I picked up Meddling Heroes by Charlie Brooks on a whim; it was in the “local authors” display at an indie bookstore.
It’s a comic book superheroes story told from the points of view of a supervillain and his lawyer. It’s a short novel and I’m enjoying it (I’m about eighty percent through it). Hopefully Brooks sticks the landing.
The title story “If It Bleeds” really only works if you’ve read the previous novels in the series.
… Wow.
I really didn’t like that book.
Based on your review, I’ll give it a pass. 
You don’t say.
I enjoyed Queen’s Gambit when I read it, many years ago. Since Tevis had written science fiction (most notably The Man Who Fell to Earth), I thought that Queen’s Gambit would also be SF, but I still enjoyed it for what it was.
Finished 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, both of which I enjoyed.
Next up: Shoebag, a middle grade fantasy by Mary James in which a cockroach wakes up and discovers that he’s been turned into a boy; and What an Owl Knows: The Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman.
I hope so, too! As you may recall from March and April 2021: Queen's Gambit on Netflix - #159 by Elendil_s_Heir
Current read; cozy steampunk from a favorite author:
My September/October 2025 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact magazine just arrived today, and there is a story by Larry Niven in the current issue! He’s apparently 87 years old now, and still writing.
I read Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells. Murderbot solves a murder mystery. I think it’s one of my favorites in the series.
I started What Stalks the Deep the latest Sworn Soldier book by T. Kingfisher. We’re going underground and I’m already feeling claustrophobic.
Three books since my last post, I think:
Gifted and Talented, by Olivia Blake. I picked it up because of the title and because I’m a gifted education specialist and it amused me. The first half of the first sentence hooked me: “Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole, not that it matters at this stage in the narrative but it’s worth pointing out….” It maintains this mordant narrator voice through most of the book, and while I generally hate the genre of “problems faced by the ultra-rich,” this one, like Knives Out, had enough of a spin on the genre that I found it delightful. It’s a modern fantasy with a magical realist touch to the fantasy and a very bitter, sharp sense of humor.
Sea of Tranquility. This was for a book club, and while the author’s prose is lovely, I ended it and was like, eh, Interstellar did it better. All its narrative tricks and supposedly satisfying conclusion just felt like stuff I’d seen done before, and what I was left with was a bunch of characters that I didn’t find very compelling, including one of the most glaringly obvious author stand-ins that I’ve ever seen (a character who’s a best-selling author whose most famous book was about the aftermath of a pandemic–o where o where did you get that idea from, Emily St. John Mandel?
Overgrowth, by Mira Grant. The premise–Invasion of the Body Snatchers, more or less, told from the POV of a self-aware pod person–is really intriguing, and throughout the book I kept thinking how much better it’d be if a better author had tackled it. As it is, the pod-person is a neurospicy petulant millennial who can’t shut up about how she hates people, except for her trans boyfriend, and the book is a paper-thin allegory for being trans. The ending actively pissed me off. The author, I concluded, genuinely thinks she’s better than all us normies, and doesn’t hate us so much as she despises us; her superiority complex drips through on every page. But it was the last two words of the book that made me laugh out loud: in the author’s note, it said, “Mira Grant also writes under her other name, Seanan McGuire.” I fucking hate the writing of Seanan McGuire, and had I known this was a pseudonym, I would never have picked up the book.
Halfway through What We Can Know and the sunk cost fallacy is pushing me ever onward.
There’s a point (and I am making this vague and as spoiler free as possible) where someone says to the protagonist, “I don’t care about any of this.”
And I’m like, yeah. Neither do I.
Finished Misery, by Stephen King. The author of a popular romance-novel series wrecks his car in Colorado’s High Country and is rescued by his “Number 1 fan.” She also keeps him prisoner and tortures him. Very good, of course. I think by now everyone knows the story, if not because of the book, then thanks to the movie. I bought the book for my wife, because before we returned to Bangkok we were really getting into Kathy Bates’ new Matlock series, and I told her the story of how she won the Oscar for playing Annie Wilkes in Misery, her first major screen role. I’d read it years ago and so reread it after the wife finished it. It reminded me that way back when, I myself dated an ex-nurse named Ann who was just as bat-shit crazy as Annie Wilkes. I could easily see my Ann doing the same things to me that Annie Wilkes did to Paul Sheldon. Easily. It’s just that I had a luckier escape.
Next up is Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood.
Misery is one of two Stephen King books I woll never read again because it was too real. The other one is Cujo.
I just want to rant a little more about this, because people might not believe me. Spoiler box out of an excess of caution, describing a scene from near the end of the book:
The narrator is riding on the back of an immense winged beast–a plant-based pterodactyl-like alien with telepathy–and getting to know it. Does she ask about its homeworld? About its perspective on the invasion of Earth? About its relationship to other aliens? About its memories of other invasions? About what humanity can expect?
No. Her telepathically-delivered question: “Um, what are your pronouns?”
I thought Into the Drowning Deep was a barn burner of a read. It’s not perfect but tons of fun (creepy ass mermaids take over a ship and eat a bunch of scientists.)
It was pretty woke, now that you mention it. We had an autistic character, a lesbian character, and a Deaf character. They were all scientists and I thought all that was pretty cool. I won’t deny there was something very vaguely preachy about it. But at the same time, I found it gripping.
I started and then quickly gave up on A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham. The first chapter made me question her choice of adjectives. The second chapter started with the main character trying to shove her own tongue down her throat to scratch an itch. Then the short sentences. Fragments, really. All the time. Trying to convey the MC’s disjointed thoughts. But it was when the MC literally phoned in not one but two prescriptions that I knew I was done.
It might just be me for that last part because part of my job is proposing prescriptions to PCPs. They don’t “call in” medications, they escribe them. The information on the proposal is much more detailed than the “medication name, dosage, patient’s name, p-a-t-i-e-n-t-’-s-n-a-m-e” messages that the MC left. At the very, very least there should have been instructions. How many times a day does the patient take the medication? How many milligrams per day? Are generic substitutions allowed?
I know it’s just one little scene that probably won’t recur again in the novel, but it really bugged me. Also, did she even discuss prescribing anti-anxiety medication with the patient? The patient’s parent/guardian since she’s a pediatric psychiatrist? And why is the patient lying on a leather couch like it’s Freudian times? All the therapy appointments I’ve had, we’re sitting in regular chairs facing each other.
On the other hand, I’m rereading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which I love. And I just finished The Tomb of Dragons, the third book in Katherine Addison’s Cemeteries of Amalo series and it was great.
Finished Absolute Batman and Superman and liked both so decided to try Absolute Wonder Woman and wow it was pretty great. My favorite of the three. Really leans into the Greek myth aspects of her story.
Oh, wow–I didn’t even realize that was her! I’d forgotten the woke aspects, but remembered that the story didn’t do it for me: it didn’t piss me off in the way this book did, but there was something fundamentally implausible, even for a fantasy, about the whole thing for me.
And I tend to love woke books. I’m reading one now–The Sapling Cage, a YA story about a trans girl who hides her AMAB status to join a coven of witches–and am really enjoying it.
I think that Grant/McGuire just has an approach to humans that I don’t like. I find her writing to be didactic and obvious instead of empathetic and insightful, like she’s writing to score points instead of to tell a good story or figure out what it means to be human.
But plenty of folks love her stuff, so I guess it’s just a bad fit for me.