I read this last year, because Wiswell was going to be GoH at a convention I went to, but he had to cancel. An admirably weird book (It’s sort of a Beowulf-like story, told from the point of view of the monster), but I haven’t read the other two yet.
Thanks! Very glad to hear you enjoyed it.
Here’s what I wrote when I read this book:
Finished Out of the Clouds: The Unlikely Horseman and the Unwanted Colt Who Conquered the Sport of Kings, by Linda Carroll and David Rosner, which I enjoyed; and 1901, by Robert Conroy, which I did not.
Next up: Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson; and Quest in Paradise, by David Attenborough.
I was going to warn you but didn’t want to be a negative nelly.
Finished Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson, which I enjoyed; and Quest in Paradise, by David Attenborough, which was interesting (especially the part about the “Land Divers”, which was the origin, after people read about it in National Geographic, of bungee jumping). Quite a few things in this book, however, did not age well. It was written in 1960 and I read it as part of a collection of three early books of his that was published in 2018. I’m somewhat surprised that it wasn’t edited.
Next up: Gabriel, by Jean Slaughter Doty; and Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future, by Caitlin Vincent.
Finished Gabriel, by Jean Slaughter Doty. Meh. Also finished Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future, by Caitlin Vincent, which I enjoyed.
Next up: Elysium Fire, by Alastair Reynolds; and Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, by Mac Barnett.
Just finished a re-read of Tana French’s The Secret Place. Loved it when I first read it years ago, loved it still. She’s just so brilliant at creating real, complex, living, breathing characters and their motivations. The nuance and subtlety is off the charts. And the mysteries are great, too (though not in a forensic, procedural sense, if that’s your thing). This particular book made me so glad I was never a teenage girl 
I’m going to have to go back to re-read the rest of the Dublin Murder Squad books, now that I’ve reminded myself how great they are. 10/10 - my highest recommendation.
I recently re-read the first two of the Dublin Murder Squad after finishing the Call Hooper series, which was also excellent. I don’t usually re-read mysteries but she’s one of my favorite authors. I especially loved Faithful Place.
Just finished The Secret Dinner, by Raphael Montes. A big slice of that-never-would’ve-happened, but let that go and just enjoy the ride. I’d have given it four stars for the story, but the fact that it gives you some real questions to ask yourself made me bump it to a five.
I finished Face Off, an anthology of mystery short stories, each written by a pair of authors. Like most anthologies, most of the stories are good, several are great, and a couple are real stinkers. Still, rather enjoyable.
Next up: Alone by Lisa Gardner.
Finished Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle by Dorothy Gilman, probably the most implausible entry in a highly implausible series, but still a lot of fun.
I took a break from Sherlock Holmes pastiches to read a couple of vintage (read: late 1960s) SF paperbacks. The first one I hadn’t seen before – Wolfbane by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. I thought I knew all their collaborations, but I missed this one. The Earth has been driven out of its orbit, as in When Worlds Collide, but people don’t go to the disturbing planet – they stay on Earth, as in Fritz Leiber’s short story “A Pailful of Air”. Only they don’t need to go to the extremes of that story, because aliens – the ones who perturbed the Earh out of its orbit – kindled the moon as a miniature sun, and re-kindle it every five years. The aliens live in several places, including a pyramid that sits on the top of Mount Everest, from which the very peak has been cut off to provide a plateau for it to sit on.
And then it gets weird. Really weird. This is not usual territory for the guys who wrote The Space Merchants and Watch the Skies. It’s got a touch of Keith Laumer’s A Plague of Demons.
After reading that, I moved on to the other one – Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization. This is one of the very first science fiction novels I bought and read, but the copy I picked up is in pristine edition (as is Woilfbane). When I first read it I didn’t appreciate how heavy the satire was, and took it as a straight adventure yarn (which it also is). As I’ve pointed out before on this Board, I’m convinced that Paul Veerhoeven strip-mined this book for most of the plot of his movie Total REcall. I know that movie is nominally based on Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can REmember it for you Wholesale, but they exhaust the material in that story in the first half hour or so. Most of the rest of it, I maintain, is from Sheckley’s book. It’s got the trip to another planet, the deadly shoot 'em up chases. the wiped memory and the deformed mutants who can help you recall those memories, the mysterious beautiful woman who helps the hero and (Spoiler) the fact that the hero is himself responsible for his wiped memory and his being where he is.
Back to Sherlock Holmes after this.
I was up way too late finishing Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved it.
How to describe? Coherence, but literary.
I didn’t care for that movie but similar premise.
The thing is, it’s evocative of the same intellectual dystopian mood that Ian McEwan was apparently going for in What We Can Know, but I hated that book and I loved this one.
I can’t figure out why.
I want to reread it because there are so many recurring themes (travel, crime, art, surveillance, neglected children) that I’m probably missing stuff.
An addendum – my bedtime reading on my electronic tablet consists of a re-reading of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary alternating with a first-time reading of McPherson’s forged Poems of Ossian. So far I am not impressed by Ossian. But maybe that’s because it’s in turgid 19th century forms.
They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen: The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers
Jason Turbow
The story of the Los Angeles Dodgers during the weird 1981 split season.
Some of the early sections were interesting, but much of the second half of the book was a rote game-by-game recounting of the postseason.
I finished Katabasis, by RF Kuang, last night. After noping out of the Poppy Wars (I wasn’t told there would be the rape of Nanking in this fantasy novel), I decided to give Kuang one more chance–and I’m glad I did. The magic academy genre is pretty played out at this point, but the story she tells in the genre’s confines, a story of abuse and suffering and finding strength thereby, was well served by those tropes. And it’s not every day I read a book set in hell.
I was like “nope” until you mentioned hell. I’m a sucker for mythological afterlife stories. I guess I’m just interested in all the artistic interpretations of these ideas.
New thread: Happiness is a cozy hoodie and a good book