As August winds down, there is only ONE question on the mind of all North Americans: “Can we just cool down already?!” And if everything would stop burning that would be great too!!! Inerestingly, this has been the worst, and earliest starting, fire season in my area in the 140 years of record keeping. I feel like a smoked ham myself.
So anyone reading books about fires? Barbeques? Outdoor living?
Print: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, I’ve finally decided I like where this is going…
Audio: The This by Adam Roberts. My book Club chose it based on the description on Goodreads, but at 2 hours out of 10, I’ve yet to even spot a plot on the horizon, so I’m expecting a DNF in the near future.
Kindle: Manners and Monsters by Tilly Wallace.. very VERY generic Gail Carriger and I hate, hate, hate the trope of rude, fierce, unlikeable male leader becomes nice because of heroine. Another possible DNF.
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’m reading The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories edited by Otto Penzler. The title sounds like one of those books for pre-teens, but this is meant for adults. It’s a hefty 783 pages in double columns (when’s the last time I read a contemporary book in double columns?) It’s an odd mix in quality. I hadn’t realized that KIngley Amis wrote a Sherlock Holmes story (which makes him and Anthony Horowitz the only two people I know of who have written both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond stories.)
On audio I am finishing up Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is MUCH better than I expected. Ms. Stowe had an eye for detail and has a range of Southern characters who have lots of reasons to justify the Peculiar Institution. It’s also surprising in the placing of incidents. I had thought that Eliza Crossing the Ice was a big climactic moment that came at the end of the book. Also, we’re so familiar with the character of Simon Legree that I assumed he’d play a much bigger part in the book – but I still haven’t gotten to him as a character, although I expect to encounter him soon.
My bedside reading has switched back to a collection of Voltaire’s works. Voltaire tosses off weird little historical factoids that leave you wanting to know more, except he doesn’t give them. And, of course, he rarely cites his sources.
Well it starts with an arson event … The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright by Casey Sherman. Too early into it to judge but my wife loved it.
Last book finished was finally reading a book that had been on my list for a long time: Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. Same structure of starting with a disaster and then to the major historical figure’s childhood. Definitely worth the read. Very much so. I was bothered a bit by the author
Summary
being a bit of an unreliable narrator. I believe all the historical information but regarding her own story? I think less so. Not much of a chance she got as deep into her research as she tells it before having discovered his unsavory bits. And that suggests her other autobiographical memory bit is possibly … embellished some.
Just finished We the People by Jill Lepore, a Pulitzer-winning history of the U.S. Constitution, focusing particularly on the process and examples of amending it. Lepore pretty persuasively argues that the country would be better off, and the American people better-served, if the Constitution were more frequently amended. I caught some minor factual errors, and she makes some arch contemporary political observations that IMHO don’t quite fit, but it’s still worth a read.
I’m now about a third of the way through 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.
Finished American Craftsmen, by Tom Doyle, which is one of the best novels I’ve read this year; and Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon, by Jim Paul, which had some interesting parts. They were the parts not about building the catapult, but about military history, however. (Some were about the use of catapults in historical battles.)
Next up: Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes, by Ha-Joon Chang; and Sunward, by William Alexander.
An interesting hybrid fiction/nonfiction. The book presents vignettes imagining how the final day passed for different people who lived in Pompeii, some of which are based on the lives of people we know lived at there at the time. The stories are supplemented with footnotes explaining how we know certain things might have happened.
Enjoyable read. It’s fascinating how much we know about day-to-day life in ancient times.
Finished Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes, by Ha-Joon Chang, which was okay. Also finished Sunward, by William Alexander, a science fiction novel which is one of the best novels I’ve read this year. Recommended for readers who enjoy the series Murderbot and Wayfarers.
Next up: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com, by Kimberly Lemming, and True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink, by Kory Stamper.
Finished Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. A hard-boiled stoner detective caper set in LA in 1970. Think Cheech and Chong crossed with Sam Spade. Cultural references from the period galore, along with lots of sex and drugs. Stoner PI Larry “Doc” Sportello’s old girlfriend asks him to foil a plot by her current lover’s wife to have said lover committed so the wife and her boyfriend can steal his billions. The term “inherent vice” refers to the quality of an object to deteriorate on its own due to its essential properties and without any outside influence. Marine insurers use the term to deny claims for damage caused by an item’s breakdown – for instance, they will not insure against ships rusting or cargoes of fruit rotting, because that would be due to their own nature and not any kind of accident. The marine-insurance angle is pertinent, as a large schooner is central to the story, but it does refer to LA hippie society itself at this time. Very good. Enjoyed it.
Finished How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin. I picked it up thinking it would be fun light hearted mystery… and it was but it was rather darker than I expected. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Lot of spoilers in there if you haven’t watched the Hitchcock movies but not a problem for me. I’ve been a long fan of his which is why I picked this book up. It seemed right up my street and for a period it matched the subject well. The build up of suspense was good, the unlikeable set of characters, the plot line while a little far fetched had some fun it. But then things went from a slow creepy mystery to all sorts of things happening at once and I didn’t like that. The ending made up for it a bit but was also a bit predictable however it was one of those books where it felt like the author went too slowly for too long and then decided to have to cram as much as possible at the backend.
Currently working on A Parade of Horribles, the most recently published of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books (there are two more planned to complete the series). Honestly, it’s just a blur at this point, but I’m invested.
Finished The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke. Seven struggling authors of various genres are invited to a weekend retreat on a Scottish island owned by a best-selling mystery writer. When they arrive, they find that they have been entered in a contest to finish an unwritten novel by their host, without phones, computers, or the internet. But the competition quickly turns dark as they all struggle to complete the book on their manual typewriters.
Great premise, but the plot somehow started to drag, and the ending was quite unbelievable. The book was okay, but I’m not sure I would recommend it.
Re The Ending Writes Itself: You know what bugged me the most? All these authors, given an assignment and a deadline, and all they did was argue and drink tea. I was stressing!
So glad you enjoyed it! I forgot about the sequel and need to track it down.
I just reread The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. In 2019, members of the Society of Jesuits, working at the Arecibo Telescope, hear an unmistakeably alien signal from the stars. Hijinks and horrors and tragedy ensue.
I first read this back in the nineties when it was published, and I just reread it for a book club. It was just as devastating on the second read as on the first, but new aspects stood out to me.
First, of course, the sections set in 2019 read as historical fiction, and it’s always entertaining to see what an author gets right and wrong about their future and my past.
I’ve read a lot more first contact literature since then. Russell’s aliens are frankly Star-Trek-levels of creative, when compared to the aliens of Adrian Tchaikovsky or Peter Watts or Arkady Martine or many others: they’re implausibly humanoid, and it took a lot of effort to remind myself that she just wasn’t that concerned with the biology of it all.
However, her characters are excellent. It’s so easy to love all of them (well, Voelker can go stand outside, to love most of them). Her societies are deeply detailed and fascinating. And the structure and pacing are, in the best possible sense, dreadful, by which I mean she builds the dread until it’s almost intolerable.
I’m reading The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard. It’s a comic book series (I’m reading the collected books). The basic idea is that there are six superpowered people in the world and they essentially function as major nations. Countries have to negotiate with them as they would with another major power and each of the superpowered beings have to deal with the other five as well. It’s an interesting way of personifying the Cold War era. (There’s also an obvious Watchmen vibe.)
Finished Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha by Dorothy Gilman, Very dark for this cozy espionage series, but very enjoyable, even from the future of Hong Kong having returned to China.
A few instances of language not acceptable these days ie “oriental” and “slant eyes” but not meant derogatory.
