Ah, thanks. That’s next on my list. I’ve been a Dench fan for a long, long time (and my dad dated her back in the Fifties!).
I was kind of wondering where you were, hadn’t quite got to worried yet, just figured you were busy. Welcome back.
Finished Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace, by Michael Perry, which was good.
Next up: Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson, and Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, by Lawrence Wood.
I am reading Rorschach a graphic novel set in the Watchmen universe that when I bought it I thought was prequel about the eponymous character but is actually something even more interesting. It is instead more like the HBO series where it takes the world to the present day and extrapolates the events of the original story and how they would effect that world.
I think it is specifically set in the same continuity as the show because it makes some references but you don’t have seen that show to enjoy it (you do have to be familiar with the original graphic novel though).
I read A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher recently and had so much fun, I had to read another of her books. Thornhedge was, perhaps, not one of her best but still head and shoulders over the drek my book club likes to read (I stay because I enjoy the social side of the club). I loved Toadling and the world she inhabited and I must say I have never encountered a hero who apologized as much as Halim, which was actually rather cute.
I have started Planet of Exile by Ursula K LeGuin (Not my intent to follow up one Ursula with another, it’s how the library delivered the books). I can’t remember reading it but my LeGuin phase is 40 years in the past so…
I also started Poirot Investigates a volume of Poirot short stories by Agatha Christie and ummmm did NOT expect that Chinese slur repeated twice in the first 10 minutes. 
I am not liking this narrator either, he has Hastings giggle now and then.
Finished Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson, and Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, by Lawrence Wood, both of which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading Sip, a dark fantasy by Brian Allen Carr.
Quimby, I posted about Rorschach in the Aug. 2024 Whatcha Reading thread (posts 5 and 9). Check it out, if you like.
Thank you for the heads-up. I agree the ending was weird and not what I expected but I think I liked it better than you did.
The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity - Timothy C Winegard
A comprehensive look at the history of mankind’s relationship with the horse, from the Stone Age to the present.
Pretty interesting. I don’t know much about horses, so I certainly learned a few things.
Once every few years or so, my husband asks me what I’m reading. Yesterday was the big day, so I told him I was reading a mystery about buried treasure. “And there’s a group of young people solving it, kind of like Scooby Doo. Only they’re a ghost, and a medium who’s the only one who can see her, and a non-binary person, and a neurotic gay guy, and it’s all really British and funny.” Husband backed away slowly. I tell ya, he never asks me when I’m reading something serious.
Displeasure Island, Alice Bell
OHHHH! I need to read that!
Continuing with my old school phase, I just finished Planet of Exile by Ursula K. LeGuin. The book is a deft exploration of the question: At what point, does a group of people stop considering themselves visitors and startconsidering themselves inhabitants of the world their distant ancestors crash landed on?
I’m quite certain I hadn’t read this back in the mists of time that was my late teens/early twenties. It was a more detached style of storytelling than I really enjoy but I liked the story nevertheless.
Thanks, Quimby. I suspect you’re right.
I’ve finished The World as It Is by Ben Rhodes, nonfiction by a top NSC staffer in the Obama White House. Rhodes joined the Obama campaign early on, and remained as an advisor and speechwriter throughout both terms. He has a lot of interesting things to say about Obama’s foreign and military policies (including Afghanistan, Iraq, Benghazi, the opening to Cuba and trying to make the best of a bad situation in Myanmar), as well as West Wing staff drama and dealing with an implacably-hostile Congress. Recommended for any political junkie.
Just started Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black, a pastiche by June Thomson, one of my all-time-favorite writers of Sherlockian mysteries. It’s set in the summer of 1909; Dr. Watson goes to visit Holmes in his retirement cottage on the Sussex Downs and (of course) is drawn into solving a mystery with him. So far, so good.
I finished reading the Kravitz translation of the unabridged The Mysterious Island . Great stuff, and a surprisingly long read (almost 650 pages – no wonder it’s so often been abridged). It ties into two other Verne novels – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, of course, and The Children of Captain Grant (AKA In Search of the Castaways). The timelines don’t agree in either case. There really ought to be several decades between MI and 20kL, and Verne himself sneakily slips in an extra decade between CCG/ISotC and MI. Oh, well – he’s not the only novelist to bobble the chronologies between his connected works. In honor of the book, I re-watched the Ray Harryhausen movie over the weekend.
I read all the way through Three Men Out, a Nero Wolfe collection by Rex Stout. I’d read one of the stories in it, but not the others. It wasn’t top-notch Wolfe, but it was interesting to see how Wolfe dealt with being at a ballpark. Even in a celebrity box, the seats were too narrow for him.
I also read through Everything You Pretend to Know About Food (and are Afraid Someone Will Ask) by Nancy Rommelmann. I picked this up last weekend at the Avenue Victor Hugo third going-out-of-business sale. It was literally a lat-minute purchase, as I sa it just before getting in line. It dates from 1998, but was definitely a worthwhile purchase. There’s too much in this I never even heard about before, so I couldn’t pretend to know it. I’ve got several cookbooks and have read a bit, but there was a huge amount here totally beyond my experience and knowledge. A good, light read, written with some wit.
Next up, also from that sale, is The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas. I’d never heard of this one, but the premise appears to be that, although there have been plenty of books and movies asking what would happen if Sherlock Holmes had investigated the real-life mystery of Jack the Ripper, nobody has looked at what would have happened if he’d looked into other Victorian and Edwardian era real-life crimes and mysteries. A quick look at the reviews on Amazon give this a less-than-stellar rating, but it’s still weighted toward the top. And apparently he wrote a sequel. And it was only a buck, so I’ll give it a shot.
On audio, I finished Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric. I’m now re-reading …And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer’s “sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy”. It’s not Adams, but it’s a reasonable facsimile thereof (not a trivial achievement. Kind of like the waty the screenwriters of Airplane II managed to catch the ZZA vibe.) , mand it provides a happier ending than Mostly Harmless did.
Finished Sip, a dark fantasy by Brian Allen Carr, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Pelican at Blandings, by P.G. Wodehouse.
I notice that Eoin Colfer’s Hitchhiker’s Guide sequel …And Another Thing is the only work of fiction I’ve found that uses the word “Philosophunculist”, besides Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, he uses it more than once (Heinlein only has a single use).
The only other books I’ve found it in are dictionaries, usually dictionaries of odd words, and all of them point out how rare and unusual the word is. If you plug it into the Google N-gram Viewer, it draws a blank. If you’re using this word, you’re doing it very much on purpose. And the purpose is to show that you know this very rare and weird word.
It means, basically, an amateur philosopher who may not really know what he’s talking about (depending upon how lenient the defining dictionary is).
There are probably one or two uses cited in the OED, but I can’t access the online version, and my hard copy’s at home.
Ramage, by Dudley Pope, the first book in a series about a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars.
How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defence, by Robin George Andrews, pretty much what the title says.
Finished Displeasure Island. It was decent. I lost the thread of the mystery towards the end, but I have to admit I didn’t really care about it. I’m reading to enjoy the interactions of the characters. My favorite character is Sophie the ghost (she’s quite rude). I want to find out more about the rules she’s bound by, and especially, how she died.
Started today on The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer, a novel “inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia”. Truthfully I’m not expecting it to blow me away, but we’ll see.
I finished On The Road by Kerouac. A decent, if rambling, adventure story of a guy going back and forth across America in the late 1940s. I know I’m not a literary critic, but I wouldn’t put this book in my top 50, even though it’s in all the top 50 lists of American novels. Of course, I thought the same thing about The Great Gatsby.
Next up:
Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson.
Finished Pelican at Blandings, by P.G. Wodehouse, which was okay.
Next up: Beyond Bizarre: Frightening Facts and Blood-Curdling True Tales, by Varla Ventura, and Queen’s Bureau of Investigation, by Ellery Queen.