The heat has finally broken in the Intermountain West! Daytime temps in the 70&80s (20sC) and nights as low as 50! (10C) I wore shoes to work at 5 am today for the first time since… April? Autumn is coming… Halloween decorations are already in the stores. Thank Heaven, I didn’t have a credit card in Michael’s last week!
So Whatcha all readin?
On Kindle: Two Necromancers, a Dwarf Kingdom and a Sky City by L.G. Estrella. This is the fourth installment in their Unconventional Heroes Series and sad to say the weakest book. The former three weren’t great writing but they were fun potato chip books, but this one suffers from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much description and sooo many fights. I’m plugging along but it’s slow.
Print Camp by Lev A.C. Rosen. Hijinks and romance at a summer camp for gay teens… and not nearly enough of either. I really enjoyed Rosen’s Jack of Hearts (and other parts) but this book is so tame, there’s got to be drama coming but there’s no sense of tension or impending disaster. I realize I am WAY out of the target demographic, but even if I were a teen I’d still be frustrated.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I just finished Our Wicked Histories, by Amy Goldsmith. As I had hoped, there was a story there about supernatural happenings at a spooky old mansion, but it got utterly buried under the idiocy of the main character. She had no self-respect at all when it came to the douche-boy she had a crush on, it was sickening. Plus, it seemed like long stretches of this novel were like: “What was that sound? Could it be crying? Where were my friends? What had happened when the lights went out?” I mean, I think the editor should have told the author to cool it with the fucking question marks. Not recommended.
Finished Road Trip by David Keener and Raising Hell Plus… by Norman Spinrad. Meh on the first, while I found the second to be okay.
Next up: God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson (a poetry collection) and An Equation for Every Occasion: Simple Formulas for Surviving the Unexpected, by Chris Waring.
I got to thinking about the many classics I’ve never read or those I read when I was too young to really understand them. At the moment, I’m reading Oliver Twist, having recently read a few others by Dickens that I’d never read before. Next on my list is re-reading Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg series, starting with Dawn’s Early Light. I vaguely remember my mom recommending them back in the late 60s/early 70s, and I recently bought all 7 from Thriftbooks. It’ll be interesting going back to dead tree versions after reading on my tablet for so long.
Finished God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson (a poetry collection), which I agree is wonderful. I thought “Listen, Lord” was the best of the poems.
Also finished An Equation for Every Occasion: Simple Formulas for Surviving the Unexpected, by Chris Waring, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, which has been on my TBR list for years.
They were my go to books as a teen! I still love Bracken and Dinah dearly. I learned a LOT about the wars she centers the books around, lady did her research.
YAY! I’m so glad you liked it! “The Creation” has been my favorite. That’s not a God that worries about skin color, sex organs, sexual orientation/identity, that’s a God who is just glad to exist.
Started last night on Sugar On the Bones, a Hap & Leonard novel by Joe R. Lansdale. Uncomplicated and formulaic (although I’m on page 104 and I don’t think Brett’s pretty red toenails have been mentioned yet), but maybe that’s what I need right now. I’ve been picking things up and putting them down lately. This I will finish.
Excellent book! I’m so glad I picked it up as a teenager and devoured it. I just re-read it as an audiobook a couple of weeks ago.
I’m still finishing up The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain.
Over the weekend, out of a sense of nostalgia, I zipped through Conan, the first volume of the L. Sprague de Camp-edited Conan series they started publishing through Lancer back in the 1960s. A quick read. The most recent Conan I’d read was the more recent Del Rey edition that pointedly was NOT edited by de Camp,. And I’ve been reading so much stuff about how de Camp exploited the writings of Howard, and, for many, ruined the series with his own pastiches. But I was curious to re-live my first encounter with the character, and read it, de Camp and Lin Carter pastiches and edits and all.
Next up is probably Randall Munroe’s What If…? 2, which I got as a gift.
On audio, I’m reading Clive Cussler and Jack de Brul’s The Heist, part of the Isaac Bell series. I wonder how long until I don’t need to add Cussler’s name to this. He died four years ago and de Brul undoubtedly wrote all the prose, but I suspect that Cussler left a stack of ideas and outlines for his cadre of collaborators to use for years. Maybe he left a kind of “create-a-plot” contraption , like those “all purpose new story sets” that Mad magazine used to publish.
Well, at last in Cussler’s case, he can’t complain (from beyond the grave) about people writing pastiches. They were already writing pastiche/collaborations while he was alive.
I just finished Antimatter Blues, the sequel to Mickey 7. At first I three-starred it on Goodreads, because I read it after Saint of Bright Doors, and it doesn’t hold a candle to that book. But I revised it upward, because it’s not trying to hold a candle to literary works. It’s a popcorn read in the same vein as Old Man’s War and other Scalzi books. If you like Scalzi, you’ll like this, and if you don’t you won’t. As popcorn it was just fine.
Now I’m reading Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo. It’s part of a series of novellas that follows an itinerant nonbinary monk as they travel through FantasyChina and collect stories and encounter magic and mystery. I really enjoy the series, and this one is shaping up to be more of the same lovely comforting fantasy.
Currently reading All This and More, by Peng Shepherd. It’s about a reality show which allows the contestant to relive their lives and make different decisions, using a technology called “quantum bubbling” which actually rewrites history. The gimmick of this novel is that the reader can make some decisions, like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. I’m not certain, but I think all choices eventually lead to the same place. I’m finding the storyline about the contestant very uninteresting, but there is evidently something going wrong with the mechanics of the reality show itself… that keeps me reading.
Finished Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, and I agree that it’s excellent.
Now I’m reading Eagle in Exile by Alan Smale. It’s the second book in an alternate history trilogy in which the Roman Empire never fell and now it’s trying to conquer the Cahokia peoples in North America.
Finished Mammoths at the Gates. Exactly the sort of medium-stakes, gentle fantasy that makes for excellent bedtime reading.
Now I’m reading Vampires of El Norte. It started strong, and so far (about a quarter of the way in), it’s
Historical fantasy, which I love.
Vampires, which is fine.
A romance thwarted by a strained misunderstanding that could be cleared up by like ninety seconds of people not saying “I’M NOT LISTENING TO YOU,” which I fucking hate.
Vampires of El Norte remained what it was: a romance between two kind of asshole characters who communicated poorly and created needless drama, with a little bit of vampires thrown awkwardly into the mix. I’m fine with a well-written romance, although it’s not my normal genre; but this was the exact kind of romance that annoys the shit out of me. I don’t recommend.
And then I finally finished rereading The Last Unicorn to my 11yo daughter as a bedtime story. Holy smokes can that Peter S. Beagle turn a phrase! It’s quirky and anachronistic and funny and poignant, but overall it’s just beautiful, a shocking metaphor in every paragraph. Definitely one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read.
And with that, I’ve hit my goal of 50 books for the year.
I’m sad to hear Vampires of El Norte wasn’t that good. I’ve had that on my Want to Read list for awhile.
I, too, have finished two books, first up Two Necromancers, a Dwarf Kingdom and a Sky City by L.G. Estrella, the 4th in their Unconventional Heroes series. If you’re a role player or LARPer, I recommend this series because that’s pretty much what they are. Estrella’s writing has improved a lot over four books, but this one needed an editor, many of the fight scenes were too long and there were so many back to back fights. Still I enjoyed the book.
#2-Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie (I saw a review of Branagh’s latest Poirot movie and I remembered reading this 40ish years ago, but couldn’t remember the ending.) Not one of Dame Agatha’s best, I must say, between the sh*t ton of xenophobia/racism and the overly complicated set up, not to mention moments where the characters made comments more fitting for 40 years earlier, like when Poirot expresses surprise that a servant can read and write, you can tell that Christie was slipping a bit mentally. It was less than 10 years from her death sadly.
I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. An excellent read (with a caveat*), and thanks to all of you who recommended it. (Although, I have to admit that it took me a while to figure out that the novel was written using an alternative history setting. I guess I’m just a bit slow.)
*I really did not like the ending, which I thought left several questions unanswered.
Next up: The Eighth Detective, the debut novel by Alex Pavesi.
Currently reading a YA novel, Trespass Against Us, by Leon Kemp. It’s about some teenagers on a ghost-hunting show, revisiting an abandoned Catholic school where several troubled teens disappeared years ago. The setting’s nice, the supernatural stuff is groovy, but all of the characters argue with each other so much it makes me tired. Drama! I’ll have skimmed to the end of this by tomorrow.
