October is here, I feel like I blinked and missed September. Time to get your skeletons out of the closet -snerk- and onto your porch! And for us Northerners, time to dig the comfy hoodies and thick socks out of storage. Then settle down with a warm drink of your choice and a book.
Currently reading: Gardens and Ghosts the latest in Maz Maddox’s Dinosaur shifter series RELIC. Finally the boss man is going to get his HEA.
Print: Still working on The Witches of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly. My hands really don’t like big books anymore so my progress is still slow.
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.
Currently reading A Closed and Common Orbit, the second book in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series. I read the first one a while back and adored it, but I have a huge backlogged reading stack so it’s taken me this long to fit in the continuation. Really good so far, an interesting way to develop the world. Feels different and yet the same.
@Spice_Weasel , glad you appreciated the Tom Mead “Golden-Age-locked-room” mystery review from last month’s thread. If you do read it I hope you’ll enjoy it. I picked up the first book in the series from the library three minutes before closing time today. I’ll be sure to post about it when I finish it.
I read The Wager by an author named David Grann. Nothing to do with gambling, but rather a British warship of that name being wrecked off the coast of Chile in the 1700s as a (minor) part of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Scurvy, storms, starvation, dissension, mutiny…and some actually survived after a three thousand mile journey through the Straits of Magellan. Well-written, informative, and much of the time pretty grim, and Grann does a nice job of drawing conclusions about imperialism and Western civilization.
@Elendil_s_Heir, I thought of you several times while reading this as I know how much you like the works of Patrick O’Brian; turns out that O’Brian based one of his early novels on the events described in this book, so you may already have read that novel, or read this book.
In any case, I’d recommend The Wager for anyone in the mood for a little dramatic and occasionally appalling adventure.
Thanks, Ulf! Several friends (including a fellow O’Brian fan) have also praised The Wager to me - sounds quite interesting. I just placed a hold with my local library for the audiobook.
Last night I finished The New Hunger by Isaac Marion, a prequel novella to his book Warm Bodies, which was made into a pretty good zombie romcom a few years ago. I liked it - a good mix of horror and humor, although the fate of one character at the end is a little confusing.
Just started The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson, a history book about the early years of the American Revolution. So far, so good. His writing style reminds me a bit of David McCullough’s.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth by Burt W. Griffin, who was a Warren Commission staff lawyer. It’s uneven but worthwhile so far.
Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames
Lara Makleim
A mudlark is a hobbyist who scours the shoreline of the river Thames in England looking for bits of historical detritus - coins, buttons, pottery, etc
It seems like a very British thing to do. It also seems like a lot of fun.
The author, a devoted mudlark herself, describes the various places she visits and things she finds, as well as reflecting on how her hobby fits into her own life.
I am reading The Door-to-Door Bookseller by Carsten Henn. I’m about halfway through and enjoying this nice little look into the lives of several people in a small German town. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of discussion of literature.
I’m listening to Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell. I picked it without much consideration from a list of NYT’s best nonfiction because I thought I should try more nonfiction audiobooks. So far, I’ve enjoyed listening to anecdotes about freethinkers during the Italian Renaissance. We’ll see whether I’m up for another 10 hours.
Just finished the latest John Scalzi book, Starter Villain, narrated by Will Wheaton (mostly blind, so audiobooks are my thing). Solid Scalzi. Lightweight, but very fun.
I was a fan of Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series (sufficiently so that my laptop is named Verus, and my backup drive is Starbreeze). I’m very much looking forward to Book 1 of his new series, An Inheritance of Magic, which comes out next Tuesday in the US (this Thursday everywhere else, I think). I’ll be listening to that as soon as it comes out.
Getting to the end of Jules Verne’s first novel, A Priest in 1835.
My bedside reading is Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, which is more fun than it sounds (Voltaire basically used it as an excuse to write about just about anything he wanted, swearing at the top of his voice that anything that sounded controversial or blasphemous was really just fiction or speculation (wink, wink). I read the penguin paperback ages ago, but the Kindle version seems more complete.
On audio, I’m re-listening to Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys
