No, the Patrician sounds like Jeremy Irons. 
After months of waiting for a copy to show up at one of the two branches of the library I frequent, I finally found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle at another branch. I’ve gotten through the first part and it looks like it’s only going to get weirder from here. I hope they find the cat, though.
I finished reading The Three Musketeers. I liked it, but I thought it was pretty uneven in tone; it starts off with lots of dueling and sword-fighting, then transitions to mostly broad humour, then ends with the downfall of Milady de Winter without the musketeers doing much of anything.
I started Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair, which I got the idea of downloading because it was mentioned in The Eustace Diamonds. It’s a little flowery for my taste, but it’s not too long so I’m sure I’ll make it to the end.
I got **We Are Water **(Wally Lamb) for my birthday so I am back on that one after a detour into **One Good Turn **(Kate Atkinson). I will probably be back to Atkinson since I have **Case Histories **in my pile.
I’m finishing up Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. Medieval feminism is awesome, except at the end when it gets a little torture-porny with all the martyrs. All these women were tossed into bonfires from which they emerged untouched, usually bleeding milk.
I have just begun Sunk Without a Sound, the story of Glen and Bessie Hyde, a young honeymooning couple who tried running the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon in a homemde wooden boat in 1928. A month after they departed the boat was found still afloat with all their provisions, but the couple was never seen again. Or were they?
Author Brad Dimock and his wife re-enacted the mysterious trip down the river in a saimilar boat in 1996. So far, so good.
From last month’s thread, regarding Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend
I finished it last night and I have to agree on the clunkiness. The ending of this one clanked around like a sack full of cast iron skillets. I did like how Mortimer and Twemlow managed to shut down the malicious gossip at the Veneerings’ last dinner party, though.
I liked it, and more so after I met the author at a signing. Unfortunately the attendance was very poor, but that was good for me as I had quite a bit of time to talk to him. He’s very engaging and interesting on a lot of subjects. He told me about his research on 19th-century European circus troupes, for example.
I read “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells,” an authorized pastiche by Sebastian Faulks. I approached it with trepidation, but the purist will not be disappointed. It was quite good.
I bought a copy of Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened about a month ago.
I’ve been a fan of her blog/website (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/) for quite a while - her simplistic drawings (practically children’s scribblings) perfectly compliment the offbeat, goofy and subversive stories she tells of her childhood and other experiences. I identify with her “This is Why I’ll Never Be an Adult” story perhaps a little too closely and had a somewhat “simple” dog growing up myself (he liked to chew on rocks). The snarkiness of stories like “The Alot” and “A Better Pain Scale” tickle my warped funny bone wonderfully well.
As she continued her writings, I was sad to hear about her struggles with depression, and happy when she posted that not only was she doing better, she had a book coming out in the fall of 2013. And while she even warned her readers that some material would be repeated from the website, I didn’t expect quite so much of the funny bits to be retreads, while the new material focussed more on her issues with depression. That said, I found her insights and explanations interesting, and potentially helpful in working with friends and family members who may be depressed; but I still felt a bit disappointed.
So I guess I would give this book two separate ratings - a 4-star for the material overall, but a 2 star for Allie Brosh fans who were wanting something new/more. I’m glad I bought it, as I want to support her endeavours, but wish I’d had a better heads-up.
I just read Countdown City, by Ben H. Winters. It’s the second book in his “Last Policeman” trilogy: detective novels set in Concord, New Hampshire a few months before an asteroid is supposed to hit the planet and destroy life as we know it.
The detective story is unremarkable, but serves as an excuse for our policeman to wander around town witnessing the collapse of civilization. This second book begins 77 days before the asteroid strike is due, and the protagonist is trying to track down a missing husband in a world where the missing people outnumber the ones who have stayed put.
There are some serious plot weaknesses, but I like the atmosphere of these books. The kindle editions are cheap right now. The third book is due next summer.
I’ve made the executive decision that since I don’t like unfinished novels, I’m not going to read The Mystery of Edwin Drood. That means that the long slog through Dickens is over!
Next up is the shorter slog through Tarquin Hall. I heard about his Vish Puri mystery series on NPR and it sounded interesting, so I checked out The Case of the Missing Servant.
Still enjoying Bertrand Brinley’s Mad Scientists’ Club short stories with my ten-year-old. Right now we’re reading about the sea-monster hoax the boys pull on the credulous folk of their hometown.
On the homestretch of Roy Jenkins’s wonderful bio Churchill. World War II is winding down and military victory is in sight, but poor ol’ Winston doesn’t know what a pounding he’s in for at the hands of British voters in 1945.
I got Stephen King’s 1975 vampire novel 'Salem’s Lot, an old favorite, from the library just to check a few things, but it’s hooked me and I’m reading it all over again. It really holds up well.
Wodehouse, Wodehouse and more Wodehouse! Mainly the Jeeves and Wooster series right now, but the long, long list of his books at the front of each novel makes me very happy.
Although I’ve learned not to read them in public places - explaining to nervous strangers that the reason you’re having a laughing fit isn’t because you’re crazy but because, see, Aunt Agatha . . . well no, really the Uncle . . . but it started at the beginning when Jeeves. . . etc, etc. The way he can have ten complex story lines running simultaneously with only one point of view, and tie them all up perfectly in the last chapter is just so satisfying. If Pratchett wrote realistic fiction, it would be like Wodehouse. Or maybe if Wodehouse wrote fantasy it would be like Pratchett . . .
I think Salem’s Lot is my all time favourite Stephen King…
Rich Man, Poor Man by Irwin Shaw, it was a cheapie on the Kindle. I like those potboilers from the 50’s and 60’s. Have good memories of the miniseries.
So I said last month, I think, that I’d be reading the 3rd in Harry Turtledove’s Supervolcano series, Things fall Apart.
The world, or more particularly the USA, is still barely recovering from the massive eruption and subsequent destruction and the Ferguson family soap opera continues. With family and friends spread across the country life is difficult everywhere and communication very slow.
A picture of how the rest of the world is coping starts to emerge and it’s at least as bad as the American situation. Wars, nuclear and regular, famine, extreme weather, abrupt climate change etc.
It’s an episodic rambling colloquially-told soap opera with a very harsh background none of them can do anything about. No politician above a city mayor, no generals, no scientists explaining things, just regular folk. One character is a geologist but she doesn’t know the big picture except for what she gleans from collegues at a convention. This knowledge very quickly becomes national news anyway as big hydro power stations freeze up and plunge millions of previously less-affected people into darkness and sub-zero temperatures… Not that the story focuses on any of them, it’s just far away background that percolates through to the various characters stuck in Maine, Nebraska or southern California.
I ramble, but so does the novel’s prose! Excessively. With pithy aphorisms, etc.
Anyway, I’ll happily read another volume if there is one, but I suspect it was sold as a trilogy; all the strands could be continued but, conversely, most of the characters are fairly settled (or at least positioned) in life and stopping now is no hardship - although the character’s hardships will continue and may even increase - but they’ll cope somehow! Except maybe Vanessa. She’s a bad 'un.
I won’t say the series is a masterpiece but it is a very enjoyable easy read which very deliberately focuses on everyman and his world, not on top planners and scientists with the resources to know just what’s going on. News is filtered through poor communications, lack of power (brown outs, black outs and more), censorship, etc. and readers wanting to know how the land war in Asia is going will be sorely disappointed. Or just who used nukes in the Middle East.
Books also read included The Loch Ness Legacy by Boyd Morrison, which is a pretty mindless, non-stop action thriller. But when they finally got to Scotland and Loch Ness, it was kind-of fun!
Currently re-reading Chase the Morning by Michael Scott Rohan, which I’ve not read since it first came out… It’s one of my favourite ‘turn a corner and find yourself somewhere else’ books. In this case a shipping agent finds himself in an old-fashioned harbour area helping, and being helped by, various tavern wenches, swordsmen, sea captains, etc. from an earlier age as he goes in pursuit of his secretary, kidnapped by evil semi-human pirates!
It’s as good as I remember it being.
It’s certainly right up there for me, along with The Stand and Misery, I’d have to say, although The Dead Zone is quite good, too. My book club just picked 11/22/63 for April 2014, so I have a great reason to finally plunge in!
11/22/63 is an excellent read–I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I tried to re-read The Stand a while back and couldn’t do it; Mother Abigail set my teeth on edge.
I’m deep into Shriek, and enjoying it, though it (so far) lacks the wild structural creativity of City of Saints and Madmen. That, perhaps, is just as well; that wild creativity is most likely what kept me from ever finishing that book. (Also the fact that it was poorly bound and physically fell apart as I was trying to read it.) This is a fairly straightforward narrative–though told, in effect, through first-person memories that often ramble, take false starts, and start over again. The unreliable narrator is spotlighted in a way I’ve never before seen–the subject of this “afterword” (to whom something has happened, though it is, as yet, unclear what) has extensively annotated his sister’s text, dialoguing with it throughout, pointing out where she saw something that was, from his point of view, quite different. The atmosphere of Ambergris continues to captivate; decadent, decaying, rusting and rotting, feculent and fecund, everything in my mind’s eye seen through a slightly green filter. I wouldn’t want to live there, and I wouldn’t want to visit it in person, but safe behind the pages of my book (or screen of my e-reader), it makes an excellent vacation.
I reread this over the summer, for the first time in years, and was impressed with how well it held up. I found myself wishing the doctor survived, because he would be a great character for his own book.
I finished The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips. I loved this! It’s like dueling unreliable narrators. It’s a descent into madness story, set mostly in Egypt during the 1920s.
Last Rituals, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, is a pretty straightforward murder mystery, taking place in Iceland. It was okay for what it is, nothing too heavy here.
The Rescuers by Margery Sharp. I picked this up because my daughter watches the Disney movie a lot, and I realized I had never read the original. I think the movie is vaguely based on the entire series – the plot of the movie doesn’t resemble the first book at all, other than the fact that mice are rescuing somebody. Anyway, it’s a nice book about talking animals that is genuinely cute. I would compare it a little to Cricket in Times Square (probably helped by the fact that Garth Williams illustrated both). It would be a good read aloud book for kids. It’s adventurous but not TOO scary.
Hehe, Anansi Boys is just a book I’m reading at work. Sadly, I don’t actually get paid to read it. What a world that would be! I did enjoy it as I do most Gaiman books.
Yes, Alan Rickman would make a GREAT Patrician. 