Me too! 
Me three. I assume they’re trying to get books out timed for Xmas gift giving.
Finished The Wanted, another Cole/Pike winner. Starting A Dangerous Man.
Ugh, no. Can’t finish.
How bad does it have to be???
I tend to read stuff of questionable quality as the week draws to a close. Then I don’t waste all week trying to force myself through it. It’s pretty easy to chuck it when I know I’m going to the library on Saturday!
Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life Brenda Maddox
A history of geology in Britain in the 1800s. Good idea for a book, but tries to cover too much in a short work.
The priory of the orange tree.
So far, it seems to be a big juicy fantasy with interesting characters.
As I’ve said before, I give authors 50 pages. If they haven’t hooked me by then, I know from hard experience that they never will, and put down the book guilt-free.
Today I tried to read Until Summer Comes Around, by Glenn Rolfe. It’s a vampire story, but I’d seen an intriguing review somewhere. Unfortunately…
That “male gaze” thing usually doesn’t phase me, but it was really laid on thick here. Strike one. Boobs described as “mounds”, strike two. 
And then this sentence: “He felt his dick come to life and had to turn away and try to get myself under control before it became blatantly obvious and totally embarrassing.” Poor editing, strike three!
It seems pretty obvious that this book is going to be a series of masturbatory fantasies, strung together with some weak plot. Which, you know, is fine, but not what I was looking for today.
I didn’t know until a couple of days ago that Woody Allen had a new book of collected humour pieces out – Zero Gravity – I believe the first one in fifteen years. He may be a prolific filmmaker and sometime playwright, but writing prose is just not something he’s inclined to do very often.
His biting and often self-deprecatory wit is still going strong, though … an excerpt from a story in which he appears to be describing himself …
When I heard that this auteur sometimes took the lead in his own pictures I envisioned a filmmaker-movie star as formidable as Orson Welles and as handsome as Warren Beatty or John Cassavetes. Imagine my surprise when I lamped the triple threat I speak of and registered neither a brooding cult genius nor a matinée idol but a wormy little cipher, myopic behind black-framed glasses and groomed loutishly in his idea of rural chic: all tweedy and woodsy, with cap and muffler, ready for the leprechauns. The creature proved a handful from the very first, grumbling to all about the muddled directions that had forced his chauffeur to squander hours driving around in a Möbius route … Mr. Pudnick recalled that David Mamet had once mentioned changing planes when he heard this individual was on the same flight. I might add that the character’s incessant carping was done in a kazoolike nasal whine, as were his incessant jokes: a spate of fatal snappers designed to ingratiate but eliciting from all within earshot a columbarium-like silence.
I enjoyed Paul McAuley’'s latest, Beyomd the Burn Line, which is set on a future, human-free Earth where other species have developed civilisations and are investigating the past.
Amd I also tore through Finder & Driving the Deep, the first two novels by Suzanne Palmer. The protagonist is a ‘finder’ who stumbles through his jobs on other planets, space colonies, etc with a mix of skill and unlikely schemes as the situations become ever more awkward oand finding a solution ever more unlikely.
A bit like Rusch’s Retrieval Artist srries with some Stainless Steel Rat tjrown in and great fun to read.
And vol 3 is out next month in p/b!
His new book comes out November 1.
Finished Agent Running in the Field, by John Le Carre. His penultimate novel and the last one published before he died. Russian intrigue, Brexit and badminton about sums it up without giving away too much. It was good. The protagonist did not suffer too much angst. That’s my problem with a lot of his novels, protagonists suffering from so much angst that in the real world, they would have blown out their brains long ago. An enjoyable read.
Have started a rare reread: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I first read it toward the end of last century, and it’s one of my favorite books. Felt like revisiting it, maybe because it comes up so often on Jeopardy!, serving to keep it on my radar. We’ll be hitting Vegas soon, then friends are coming in from Thailand next month, so I don’t want to start any involved reading for a few weeks.
I’ve read almost all of the books he’s wriytten since 2000, which were with co-authors. I imagine Cusllerr outlioning the plot and giving some techn8ical details and letting co-author loose on it.
They’re my guilty pleasure. Cussler writes what I call “weapons porn”, where he finds some esoteric litlle-or un-used piece of WWII or later weaponry and concocts some way to work it into the plot, often with some modern technical aspect to tie it all together in a single outrageous package. As I always say, if Cussler doesn’t make you say “Oh, come ON!” at least once in his book, (meaning he actually did the ridiculous thing he was leading up to, but which a lesser author would’ve avoided doing, in recognition of the laws of probability). , then he hasn’t done his job.
I’m convinced that he started his Isaac Bell series, about a detective with a Pinkerton-like agency at the Turn of the Century, just so he’d have an excuse to use obscure railroad (and early airplane) technology.
Most of his books since 2000 are readily available as CD audiobooks at libraries (that’s where I’ve mainly been getting them). It’s the earlier ones (Raise the Titanic, Vixen 03, etc.) that are harder to find on audio.
If you find that Cussler works for you, I recommend the works of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs, either together or separately. They’re similarly absurd and off-the wall. (They’re the ones who wrote The Relic, about a monster loose in a thinly-disguised American Museum of Natural History). Again, libraries tend to carry the CD versions of their books.
Thanks, Cal! I will try Cussler, and then maybe your other recommendations.
Much appreciated!
Interesting! What species? Tell me it’s not cockroaches….
My timing is good. I finished The Wanted. Reading Demolition Angel, which is outside the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, but very good.
Just finished The Depths, a YA novel by Nicole Lesperance. It’s about a girl who visits a secluded island. She starts to see ghosts, meets a mysterious boy, and comes to realize that the island is alive. It was very atmospheric and engrossing. In the end, I’m not sure it completely made sense, but it was a fun ride.
Finished The Arts by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. Not recommended.
Now I’m reading Living Memory, by David Walton.