May is here! How are we five months into this year already?! Almost summer up north, almost winter if you’re upside down passes out allergy meds Lots of great books coming out this year, so much T. Kingfisher this year; let’s keep hyping them up, sharing the love and completely eviscerating the bad ones!
So Whatcha all readin?
This year apparently I have the attention span of an over caffeinated grasshopper on crack..
Print:
Blitz by Daniel O’Malley, still plugging away but damn four pages of plot then FIFTY pages of tangent. I love the world he’s created but dude, focus!
How to Fake it in Society by K.J. Charles. Her newest Regency m/m romance. I love her characters, most are ordinary people, some are con men but hardly a Duke or Earl in sight.
Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher. I"m having trouble getting into it, I’m not a fan of body horror … or swarming insects for that matter.
System Collapse by Martha Wells. Frankly, I NEED some snark in my life right now.
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.
Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The double Life of Laurel and Hardy by Simon Louvish, the last of the books I received last Christmas.
Comments:
1.) Decide on the subtitle you want to use before your book goes to press
2.) Very good so far. Both men had very interesting family histories and childhoods. The description of Oliver Hardy’s father, Oliver, reads like a description of Oliver Hardy himself. Sadly, the younger Hardy (whose name was really “Norvell” (his mother’s maiden name) , so he wasn’t a “junior”) never got to meet his father.
3.) Louvish wrote a great many other books, including one on the Marx Brothers. Our own Exapno undoubtedly has an opinion on that one.
On audio I finally found an audiobook of another Clive Cussler-inspired novel – Quantum Tempest, an “Oregon Files” novel actually written by Mike Maden. I swear, Cussler publishes more books now that he’s dead than I do alive. I’ve already spoken of my suspicion that he left a whole stack of plot ideas before he died, so that his many collaborators could continue the grift, but I might be selling Mr. Maden short.
My bedside reading is still The Penguin Book of Mermaids, which includes quite a few stories that have never been published elsewhere, or have just been translated into English, or which appeared in obscure old books.
Finished The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer; and Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, both of which I enjoyed. They’re very funny.
Next up: More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, by Meredith Broussard; and Infinite Archive, by Mur Lafferty. The latter is the latest in the Midsolar Murders series.
I finished Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher finally. It is one of Ursula best crafted stories. I probably wouldn’t have read it if I’d known about the body horror, but it was a good read nevertheless.
Finished The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The title is an ironic reference to the main character, Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin, whose goodness and open-hearted simplicity lead others to believe him to be mentally deficient. That effect is exacerbated by the prince’s epilepsy (which Dostoevsky himself also suffered from). At the start of the novel, Myshkin is returning by train from Switzerland, where he has spent years in treatment. High jinks ensue as Myshkin mixes it up in the upper and middle crusts of Russian society in and around Petersburg in the 1860s. A love triangle is involved, or more like two. It was okay, but a bit chaotic. I did not like it as much as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov.
Next up is Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham. I have a couple Grishams I’m taking with me when the wife and I travel upcountry in a few days. Our time in Bangkok is almost up, we have to be out of our place by July 15. We’re going to be looking for a permanent place in a little resort town on the upper Malay Peninsula, on the Gulf of Thailand coast, all next week. The plan is to move as early as mid-June.
After years of procrastinating I finally got my library card in the (no longer) new City I have lived in for eight years now and have got the Hoopla app on my Kindle. I have been checking out the Invincible Compendium volumes and plan to eventually reread the whole series. I actually have all 11 of the physical books but this is much easier to carry and read (they are big and heavy).
Just finished Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami.
I guess it can be called soft sci fi? More of a dream state mood piece than anything else. Vaguely reminds me of Cloud Atlas. Confusing, non-linear with having to figure out when each vignette fits and how they fit together. Not a plot driven space opera, definitely much more about culture and the nature of being human.
Frustrated by the way “evolution” is presented in it but it isn’t a book about the science.
Worth reading. But not the favorite thing I’ve read recently.
I just finished The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #3). This one, I have to admit, was a bit of a slog. There is just way too much detail about the trains and lines and stations. Most of the time I didn’t understand why they were doing things. However, there’s an author’s note at the front of the book that said it wasn’t necessary to keep up with all the train stuff, and I found that to be true. I’m still really invested in these characters and looking forward to the next book.
“Toxic Faith: Experiencing Healing from Painful Spiritual Abuse” by Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton identifies how religious practice can become an addiction, replacing genuine faith with control, guilt, and abuse.
I found this book interesting because, throughout history and no matter what the religion, we have always had this kind of thing. It certainly is a significant factor as to why so many have abandoned organized religion.
On the flip of the coin, the absence of toxicity and the total spiritual support of all seem to be the reasons why some churches are full of people, many of them young.
Just started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud. 40 something pages in but not sure I’m going stick with it. Far enough in that it sure seems like it’s going to be same basic formula with a new alien variation, and his characters are never all that interesting. The science is generally good and there already have been a few good lines … but not enough to grab me if it is the same basic story again. I’ll give a few dozen more pages …
Finished More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, by Meredith Broussard, which was interesting and would have been more so if I hadn’t read about many of the issues she cites in other places already. Also finished Infinite Archive, by Mur Lafferty. I enjoyed it, but it gets off to a slow start because of all the info dumps the author does before starting this book’s plot. (It’s part of a series.)
Next up: Sour Cherry, by Natalia Thodoridou, which is a retelling of “Bluebeard”; and Daydreaming in the Solar System: Surfing Saturn’s Ring’s, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration, by John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson.
I’m currently reading The Girls Trip by Ally Condie, which is about three women who go on an off-grid hike in the wilderness together. Supposedly there are lots of twists in the narrative. I haven’t hit one yet; maybe after I do I’ll be hooked. Right now I’m feeling meh about it.
Last night I finished London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, nonfiction about the 2019 death of a young British man who was seen leaping into the Thames one night from the balcony of a luxury apartment building. His grieving parents later attempt to figure out if it was suicide, murder, an escape attempt or a desperate move made under duress. A very good book, I’d say, involving secrecy, deception, fake identities, personal reinvention, dirty money, the London underworld, Russian oligarchs and British criminal investigations.
Just started the novel Pearce Oysters by Joselyn Takacs, about a fishing family in coastal Louisiana at the time of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. It’s meh so far.
Still reading Stan and Ollie. Next up is Four-Sided Triangle by William F. Temple. I only know about this because I’d read about the movie made from it in 1953, but have never even seen available in any format. It apparently was released on DVD a while back, but is hard to locate now. I’ll see if I like the book, and , if so, look up the film.
On audio I’m still reading Quantum Tempest, part o the Clive Cussler “Oregon Files” series really written by Michael Maden, now hat Cussler’s dead. But I took out time to read Kate Sidley’s informative but wacky How to Be a Saint: An extremely Weird and MIldly Sacriligeous History of the Catholic Church’s Biggest Names. The author is a writer for Stephen Colbert, who contributes a foreword (which he reads). Recommended.
I stopped reading The Girls Trip today, though I was within a few pages of the end. As soon as I found out who the murderer was, I lost interest in hanging around for the denouement, though it must have been a doozy because nothing made sense anymore. The writing was fine, but reading about real-life problems like damaged marriages and dangerous men just makes me sad. I like my scares more on the supernatural side.
On that note… started now on Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, a novel about time-travelling fascists. (That’s imaginary, right?)
Finished The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth. Excellent spy/cyber sleuthing/Islamic Terrorism novel by a master of spy thrillers. I only wish that Libby had more audiobooks by this author.
Next up, based on a recommendation by my daughter: The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose.
passes out allergy meds Lots of great books coming out this year, so much T. Kingfisher this year; let’s keep hyping them up, sharing the love and completely eviscerating the bad ones!