Who dies to teach the reader a Very Important Lesson?
A) The mom?
B) The tiger?
C) The best friend?
D) The protagonist’s best friend, a weretiger who is somehow also their mom?
Actually, it’s the Halmoni (which is Korean for “Grandmother”) of the main character. The “weretiger” is supposed to be, I think, her great-grandmother.
I was close!
Finished The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories , by Tom Doyle. I thought “Inversions” was the best one.
Now I’m reading Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America’s First Celebrity, by Tana Wojczuk.
Just started Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Finished Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America’s First Celebrity , by Tana Wojczuk, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune.
Finished it. It was all right; about average for nonfiction writing about contemporary warfare, I’d say.
I’ve just started Playmates by Robert B. Parker, in which smartass Boston private eye Spenser is looking into allegations of point shaving by a hotshot college basketball player.
Currently reading Where They Wait by Scott Carson (the nom de plume of Michael Koryta, for his horror books). It’s about a man who is becoming frightened and controlled by a “mindfulness” app on his phone. Pretty good so far. I found a Stephen-King related Easter egg about halfway through; I also see that King blurbed the book. I guess they’re friends.
I finished Where They Wait yesterday. It is a ghost story, and when they start delving into the whys and hows and the history behind what is happening, it’s great. However, things also felt a little messy and by the end I didn’t feel I really understood the “rules” of the supernatural events. Still, well-written and a good read.
Started today on The Last House on Needless Street, by Catriona Ward. It’s pulled me right in and feels like it has a lot of potential. However, it also seems like it could veer in directions that are personally disturbing to me…I stand ready to chuck it if that happens. (Hey, it’s another King-blurbed book. I generally avoid these.)
Finished The House in the Cerulean Sea , by TJ Klune. Meh.
Now I’m reading The Brief Life of Flowers by Fiona Stafford.
Finished The Brief Life of Flowers by Fiona Stafford, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Space Between Worlds, a science fiction novel by Micaiah Johnson.
Finished Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace. I loved her first novel, Crow Lake, and enjoyed the two sort-of sequels, and had high hopes for this one, but…meh. The characters never really came alive for me and the plot was too predictable. She does write well and the northern Ontario setting is always fun.
Started Laura Lippman’s new-(ish?) novel, Dream Girl. Again, high hopes…
I just finished All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. A really well-written book with an interesting plot, although I was somewhat disappointed in the resolution and ending. Still, a book I would recommend.
Now I’m trying to decide which Ruth Ware book to download for my first read of her books. Suggestions?
I finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. A solid C from me, not bad but nothing I’m going to encourage anyone else to read. My Goodreads reveiw: The book suffered from pacing issues and if I hadn’t beeen reading it for my book club, I’d have put it down by the 100th page. There was far too much wandering from point A to Point B and talking to this person and then that person over and over for my taste.
Also the “romance” between Noemi and Francis felt fake, there really wasn’t anything to pull her to him other than he was nice to her.
Most of the “twists” were pretty standard as well, Virgil’s revelation about Francis’ role in the plot was no surprise. I’d already figured that someone of his ego wasn’t going to be the fall guy.
Overall, not bad, a bit slow and nothing really new, but still an enjoyable read.
I’ve decided to be brave and try Confederacy of Dunces. I have one friend who liked it and a lot of others who were not whelmed.
We’ll see how it goes.
Finished The Space Between Worlds , a science fiction novel by Micaiah Johnson. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year. Strongly recommended.
Now I’m reading Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors, by Matt Parker.
Started The Lying Game by Ruth Ware. Liking it thus far.
Hah! Interesting…I feel like Moreno-Garcia’s books get a solid B from me. Mexican Gothic was probably my favorite of hers (I think I’ve read 4 different novels by her), and I like the first 2/3 far more than I liked the ending. The slow pacing was totally fine for me, but the resolution to the spookiness disappointed in the way that horror novels often do, as the monster is never as scary as the dread building up to it.
Speaking of Moreno-Garcia, I just read her latest book, a noir set during the seventies in Mexico, Velvet was the Night. It’s another B for me: on the good side, it was a pretty by-the-numbers noir mystery, set in an historical setting that I knew very little about. On the downside, like all her other books, the characters never quite grabbed me, and the prose was good but not glorious.
I’ll keep reading her stuff, but at this point I don’t expect ever to have a Holy Shit! moment with her.
I also have read a few other books recently:
Black Buck, a satirical take on racism in the techbro world. It’s compared to Sorry to Bother You, a bizarre delight of a movie, with good reason. I liked the movie better, but the satire was pretty great here as well.
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik, continues the Scholomance series, with its central conceit of, “What if Hogwarts was fuckin deadly, and the only reason anyone went there was because it was safer than not going?” Novik is a virtuoso author; while I’m not convinced she’s shattering genre conventions or anything, I enjoy the hell out of everything she writes. With the proviso that her romances are uniformly fucked up. Man, someone needs to enroll her in therapy.
Conspiracy of Ravens, the sequel to Wake of Vultures. It’s a profane nineteenth century fantasy western, starring an Indigenous/Black multiracial transman wizard. It’s not great, but it’s sure fun. There were a few tryhard moments in it, but all in all I read it in about 36 hours.
And I started but did not finish Mordew, a promising-looking fantasy. Once I realized that the glossary was, not exaggerating, over a hundred pages long, and that the author was one of these literary motherfuckers who decides to go slumming in fantasy, I lost my taste for it. Maybe I’ll pick it back up, but honestly I don’t have a lot of patience for that sort of thing any more.
Saw John Grisham’s The Judge’s List (a sequel to The Whistler) on the shelf at Walmart. Looked interesting enough that I ended up paying ~$15 to read it now instead of waiting months for the library to pick it up- something I almost never do.
“The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”. Jimmy Breslin’s 1971 comic Mafia novel. Not quite sure how I stumbled into this one - I saw the movie and it was pretty underwhelming, but I’m really liking this.
I was once a big Tom Wolfe reader, but the two novels of his that I consumed, “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” both suffered from the same inability to come to a satisfactory conclusion - you could sense the writer had lost interest in the world he’d set up so entertainingly and just wanted to wrap it up and go home.
Jimmy Breslin’s book reminds me of this - he’s just so good at building up a situation with quirky personages who flail about in thier own blinkered existence, so full of themselves that they can’t see the express train bearing down on them, but of course you can and it’s moider!
I’m two-thirds through it - hope it sticks the landing as they say.