Autumn has hit my beloved Wasatch Front with a vengeance! Everything is yellow, orange and red; the crunch of leaves accompanies every footstep. AC units everywhere are going into storage and warm jackets, hoodies and sweaters are coming out of storage… your mileage will DEFINITELY vary if you live south of the Equator
Currently I am reading:
Robots have not Tails by Henry Kuttner
I Remember You by Yrsa Sigurđsdottir, the existential dread is high with this one, though that might be the fault of the translator being a woe is me bunny.
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.
Ha, I read this one! Ironically I don’t remember many specifics, but I do remember a couple of scenes, and the feel of it. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.
I started today on A Good House for Children by Kate Collins. There are two timelines, both involving a woman and children experiencing odd events in a big lonely mansion by the sea.
Finished Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden, which was excellent. It reminded me of the Murderbot series by Martha Wells and the Lock In series by John Scalzi.
Now I’m reading Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER, by Farzon A. Nahvi, M.D.
I started listening to City of Dreams by Don Winslow. It’s the second of 3-book series about a small-time Irish mobster from Providence, who’s now on the run after taking down a rival as well as a dirty cop. I’m finding it quite entertaining.
Book 2 of the Broken Earth series, it follows the main character, Essun, a wizard who can create and control earthquakes, as she struggles in the aftermath of the destructive events of the first book. It also takes up the story of her daughter, Nassun, also a wizard.
I enjoyed Hilma Wolitzer’s novel An Available Man, about a 62-year-old widower and the twists and turns his love life takes in the wake of his wife’s death. Well-written, well-drawn characters (I especially liked his stepdaughter, Julie), nicely paced. I wasn’t at all sure I was going to appreciate the book, but I did.
And I enjoyed Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball even more. Posnanski is a terrific sportswriter (and a terrific writer, period) who, well, loves baseball, and that love shows up on every page (and it’s a loong book). The subtitle is “A History in 50 Moments,” though when you come right down to it there are a lot more than 50 moments described. I wasn’t in the stands for any of the 50 moments, but I did experience a few via radio or TV or the next day’s newspaper, and I was in the stands for one of the homers described in the section entitled “Five Unlikely Homers.” A trip down memory lane, plus which I learned a lot. A wonderful, wonderful book.
I started Worrying is Optional: Break the Cycle of Anxiety and Rumination that Keeps You Stuck by Eckstein & Coyne.
There aren’t too many books like this that are firmly grounded in evidence-based methodology. It was recommended by someone in my husband’s OCD group (my husband is a clinical psychologist who specializes in OCD and other anxiety disorders.) One thing I’m coming around to is the realization that I ruminate a lot, and that actually I’m not required to engage with my thoughts. It started with an excellent podcast episode on Clearer Thinking With Spencer Greenburg where he interviewed a metacognitive therapist. The difference between “classic” CBT and metacognitive approaches is that metacognitive therapy doesn’t engage with the content of your thoughts, it is more about understanding the process of thinking itself and how that affects how you feel. Good stuff - this is the future of cognitive behavioral psychology.
So this book comes at a time when I already want to learn more about stopping rumination. The book is transdiagnostic, meaning it is geared for anxiety disorders of every kind, from OCD to PTSD and GAD. All types of anxiety are perpetuated by rumination to some degree. So far, I am really enjoying the book. For books of this nature I usually read them once, then read them again, slowly, journaling or what have you so I can really get the most out of it. I can’t say it’s really helpful until I’ve implemented the advice. But so far, I think it is very promising.
I started The Leading Indicators by Zachary Karabell. It’s supposedly “a short history of the numbers that rule our world,” but it’s actually not all that short and it’s really about the development of economic metrics such as GNP and unemployment rates.
It’s got some interesting parts, but man oh man could it have used a good editor. The book is repetitive to the nth degree (speaking of numbers), also repetitive, plus which it’s highly repetitive, and I am thinking I may not read much further. Oh well!
Finished A Good House for Children, and liked it. A gothic ghost story that delivered what it said on the tin, and the quality of the writing was a cut above the stuff I’ve been reading lately. I think it could have had more impact if things were connected or tied up a little more, that’s my one complaint. This was Kate Collins’ first book, so I will pick up what she does in future.
Finished The Prague Coup, a graphic novel written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Miles Hyman. It’s about Graham Greene, Cold War espionage and the making of the classic post-WWII noir thriller The Third Man. Pretty good, all in all, although the story inexplicably shifts from Vienna to Prague towards the end - other than to be true to the title, I couldn’t really tell you why.
I’m now about halfway through my current audiobook, Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero by Douglas Perry, a bio of the Untouchables superstar lawman who never quite lived up to his early fame. The prose is a bit too self-consciously, even laughably, hardboiled at times, but I’m learning a lot from it.
A survey of the latest research on these wonderful birds. Personal note: I’ve seen an owl exactly once in my ten years of semi-serious birdwatching. It was magnificent.
The Underworld Susan Casey
The history and current state of reserach on the deep ocean. Personal note: I have never been in the deep ocean, and that’s cool with me.
Finished Worrying is Optional by Eckstein and Coyne. This is the real stuff. Draws on evidence-based interventions including CBT, metacognitive therapy, ACT, inference-based CBT and Exposure and Response Prevention.
I’m going through it a second time now jotting my notes down in Microsoft word, but wow, total game-changer so far. I’ve been through some highly stressful events since I started reading it and was able to just say, “Hey, I don’t actually have to engage with that thought right now.”
It’s so liberating.
If you are a chronic worrier/anxious person I recommend giving it a shot.
Just began Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, a Star Trek novel about a pre-Generations meeting between Kirk and Picard. Pretty good so far. The opening chapter has Kirk, near retirement, wistfully visiting the Guardian of Forever once more. In a clever nod to the writer of the classic TOS episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the time portal is the site of the Ellison Research Outpost.
Whiled away some time today with a collection of short stories, Riding the Nightmare, by Lisa Tuttle. Then I realized I’d read some of these before. However, I’ll use this to fill in when I can’t start the next novel for whatever reason. I’ve picked up and put down several things this week.
Finished Halo by E.M. Lindsey. M/M romance that was so sweet my teeth are rotting. I love this author for her positive and realistic-warts and all-portrayals of disabled people. Having spent most of my adult life working with disabled children and adults, I love seeing their inclusion as main characters not just “color” on the sidelines.