if the focus had been on one of the supporting characters whom I found more interesting. That’s happened in quite a few books I’ve read this year.
Now I’m reading The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization, by Roland Ennos.
I haven’t read Piper’s book, but I highly recommend Fuzzy Nation, which is John Scalzi’s affectionate update/adaptation, done with the blessing of Piper’s estate.
I finished standup comedian Gary Gulman’s memoir Misfit, and overall I enjoyed it. It ended with his high school graduation, so I hope there’s a second book which takes his life’s story from there.
Also finished Have Space Suit - Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein, an old sf favorite of mine. A tech-minded teen in the near future wins a surplus space suit in a contest, overhauls it, gets kidnapped while wearing it and then has a galaxies-spanning adventure. Not Heinlein’s best, but good fun.
I’m now about a third of the way through American Dialogue by Joseph Ellis, nonfiction about what the Framers have to teach us, or not, as we grapple with today’s problems. Thomas Jefferson (on slavery and racism) and John Adams (on economic inequality) are the focus so far. It’s okay but not great.
Finished The Witching Year, by Diana Helmuth…finally. I’ve always been interested in witchcraft and reading about witches. I thought this would be right up my alley, but no. This lady was trying to take witchcraft seriously, and I found that while I still enjoy fictional witches, there is not a drop of belief in my whole body. This book contains a sickening amount of woo. Also, I was really starting to dislike the author. She seemed to have so much disposable income, an endlessly accommodating boyfriend, and an environment populated entirely by liberals and lesbians. I mean, bully for her, but that is not the planet I live on. She wrote another book with subject matter very different from this one, and it’s next in my TBR pile, but I’m going to skip it for now.
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold. This novel came out in 2002 and was quite well received. I’m not entirely sure why.
Maybe it’s just me, or maybe the novel struck chords in 2002 that it isn’t striking today, but I wasn’t impressed. The central idea is that 14-year-old Susie Salmon is raped and murdered on her way home from school (this is back in the 1973), and the story is told from her point of view from a vantage point in heaven.
Susie functions as an omniscient narrator, able to be everywhere at once, privy to people’s thoughts and feelings as well as aware of their actions. It’s a decent concept, though some of the reviews I saw thought it was groundbreaking, and it’s carried out well enough. Susie’s voice is generally interesting and authentic (I think; Susie would have been born the year before me).
But I think the rest of the characters are just not interesting enough to make the novel work, especially as time passes and we get about halfway through the narrative. Also, there is a scene toward the end that the jacket flap calls “a miraculous event,” and I just found it kind of icky. Could just be me…
Anyway, I didn’t like it as much as I had hoped. On to something else.