Stiff is my favorite, purely on subject matter. But I’ve liked all of them.
I have, as expected, been puttering around w/ Lovecraft on the one hand, and re-reading The Unwritten on the other. Both have gotten a bit off-track–things have been very busy at work this week. Plus, Lovecraft doesn’t sync very well across my iPad and iPhone, since Kindle wants to go to the “furthest page read” rather than the page I happen to be on currently. Still, quite enjoying both.
Just finished Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine, about an MIT dropout who discovers that an otherwise-unremarkable callibrator travels into the future every time its ON button is pushed - but 11 times farther into the future every time! Some interesting future human societies explored along the way. Not Haldeman’s finest, but a worthwhile read; I’d say it’s good but not great.
Now back to Ron Chernow’s bio Washington.
I quite enjoyed reading ***Royal ***on a bus up to Toronto once. On the other hand, it had about 100 pages more description of a cricket match than any book ever should.
You may be thinking of Flashman’s Lady.
Cricket is the only sport I’ve ever enjoyed playing, but it is deathly dull to read about. Unless, of course, it’s Douglas Adams’ description of the game in…was it So Long and Thanks For All the Fish? I think it was.
I’m about halfway through Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would. It makes me want to grab a pole and go fishin’ for a few days. Too bad I don’t have a fishin’ pole. 
Have you ever read Paul Quarrington’s Fishing with my Old Guy? It’s a fun little romp through the quest for the perfect cast, and the descriptions of their misadventures on some little island in northern Quebec are worth the price of the book by themselves…
I’m reading Star Wars: The Last Command by Timothy Zahn. It’s the third of his post-ROTJ trilogy. The series has actually been pretty entertaining, even if Zahn can’t write worth a damn.
I believe you’re right. I blame my error on cricket.
I read so much British stuff that I finally went and looked up the rules to the damn game.
I’ve just finished reading *Cranford *(no cricket in that one, actually) and it was cozy and amusing. The TV miniseries more than does it justice.
I read Barbara Hambly’s newest vampire novel, Magistrates of Hell, which is set in Beijing just before World War I. It wasn’t the best of the series, but Hambly is always a good read. I like her version of vampires: they are unequivocally murderers, and our human protagonists are wracked with guilt for befriending one of them.
I’m almost finished reading The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters. It’s a murder mystery where a brand new police detective is trying to prove that an apparent suicide victim has actually been murdered - but nobody cares, because it’s all taking place six months before an asteroid is going to strike the planet and bring about the end of civilization. Not sure how it’s going to end, but so far this is better than I was expecting it to be.
I recently finished My Dark Places, a warts-and-all memoir by James Ellroy centered around the murder of his mother when he was a kid and his attempt to find the killer years after the fact. It was interesting and provides a lot of insight into Ellroy’s decision to become a crime novelist, but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, because I found Ellroy to be unlikeable. Still, a good book.
Followed that with Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, which is the first thing of his I’ve read. I like his writing style, but the story (really, a series of short stories) didn’t do much for me. I have The Grapes of Wrath and will give that one a try.
I’m currently reading Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Journey by Alfred Lansing and am enjoying it quite a bit.
I agree. It was a selection of my book club awhile back. I found it very engrossing (esp. for its portrayal of post-WWII Los Angeles). I admit I don’t like Ellroy’s fiction all that much.
The Heart of a Continent: A Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, across the Gobi Desert, through the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and Chitral, 1884-1894, Francis Younghusband.
Younghusband was one of the early English explorers in China and the Himalaya regions. He made an epic seven month trek across the Gobi Desert from Peking to India. It’s in pretty much of a diary format, and some of it is tedious accounts of weather, etc. But his encounters with people and geography are interesting. Younghusband was later one of the driving forces behind the initial failed attempts by Mallory and his team to reach the summit of Everest.
Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden are much better than the short story collection, IMO.
Endurance is a great book. I love a good survival story; if you’re interested in that genre, I can recommend some for you.
I could never get into her science fiction, but I really enjoyed her Benjamin January mystery series. In your opinion, are is the vampire series closer to one or the other in terms of style?
I think they are closer in style to the Benjamin January books, which I also like better than her fantasy.
I was on my phone last night; I’ll expand. The Asher & Ysidro books have the same rich atmosphere that I like in the January books, and the same vivid sense of the historical time and place. They also have the same touch of melodrama and the same wildly improbable action scenes at the end (chases, hostage-taking, shoot-outs, fire, explosions, etc.) but if that kind of thing doesn’t bother you in the January series, it probably won’t in these.
The series is set just before WWI. Asher is a linguist, a mild-mannered Oxford don with a secret past as an international spy. The vampire Ysidro was a 16th-century Spanish nobleman who came to England with the court of Philip of Spain when he married Mary Tudor. Hambly does a wonderful job with Ysidro: he’s ancient and powerful and bookish and lonely; he’s not maliciously evil but there’s no getting around the fact that he murders people to stay alive. Asher spends a good bit of the series looking for an opportunity to kill Ysidro, but then the vampire saves his life a few times and things get muddled.
I’m now reading Jo Walton’s novel Farthing, which is a British country house murder mystery, but it’s set in an alternate timeline where England made peace with Hitler in WWII.
I’ve long been interested in alternative history, and had heard about that book awhile back. Please let us know how you like it.
Well, I have decided to put Lovecraft aside for now. I’m still working on The Unwritten, trying to get my way up to the new TPB that’s sitting on my shelf; but now the Other Book is The Stand. I think this is my third re-read of that classic.
After not reading anything in almost a month, I’ve justed started John Cheever’s*** The Wapshot Chronicle.***