I have a bunch of credits racked up at Audible so I threw one away on Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, Enough. What can I say, I want to hear the salacious tidbits. Here’s the thing, I’ve only listened to the first chapter so far, narrated by the author, and I’m in for a slog. I said somewhere else that she’s either really bad on the TeeVee or a complete numbskull. She maybe both. It is not well written. Scattered thoughts, incongruous narration, short clipped sentences as though designed for grade schoolers … and her reading voice is every bit as bad as her TeeVee skills.
But that’s not what I came in here to say. What I came in to say is that it’s no wonder how screwed up this woman is being raised by a completely psychotic father. He took her, “hunting” when she was five and made her watch while he and his buddies shot the shit out of snapping turtle for fun; he wouldn’t bring her for stitches when she fell on a lawn mower blade because he wanted her to be a, “warrior”; when an opportunity to move the family came up, he pussed out and broke down in tears about how he just couldn’t leave his home town, so they all turned around and moved back - after, I might add, he made her give her cat away because of the move only to then yell at her when her uncle gave her a kitten for the move back. The man is a complete prick.
I can’t wait for the next few chapters where I’m sure he’ll have thrown her out of a moving car for her sweet 16 birthday telling her to find her way back or she’s out of the will
Started Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie. So far it’s okay. It’s keeping me entertained enough. Not my favorite so far. A nice cast of rich asshole characters to consider for murder. I’m not even trying to solve this one.
Working through Time Runner by LP Styles about a chapter a day. It’s pretty good, and I would say that even if I weren’t friends with the author. I think it blends a lot of far -out sci Fi concepts with teen pathos pretty well.
Just rediscovered and am reading again The Tutor: Being the Reminiscences of Thomasina Wragg by P.N. Dedeaux, a faux-Victorian erotic novel from my misspent youth. It’s pretty good, although with a lot more canings, birchings, whippings etc. than I recall.
I finished listening to City On Fire by Don Winslow. It’s a surprisingly entertaining saga of a Mafia war in Providence in the late 1980s, between the Irish and the Italians. The audio book is made even more enjoyable by the skilled narration of Ari Fliakos, who manages to create at least a dozen different New England accents, both Irish and Italian.
I just picked up Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux. I heard this guy on PJ Vogt’s new podcast Search Engine talking about how Sam Bankman-Fried happened.
This book is genuinely funny. I wouldn’t say this is an area of particular interest to me, but it is something I’ve always kind of wanted to understand, and here’s this book written from the perspective of a journalist who never took Crypto seriously for a second. There’s more than a little schadenfreude and a fair amount of genuine outrage for all the ordinary people who got scammed. Overall I’m immediately taken in by the bemused and engaging tone of the author. This is probably the easiest way for me to learn about this.
Interesting book. It was Heinlein’s first, and it shows.
I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted it reprinted, like his three “stinkeroos”. But I’m glad they did. It shows us a first step in his evolution as as writer
Started yesterday on Fever House by Keith Rosson. It’s about a magical artifact that causes killing rage in those near it, and the various people who are after it. Reminds me of Pulp Fiction in that way. After reading a bit I nearly put it down, as I’m not up for gore, but then it hooked me, and I haven’t run into anything too hard to handle yet.
I finished Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie on audiobook. I originally read this some thirty years ago when the classism and sexism wasn’t as aggravating to my 20 something self, though to give Dame Christie her due, it did feel like she was poking fun at 1930s British society at several points.
Overall, the mystery was good, the characters not as two dimensional as I expected and the many twists were excellent. The pacing was well done for a book that had little action in it, at no point did the story lag.
I’m not tremendously thrilled with the narrator of the audiobook though, he had a hard time with female voices and there were several instances of him “forgetting” the voice and going into the narrator’s voice if he had more than a few sentences to say. And the less said about him pronouncing Lettice as lettuce the better.
Finished Just Build the Ark and the Animals Will Come: Children on Bible Stories, by David Heller, which I enjoyed. One favorite: “God made Adam first because the first person had to be stronger to protect them from wild horses and cantaloupe.” Also, “Jonah learned mostly about whales. He learned that whales are not good to visit and pet. Even if you can get in free.”
Now I’m reading an anthology, Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful, edited by Alfred Hitchcock.
I’ve really enjoyed every single one of her Ms. Marple books, until this one. So credit where it’s due; she’s a great storyteller and her characters are often really compelling.
Reading The Story of King Arthur and his Knights by Howard Pyle. I hadn’t realized that
1.) This is a LOT longer than I thought it would be
2.) He wrote three more volumes to complete the story
3.) He also illustrated it himself. Gorgeous, intricate drawings that almost look like woodcuts.
On audio, I finished re-reading Homer Hickham Jr’s Rocket Boys. Now I’m going back through a bunch of other things I’ve read recently, like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I’m still slogging through Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary as bedtime reading. I picked up a copy of Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke at the sadly going-out-of-business Avenue Victor Hugo Books last weekend.
Speaking of Agatha Christie–just read Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates, which tries to out-And-Then-There-Were-None And Then There Were None. Large numbers of people in an isolated Rocky Mountain cabin during blizzards being decapitated one by one by person or persons unknown. The plot is seriously implausible, even for this kind of novel, and the writing style–well, it’s first person, with the narrator in a constant state of high alert and anxiety; this is reasonable under the circumstances, of course, but it makes for a one-note narrative which gets wearying after a while. I started skimming about two-thirds of the way through, and I’m not sorry I did. Still, if decapitations are your thing it certainly has its charms…
I also read Ed Stafford’s Walking the Amazon, which he became the first person to do (actually he went from Peru’s Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast of Brazil). It took over two years and it sounds absolutely miserable, but it’s certainly an intriguing account.