I’m still soldiering through The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (edited by Otto Penzler), which is now starting to feel like a painful slog. I’ve taken a couple of breaks reading vintage paperbacks, as I think related earlier, but now it’s back to ersatz Sherlock.
On Audio I’ve been re-reading books I transferred to MP3 files in my car – Ken Burns’ Mark Twain (the companion to his PBS film), Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. I’m now re-reading David McCullouch’s Brave Companions.
For bedside reading I’m alternating between Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary and James MacPherson’s famous forgery, The Poems of Ossian. I want to se what got people so excited and passionate about “The Homer of the North”. Was it all Northern European chauvinism? Or was there something to it? It’s probably because of MacPherson’s 18th century style, but I find the poems turgid and tough going.
LOve of these supposed early heroic poems inspired tons of artwork, music (Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave), and names. “Oscar” was already an existing name, but MacPherson’s Ossian poems popularized them. He also apparently created “Fiona” and “Malvina”, so Shrek’s main squeeze and my grandmother got their supposedly ancient names care of a forger. Also the town of Selma, Alabama came from a city in Ossian’s poems (founder and city planner and future veep William Rufus King was an admirer of Ossian – the name is supposed to mean “high seat” or “throne”, but think MacPherson made this one up, too.)
I’m plugged into my new King book and enjoying it. However, I wouldn’t bother unless you have some passing knowledge of the Talisman and Dark Tower stuff.
Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie, the fifth (?) in her Imperial Radch series. It took me awhile to settle into this book. The characters are chilly as they so often are in Leckie’s stories, but the book lacked the sharp edges of the Ancillary trilogy. It wasn’t until I started reading it as a comedy of manners, as Downton Abbey in space, that everything clicked. It was a lot more interesting then, but still isn’t my favorite of her works.
A Trade of Blood, by Robert Jackson Bennett, the third in his Ana & Din series. There’s a small moment in the book where brilliant-and-bonkers detective Ana snaggles a brined fish out of a jar, and I flipped from reading this series as a Rex Stout homage to reading Ana as fantasy Cordelia Cupp. Wherever Bennett derives his inspiration, I am here for it: this third book in the series presents a satisfying mystery wrapped in a weird fantasy world that resonates powerfully with our world. This one is going to be on my best-of-2026 list for sure.
I finished A God In Ruins by Leon Uris. It had an interesting thesis, but wasn’t particularly well-written, IMO. Not nearly as good as Exodus, Trinity, or QB VII.
Just finished The Tigress of Forli, by Elizabeth Lev. A biography of Caterina Sforza. I was worried it was going to be dry and academic but the story is just too compelling. There are at least two movies here.
About to start White Cat Black Dog, by Kelly Link, seven stories loosely inspired by classic fairy tales. I’ve already read the story Skinder’s Veil, loosely, very loosely based on Snow White and Rose Red. If the other six stories are as good, I’m really looking forward to it.
I started Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion by T. Kingfisher. I know nothing of the source material which means, unlike the masses on Goodreads having multiple meltdowns, I will likely enjoy Ursula’s take on vampires.
(I’m sorta sad that Goodreads shut off reviews for this one, watching nerds lose their minds is rather entertaining. As I pointed out, I’m sure she cries herself to sleep hugging her Hugo, Sequoyah, Nebula, Alfie, WSFA, Coyotl and Ursa Major awards. )
Oh, the reviews are back, good and bad.
Finished The Reavers, by George MacDonald Fraser, which was amusing but not as good as his Flashman novels; and Infinite Life: The Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth, by Jules Howard, which was very interesting.
Next up: Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56, by Rafe Esquith; and The Wrong Rite, by Charlotte MacLeod (writing as Alisa Craig).
Started on First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston. The protagonist is a con woman, who is obviously up to no good, but I haven’t got that far to figure out what her scheme involves. Pretty good thus far.
For my bedside reading I put Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn on my tablet. Heck, I’ve visited the titular Wayside Inn and had the Coow Woow, the original Colonial specialty of the house (made with ginger brandy and rum), but I’ve never read the poem. I’ve never even read all of “Paul Revere’s Ride”. So I figured it was time to do so.
First off, Longfellow is undoubtedly a great poet. That might be obvious, but I thought it was worth saying – I’ve often felt that some writers and poets don’t live up to their hype. But I’ve read The Song of Hiawatha and now am reading this, and I can appreciate good poetry. I can’t write it.
Second, The Ride of Paul Revere (aka “The Landlord’s Tale”) is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It pretty clearly makes a lot of historical blunders, but it seems likely to me (and the Wikipedia article confirms this) that these were deliberate. Longfellow was deliberately doing “myth making”, and he succeeded so well that it left a mark on American culture from not only this poem, but also his Hiawatha and Miles Standish. Because of Longfellow, a lot of people believed (and many still believe) things that weren’t so. Longfellow, for instance, doesn’t mention that Revvere was caprtured by the British, suggesting that he completed the ride.
In large part because of this poem, Revere was lifted out of relative obscurity. Before this he wasn’t accounted among the “Founding Fathers” or given a significant place in American history. But once the poem was published his name became widely known, and it was almost certainly this new recognition that caused the new town that had been North Chelsea to take the name “Revere” only ten years later.
As for the rest of the poem, I wondered what the other tales told were. I thought maybe other stories associated with America or Colonial life. But the stories I’ve encountered so far are either drawn from or in imitation of European stories, as from the Decameron. One explicitly says it came from the Scandinavian Heimskringla. Definitely not what I expected.
I have been rereading the comic run of Gotham Central which is about the police in Gotham City. I haven’t read it since it first came out 20 years ago or so and it is still great. It has one of my favorite (in a terrible way) Joker plots which I will spoiler in case you read it:
Just before Christmas, the Joker (although they don’t know that right away) starts murdering people including the mayor with a sniper rifle. This terrorizes and locks down the city for days. Two days before Christmas he turns himself in. Why? Because he knows everyone will rush out to finish the Christmas shopping they couldn’t do while the city was locked down and he has planted a bomb under the Gotham version of FAO Schwarz.
The Language of Liars, by SL Huang, a multispecies science fiction dealing with issues of enslavement, language, and anthropological colonialism. The premise and theme were excellent. The protagonist was less-so: a gifted kid who thought he was too cool for school somehow does something that nobody else can do, and then spends his time emoing his way through moral complexities. I disliked the protagonist too much to focus on the plot. The linguistic complexities of the book also fell short. I’m a big fan of linguistic science fiction (Embassytown, The Sparrow, and so on), and love it when the linguistics makes sense. Here, it felt poorly sketched out.
Finished Other Worlds Than These, King’s last book in the Talisman trilogy. Peter Straub’s name is also on the cover, but I’m not sure he really contributed anything at all. A decent enough tale, and a few beloved old characters reappear (sort of). I got the feeling I was supposed to like certain characters more than I actually did, though. What else…OH. Well, this is a story about people overcoming all manner of terrifying things in order to save the world, so we had the obligatory whole lot of spiders scene. Fuck that noise. If there’s ever a time that the fate of the world depends on my having to deal with a whole lot of spiders, y’all can just kiss your ass goodbye.
Started today on
I love the way this lady writes, and the premise is good (during WWII, people all over the world begin having dreams of King Arthur, except for the main character, a librarian who is working in a remote mansion on the coast of Wales). I could give this five stars right now, but I guess I’ll read it first.
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, the second in her distant-future political/military sf trilogy. It’s just as good as the first book, Ancillary Justice, which was very good indeed.
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo, a supernatural mystery/romance set in 1908 Manchuria, about a beautiful shapeshifter and her adventures as she seeks revenge for the death of her cub. Good but not great, I’d say.
High Achiever by Tiffany Jenkins, a meh memoir about a drug-addicted woman who steals from her deputy sheriff boyfriend and gets into all kinds of trouble.
Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volumes Two & Three, edited by Geoff Brown and Amanda J. Spedding, a pretty good collection of sf and fantasy short stories, although with some clunkers. The standouts were “Snow in the Desert” (a no-nonsense gunslinger turns the tables on his pursuers) and “Bad Traveling” (kinda sorta like a Melville/Lovecraft mashup), both by Neal Asher, and “Swarm” (human trade envoys to an alien asteroid hive get more than they bargained for) by Bruce Sterling.
Just started Titan, Ron Chernow’s huge 1998 bio of John D. Rockefeller Sr. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would, but I am learning a lot about the Standard Oil tycoon and will definitely keep going.
The exploration and struggle over the spice producing islands of what is now Indonesia in the 1500’s, undertaken by Spain and Portugal, two countries on the other side of the world.
My book club is reading The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig this month. This is my introduction to him, so far and I’m only one chapter in, I am enjoying it.
Because I was too lazy to walk into the other room and retrieve Astarion out of my tote bag, I pulled Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree out of the stack on my headboard. His humor and storytelling are similar enough to T. Kingfisher to have me interested from the get go. Besides who doesn’t love a book about books?
Finished Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56, by Rafe Esquith; and The Wrong Rite, by Charlotte MacLeod (writing as Alisa Craig), both of which were okay.
Next up: Ghosts of Sicily: The True Story of the Naval Intelligence Agents Who Courted the Mob to Fight Nazis in America and the Battlefields of Italy, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr.; and A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher.
