We are so close, 2020 is almost over. With so many of us in quarantine, our book stash should be shrinking, however mine is growing, I think it’s become a sentient being in the corner of my room… or a gravity sink… or something…
I am almost finished with my second reading of Johannes Cabal, Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard. My book club is reading it this month
After that I’m thinking a straight up whodunnit sounds good, it’s just deciding which one! Hmmms Bill Pronzini, Jonathan Kellerman, Mike Faricy, a dozen other random authors on my Kindle, hmmmm
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.
Cemetery Boys: Lighter and heavier than I expected: a trans boy in a family of Latinx brujx deals with a fairly standard “mysterious deaths plus magic” plot. The mystery wasn’t especially mysterious, but it was serviceable. The coming-of-age story as the youth navigates multigenerational transphobia and other issues brings a lot of interesting stuff to bear; and the romance at the heart of the book is deftly handled and charming.
The author’s note in the back talks about how he never saw characters matching his gender identity growing up, and how it blew his mind when his agent suggested he set the story in his own Latinx culture. He didn’t think the book stood a chance in hell of ever getting published. Not only was it published, but this debut novel was a National Book Award nominee.
Just this morning finished Rage, by Bob Woodward. The title is taken from a Chump quote during an interview with the author and Robert Costa during the 2016 campaign: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.” A very good read. I did not read the author’s previous offering, Fear, but it is not necessary for enjoying this book. The book ends – no spoiler alert necessary – with this sentence: “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.” As if I needed any further persuading. A minor quibble is Woodward could have used one more read-through before going to press, as a handful of errors did creep in. For example, he mentions something he says happened in the Clinton administration in 1992. Well, no, while Clinton was indeed elected in 1992, there was no Clinton administration until 1993. I still don’t know if Woodward got the year or the administration wrong. Still a powerful book.
Next up is The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
I finished The Whitsun Daughters, which was a novel about a family of women on a farm and also about a woman who used to live on that same land. I picked up the book because that character was a ghost, but this was no spook story. The narrative could have switched back and forth between the timelines without that gimmick. This book was practically a Judy Blume plus sex (maybe it was like that Judy Blume book where the guy names his penis? Was that Deenie? I don’t know, I never read it). Anyway, periods, loss of virginity, homosexuality, abortion, and no reason to really care about any of it. A waste of time.
Next up, I’m going to waste my time with some timeless, classic literature. Nah, just kidding! I started this morning on The Return by Rachel Harrison, about a woman who goes missing for two years, then reappears with no memory of where she has been.
And not really by him – it was finished up (and I suspect, largely written) by Richard Preston. I gave up on it when it was clear where it was going, and that it seemed to be a rewrite of Dr. Cyclops.
I finished Johannes Cabal Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard yesterday. It’s rare when I enjoy a book just as much the second time as the first, maybe even a little more since I was going through a bad time when I read it the first time.
I’m kind of overfull of fancy prose, heavy descriptions, world building paranormal for a bit so back to the basics! A good old fashioned whodunnit…
I started reading the second Nameless book The Vanished by Bill Pronzini yesterday. It will be a quick read.
I’ve finally gotten to the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett opus Good Omens that my daughter gave me last year (after we saw the Netflix series).
It’s a quick read, but it’s been slow going for me because I’ve been editing my next book and seeing to the publicity for the current one. Don’t write a book unless you’re going to love it, because if it goes forward you’ll be reading it over and over and over and over doing the grammar and spelling checks, fact checks, proofreading, indexing etc. etc. until you can’t stand it anymore.
On audio, I’ve been re-reading several Nero Wolfe novels, and I just finished the audiobook of Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual (which has less than half of the actual printed book content). But it was cheap.
Last week I completed Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography Magnificent Desolation. He’s been an American hero for as long as I can remember yet it was quite illuminating how little I, and I presume most of the public, are unaware of his actual lifestory either side of those eight days in July 1969. He went up in my estimation after reading his candid revelations of personal demons as a means to help others. He acknowledges in the book that there was a false veneer of invincibility men like him who were seen as heroes of that era were made to maintain and in writing the book he finally did what he wanted to do as a younger man and break that veneer. To show a fighter pilot veteran, astronaut, moonwalker suffers the same insecurities and vulnerabilities as anyone else.
Now I’m onto a biography about the famous MI6 agent Kim Philby who while over years and years of climbing the ranks of British intelligence was actually working as a double agent for the Soviet Union. It’s a book titled A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and The Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre.
I’ve started reading The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, a collection of short stories by the author of the super-fun children’s book Sal and Gabi Break the Universe. I can say with all honesty that it contains the first robot-giant-pandas-fight-terrorists-and-have-sex story I’ve ever read.
