Interlibrary loan request placed.
Finished Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful, edited by Alfred Hitchcock. I thought this wasn’t one of the best of his juvenile collections. For one thing, there are (IIRC) only two stories that involve actual ghosts. The best story in it was “The Red-Headed League” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which doesn’t even have a fake ghost.
Now I’m reading The Society of Shame, by Jane Roper.
Finished Fever House, which was a lot better than I expected it to be. It’s first of a series, so I’ll definitely pick up the second when it comes out in January.
Started yesterday on Pet, by Catherine Chidgey. It’s about a teacher at a New Zealand Catholic school in the eighties, and the hold she gains over her students. What she will do with this influence remains to be seen.
Finished Pyle’s King Arthur. Now I’m reading Tom Clancy’s 1992 Without Remorse. I thought I’d read all of Clancy’s early doorstop-thick techno-thrillers, but I missed this one somehow. Picked it up for $1 at a used book rack.
Finished Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux.
It was a fun, engaging read, a bit sobering when he got to the human trafficking part, but it wasn’t gratuitous and he didn’t dwell on it too long. This is a good entry point for a layperson curious what the whole crypto thing is about. I learned quite a bit with no background in finance. As for crypto, to quote Faux: It’s even dumber than I thought it was.
Some people might find his merciless dweeb-bashing distasteful, but these are billionaire scamming money-laundering dweebs profiting off of human misery, so I didn’t feel too bad for them.
Death and the Conjuror Tom Mead
A locked-room murder mystery set in 1930s London, where the chief investigator is a retired stage magician.
Clever and fun
Recommended
Hat tip to @Ulf_the_Unwashed who mentioned this author in a previous month
Cave of Bones Lee Berger and John Hawks
The interesting story behind the discovery of an early homind, Homo Naledi, in a South African cave. Lots of cool pictures and diagrams. The descriptions of squeezing through narrow cave passages are pretty intense.
Recommended
Finished The Society of Shame, by Jane Roper, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Lessons Learned and Cherished: The Teacher Who Changed My Life, edited by Deborah Roberts.
Five stars for Pet. I don’t mean it was the best dern book I ever read, but it was a fun read for sure.
Finished Lessons Learned and Cherished: The Teacher Who Changed My Life, edited by Deborah Roberts, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, by Anupam B. Jena, M.D., and Christopher Worsham, M. D.
I enjoy ‘em, but try not to let ‘em go to my head.
Finished If It Bleeds, by Stephen King. A collection of four novellas. The third one is “If It Bleeds,” featuring Holly Gibney of Mr. Mercedes trilogy fame. All four are very good.
Continuing my Stephen King jag, I have started Holly, his newest, and again featuring Holly Gibney.
I’m about 75% done and should finish it in the next couple of days. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, and I’ll be interested in your review.
Another Amazonia book (I almost wrote Amazon book, but I got it from the library, not over the internet): I liked David Grann’s The Wager well enough to try his The Lost City of Z. A British army officer of the early twentieth century decides to locate a city of great riches said to lurk somewhere in the Amazon basin.
Grann describes the officer’s experiences and follows to some degree in his footsteps to try to find out a) what happened when the explorer disappeared and b) what the straight dope about the “lost city” might be.
The parts delineating the explorer’s journeys, ideas, and obsessions are very interesting and well done; the parts about Grann were less compelling and I kept wanting to get back to the good stuff, and the big reveal at the end about the city feels surprisingly anticlimactic, almost like it’s tacked on. Still, definitely worth a read.
Yesterday I read 70 pages of Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig. However, at that point things were still just being set up, and I was getting bored, so I ditched. My TBR pile is very healthy right now, with a lot of horror novels newly released.
Started today on Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison, a novel about a woman returning to visit her family’s cult on the occasion of her ex-boyfriend’s marriage to her best friend. It’s lighter and more amusing than it sounds!
Finished Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, by Anupam B. Jena, M.D., and Christopher Worsham, M. D., which was very interesting. I’ve always gotten a flu shot, but I didn’t realize how important it was.
Now I’m reading Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree.
I started something called Thursday Morning Murder Club by Richard Osman.
It’s so good! Four octagenarians in a retirement home solve murders in the dryest, most British way possible. So far it is really something special.
(I finished Christie’s Pocket Full of Rye. Didn’t like it.)
I finished Holly by Stephen King. As noted upthread, this is not his finest work, but it certainly held my attention. An unlikely premise, to be sure, but certainly interesting. My only complaint was that the bad guys were dealt with and the protagonist rescued well before the book ended, and the last several chapters were more or less fluff. Maybe King had a minimum word count that he had to meet.
Next up: Judgment Prey by John Sandford.
I read the first chapter online and then placed a hold. Thanks!
Someone upthread reminded me that Robots Have No Tails by Henry Kuttner exists and I remembered liking it when I was 20ish. Since my copy literally has no binding anymore (all just loose pages in the cover) I picked it up on Kindle and started it this morning.
I will be gone this weekend, it’s my local anime convention, so I may or may not get any reading done over the weekend.