Finished The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd, which is nature writing about Scotland, and is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Her use of language is stunning. My Name Is Lucy Barton, a novel by Elizabeth Strout. Not recommended.
Next up: A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer, by Maxie Dara, and Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life, by Terry Brooks.
Finished Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson. Larson intersperses the story of the development of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi with the story of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered his wife in London in 1910, then fled to Canada with his lover aboard an ocean liner, only to be caught immediately upon arrival by authorities who had been partially tipped off by this new wireless invention. Very good.
Have started Misery, by Stephen King. A reread after some years.
My favorite. I nearly named my daughter Misery, but the family talked me out of it.
Did you name her Annie?
Nah, that would just be weird! 
How about Kathy?
My daughter’s girlfriend is named Annie… my sister is Anna.
At least I did name my son Paul. 
Finished The Unseen. I wish it had been The Unread (yeah, I took the cheap shot). It was full of unlikeable characters and strange happenings, and then it gave no satisfaction.
Starting now on
An author is locked into a haunted lighthouse for a weekend to gather material for his next book. A good idea if I ever heard one!
I started What We Can Know by Ian McEwen. I have never read this author before. Probably most known for Atonement.
I think I picked this recommendation up from NYT somehow. It’s a literary novel about our future with climate disaster. So far it’s about someone from the future researching a poet and his wife and their famous dinner. I’m not sure where it’s going, or if I’m going to continue. But so far I’m mildly intrigued.
I named my son for The Vorkosigan Saga and nobody talked me out of it. I think it’s funny because Miles Vorkosigan has a genius for reading and manipulating people and my son is no social genius, he’s autistic. (They probably share ADHD in common though.) I think the general message of doing hard and important things despite your limitations still holds true.
Finished Widow’s Point, it was okay. It does exactly what it says on the tin. However, it wasn’t long enough to be really effective.
Finished If It Bleeds by Stephen King. It was okay. It consists of four novellas of varying quality. The first one and the last one are pretty good; the middle two are average. None of them is anywhere close to the quality of the novellas in Different Seasons, which is one of my favorite King books.
Been in a Comic Book mood so I am reading Absolute Batman and Absolute Superman vol. 1.
The Absolute Universe is a new line that is based in a new DC Universe that was created by Darkseid using Comic Book nonsense. The heros have been reimagined in interesting ways. For example (some spoilers I guess but a lot of this was in the marketing), Batman is not an orphan. His father was killed in what is essentially a school shooting but his Mom is still alive. And he isn’t rich. He is an engineering genius who builds all his own gadgets and tech.
I am not usually a fan of the grimdark so I was surprised how much I liked this.
I just threw The Magnificent Ambersons across the room. Full rant to follow.
Woo hoo! 
runs off to get popcorn
I guess I’m officially reading this now because I bought the book. It’s fine.
I told my husband, “uh, it’s a futuristic literary novel… About a poet…”
“Oh, God, that’s so pretentious.”
“No, it’s actually about a historian researching a poet… And his wife, and a famous dinner they had with their friends.”
“That’s even worse.”
I’ll not deny it’s pretentious, but I’ve enjoyed my share of pretentious things (Station Eleven for example), so let’s see where it’s going. It vaguely does remind me of Station Eleven in the sense of realizing the enormity of what you have in the present, from the perspective of characters who have none of what you have.
It’s an easy read, though. A comfortable read. I’m already 20% done.
I finished Death at a Highland Wedding by Kelley Armstrong , the 4th in her Rip Through Time series about a modern cop (female) transported to the late 1880s Scotland. I enjoyed it a lot, though the exposition at the end could have been left out.
Just checked out Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. Hope i enjoy it as much as i liked the series.
Just started Exordia … was browsing at a local relatively recently opened independent bookstore and opened up the “Best Books of 2024” thread for ideas. @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness had this on his list in the OP with description that appealed and they had it.
Only 25 pages in but loving it! Thanks LOHD.
Last book bought on browsing at the other even newer local independent just by description was Annihilation … okay but just okay. Not going to read the rest of the series. Wolf Hall started out strong but got boring.
Glad you’re liking it! It gets really weird, but in the kind of way that I enjoy.
My full rant about The Magnificent Ambersons in the form of a sneak preview of the post going up on my book blog this Friday:
The only reason this book got one whole star is because it was well-written. The thing that doomed it to my wrath was the main character who was a horrible spoiled brat who deserves all bad things. This meeting of the We Hate George Amberson Minafer Club will now come to order.
George Amberson Minafer, or Georgie, was spoiled from birth. His mother Isabel worshiped the ground he walked on. She never punished him for acting a fool, barely scolded him when he got in trouble, instead telling him that he was the stars, the moon, the sun in her sky. His father, Wilbur, was too wrapped up in his business to attend to his wretched offspring. So Georgie grew up running roughshod over the town thinking he was the Lord High Ruler of All He Surveyed. The neighbors, who hated him because they were reasonable people, shook their heads disapprovingly and said one day he would get his come-uppance.
His come-uppance took entirely too long to arrive.
By the time his grandfather, the founding Amberson, died leaving his heirs penniless, Georgie has started and destroyed a relationship with Lucy Morgan, the only girl who stood up to his bratty ways. Unfortunately Lucy is an idiot and still likes the little monster. Georgie also destroyed his mother’s life because she was fond of Eugene Morgan, Lucy’s father and an old flame of Isabel’s. After Wilbur died, Georgie goes nuts at the hints that people are “talking” about his mother and Eugene, so he throws a tantrum and bullies his mother into giving up Eugene’s friendship before whisking her off to Europe. Then he brings her home one day before she dies of heart disease, making sure to refuse her final wish to see Eugene again before she goes.
He spends the last few chapters wracked with guilt over that decision but it’s too little too late.
Georgie has the delusion that he’s a Victorian gentleman and can live the life of an idle lord contributing nothing to society except his exalted presence. Thing is, he lives in freakin’ Indiana at the turn of the twentieth century, notable for being a place and time when idle lords are neither needed nor wanted. What they do need is people who are willing to contribute to the community in some way. Georgie refuses. This is symbolized by his rejection of automobiles long after Morgan’s cars have supplanted horse-drawn carriages.
It’s a touch of poetic justice that Georgie gets hit by a car near the end of the book because he’s got his head too far up his own lower intestine to pay attention to the driver and passenger yelling at him. Sadly, the car was only going 4 miles an hour so he just got both legs broken and a touch of internal bleeding. Nothing fatal. Dammit. What’s worse, his accident paves the way for a reconciliation with the Morgans and it’s hinted that Lucy is going to marry his worthless ass after Eugene gives him a pity job.
And that’s why I broke a years-long streak and threw this book across the room when I finished it. If it weren’t a library book I would have found a creative way to destroy it, but it’s not worth the money I’d have to pay to replace it. Instead I amused myself by thinking up creative ways to destroy Georgie. Such as:
go back in time and drown him at birth
feed him to sharks
blow him up with the nitroglycerine he worked with after he finally got up off his duff and got a job
make him stand naked in the middle of Times Square at rush hour, encouraging everyone to point and laugh
run over him at a speed exponentially faster than 4 mph, back up, and run him over again
have the decaying remains of his grandfather’s manor fall on him and crush his skull
drop him in oubliette and laugh at his cries of anguish as he dies
give him black lung from all the soot in the air and smile gleefully as he hacks up his lungs
cover him with papercuts and roll him in salted lemon juice
push him off the ocean liner either to or from Europe
clown hammer
What creative ways can you come up with to destroy Georgie? It’s a fun game for the whole family!